Homework answers / question archive / According to Lederach & Lederach why is the current reconciliation paradigm problematic? Through metaphoric analysis of place, voice, safety and resilience analyze aspects of cases studied through the course that challenge us to think differently about the needs of those who experience conflict and violence

According to Lederach & Lederach why is the current reconciliation paradigm problematic? Through metaphoric analysis of place, voice, safety and resilience analyze aspects of cases studied through the course that challenge us to think differently about the needs of those who experience conflict and violence

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According to Lederach & Lederach why is the current reconciliation paradigm problematic? Through metaphoric analysis of place, voice, safety and resilience analyze aspects of cases studied through the course that challenge us to think differently about the needs of those who experience conflict and violence. (Lederach)

When Blood and Bones Cry Out This page intentionally left blank When Blood and Bones Cry Out Journeys through the Soundscape of Healing and Reconciliation JOHN PAUL LEDERACH ANGELA JILL LEDERACH 1 1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With of?ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © John Paul Lederach and Angela Jill Lederach, 2010. All rights reserved. Foreword © Judy Atkinson 2010 First published by University of Queensland Press, PO Box 6042, St. Lucia, Queensland 4067, Australia. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lederach, John Paul. When blood and bones cry out : journeys through the soundscape of healing and reconciliation / John Paul Lederach and Angela Jill Lederach. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-983710-6 1. Peace-building. 2. Mediation. 3. Reconciliation. 4. Forgiveness. 5. Con?ict management. I. Lederach, Angela Jill. II. Title. III. Title: Journeys through the soundscape of healing and reconciliation. HM1126.L435 2010a 327.1'72—dc22 2011009171 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Tom Cauuray, whose life and words inspired our writing, and for his family in the Falui Poets Society who faced the horrors of unfettered violence with the prophetic imagination of memory and hope; For the family of Efraín Arenas and Doris Berrio and the more than four million displaced and disappeared in the Colombian wars; For Morris Matadi and the thousands of child combatants on the journey to ?nd their way home; For Kadiatu Koroma and women everywhere who have the courage to give voice to the unspeakable devastation of sexual violence. This page intentionally left blank Contents Foreword ix Preface xv Introduction: social healing in the age of the unspeakable 1 SECTION I NARRATIVE REFLECTIONS 15 chapter 1 Drums and gardens 17 chapter 2 The wandering elders 23 chapter 3 The Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace Campaign 28 chapter 4 The bones with no name 34 chapter 5 Shifting metaphors 41 SECTION II THE SONICS OF HEALING 73 chapter 6 Sonic survival 75 chapter 7 The Tibetan singing bowl 89 chapter 8 Following the healing muse 111 THE WOMB OF CHANGE 145 SECTION III chapter 9 When mothers speak 147 chapter 10 The poetry of social healing 170 SECTION IV THEORY, IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS 195 chapter 11 The resonating echo of social healing 197 chapter 12 Conclusions 225 viii Contents Acknowledgements 235 Endnotes 239 References 241 Index 251 Foreword When I ?rst read the book Moral Imagination: The art and soul of building peace by John Paul Lederach, I felt the pull towards a kindred spirit, someone who knew something about where I had been and what I was doing in my life and work. John Paul had written in a way that connected with me. I felt he knew the landscape, often a rough, harsh terrain, over which I had been walking, and sometimes a moisture-rich valley of sounds, calling me to places where people desired to sit in the Dadirri1 circle, listening to and learning from each other. Later, when he sent me the draft manuscript for When Blood and Bones Cry Out: Journeys through the soundscape of healing and reconciliation, as I read, page by page, slowly, taking time to think, re?ect, and reconnect where I had been, I felt and heard that kindred soul speaking to me on another level. John Paul observed that this writing project with his daughter Angie is ‘one of the most beautiful experiences a father could have’. Perhaps even more so is to work with your children on things that matter. When Blood and Bones Cry Out links John Paul’s work in many places, but for this book, violence in Colombia links with that of his daughter Angie’s work with child soldiers in West Africa, coming home from their childhood war zone experiences. John Paul writes about what he calls a neglected aspect of healing and reconciliation. We too often write about it as a linear process. Of x Foreword course it is not. And yet as John Paul points out we say ‘healing is not a linear process’, and then in the next sentence, as I have done many times, write about the stages and steps of healing. So, within When Blood and Bones Cry Out, the imagery created, for example, of the Tibetan singing bowl, with the circular process, and the sound, both moving deep into the bowl and upwards in a shared space, provides a visual element, producing for those who have been there the acknowledgement: ‘Yes, I know that space – this is how it is!’ The process is both personal and social healing, as voices mingle, join and resonate with each other. Within the academy, this creates problems. Personal healing, for them, suggests therapy. Professional skills development is about education, they would perceive, and you cannot mix them. Education, within the western construct, is an intellectual pursuit. Other Indigenous models of ‘education’ – or, as we call it at Gnibi,2 ‘educaring’ – can provide both and, I would argue, are necessary when working within the ?eld of historic, social trauma and generational community social healing. I would argue that when working with people who have been through layered experiences of generational trauma, the only ethical approach is to allow both deep personal inner work within the context of social healing, and the development of skills to continue the work with others. In the last month I have seen this possibility while working with my own people in Australia; Aboriginal Australians; and with our brothers and sisters we could call our near neighbours, in Papua New Guinea and in Timor Leste. In September 2009, I was invited by Peter and Lydia Kailap of Kaugere, a settlement on the edge of Port Moresby, the government centre of Papua New Guinea, to run a ?ve-day workshop with a focus on human rights in relationship to family and community violence. Because there is no school in Kaugere for the children, Peter and Lydia had established the Children’s University of Music Foreword xi and Arts (CUMA), with volunteer workers using music and art to teach children who are eager to learn. Often the only meal the children will receive for the day is at the school. For the ?ve days we were there, the school became an adult learning centre – a ‘university’. Each day 75 men and women, parents of the 70 children who attend the school, sat together to consider the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959), the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) in relationship to the violence they live with on a daily basis. Starting with what happens to children when they witness and hence experience violence, the men and the women – at ?rst in separate gender groups, and then together – worked to develop a community development approach to their needs, which would allow healing to occur across generations. As I think back to those ?ve days I see the metaphor of the bowl taking shape. In the ?rst round people began to feel safe, so that they could listen and learn together. Once they felt comfortable, not threatened by what they were learning, they went deeper into the bowl, inwards, looking at themselves. And in the circular process of listening and learning together, as their voices grew strong and powerful, the sound rose up, and in the process talking became music, shared between them, and with us, the visitors, a social healing. On the last day, in what they called a celebration of change, they sang us a farewell song. A young man, Emmanuel Mailau, sang his song ‘Children’. Ceremonies can often be rituals of grieving, and the song ‘Children’ is a lament for the lives of children who are crying and dying on the hills outside Port Moresby. From the ?rst day in Kaugere, I kept thinking of John Paul and Angie’s metaphor, and the need for a metaphor shift. As they write, healing is aural. And sound is not linear. Sound rises and falls in joy and in sorrow, in loss and in triumph, in fear and in courage. xii Foreword These are human experiences and they validate our humanness. The song ‘Children’ locates us in a place where children see much violence, where children are hungry because their parents have no money to buy food, and where children die early from diseases that are preventable. As Emmanuel says: ‘I live in a settlement. The song is about all the children that I see everyday living such hard lives of poverty, the orphans that roam the streets in the settlement – it is an emotional song.’ Yet every morning in Kaugere we also hear the voices of children who attend CUMA, singing their joyful morning songs, showing that while violence in its varied shapeshifting forms is remarkably resilient, so are children, as they reach beyond themselves engaging in celebration – ceremonies of healing, each morning in this small classroom without walls. They teach us how to be human. And as I left Papua New Guinea to travel to Timor Leste, to deliver the last unit in the Diploma of Community Recovery,3 I carried with me the draft manuscript of When Blood and Bones Cry Out. Each night I would read again pages I had previously read, and each day in class we would explore the need for men and women to heal from the multiple human rights violations that have been part of the historical, social trauma of Timor Leste. There is, within this small island, the world’s youngest democracy, the human will to ?nd a better way to live together, a resonance that rises from working in con?ict transformation and peacebuilding, in healing from trauma. ‘In Timor,’ the students said, ‘we must all be responsible for rebuilding our country. No one person created our violence. We now must ?nd a way to heal, men and women, separately, and together, always placing our children in the centre of our circle.’ They painted as they talked together in the classroom, a circle dance on canvas, with children surrounded by their families and communities. As I sat back listening and watching them talk and work together, the canvas moved and danced and sang to me. They discussed culture Foreword xiii as a changing, moving entity, and yet under the intellectual discussions, at their core, they drew on the strength of their resilience and resonance, both separate yet interdependent qualities in the work of community peacebuilding. They taught me. In Timor, completing my day’s work, I retired to my room to read When Blood and Bones Cry Out, as if it were written for this country, for these people. This is my third reading. Each reading has taken place in a location that has meaning: in Tasmania, Australia, with its history of genocide, talking with people about their proposal to build a healing centre. In Papua New Guinea, where orphaned children starve, yet each morning children sing songs in their university of music and arts. And in Timor Leste, where the ?lm Balibo has just been released, and my students are all members of families who have, in various ways, survived the genocide of multiple colonisations and invasions. The students all work with people who have suffered torture trauma, and where blood and bones cry out. These students inspire me with their capacity to laugh, sing, cry and be heartbreakingly real as we go about our studies. In Timor, while I am there, there is always a celebration – a birth, a marriage, the commemoration of the Santa Cruz massacre this last time. They gather to dance and sing in celebration of their survival, of the great genocide that is their history. Here students asked me, ‘What is the difference between political trauma, historical trauma, and social trauma? Can you explain the difference between loss and grief, victimisation, and traumatisation?’ Their challenge to me is my challenge to myself, to get it right. As John Paul and Angie have written, violence displaces people at multiple levels, fracturing their sense of safety in the world. The key to health and being well is both immediate and transgenerational, essentially at the same time. It is also about healing, in education or educaring. Education is healing, yet our policy makers do not xiv Foreword yet understand that. The process will never be linear, just as songs are circular, transcending time and space, linking people – in sound, space and words – to each other. Let me go back to the beginning. When John Paul said that writing this book was ‘one of the most beautiful experiences a father could have’, he did not say that he and his daughter could not have written When Blood and Bones Cry Out, a beautiful, heart wrenching, inspirational song, without ?rst working together. That is obvious, however. They set an example for us all. Only we can raise our individual voices to make a collective song of healing. Only we can choose to sit in circles and listen and learn together. Only we can put into action what we have learned, knowing that as we nurture spaces for healing and reconciliation, we do so from our own experiences and a longing for a renewed world, in which humans live and work together with mutual care and respect for each other and the lifeworld in which we all live. Dadirri – listening to one another. Judy Atkinson Head of Gnibi, the College of Indigenous Australian Peoples Southern Cross University Lismore, Australia Preface A book always grows out of curiosity, care and experience. This one has perhaps undergone the process at a deeper level. It has taken a while for us to pull these pages together and the process was an unusual gift in the relationship between father and daughter. While a generation separates us in age, our experiences bind us together. As the reader will ?nd in the coming pages a lifetime of experience has touched us at the level of our family. Many of the most formative moments in pursuing peacebuilding have had direct ripple effects in our family life. Angie was a young child when our paths moved in the war-torn regions of Central America. The impact of a car accident in the Basque country caught us all up short. Shared and independent relationships and experiences we have had with colleagues and friends so hard hit by violence in places like Somalia, West Africa and Colombia have made untold contributions to our lives. The faces and love of these people have never left our consciousness or our hearts. As a family we have hosted and been hosted by people from all those locations, sat together around tables, listened to people, shared experiences, felt the trauma and seen resilient hope. Over the years our paths at times separated as we individually moved into peacebuilding research and practice in different locations. Coming back together, sharing our experiences, at times our traumas, and certainly our ideas, we intuited that aspects of our xvi Preface experiences were converging and leading to interesting insights and understandings. This volume represents an effort to share those conversations, ideas, insights and understandings with a much wider audience. We have co-authored this book, though at times we knew we had to provide space to speak from our individual voice and experience. We hope readers can follow the unfolding without confusion. The ?rst and last sections of the book were written together. However, in Section II John Paul, as the primary author, follows his deep interest in the sonics of healing, starting with personal stories that were lived in ?esh and bone. In Section III Angie re?ects on her multiple visits and stays in West Africa that began when she accompanied her father on trips to the region, and continued when she returned later on her own to pursue research and to work with people in communities affected by violence. In each of those sections the voice at times moves to ?rst person even though we have contributed ideas and suggestions to each other’s writing. As a ?nal note we must thank the readers who will permit us to share these stories and musings. We experienced, much as we describe in the book, a healing wave as we remembered and found hope in the telling and exploration of our inner and collective voice that mixed our experiences with the stories of those whose lives of courage and resiliency have enriched and blessed us across the years. John Paul Lederach Angela Jill Lederach Others simply love and respect us. These are true leaders of humanity, descendants in a direct spiritual line from one or other of the great teachers. They can be recognized by their amazing generosity in both giving and receiving unconditional love. Adam Curle This page intentionally left blank When Blood and Bones Cry Out This page intentionally left blank Introduction: social healing in the age of the unspeakable ‘Speaking the unspeakable.’ With three words poet Robert Pinsky (2008) frames his New York Times review of Kathryn Harrison’s book While they slept (2008). Her study follows the lives of the survivor sister and her perpetrator brother across several decades in the tragic multi-member Gilley family murder that stunned the small town of Medford, Oregon in 1984. Harrison recounts the night a troubled and routinely physically abused teenager pounded his father–abuser, his mother and his sister to death with a baseball bat. Two children survived – one a sister who hid in the closet and one the teenage brother who more than 25 years later still sits in prison. His lawyer has recently asked for a legal review of his case, based on the argument that the young perpetrator was a victim–offender. Even legal language has had to invent categories to describe the ambiguities of the unimaginable. The two siblings have not spoken a word to each other in the past two and a half decades. Unspeakable. How do people express and then heal from violations that so destroy the essence of innocence, decency and life itself 2 When Blood and Bones Cry Out that the very experience penetrates beyond comprehension and words? It takes a poet to situate what may otherwise appear in news media as a sensational anomaly in the context of this longstanding human inquiry, which remains for the most part unanswered. Pinsky (2008, p. 1) opens his review by looking back to mythology and the classics of literature, the literature before and beyond what he calls the ‘the Freudian cure’ and the ‘too mild and cool’ notion of the ‘therapeutic’. He brings forward the ?gure of Philomena, her tongue torn from her mouth, who transforms into a nightingale in order to ‘sing’ the accusations against her rapist. He cites the narrator’s lament from Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus that ‘it cannot speak’ and is forced to look away, unable to absorb the tragedy heaped upon the destroyed yet living Oedipus: ‘I would speak, ponder, question if I were able’. He returns as far as Genesis and the story of the ?rst murder where Abel’s voice was silenced and his blood had to ‘cry out from the ground’ (Pinsky 2008, pp. 1, 10). What happened in microcosm in Medford in 1984 has unravelled at macro levels in untold numbers – from Rwanda to Liberia, Bosnia to Colombia blood has cried from the ground. Minow (1998) refers to these unspeakable macro-tragedies in a variety of ways – ‘mass’, ‘collective’ or ‘societal-level violence’, all clearly creating the image of whole communities and nations facing violation. Atkinson (2002) refers aptly to the impact of arriving coloniser violence on the Aboriginal experience in Australia as ‘trauma trails’ that cross and transfer to whole generations of people. Hayner (2002), in her early and comprehensive review of truth commissions in the aftermath of two decades of civil war, chose the title Unspeakable truths. We return to the question: How do people with collective experiences of violence reconcile and heal from experiences that penetrate below and beyond words? Over the past ?fteen years, with an increase in peace agreements that purport to end, or at least hold hopes for a conclusion to civil Introduction 3 war, the literature and programmatic interest in reconciliation has exploded. What the term reconciliation has gained in broad popular coinage it seems to have lost in de?nitional value, to the degree that recent overviews and essays note as a standard starting point the variety and lack of common de?nitions (Bloom?eld et al. 2003; Kaimal 2008). Once the primary territory of religious concern and to a lesser degree, of social psychology, reconciliation has increasingly emerged as a political category (Abu-Nimer 2001; Barkan 2000; Biggar 2003; Minow 1998, 2002; Philpott 2006; Schapp 2005). On a regular basis our news media report on the need for political, national, inter-religious or inter-ethnic reconciliation. The word has increasingly become a buzzword for politicians wishing to end wars they no longer seem interested in supporting. The political arena in particular seems to treat the word as synonymous with some form of enmity accommodation, a coexistence necessary to control the bitterness of entrenched divisions in favour of a reasoned peace, or what political philosopher David Crocker (1999, p. 60) has called a ‘thin’ rather than a ‘thick’ understanding of reconciliation. Political analyst Ignatieff called this a ‘cold peace’ when he observed that politically it is possible to ‘coexist with people without forgetting or forgiving their crimes against you’ (Ignatieff 2003). In the mix of this varied multidisciplinary, academic, self-help and media-driven literature we ?nd a remarkable absence of agreement on what exactly reconciliation represents and even less consensus about what the term means or how it best should be used, though some important efforts have helped clarify the range of understandings and de?nitions (Bloom?eld et al. 2006; Villa-Vicencio & Doxtader 2004; Kaimal 2008; van der Mark 2007). The most signi?cant volume of case studies is the book Peacebuilding in traumatized societies in which Barry Hart (2008) facilitates the gathering of experiences that explicitly link the wider approaches of con?ict transformation and peace strategies with the challenging concern 4 When Blood and Bones Cry Out about trauma. The range and depth of articles testi?es to the creativity required, the diversity of ideas and approaches, and the wisdom emerging from these hard-won efforts. Hart (2008, p. viii) suggests that among the key challenges are the questions of how to address those elements that are intangible and hidden below the surface but which so signi?cantly affect healing and reconciliation, themes that we explore in the following pages. In recent years we have witnessed an extraordinary explosion of programs and initiatives that purport to pursue and deliver reconciliation – that much-sought-after concept – in what appear to be far more random applications, often only loosely referring to reconciliation. Smith (2004), for example, in the review of expenditures of major donor programs and categories reported that reconciliation is among the top four international funding categories: it ranks third behind political development and socioeconomic assistance, and one ahead of security. This interest in reconciliation points to the fact that something resonates deeply in the human soul about the need to ?nd our way towards healthier human relationships and the forging of what Martin Luther King Jr referred to as the ‘beloved community’. But at the same time, the multi-varied understandings and particularly the political use and manipulation of the word ‘reconciliation’ show how far we fall short of King’s vision of authentic community. Within this wide-ranging and contested literature two points of consensus seem to hold about the concept of reconciliation. One point of consensus is the idea that reconciliation begins from and solidi?es around a relational focus (Assefa 