Searching for Normal in the Wake of the Liberian War. Sharon Alane Abramowitz
Chapter 1
Searching for Normal in the Wake of the Liberian War
Agnes’s Lament
On a hot dry day in the winter of 2006–2007, I accompanied a team of psychosocial workers to a village in the far north of Bong County to audit mental health interviews. Sitting in a dusty, narrow, blue examination room with a table, a few chairs, and an empty bookshelf, Agnes, the psychosocial counselor, looked down. Her typically tall and graceful frame was slumped, and her arms moved slowly and listlessly through her notebook and kit. She seemed far removed from her usual pert, optimistic professionalism—her eyes looked haunted and distressed.
It was a slow day, and few clients were coming round to meet with her, so I asked her what was wrong. Agnes said she was “really discouraged, and upset about my country, my nation.” A very senior public official, Willis Knuckles, had been photographed having an affair with two women simultaneously, and in the photograph, the two women appeared to be engaged in sexual acts with each other.1 The photographs had been rapidly disseminated; they soon hung on walls, billboards, and doors in every large town throughout the country.
Agnes began to sob. “What will become of our own nation? That’s a public figure. The immorality! I pray to God, and I know that God forgives, but what can this country be, what can this country become with the behavior of people like this? These are our leaders? And what will become of this man’s wife? What will become of this man’s children? What will become of his generation? I’m just sick. Where is the pride? Where is the dignity that you are supposed to have for yourself, for your family, for your country? We are totally ruined. The immorality is too deep, and it hurts us. It’s irreversible.”
Agnes continued: “I tell you. It will take the grace of God. Sometimes I go home, and I just pray to God. And these women! These photographs! Women are supposed to respect themselves and be respected. I was just walking down [in town], and I saw a group, and I went over, and they were all looking at this photograph. This is the first thing I see. These are people who preach against prostitution, against corruption, against immorality, and they go and do the same!”
Agnes’s eyes grew red, and she avoided my gaze. In an urgent low tone she moved into a steady patter of stories of shame and fear and horror. As she spoke, the circle of her condemnation grew larger and larger. She talked about ex-combatants, trauma, mental illness, and the local form of brain sickness called Open Mole. She talked about women who were trapped in domestic situations with men who had killed their family members and neighbors and about rumors of human sacrifice during the elections. She talked about community attitudes, noting that many of the Loma and Kpelle people she worked with believed that “Open Mole is a sign that you are a witch … that maybe you have done something … and it is playing on you.” With a great deal of shame, Agnes said, “Sometimes I feel so … African.” And then Agnes redirected her lament toward her community and her society.
Agnes’s speech struck me powerfully. Unlike the other trauma counselors I had interviewed and watched during the previous weeks and months, she had never broken face. She had never indicated the slightest doubt about Liberia’s road to recovery, and she had never criticized the humanitarian NGOs that gave her an ID, a professional identity, and a stable salary. She believed in the psychosocial work they had done with ex-combatant rehabilitation, and as an example, she often cited the story of Princess.
Princess was a young former child soldier whose life history had been written up for the NGO’s press kit. Her profile described her kidnaping from her village, her years spent as a soldier and as a bush wife with the rebels, and her reluctant participation in the Disarmament, Demobilization, Rehabilitation, Reintegration (DDRR) program. The narrative ended with a smiling photo of Princess in a DDRR T-shirt and a report that she had been successfully reintegrated into her village and her family. She was an iconic success story of ex-combatant rehabilitation.
Two years after her rehabilitation program had ended, Princess still came to the clinic to visit Agnes; her initially successful reintegration had faltered. She was lonely. Her boyfriend had promised he would come back and pay a dot (dowry) to her parents, but he had left and hadn’t called for more than six months. The people in the community didn’t like her very much, and it was hard for her to make friends with anyone who hadn’t previously been a fighter. Princess came often to visit with Agnes, and during her visits she sat humbly across the table from a psychosocial counselor who was no longer mandated by her NGO to work with her. For Agnes, her routine of peppering Princess with questions about work, dress, family, and drugs was a form of kindliness and support, but at the same time Princess was a living reminder to everyone that the immediate exuberance of postconflict interventions was wearing down into an extended period of uncertainty and ambivalence.
Reviving her critique of the immorality of public leaders, Agnes told a story that I’d heard elsewhere in Monrovia, in the Bong County capital Gbarnga, and in some of the smaller trading towns between. Agnes, a Seventh-day Adventist, was a frequent churchgoer. In the years after the war, she attended Sunday services, as well as weekly Bible meetings and evening prayer sessions as often as she could. On a crowded weekend morning at her church, word had circulated that a nine-year-old girl—a church member—had recently been raped. The pastor brought the accused rapist onto the podium before hundreds of congregants and begged for their forgiveness for the rapist. Agnes’s voice swelled with rage and disgust as she recited his preaching:
Everyone in this congregation must forgive this man and give him our protection, for this is a time of reconciliation! If we are to recover from this war, if we are to rebuild to assume the riches of Liberia and to become the blessed nation as we were born, we cannot harbor anger in our midst! This man needs our forgiveness, and we must forgive him, for this is the time when truth and reconciliation will set us free from the wickedness of our past! We must bring this man into our arms, into the arms of Jesus, and we must forget all the wickedness we have done against each other! For now is the time when we must forgive, when we must let the past remain in the past, and move on with our future!
Agnes’s lament seamlessly transitioned into her own story of sadness and loss, her trauma, as she put it. Several years earlier during the war, Agnes, along with her sister and niece, were fleeing toward the Ivorian border in search of shelter. Agnes’s sister was pregnant, and their journey induced premature labor. Agnes had some training as a health worker prior to the war, and she guided her sister to a locked clinic in an evacuated village, where she managed to find an entrance. Inside the clinic there were no medications, no staff, and no supplies. Her sister and the baby died of a hemorrhage, and today Agnes is the guardian for her teenage niece.
Agnes demanded, “Who is to blame for my sister’s death? Was it someone carrying a gun? No. Was it someone you can go to the TRC [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] and say this person did this thing? No. But it was the war that killed my sister. If it was not for this evil war, my sister would not have been left to die in that place, we would not have had to run away from the war, there would have been someone to help. And people talk about war trauma. Hmph! Can I ever be a mother to my niece?