May we never forget!
My book about the war and what comes after.
A few years ago, on a warm and pleasant October day, the kind where the autumn sun gilds the fields and pumpkins and fallen leaves create a golden carpet on the ground, my husband Ard, our two children — Bora, then 16 years old, and Mal, 12 years old — and I set off for Kishnica, a village on the outskirts of Gračanica.
Mal had his next football match. As we left Prishtina, we took the turn toward Gračanica. In front of the municipal building, we saw the three-color Serbian flags and several miniature shrines, interspersed with party posters.
I explain to Bora and Mal where we are and why these flags are displayed. Inevitably, the war comes up and they ask me, one after the other: “When did the war start? Who was Milošević?”
I smiled at a sudden childhood memory, imagining Milošević’s face appearing in small circles above his head, like in a cartoon. I remembered my grandmother, who, whenever his face appeared on TV, would wash our faces to “wash away the evil.”
I returned to the present, to that moment in the car. But there wasn’t enough road ahead to explain the history in detail, even though wars often have a start date and an end date, imposed by somber men sitting around negotiating tables.
But for ordinary people, war often begins long before the official dates and continues long after. I wanted my children to hear our story of the war, which started much earlier.
Apartheid had lasted throughout the 1990s. I tried to explain home-schools to them, the long walks to reach “Kodra e Trimave,” the room where we took off our shoes at the entrance and how we sat on the cold floor, leaning our backs against each other’s legs. I told them about the home-schools that, during the war, were destroyed by Serbian forces’ bullets.
I told them about the teachers who, after the mass expulsion of Albanians from their jobs, had to survive by exchanging currency on the street or selling jeans in the market. Our parents were also forcibly removed from their jobs, yet every day we held onto the ideal of freedom — without exaggeration, romanticism or pathos.
I wanted to tell them so much about a golden era of unprecedented solidarity where we were all united and stood for one another. An era where we lent eggs and sugar to the neighbor because unexpected guests had arrived, where girls played make-believe brides in the dresses of the neighborhood women and where guests often stayed the night because a curfew was in effect.
I wanted to tell them about the last regular bus from Prishtina to Macedonia in March 1999, when, at 19 years old, I traveled to Skopje with my four-year-old sister in search of shelter. About my grandparents’ house, which had become a refuge for 13 displaced people. About the birth of a baby girl, Lëdina, in the Stenkovec refugee camp, where I worked as a translator for NATO doctors. About entering Kosovo alongside British troops on June 12, 1999. About our family’s return to our apartment in Bregu i Diellit, where we found the lock broken, the door half open and our belongings stolen.
Our confrontation with the ’90s is complicated by the crossroads between gratitude for having survived and the lingering pain we still carry.
And as I spoke, feeling the familiar rise of concern that always accompanies me when I discuss this period, Bora interrupted me: “Mom, I think that your entire generation, along with your parents, your mother, your grandmother, everyone, carries unhealed traumas that you really should talk to professionals about.”
Both Ard and I instinctively opposed the idea, insisting that we were fine — a reaction that had already become a habit. In war, as long as you stay alive, you are fine. For 25 years, caught up in building a new life, we had responded the same way, locking away the Kosovo of the ’90s and leaving those memories in the dark corners of our minds.
Our confrontation with the ’90s is complicated by the crossroads between gratitude for having survived and the lingering pain we still carry.
‘And when did the war start?’
Bora was right. I was not at peace with what we had lived through. Every time I spoke about that time, I felt the blood rush to my head, my heart pounding as if it would leap from my chest, only to rise to my throat and choke the words before they could come out.
Every time I talked about the ’90s and the war, I would sweat, tremble, struggle to hold back tears, then stop halfway and leave the story unfinished. The memories came with physical pain, until, as a defense mechanism, I would utter a familiar Albanian phrase: “Thank goodness we survived. The rest doesn’t matter anymore.”
Healing begins when we start answering questions about the war.
I deliberately avoided confronting those memories — until the next car ride, when the children would ask me again: “And when did the war start?”
