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 buried in the heart

In Buried in the Heart, Erin Baines explores the political agency of women abducted as
children by the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda, forced to marry its com-
manders and to bear their children. Introducing the concept of complex victimhood, she
argues that abducted women were not passive victims, but navigated complex social and
political worlds that were life inside the violent armed group. Exploring the life stories of
thirty women, Baines considers the possibilities of storytelling to reclaim one’s sense of
self and relations to others, and to generate political judgement after mass violence.
Buried in the Heart moves beyond victim and perpetrator frameworks prevalent in the
field of transitional justice, shifting the attention to stories of living through mass violence
and the possibilities of remaking communities after it. The book contributes to an
overlooked aspect of international justice: women’s political agency during wartime.

Erin Baines is an Associate Professor at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the
University of British Columbia. She is the author of Vulnerable Bodies: Gender, the
UN and the Global Refugee Crisis (2004), and the editor of a life history of a woman who
spent eleven years inside the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), I Am Evelyn Amony:
Reclaiming My Life from the LRA (2015). She has published articles on gender, respon-
sibility and transitional justice, social repair, symbolic violence and forced marriage in
the Journal of Peace Research, the International Journal of Transitional Justice (IJTJ)
African Affairs, the Journal of Modern African Studies and the Journal of Human Rights.
 CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN LAW AND SOCIETY

Cambridge Studies in Law and Society aims to publish the best scholarly work on legal
discourse and practice in its social and institutional contexts, combining theoretical
insights and empirical research.
The fields that it covers are: studies of law in action; the sociology of law; the
anthropology of law; cultural studies of law, including the role of legal discourses in
social formations; law and economics; law and politics; and studies of governance.
The books consider all forms of legal discourse across societies, rather than being limited
to lawyers’ discourses alone.
The series editors come from a range of disciplines: academic law; socio-legal studies;
sociology; and anthropology. All have been actively involved in teaching and writing
about law in context.

Series editors
Chris Arup Monash University, Victoria
Sally Engle Merry New York University
Susan Silbey Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A list of books in the series can be found at the end of this book
 Buried in the Heart
women, complex victimhood and the war in
northern uganda

ERIN BAINES
University of British Columbia
University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia
4843/24, 2nd Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi – 110002, India
79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107137127
10.1017/9781316480342
© Erin Baines 2017
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2017
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
names: Baines, Erin K., 1969– author.
title: Buried in the heart : women, complex victimhood and the war in
northern Uganda / Erin Baines.
description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2016. | Series: Cambridge
studies in law and society
identifiers: lccn 2016025926 | isbn 9781107137127 (hardback)
subjects: lcsh: Women – Crimes against – Uganda. | Lord’s Resistance Army. |
Resilience (Personality trait) – Uganda. | Transitional justice – Uganda. |
Women and war – Uganda.
classification: lcc hv6250.4.w65 b345 2016 | ddc 967.6104/40926949–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016025926
isbn 978-1-107-13712-7 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
For the missing and missed
She is my country

everytime she goes

I am a leaf in the wind
everytime she goes
she takes with her
all the home that I can ever claim

what use do I have

for the carrier of bones

what anthem can I sing

for the graves of children

she holds my home in the country that she is

& every time she returns
she is my flag & I am home again

Juliane Okot Bitek, Day 40, 100 Days

 Contents

List of Figures page viii

Foreword ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgements xviii

1 Introduction 1

2 The New Acholi 31

3 The Originals 51

4 Grandmother 78

5 Seven Stories 99

6 Conclusions 129

Light, by Juliane Okot Bitek 147

Index 149

vii
 Figures

1 Representation of LRA hierarchy of command 1997–1999. page xvii

2 A life map. 22
3 An LRA compound/homestead in Sudan. 22
4 An LRA military base in Palateka, Sudan. 23
5 An LRA military base in Nicitu, Sudan. 23
6 An LRA military base in Jebelin, Sudan. 24
7 A body map. 25
8 A body map. 26
9 Photograph of LRA Commander-in-Chief, Joseph Kony (left) and former
LRA Second in Command, Vincent Otti, now deceased (right), by Erin
Baines. 30
10 An LRA military base in Aruu, Sudan. 50
11 LRA climbing mountains in South Sudan during Operation Iron Fist. 98
12 Drawing life maps. 102
13 Storytelling with life and place maps. 116
14 LRA on “mobile” (moving long distances), including the configuration of
LRA in the “position” (temporary bases). 128

viii
 Foreword

In the memoir of Evelyn Amony’s life in and after her abduction by the Lord’s
Resistance Army (LRA), the author tells a story she describes as “particularly pain-
ful,” one she has been unable to tell anyone, “not even [her] own mother.”
It involves an evening some months after her abduction from her village and after
she had moved a great distance in a military convoy transporting foodstuffs to a safe
base. Along the way, Evelyn spills a cupful of sorghum and, when confronted by
rebel commander Joseph Kony, she pleads with him, telling him that she could lead
him to her home village, which was nearby. There, she tells Kony, her mother has at
least four granaries full of sorghum that she would gladly give him to replace the
small amount Evelyn had lost.
In response, Kony orders a boy of Evelyn’s age to whip her as she lies face down.
If she should move or cry out, Kony tells the boy, he should begin to whip her over
again. At some point, Evelyn loses consciousness. She is left unattended overnight
but in the morning, when Kony sees that Evelyn will survive, he consoles her, and
gives her medicine to help her heal. In her account of this incident, Evelyn reflects
on Kony’s offer to help her as if she were once more there, reliving the moment:
“First you want to kill me? And . . . now you want to give me medicine to live?
I would rather die. Was I really beaten for the sorghum I spilled?” When Kony leaves
she throws the medicine away.
The same boy who inflicted the beating on Evelyn is then ordered to carry her to
a nursing station. The boy remains with Evelyn and watches as a nurse attends to her
wounds, using warm water to loosen the threads of fabric that had become
enmeshed in her flesh. The boy begins to cry. “Is this how people are really beaten?”
he asks her, “For just sorghum?” The two begin to cry together.
It was, I would suggest, Kony’s intention to sever Evelyn’s affinity for her mother,
to whom she looked as a source of continuing protection; to replace a sense of
longing for home with fear. Yet in recalling the story, Evelyn leads us to another
place, one the commander could not reach, for she still loves her mother enough to
want to protect her from the story and the heartbreak it would bring if she were to
hear it.
Through their tears – forbidden in the LRA – Evelyn and the unnamed boy
together mourn a common fate. Their roles could easily have been reversed, with
Evelyn inflicting a beating on the boy. In their silent exchange, they communicate

ix
x Foreword

both the arbitrariness of violence and the uselessness of it: the violence served no
other purpose then to dehumanize those subject to it, and those forced to impose it.
If Kony’s purpose was to create an army of those willing to kill for his cause, he did so
through infliction of violence without cause. In Evelyn’s acts of refusal, in the
performance of mourning, and in her act of love for her mother, she denied Kony
any measure of success in that purpose. Through bearing witness to useless violence,
Amony challenges assumptions about the LRA’s ability to dominate absolutely,
Evelyn did not submit, she did not become like them.
 Preface

We are trying to build a life for ourselves.

– Evelyn Amony
Amongst the war affected in northern Uganda, it is sometimes difficult to disen-
tangle victims and perpetrators. For more than a decade, starting in the early 1990s,
young Acholi1 boys and girls followed their parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts
into one of the hundreds of displaced persons camps created by the Government of
Uganda. The rebels abducted tens of thousands of children and youth, and if they
did not escape or were not released shortly thereafter, they were trained, given
a weapon and made to fight. As abducted girls matured, they were forced to marry
rebel commanders and give birth, fulfilling the spiritual vision of its leader, Joseph
Kony, to create a “New Acholi.” Most were brought to LRA bases in Sudan and, with
little hope of escape, they settled to raise their children, run the home and orient
newly abducted children. Others – their numbers unknown – were recruited into
a camp militia and some later joined or were forced into the Ugandan military as
soldiers, or wives to soldiers. Each party to the conflict – the rebels and the Ugandan
military – terrorized the civilian population, displacing more young boys and girls,
and the cycle continued. Those who avoided recruitment or abduction had to
continue to dodge both parties. If either the rebels or soldiers came across civilians,
they forced them to pledge allegiance to the cause. If they mixed up a rebel and
a soldier – something that was easy to do in the dark, and because both parties to the
conflict wore similar uniforms – they were accused of being traitors and punished.
It was perhaps no surprise then that so many young men and women who did escape
the rebels found it difficult to integrate within communities that had been afflicted
and divided by more than two decades of violence. This extends to the children born
in the rebel group. Consider the reflections of one mother on how community
members treat the child she gave birth to “in captivity”:

He is called “Kony” even from our own home. They do not call him any
other name. They always call him Kony. They say that his mind is like
Kony. They say that he acts like Kony in every way. They say that people
1
The Acholi are a Luo speaking Nilotic group in the north of the country; the majority of the LRA and
its leadership were Acholi.

xi
xii Preface

should just wait and see because the boy will be a General like his father.
They say, “You wait for this child to grow, he will become a real rebel to
Kony. He is a real General.”

This book is based on the life stories of 30 women abducted by the LRA who have
since returned with children born of forced marriages to rebel commanders. It seeks
to understand their efforts to return home and fit into a community that now sees
them as the mothers of rebel children. Many describe the daily challenges of seeking
to conceal their identities, and those of their sons and daughters, in an effort to start
over again. Most left their communities in the village2 and moved to Gulu – the
largest city in northern Uganda – to access aid programmes designed to help “child
mothers,” as they are often locally called. In the mid-2000s, international nongo-
vernmental organizations (INGOs) had earmarked significant funding for skills
training and income generation projects for “child mothers” and created scholar-
ships for their children “born of war.” Given that many were confronted with dire
poverty, poor living conditions and continuing health issues, these programmes
were welcomed. Most women found themselves alone, solely responsible for raising
their children: “How can we take care of the children we have returned with if there
is no one taking care of us?”
In their neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Gulu town, in market places and in
churches and mosques, women make conscious efforts to hide their pasts, careful
with whom they share stories of “life in the bush.” They coach their children to speak
quietly and to never fight or get into trouble. They hold their tongues when negative
words are spoken about the rebels, and isolate themselves when they feel they cannot
contain their anger:

You should keep quiet when you hear people talking about Kony.
Be quiet. No one knows that I came from the bush in the area where
I stay. I live with everyone equally. When I am annoyed over something,
I leave the place and go somewhere else. There are some things we can
control individually. If you cannot control your temper, everyone staying
in your area will know that you came from the bush. Be humble with
people. When they are talking about a certain topic, answer them accord-
ingly. Life will go on. No one knows where I stay that I come from the
bush.

But even with careful efforts to control their behaviour and that of their children,
their past is revealed in other ways.3 One evening in 2005, I had invited a woman
I had met at a rehabilitation centre and developed a friendship with to come to
2
The women involved in this book escaped between 2000 and 2005; some were reunited in displaced
persons camps, or in town centres where their families lived. When the war ended, the government
shut down the camps, and started a resettlement process of families to their villages. All thirty women
involved in documenting their life stories, and the thirty other women who participated in group
discussions, decided to leave the camp or village to live in the town centre of Gulu.
3
Theo Hollander and Bani Gill. “Every day the war continues in my body: Examining the marked body
in postconflict northern Uganda.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 8.2 (2014): 217–234.
 Preface xiii

dinner with myself and some good Acholi friends in their nearby village. After we
had finished eating, one of other guests leaned over and said, “I see you have brought
a woman from the bush with you.” At first I kept quiet, but then asked how she knew
this. “We can tell,” was her only answer. When I later asked another Acholi friend
about this, he agreed with the woman at the dinner and vaguely explained that there
were certain behaviours and body movements they possessed, nuances I was not
attuned to. Said one woman, “My heart still skips even if am back home. I know that
I will not be killed, but still my heart skips.”
What is it to survive LRA abduction only to return with children who are called
rebels, and to forever have your identity tied to the perpetrators who had also made
you a mother? To be unable to speak of a past that so pressingly defines the present,
because to do so would only increase your vulnerability? Yet it is this very identity
that qualifies women for assistance from international organizations, and their
children for scholarships from NGOs. It was the specificity of a woman’s victimhood
that attracted international researchers like myself, and journalists, writers, docu-
mentary makers, photographers, aid workers, religious charities, travellers and a host
of other parties to do their work. It was this same specificity of their victimhood that
led to the women’s social exclusion. How does one live with being labelled a victim
and perpetrator at once?
I first went to northern Uganda to work with human rights activists on document-
ing violations, and exploring justice alternatives, including amnesty. It struck me
that while we as international scholars, human rights activists and aid workers were
focused on debating which justice mechanisms were most appropriate for redressing
violence, persons affected by war were learning to navigate a complicated and
fraught social landscape to work out who was responsible for what and why. All of
this was done in coded and scripted ways I did not understand. In my interviews with
displaced persons in 2004 and 2005, I asked rather naively, “Do you forgive those
who came back?,” in the hopes of learning more about the claim that amnesty is part
of Acholi culture. I did not fully understand the rote answer given by nearly every-
one – “Yes, we forgive them, they are our children!” – was a politically manufactured
one, scripted by Acholi religious leaders and cultural elders as a mechanism for
pushing for a government amnesty that would enable them to come back, sending
a message to the rebels they would be welcomed without repercussions. Forgiveness
began to sound like an empty word as I continued to encounter bitterness buried in
the hearts of people who had endured so much loss at the hands of rebels they could
not name, for the rebels had come in the night and from regions they did not know.
And so someone, anyone, who was once part of the LRA, now became that person
who had terrorized them in the night. This sometimes played out with tragic irony.
Such was the experience of one woman beaten by a Ugandan soldier for being
a “mother to a rebel.” As he beat her and her child, the soldier told her that the rebels
had killed his parents. Yet the rebels had also killed the young mother’s parents
before they abducted her and fathered the child she carried.4 She remained quiet as

4
I wrote about this encounter in Erin Baines “Spirits and social reconstruction after mass violence:
Rethinking transitional justice.” African Affairs 109.436 (2010): 409–430.
xiv Preface

he beat her, pleading only for him to understand that it was not her choice. There are
no forums for talking about life in the bush, only amnesty cards that can be held up
to say, “Look, I have been forgiven” – but forgiven for what?

