About Zëri i Grave
Zëri i Grave began as a personal question—where are the women?—sparked by Cynthia Enloe’s work and carried with me since childhood. I grew up surrounded by the quiet strength of the women in my family—my grandmother, my mother, my aunts—whose lives were full of care, labor, and resilience. Their stories, however, were rarely told. I realized that while the men sat under the grapevines, laughing and resting, the women were always moving, working, holding everything together. Even as war loomed and then arrived, their strength remained unspoken. This project grew out of a desire to listen more closely to their lives and to offer space for those stories to be seen and heard.
As I moved into graduate studies, this question deepened. I began asking my aunts and cousins about their wartime experiences—and once I opened that door, the stories came. Often tender, sometimes harrowing, always powerful. Zëri i Grave exists because so many women were willing to speak, to revisit painful memories in order to be witnessed. This project documents their stories as acts of remembrance and resistance. It’s a digital archive that speaks back to the silence and erasure of women’s roles in Kosova’s war, and to the ongoing cultural and political systems that continue to overlook them.
The process of collecting and writing these stories has not been easy. As a child of war myself, sitting with these memories—both mine and others’—has been emotional and often overwhelming. There were times when I couldn’t write, when revisiting an interview would leave me speechless or in tears. But through the difficulty, I’ve come to understand that storytelling is not just about looking back—it’s about making sense of who we are, and how we move forward. Zëri i Grave is my offering to the women of Kosova, and to others who continue to live through war. It’s a space for witnessing, for honoring survival, and for affirming that these stories matter.
About Clarity of Process
Creating a platform for Kosovar women’s voices to be heard allows them to participate in the research process beyond interviews. I am committed to allowing their stories to be the lifeblood of this digital media project and showcasing their authentic voices through an audio format deriving from our interviews in our native Albanian language, and transcripts in both Albanian and English. In doing so, I wish to stay true to Kosovar women’s voices and experiences rather than offer my own interpretations as a scholar. I believe these stories speak for themselves and my academic interpretations are not what gives them power and credibility. In the contrary, my academic tone interferes with the power that these narratives inherently carry and the lessons that emerge from them about living, being, and surviving in wartime.
Thus, I intentionally dedicate this space to my participants’ experiences and let their stories stand as grounded theory about living, being, and surviving. In seeking some balance in their representation, I was guided by Boylorn’s (2009) words:
It would be useless and futile to collect their experiences with the hope of magnifying and centering their lives if they themselves could not benefit from or translate the meaning. If the text was written in such a way that they could not or would not want to read their own stories, what would be the point”? (p. 79)
In other words, what would be the point of bearing witness to war stories if they did not remain true to the tone of the storytellers and resemble the lives that the survivors lived?
As a scholar, I am aware of the ongoing monolithic narrative of women as victims of war and I do not wish to perpetuate it in this project. In addition, I am mindful of my own risk of portraying homogenous stories about Kosovar women as heroines of war who are kind-hearted, care for their communities, and are highly resilient, thus telling “a single story” about their identities, and even accidentally romanticizing their atrocious and traumatic experiences of wartime.
As a result, in this space, I situate recorded interviews with Kosovar women to portray them and their realities of war as personal, nuanced, and fluid, and refuse to draw rigid general conclusions about all women in Kosova. Therefore, to be as ethical as possible, I invite you to engage with their stories and interpret them based on your own lived experiences without offering you a lens to look at them. I invite you to pay attention to details, to the lack of cohesion and clarity in many of my participants’ stories, and do your best to hold on to those characteristics as you draw your own partial conclusions. To the best of your abilities, listen and attempt to engage with their raw rhythms, silences, moods, and their own reactions to their memories of war.
By listening to Kosovar women’s narratives, you are bearing witness! You are sharing the responsibility for seeking justice for women’s suffering in wartime, confronting its gendered dimensions, and recognizing the integral role that women play in shaping the course of history.
Zëri i Grave 