The psychology of art

Traumatized by war, Kosovar children express their anger, fear and hope through art.

By Vivienne Walt

June 4, 1999 | STANKOVIC 1 REFUGEE CAMP, Macedonia -- In the refugee camps, there are children who draw burning houses, bombs exploding and dead people bleeding on the ground. But those are not the ones to worry about. The children who are truly troubled are those who paint sunflowers and daisies, cloudless blue skies and golden sun rays shining down on a cut lawn. On paper, everything is right with their world.

Psychologists who deal with trauma have seen this before -- in Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Afghanistan -- in corners of the world where children's secure lives have been wrenched from their sockets. When a catastrophe like war occurs, children are tossed upon the emotional high seas and left adrift in the turmoil. As their reality begins to take on some grim new shape, they start drawing pictures of what they have seen -- and of what they wish they still could -- offering tentative glimpses into the chaos within them.

To one walking through this sprawling refugee camp just north of Macedonia's capital, Skopje, that chaos is not at all obvious. Children are squealing with laughter between the tents, jumping elastic tied around garbage cans and shooting hoops on makeshift basketball courts staked out in the mud. Some play elaborate hide-and-seek games between the tent ropes; others walk the paths, their arms linked, as though strolling through a Pristina park on a lazy weekend afternoon.

"They look happy, but underneath, it is something very different," says Zana Dobroshi, who left her home in Pristina, Kosovo's capital, 18 years ago. Now a child psychiatrist at Case Western University in Cleveland, she flew back to the Balkans in April to volunteer her services in the camps, and has spent the past several weeks doing triage on a few shattered psyches.

I first met Dobroshi walking down a hillside early one morning in Blace, a transit camp bordering Kosovo. Most refugees fleeing across the Macedonian border find themselves here, before they are assigned to camps like Stankovic. Dobroshi had made it her task to tour Blace every day, looking for new arrivals in particularly bad shape.

When I stopped to ask her what she was doing there, she sighed deeply and said she was on her way to see an 18-year-old girl who had been raped by Serbian soldiers. The girl had tied a scarf around her head during her flight from Kosovo, trying to hide her youth and prettiness from the soldiers along the way. But the ploy failed, and by the time Dobroshi met her, she was devastated. "She cannot sleep, she won't talk, she is vomiting all the time," she said. "I am trying to take her some homemade food, Albanian food. Maybe she will be able to eat this."

When I meet Dobroshi again in Stankovic a few days later, she has drawings from some of the refugee children to show me. She holds up a picture of red flowers given to her by a 7-year-old girl she interviewed last week at Blace. The girl told Dobroshi that she had stood outside her home in Kacanik, near the Macedonian border, and watched as people were killed across the street. Then, she and her family hid in the woods for a week until they were able to flee across the border to safety in Macedonia. "This was one of the most traumatized children I've seen, and yet she paints flowers," says Dobroshi. "It is as if she's saying, 'I want to draw flowers so you can be happy.'"

Jean-Claude Le Grande, a seven-year UNICEF veteran and sociologist who works on humanitarian emergencies, has seen this phenomenon before among children who have endured severe trauma. "This sort of behavior may be avoidance of reality. But you also have to understand that children have a huge capacity of resilience, adaptation to situations," he says. "This has been in their lives for the past two to three years. The tension, the fear was there for a long time. They may have already adapted."

All over this sprawling camp, with its shifting population of about 25,000 people, Kosovo's children have been painting. Their work is tacked against fences, or stuck clumsily with tape inside the tents of relief agencies. Others are pinned to the walls of their family tents, perhaps in an attempt to substitute the real paintings many of them abandoned on the walls of the homes they fled in minutes.

Next page: KLA soldiers and Apache helicopters dominate many paintings