Even the big people point fingers at your back that so and so has returned
from the bush. I didn’t choose to go in the bush. The sufferings I have gone
through, if you still point fingers at my back, reminds me of the past.
Therefore if there is still finger pointing then there is still war.

This book explores how and why women were implicated in the violence they
endured as forced wives, and how they navigate this ambiguous status between
victim and perpetrators on their return. It further considers the implications of
failing to recognize the complexity of victimhood after mass violence in mechan-
isms designed to facilitate transitional justice. As the women quoted above suggests,
if there is still finger pointing, then “there is still war”: communities remain
fragmented, divided over questions of who is responsible and for what. Whose stories
are told about the war, and whose remain silenced? There is a distinct lack of
knowledge of daily life inside the LRA, the meaning of the difficult ethical choices
young persons took to survive, and of their struggle to live together again with
communities in northern Uganda.
What does it mean to survive mass violence? What is it to remake a life and
a community after it? These are not questions one can simply pose to another. I have
come to understand that processes of social repair takes place in the daily exchanges
of persons within the north, exchanges such as the measured reaction to a raised
voice; the way a child plays; or, how one’s body moves at a social gathering. Yet these
were all clues not readily available to me at the start, someone who didn’t know the
language, someone “outside of culture.”5 To explore these complexities, I had to first
learn to listen to what is not said and what is not obvious. In a reflection of his own
research in northern Uganda, anthropologist Sverker Finnström describes this work
as a long process of learning, a collection of secrets slowly revealed over time, and in
nonlinear and often unexpected ways.6 It was through the interaction of the
researcher, seeking to learn secrets, and the research subject, seeking to keep
them, that we should critically read the knowledge produced about war.
I once asked a humanitarian who had worked with more than 200 survivors in an
income generating and awareness raising group if he had ever asked about their past
experiences. His answer was simple: “Never. That is their life and their past and that
is it.” He kept their secrets by not learning them, aware that too many other aid
organizations had repeatedly asked for the same information time and again.
In 2005, I had asked a group of 20 young men and women in Anaka, as part of my
research on re-integration, to brainstorm the plot of a play on the topic. Within
minutes, they congregated and discussed and then suddenly said, “We are ready, let
us perform.” The play consisted of aid workers, journalists, scholars, government
5
Sverker Finnström. “In and out of culture fieldwork in war-torn Uganda.” Critique of Anthropology 21.3
(2001): 247–258.
6
Sverker Finnström. “War stories and troubled peace: Revisiting some secrets of northern Uganda.”
Current Anthropology 56.S12 (2015): S222–S230.
 Preface xv

officials and the military coming to the group one by one and asking the same set of
questions. “Date of abduction? Date of return? How old were you? Do you have
amnesty. . .” The dramatists then laughed as they continued to act, telling each set of
officials the same story of their abduction, but slightly changed each time to respond
to what the interviewer had wanted do to know. Victimhood – helpless, innocent,
injured – became a trope through which the victims reclaimed control over the
research process.7 And so it was apparent, I had to discern why some stories were told
while others were, modified or withheld altogether. What I determined to be
important might, at best, be entirely redundant in the context of the lives of the
storytellers at best, and at worst, detrimental to their safety. There are stories not told
to protect you as a researcher from the truth, and to protect those who tell them from
you and what you might do with their stories. And so I have begun to appreciate the
delicate life of a story, for once you tell it, it no longer belongs to you.8 This is my own
ongoing ethical struggle. These stories never belonged to me in the first place to tell.
Stories – told and retold – are powerful. Some stories erase and deny
violence. Others may reveal and resist it. “We tell stories so that we do not
die of truth,”9 but we also tell stories to re-negotiate life, to live. “Generally,”
writes Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, “the telling of a story revitalizes the memories of
other stories that, upon being heard, activate a reflective process,” which in
turn facilitates the negotiation over “what has been lived and its impact,”
making it possible to reconstruct and re-signify “experience and the elaboration
of meaning.”10 Stories told about the violence one experiences can help make
sense of what happened, and can engage others in the process of making sense
of what happened too. In this sense, telling stories involves a negotiation about
meaning, life and relationships. The process of storytelling, involves a teller
who shares the story and a listener, one who actively receives the lessons
departed. The process of telling stories is interactive and productive; it “estab-
lishes a common experience between teller and listener, creating a connection
between them.”11 This connection holds potential space in which transforma-
tive relations may happen between two people.
Yet the relationship between researcher and researched persons is one that spans,
in this case, massive socio-economic and cultural differences. As the writer, I hold
authority over the final product. I am also mindful of what Eve Tuck aptly calls
“damage centred” research, produced on and about persons in oppressed and

7
Mats Utas. “Victimcy, girlfriending, soldiering: Tactic agency in a young woman’s social navigation of
the Liberian war zone.” Anthropological Quarterly 78.2 (2005): 403–430.
8
Fiona Ross. “An acknowledged failure: Women, voice, violence, and the South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission.” Localizing transitional justice: Interventions and priorities after mass
violence (2010): 69–91.
9
Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni, and Kopano Ratele. “There was this goat.” Investigating the Truth
Commission testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile. University of KwaZulu Natal, África do Sul (2009).
10
Pilar Riaño-Alcalá. Dwellers of memory: Youth and violence in Medellin, Colombia. Vol. 1.
(Transaction Publishers, 2011): 16–17.
11
JoAnne Banks-Wallace. “Talk that talk: Storytelling and analysis rooted in African American oral
tradition.” Qualitative Health Research 12.3 (2002): 411.
xvi Preface

marginal spaces. Such work documents the negative aspects of people’s lives, and
occludes their agency, desires and choices.12
Sverker Finnström suggests a way forward, “If the telling of war and other
things . . . is steeped in relations of power that ultimately will define how data are
crafted and edited, an anthropological ambition must be to find ways to account for
the agency of the protagonist of the story, or the storyteller herself.”13 So it is through
the work of stories of survival and of reclamation of the self that the political subject
in the history of the LRA and war in northern Uganda appears. Recognizing women
as political agents in wartime is all the more important in the face of Western
scholarship and activism that render its protagonists speechless, and confines
them to victimhood. I conceptualize agency within settings of coercion as more
than merely a survival tactic, but as including moments of the political, defined
as the drawing of boundaries between what it means to be a human being or not, and
in the ongoing process of negotiating personhood. The following excerpt from
one women’s life story is illustrative:

You were not allowed to reject any man, not even if he was very old!
However much you hated him, there was nothing you could do to express
your anger. So you would keep it buried in your heart. You hate him but
you do not express your anger. In your heart you remember the anger, but
on the outside, you laugh, you smile at him.
For this woman, to bury anger in the heart (kano kiniga i cwiny) was one of the
ways she retained her sense of self within the bush, where she was forced to comply
with orders to marry a male commander she loathed. The political is found in the
recall of refusal. She may have surrendered her body to the LRA, but she did not
yield her heart, a symbolic part of one’s body in Acholi, which reveals the essence
and character of a person. To me, this woman’s statement makes a subtle but
important distinction between complicity, survival and political agency. She
might have accepted becoming a wife to survive, and even smiled and laughed
with him, but in the act of burying anger, she retained a sense of presence. In her
brief reflection, we are led into the complicated ethical space in which women lived
in the LRA, and sought to remain human beings. To bury one’s anger also becomes
a metaphor for the strategies women employ on return: to remain silent in the face of
accusation, and to mask their identity and those of their children.
At the same time, in any community trying to come to terms with violence, telling
stories of anger buried in the heart has the potential to open dialogue about who is
responsible for what happened, and why. Without such stories located in the “grey
zones,” questions of accountability will remain the work of courts and professionals,
and not be assumed by those who must live together again. Women who participated
in this research project stated that they did so to address the misperceptions of what
happened inside the LRA. They are tired of being called prostitutes, insane and the
mothers of rebel children. Others lament the loss of mechanisms with which to
12
Eve Tuck. “Suspending damage: A letter to communities.” Harvard Educational Review 79.3 (2009):
409–428.
13
Finnström. “War stories and troubled peace.”
 Preface xvii

convey their experiences, such as wang-o, stories told around the fireside in Acholi
familial settings to promote social cohesion and resolve conflicts. Most stated that it
was too painful to speak out loud anyhow. Still, they want the next generation to
understand what happened there, in the “bush.” Remarked one participant:
Since I grew up in the bush, I do not have the capacity to teach my
children in the way Acholi children learned in the homestead near the
fireplace [wang-o] before the war. What I have narrated in my story is
equivalent to the teachings at the fireplace and my children will read it for
themselves. I will keep this book very well the day it reaches my hands.
I hope this book might make a modest contribution to an archive of what is currently
overlooked in the search for international justice: women’s political agency in
wartime. I have done my best to document these stories in ways that can be taken
up around a fireside – providing each woman involved in the project a copy of their
own life story. I am grateful for the teachings they offer us into the making of wartime
violence and the remaking of communities after it.

figure 1. Representation of LRA hierarchy of command 1997–1999.

 Acknowledgements

Thank you to the anonymous women in this book, who “returned like books” and
told their stories.
A special appreciation to the dedicated and brilliant women who played a central
role in the making of the book: Grace Acan, Evelyn Amony, Ketty Anyeko and
Nancy Apiyo. I will never forget the time we spent together documenting the stories
within, the tears we shed over them and the moments of hope, laughter and love we
shared throughout the process.
Thank you, Pilar Riaño-Alcalá. I am grateful for each difficult (and sometimes
devastating) question you posed, and for each of your gentle but firm pushes for me
to think beyond my discipline. You listened patiently to so many ideas over the
years it took to write this book and inspired new ones. Thank you for all the early
morning and late night calls to work through questions of ethics, relationships and
reciprocity in research. I have the utmost respect for you, your work and your
commitment to others.
Intellectually, I am indebted to the teachings of following scholars, artists and
activists: Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, Hannah Arendt, Grace Acan, Evelyn Amony, Veena
Das, Chris Dolan, Sverker Finnström, Michael Jackson, Bronwyn Leebaw, Juliane
Okot Bitek, Okot p’Bitek, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Kimberly Theidon and Fiona
Ross.
Thank you to persons who facilitated the research and/or read different versions of
the monograph, providing moral support, reading drafts, giving feedback and offer-
ing friendship: Janet Aber, Omer Aijazi, Evelyn Akullu, Ketty Anyeko, Chrissie
Arnold, Cheryl Heykoop, Julian Hopwood, Jessica Huber, Philippe LeBillon, Jodie
Martinson, Kasiva Mulli, Victoria Nyanjura, Juliane Okot Bitek, Boniface Ojok,
Sylvia Opina, Lindsay McClain Opiyo, Michael Otim, Juliane Okot Bitek, Lino
Owor Ogora, Patrick Odong, Tamara Shaya, Beth Stewart, Carla Suarez, Zaira
Petruf and Letha Victor.

xviii
 Acknowledgements xix

A particularly warm thank you to Carla, Chrissie, Omer, Lara and Juliane, for the
attention and love you gave to this project, including reading and commenting on
drafts and exchanging ideas.
Friends, students and neighbours were generous enough to listen to my many
reflections throughout the process of writing the book and the questions it raised,
opening your homes, meeting for dinner and providing encouragement: FKM,
Stephen Brown, Barry Burciul, David Capie, Arjun Chowdhury, Kat Fobear,
Stefana Fratila, Kathryn Gretsinger, Patty Hambler, Sally Hill, Tara Ivanochko,
Brian Job, Peter Klein, Krystal Kirchen, Dyan Mazurana, David Lightfoot, Lucia
Lundin, Alicia Luedke, Taylor Owen, Ricardo Chaparro-Pacheco, Emily Paddon,
Leslie Robertson, Anastasia Shesterinina and Julie Wagemakers.
In loving memory of Samantha J. Walker.
Thank you Ryan Gauvin for the photographs of the drawings, Crystal Heald for
the cover design, Beth Stewart for the artwork, Juliane Okot Bitek for the breath-
taking poetry and Banks for the music.
Thank you Kimberly Hunter and Zoë Prebble for your excellent proofreading
skills, in particular Prebble’s art of finding, dissecting and commenting on various
passages that needed clarity and her suggestions how to achieve this. Thank you to the
research assistance of Aislinn Adams, Chrissie Arnold, Alison James, Kyle McCleery,
Kiah Van der Loos, Hannah Van Voorthuysen, Simon Child and Tanja Bergen.
Thank you to Ramya Ranganathan for her guidance and support in the final stages of
editing.
Thank you to the Ugandan government officials, elders and civil society leaders
who made this work possible. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council (Standard Research Grant) and the Hampton Fund, and the in-
kind support of the Liu Institute for Global Issues and the Justice and Reconciliation
Project. Patty Gallivan, Patrick Odong and Tim Shew were amazing sources of
support at the logistical and accounting side, and always with good cheer. I give
recognition to the Journal of Peace Research and the International Journal of
Political Sociology for some of the sections of Chapters 1 and 2 that I previously
published in these journals.
With love to Mikis, my sons, Florence, Dino, Niko, Alexi, Kate, Max, my Mom,
Dad, Andy, Marsha, Shelli-Anne, Kim, Ed, Tresina, Christine, Brett, Jillian,
Aislinn, Alexia, David, Patricia, Scott, Carrie, Ryan, Jenny, William and Brittany
and all my grand nieces and nephews.
 1

Introduction

I have sisters, but I do not remember what they look like, so I cannot look for them . . . I was
young when I was abducted. I came back when I was older and a mother.
Lily
When I was released from the rehabilitation centre, I went to my village to find my father. He
rejected me. He told me that I had just returned from the bush and I have that bush mentality
so he doesn’t want me.
RV
Life at home is very hard. Even when you are humble, people talk about me wherever I go.
They say, Obeno pa meni tek [the cloth your mother used to carry you with on her back was
strong] because I managed to return yet other people’s children died. Many people have died.
They were killed. There is no way out.
Adong

When the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Luis Moreno
Ocampo announced his intention to focus his first investigation on the war crimes
committed by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) against civilians in northern Uganda
in January 2004, I was with a group of Uganda civil society activists in New York City.
The delegation had arrived at the United Nations (UN) several days before the
announcement, hoping to appeal to influential states and UN bodies who could
pressure the Ugandan government to enter peace talks with the rebels and uphold
an amnesty put in place some years earlier. One of the civil society members was
Angelina Atyam, co-founder of the Concerned Parent’s Association (CPA), a network
composed of hundreds of parents whose children had been abducted by the LRA, and
most of whom were still missing. Over the course of the long war, tens of thousands of
children and young persons had been captured by the LRA and forced to porter, work,
fight, kill or harm civilians, or even abduct other children and youth.1 Atyam’s

1
Phuong N. Pham, Patrick Vinck, and Eric Stover. “The Lord’s Resistance Army and forced conscrip-
tion in northern Uganda.” Human Rights Quarterly 30 (2008): 404–411.

