In this article, the life story of a Polish woman in South Africa is used to illustrate that stories of exile are ‘matter out of place’ in host countries. Space is a central category in both the story of exiles and in the collective history of receiving countries, but it has different emotional, social, cultural and political meanings. Sometimes stories of exile are denied a place in the social memory of a society. Therefore, recollection and making sense of experienced misery in foreign contexts is often a difficult and lonely undertaking. The article links the story to macro-political processes and attempts to answer questions regarding the consequences of the lack of meaningful space for exiles to remember. Collective and national memories and ceremonies are often exclusive and offer no place for ‘alien’ memories. Therapeutic repertoires often fail to address the emotional value of communal sharing a socio-cultural and (meta) physical space. It is argued that because the state does not take responsibility for providing a (symbolic) space for the mourning and reconciliation of people whose memories are out of place, transcultural psychiatry – its subsystem – will have to reflect on how to provide such a space.
Agger, I. (1994). The blue room: Trauma and testimony among refugee women. A psycho-social exploration. London: Zed Books .
2.
Allbrook, M. , & Cattalini, H. (1995). The general Langfitt story: Polish refugees recount their experiences of exile, dispersal and resettlement. Available: www.immi.gov/research/publications
3.
Andrews, M. (2003). Grand national narratives and the project of truth commissions: A comparative analysis . Media, Culture, and Society, 90(2), 45–65 .
4.
Antze, P. , & Lambek, M. (Eds.). (1996). Tense past: Cultural essays in trauma and memory. New York: Routledge .
5.
Arendt, H. (1973). The origins of totalitarianism. New York/London: Harcourt .
6.
Aron, A. (1992). Testimonio: A bridge between psychotherapy and sociotherapy. In E. Cole , O. M. Espin , & E. D. Rothblum (Eds.), Refugee women and their mental health: Shattered societies and shattered lives (pp. 173–191). New York: Harrington Park Press .
7.
Bourdieu, P. (Ed.). (1993). La misère du monde. Paris: Editions du Seuil .
8.
Clifford, J. (1994). Diasporas . Cultural Anthropology, 9(3), 302–338 .
9.
Coetzee, C. (2000). Krotoa remembered: A mother of unity, a mother of sorrows? In S. Nutall & C. Coetzee (Eds.), Negotiating the past: The making of memory in South Africa (pp. 112–120). Cape Town: Oxford University Press .
10.
Connolly, W. (1996). Suffering, justice, and the politics of becoming . Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 20, 251–277 .
11.
Crane, S. (1998). (Not) Writing history: Rethinking the intersections of personal history and collective memory with Hans von Aufsess . History and Memory8(1), 5–28 .
12.
Crossley, M. (1999). Stories of illness and trauma survival: Liberation or repression?Social Science & Medicine, 48, 1685–1695 .
13.
Daniel, E. V. (1997). Charred lullabies: Chapters in an anthropology of violence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press .
14.
Das, V. , Kleinman, A. , Lock, M. , Ramphele, M. , & Reynolds, P. (Eds.). (2001). Remaking a world: Violence, social suffering and recovering. Berkeley: University of California Press .
15.
De Gruchy, J. (2000). The TRC and the building of a moral culture. In W. James & L. van den Vijver (Eds.), After the TRC: Reflections on truth and reconciliation in South Africa (pp. 167–172). Cape Town: David Philip .
Frank, A. (1998). Stories illness as care of the self: A Foucauldian dialogue . Health, 2, 329–348 .
18.
Friedlander, S. (1993). Memory, history and the extermination of the Jews of Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press .
19.
Harris, B. (2001). A foreign experience: Violence, crime and xenophobia during South Africa’s transition. Violence and Transition, Series 5.
20.
Hochbruck, W. (1996) ‘I have spoken’: Fictional ‘orality’ in indigenous fiction . College Literature, 23, 132–142 .
21.
Horowitz, S. (1997). Voicing the void: Muteness and memory in Holocaust fiction. New York: State University of New York Press .
22.
Irele, F. (2002). The crisis of cultural memory in Chinua Achebe’s Things fall apart. African Studies Quarterly [online]. Available: www.africa.ufl.edu
23.
Jain, J. (1998). Writers of the Indian diaspora: Theory and practice. New Delhi: Vedam .
