A soldier, a neighbour, and a brother; a Story of …Love?

In Warscapes, solidarity and love are not less of a reality than suffering and violence- and not telling the astonishing stories that prove so is an active way of negating it. Here is one of those (extra)ordinary stories that ought to be told.

Can you remember your first memory? If you ever attempted to situate your very first, you will know that it takes time and effort to navigate a sea of images that fight each other to establish a chronological order. Independently of the accuracy of the answer, that six word question generally triggers a journey into the past that unlocks long forgotten stories and the retrospective feelings associated with them. It is an arduous task, and people generally take their time. Shockingly, when I asked Kitara for her very first memory, her response was swift, like, seconds quick, and the answer turned out to be a series of interlocking memories that portrayed the hardships of her childhood.

Kitara’s first memory is that of hunger and suffering, but arguably also of solidarity and love. Let me tell you what she recalls:

“Because it was hard for my parents, they distributed us, they sent some of us to live with our uncles and aunts, other with grandmothers and the like. So, when I was five years old I was sent to live with my Aunt in Walungu. It was hard there…I had a cousin who also lived in my aunt’s house, and we eat together- you know? Here we eat from the same dish, and so, I could never satisfy my hunger. We had a code when we were eating (to which she pinches me softly in the top my hand); when he (her cousin) pinched me in the hand , I had to stop eating, even if was still hungry, or I had not started eating.. otherwise he will beat me when we were alone.”

This situation seemed to have lasted for about a year, and it is literally marked in Kitara’s skin. As she told me her very first memory, she pointed up to a few burn marks in her arms and explained to me that she got them when going to the village fields to collect sweet potatoes and cook them under the soil in order to nourish herself. Importantly, Kitara remarked how caring her aunt was and how much they loved each other. She explained to me that her aunt was simply too sick, and thus unable to take care of home affairs, including the ‘pinching situation’.

As she was Mona-Lisa smiling to herself while looking at the burn marks, I asked Kitara what was her first happy memory; to which she answered as fast as the first time around:

"I was saved by a military, a rebel!!"

As unexpected as this was I asked Kitara to tell me more about it, to which she continued:

“There was a big war in the village, and I was saved by a rebel. I was sleeping and everybody left; you know? When the war arrives, that is what people do- they run and hide in the forest until the danger has past. In the rush they simply forgot that I was sleeping, and when I woke up, I was alone. The village was empty but there was a rebel there. He did nothing to me, he protected me, he made me eat, he fed me and took care of me for three days. We hide into my aunt’s house, but he left the door open to make it seem like the house was already searched and empty. At that time I think he was trying to find a solution to reunite me with my family. At the third day he took me to the forest nearby to look for them; we couldn’t find them, but we found other people that I didn’t know and he left me there with them and left- they guarded me until we found my aunt”.

She paused for a few seconds and continued: “shortly after that… I was very sick, I think I was malnourished (remember the pinching situation?); and there was a neighbor in the village that liked me well. She was an old lady, and she was shocked every time she saw me because of my state. So, she sent a letter to my house in Bukavu explaining my situation and saying that if they did not do anything about it, I was just going to die there. But my family took some time, so one day she picked me up without saying anything to anybody and guarded me in her house for a whole week- she fed me, she helped me showering…and when she constated that I was a bit better, she took me back to my aunt’s and told her that she had found me around the villages' church”

Just when I thought that the tale was at its end, and while I was processing the information and looking at my notes; Kitara went once more:

“ Then, I was sick again, I had a ball in my throat, it was big, like a second head. And my older brother, which was 15 at the time, and who had received the news (because the letter that the kidnapping lady had previously sent) came and took me, again without saying anything to my aunt. He came all the way walking from Bukavu (about 50 kilometres). He had no money or anything, but he brought with him a little bag of sugar, he put me on his shoulders and explain me that I had to suck little quantities of the sugar packet every now and then to keep my energy until we arrived home. He thought that we will go back the same way he did- walking; but after seeing my state he realised that it was impossible. We walked and walked, until a camionette passed by and my bother asked the driver to give us a lift; we were lucky because the man was also going towards Bukavu and accepted to take us with him. We travelled on the open back of the track and it rained all the way through, it was really cold and wet but I remember my brother held me close and kept me warm all the way home”.

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Hidden Stories & the Politics of Love

When reflecting on her first memories, Kitara naturally stressed the hardships of her childhood; and while hunger, sickness and fear were no doubt the protagonists of her memory canvas, I however cannot help, from my privileged position, to see the other side of the story: the patterns of solidarity and love that thread these memories together.

Way too often we are flooded with the normative warscape tales stressing people’s survival self-interest, and those of easy on the trigger ‘soldiers’ pillaging villages, kidnaping children, engaging in forms of sexual violence, and what have you. As true as these images can be, Kitara’s memories attest that these fragments are at best only part of the story. The stories that we do not hear, hence somehow those silenced, are those ones that talk about a stranger in arms ready to help a lost child in the battlefield, a compassionate neighbor willing to selflessly take on someone’s wellbeing, a caring brother ready to do two marathons front-to-back carrying her sister on his shoulders.

I believe that love is the higher form of politics there is, and as feminist, poet, theorist and cultural critic Bell Hooks kindly remind us: " The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others" (Hooks, B., 1994).

These hidden stories tell us that, in warscapes, solidarity and love are not less of a reality than suffering or violence, and negating this (remember, not telling these astonishing stories is an active way of negating their existence) does not only create a deformed portrait of warscapes but it also runs the risk of pathologizing entire populations by negating them the politics of love.

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A final reflection: Deforming those in arms

I think about the stranger in arms quite often, and when I do so, a thousand questions come to my mind: what exactly motivated the rebel to separate from the group to help Kitara? Had he already decided to break from the group before seeing her? What did he do after- did he went looking for his comrades? or did he demobilise by himself and went back looking for his family, or maybe for a new life somewhere else? If so, was leaving the group something that he had been thinking for a while, or a decision he took in that specific moment? Something that he wanted to do for quite a while but for some reason he could not do until that very particular day? Was taking care of Raissa a pivotal moment in his own story? In fact, maybe he just joined, or even got trapped, in the militia that same morning? For what reasons? ....

I don’t have answer to any of these questions, and I doubt nobody by him does; but one thing is for certain, Kitara’s story goes a long way to break with normative assumptions about both, people acting simply on the basis of survival individualism and that of soldiers as an homogenic evil force, an universal category, two dimensional characters with neither a story of their own, nor complex rationalities shaping their actions. Perhaps we ought to think more often as soldiers also as being cousins, neighbors and brothers.