1
2 Introduction

daughter had been one of them. She was gravely concerned by the prosecutor’s
announcement, and by how it might affect the chances of her daughter returning
home safely. The indictment, she feared, would legitimate the military campaign; but
when the army engaged the rebels, their bullets did not differentiate between a rebel
and an abducted child. Even if she did return, Atyam asked me, how would the
community view her? She had pushed for an amnesty to protect her missing child: was
she also culpable after ten years in the “bush”? The Chief Prosecutor’s investigation
was on behalf of the victims, but as Atyam would ask that day, who are the victims and
who are the perpetrators in the case of northern Uganda?
Following an escalation of the war between 2003 and 2004, many children – now
adults – who had been abducted in the 1990s began to escape or were released by the
rebels. Atyam’s daughter was amongst them. Some described returning to places
that they no longer recognized, and to families that no longer recognized them.
As the quotes above indicate, some who had escaped no longer remembered what
their own family members looked like. Others were rejected outright for having “that
rebel mentality,” even by their own parents and extended family. Some parents
whose children have still not returned blame the families who are reunited. “Why
did your child return,” they ask “and not mine?” Others insist that if a child has not
returned, they must be a “real rebel” by now; otherwise, why didn’t they too escape?
In this post-war context, survivors of long-term LRA abduction search for the mean-
ing of their survival, and consider who they have become in relation to all that has
happened.2
Within communities, the victims of war must learn to live with the choices they
made to survive. Over the course of twenty years of ongoing violent conflict in
northern and then eastern Uganda (1986–2008), families and communities became
fragmented and divided, some complicit in the violence. Some community mem-
bers may have looked the other way, and did nothing when they saw an abuse
occurring. Others took sides and collaborated with the rebels or government forces.
Still others were benefactors, trading information and supplies with the rebels or
government army for profit and protection. Following the war, there remain com-
peting claims of who did what during the violence, and accusations and denials of
responsibility. This is not to say communities are “stuck” in memories of violence
and unable to repair or remake social relationships; indeed, people are working
continuously and actively to make a new life in northern Uganda, Atyam, her
daughter, Lily, Amony and RV included. However, social fragmentation illustrates
the limitations of victim and perpetrator categories that are otherwise understood as
2
Here I want to remind readers that most children and youth were released or escaped following their
abduction within a few weeks or months. Pham, Vinck and Stover (p. 407) estimate that 20 percent of
all persons abducted stayed more than a year; and that girls and women were less likely to be abducted,
but stayed a longer period of time within the LRA than men and boys. All data was based on persons
who returned to rehabilitation centres, and failed to capture those who might have by-passed such
centres and gone home, as well as those who never returned home. This book is focused on women
who had been abducted as girls and spent a long period of time within the LRA, between 7 and 17 years.
 Introduction 3

oppositional, homogenous and separate groups in pursuit of justice after war. It is

also to suggest that societies, as well as the study of societies after mass violence, must
begin to grapple with the complexity of responsibility during and after mass vio-
lence, and work through difficult ethical questions. By moving beyond static cate-
gories of victim and perpetrator, we can begin to recognize contingency and agency
within these categories.
For more than a decade now, I have struggled with the meaning of bearing witness
as a scholar to the suffering of others, and how bearing witness to violence shapes the
process of research and writing politically. My work to date has largely been to work
with the life stories of persons who had experienced abduction, in hopes of bringing
lived experience3 into the study of transitional justice – processes and institutions
designed to facilitate political transformation after periods of extraordinary violence.
Over time, my discomfort with the conceptual categories of victims and perpetrators,
first troubled by Atyam that day in New York, was further unsettled by the complexity
of the lived experiences of those at the centre of the war. Working with Evelyn
Amony – a woman abducted at age of 12 by the LRA and forced to be married to its
leader for nearly a decade – and editing her life story to prepare a monograph for
publication4 led me to further question the field of transitional justice, and ulti-
mately, to the subject of this book. I want to be clear: it is not that I misunderstand
the responsibility born by those who commit violence. Rather, the field of transi-
tional justice has spent so little time developing a relationship with those subject to
violence and their lived experience that this detachment negates the subject, dulls
understanding, and I would state, reproduces violence.
Since 2008 and with the help of Evelyn and others, I have worked with over 50
women who escaped the LRA between 2004 and 2005, each the survivor of long-term
abduction. Most had been married to senior level commanders and returned with
children to face social exclusion and stigmatization, accused by communities
affected by war of complicity with the rebels. Many of the women I worked with –
though not all – were rejected by their families following their escape; few were able
to find lasting relationships, rejected by a new partner or his family because of their
past. Although women were fighters in the LRA, it was the particular experience of
becoming a wife and mother that most disturbs the community, and is the basis for
their social exile. “You as the women were the ones who made the LRA very strong,”
they were told; and, “They [the community] say women were like guti (foundation)
because they cooked for the men and they got satisfied.” Some were asked, “What
stopped you [from] coming home some time back?”
The child abducted and forced to become a fighter, and to make the terrible
decision to kill or be killed, is a troubling figure in the field of human rights. At what
3
Christine Sylvester. War as experience: Contributions from international relations and feminist analysis.
(Routledge, 2013).
4
Evelyn Amony. I am Evelyn Amony: Reclaiming my life from the Lord’s Resistance Army. Erin Baines,
ed. (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015).
4 Introduction

point is the child no longer a victim, but a perpetrator?5 To what extent should
mechanisms be designed to recognize the particular status of such persons in order
to assist communities in the process of sorting through questions of responsibility
after conflict?
Just as the child soldier presents pressing justice dilemmas, so too do girls and
women who are forced into marriage and motherhood by armed groups. In fact,
women forced intro marriage and motherhood present a particularly compelling
subject through which to explore the concept of the complex victim. International
legal norms flatten these women’s experiences to the violent events they endured
(multiple rape, sexual torture and forced domestic labour, childbearing and
rearing).6 These categories fail to account for the complex lived experiences of
women, where violence unfolds in relation to those who force upon her a new
identity of “wife” or “mother.”
Human rights narratives tend to represent persons who have endured sexual
violence such as forced marriage as victims in need of rescue, in part because of
the need to make legal arguments that negate any suspicion of consent.7 Such
presumptions of innocence do not stand up well in war-affected communities in
Uganda, in the eyes of the Ugandan state, nor does it necessarily reflect the lived
experiences of abducted women themselves. In international law, the figure of the
abducted woman appears as a “victim,” “survivor,” “sexual slave,” “conjugal slave,”
“forced wife” or “concubine” or a “child mother,” relegating those who return from
abduction to a state of childhood, a place of innocence.8 In contrast, in the context of
the Ugandan war and military discourse, the figure of the abducted woman appears
as “a terrorist,” “a rebel,” or “a rebel’s wife.” Upon her escape, release or rescue, she is
demonized as one who has betrayed the community, having given birth to “those
rebels.” In these multiple, conflicting and contradictory stories about the sexually
violated woman, she rarely appears as a subject. Instead, her body and her experi-
ence are the object of contending political projections, quests for justice and
justifications for war.
Gender critiques of transitional justice mechanisms – namely judicial or truth
commissions – illustrate the limitations of restorative and retributive approaches in
the context of addressing the complexity of victimhood.9 Legal prosecution of war-
related sexual violence in international tribunals must prove guilt beyond reason-
able doubt. As a result, victim’s testimonies are often curated to focus on harm to the

5
Erin K. Baines. “Complex political perpetrators: Reflections on Dominic Ongwen.” The Journal of
Modern African Studies 47.02 (2009): 163–191; Mark A. Drumbl. Reimagining child soldiers in inter-
national law and policy. (Oxford University Press, 2012).
6
Augustine Park, S. J. “‘Other inhumane acts’: Forced marriage, girl soldiers and the Special Court for
Sierra Leone.” Social & Legal Studies 15.3 (2006): 315–337.
7
Doris E. Buss. “Rethinking ‘Rape as a weapon of war’.” Feminist Legal Studies 17.2 (2009): 145–163.
8
Chiseche Salome Mibenge. Sex and international tribunals: The erasure of gender from the war
narrative. (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
9
Erica Bouris. Complex political victims. (Kumarian Press, 2007).
 Introduction 5

sexed body, and the person is portrayed as devoid of voice or subjectivity.10 In an

effort to establish the validity of victim status, legalism favours victim testimony that
gives no indication of agency (the possibility she or he could have resisted), and
victims who embody expectations of what a rape survivor looks and acts like
(traumatized, fragile, helpless).11 Restorative justice mechanisms, such as truth
commissions, similarly silence the vast range and complexity of ways that women
experience violence. Fiona Ross’ careful study of the South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (TRC), reveals the ways the commission privileges
narratives of “spectacular events” (murder or rape), rather than the everyday, diverse
realities of how violence seeps into people’s lives and relationships.12 Violence
during apartheid shattered familial relationships, and women spoke of how “grief
and social repair are folded into everyday activities”13 rather than into direct forms of
harm, despite the TRC’s keen interest in this. The “ways in which people [try] to
create meaningful lives for themselves and others,”14 did not interest the
Commission.
In effect, the lived experiences of war are reduced to the event, an act of violence.
Stories of victimhood are invested in the vulnerability of the person and integrity of
a human being, while stories of perpetrators are steeped in notions about the
extraordinariness of evil, regarding perpetrators as people beyond or outside human-
ity. Conceptualizations of culpability and innocence in the field are gendered: all
men are perpetrators; and all women are victims.15 Such conceptualizations of
wartime rape reassure us that lines of responsibility are clear, and that the solutions
to prevention are simple. Focusing on “victims” and “perpetrators” as binary groups
blurs the complexity of responsibility.16
In addition, a human rights-based approach privileges overt civil and political
harm, while overlooking the ways in which blatant violence can be entangled with
structural and everyday forms of violence.17 Yet, recent studies show that wartime

10
Jonneke Koomen. “‘Without these women, the tribunal cannot do anything’: The politics of witness
testimony on sexual violence at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.” Signs 38.2 (2013):
253–277.
11
Henry, Nicola. “The fixation on wartime rape feminist critique and international criminal law.” Social
& Legal Studies 23.1 (2014): 93–111.
12
Fiona C. Ross. Bearing witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.
(Pluto Press, 2003).
13
Fiona Ross. “An acknowledged failure: Women, voice, violence, and the South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission.” In R. Shaw, L. Waldorf, and P. Hazan, eds. Localizing transitional
justice: Interventions and priorities after mass violence. (Standford University Press, 2010): 88.
14
Fiona Ross. “An acknowledged failure”: 87.
15
Dara Kay Cohen, Amelia Hoover Green, and Elisabeth Jean Wood. “Wartime Sexual Violence.”
Special Report. (United States Institute for Peace, 323, 2013). http://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/
resources/SR323.pdf accessed September 4, 2015.
16
Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern. Sexual violence as a weapon of war?: Perceptions, prescriptions,
problems in the Congo and beyond. (Zed Books, 2013): 109.
17
Jelke Boesten. “Analyzing rape regimes at the interface of war and peace in Peru.” International
Journal of Transitional Justice 4.1 (2010): 110–129.
6 Introduction

violence is shaped by pre-war societal orders, which in turn shape humanitarian

responses post-conflict. In her study of female soldiers in Sierra Leone, Megan
MacKenzie convincingly argues that notions of conjugal order are inscribed and re-
inscribed in Western liberal development and post-conflict reconstruction policies,
problematically reinforcing patriarchal orders that decrease, rather than increase,
women’s security during and after war.18 In her anthropological study of “bush
wives” in the rebel group, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone,
Chris Coulter posits that morality, generation and kinship are important dimensions
of wartime violence.19 In a similar vein, Jelke Boesten examines the various motiva-
tions of different parties to rape, and argues this violence “builds on and reproduces
institutionalized structures of violence and inequality,” shaping legal policy and
practices.20 Her study urges the field of transitional justice to widen its conceptual
lens regarding what is sexual violence and when it happens.
Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern argue that current assumptions in scholar-
ship on sexual violence “present an impoverished framework for seeing, hearing,
making sense of, writing about and empathizing with subjects of sexual violence.”21
They urge us to look to alternative stories to gain a more comprehensive under-
standing of wartime sexual violence. This requires us, as Saba Mahmood urges,
to “. . . imagine the politics of gender equality when situated within particular life
worlds, rather than speak from the position of knowledge that already knows what the
undoing of inequality would entail.”22 In effect, we must “learn to learn
differently,”23 to “learn to learn from below” to avoid the reification of gendered
binaries about victims and perpetrators, and recognize the complex interplay of
violence, complicity and responsibility. Doing so involves a critical investigation of
violence and its reproduction. This means moving beyond depoliticized stories in
which victims appear apart from violence, towards stories in which victims are
subjects formed in relation to violence. This, I will suggest, is a process that involves
re-imagining the political as an ethical praxis in settings of extreme violence. It is to
answer the question, “What did you do to survive?”
Stories of complex victims – persons subjected to the same harms in which they
are also complicit – have a place in the field of transitional justice. By considering
their experiences, we are confronted by the challenging set of dilemmas they faced
while they lived in the midst of violence, and with which they must now learn to live

