so then. days later, and not sure about blogs still, i'm writing. here. to see. just to see.
The flight home with Burger's daughter and Carolyn Nordstrom's a different kind of war story. between the two. drawn inevitably towards this africa of youth. knowing insistently, steadily, the frustration of such moves. towards. something that isn't.
Nordstrom says "Surviving war entails the fundamental irony of simultaneously creating meaning and embracing (the reality) of chaos--a demand on cognitive process that confounds even the best philosophers" (109). "William James was one of the first contemporary westher theoreticians to lay to rest the ideal of a fixed identity: "Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind" (1890: 295). And he continues with a line that could not speak more directly to the Mozambican experience: "To wound any one of these images is to wound him."
"The richly nuanced complexity of self has recently come to stand as one of its defining characteristics in contemporary philosophy. Like the stories people fashion to survive the war, self is a continually emergent phenomenon: crafted, enhanced, re-sculpted. The process is a creative one. 188
and
"What happens when very little of social and cultural relevance is left intact? Worlds cannot simply be created, they must be created anew.
The dilemma is clear: between the world as it was, the world as it should be, and the now of a world destroyed lies an abyss, a discontinuity, a need to define the one by the other, and the impossibility of doing so. Identity hinges on bridging this gap." 190
and
I have begun to accept that, at special times, a true spark of creativity is possible, a spark that defies the logic of tradition and the bounds of the culturally possible to forge the wholly new. Yet this spark of creativity is not a light in an otherwise darkened horizon. It is attended by the minutia of daily acts that take place within a field of cultural possibilities; it works amid processes of cultural selection and recombination that hone the day-to-day manifestations of the creative process. 198
and
I have "seen" (a western phrase elevating sight to knowing) Mozambicans create worlds from the voics of burning embers that were once home, family, and accepted reality. The problem I face is not with the knowing or understanding of this, but with translating it into words, words incapable of fully communicating this experience, this creativity. Possibly this dearth of explanatory tools relates back to the simple fact that writers depend on language. How can we write of that which does not partake of language? How can we communicate what the printed word cannot convey? Yet in the same way that the lack of knowledge of the circular nature of the earth or the circulatory system of the human body once thwarted, but did not arrest, scientific understanding, I do not think our inability to transcribe some of life's larger realities should obscure the fact that we theorize in an academic world limited by a language not yet capable of encompassing the vicissitudes and depths of existence." 203
and
"the healing conceptualized in Mozambican/African medicine viewed violence as a pathology that needed to be cured like any other illness or misfortune. Hundreds of conversations I had with Mozambicans reflected their preoccupation with defusing the cultures of violence the (209) war had wrought. It is a violence, they stress, that can last far beyond formal military cease fires. People constantly reminded themselves and others about the insidious nature of violence to reproduce itself, and to destroy worlds and lives in the process...210
and reporting what someone else has said: "the importance of the Curandeiro lies not only in her or his ability to treat the diseases and physical ravages of war, but in their ability to take the violence out of a person and to reintegrate them back into a healthy lifestyle. You see, people who have been exposed to the war, well, some of this violence can affect them, stick with them, like a rash on the soul. They carry this violence with them back to their communities and their homes and their lives, and they begin to act in ways they have never acted before. They bring the war back with them--they become more confused, more violent, more dangerous, and so too does the whole community. We need to protect against this. The Curandeiros make consultations and patiently talk to the person, they give medicinal treatments, they perform ceremonies, they work with the whole family, they include the community. They cut the person off from any holds the war has on him or her, they scrape off the violence from their spirit, they make them forget what they have seen and felt and experienced in the war, they make them alive again, alive and part of the community. ... . the Curandeiros take the war out of them, they uneducate their war education. They remind the person how to be a part of their family, to work their machamba, to get along, to be a part of the community. They cure the violence that others have taught. 210