1993; Bloom?eld et al. 2003; Bloom?eld et al. 2006; Helmick & Peterson 2001; Lederach 1997, 1999; McSpadden 2000; Schreiter 1998; Volf 1996). As a relationally based and nuanced construct this view of reconciliation is guided by a spatial metaphor of encounter, an understanding that suggests places for the estranged to meet, exchange, engage and even embrace; where they create and re-create common ground in Introduction 5 contested histories embedded in their social and physical geographies. The spatial encounter motif involves a repetitious back and forth, the circling if you will, that relationships in real life actually represent. Another point of consensus is the widely embraced notion that reconciliation is best understood as a process involving some form of movement as in a developmental progression. Movement as metaphor has had two distinct, at times seemingly contradictory, perspectives. On the one hand quite a number of authors posit the notion that reconciliation and healing involve cyclical or circular movements (Assefa 1993; Atkinson 2002; Bloom?eld et al. 2003; Botcharova 2001; Hart 2008; Helmick & Peterson 2001; Kraybill 1995; Pranis et al. 2003; Yoder 2005). These are literally drawn out as images with circles, often in the form of a single iteration that seems to suggest the beginning of a spiral, the end point of the circle being somewhat higher than the beginning point. In addition, an emerging trend in recent years has documented the important contributions, perspectives and practices of indigenous peoples that focus much more directly on the importance of circle per se, on native understandings of restoration and change, and on approaches based on ceremony and ritual (Atkinson 2002; McCaslin 2005; Pranis 2005). Invariably those who describe reconciliation and healing as cyclical in nature also suggest the processes follow a linear progression. Here they identify discernible stages, phases or steps (Botcharova 2001; Herman 1992; Kraybill 1995; Yoder 2005). This description responds to the analytical need to identify patterns that emerge when considering many cases of how healing and reconciliation function. In this latter metaphor most authors recognise the inherent tension between the movement images that hold the circular and linear. Ironically, however, as Bloom?eld and his co-authors (2003) noted, while analysts argue that reconciliation is not a linear process they then proceed to suggest in almost the same breath 6 When Blood and Bones Cry Out the stages it follows. Overridingly in seeking to create scienti?c and pragmatically useful categories and meaning the academic literature has tended to pass over this inherent tension. While reconciliation and healing have risen to greater prominence as political categories integrated into peacebuilding – with corresponding investment in research and program development – a paradigm deeply guided by a metaphor structure of linearity, with its sequential notion of social change and progression in time, has become increasingly prevalent. Though not always explicit, the underlying meaning arising from this structure suggests that reason, maturity and individual and social health develop towards the latter stages of the sequential progression, whereas unhealthy patterns of reactivity, denial, being stuck, repetitiousness and irrationality are prevalent in the earlier stages. Thus, while the literature acknowledges the spatial and cyclical metaphors, the bulk of the writing seems to accept as necessary the notion that linearity forms a foundation for understanding, agency and application. Few authors who explore the merits of spatial and movement metaphors do not give way to the pressures of sequential linearity. In this book we explore these more hidden aspects of healing and reconciliation in contexts of protracted, violent and deep-rooted con?ict. As a starting point we propose a more direct exploration of the underlying metaphoric structure rising from the experience of healing and reconciliation. Our purpose focuses on the development of the concept of social healing as an intermediary phenomenon located between micro-individual healing and wider collective reconciliation. The phrase social reconciliation is better known in the literature (Bronkhorst 1995; Kaimal 2008; Schreiter 1998). Though not a new term, the topic used in this book, social healing, has not been as fully explored or developed, though examples do exist. O’Dea (2004) on the website of the Institute of Noetic Sciences suggests social healing is ‘an emerging ?eld that seeks to deal with wounds created by Introduction 7 con?ict, collective trauma and large-scale oppression’. Thompson (2005, p. 7) frames social healing as ‘justice-making’ and ‘as a matter of addressing and healing social wounds, not punishing human evil’. In her recent essay Paula Green has provided the most speci?c de?nition when she suggests that social healing ‘can broadly be de?ned as the reconstruction of communal relations after mass violence’. She goes on to suggest that social healing precedes reconciliation after open warfare, asking only that ‘postwar communities begin the process of restoring relations so that they can coexist, make decisions together and rebuild their destroyed commons. Often a prelude to reconciliation and forgiveness, social healing can emerge through initiatives that rehumanise broken relations, rebuild trust, normalise daily life and restore hope’ (Green 2009, p. 77). In our concluding speculations on theory we propose a de?nition of social healing based primarily on an aural understanding of change and movement, a context that requires a metaphor shift away from linearity. We suggest that social healing requires a focus on the local community that takes seriously their lived experience in settings of protracted con?ict, with their inevitable need to survive and locate both the individual and the collective voice. Voice suggests a notion of movement that is both internal, within an individual, and external, taking the form of social echo and resonance that emerges from collective spaces that build meaningful conversation, resiliency in the face of violence and purposeful action. These terms suggest an important metaphor shift with reference to how we understand individual and social processes, a shift based on an understanding of change that re?ects the nature and movement of sound. It is this underlying metaphor shift we wish to explore in greater depth in this book. Across the wider literature on reconciliation, trauma healing and peacebuilding we ?nd three elements that are often mentioned as important caveats but are rarely explored in depth on their own 8 When Blood and Bones Cry Out merits and which form the particular challenges of our approach. These elements create both the opportunity and the challenge faced by this volume, precisely because our interest lies in ?nding creative ways to lift out those hidden but very real aspects of social healing that seem least attended to in the literature. First, as described in the opening of this introduction, time and again authors note a fundamental dilemma around the issues of justice and reconciliation. On the one hand they are keenly cognisant that gross human rights violations and collective violence in protracted con?ict must be addressed. At the same time they recognise that words inadequately express the depth of tragedy of this lived experience (Atkinson 2002; Biggar 2003; Hayner 2002; Minow 1998, 2002). Perhaps Minow (1998) articulated this human dilemma most succinctly in her early volume Between vengeance and forgiveness. She writes (1998, p. 5) that collective violence poses the challenge that ‘closure is not possible. Even if it were, any closure would insult those whose lives are forever ruptured. Even to speak, to grope for words to describe horri?c events, is to pretend to negate their unspeakable qualities and effects. Yet silence is also an unacceptable offense, a shocking implication that the perpetrators in fact succeeded…’ Our challenge in this book is to open some pathways into the exploration of the unspeakable that are not dependent primarily on the spoken and explanatory word, a challenge to say the least, when approaching this through the written medium. Second, numerous authors discuss the idea that reconciliation and healing are inadequately understood exclusively as linear processes, though most offer frameworks that provide a structure of change as passing through phases or stages (Botcharova 2001; Kraybill 1995; Yoder 2005). Our interest lies in the less explored aspect of this af?rmation, namely that linearity is not adequate on its own to fully penetrate the nature of social healing. Our challenge is to ?nd ways to guide the conversation towards other metaphors that are not Introduction 9 linear in nature but which, by their very structure, provide insight and contribute to our understanding of the multifaceted nature of reconciliation and social healing. Here we must envision elements of movement metaphors – for example, repetitiousness or circularity – as contributive and positive components of change, rather than as negative components that are stagnating, reactive or detrimental. Third, we ?nd that many authors acknowledge the extraordinary complexity of healing and reconciliation whether at personal, community or national levels (Bloom?eld et al. 2003; Hamber & Kelly 2005; Hart 2008; Lederach 1997). Of particular note is the basic idea that complexity functions by way of temporal simultaneity of processes and experiences. Simultaneity in the midst of complexity suggests that many things happen at once. For political reconciliation this complexity refers to major events and programmatic needs in the post-agreement phase of implementation. We propose to study the metaphoric structure of spatial simultaneity more carefully than that of directional sequentiality. We explore social healing through its metaphoric structure, with an emphasis on examples that address the simultaneity of temporal experience; of how we as humans construct meaning around our response to past, present and future, not as a linear concept but as lived multiple realities that are simultaneously present in the ways we make sense of our lives, our place and our purpose, particularly in the context of protracted con?ict. The focus on social healing also requires us to narrow the discussion of reconciliation to several focal points or boundaries. Three speci?c limitations delineate our inquiry. First, we emphasise lived experience and place particular importance on local communities affected by violence and faced with a need to address grievances and deep loss in the presence of their enemies. We propose a preferential option for the local community within the rubric of categories for locating reconciliation. We believe that social healing is best 10 When Blood and Bones Cry Out understood and explored at the level of real-life, face-to-face relationships. Following one of the spatial metaphors, we explore in much greater detail how the local community provides a container that holds the unique capacity and potential to both experience and create echoes. These echoes are the ripples of vibration that touch and are felt by people and that move out into a wider context and which offer at least one way to bridge the intriguing but theoretically dif?cult chasm that separates micro and macro approaches to both healing and social change. The local community as locus emphasises a social unit that includes but goes beyond individual processes of healing, while at the same time it provides a context of more direct, accessible experience than is commonly experienced in national processes. Second, we direct our inquiry towards the phenomenon of healing as seeking good health that can include but does not require a vigorous expression of forgiveness and reparations in broken relationships. Here we must explore the nature of healing as a permanently dynamic aspect of ongoing life when in fact the possibilities of a far more vigorous reconciliation may be partial and incomplete, remote or even impossible. As such we propose to de-link social healing from politically expedient notions of reconciliation as a onetime event. Health-as-metaphor suggests not a one-time event but a daily presence that