18
Megan MacKenzie. Female soldiers in Sierra Leone: Sex, security, and post-conflict development. (NYU
Press, 2012).
19
Chris Coulter. Bush wives and girl soldiers: Women’s lives through war and peace in Sierra Leone.
(Cornell University Press, 2009).
20
Jelke Boesten. Sexual violence during war and peace: Gender, power, and post-conflict justice in Peru.
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
21
Baaz and Stern. Sexual violence as a weapon of war?: 32.
22
Saba Mahmood. “Feminist theory, embodiment, and the docile agent: Some reflections on the
Egyptian Islamic revival.” Cultural Anthropology 16.2 (2001): 202–236.
23
Baaz and Stern. Sexual violence as a weapon of war?: 113.
 Beyond Victim-Perpetrator 7

after violence: What does it mean to bear the child of a man responsible for endless
suffering? How do you make sense of the non-choice of being asked to kill someone
or to be killed? When your survival is contingent on betraying the intimate ties that
once gave you meaning (who am I in relation to others?) as a human being, who do
you become? What is it to stay alive all those years, to long for home, only to return
there and to be asked: “Why didn’t you escape sooner?” This is a “space-in-between”
victim and perpetrator. It is a realm of unchartered ethics, in which common sense is
made senseless, and moral precepts guiding human relations are exposed as
constructed, not fixed. The categories of victim and perpetrator are unmoored.
This book makes the case for recognizing complex victimhood in transitional
justice. I do not suggest complex victims are a “type” of victim group that should be
identified and added to the remit of the field. Rather, I work towards
a conceptualization of justice that unsettles categories, and makes possible the praxis
of judgment, one in which the polity deliberates over what it means to be a human
being in the face of violence, what it means for people within the polity to exist in
relation to one another, and what responsibilities polity members hold toward one
another.24 I recognize the limitations of witnessing the pain and suffering of another,
but argue that stories bridge differences in experience and work towards new forms
of political community after genocide.25 The experiences of women abducted and
forced into marriage and motherhood in wartime are particularly rich for this
exploration. They are simultaneously upheld by international justice scholarship
and practice as guileless and without agency, while war-affected communities
demonize them for perceived guilt. They represent both innocence and betrayal,
depending on which story is told, and by whom. Stories of life within the extreme
contest gendered politics of nation-building after war. Stories of complex victim-
hood, I will attempt to argue, move beyond the limitations of the law, opening space
for debate on how people want to live together again after mass violence.

beyond victim-perpetrator: storytelling

after mass violence
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
– Arendt

In his reflections on questions of responsibility for the Holocaust, Auschwitz survivor

Primo Levi26 introduces the term “the grey zone” to refer to the morally ambiguous
space in which persons are neither complete victims nor perpetrators in systematic
24
On responsibility see Edwin Bikundo. “The International Criminal Court and Africa: Exemplary
justice.” Law and Critique 23.1 (2012): 21–41.
25
Michael Jackson. The politics of storytelling: Violence, transgression, and intersubjectivity. (Museum
Tusculanum Press, 2002).
26
Primo Levi. The drowned and the saved. (Random House LLC, 1988).
8 Introduction

violence, but rather are both implicated in and harmed by the realization of
violence.27 Levi discusses the differences between those who survived Auschwitz
(the saved) and those who perished (the drowned). He reflects on the sense of shame
born by the saved for having made choices to survive they felt would never have been
made in “normal” circumstances; and as such and in part, this presents an impos-
sibility of sharing this experience with others. Still, Levi feels compelled to narrate
the story, to tell others, but in doing so, urges the listener to suspend judgment.
Bronwyn Leebaw deftly illustrates how grey zones are turned into black and white
narratives in her critical investigation of the assumptions guiding the field and
practice of transitional justice.28 Mechanisms such as truth commissions and trials
depoliticize and dehistoricize violent events, limiting them to individual acts and
experiences of harm, and obfuscating attention to wider systems that give violence its
shape and momentum. Official narrative accounts (such as testimonials during trials
or truth commissions) focus on what is done to victims by perpetrators; this reduces
the process of violence to a set of events in which the victim is in need of justice, and
the perpetrator is in need of punishment. Leebaw recognizes the limitations of
human rights frameworks to usher in a deliberation of the political after violence –
including the need to rethink questions of responsibility that move beyond static
victim-perpetrator narratives. She argues that stories of resistance offer such poten-
tial, engaging others in a process of interpretation and opening space to hold new
conversations about what it means to live together again after conflict, state repres-
sion, or disaster. Taking a lead from Hannah Arendt, transitional justice mechan-
isms best serve a public when they prompt people to think anew after atrocity, to
exercise political judgment not according to the rule of law (for such rules are often
the same that betrayed them) but “without bannisters,” with “imaginations that go
travelling.”29
Stories of life inside the grey zone, in other words, are sites of the political, in
which “meaning is revealed but not defined.” As Arendt argues:

The meaning of a committed act is revealed only when the action itself has come to
an end and become a story susceptible to narration. Insofar as any “mastering” of the
past is possible, it consists in relating what has happened; but such narration, too,
which shapes history, solves no problems and assuages no suffering; it does not
master anything once and for all. Rather, as long as the meaning of the events
remain alive—and this meaning can persist for very long periods of time—“master-
ing of the past” can take the form of ever-recurrent narration. No philosophy, no

27
This is not to blur questions of responsibility, but to complicate it: “We are anxious to be clear: both are
in the same trap, but it is the oppressor, and he alone, who has prepared it and activated it, and if he
suffers from this, it is right that he should suffer; and it is iniquitous that the victim should suffer from it,
as he does indeed suffer from it. . .” Levi. The drowned and the saved. 1988, 24.
28
Bronwyn Leebaw. Judging state-sponsored violence, imagining political change. (Cambridge University
Press, 2011).
29
Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem. (Penguin, 1963).
 Beyond Victim-Perpetrator 9

analysis, no aphorism, be it ever so profound, can compare in intensity and richness

of meaning with a properly narrated story.30

In her own rethinking of the field of transitional justice, Leebaw draws upon
Arendt’s incomplete writings and lectures on political judgment31 (which I interpret
as the capacity to see things from another’s perspective) to usher into public
deliberation a plurality of perspectives that is part of the human condition.
“Political judgment requires efforts to examine a common problem from diverse
perspectives and to generate a basis for common ground through a process of
persuasion.”32 Informed by Immanuel Kant’s ideas on “enlarged mentality,”
Arendt takes the position that political judgment is necessary in the wake of mass
violence in order to re-engage and re-invigorate the political. Political judgment,
then, requires dialogue, debate and persuasion amongst the polity. More pressingly,
to arrive at political judgment as praxis requires a storyteller.
For Arendt, the factual truth of events is less important than how they are
remembered by those who experience them; she eschewed impartiality in the social
sciences, instead recognizing the plurality of meanings attached to variously
located experiences of events. Lisa Disch33 relates Arendt’s theoretical approach to
Donna Haraway’s defence of “situated knowledges,”34 recognizing that social
relations mediate the construction of knowledge and that experiences of those on
the margins of power provide critical distance and insight into the machinations of
power. It is through stories that people draw connections between human experi-
ences and the complexity of deliberation, inviting us to consider the dilemmas and
difficulties of choice in spaces of extremity. As such, stories inspires the kind of
critical thinking Arendt so admires, and which Leebaw considers vital to the project
of transitional justice.
Arendt tells the story of Anton Schmidt, a German officer under the Nazi regime
who forged papers to abet the escape of Jewish partisans and was executed for his
refusal to comply with orders. Arendt suggests that had more stories like that of
Schmidt been told, everything would be utterly different today. For Arendt, stories of
those who resisted – those who forged papers and faced execution – usher into public
light the possibility of solidarity and agency in the face of the extreme.35 Leebaw
turns her attention to stories of resistance in the final chapter of her book, illustrating
“possibilities for political engagement and community – even in the darkest
moments of history.”36 Resistance stories (privileged or oppositional, collective
30
Hannah Arendt. Men in dark times. (Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993 [1968]): 21–22.
31
Hannah Arendt. Responsibility and judgment. (Schocken, 2005).
32
Leebaw. Judging state sponsored violence: 176.
33
Lisa J. Disch. “More truth than fact: Storytelling as critical understanding in the writings of Hannah
Arendt.” Political Theory 21.4 (1993): 665–694.
34
Donna Haraway. “Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial
perspective.” Feminist Studies (1988): 575–599.
35
Leebaw. Judging state sponsored violence: 107.
36
Ibid.
10 Introduction

and individual) help the scholar to move beyond limitations of legal approaches,
which reiterate victim-perpetrator roles, towards the active engagement of the polity
in the reproduction of, and challenges to, power. Leebaw focuses her study of
resistance on three types of action: failure to resist (mass complicity in violence
through active or non-active engagement); resistance movements (opposition move-
ments and networks); and privileged resistance (insiders that refused to obey).
While Leebaw provides a framework to reconsider transitional justice, and
encourages us to re-imagine the political within it, her work is less concerned with
defining the political than the processes through which political judgment might be
stimulated. Moreover, the figure of the complex victim, discussed in relation to
Levi’s address of the drowned appears only briefly in her consideration of storytelling
after mass violence. My focus is on the ways the complex victim – those implicated
in the same violence they endure – enact the political in settings of coercion and
deprivation. To this end, I suggest it is necessary to consider not only stories as sites of
meaning-making and ignition of the political, but that our understanding of the
political needs some elaboration in relation to the complex victim. I am concerned
that without doing so, the political subject will once more disappear, and be
rendered invisible.

the political in settings of extreme coercion

Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives?

– Judith Butler

It is often assumed that people must require some degree of freedom to participate in
public life, as guaranteed by a set of rights bestowed upon a person by the state. Thus
it is not uncommon to think of the political in a formal sense: public debates;
protests; campaigns; sit-ins; or movements. Without freedom, without some capacity
to engage the powerful, people cannot participate in political life. As James Scott
observed some years ago: “Power relations are not, alas, so straightforward.”37 Under
conditions in which rights are denied, the political can be exercised, though
political acts might be less easily identified. Addressing the binary perception that
the public stage is one of freedom (zoe), and that what is off-stage, necessity (bios),
Scott develops the concept of “infra-politics” to discuss small-scale acts of resistance
of subordinate groups.38 Such acts are important, for although they are often
conducted off-stage and unknown to the powerful, they give expression to important
forms of political dissent.39 Thus Scott looks to “hidden transcripts”: gestures,

37
James C. Scott. Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. (Yale University Press,
1990): 5.
38
Scott. Domination: 19.
39
Ibid., 20.
 The Political in Settings of Extreme Coercion 11

performances and utterances that may be conscious or unconscious, but which

cumulatively can be understood as political:
So long as we confine our conception of the political to activity that is openly
declared we are driven to conclude that subordinate groups essentially lack
a political life or that what political life they do have is restricted to those excep-
tional moments of popular explosion. To do so is to miss the immense political
terrain that lies between quiescence and revolt that, for better or worse, is the
political environment of subject classes. It is to focus on the visible coastline of
politics and miss the continent that lies beyond.40

Scott’s ideas resonate with multiple studies of subordinate groups in diverse

settings. In her discussion of ordinary Rwandans living under the post-genocide
regime of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), Susan Thomson examines the myriad
forms of “subtle, indirect and non-confrontational acts that make life more sustain-
able under a strong centralized state . . . when open resistance was not deemed
possible.”41 She argues that everyday resistance involves persistence, prudence and
individual effort that may or may not be known to the target group, and may or may
not benefit the resister, but is always shaped by a calculated risk. In other words,
rapid transformation (of the individual or the state) is not the intended goal, but
everyday resistance seeks to make life more liveable and sustainable under condi-
tions of domination, and can also frustrate or undermine authority. In his discussion
of the Middle East, Asef Bayat also attempts to distinguish between the politics of the
powerful, and the politics of those subject to power.42 Under patriarchal authoritar-
ianism, “ordinary persons” are political through what he calls “the power of pre-
sence,” wherein they:
Consciously or without being aware, defy, negotiate, or even circumvent gender
discrimination – not necessarily by resorting to extraordinary and overarching
“movements” identified by deliberate collective protest and informed by mobiliza-
tion theory and strategy, but by involving ordinary daily practices of life . . .. This
involves deploying the power of presence, the assertion of collective will in spite of all
odds, refusing to exit, circumventing constraints, and discovering new spaces of
freedom to make oneself heard, seen, felt, and realized. The effective power of these
practices lies precisely in their ordinariness, since as irrepressible actions they
encroach incrementally to capture trenches from the power base of patriarchal
structure, while erecting springboards to move on.43

