Not Born a Refugee Woman by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Cultural Studies, Emigration & Immigration, Anthropology, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9780857450265
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2008-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

A Map Is Not a Territory

A map is not a territory, according to the historian Michel de Certeau. I have cited this sentence over and over again, first as early as in 1979 as an epigraph to my novel Lueur. I had wanted that novel to be a translation of the inner quest of the corporeal monument engraved with letters (tattoos), which are partly erased yet still present, letters that represent the return of the repressed, also called “drives” in psychoanalysis. I had called and still call this writing the archaeology of the inner self.

And this is how I had conceived writing Women in a World at War. After having unfolded and read the geographical maps of the countries where we were going to work, after having read numerous written works that broach the questions of war, human disasters, violence of all sorts, and the complex relationship maintained with death by those who kill or who are killed before their biological clocks inevitably stop, I wanted to explore further than the maps and sociological analyses. I wanted to go beyond all prescribed frameworks, and delve into the waters of the unknown. Like an archaeologist of souls—including my own—I wanted to survey the territories devastated by terror and death in action. I wanted to see with my own eyes, to hear with my own ears, to touch with my own hands, what the others had explored of death at work during the state of war, all the while maintaining the connection to the other within myself.

It seemed to me that the field experience was consubstantial with the book to come. It seemed to me, surging from the same flow of knowledge, that the writing of the book offered me the best lit path on which to proceed, hard as it would be, on that shady field littered with debris and remains. Writing, through its very qualities, which are at once reassuring and disconcerting, would know how to give the debris a voice. I knew this from a sustained lifelong practice of it. I had no scientific or philosophical proof. And still have none. If I had proof, I would no longer write.

And on site, writing was made possible thanks to the words spoken by the women, but also to those spoken by certain men who seemed to hold the same type of feminine intimacy with death—a sort of complicity made of tender gestures, of whispered sentences, of childlike laughter and sometimes even of tears, as though an archaic dance from deep within had resurfaced, an archaic dance learned from a loving mother and developed before the discourse of the law and of structured language set in. Those primal words and dance would have absolutely proscribed the violation of both life and bodies. Facing the horrors of war left them stupefied. Dumbfounded. They were left in the interstices of structured discourses. Like their sisters, they were abandoned on the shores of the unsaid. Of what still had not been said on the subject of war and on the death drive.

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