When do wars end? Do they end with surrender, with military
annihilation of protagonist, the recovery of livelihoods, reconstruction of
houses, hospitals, schools, return of the displaced, erasing off things with
military signature, free and fair elections and a shaking of hands all
around? Do wars end that way, ever,
though? Isn’t it true that the wars that
have truly ‘ended’ for all practical purposes those which are beyond recall and
whose identity-ties have been smudged by the movement of people and dwarfed by
event after earth-shattering event?
What do people do in after-war nations that are yet
to conclude their memory-wars? Do they
wait and wait and wait? No. Life lives through all wars. Even in the most terrible conflagrations,
amid the worst deprivations, caught in the swirl of loss and sorrow, people
can’t roll over and die. They breathe,
they hope and they do their best to survive.
In post-war nations, peoples who have eked out an existence in the
harshest of circumstances are naturally ‘better off’ than they were and perhaps
better equipped to face new challenges.
But that’s not what is important.
What is important is that they are alive and do not have to deal with
the kinds of uncertainties that attend armed conflicts.
And it is the same for those who lived outside the
better defined war-zones: places whose young residents were in the battlefield
and places that were bombed or were legitimate targets. The entire island was
such a place. These people too have
memory-wars to deal with. And yet, just
as they breathed during the war, so too do they breathe now.
There was more than breathing and anxiety during
those endless bloody days that bled into bloody nights that ended as bloody
mornings, again and again and again.
There was conversation. There was quarrel. There was wanting-to-know. There was a child’s curiosity. There was an
old man’s indulgence in a pastime that cannot be discarded – reading
newspapers, even if they are old, even if he’s already heard it from the radio
or a neighbor.
Abducted though they could very well be the next
moment and duly robbed of childhood, children did child-things. They still do.
It couldn’t have been laugh-less back then and it is not laugh-less now. There was color but far more discoloration
that the eye could take; but eye adjusted to the dismal and the eye re-adjusted
to the return of color.
Even as people struggle with accumulated anguish and
things that can only die in any meaningful way with death, even as they have to
contend with the fact that days gone by haunt their wakeful hours, even though
they know that memory doesn’t sleep at night, people live on. They draw water from the well, they draw
yield from the earth that has not lost its goodness, they seek, find, give and
obtain love, and indulge in everyday joys regardless of their dimensions.
During terrible times even as despair prompts the
questioning and doubting of faith and deity respectively, even as places of
worship get turned into refuge for the homeless and fearful or cover for men
with guns, even as temples are desecrated or destroyed, the sacred resists, the
sacred denies all intruders, whatever their uniform, whatever their rhetoric of
fervor. Holy days did not become
unholy. But such days call for greater
faith and firm footfall as the faithful re-embrace traditions and customs that
nothing, not even war, can burn easily.
There are faces in this land, the territories once
called ‘cleared’ and ‘uncleared’, weary places where bombs exploded and where
bombs were expected to explode. There are hands and feet. There are eyes and therefore there is
gaze. They look and are looked
upon. Every single expression in the
so-called un-reconciled earth can be found in other parts of the island
supposedly ‘reconciled’, for memory-angst does not forbid living. Memory-wars do not bury the fear of death or
the will to live. In every nook and
corner of this island there are eight things that are common to all: joy and
sorrow, profit and loss, praise and blame, and prestige and obscurity. And all peoples, to a lesser or greater
extent, find ways of dealing with these vicissitudes, some with equanimity,
some with resignation and others with arrogance.
There are streets and street corners. They’ve been wiped of war’s inevitable
dullness and desolation. The colors of
hope have returned. The music of a
normalcy it would have been too optimistic to envision not too long ago fills
township and vendors, marketplaces and shoppers. Even those who loiter, do so because it is
good at times to just let the world pass by.
These are not representative stories of the formerly
conflict-ridden regions. These are the
‘everydays’ of people all over the island. And yet these are also images of
determination and resolve. They are the
‘moving-on’ narratives of work, industry, commerce and tough engagement with
the social and physical universe, expressions of the indomitable character of
the human being to resist subduing. They
are stories of these times; stories that no doubt carry trace of ‘those times’
that came before but are nevertheless inscribed by a kind of ‘resolution’ the
users of that word may not understand or even care about. They are inscribed, also, by a reconciliation
of a far more significant kind embedded with gravity of meaning that the users
of that word, reconciliation, probably do not have the intellectual,
ideological or political endowments to fathom.
Previously too, there was reconciliation. People were reconciled to what was considered
the fact of inevitability. Tragedy was
expected. The only thing that counted
was the ‘when’ of it all. This is
reconciliation to something else.
Reconciliation to the fact that all that is over, that there will come a
tomorrow that’s worth investing hope in, that there is a huge difference being
recipient of context and partner in context-creation.
It is all written in line and curve, on face and
frame, backdrop and foreground, the random configurations of people and things
that narrate a time that is not the best of times but is most certainly times
that are infinitely better than times past.
Yes, wars truly end for
all practical purposes when they move beyond recall and whose identity-ties
have been smudged by the movement of people and dwarfed by event after earth-shattering
event. From war to memory-war, from the end of war to the irrelevance of memory
is a journey of many generations. But
from that first conflagration of sound and fury and through the less loud and
less in-your-face struggles of the memory-war to some war-less time, one thing
does happen. People move. People move
on.
This is a moving-on
story that we are all a part of. A
moving-on story replete with obstinacy and intransigence, where one-upmanship
is part of script, where victor, so-called, will not concede ground and loser,
so-called, will demand by way of compensation everything that was fought for to
no avail. A moving-on story where
‘reconciliation’ is code word for extraction and legitimating claims based on
myth and land-greed. A moving-story
where such the exaggeration of grievance is responded to with objection to both
exaggeration and grievance.
It is a moving-on story
that will be long but will be read nevertheless with reader interjecting
preference into narrative.
And among those who
write there will be those endowed with patience and humility, generosity and
reason; they may make the lesser numbers, but just as the tyrannies of the
world are perpetuated by the few, so too the reversal of the vile.
Wars never end neatly. Recovery is never smooth. Other struggles, wars if you will, can and do
weave in and out of these processes, adding or subtracting color as the case
may be. There’s one thing that’s not in
dispute, though. No one wants to return
to that other time. For that very
reason, this moving-on will water the earth.
Some flowers must bloom.
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