Bayat reminds the reader that such actions are less prone to repression than open,
organized and collective opposition. “Deeply intertwined with the practices of daily
40
Ibid., 199.
41
Susan Thomson. “Whispering truth to power: The everyday resistance of Rwandan peasants to
post-genocide reconciliation.” African Affairs 110.440 (2011): 439–456.
42
Asef Bayat. Life as politics: How ordinary people change the Middle East. (Stanford University Press,
2010).
43
Ibid., 98.
12 Introduction

life,” Bayat is interested in the cumulative effect of these “quiet and unassuming”
struggles for how they “reconfigure new life.” His focus then is “direct actions in the
very zones of exclusion” to which the majority of persons are confined.44 For those
excluded from political life, sites of exclusion become sites of political life.
While the framework of resistance captures well the forms of politics possible
under violent constraints, Sherry Ortner reminds us that “the dominant often have
something to offer, and sometimes a great deal,”45 and so, some members of
a subordinate group become complicit in the perpetuation of violence against others
in order to advance their own self-interests. No subordinate group is homogenous,
Ortner tells us, but they are often internally divided by age, gender, kinship or any
number of social and political factors. Recognizing the internal tensions and fissures
provides a greater insight into both the infra-politics of a particular group and the
operation of relations of power. Acts of resistance are often contradictory, conflated
and effectively ambivalent, in large part due to these internal political complexities.
In the following chapters, Ortner’s insights are useful to comprehend the internal
politics amongst co-wives, how girls and women are involved in the organization of
sexual violence in the LRA, and how their tactics of protest are often contradictory.
Furthermore, girls and women often occupy ambiguous positions in the armed
group, meaning their political agency is shaped by processes of socialization and
governance structures that lead to contradictory forms of political action.
To comprehend the political agency of women in the armed group, is to consider
the extent to which women expressed sometimes contradictory forms of political
action.
However, I am not only interested in forms of political life that made life more
sustainable for women, or frustrating to commanders, but a particular form of
politics practiced by subordinate groups, which might be understood as the negotia-
tion over the value of a human life. In his work, Acholi intellectual Okot p’Bitek
(1931–1982), an anthropologist and poet, challenged Western centric writing and
thought on African traditions and philosophies of life, responding to the sweeping
implications of colonialism on African identity, and turning to the importance of
Acholi oral literature, performance and song to remake social order after
colonialism.46 In Artist the Ruler, he elaborates the differences between Western
concepts of autonomy and individualism (as in the rights-bearing individual) and
Acholi concepts of social collectivism (and in turn, personhood as relational).
p’Bitek argues that “The question of ‘Who am I?’” cannot be answered in any
meaningful way, unless the relationship in question is known.”47 Drawing on
44
Ibid., 5.
45
Sherry B. Ortner. “Resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal.” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 37.01 (1995): 179.
46
p’Bitek, Okot. Africa’s cultural revolution. (Nairobi, Macmillan books for Africa, 1973); see also Samuel
Oluoch Imbo. Oral traditions as philosophy: Okot p’Bitek’s legacy for African philosophy. (Rowman &
Littlefield, 2002).
47
p’Bitek, Okot. Artist, the ruler: Essays on art, culture and values. (East African Publishers, 1986).
 The Political in Settings of Extreme Coercion 13

p’Bitek, Lara Rosenoff Gauvin asserts that in the everyday lived sociality of the
Acholi, one realizes personhood: “in the meaningful practices of people’s daily
activities, or in life as it is actually lived.”48 Further, she states that:

. . . the relationality of social existence and . . . oral tradition is inextricably linked to

social relations . . . the social philosophy (or “knowledge,” per contemporary
Indigenous scholarship) of a people is not communicated through abstract
speculation or by seeking experts within the culture, but that it should be sought
in the meaningful practices of people’s daily activities, or in life as it is actually
lived.49

Thus we might look to the relationships in question and the social action that gives
them meaning to understand the question “Who am I?” To consider the political,
we might look at how social action and the negotiation of relationships in effect
answer the question, “Who is a person?”
In his insightful study of the socio-cultural coping mechanisms of Acholi child-
inducted soldiers in northern Uganda,50 Opiyo Oloya demonstrates the ways
abducted children retain a sense of self in the face of brute violence designed to
turn them into combatants, and follows their return and social exclusion based on
the perception they are olum51 “of the bush.” He introduces the reader to the Acholi
concept of dano adana, or what it means to be “a human person,” as one frequently
evoked by his research participants who sought to reclaim social value within Acholi:
those children who escaped were not olum, as their communities argued, but dano
adana. Throughout his study of children in the northern war, he draws on the
concept of dano adana to describe the essence of being human, “a core identity
endowed on each individual which determined how that individual viewed him /
herself and was treated by others within the community.”52
Thus I am also interested in forms of the political that insist upon the person in
relation to another, and political agency as that which brings into conversation what
it means to be a human being within the realm of social action. The political in this
sense is always a process of contestation over the meaning of what is human, and
what is not. This stands in contrast to, and displaces the privileging of, concepts of
the sovereign as “the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is
disposable and who is not.”53 If we understand that a person’s subject position is
never fixed but relational, and that social action defines a person, we must think of
48
Lara Rosenoff Gauvin. “‘In and out of culture’: Okot p’Bitek’s work and social repair in post-conflict
Acoliland.” Oral Tradition 28.1 (2013).
49
Rosenoff Gauvin. “In and out of culture.”
50
Opiyo Oloya. Child to soldier: Stories from Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army. (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2013).
51
Olum in English means “the bush” or wilderness, a place in Acholi culture that is considered a realm
beyond humanity.
52
Oloya. Child to soldier: 17.
53
J. A. Mbembe and Libby Meintjes. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11–40.
14 Introduction

persons as always in the process of becoming. Inter-subjective exchanges shape, and

are shaped by, who we are and how we are defined. This has material consequence
for how we live as individuals and as a collective; some lives are deemed of less value,
less worthy. This conceptualization of the political recognizes that the subject is
implicated within relations of continuously negotiated power, meaning one’s vul-
nerability in one relationship does not define the person as ever vulnerable. Social
action, furthermore, actively and continuously redefines the boundaries of the lives
that are of value, and those that are not. It is not that every social action is
determinative of a human being, but that cumulatively they are. It is the contestation
and negotiation of acts that exclude one from being human that interests me.
Of course, violence negates the subject in that it does not merely violate the physical
body, but does harm to the relationships and sense of self one possesses in relation to
others; it negates one’s subjectivity, internalizes inferiority and fragments collectives. But
this insight lends even further support to the idea of the unfixed subject, for even “the
missing” and the “disappeared” call attention to personhood by their very absence,54 just
as the dead can emerge from the grave to insist on recognition.55 Political agency is
defined by one’s ability to improvise social action to remake the self in relation to others,
to push back against violent acts, and to “reconfigure new life.”56
If we understand the subject as unfixed and relational, we must also understand
the sovereign as such. Therefore the political emerges not only in grand gestures to
claim the rights of a person (protests, human rights campaigns and movements) but
in the myriad exchanges between persons (which constitute the meaning of soci-
ality), and, when this exchange turns to the meaning of personhood, the meaning
of politics itself. This conceptualization helps move beyond binary conceptions of
victim/perpetrator (or the limitations of categories) that erase the subject of human
rights violations, and that privilege the sovereign state as the unitary institution in
which to enter into political life. If the sovereign is also relational, in terms of who
has the capacity to define who matters and who does not, then there are infinite
encounters of the political. This leads us away from the political as a grand project of
mass transformation, and into sites of constant change, in the realm of the everyday
and of matters that give life meaning.
Let me make this conceptualization clearer by drawing on the work of Veena Das
in Life and Words.57 Das turns to critical ethnography of the everyday in order to

54
Jenny Edkins. Missing: Persons and politics. (Cornell University Press, 2011).
55
Victor Igreja, Béatrice Dias-Lambranca, and Annemiek Richters. “Gamba spirits, gender relations,
and healing in post-civil war Gorongosa, Mozambique.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
14.2 (2008): 353–371; Victor Igreja. “‘Why are there so many drums playing until dawn?’ Exploring the
role of Gamba spirits and healers in the post-war recovery period in Gorongosa, Central
Mozambique.” Transcultural Psychiatry 40.4 (2003): 460–487; Heonik Kwon. Ghosts of War in
Vietnam. Vol. 27. (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
56
Bayat. Life as Politics: 5.
57
Veena Das. Life and words: Violence and the descent into the ordinary. (University of California Press,
2007).
 The Political in Settings of Extreme Coercion 15

comprehend how people lived through, managed, and domesticated the violence of
the Indian Partition. She suggests we hold at bay “our theoretical impulse. . . to think
of agency in terms of escaping the ordinary rather than as a descent into it.” To do so,
Das begins with stories of ordinary women.58 Such a technique counters hegemonic
narratives about the nation, in which women’s bodies are placed as sites of
contestation and belonging that reinforce the legitimacy of the state. Das weaves
intricate connections between the sovereign male head of household and the
sovereign state; both appear to fix women as victims of the Partition, and the project
of nation building as it rests on patriarchal foundations. Writing “against finitude,”59
she reveals the way women seek to reclaim a space of belonging and swallow
“poisonous knowledge” through performance and speech acts with intimate others
in the everyday. Politics as relational is infinite, situated and contingent:

For me the political is not set apart, it is closely related to the way in which one’s
being in the world is engaged. Of course, you have to deal with overtly political
institutions such as the State, or engage in what we recognize as political action.
What strikes me as very interesting in the struggles of extremely poor people with
whom I often work is not that the locus of morality lies in some kind of rigidly moral
individuals, but that very ordinary individuals in their ordinary acts manage to
produce specific newness, precise possibilities . . . Politics become the arena in which
a lot of people can engage in actions of claiming for themselves particular forms of
dwelling in the world. And on another field, politics becomes a question of ways in
which I can express my devotion to the world, in which I belong to the collective
world. . .. I understand the political through these questions: what are the ways that
the world claims you? And how do you respond to this kind of claim, from the position
that you are in?60

Similarly interested in the way politics might be recast from the public to the
everyday, Häkli and Kallio redefine political agency as that which “is prompted
when matters of importance are challenged or called into question, because those
involved have something at stake in them.”61 Politics of the “rightless” might involve
state policy and be enacted in the public sphere (a protest, a debate, an appeal), but
as politics unfold in everyday life, it also involves the interactions between people
that matter to the issue at hand, possibly known only between those it involves.
In this conceptualization of politics as relational, political agency is conditioned by
subjectivity (who am I in relation to who you are) and the structural (which give
form to these relationships, but does not determine them). This reconceptualization
of the political is important to recast the subject of transitional justice: it locates
58
Das. Life and Words: 7.
59
Ibid., xi.
60
Emphasis mine, Kim Turcot DiFruscia. “Listening to voices: An interview with Veena Das.” Altérités
7.1 (2010): 136–145.
61
Jouni Häkli and Kirsi Pauliina Kallio. “Subject, action and polis: Theorizing political agency.”
Progress in Human Geography (published ahead of print: 0309132512473869, 2013): 3.
16 Introduction

political agency not in some liberal rights bearing the individual, but in “the social
world that the embodied individual encounters in multiple different subject posi-
tions, averting, accepting and altering them through individual and concerted
action.”62 p’Bitek’s conceptualization of oral tradition as social action is relevant
here. It moves beyond reification of the powerful and the overpowered to capture the
complexity of political life. What qualifies as political life is a refusal of the subject to
accept that they are not qualified to be political, to be a human being. The narration
of just such a moment projects this moment into public life, and fosters the
possibility of political judgment.
In this book, I identify moments of the political in the stories of women who spent
multiple years in the LRA. Their stories reveal how they make sense of what
happened to them, and allow them to re-assert their personhood. Stories of complex
victimhood illuminate the relationship between victim and perpetrator, and engage
with questions of ethics and responsibility in new ways, leading us to a new kind of
politics in which the assignment of culpability to one person or collective outside of
the law is brought into focus. This is the work of what Agamben calls “unassumable”
responsibility:

Ethics, politics and religion have been able to define themselves only by seizing
terrain from juridical responsibility – not in order to assume another kind of
responsibility, but to articulate zones of non-responsibility. This does not, of course,
mean impunity. Rather, it signifies – at least for ethics – a confrontation with
a responsibility that is infinitely greater than any we could ever assume. At the
most, we can be faithful to it, that is, assert its unassumability.63

In attending to that which cannot be assumed by anyone, political communities

form to agree on how to move forward together, what to remember and what to bury
in the past. To date, the field of transitional justice has focused on which justice
mechanisms are relevant for a particular context, and when.64 This focus fails to
consider how violence and power is reproduced, interpreted and lived by those
affected by it. It likewise fails to consider the complexity of victims within the
conflict: some are not only targets of violent events, but are transformed by it in
relation to others. It is to miss how victims may become complicit in violence, and
how, politically, they might seek to resist, evade and negotiate life in the face of it.
It is to suggest that victims are complex and politically engaged even in spaces of

62
Häkli and Kallio. “Subject, action and polis”: 11.
63
Giorgio Agamben. Remnants of Auschwitz. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazan. (Zone Books, 1999).
64
Tim Allen, ed. Trial justice: The International Criminal Court and the Lord’s Resistance Army. (Zed
Books, 2006); For a critical reading of the field see Kamari Maxine Clarke. Fictions of justice:
The International Criminal Court and the challenge of legal pluralism in sub-Saharan Africa.
(Cambridge University Press, 2009); Sarah M. H. Nouwen. Complementarity in the Line of Fire:
The catalysing effect of the International Criminal Court in Uganda and Sudan. (Cambridge
University Press, 2013).
 War and Displacement in Northern Uganda 17

coercion, and that their stories can stimulate important insights into the making of
mass violence and dialogue on the meaning of responsibility after mass atrocity.