necessarily entails a constancy of vigilance, with ups and downs, prevention and cure, and which is present in the everydayness of people’s lives. In contexts of violence communities that provide the space for individual and social processes of health must face and engage with the unpredictable nature of historically patterned and immediately dynamic situations, with many variables that lie beyond their direct control. In other words, healing while facing the continued threat of violence represents simultaneous aspects of a complex reality; aspects that are rarely experienced in a neat, sequential order. Introduction 11 This approach requires us to ground our exploration of social healing in the context of what we believe is best described as the midst and aftermath of open violence. Combining these temporal terms af?rms the idea that contexts of sustained and systematic violence continuously offer up extraordinary challenges before, during and after spikes of violence and/or the signing of peace agreements, independent of whether these are adhered to or broken. In recent years, the increase in literature about the aftermath of armed strife has highlighted the multifaceted experiences war and peace create for those who must survive and rebuild after the guns fall silent, even though the deep patterns of violence keep re-emerging (Brison 2002; Herman 1992; Meintjes et al. 2001; Stolen 2007; Terry 2005; Webster 1998). In other words, analogous to the discussion of healing and reconciliation, violence itself shows a remarkable capacity for repetitious circularity and rarely follows patterns easily described as linear. Our interest in social healing has been sparked by the resiliency of people and communities who in the extended and unremitting midst and aftermath of open violence must make sense of their lives and build a way forward, while still living in the presence of their enemies and all that makes their suffering vivid, painful and dif?cult. We propose that social healing cannot be understood as a phenomenon that emerges exclusively after violence ends, in large part because in so many places it simply does not end and it ?nds ever new forms by which to express itself locally. We suggest that social healing creates and rises from a fragile though dynamic space with a seed-like quality that simultaneously is both birth and fruit and that by this very nature requires a more intentional re?ection on important aspects of reconciliation that do not neatly ?t a linear metaphor. Third, to explore this seed-like quality of social healing we propose to follow our intuition that a signi?cant starting point requires 12 When Blood and Bones Cry Out serious engagement with metaphor. Our approach suggests and unpacks a series of phenomena as metaphors – some of which may seem far-fetched to the pragmatic reader – that by their very nature distinctively display the character of circularity and multi-layered simultaneity and provide insight into processes of healing and reconciliation. In this sense, our purpose in exploring these concepts is not to propose a progression or even a process as is typically conceptualised by common usage of scienti?c method, the accepted categories of the social sciences, or the pragmatic demands of program-driven peacebuilding and con?ict resolution agency, agendas and time frames. Rather, we wish to give ourselves permission to enter and explore healing and reconciliation as spaces of human interaction that have qualities of deepening and expanding, though they rarely move uni-directionally with clear sequential or intentionally purposeful logics. Through exploration of metaphor–phenomena like sound, music, poetry and mothering, we watch for ideas, suggestions and qualities that stimulate the imagination about the challenges and mechanisms by which social healing may be observed and perhaps understood. We do not propose a forced choice between circular and linear views of movement in processes of reconciliation. But we do propose to describe with greater intentionality and depth what is often mentioned in passing, and what remains mostly unexplored in the literature: the constructive elements of healing that are circular and which, envisioned through the lens of a metaphoric structure, are not dependent on sequential linearity. Finally, it should be noted that we are proposing an empirical journey both intuitively adventurous and experimental in nature. From the empirical standpoint, our points of reference are rooted in contexts where we have worked, practised and directly observed. These are decidedly well within the description of contexts characterised as resurgent in the midst and aftermath of open violence. Introduction 13 Speci?cally these include contexts such as Colombia, Somalia and West Africa. Methodologically in working with stories, observations and metaphoric structure we build from what could be understood as a phenomenological approach. Phenomenology in its classic application, particularly from the perspectives of authors like Berger and Luckman (1966) and Schutz (1967) provides a focus on a two-fold understanding of how things appear in the social world. First, phenomenology attends to how something appears, as in how it arrives in the world; the process of giving birth to something. We are interested here in a range of issues that include, among others, how violence and response to violence creates the need for people to locate themselves and name the realities that surround them. Australian Aboriginals, for example, locate their place and themselves through songs – the songlines function like maps of geography that are simultaneously attending to more than one aspect of their lived reality, and in so doing provide a sense of location, name and meaning. Or, the common phraseology of ‘internally displaced persons’ provides a deeply metaphoric structure at numerous levels, from forced physical departure, to feeling lost, to attempting to relocate a sense of place and purpose in a context where few things make sense and must constantly be negotiated. Displacement functions simultaneously as individual and social processes that can legitimately perhaps best be de?ned and explored in spatial terms, with signi?cant circular, repetitious and even sonic points of reference in everyday language. Displacement therefore requires metaphoric structures that re?ect the complexity of creating and bringing into existence social realities, rather than the assumption that these are predetermined – a category created by and useful to the outside observer. At a second level phenomenology focuses on how things appear once they are noticed, as in what meaning people attach to things 14 When Blood and Bones Cry Out in the social world of intersubjective shared human experience. In our particular case, we are interested in how communities negotiate meaning in contexts of violence. At the same time, we are curious about metaphors that seem to parallel this experience and which function as archetypical spatial understandings that touch aspects of human experience not easily understood through paradigms that focus on change and which are attached to logical progression and analytically de?ned categories. For example, the fundamental category alluded to by many authors, that the experience of violence creates an experience of unspeakable depths, suggests that words alone attend to only a small portion of the deeper process. We wish to write from an intuitively adventurous and experimental standpoint that breaks away from the most common vantage points from which studies and essays on reconciliation have approached the subject matter of social change. With somewhat wild abandon our chapters explore phenomena like sound, music, the poetry of presence, mothering and the too-oft neglected shifts that come with deeper understandings of a gender lens. Chapters on a Tibetan singing bowl, the music of Van Morrison, the ways of mothers in West Africa, or the poetry of life in a community stand as experiments that seek to discover and follow metaphors on their own merits, metaphors not commonly found in the literature. We hope that their weaving together provides a fabric of thought, proposal and insight that may, in some ways, deepen the theoretical exploration that appears overly driven by short-term political objectives and the predetermined needs of social programs. This weaving of approaches also includes a speculative theoretical fabric, the suggestion of how such a range of ideas may come together into a common framework where key aspects of widely diverse inquiries may converge and how, following the metaphor of sound in particular, these ideas provide insight into the nuances and potential of community-based social healing. SECTION I I NARRATIVE REFLECTIONS I will tell you something about stories. They aren’t just entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have, All we have to ?ght off illness and death. You don’t have anything if you don’t have stories. Leslie Marmon Silko This page intentionally left blank CHAP TER 1 Drums and gardens ‘I was thirteen when the rebels came. My father, a local farmer, made me hide under the table. I never saw the rebels kill him, but I saw them through the window, blood was dripping from the knife. I will never forget the blood on the knife.’ A child soldier and a commander in both the Liberian and Sierra Leonean civil wars, Morris remembers all too well the day his life changed forever. In the chaos of his father’s death his older siblings ?ed. Morris remained frozen, crouched under the table. He waited. And waited. At such a young age – and in the midst of such trauma – he could not connect the bloodied knife with the death of his father. ‘I kept thinking my father would walk through the door. But he never came, so I too ?ed.’ Alone he found the road to look for his aunt, haunted by what had transpired at the farm. In Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, he found other youngsters; some had guns for protection and soon Morris did as well. Living in the streets without a family he found comfort in their friendship and shared experience. He soon joined 18 When Blood and Bones Cry Out them at the rebel camp outside town. ‘You know, people think that child soldiers are greedy for material goods or just want to do something wicked, but many of us watched our families being killed. We had nowhere to go.’ Morris and his friends were told they could ?ght for the death of their parents. They were told they would help bring their country to peace. They were told they would be heroes. They were given new names. New identities. New families. ‘There was a whole army of us, child soldiers. We ruled the camp. And that is when it all started. That is when the real violence began. That is when I really saw killing, you know. Anything you can imagine,’ he paused, his eyes drifting to another time, another place. ‘They sent us back into our communities, to do these horrible things to our own people. And then one day you realise I just killed my auntie, or my sister, the woman who fed me when I was young. We had AK47s, grenades, M16s, anything you can imagine and we would shoot from the trucks through the villages, because if you didn’t do it, you wouldn’t survive.’ He soon moved up the ranks to become a commander. In the mid-nineties, as the war shifted in Liberia and peace seemed close, he travelled to Sierra Leone. He trained young child soldiers to ?ght for the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). He, too, continued ?ghting. ‘And then I realised I couldn’t do this anymore, I was just becoming something negative. I had nothing, I was nothing.’ He escaped and came to Ghana. Buduburam Refugee Camp – far away from the land of his people – became his new home. The United Nations Refugee Agency opened Buduburam Refugee Camp in 1990 in response to the devastating violence that swept across Liberia in 1989. It holds more than 30,000 refugees who ?ed their homeland of Liberia in a drastic attempt to escape the war. The war, which lasted from 1989 to 2003, garnered international attention for the gross human rights abuses of child soldiering, diamonds for arms trade, and sexual violence. Although Buduburam is located Drums and gardens 19 only 45 minutes from Ghana’s capital city of Accra, the two places are worlds apart. The camp buzzes with life. The sounds of laughter, music, chickens, and children playing ?ll the air in a place created as a result of devastation. Like a small city the camp holds several schools and various neighbourhoods. People live in makeshift homes that line the narrow dirt alleys which weave through the camp. Though the ?ghting had ended, the violence continued to plague Morris’s mind as he tried to begin a new life in the refugee camp. ‘It is so hard. You have this weapon. I don’t mean a weapon like just a gun, but your mind, your mind is the weapon. All you have in your mind is violence. You have been living in violence for so long and at any moment with any person you can take this weapon out. It doesn’t matter where you are. It’s embedded in you. And it is creative. You can do unimaginable things, terrible things with this creativity, because you have seen so much violence. It takes willpower to transform that. Some of us are working hard to change. I think about how Saul became Paul and that gives me hope. I know I can transform and maybe people will begin to accept me, forgive me. We need reintegration. We need acceptance. What we really need is forgiveness. To forgive is divine.’ Morris lives with the daily challenges countless others in his position face. He lives with the images of war, of death replete with the visions of blood. He lives with a debilitating guilt. He lives the multiple realities of child soldiering: victim and perpetrator. Morris has not stopped working towards healing. He wants transformation. He wants, like the biblical story of Saul, to ?nd forgiveness. In an attempt to give back to the community, Morris began gathering an army of children once again – this time to build a farm. Today, 200 child combatants have come together to grow vegetables and fruit. They work the land. They create and nurture new life. They support one another. They have found, once again, friendship in their shared experiences. 20 When Blood and Bones Cry Out ‘As a group we did so many bad things, so many bad things. We were so powerful. Maybe if we bring that group together again we can have the same power, but this time we can use it to do good things. We want to give life back to our community, our people. They told us we were helping our people, but we were destroying them, our own people. Now we want to give back to our people.’ It has not been easy. Morris lives with stigmatisation by the community every day. The names cannot be washed off: Child soldier. Murderer. Rapist. He carries those labels with him, but continues to work – to show how he has changed, in the hope of one day ?nding acceptance. ‘People think you will just be violent forever. There is stigma and fear. We are afraid to even share our stories because of the stigma. Facing the past is too hard. Today I still see things in the past before me, they come right here in front of me like I am there again. They always return. But with this organisation we are also trying to take away the weapons and bring all of us together. We are doing the disarmament. And maybe if the community sees that, they will begin accepting us.’ How are relationships restored after such devastating violence? Where is healing located in the complexity and violation of child soldiering? Through his garden, Morris eventually met Jake.1 A refugee and peace practitioner, William ‘Jake’ Jacobs was among the ?rst young people to arrive here, almost 20 years earlier. ‘There was nothing when we ?rst arrived here. You had to ?ght for food, if you didn’t ?ght, you wouldn’t eat. Everything was so violent because people were trying to survive. But I am not a violent person, so I knew I had to survive some other way. That is when I started gardening. I grew and sold food. You see that coconut tree,’ Jake points across the dirt road. ‘I planted that tree! I planted it sixteen years ago. That is where my tent was. We didn’t have these buildings then, you know, just tents.’ Drums and gardens 21 Jake lived in Monrovia, Liberia where he studied at university. His family lived miles away in a small village. When the war came, they separated forever – he on one side of the rebel lines, his family on another. For a year he survived, running and hiding, never knowing what day might be his last. As a last resort, he boarded a boat to Ghana and became one of the ?rst refugees at Buduburam. Morris has found comfort and encouragement in his relationship with Jake. He has found transformation in the cultivation of life – his garden. And he has found healing at the Buduburam cultural centre. ‘Here it is,’ Jake smiled as he walked into the bright orange youth cultural centre he helped design and build. The cultural centre began as a space where children could come together. A dance troop formed as a result of the cultural centre. They now use dance, music, drumming and theatre to tell the stories of war, journeys of displacement, the too prevalent HIV/AIDS and teenage pregnancies, and the challenges child soldiers continue to face on a daily basis. Displaced for over 20 years, Jake understands the importance of connection to the homeland, to the traditions of his ancestors, for surviving life in the refugee camp. He started the cultural centre to create a bridge. The traditional Liberian practices of drumming and dancing create a link to connect lost children and their lost childhoods to their homeland. They learn the languages, tribes and traditional dancing from Liberia. They learn the songs of their grandmothers. It is a space of healing and transformation, an undeniable reality for anyone who has the privilege of stepping through the bright orange opening and onto the dirt ?oor of the centre. Jake’s desire to continue meeting and encouraging former child soldiers lies in his understanding of collective responsibility. He recognises that Morris was both a victim and a perpetrator of the war. ‘We are all responsible, no one person created the war, we are 22 When Blood and Bones Cry Out all at fault for the war in Liberia and we all need to participate in the rebuilding of our lives and our country.’ The challenge, however, of rebuilding life after devastating violence is enormous. The hope of social healing gets lost in the barriers to peace that are built into the aftermath of war, but it has not stopped Jake. He sees a new world; he sees a new hope in the young people who come to the cultural centre. Hope is found as the jembe drums resonate throughout the community, their sound rising above the sound of rain falling on the tin roof. Black hands beat white cowhide and life pours out from each ?nger. Jembe literally translates as ‘coming together’, the drawing point where pulsating rhythms create dance, celebration and ritual (Doumbia & Doumbia 2004). Youthful black bodies bob and weave, sweating intensity from head to foot, their rhythms pound into the dirt releasing something of themselves back into the earth. These are no ordinary dancers. Their eyes have seen too much death, their hands spilt too much blood; and their feet, hardened from the miles of bush, no longer know the pathway home. Much needs to be released as the jembes call to these young lives, these child soldiers, living hundreds of miles from their native Liberia, far from, yet inextricably wrapped in, the mantle of the war they never started. ‘You know, you see these kids and they tell you what peace is. They are so bright, and full of hope and life. That is it. That is what keeps you going. It is healing you know, to drum and dance and sing and be together.’ Jake watches the hands pound and bodies sweat. ‘Sometimes I just want to cry! I think about what they have seen and lived through and I just want to cry. To see this talent and this passion. They are so beautiful. This is the hope!’ Drums and gardens. CHAP TER 2 The wandering elders We sat in a courtyard on the outskirts of Hargeisa. It was midway through 1990. Three of us were visiting from Europe and the United States, working on ?nding ways for the international community to support peace efforts in Somalia. A year earlier longtime strongman Siad Barre had been chased from power. The ?ghting was intense and militias spread like wild?re. Though armed movements had taken on nationalist names, their subclan af?liations suggested the deep divisions that would continue for years to come. The groups and the ?ghting, while uni?ed against Barre, soon descended into subclan ?ghting, animosities rising sharply between militia strongmen who wished to accede to power in the political vacuum. Exacerbating the violence and the displacement of people was one of the most severe droughts experienced in decades across this far eastern portion of the Horn of Africa. People were starving, driven by armed con?icts, fearing militias; the country was falling into chaos. The worst of this ?ghting tracked towards Mogadishu, the 24 When Blood and Bones Cry Out national capital in the south of the country. In the face of a daily televised humanitarian disaster the international community was desperate to ?nd ways to end the ?ghting and provide much needed food and shelter to millions of Somalis on the brink of collapse. But as was seen over the next decades, the intensive efforts, including multiple internationally convened peace processes, hundreds of temporary cease?res, interim governments and massive humanitarian relief deliveries, have not been able to reconstitute a stable and functioning national government in Somalia. In the midst of this sustained violence extraordinary exceptions were found. Perhaps the most robust and comprehensive, though still poorly documented, was a process of reconciliation that was initiated in the environs of Hargeisa. It all started with some conversations. Margaret Wheatley (2002), in her book Turning to one another, suggests that most signi?cant social movements can be traced to a single conversation. In this courtyard outside Hargeisa we were watching one such conversation begin. Located in the north, a great distance from Mogadishu, Hargeisa is the largest city in the region and a historic hub of political activity. The people in the north, as longtime adversaries of Siad Barre and resistant to his autocratic rule, had suffered excessive repression from the dictator for years. Hargeisa had been air bombed into shambles. Landmines had systematically been placed around cities and towns and in the major pathways used by the nomadic tribes. Armed resistance emerged early in the north and by the time Barre fell, ?ghting had begun and had spread from west to east in the northern part of the country. The violence turned inwards once Barre was gone and the people of the north began to suffer the challenges of severe subclan ?ghting. The conversation we heard in 1990 rose out of a simple proposal. Peace was possible but only through talk. A grassroots effort was underway to build what was being called a reconciliation process. Nabad raadin, reconciliation, or ‘let us talk’, The wandering elders 25 were the phrases we heard. The time had come to stop the ?ghting. Reconciliation required engaged dialogue. The elders proposed to travel and talk. Across from us sat three elders, two sheiks and a sultan, in white ?owing robes, prayer caps, with walking sticks in hand. They seemed to be in their seventh decade of life. Beside them, four or ?ve younger, western-educated Somali NGO leaders served as interpreters. The elders spoke little English but some of the younger generation had sharp British accents, having recently graduated from the best universities in the United Kingdom. We inquired about their proposed process and about what we from the international community might do to help. Over sweet tea the discussion rambled across history, poetry, current situations of ?ghting and their pending departure and mission. Nomadic by background, the three elders were about to embark on a rather remarkable journey. Each came from one of three subclans but were widely recognised and were among the most respected elders in the region. Following lengthy discussions within their own subclans and then together, the three were forming an ergada, a travelling group of elders that would venture out to meet the other warring subclan elders in an effort to persuade them to participate in a guurti, a gathering of elders, poets, spokespersons and chosen representatives of the various subclans (Farah 1993; Lederach 1997; Lewis 1994, 1998; Samatar 1982). As Farah (1993) has noted, they named themselves with the rather modest term, dab damin or ?re extinguishers. Given their culture, travel was nothing new. They would move by small convoy, and where necessary by camel and foot, from one village in the region to the next. Their proposal was to go from as far west as Boroma to the east into Sanaag and Erigavo. We asked if it was safe. They smiled and said, ‘This is our place, our people. It is our duty. They will recognise us. Each of us is from one of these places. We travel together’. 