Healing begins when we start answering questions about the war. When we talk about our memories, even if that conversation happens 25 years later. And all these memories, I had already written in my diaries. In a way, I had written my book about the war long ago. Tucked away at the back of the closet, my diaries told of the segregated schools of the early 1990s, where Albanian students attended school in one building and Serb students in another. They hold memories of Albanian films from the 1980s, like “The Second November,” which we could only watch if we secretly smuggled them into our living rooms — otherwise, we risked prison, accused of being separatists and traitors. They hold stories of the fake red Levi’s 501 jeans, bought with months of hard-earned savings and the hours-long lines in front of the neighborhood grocer for a single liter of milk. They hold stories of a time when the hip-hop group Salt-N-Pepa sang about sex, and after the dancing — or as we called it, slet — I would change into a red and black nylon shirt to sing in the school choir.
My diaries preserve the history of the departure of young Albanian men and women, carry the heartbreak of those who wept on the eve of war and hold the pain of those forcibly expelled from their homes.
With deep emotion, I had described the overloaded buses of March 1999, the longing for our home in Prishtina — just 60 kilometers away while we were refugees in Skopje — and the human dignity shattered near the railway, in the mud of the Bllaca valley. I wrote about Stenkovec 1, where people were nothing more than a number, sheltered in one of the camp’s endless tents, and where newborns were given the name Lëdinë.
As the years passed, these diaries became even more valuable, turning into some of the most precious things I owned. Life had moved on, and I had lived in many different homes. Yet, no matter where I was, my diaries always found their rightful place.
Their significance grew even more after Bora and Mal asked me, “When did the war start?”
Both of them, today, belong to the new Kosovo — free from the memories of a past that no longer exists, yet full of questions that deserve answers, answers not always found in school textbooks. That is why I wrote the book “Chronicle of the heart: These were my ’90s.” As a response to my children’s question — but not only that.
It is also a confrontation with memories — for my parents, who turned their living rooms into news centers, following one edition after another on BBC, Deutsche Welle and Voice of America, while keeping the radio on to ensure no news was missed; for my sister and brother, then just small children, who found joy in adjusting the round dish satellite to catch endless cartoons; for the neighbors who reinforced their apartment entrances with iron bars during the long curfew hours.
And not just as a war diary, but also as a narrative of triumph. While browsing through my diaries during the writing process, I would occasionally research historical events online to verify their accuracy — so much time had passed. With a click, I would travel back in time, through recordings of demonstrations, brutal police violence, images of bodies in mass graves, the sorrowful faces of mothers in mourning — events I had seen and lived through.
For some, eternal memory may be a curse — for me, it is one of the greatest blessings.
I was engulfed by the weight of the past until it overwhelmed me. The pain was there, like an old wound that still stings at the slightest touch. Especially because, in many of these events, I had been a protagonist myself.
But the book had to be written, and healing had to begin.
For some, persistent memory may be a curse — for me, it is one of the greatest blessings. May we never forget! For those of us who have lived through apartheid and war, memories may hurt, but forgetting is a sad, frightening and painful alternative. Without the memories we have preserved in drawers, diaries and photographs, it can feel as if the war never happened. Yet the war is an inseparable part of us. Without these memories, it feels as though we, too, are falling apart.
Semezdin Mehmedinović, a Bosnian author and one of my favorites, revealed in 2010 that he had suffered a heart attack — one he had fortunately survived. However, the mandatory treatment carried the risk of memory loss. “Forgetting won’t kill you,” his cardiologist had told him. But for Mehmedinović, forgetting is a kind of death. Not because those of us who have lived through war feel nostalgia or a pathological longing to return to the past, but because we want to bear witness, to tell our truth and to create a bridge between the past and the present.
Let’s heal ourselves and others, including in our history the new generations. The opposite of forgetting is mnemonics — the practice of remembering. My diaries, filled with memories written in pink notebooks, are the best mnemonics, especially in a time when even memory has gone virtual, for God’s sake, like these Facebook memories.
“What doesn’t kill me makes me a writer,” says Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov. Perhaps he wasn’t thinking of award-winning writers, but of storytellers — those who write with readers in mind, especially those who come after us. Those who recount history as they lived it.
Some houses have rooms that remain locked. Rooms filled with things — mostly objects that seem irrelevant to daily life but, strangely, feel necessary, like memories. These rooms stay closed until the day comes when the homeowners make peace with the past and open the doors — all of them, especially the ones in their hearts. For me, my storytelling is that room. I have opened it, and I don’t believe I will ever close it again.
Parts from the author's diary.
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Feature image: Atdhe Mulla with photographs by the author.
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- This story was originally written in Albanian.