Write, Just Write - It's All You Have

Months have passed since I wrote anything more than a briefing paper or an assessment of protection concerns in some far-flung region of South Sudan that few have ever heard of, fewer still have ever been to.

I don’t mean that to sound romantic. In the past several months, I’ve been to villages named Mading, Buaw, Gorwai, Pulturuk, Waat, Mathiang, Koch – each one different in so many ways and yet so similar. In nearly every one, markets are shadows of their former selves or gone altogether. Families crowd into ever more fully-packed shelters as they welcome distant relatives or complete strangers who have fled conflict in a neighboring county or village, their condition ranging from dire to “normal for South Sudan,” a state that is rarely normal for anywhere else in the world.

And yet many cope. They continue to get by, as millions of humans who have lived and loved and lost, survived and died, for thousands of years. What choice does one have, in the end? Give up or keep going. We’ll all die eventually, and the only choice that many have in such hard circumstances is to wake up with the resolve to say, “Not today.”

One would think it would be easy to write in such conditions – to record the stories of those who have said, “I’m still here, and I plan to remain as long as I can.” To speak of one of Sudan’s top marathoners, a man who, though old now, told me of finishing 60^th out of 1000 in a race outside Addis Ababa thirty or more years ago. I, amazed, had to smile a bit, incredulous at his disappointment. In the swamps and the desert heat of Sudan, he was unbeatable, but take him to the mountaintop, where the air ran cold and thin, and suddenly, his career was over.

My mother was the first to notice the long stretch where I was no longer writing. It worried her, but I brushed off her concerns like so many others she’s raised throughout the years. Not because she was wrong, but because I was afraid of all that was right in her worry. I’ve seen so many of my friends and colleagues take up habits that signal an unhealthy amount of stress. Juba is full of them. Those who drink too much, smoke too much, work too much, fuck too much – the city is a seedy hive of empty relations and forced joviality. All to keep darker emotions at arm’s length.

I don’t go in for that, and for most of my time here, I thought I was immune. Everyone likes to think that they’re stronger than they actually are. All of these vices are an avoidance trick, a way to keep from looking in the mirror. You dance and turn circles, faster and faster, hoping that the momentum can keep the world blurred until you break the cycle with R&R, or until you break down.

I don’t smoke. I haven’t taken up drinking. My avoidance trick was just to never look inwards, and to do that, I had to give up writing.

Because writing, for me, takes strength. It takes an ability to live alongside my inner self and communicate freely with those emotions that are hidden from the everyday. That act can be profoundly spiritual, in a way, but it’s also profoundly vulnerable.

In our work, especially amongst protection actors, we have to cultivate empathy. Without it, it is impossible to cultivate the trust and relationships necessary to speak openly and candidly about where an individual or community’s concerns, fears, and hopes lie.

But it’s a razor’s edge, both for me and the person I’m interviewing, and it’s often one that I’m walking blindfolded. Think of it like this – a person has been displaced from her home. She has no idea if or when she will go back. She is, more often than not, missing a child, probably more than one, or a sister, brother, husband. By opening myself up, I may open her up, and she may relive darker moments – a grandchild murdered while she watched, his throat slit. Rape. A friend who died of thirst in the bush, unburied.

That’s what I’m avoiding when I don’t write. I’ve been maintaining my distance from some of the darkest stories I’ve ever encountered. They’re not the same as those written up in a report from Amnesty or Human Rights Watch or the UN. Those are words on paper, able to move someone, but ultimately unable to truly reflect the pain in an old woman’s voice or the vacant look in a teenager’s eyes.

Even now, I want to push this away, close the computer, and delete this file. I don’t want anyone to know that in hearing these stories, I’ve absorbed some of the darkness. However much I’ve tried to protect myself, I still need to empathize, and that means leaving the door unlocked for a whole range of emotions, not least trauma and loss. Even if it’s not my own, I as a human being can picture my own family, my own friends, those I’ve lost and those who are safe at home, unaware of all these…these things.

But if I close myself off to the bad, I also shut out the good. I shut out the amazing men and women of South Sudan who have acted as translators, facilitators, and friends in this last year. People who have lived through horror and yet are full to bursting with energy and humor. People whose lives have been full of tragedy but also full of adventure and life – like the marathoner whose legs took him from a rural village to the regional capital, from secondary school to university, and let him see places many here can’t even imagine. Or the school teacher, who chooses to remain in a small town with his family rather than move to a city several hours away for the safety and security of an NGO job. To him, the presence of his family in an emergency outweighs any monetary gain.

I don’t know about others, but for me, writing, especially when I can evoke feelings that are true and pure and deep and real to me, can carve me out and make me feel like I’m bleeding from a thousand emotional cuts. But the hope that it brings, the hope that soothes the pain, sets me on a stronger foundation.

                

I have to write again, and I want this to be the start.