This extravagant dwelling, as domineering as it was distant, brought home to me the intimateconnection between tyranny and abstraction, and put me in mind of John Berger's observation that "abstraction's capacity to ignore what is real is undoubtedly where most evil begins."

On Academic Writing: "The more passive one's life in the field, the greater the need to reverse the situation when one returns home, which is why the arcane and authoratative character of academic writing may be seen, to some extent, as a vengeful reaction to the inertia, uneventfulness, and waiting one had to endure as a guest at someone else's banquet. A way of redressing an existental imbalance, as it were-- reclaiming authorial will by superimposing one's own meaning on theirs...

Pierre Bordieu was right: "The all powerful is he who does not wait but makes others wait. Absolute power is the power to make oneself unpredictable and deny other people any reasonable anticipation, to place them in total uncertainty by offering no scope for their capacity to predict."

I grew up in a world that regarded authenticity as something deep within one's soul-- governed by one's conscience and measured against one's true nature. A question of being true to oneself. Of avoiding artifice. Kuranko do not fetishize the ego as we do, but emphasize a person's social nous. As such, authenticity is consummated in the way one realizes one's given destiny or plays one's social role. The name of the game is not self-knowledge, but knowing one's place and making the most of it. Fot this reason implies theatricality implies something very different from acting out. rather than spontaneously giving vent to one's feelings, one learns to perform the gestures and emotions appropriate to one's role.

The most conspicuous thing about suffering is, as W.H. Auden once observed, its banality. The day is green, the sun is shinging, someone is eating, or opening a window, the torturer's horse is scatching its innocent behind on a tree, and in a mere second someone we love is dead.

In 1967, not long after the outbreak of civil war in Nigeria, the federal wuthorities arrested poet and playwright Wole Soyinka and imprisoned him without trial. In solitary confinement, summoning all his resources to stay alive, the thought occured to Soyinka that "some (albeit warped) logic is involved in acts of inhumanity." But how is one to understand this logic? All violence is a form of retribution. A form of payback, driven by the need to reclaim something that one imagines to have been wrongfully taken, that one is now owed. One's very existence is felt to depend on making good this loss-- a legacy stolen, a promise broken, a loved one murdered, one's honor impugned, a dream betrayed. Often, these existential wounds are so deep and degrading that material indemnification is considered inadequate. The injured party demands satiisfaction, and this, as Nietzsche observed, commonly involves punishment inflicted on the debtor's body-- by branding, amputation, rape, and mutilation. (citation and notes) The logic of this kind of exchange, Nietzsche writes, restson the fact that "instead of money, land, possessions of whatever sort,) a sort of pleasure is conceded to the creditor as a form of repayment and recompense-- the pleasure of being able to vent his power without a second thought on someone who is powerless, the enjoyment "de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire," the pleasure of violation." connects to Nazis, RUF

LIke any other animal, human beings will fight to the death when threatened or cornered, but as a species we are perhaps alone in imagining that our survival depends on such elusive properties as recognition, love, identity, honor, prestige, and wealth. Only we will feel that our very existence is endangered when our name is taken in vain, our pride is hurt, our nation threatned, our reputation impugned, our voice ignored, our loyalty betrayed. No other animal will figh t tooth and nail, not only to see that such symbolic losses are made good, but that those hwo have allegedly taken these things fro us are themselves subject to all the torment, degradation, and loss that we have suffered at their hands. This is why violators seldom admit to guilt. For they believe they were fully justified in their excesses; they were only taking back what was rightfully theirs, preserving their civilization, defending their rights, upholding their honor, and, of course, obeying orders from above.

Unless one has been caught up in a war and experienced the terror that comes of knowing that thousands of heavily armed individuals are bent on one's annihilation, it is hard to realize that most violence is not primarily motivated by evil, greed, lust, ideology, or agresssion. Stranges as it may seem, most violence is defensive. it is notivated by the fear that if one does not kill one ill be killed. Either by the enemy or by one's own superiors. Against this constant anxiety, and the acute sense of fear and vulnerabilty that accompanies it, one conjures an illusion of power-- torching buildings, shooting unarmed civilians, firing rocket grentades, smoking cannabis, shouting ordrs, changing slogans, seeing oneself as Rambo, taunting, torturing, and abusing the individuals one has taken captive. But all this display of might-- this weaponry, thse medicines and amulets, this noise, these incantations, both political and magical, these Hollywood images, these drug-induced fuges, these rituals of brotherhood and solidarity -- simply reveal the depth of oen's own impotence and fear. This is Hannah Arendt's great insight-- that while military power consolidates itself in numbers, and in coordinated, automatic forms of mass movement, terrorism seeks power in implements, and is driven not by might but by its absence. And so it is that in the auto-da-fe, with explosions and bomb blasts, fire, noise, and mayhem, that the terrorist, like a child, finds his apotheosis, achieving the recognition, presence, voice and potency he has been denied in the real world.

I spent a lot of time mulling over what S. B. had told me about his thirteen months in solitary confinement, surrounded by death, and the "wild thinking" that drew him back to his beginnings. It seemed to me that this urge to retrace one's steps nto the past arises neither from nostalgia nor from a need to tell one's story to the world. It is a way of cheating death. An instinct for life in the face of oblivion. For to recollect the innocence of childhood o the viogr of youth in a moment of peril is to retrieve a sense of leife's infinite possiblitiy, ot conjure a period in our life when the wold seemed ours for the taking, and we thought we would never die. It is, in essence, to recapture a sense of our capacity to act and initiate someothing new, for, as Hannah Arendt notes, action is synonymous with our capacity to bring new life into the wold. Mortality is thus conuntermandded by natality, ai ti si this unquenchable desire for renewal, this refusal to go gently into that good night, that explains why we go back, tumbling through the darkness, in search of the light that flooded and filled our first conscious years. The days of wine and roses. When our livesstretched before us liek a field of dreams. But if our imagniation springs to our rescue in such dark times, holding out the promise of rebirth, how do we fare when we are released from darkness, and are returned to our everyday lives? How do we address the injustices we have endured, the life we have wasted, the pain we have so needlessly suffered? This question was much on my mind the day I wen to see Fina Kamara in the Murraytown Amputee Camp.

"In Africa," S. B. once remarked, "if you do well, people close to you will hate you."