24.
James, W. , & van den Vijver, L. (Eds.). (2000). After the TRC: Reflections on truth and reconciliation in South Africa. Claremont, South Africa: David Philip .
25.
Jedlicki, J. (1999). Historical memory as a source of conflicts in Eastern Europe . Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 32, 225–232 .
26.
Królikowski, L. (1983). Stolen childhood: A saga of Polish war children. Lindsey, ON: Deyell .
27.
Langness, L. , & Frank, G. (1981). Lives: An anthropological approach to biography. Novato, CA: Chandler & Sharp .
28.
Lasch, C. (1985). The minimal self. London: Picador .
29.
Levi,P. (1988). The drowned and the saved. Abacus: London .
30.
Massey, D. (1998). Space, place and gender. Cambridge: Polity Press .
31.
Ministerial Committee on Abuse, Neglect and Ill-Treatment of Older Persons . (2000). Mothers and fathers of the nation: The forgotten people?Pretoria: Ministry of Social Development .
32.
Minkley, G. , & Rassool, C. (2000). Orality, memory, and social history in South Africa. In S. Nuttall & C. Coetzee (Eds.), Negotiating the past: The making of memory in South Africa (pp. 89–100). Cape Town: Oxford University Press .
33.
Myerhoff, B. (1978). Number our days. New York: Dutton .
34.
Nasson, B. (1999). The South African War, 1899–1902. London, Arnold .
35.
Pedersen, D. (2002). Political violence, ethnic conflict, and contemporary wars: Broad implications for health and social well-being . Social Science & Medicine, 55, 175–190 .
36.
Probyn, E. (1996). Outside belongings. New York: Routledge .
37.
Ramphele, M. (2000). Law, corruption and morality. In W. James & L. van den Vijver (Eds.), After the TRC: Reflections on truth and reconciliation in South Africa (pp. 172–177). Claremont, South Africa: David Philip .
38.
Richters, A. (2002). Als de dag van gisteren:Tijd, tijdsbeleving en de geestelijke gezondheidszorg. In E. van Meekeren (Ed.), Culturen binnen psychiatriemuren: Geestelijke gezondheidszorg in een multiculturele samenleving (pp. 48–62). Amsterdam: Boom .
39.
Scott, J. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press .
40.
Skotnes, P. (1996). Miscast: Negotiating the presence of the Bushmen. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press .
41.
Skweyiya, Z. (2000). Foreword. In Ministerial Committee on Abuse, Neglect and Ill-treatment of Older Persons (Ed.), Mothers and fathers of the nation: The forgotten people? (pp. 1–3). Pretoria: Ministry of Social Development .
42.
Soyinka, W. (1999). The burden of memory, the muse of forgiveness. Oxford: Oxford University Press .
43.
Stanley, L. (2002). Mourning becomes... The work of feminism in the spaces between lives lived and lives written . Women’s Studies International Forum, 25(1), 1–17 .
44.
Temple, B. (1999). Diaspora, diaspora space and Polish women . Women’s Studies International Forum, 22(1), 17–24 .
45.
Thomas, N. (1987). Possessions: Indigenous art/colonial culture. London: Thames and Hudson .
46.
Thompson, P. (1988). The voice of the past: Oral history. Oxford: Oxford University Press .
47.
Thompson, P. (1993). Family myth, models, and denials in the shaping of individual life paths. In D. Bertaux & P. Thompson (Eds.), Between generations. Family models, myths and memories (Vol. II, pp. 13–39). Oxford: Oxford University Press .
48.
Thomson, D. (1962). Europe since Napoleon. London: Longman .
49.
Van Dongen, E. (2002). Skeletons of the past, flesh and blood of the present: Remembrance and older people in a South African context. In S. Makoni & K. Stroeken (Eds.), Ageing in Africa: Sociolinguistic and anthropological approaches (pp. 256–276). Aldershot: Ashgate .
50.
Van Dongen, E. (2003). ‘Die lewe vat ek net soos ek dit kry’: An ethnographic account of the past, present and future of older people on farms in the Western Cape Province . Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, 18, 303–337 .
51.
Werbner, R. (1991). Tears of the dead: The social biography of an African family. London: Edinburgh University Press .
