A Gift from Darkness by Andrea Claudia Hoffmann

Author:Andrea Claudia Hoffmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2018-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

The demons of memory

Patience has reached an uncomfortable point in her story. I notice that she is losing concentration, and that her descriptions are becoming more and more confused. Often she gazes vaguely into the distance and seems as if she has drifted into another world.

It is the world of horror, which she doesn’t really want to think about. She had buried away the terrible things that happened in the Boko Haram camp deep inside her. But now that she is telling me what happened, those events are assuming new life: the demons of the past are coming after her.

“The rest is really unimportant,” she sometimes says.

“No, it’s all important,” I say. “Nothing that they did to you and the other women should be forgotten.”

Patience nods. Still, she becomes increasingly tense and laconic. Even the baby in her arms notices that; Gift begins to cough and wail much more often than she did at the start of our interview. She is protesting against the unease that she perceives in her mother.

And her mother understands her protest: she would probably like to wail herself. But instead she regains her composure; she has been taught to keep her feelings to herself. Her crying child also gives her an excuse to interrupt the interview. She walks back and forth with Gift in the yard in front of the church. Patience needs these breaks. It gives her a chance to catch her breath and, for a moment, to escape the acts of cruelty that she is laying out before me.

But her stories are leaving their mark on me as well. Particularly at night, when I lie on the mattress next to Renate, my thoughts are uneasy. Again and again I find myself imagining the scenes that Patience was telling me about only a few hours before. I can’t grasp the horror that is still being played out only a few miles away from me. I am especially troubled by her most recent report. Is it really possible that there was cannibalism in the Boko Haram camp? I wonder. Were the members of the sect truly capable of such monstrosity? Or is it Patience’s trauma that makes her claim these things? The description of the killings, and of the consumption of human flesh, are a central element of her story. She has mentioned them several times. It seems very important to her that I should know about it.

Because the subject won’t leave me in peace, I try to find other eyewitnesses. Several women confirm to me that they saw Boko Haram members drinking the blood of their enemies. I hear several times that they also mutilated the corpses, removing their hearts, for example. But no one apart from Patience mentions body parts being turned into soup. Among my interviewees, however, she is also the only one who experienced conditions in the Kauri camp in person. And I manage to discover that the vicar’s wife she quotes as a witness actually exists: Rebecca finds her name in the parish register of the EYN church.

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