26 When Blood and Bones Cry Out In greater detail, they also noted that women had already gone ahead of them. As later documented by anthropologist Farah (1993), women had indeed prepared the way. Located as they were in crossclan marriages, women were the informal early diplomats, travelling safely in the midst of war from their clan of marriage to their clan of birth. In the lineage culture of this northeast region, women experienced the war in a way far different from men. Their fathers and brothers were ?ghting their husbands and sons. In times of open ?ghting women traditionally could travel from their subclan of marriage back to their subclan of birth, effectively creating an informal diplomacy that appealed for violence to stop and peace negotiations to open. So, the elders explained to us ‘our way has been prepared by the women’. ‘What exactly would they do?’ we asked. On each stop the elders would seek their counterparts and talk. ‘Somalis say, “The answer to the problem is more talk” ’, one elder remarked. One round of talks would not be enough. It would only start the process. Few if any commitments were expected on a ?rst conversation, except that the subclan elders they met would in turn talk among themselves. The ergada might grow by a member or two and would return, going back again for more talk. And again and again as necessary. As the rounds of contact and discussions coalesced some speci?c subclan issues would be identi?ed and interclan, bilateral negotiations might be proposed. Reconciliation, they said, required long discussions. Many times it would take poetry to make the historical case and situate the current problems. Akils, the heads of dia-paying lineage groups, would be involved. Dia is payment for loss of life, so compensation would be discussed as well as immediate and future responsibilities. The elders projected that over time these rounds would bring together more and more groups until a grand guurti could be achieved, where many would sit together and discuss the wider issues of the region and the steps needed to end the internecine wars. The wandering elders 27 ‘What might we offer to help facilitate your process?’ we asked. Their answer: ‘Maybe some petrol and rice. But mostly, please understand that this will take time. And do not interfere.’ Smiles again. And a second time, ‘We don’t need your help. We need to do it ourselves.’ Three years later in 1993 the elders’ initiative arrived in Boroma, en masse. From February to May a grand guurti was held in the northwest of the region. This guurti is known as the Boroma conference; hundreds of delegates gathered as did thousands of observers from the subclans. The deliberations lasted for six months. Talk, poetry and song ?lled the days and nights. The delegates circled round and round the issues and proposals, the grievances and demands, until slowly a consensus began to form. As a proverb puts it, ‘You can deny a Somali food but you can never take away his word.’ A proposal eventually emerged: the wider region declared itself independent as the Republic of Somaliland. The road to the declaration was built on hundreds of discussions; initiated, failed and reinitiated negotiations; small and larger subclan agreements; compensations and more talk. Some say it never did really end. The process was simply transferred to another level: the formation of a parliament, space for traditional leaders, local peace initiatives between the subclans still ?ghting. Now nearly two decades since we talked with the three elders who wandered out to meet with their counterparts, Somaliland still claims independence, though little international recognition has come its way. However, the northwest and northeast of what was Somalia have had far less ?ghting than other regions to the south. The process in the early nineties, called by Farah (1993) the ‘roots of reconciliation’, stands as perhaps one of the most extraordinary and least documented processes of its kind. CHAPTE R 3 The Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace Campaign A NEW KIND OF BOLDNESS In the midst of the brutal civil war in Liberia a few women began talking. They had watched their brothers, husbands, sons and daughters killed and raped. Innocent lives stolen for a senseless war. ‘We could not sit down anymore to see this hopeless situation degenerate into a greater state of hopelessness.’ And so they began organising. They met in the ?sh markets and refugee camps. They met in homes and on street corners. They met as Christian and Muslim women, in churches and in mosques: ‘Can a bullet pick and choose? Does the bullet know Christian from Muslim?’ Leymah Gbowee asked when religious differences threatened the possibility of peace (Pray the Devil back to Hell 2008). And slowly, the barriers of religion, class, age and ethnicity shattered in the common desire to end the war. The women were refugees, educators, politicians, police of?cers and market women. They were mothers, daughters, aunties, grandmothers and nieces. They were the creators of life. Women talking, mothers rising, they could not sit anymore. The Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace Campaign 29 The ?rst meeting of four women soon grew to meetings of more than 500. And the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace Campaign was born. As their numbers grew, so too did their actions. They organised mass protests: they danced, they sang, they wept. They began a sex strike, refusing to have sex with their husbands. Using the power they had to demand an end to the war. But mostly they sat. Lining the streets in bright white t-shirts they sat through rain, blazing sun, wind – sometimes with bullets and air raids whirling around them. They sat. With only one simple message: ‘We Want Peace, No More War.’ William Saa,1 a renowned Liberian peacebuilder, later re?ected, ‘The women’s reserved energy was there for a long time. It was like a time bomb just waiting to explode.’ And explode they did. They insisted on meeting with the then president, Charles Taylor. Finally, after weeks of protest he agreed to see them. The women lined the halls of parliament in their simple white t-shirts as Leymah Gbowee presented their statement to the president: ‘The women of Liberia, including the Internally Displaced People, are tired of war. We are tired of the killing of our people and we, the women of Liberia, want peace now’ (Pray the Devil back to Hell 2008). Taylor refused to meet with the rebel factions. He ignored the women’s plea for peace. But this did not stop the women. They went to the United States Embassy and to the international press. The pressure mounted and the women did not stop until eventually, the day came when Charles Taylor could no longer ignore the power of the women who gathered. He agreed to meet for peace talks with the rebel faction, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD). So the women travelled, unarmed, as mothers, into the bush. They met with the LURD warlords, delivering their message: ‘The women of 30 When Blood and Bones Cry Out Liberia want peace now.’ LURD agreed to meet for peace talks and arrangements were made for the top rebel leaders of LURD to meet with Charles Taylor and his administration for peace talks in Accra, Ghana. Despite their leadership the women were excluded from the talks. They were not invited to the negotiation table. Their voices did not count. ‘What could market mothers know of negotiation?’ the men asked. But they had found a new power in their collectivity. ‘We have all suffered,’ Leymah said. ‘If you are illiterate: you are a target of rape; if you are a market woman: you are a target of rape; if you are active in civil society and politics: you are a target of rape. We are all victims. And we all have a voice.’ Once again, they began talking and gathering. They spread their message throughout the marketplaces. One mother to another. Their message soon reached mothers in Ghana. The Ghanaian women began gathering – in marketplaces, on street corners, in churches and mosques – and they in turn alerted their Sierra Leonean, Ivorian and Nigerian sisters. Together, they raised money and travelled to Accra. A powerful coalition of more than 200 women gathered outside the building where the political leaders who had denied them voice met. Fatura, a strong woman from the north of Ghana recalled the day, a sparkle in her eyes: We were dressed in our white t-shirts to show we were all women. We all wanted peace. We were Liberian Women. We were Ghanaian Women. We were Nigerian women. And we were weeping and dancing and it was raining and we were in the rain dancing and singing and weeping. They circled the building, holding hands and dancing. Unshaken in their message, ‘We Want Peace, No More War’. While the women gathered outside the site of the peace talks in The Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace Campaign 31 Accra, the war in Liberia continued to spread. They received a devastating call that all-out war had erupted in Monrovia, the capital city. Charles Taylor ?ed the talks, hoping to save his own life. And the negotiations began to crumble. ‘I was just raging inside,’ Leymah said, ‘so I told the women, “Sit at the door and loop arms one with the other” ’ (Pray the Devil back to Hell 2008). The women held the doors, refusing to let the men out. They would not allow anyone to leave until the peace agreement was signed. When the men sitting behind closed doors ?nally realised what was happening, an announcement came through the overhead speakers: ‘The peace hall has been seized by General Leymah and her troops’ (Pray the Devil back to Hell 2008). Armed only with their tears, their song, their dance and their sisterhood, the women took control of the negotiating room. When several of the leaders attempted to escape, Leymah began stripping in front of the men – one of the greatest taboos in West African culture. Finally, the head mediator of the peace talks, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, the former head of state of Nigeria, turned to the men and said, ‘I dare anyone to leave this hall until we have negotiated with these women’ (Pray the Devil back to Hell 2008). And with that, the men went back to the negotiating table and began constructing the terms of the agreement. Two weeks later the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the Government of Liberia, and LURD and the Movement for Democracy in Liberia was signed. The signing of a peace accord never ends violence. The women had much work to do, particularly with the reintegration of child soldiers. Initially the United Nations (UN) excluded the women from the disarmament process. The women sat back, helplessly, and watched. The child soldiers came, drugged and armed, and complete chaos ensued. Money for arms was not enough. Eventually, the UN turned to the women, who began their own approach to disarmament. As victims of the war the women understood the complexity and 32 When Blood and Bones Cry Out gravity of disarmament. As mothers, they understood the suffering and needs of their children who had become machines of war. As women, they knew much more was needed than the signing of an agreement and the promise of money to sustain disarmament. ‘We offered a rehumanising approach,’ Leymah Gbowee explained. ‘We engaged in real relationships with the child soldiers. We saw them not as perpetrators of violence, but as our sons and daughters.’ They ate food together, laughed and cried together. ‘We had to rehumanise them in their powerlessness. We had to take away not only their guns but also their vulnerability. We had to give them a new kind of power.’ In the presence of their mothers, the children no longer found power in their guns, but in their relationships. ‘We took away their fear and gave them a new kind of boldness through love.’ In one village, the women chose to create a rebirthing ritual. They wore white, a colour symbolic of childbirth and peace. From outside the villages, they took the hands of their sons and daughters and began the long walk home. Mother and Son. Grandmother and Daughter. Each woman walked, hands clasped, with one child soldier. As they walked, they sang. They sang songs of lament, songs of loss, songs of exile. And when they entered the village their voices rose in unison: jubilant songs of celebration spilled from their lips. They sang their lost children home. As the women became more involved in leading their villages towards reconciliation, they began to realise that sustainable change could only come if their voices were represented in the political process as well. ‘When I talked with the men,’ Leymah Gbowee (2006) explained, ‘I would tell them that you are only comfortable with empowerment and with women’s leadership as long as it doesn’t involve your own social structure. So during the war, women could engage in peacebuilding because it did not interfere with the immediate social structures. But, when the war ended and communities started to come back together, women recognised that they The Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace Campaign 33 could continue leading, but that is when the men tried to take away the voice of the women again. So the question then became, do we sit down again, or do we push this leadership so that it is sustained?’ The Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace Campaign decided that they could no longer sit down, and they began a grassroots campaign to register women to vote in the hope of electing the ?rst woman president in Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. They travelled door to door, village to village, to meet and talk with women from all walks of life about the power of the democratic voting process. They tended the market stands and babysat small children so that working women and mothers had the freedom to register. Woman to woman, they began once more to organise their masses, working beyond social and economic boundaries to bring democracy to Liberia. Eventually, more than 7,000 women registered to vote. And on 23 November 2005, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became the ?rst woman president of Liberia. The Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace Campaign, which had contributed enormously to community reconciliation, to the signing of the Liberian Peace Accords, had now also entered the political realm. The power they found, however, did not come from traditional notions of domination – but from a profound capacity to network; from the grassroots markets to the parliamentarians, women organised and transcended the barriers of class and political party to bring a new form of leadership to their country. In desperation the women found voice. They broke the shackles of violence and exclusion placed on their hands and feet. They danced, cried and sang their country back onto the long road towards healing. CHAPTE R 4 The bones with no name A few miles from the Venezuelan border, Maria,1 her husband, brothers and neighbours have small coffee farms in the cool high altitudes of far northeastern Colombia. In addition to planting, pruning and picking the red berries at harvest the families have learned to live with war. With their farms located in the lower portions of the mountainsides sitting above a wide valley, local farmers have negotiated a delicate balance in their existence. It is a balance between the pressures of the leftist guerillas roaming the higher elevations along the ridgelines of the mountains and the paramilitaries who emerge from the towns below, and who are often ?nanced by the large landowners and cattle-farming families seeking to protect their valley territories from the guerillas. In this geography of the Colombian wars the two ?ghting groups rarely engage each other directly. Rather, the ?ghting consistently focuses on the allegiances and lands of local campesinos, families like Maria’s. In early 2002 Maria’s family and their neighbours experienced a systematic rise in violence. It started with selected killings and The bones with no name 35 disappearances of young men and fathers. Bodies appeared by the roadsides on occasion but, more frequently, family members simply did not return at night. Arriving home from the market late one afternoon Maria found her house ransacked, chairs and clothes strewn around. Her husband was nowhere to be found, his tools spread oddly around the front porch and yard. Frantically, the family ran throughout the small farm, calling his name – up to the coffee ?elds, out to the few cattle, back again to the house. On the table his lunch sat untouched. As Maria would report it, he had disappeared, or in the language of war, he was disappeared. Within days they discovered two of her brothers had disappeared from the farm next door. Fearful, they stayed close to the house, no longer venturing into the ?elds. When some weeks had passed, Maria gathered her courage, descended the pathways off the farm and sought the authorities in the nearby city. There she faced a different mountain, the piles of papers that accumulated as she submitted the of?cial forms notifying the government that her husband and two brothers had disappeared. Nobody knew a thing. No leads could be offered. Nothing could be done. After many conversations with her neighbours and people along the swathe of mountain farms and the towns on the way down the valley, Maria, her family and neighbours knew that the disappearances had all the hallmarks of the paramilitaries, the Autodefensas. And everyone knew the name and whereabouts of the local commander. After a month and many dif?culties she met the commander – Maria, a lone middle-aged woman, faced one of the most feared people in the country. ‘I have come to ask about my husband. Where is he?’ ‘What makes you think I know anything about your husband?’ the commander asked. ‘Why don’t you talk with your friends in the guerilla?’ ‘We have lived for more than 26 years on this farm. In all these 36 When Blood and Bones Cry Out years the guerrilla have come and gone. We never talk to them and they never talk to us. But never once did they bother us. I know you know about my husband. What I want to know is where he is, where I can ?nd him.’ The commander denied any knowledge and then threatened her for asking and sent her home, suggesting she not pursue it further. The disappearances continued. More threats came, round after round. If a family can stay on the mountainside, it was argued, then they must be linked to the guerrilla. If you stay, then you are with them and the legitimate target of attacks. Fearing for her children and nephews, Maria and dozens of families walked down out of the mountain and into the city. Desplazados they now called themselves, internally displaced persons. IDPs. Forced by fear from their homes they moved into the geography of war statistics, the abyss of people with no place, neither refugee nor functioning citizen. They were added to the count: a few without-a-place families among the 4 million people forced from their homes in Colombia’s wars (UNDP 2007). And the only place to be was with others like themselves, about 20 families who shared a common trail of descent that led from their farms on the mountainside to the regional capital of the province and who, whenever asked ‘Who are you?’ responded using the mantle that violence left them: We are desplazados from the mountain near the border. Months passed into years and no news. No answer. They formed a group with the local parish. Living on handouts from relief agencies and church charities, they survived week to week. They tried to ?nd jobs. They worked to get their children into school. They got a small loan from the church, and in the backyard of a friend they raised a few vegetables and some chickens, selling the eggs to repay the loan. They called it the Garden of Peace. In time the government announced a new peace plan. It was not the ?rst and it would not be the last, but this one affected them. The bones with no name 37 As a result of a negotiation with the paramilitaries, President Uribe wanted to bring the Autodefensas, the AUC, out of the bush and back into the fold. The agreements were formalised, initiating a multifaceted process of disarmament and demobilisation and, to promote reconciliation, including a national justice and reparation law focused on the victims of paramilitary violence. Criteria were established to access the reparations, including the primary gateway: it is the responsibility of the person affected to verify that they are a victim, or a dependent family member of a victim of paramilitary violence. The people-without-a-place were frantic to ?nd out how this would work. Would they be targeted if they spoke up? Could they expect money? Could they return to their farms? Was there a return plan? How exactly do you get yourself declared a victim? Will someone tell the truth about what happened to their loved ones? Where are they? Where are their bodies? Just before Christmas Maria’s brother-in-law took a risk. He decided to go back up to the farms and see if anything of a coffee harvest might be possible. He found the ?elds abandoned. The rains had long since subsided and the dry season seemed to be fracturing the unattended land. He made his way along the coffee plants the families had seeded and cared for in earlier decades. Late in the afternoon on his second day, in the portion of the ?eld closest to Maria’s home, he stopped dead in his tracks. Something was calling. His eyes riveted on a cracked area of dry ground. He was frozen for minutes and later he would say, ‘His blood called my name. I heard a voice. Someone calling, like, “I am here. Get me out”.’ The late afternoon sun cast shadows as he approached the claycracked area. Hoe in hand he scraped around one larger crack. Within a few minutes a solitary rib emerged. By then it was too dark to continue. Under a tree nearby he wrestled with sleep most of the night. At ?rst light the next morning he dug around the opening. 38 When Blood and Bones Cry Out A grave revealed itself and at the bottom, in a small square open box he found dry bones. On top of the bones, neatly folded, a shirt and pants retained their colour and form. He knew it was his brother-in-law. Back in the city he waited several weeks until after the holidays of Christmas and New Year to tell Maria. She collapsed. ‘I cannot go see some bones.’ Weeks later Maria’s son and brother-in-law returned. They walked carefully around the farm and up to the coffee ?elds. When they reopened the box it took only a single glance to con?rm what they knew. ‘The clothes, the teeth – it is our father,’ he would tell his mother. Maria went back to the local authorities. ‘We have found the remains of my husband on our farm. They are in a shallow grave and his bones and clothes are in a box. We don’t want to touch them in case there is some legal problem. Can you retrieve them and verify the remains?’ ‘No, we cannot go up there. You must bring them here.’ After some internal family debate they returned to the farm, removed the box with the remains untouched, and brought them down the mountain to the regional capital. ‘These are the clothes of my husband and his bones,’ Maria handed over the box. ‘I would like to be able to bury them, but ?rst want to make sure I have your papers in order, showing that we have suffered this death and that we are victims of this paramilitary violence.’ ‘You say this is your husband but we cannot just accept that. We have to send these bones to Bogota for testing. And how do you know who killed him?’ The box of bones was mailed to Bogota. Dental specialists, medical doctors, coroners all took a look. A few talked to Maria when she would call. His death was traumatic. His chest had been opened from throat to stomach. The bones with no name 39 After six months the ?rst of?cial report returned: ‘This is clearly a victim of violence, we just don’t know if this box of bones is your husband. We need to verify with DNA. And your children all need to go to a dentist to see if there is any parallel structure of palate and teeth.’ Blood was taken from one daughter. Another daughter had a protruding tooth that was near exact to a small hidden tooth that had never come out in the husband’s mouth. The DNA matched. Another four months passed. By late summer the authorities ?nally signed a paper that said the bones were those of Maria’s husband. According to the state she of?cially had a new status: Maria was a veri?ed victim. Papers in hand she started the process to receive the promised humanitarian aid and potential reparations. Several months later a letter arrived: ‘Your request for aid has been denied because too many years have passed since the death of your husband.’ She went to the authorities to argue her case. ‘For three years we thought he was “disappeared”. Then it took forever to verify. We did not know if he was alive or dead. Now that we have the bones, we know. The veri?cation shows this year, not some years back.’ ‘Go to Bogota and talk with them there. We cannot do anything here.’ A year later, a pile of paper stamped and signed, trips made to Bogota, Barranquilla and back to their local town, they reached consensus. Maria was of?cially a victim of violence within the de?ned time frame. More than two years after the of?cial approval Maria and her family are still waiting for compensation. The new law established that though the death was likely caused by paramilitaries – who are in the ?nal stages of the peace process, disarming and demobilising – no one has admitted to killing her husband. Once again, time has elapsed and put her beyond the period of having rights; in this case the right to reparation. 40 When Blood and Bones Cry Out Hardly daunted, Maria and friends continued to gather. With the small shared pro?ts from the ?rst loan they bought more chickens and found a bigger plot of land to plant a few vegetables. And they began to look for the other graves back on their farms. The blood called, unexpectedly. The bones spoke, scienti?cally. They had a name. And by the time the state named the bones so had Maria and her friends. ‘We know where we are from. We know who we are even if we have very little,’ Maria says. ‘And we know where the graves are located. We will ?nd our way home.’ The farmers of the mid-mountains near the border, though far from their ?elds, found each other, the courage to question, and with it a sense of dignity. As they did in planting the vegetables in their small Garden of Peace, they keep tilling the soil to create a way home. CHAP TER 5 Shifting metaphors If I make the lashes dark And the eyes more bright And the lips more scarlet, Or ask if all be right From mirror after mirror, No vanity’s displayed: I’m looking for the face I had Before the world was made. WB Yeats HIDDEN ASPECTS OF SOCIAL HEALING The opening stories in this volume pose a daunting challenge: How are adequate platforms built to nurture personal and social healing in the midst of repeated cycles of direct and structural violence? No one story captures these challenges in full. However, by looking across these stories and those that follow in subsequent chapters with their distinct social and political landscapes, a window opens onto a number of elements that, when viewed from 42 When Blood and Bones Cry Out the perspective of local communities, are particularly relevant to our inquiry. In this chapter we explore the nature of the underlying structure of metaphor in social healing. Several mechanisms are useful for approaching this task. First, using our interactions and work with local communities – illustrated in part by the range of stories in the opening chapters of this book – we identify framing metaphors that are prevalent in the experience and response to violence in protracted con?ict, and discuss how these are mobilised and important for understanding the challenges of social healing. Second, we explore the guiding metaphor around which much of the current literature and programmatic initiatives related to peacebuilding and reconciliation organise and create meaning. Of particular note, we will discuss the role and signi?cance of metaphor, how it works and the potentialities it offers for our wider inquiry, which in subsequent chapters we explore through a variety of lenses. Third, we highlight some of the differences and tensions that may exist between the experience-based perspective and the predominant analytical metaphor structures found in the literature. We will not exhaust or resolve the tensions between various metaphoric structures as they relate to our broad themes. Rather, we propose to lift out important differences, particularly between those found in the shift from the dominant linear movement metaphors for understanding social change and healing, and those metaphors organised around the more hidden aspects of circularity, simultaneity and multidirectionality. In other words, we wish to establish the metaphor shift that moves beyond linear sequential notions of change. The role of metaphor Signi?cant work has been done on the role and place of metaphor as an important, if not the key, mechanism by which we make sense of the world. Approaches to metaphor and meaning, while traditionally Shifting metaphors 43 relevant in literature and linguistics, are also found in arenas such as philosophy and phenomenology (Kóvecses 2002; Ricoeur 1987), therapy, counselling and mediation (Burns 2001; Gordon 1978; Lawley & Tompkins 2000; Monk et al. 1997; Winslade & Monk 2000). Of particular importance to our inquiry is the seminal work of Lakoff and Johnson in Metaphors we live by (1980). These authors make the case that metaphors are more than just poetic devices; they are deeply related to our ways of perceiving, understanding and interpreting the world. By their very structure metaphors organise the way we understand our experience and create meaning. By de?nition this happens through a process of comparison, where ‘one kind of thing’ is understood ‘in terms of another’ (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, p. 5). Depending on how we use and mobilise the very structure of language and how we use metaphor we shift meaning and, through comparison, the framing of reality. For example, in relation to the study of con?ict and peacebuilding, Lakoff and Johnson tell the story of an Iranian student who, on hearing the phrase ‘the solution of my problems’ from his American colleagues, drew an association by way of a metaphor that was different to the one used by his American colleagues. His classmates associated the word ‘solution’ with a mathematical image in which ‘solution’ represents an ‘answer’ to a ‘problem’. In this metaphor structure the word ‘solution’ is associated with an effort to locate a correct and ?nal answer to a problem. In essence, what is sought is the completion of an equation that solves the issue at hand. When the solution to a con?ict is found, the problem is over. Unlike his colleagues, the Iranian student associated the word ‘solution’ with a chemical metaphor; in other words, he saw liquids mixed in a beaker, not an answer to a mathematical equation. As such, his notion of how to proceed in working on crises and con?icts was one that involved visualising the con?ict as being held continuously in a liquid solution, dissolving or appearing according to other 44 When Blood and Bones Cry Out catalysts that are introduced. Lakoff and Johnson (1980, pp. 143–4) note how radically different meaning structures rise from the metaphor association of solution-as-answer and solution-as-liquid, and how those meanings lead to different ways of interacting and seeing con?icts or problems. Our interest here is to offer what we consider to be a dominant metaphoric structure as it relates to the topics of peacebuilding, reconciliation and healing. Then, by way of contrast, we explore more carefully the experience of local communities in protracted armed con?icts and suggest other metaphor structures that rise from their everyday language and meaning creation. Several key questions help focus this approach. In contexts like those described in our opening stories, what does the challenge of violence feel like to people living within these communities? How are their responses to unfolding events, their language and organising metaphors in dealing with violence and seeking health in places like Colombia and West Africa instructive for understanding the topics of social healing and reconciliation? What are the reference points that help frame their experience and the ways they make sense of their challenges? The power and weakness of dominant metaphors We begin with a simple af?rmation. The dominant understanding of healing and reconciliation has organised agency around the metaphoric structure of linear movement. Agency refers here to the way political and, to a large degree, non-governmental projects have viewed and developed programs to work on healing and reconciliation. By agency we refer to the conceptual categories that guide both funding and action. While conceptually people note and recognise that healing and reconciliation are not linear processes, the organisational structure, that is the agency, by which they pursue funding and action responds to a metaphoric structure guided and de?ned Shifting metaphors 45 by linear movement. Projects have short time lines. Funding must respond to activities with goals and measurable outcomes. In turn, these projected goals are plotted along stages and phases of change that will unfold from the action pursued. Agency follows a linear and sequential understanding of change. On the other hand, the closer one gets to everyday contexts of protracted con?ict, individual and social healing do not follow and are rarely experienced along the ‘lines’ of phase-based progression. To be more precise, in community-level experience, such as that arising from most of the stories just recounted, healing and reconciliation are not easily comprehended as phenomena that follow the ending of violence or that unfold in directional movement forward through a staged progression. Community people in settings of protracted con?ict have no greater daily wish than to silence the guns. This was the cry of the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace Campaign. This was the hope of Maria and her community. They long for the day when power is not manipulated through the barrels of blackened steel that control their local events and de?ne their shared social landscape; a power they know has rarely been gained by means of legitimate political process, authenticity of social mandate, personal integrity of shared values, or the imagining of change hoped for by those most affected by violence. However, another reality is also present. Once armed con?ict has been unleashed people in local communities experience violence in varied phoenix-like forms; negatively resilient it keeps bouncing back with new and old faces. The challenge of violence does not stop with a declared cease?re. Healing and reconciliation therefore must take place in highly dynamic and unpredictable settings whether or not peace agreements have been signed. This requires a deeper exploration to probe into the metaphoric level. Over the past several decades when theorists have analysed peace 46 When Blood and Bones Cry Out processes we ?nd a commonly accepted notion that re?ects the tensions between different metaphoric views of movement structures. On the one hand many authors note the cyclical nature of con?ict (Curle 1971; Galtung 1975; Kriesberg 1973; Lederach 2003; Lund 1996). On the other hand, as practical applications began to emerge from the study of armed con?icts, negotiations and peace accords, an analytic construct developed that posited a linear view of con?ict and peace as unfolding in categorical phases. The etymology of the word ‘analysis’ traces to Greek origins and essentially is about the task of breaking something apart; in the case of scienti?c study, to break a complex phenomenon into its component parts in order to understand more speci?cally particular aspects that make up the complexity. Within peacebuilding...