Fragments of the Everyday: Mourning the Ambiguous Loss of Missing Children in Post-War Kosovo

Parents of missing children from the 1998-1999 Kosovo War face an unfinished or ‘chronic mourning’ caused by the formally, bureaucratically, and ‘existential[ly] ambiguous’ position of the missing. The ambiguity of their loss resists a teleological logic that locates a traumatic event in the past and enables future closure. If this is a type of loss that cannot be confined to the past and mourning cannot be terminated, how do parents live with, remember, and communicate this loss? This chapter seeks to understand chronic mourning and memory of the ambiguous loss by taking the everyday as a site point of analysis. An analysis of the experiences of loss inevitably places it within the existential and phenomenological approaches. I contend, however, that this experience is always configured and articulated in complex cultural, social, and political contexts. If, from a phenomenological perspective, we accept Emmanuel Levinas’ powerful assertion that suffering is intrinsically useless, then transforming it into something meaningful demands a greater socio-political force. The issue of the missing persons in Kosovo is particularly complex because social and institutional frameworks only partially accommodated these losses within their logic of operation. The politics surrounding missing persons in Kosovo have been inconsistent. In the backdrop of a hierarchy of commemoration and remembrance with military resistance and self-sacrifice standing at its peak, missing persons are legally categorised as disappeared, hence potentially unrecoverable, while symbolically, these absent bodies are hailed as markers of national pain and collective history. Within this version of history, parents found it difficult to imagine an active role for their children in the national narrative of triumph; instead, their losses rendered them mute witnesses to the war crimes. Rather than reading chronic mourning and memory-making practices through the well-established binary of official and counter memories that commonly privileges its public display, this chapter examines how these experiences unfold in the complex, messy realities of everyday life. To show how the personal and political, the private and public are knotted together, I present a series of granular ethnographic evidence from parents’ everyday lives.