The Prose of Suffering and the Practice of Silence

"[A]nd I realized then the unmitigable chasm between all life and all print - that those who can, do, those who cannot and suffer enough because they can't, write about it."¹

—William Faulkner

The subject of this essay had its beginnings in my conversations and encounters with refugees in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in the wake of that country's decade-long civil war. My subject is suffering—how it is borne and how it is explained—by people in very different circumstances. The question of suffering is central to all religions, and has, in recent years, become increasingly focal for anthropologists living and working among people enduring the effects of war, poverty, natural disasters, and epidemic illness. It is difficult to do justice to what people suffered in the Sierra Leone conflict, but one may perhaps venture to describe how people responded to their suffering. And here I would like to emphasize something that struck me years ago, living and working in Kuranko villages—the way people are taught to accept adversity, and endure it. It is the overriding lesson of initiation, when pain is inflicted on neophytes so that they may acquire the virtues of fortitude and imperturbability. Pain is an unavoidable part of life; it can neither be abolished nor explained away; what matters most is how one suffers and withstands it. This is nicely expressed in a Kuranko proverb that exploits the fact that the words dununia ("load") and dunia ("world") are near homonyms—dunia toge ma dunia; a toge le a dununia ("the name of the world is not world; it is load") that is, the weight of the world is a matter of how one comports oneself. According to this view, life is a struggle between one's inner resources and external conditions.

Expressed in a more existential vein, one might say that human existence is a struggle to strike some kind of balance between being an actor and being acted upon. In spite of being aware that eternity is infinite and human life finite, that the cosmos is great and the human world small, and that nothing anyone says or does can immunize him or her from the contingencies of history, the tyranny of circumstances, the finality of death, and the accidents of fate, every human being needs some modicum of choice, craves some degree of understanding, demands some say, and expects some sense of control over the course of his or her own life. In the stories I want to share with you, this balance between being an actor and being acted upon has been catastrophically lost. My task is to show in what ways people in very different circumstances and societies seek to recover it.

I begin by recounting a young Sierra Leonean woman's story about her wartime suffering and her postwar situation. I then turn to a consideration of what Luc Boltanski has called suffering at a distance—the kind of suffering we liberal Westerners are wont to experience when confronted by the pain, distress, and misery of others, and find ourselves at a loss to do anything about it. Finally, I return to my Sierra Leonean story, and the way people there address the suffering of the war, offering a critique of the way suffering is commonly construed in the affluent West.

Fina's Kamara's Story

Three years before the war in Sierra Leone ended, I read a story in the Guardian Weekly under the headline "Machete Terror Stalks Sierra Leone." It concerned a rebel attack on the Kuranko village of Kondembaia in April 1998, and its focus was the ordeal of a young Kuranko woman called Fina Kamara and her six year-old daughter. I had lived and worked in Kondembaia, and was shocked by what I read, and one of the first things I did when I returned to Sierra Leone was visit the amputees...