war and displacement in northern uganda

In 1986, Yoweri Museveni, the young rebel leader of the National Resistance Army
(NRA), seized power after a bloody civil war against the Acholi-dominated Ugandan
National Liberation Army (UNLA), which upon defeat fled northwards to escape
NRA retribution.65 The UNLA soon formed the remnants of a new rebel group, the
Ugandan People’s Democratic Army (UPDA). By 1988, an agreement signed
between the NRA and UPDA led to the demobilization and return of some rebels.
Still, others continued on, fleeing further north to re-group. Some UPDA joined the
spirit medium Alice Auma aka Lakwena (the messenger), who offered a spiritual
explanation for why the rebels had failed against the NRA and why Acholi was in
turmoil. She suggested that un-cleansed soldiers returning from the South led to
contamination and misfortune, including rape, murder and looting of the Acholi
people by the NRA and neighbouring Karamojong. Following the Holy Spirit
Mobile Forces (HSMF) regulations, thousands of soldiers under Lakwena fought
a Holy War against the NRA. Although these soldiers made it as far as Magamaga in
the Jinja District, they were eventually defeated, and Lakwena fled into exile in
Kenya. Those who remained re-grouped and re-organized under the leadership of
a young Joseph Kony, eventually under the name of the Lord’s Resistance Army
(LRA).66
Political and military support from Khartoum (throughout the 1990s and early
2000s) enabled the LRA to set up expansive compounds in South Sudan. In return,
the LRA assisted the Sudanese in their fight against the Sudanese People’s
Liberation Army (SPLA), which was supported by the Ugandan government.
By 1996, as many as 450,000 Acholi were forcibly relocated to internal displacement
camps for their own “protection,” but also intended to starve the rebels of popular
support. With the launch of Operation Iron Fist in 2002 and renewed LRA move-
ment within these northern districts the government increased its level of displace-
ment of the civilian population. At one point, 90% of the population are thought to

65
This brief historical overview is borrowed in part from Erin, Baines, and Lara Rosenoff Gauvin.
“Motherhood and social repair after war and displacement in northern Uganda.” Journal of
Refugee Studies 27.2 (2014): 282–300. See also Erin Baines “Histories” in Evelyn Amony. I am
Evelyn Amony: Reclaiming my life from the Lord’s Resistance Army. (University of Wisconsin
Press, 2015).
66
Ronald Raymond Atkinson. The roots of ethnicity: The origins of the Acholi of Uganda before 1800.
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994) – see Afterwards for a comprehensive discussion of the
historical events leading to, and shaping the contours of the war; and Sverker Finnström. Living
with bad surroundings: War, history, and everyday moments in northern Uganda. (Duke University
Press, 2008) for a discussion of war and meaning making.
18 Introduction

have lived in one of the hundreds of sprawling displaced persons camps in the north.
At the height of the conflict (2003–2005), it is estimated that as many as 1.3 million
people were unable to access their residential and agricultural land, instead con-
fined to displaced persons camps in the then districts of Gulu, Kitgum and Pader.
Several ceasefires and tentative peace talks throughout the war culminated in the
Juba Peace Talks between 2006 and 2008, during which time the Ugandan
Government and the LRA signed the Agreement on Accountability and
Reconciliation (in 2007), which outlined a strategy to redress the legacies of violence
in the war. However, the failure of Kony to sign the final agreements, coupled with
his execution of second in command, Vincent Otti, led to a breakdown in
confidence in the viability of the talks. The war resumed in 2008 with the initiation
of Operation Lightening Thunder, which eventually involved a multi-national
military force to pursue the rebels to where they are now based inside the
Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Central African Republic (CAR) and
South Sudan. While the Agreement on Accountability and Reconciliation provided
a basic framework to inform the transitional justice efforts of the Ugandan state
under the Justice, Law and Order Sector, forced displacement is largely absent in
these policy discussions. This is despite the fact that forced displacement in northern
Uganda was likely a violation of international humanitarian laws by the Ugandan
state.67
In his detailed study of the camps in the early 2000s, Chris Dolan convincingly
argues that the Government of Uganda failed to provide adequate food, water,
shelter, sanitation, education, health care and protection.68 Mass displacement
disrupted social relationships, generating existential and material uncertainty
amongst the populace. The rebels entered this disrupted space to abduct, kill and
coerce the population towards the realization of its own ends. It was against this
backdrop that the stories of complex victims were narrated, focused on what it was to
live through abduction and forced marriage, and what it is to return home again after
multiple years inside one of the most violent and enduring rebel groups in Africa.

methods/methodologies
You have to speak in a place where you know what you have spoken has a future.
– Chogol

In response to European scholarship on Africa in the 1950s, Okot p’Bitek remarked,

“it is up to African scholars to tell the Truth about Africa.”69 In contemporary
67
Adam Branch. Displacing human rights: War and intervention in northern Uganda. (Oxford University
Press, 2011).
68
Chris Dolan. Social torture: The case of northern Uganda, 1986–2006. Vol. 4. (Berghahn Books, 2011).
69
Okot p’Bitek. African religions in Western scholarship. (Nairobi, East African Literature Bureau,
1970): 7.
 Methods/Methodologies 19

scholarship on violence on the continent, p’Bitek’s call to action extends to survivors.

To centre survivor’s lived experiences and worldviews is to work towards an “ethics of
listening.”70 Stories lead us to the site of the political in settings of extremity:
a parent’s love, a sibling’s decision to obey, a neighbour’s refusal to hate. Stories
reveal acts of resistance and contestation of dehumanizing violence, and reclaim
sites of knowledge where survivors have otherwise been rendered speechless.71
I look to Acholi practices of storytelling for inspiration methodologically, as I will
outline below. However, the conflict- and post-conflict milieu shapes the possibi-
lities of telling stories of the war. Participants noted that it was difficult to talk about
their experiences of life in the LRA within their families and communities, which
had been affected by more than two decades of violence. Women said talking about
their life in the LRA generated further suspicion and sometimes anger. Participants
were also cognizant of the International Criminal Court, and none wanted to be
arrested. In the context of ongoing insecurity, their knowledge is highly political and
dangerous.72 In the words of one participant, the women had “just kept quiet” since
their return “home” to Uganda.
Silence is often a strategy of survival in violent times, and enables those threatened
to navigate difficult situations to protect themselves and loved ones. The community
seemed to both judge and feel relieved by the women’s silence. When a participant
refused to answer a neighbour’s questions about her past, the neighbour concluded,
“you see, she is quiet because she knows what she did.” These women practiced
silence as a protection strategy long before they returned home. In the LRA, women
and men were forbidden from speaking to one another outside of their own home-
stead (and at times, even within) in order to control the flow of information and limit
their interactions with others. If someone was caught speaking to another person
without permission, they could be accused of sharing secrets, plotting insubordina-
tion, or planning escape. It was safer to remain quiet, and some reported consciously
choosing not to foster friendships in order to avoid punishment.
Another challenge is the commodification of stories in wartime.73 Journalists,
politicians, humanitarian aid workers, researchers and altruists travelled to rehabi-
litation centres in northern Uganda by the hundreds at the height of the war in hopes
of conducting an interview with some of those who had recently been captured or
escaped the LRA and who were recuperating in the centres. The women who
returned possessed little other than their stories, and most quickly learned of the
formulaic stories that consumers of their stories sought. Researchers in war zones
70
Sonalia Chakravarty. Sing the rage: Listening to anger after mass violence. (University of Chicago Press,
2014).
71
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. “Can the subaltern speak?” Die Philosophin 14.27 (2003): 42–58.
72
Carolyn Nordstrom. A different kind of war story. (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).
73
Kimberley Armstrong. “‘Seeing the suffering’ in northern Uganda: The impact of a human rights
approach to humanitarianism.” Canadian Journal of African Studies (2008): 1–32; Cecilie
Lanken Verma. “Truths out of place: Homecoming, intervention, and story-making in war-torn
northern Uganda.” Children’s Geographies 10.4 (2012): 441–455.
20 Introduction

elsewhere observed similar effects: formerly abducted persons rehearsed stories that
emphasized their victimization and said little about the historical or political worlds
that led to it.74 In Liberia, Mats Utas noted that war-affected persons tended to
downplay the active roles they played during the war in order to avoid judgment and
better access humanitarian resources that external actors might provide.75
Indeed, there were many reasons to invest in stories of innocence and avoid the
more ambiguous experiences of life in war. Myriam Denov notes the degree to
which her research participants feared being exposed within communities, and
possibly prosecuted within national courts, should they speak about their roles in
combat.76 Both authors emphasize the importance of developing innovative strate-
gies beyond the interview and focus group to provide space for participants to reflect
on their experiences and move beyond victim narratives. For Utas, this involved
developing a long-term relationship with his research participants, while Denov
employed other war-affected youth to liaise with children she wished to engage in
the project. Chris Coulter, in her innovative study of women who were part of the
Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone, took a life story approach,
meeting with and interviewing a small group of women over an extended period
of ethnographic field work.77 I took an approach that combined conducting research
over a long period time with a small group of women who spent multiple years in the
LRA, and that involved in the research design and process women who had also
experienced life in the LRA.
The research in this project was in part facilitated by the support lent to it by the
Justice and Reconciliation Project (JRP). JRP, an organization I had helped co-found
with Michael Otim, Boniface Ojok, Ketty Anyeko and Lino Owor Ogora in 2005,
and which realized NGO status in 2009, has a history of grass-roots community-based
research that once included offices in some of the largest displaced persons camps
during the war.78 By offering a space for the research team to work in, as well as
lending their reputation of working with communities on the documentation of
74
Dyan Mazurana, Karen Jacobsen, and Lacey Gale, eds. Doing research in conflict zones: Experiences
from the field. (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
75
Mats Utas. “Victimcy, girlfriending, soldiering: Tactic agency in a young woman’s social navigation of
the Liberian war zone.” Anthropological Quarterly 78.2 (2005): 403–430.
76
Myriam Denov. Child soldiers. (Cambridge University Press, 2012): 89–92; see also Jo Boyden and
Joanna de Berry, eds. Children and youth on the front line: Ethnography, armed conflict and displace-
ment. Vol. 14. (Berghahn Books, 2004); Alcinda Honwana. Child soldiers in Africa. (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
77
Coulter. Bush Wives.
78
As a researcher, I first went to northern Uganda in 2003 where I met Michael Otim and we discussed
writing a report on local approaches to justice in response to increasing interest locally and inter-
nationally. We formed the Justice and Reconciliation Project and set up an office in Gulu, releasing
Roco Wat I Acoli: Restoring relationships in Acholi (Gulu, 2005). With a small team of Ugandan
researchers, we continued to work in displaced persons camps and with survivors on justice and peace
issues, putting out a series of reports. In 2008, we conceptualized the idea of an NGO that would work
with and on behalf of war affected communities, registering JRP in 2009, at which time Michael Otim
and I became an Advisor to the organization.
 Methods/Methodologies 21

harms endured throughout the conflict, JRP greatly added to my ability to collabo-
rate with participants. Public dialogues, theatre, community debates, mapping and
storytelling were some of the methods JRP employed to produce some of the first
documentations of human rights abuses during the war. It was during this period of
my work with JRP that I learned the value of life stories to generate insights into
complex social worlds, producing my first academic piece on the region.79
The research project adopted a range of different methods intended to facilitate
the telling of stories.80 The first method involved holding a series of storytelling
circles, with between four and twenty women at a time, over a period of two years
(2009–2011). These circles were modeled after the Acholi practice of wang-o (bon-
fire), the familial social practice of sitting around the fire at night to discuss events of
the day, communal problems, agree on workloads and tell ododo (folk tales, stories).
Once considered integral to maintaining Acholi social life across generations, the
practice of wang-o was not possible during displacement given the confines of
camps, and the imposed curfew.
In total, ten circles were held, each at the same place: outside under a mango tree at
a location of the participants’ choosing. These storytelling circles were designed to
minimize interruption of the researcher, and encourage women to speak about the
experiences that each had within the homestead they were confined to. I provided
a different topic for the participants to discuss each time they met, which we posed as
general questions and topics such as “What is justice?,” “Let’s discuss marriage,” or
“Tell me about your children.” The circles assumed an Acholi storytelling method,
which allows each person to speak for as long as they desire before moving on to the next
speaker. Each storytelling circle lasted between two and three hours, depending on the
topic.
A second method involved documenting thirty life stories. We first asked women
to share their stories with each other in the group. Each woman had the option of
drawing her life story on a piece of paper, identifying significant events (birth,
family, school, abduction and so forth) with a picture or symbol, and then narrating
these to each other (Figure 2). These were transcribed, and each woman was then
met on a one-on-one basis to review her story and ask if there was anything she
wanted to add. A copy of her story was then provided to her.
A third method employed was to ask participants in small groups of two or four to
draw maps of their homesteads in the LRA (Figure 3), as well as some of the military
bases (Figures 4, 5, 6) and what life looked like while on mobile (troop movements).
The idea was to better understand the organization of the LRA, to learn how rules and

79
Erin K. Baines. “The haunting of Alice: Local approaches to justice and reconciliation in northern
Uganda.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 1.1 (2007): 91–114.
80
Life maps, maps of areas and body maps were inspired and adapted from the work of my colleague, Dr.
Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, and as documented in Remembering and narrating conflict: Resources for doing
historical memory work. (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica y University of British Columbia,
2013). Found online at http://reconstructinghistoricalmemory.com/ accessed September 4, 2015.
22 Introduction

figure 2. A life map.

figure 3. An LRA compound/homestead in Sudan.

 Methods/Methodologies 23

figure 4. An LRA military base in Palateka, Sudan.

figure 5. An LRA military base in Nicitu, Sudan.

Another random document with
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 9 (JULY 30, WED.)
All the people like us are We,
And every one else is They.
—Rudyard Kipling

High Tor, N.Y., is a pretty enlightened place. It's the hometown of

artists, writers and theater people, budding and blooming. It has a
syndicated political cartoonist whose satire is just a shade less biting
than Herblock's. It has a playwright who has won a Pulitzer prize. It
has a socially conscious novelist whose books are best-sellers in
spite of their Messages. Then there's the Chinese-American artist
who not only prospers but (or perhaps I should say "and therefore")
is a respected and socially accepted member of the community.
High Tor is progressive, forward-looking. It's quaint and countrified—
though it's only 35 minutes from Times Square—because of its strict
zoning laws. It has been written up in The Exurbanites as a place
neither as intellectual nor as stuffy as Fairfield County, Connecticut,
possibly because it doesn't have as many advertising men. It's not
as rich, either, which is why Mae and I can afford to live there on the
minimum plot allowed—one acre.
As I say, High Tor is no slouch of a town. If you're a New Yorker, but
can't stand the city for the hundred-odd reasons I'm sure I don't have
to list, High Tor is the place for you.
Therefore Mae and I were pretty shocked when we went out pub-
crawling and did some unintentional eavesdropping.
I'd come home worn out from the eight-hour grind at WW, which had
seemed like twelve, and suggested to Mae that we eat out and relax.
She had the lamb chops back in the freezer and her second-best
dress on in the same time it took me to luxuriate in an armchair over
one dry martini.
All unwound, I put Mae in the Volkswagen and headed for
Armando's, one of those quaint, but not too quaint, restaurants
where the owner himself comes over and suggests. He suggested
the veal cacciatore and we were agreeable.
As we were chewing the last mouthful, Armando came over to ask
how it was.
"Great," I told him.
"Out of this world," Mae said.
"Delighted," Armando said. "But please don't mention those out-of-
this-worlders to me."
"You mean the Monolithians?" I said. "What could they have possibly
done to you?"
"Two of them came in for lunch today, disguised as Negro people."
"Oh?" Mae said.
"They weren't disguised," I told Armando. "There are Negroes on
Monolithia, just as there are here."
"Well, anyway, I put them near the kitchen door and tell the girls to
bump the chairs every time they come out. You know."
I hadn't known. I looked at Mae, who looked down at the remains of
her veal cacciatore.
Armando went on: "So after a few bumps the one nearest the door
makes with a finger to me. I ignore him, of course. Then he hollers,
'Armando!' The place is full of the luncheon trade. I frown, but what
can I do? I hurry over to keep him quiet.
"'You are unhappy here?' I say to him. 'You would prefer to leave?'
But he says 'No, we prefer a better table.' I tell him there are no other
tables—the empty ones he sees are reserved. He says—he tells me
this to my face—that this is a lie. I ask him to leave, so as not to
create a disturbance."
"Sam," Mae said.
"Shh," I said. "Go on, Armando."
"Then he asks for the telephone, as if this is the Stork Club and I can
plug it in at the table. I tell him the pay phone is near the cashier's
desk, he can use it on his way out. Subtle, you see?"
"Then what?" I asked.
"He goes to the phone and calls SCAD in Albany!" SCAD is the state
commission against discrimination. "He tells them the whole story at
the top of his voice. It is mortifying. And now I am likely to lose my
license and have to close up—or else cater to the colored trade. Mr.
Kent, you are with a powerful news service. You know about these
things. Tell me—what can I do?"
"You can give us our check, Armando," I said.
Armando became upset. "You are late. I am sorry. I should not tell
you my troubles and take up your time. No—there is no check. You
have been my guests. My pleasure."
"But not mine, Armando." I said. I dropped a ten-dollar bill on the
table. "If you don't want it, leave it for the waitress. Good-by,
Armando. Come on, Mae."
In the car Mae said, "Ten dollars was too much. I saw the menu.
Seven-fifty, maybe."
"All right," I said. "Consider it a two-fifty contribution to the NAACP.
We'll make it up by not eating there again."
"Okay," she settled back in the seat. The financial end of it settled,
Mae said, "Good for you, Sam. The nerve of him, taking it for
granted we thought the same way he does. Why it wasn't so long
ago that he was a minority himself."
"The hell with him," I said. "Let's go get a drink."
Reno's Roost has a bar and a band and serves fried chicken or
shrimp in a basket. It's run by an old army buddy of mine, Paul
Reno. He gambled on the county opening up when they began
building the Tappan Zee Bridge across the Hudson and his gamble
paid off. The place was jumping.
We went in and looked around for a place to sit. The bar was filled.
So were the booths and tables.
Paul came over from nowhere and said, "Sam! Where the hell you
been? Hello, Mae. How's the gestation?"
"He's fine," Mae said. "Big crowd tonight."
"The biggest, now you're here. Here you are. Reserved for the
Kents."
"This looks like your table, Paul," I said. "We don't want to send you
back to work."
"Sit down," he said. "I'll come sit with you when my feet get tired.
What'll you have? First round's on the house."
"I'll have a very weak Tom Collins, Paul," Mae said, "and I mean
weak."
"Right you are, Mrs. K. Sam?"
"Scotch and soda, thanks."
"Strong, to even it out. Okay, Max!" He called a waiter and gave the
order. He had Seven-Up himself. Paul never drinks on the job till 1
A.M.
"I see Oliver's still with you," I said. Oliver is one of the bartenders.
He's a Negro. "We should have come here for dinner, Mae."
"Oliver's my right-hand man." Paul said. "Where did you eat,
chumps?"
"Armando's," Mae said. "But I'd just as soon not talk about it."
"Armando's!" Paul said. "That ptomaine domain! What's the matter—
you don't like chicken? If you don't like chicken we got shrimp. For
you we even got tablecloths, if you insist. Armando's! Has he got a
band?"
"He's got nothing," Mae said. "Who's playing tonight, Paul?"
"Tonight as always we have the Trans-Hudson Five, the finest
aggregation west of Ossining, augmented by that rising young cornet
star, Pete Kato."
"Japanese?" I asked.
"The rising son himself."
"Never heard of him."
"Just off the plane. He's here for kicks. I don't pay him, but maybe I
will. He's not bad."
"Jazzman?" I asked.
"I don't know," Paul said. "Sometimes he sounds like Harry James.
Sometimes he's Max Kaminsky. He's obviously listened to a lot of
records. He's pretty derivative."
That's one of the things I appreciate about Paul Reno. Most of the
time he sounds like Mr. Night Club himself, but then he comes out
with a word like "derivative."
Paul went off to see how things were in the kitchen. As I mentioned,
the place was crowded, with little space between tables. The band
was between sets and I could over-hear the people at the table
behind me.
"... deliberately soften us up with all that mumbo-jumbo in the UN," a
man's voice was saying. "Then they smuggle in a boat-load of
colored behind our backs, as if we didn't have enough of our own
already."
"And Chinks," another man's voice said.
"And Chinks," the first man agreed. "And Japs. I'll bet that was their
plan all along. They're dumping their unwanted surplus population on
us. It's a sneaking subversive thing to do and I wonder when Old
Fathead Allison will wake up to the fact that they're playing him for a
sucker."
"You used to think Gov was pretty good," a woman's voice said. "You
voted for him."
"Never again. The country's going to the dogs. It has been for years,
ever since Roosevelt. My God, Earl, do you know a Spic family is
trying to move in down the road from us? Bunch of jabbering
foreigners—must be a dozen of them. Can't even speak English."
"Now, Harvey," the same woman's voice said. "How can you talk that
way? You've always been very pleasant to our maid and you like
Oliver over there behind the bar."
"Exactly," he said. "'Over there behind the bar.' In his place."
This might very well be Oliver's place one day, I thought to myself.
Paul Reno was hoping to open another place, given the right breaks,
and he'd spoken to me about the possibility of putting Oliver in
charge of this one.
Feeling one up on the people behind me, I quit eavesdropping and
gave Mae a big smile.
"Well," she said. "Welcome back. What pleases you so all of a
sudden?"
"Nothing," I said. "Just the happy thought that that bunch of WASPS
behind me are going to be stung themselves sooner or later."
"Wasps?"
"Capital letters. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. It's a term applied in
certain quarters to a certain type."
"You're a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant," Mae said.
Paul Reno came back. "You will shortly be entertained by the
greatest little combo this side of Suffern," he said. "I'll join you for the
concert, if you're not engaged in pitching woo."
Mae laughed. "Sit down, Paul. The woo was pitched a long time ago.
We've been discussing the state of the world."
"On your night out? Sam, can't you ever forget that deadline stuff?"
"I'm willing to now, if your Augmented Five ever get their horns out."
There were piano, drums, guitar, trombone and clarinet, plus Kato's
cornet. The guitar man usually played trumpet. They did a good loud
job, but I noticed that Kato appeared really comfortable only when he
was taking a solo, such as the Berigan chorus of I Can't Get Started
or the James version of You Made Me Love You, where he was not
only derivative but imitative. In ensemble work he was terrible.
We decided we'd better go home after the band closed with The
Saints. I had my 6 A.M. alarm clock in mind.
 10 (JULY 31, THURS.)
You came to me from out of nowhere so why don't you go back
where you came from?
—Abe Burrows song title

I managed to shut off the alarm and get up without disturbing Mae. I
was having breakfast when the back door slammed open. We don't
lock our doors in countrified, law-abiding High Tor.
"Uncle Sam, Uncle Sam!" It was six-year-old Harry Tyler, the son of
our neighbors. "There's a spaceship in the woods!"
"What were you doing in the woods at this uncivilized hour?" I said,
the neighborly avuncular instinct grabbing the wrong end of his
remark. Then I said, "What? A spaceship? In the woods?"
"I went out to pick some strawberries for my breakfast," Harry said.
"That's why I was in the woods. It's big and black and nobody saw
me, I don't think."
"How do you know it's a spaceship?"
"Everybody knows what a spaceship looks like. It's big and black,
just the way it's supposed to be. Come on and see it."
"Is your daddy up yet?" I asked Harry. Len Tyler usually gets up a
few minutes after I do. "Did you tell him?"
"He's on vacation," Harry said. I'd forgotten. "He's still asleep. So's
Mommy. Come on and see the spaceship, Uncle Sam."
I always feel very martial when Harry and the other kids in the
neighborhood call me Uncle Sam. I feel that I have to uphold the
honor of the Republic and Set an Example.
"Son," I said, "you're on. Let us go investigate this phenomenon."
A telescope hung in the back hall where it had been gathering dust
since I gave up being a satellite watcher. It was a pretty good
Japanese telescope, not expensive, but not cheap either. I took it
down and wondered whether to look for my old souvenir machete for
protection. But I decided that would be overdoing it.
We have about an acre of clear ground behind our house, then the
woods begin. It's really an abandoned apple orchard, with the apple
trees grown tall and neglected and other trees grown to a
respectable height between them. A lot of sticker-bushes live there,
too—tough, nasty things with needle-sharp spines. I wished I'd
brought the machete after all.
Harry and I had threaded our way a few hundred feet when I
stopped. My left shirt sleeve was torn, my pants were wet up to the
knees from the dew, and I was sweating.
"That's far enough, Harry," I said. "There's no spaceship here."
He was a few yards ahead, ducking under a spiny branch I'd have to
lift out of the way at my peril.
"It's right over there, Uncle Sam," he said. "I think I see it now."
"Yeah? I'll go as far as you are, and if it's not there, young Marco
Polo, we're turning back."
"Shh," he said. "Come on."
I joined him and looked. "Where?"
"Right there. Near that red apple there." He pointed.
There were thousands of red apples, fit only for making pies if the
peeler had the patience to cut away the bad spots.
I followed his point and he was right. Nestled in among the trees was
a big bulk of a thing, brownish gray. It certainly wasn't anything that
had been in the woods before.
"Do you see any people?" I asked Harry.
"No. Let's go knock on their door."
"No!" I said. "Let's circle around and see what it looks like from the
other side."
We circled. I managed to tear my other shirt sleeve on a sticker that
also drew blood. Then for a while we made better progress along the
bed of a sunken, abandoned road. We had kept the spaceship on
our left and now I could see a huge clearing on the far side of it,
strung over with some kind of camouflage netting.
"There they are!" Harry said.
"Quiet!" I said, pulling him down behind the lip of the old road. I was
past caring about clothes now.
There were at least a dozen of them in the clearing. More were
coming out of the open hatch of the spaceship. Apparently they
hadn't heard us. I uncapped the telescope and looked.
They were wearing their native woolen cloaks and were setting up
furniture in the clearing, which had been divided into room-size
rectangles outlined on the bare ground with paint or strips of white
cloth.
In addition to the chairs, tables, desks and bookcases they had a
number of pieces of equipment which vaguely resembled movie or
television cameras.
"What are they doing, Uncle Sam?" Harry asked. "Let me look
through the telescope."
"I don't know. It looks as if they're building movie sets. Maybe the
walls will come later." I handed him the telescope.
"Look, they're coming out different now," Harry said, and I grabbed
the telescope back.
Those stepping out of the hatch now were wearing Earth-style
clothes, and not carrying anything. But not all of the clothes looked
American. There were men in wide-lapeled European suits, men in
the white linen suits of tropical countries, men in the jodhpurs or
dhotis of the Asian Indian, men in glittering military uniforms and
men in drab, unadorned military jackets worn by the leaders of some
totalitarian countries. They went to the various room-sized rectangles
and sat or stood. No one was talking.
Then I looked closely at their faces. I almost dropped the telescope.
I saw the Prime Ministers of England and India, the leader of the
United Arab Republic, the President of France and half a dozen
other premiers or presidents, ex-, present or potential.
Gouverneur Allison was there for the United States, as was Rupert
Marriner, the Secretary of State, and several other high
administrative officials.
I was watching the Soviet Union's top men come out when I heard a
noise behind us.
"Run!" I told Harry, getting up myself. "Run home and tell your
daddy."
He hesitated. "Aren't you coming, Uncle Sam?"
"I'll go another way, to confuse them. Go on, now!"
Harry ran back along the sunken road. I started in the other direction.
I hadn't taken twenty steps when a Monolithian in a woolen cloak
rose up in front of me. I darted off sideways and ran into another
one. There were five in all.
Escape would have been impossible even with the machete. Without
speaking they escorted me toward the clearing.
 11 (AUG. 1, FRI.)
Be good and you will be lonesome.
—Mark Twain

I woke up. It was completely dark. For a few seconds I stared up into
the blackness, then turned on my side and tried to go back to sleep.
But in a moment I realized I wasn't in my own bed and remembered
that I was a prisoner.
Fully awake, I sat up. The room, becoming light in a gradual
effulgence, revealed itself as a cube about nine feet on each side,
furnished with two things—a seven-foot couch, covered with a
coarse wool material, and me. There was nothing else. I couldn't
trace the source of the light. I lay down and the light faded; I sat up
and it came on again.
My wristwatch was gone and I had no idea how long it had been
since my capture. I had been marched in silence to the clearing,
passing through four or five of the wall-less rooms. No one had
spoken as I was led to one of the hatches of the spaceship.
I had made various remarks as I was being taken in—such as
"What's going on?" "You can't do this to me," "I've got to get to work,
for pete's sake," and "Listen, will you?"—but my captors weren't
conversation-minded.
I was led up a ramp and into the relatively dim interior of the
spaceship. I had a recollection of narrow corridors and an occasional
notice painted on the wall in some alien script. Then I was pushed
into a cabin and the door closed behind me. My captors stayed
outside, but there was a man in the room, sitting behind a long table
in one of the two big chairs. He was wearing a woolen cloak. He was
older than any of the bright young men I'd seen before, white haired
and grave in expression. He was tossing a ball from hand to hand. It
wasn't a baseball, but I had said, for no reason that I could
remember now, "I'm a Braves fan myself."
He smiled and said, "Sit down," indicating the other chair. "Yankees."
"That's no team," I said, sitting down, "that's a machine."
"Be that as it may," he said, "you must wonder why we are here."
"Not at all," I said. "You're not on my property." I was saying
whatever came into my mind. I think my idea was to discomfit him
and provoke him into saying something he didn't plan to—something
revealing.
He kept tossing the ball from hand to hand. It was about the size of a
handball, hard and black but apparently not rubber.
He revealed nothing. "The dew is heavy in the morning," he said,
looking at my soaked clothing. "And you've got a nasty scratch.
Would you like something for it?"
"What have you got?" I asked. "Mendicants?" I was freely
associating, having nothing better in mind.
"Oh, yes. Medicants and mendicants. Menders and vendors and
buttons and bows. Pills and potions and ankle-length hose."
I decided this was part of an attempt to hypnotize me and looked
away from his tossing ball.
"And Mendes-France," I said, "and Hugh Gaitskell and Krishna
Menon."
"Not to mention Sam Kent," he said. "Here, catch."
He tossed the ball to me and in reflex I caught it.
I woke up in the nine-foot cube.
Somewhere between then and now I'd been stripped of my sopping
clothes and garbed in one of their woolen cloaks. It didn't itch as I'd
imagined it would. In fact, I was quite comfortable. I wasn't hungry or
thirsty either. I judged by this that it had been only a few hours since
I'd caught the ball, which apparently was some kind of knockout
drop, and been transferred to this cubic prison and its automatic
lighting.
I got off the couch and explored. The walls, floor and ceiling were
made of a gray metallic substance, neither cold nor warm to the
touch. The couch was nothing more than an extension of the floor—
two feet high and seven feet long—with half a dozen thick brown
woolen blankets over it. There was no crack or seam in any wall to
indicate a door and no vent to bring in the clean air I was breathing. I
sat down, baffled.
After a while I said, "Hey!"
There was no answer.
I lay down and the light went out. I sat up again. The light came on.
My cloak had no pockets. I took it off and, naked, turned it inside out.
It taught me nothing. I put it back on and thought idly of smoking a
cigarette. There are times when I sit at the news desk and words
simply will not come unless I light a cigarette. It may be that I don't
take a single puff after the first one, but the mere action of lighting
the cigarette sets the old train of thought to operating. But now I
couldn't have cared less if I never had a cigarette. Or a drink. Or
food.
But my curiosity was still perking. I got to my feet and made another
circuit of the little room. I found something I'd overlooked before. On
one of the walls near a corner were two knobs, one above the other.
They were set out a scant quarter inch from the wall and were of the
same color and material.
"This opens the door," I told myself, turning the top one clockwise.
No door opened.
"Then this does," I said, turning the other one.
Instead I got music. I'd found a radio.
It was Perez Prado, that musical humorist, ripping out an unabashed
Latinate romp through an old standard, giving it new excitement with
his dramatic pauses and irreverent burps.
The Prado record ended and a recorded commercial came on:
"Ladies, stop tearing the end off the wrapper on a loaf of bread," was
the message I got. From this exhortation to the ladies, I judged that
this was daytime radio.
The next station was more informative: "Temperature now 75
degrees—bright and enjoyable. And we hope it's nice where you are
this fine Friday morning...."
Friday! It had been Thursday when my neighbor's boy had led me
through the apple orchard. I wondered if young Harry had reported
my capture, and if he had, whether anybody believed him.
My next thought was of Mae. She must be worried sick about me.
She wouldn't have worried till suppertime yesterday, when I didn't get
home on time—unless the office had called her to find out why I
hadn't come to work, as it probably had. That meant she'd already
had 24 hours of anxiety. I banged on the walls with my palms, then
kicked with the flat of my bare foot, but no one came.
"Can't stay in bed?" the radio asked me. "Get up and still get five
stay-in-bed benefits."
I turned the volume up as high as it would go, hoping that would
attract the attention of my captors. But the rest of the booming
commercial and the ensuing rendition of Stardust—a song I can do
without—did nothing but hurt my ears.
I reduced the volume for a panegyric to "the most delightfully
different cigarette ever made" and reflected that in spite of the fact
that my own pack was gone with my clothes I didn't want to smoke.
Nor was I thirsty, I realized during subsequent commercials praising
the joys of Coke and Seven Up. And I wasn't hungry, not reacting to
the one about there being "more crackling good taste in every
slice"—meaning bacon. And fortunately, considering the john-less
aspect of my cell, I didn't have to go to the bathroom. My appetites
seemed to have vanished with the 24 hours that had gone out of my
life since I caught that handball in the alien's office.
What were they doing to me? I wondered. What had they done to
me? I paced the limited confines of my prison, occasionally banging
on the hard wall, then threw myself on the couch. As I lay down the
lights went out and the radio faded. I sat up. The lights came on
again and the radio woke up to say:
"Time for news from American—live at 55! The news in just a
moment."
"From Hackensack, New Jersey, an interesting sidelight on the
aliens," the voice was saying in the verbless way of radio newsmen.
"Commuters, faced with a new fare increase totaling 81 per cent in
ten months, revolted against the Susquehanna Railroad today and
rode to work in a bus provided by the Monolithians. They pay $24 a
month instead of the $35 the new railroad fare would have cost.
There was no immediate comment from the Susquehanna, but a
spokesman from the commuters' association said the idea is so
successful that a second group is joining...."
That being the first news item, it was obvious that nothing startling
had been going on. Whatever all those duplicate men were planning
to do, they hadn't done it yet.
"In Boston, a group of alien volunteers pitched in with a will to help
tow away illegally parked cars. In the first two hours they towed away
28 unmarked police cars...."
WABC's newscast came five minutes before the hour. I switched to
the NBC station, "where news comes first"—meaning on the hour—
and endured the opening gongs which were NBC's substitute for big
black headlines. It started off with a couple of non-Monolithian items
from overseas.
"More news in a moment. But first—"
"Isn't there someone, somewhere, whose voice you'd like to hear?
Well then, why not pick up your telephone...."
I yelled at it, "Yes, God damn it! Why don't I just?" and switched it off.
I must have fallen asleep. I came to in darkness and when I sat up
the lights glowed on. I tried the radio again. Music.
I still wasn't hungry or thirsty and I still didn't have to go to the
bathroom. I wondered if I were being watched. I looked again for a
possible tiny television eye but couldn't see any. I considered
thumbing my nose in all directions, as a morale factor, but decided it
would be undignified.
I wondered what time it was, how long I'd slept. Somehow it sounded
like early evening music, suitable for housewives preparing dinner
and men driving home from a hard day at the office.
Then station identification told me it was seven o'clock (P.M.) and
asked whether right about here I would like a beer. The answer was
no. All I wanted was to get out.
"And now we bring you that popular round-table discussion of events
of the day, News and Newsmen," the radio said, "featuring the men
who edit the news for leading papers and wire services. Tonight our
subject is 'Monolithians—Friend or Foe?' and our panel consists of
Russell Sidenam, city editor of the World-Telegram; Barton Pascal,
reporter on the Daily News; Herb Small, from the world desk of the
Associated Press; and Sam Kent, assistant editor of the New York
bureau of World Wide News...."
A few minutes later, after the inevitable commercial, I heard my own
voice passionately defending the Monolithians as men of principle
and high conscience whose only purpose was to uplift their brethren
on Earth to a realization of their manifest destiny as worthy members
of the community of the Interstellar Realm.
 12 (AUG. 2, SAT.)
Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a
trout in the milk.
—Thoreau

I had put myself to sleep by playing the name game. You start with
two A's, as in Alfred Adler, then go to AB, Anthony Boucher, and so
on—Arthur Clarke, Antal Dorati, Albert Einstein, Alexander Fleming. I
dropped off somewhere in the middle of the C's—Mickey Cohen or
Norman Corwin—and woke up knowing exactly where I was and
wondering what time it was.
It turned out to be 8 A.M., August 2d, according to Station WTRU,
which was playing wake-up music for the poor souls who had to
work on Saturday, and a fine warm day it looked like it would be. For
me it looked like it would be the same kind of cooped-in day, with
nothing to do but chomp at the bit and wax wroth at the aloof jailers
who had stolen my identity and sent it out to make me look
ridiculous. He who steals my purse steals trash, I thought, but he
who steals my good name.... They'd stolen both, these alien do-
gooders with their sweet mad reasonableness.
"They said it couldn't be done—couldn't be done!" the radio boomed.
Well, they done did it. I didn't know how, but they duplicated me and
sent me out to champion their cause while the original model
languished helpless in their cell, beset by commercials and growing
a fine beard.
"Our traffic-conditions helicopter reports unusual tie-ups in various
suburban areas," WTRU was saying. "Traffic is bumper-to-bumper
and backed up for miles in some sections.... For a direct report we
go to our beeper-phone and we'll see if we can talk to the police
department in Haverstraw, New York, close to the scene of one of
the major tie-ups on Route 9W."
I perked up at that. Haverstraw is near High Tor on the west bank of
the Hudson River.
"My engineer tells me we've got Sergeant Kiefer of the Haverstraw
police on the beeper-phone. Go ahead, Sergeant Kiefer! Tell us,
what's the cause of the big traffic jam on Route 9W?"
Sergeant Kiefer came in, loud, clear and profane. "Some God damn
jerks are obeying the 20-mile speed limit," he said.
"Heh, heh, Sergeant Kiefer," the announcer said. "Remember, you're
on the beeper-phone. This is radio, you know! What's that you say
about the speed limit?"
"The speed limit's 20 miles an hour and there's two cars abreast on
the highway not going any faster. Traffic's backed up clear to
Piermont to the south."
"Piermont to the south," the announcer repeated, just as if it meant
something to him. "How about in the other direction, Sergeant?"
"Same God damn thing. Two other wise guys ambling along——"
"You're on the air, Sergeant!"
"Same thing, I mean. They're backed up north to Bear Mountain. It's
murder."
"Why don't you arrest them, Sergeant?"
"For what? For obeying the speed limit? It'd make more sense to
arrest the stupid jerks that posted the 20-mile limit on a state
highway."
"Just a minute, Sergeant! We're getting a message from our WTRU
traffic-conditions helicopter that the lead cars, both northbound and
southbound, have banners reading 'Monolithians Obey the Law.' Can
you confirm that, Sergeant? Is it true that the Monolithian space
people are the instigators of this fantastic traffic tie-up up there in—in
—what county is that up there where you are anyway, Sergeant?"
"Rockland County. Yeah. That's what their signs say. One of the cars
is a Volkswagen and there's some guy in it says he's a reporter. Sam
Kent of World Wide. Legal Sam, the law-abiding man, he told us he
was. You know him?"
"I've heard of World Wide, Sergeant. It's one of the three wire
services we have here at WTRU to give you and all our listeners the
most complete, up-to-the-minute news of any station in the
metropolitan area. You say a reporter is personally instigating this
mass traffic tie-up?"
"He's legal. We can't touch him. You want to know anything else? I
got to get back to work here."
The announcer let him go back to work because he had to go back
to work himself—to wit, to put on a commercial about something that
was more lastingly odor-free than any other something.
So my alter ego had stolen not only my good name but my little red
Volkswagen as well. I hoped he was keeping it in second for his 20-
mile-an-hour jaunt and not ruining the gear-box by trying to do 20 in
third.
Then a more urgent thought occurred to me. Had Spurious Sam, the
Duplicated Man, gone home last night and posed as the lawful
wedded husband of Mae Kent? If that was the case I wasn't even
missing, and no one would ever have investigated young Harry's
story of my capture.
"Let me out of this God damned trap!" I yelled, getting as profane as
Sergeant Kiefer. Nobody paid any attention.
My attention wandered during the next news item, which was about
a cabinet crisis in one of the Arab states, and I began to think about
my stomach. I still wasn't hungry, but a peculiar sensation was
setting in. I can only describe it as a hunger to be hungry.
I was also experiencing a thirst to be thirsty. For a while I kept saying
to myself, "You get more beer in your beer in New Jersey"—parroting