Excerpt from, A Different Kind of War Story

" Self, culture and reality are regenerative. If people are defined by the world they inhabit, and the world is socially and culturally constructed by the people who consider themselves a part of it, people ultimately control the production of reality and their place in it. They produce themselves. As much as terror-warfare tries to dismantle the viable person, people fight back. They create themselves in resistance. . . 


The dilemma is clear: between the world as it was, the world as it should be, and the now of a world destroyed lies in an abyss, a discontinuity, a need to define the one by the other, and the impossibility of doing so. Identity hinges on bridging this gap. 


The solution, Mozambicans taught me, lies, in part, with the imagination. When people look out over a land that should resonate with meaning and life but that now stares blankly back with incomprehensible images of barren fields, broken communities, tortured bodies, and shattered realities, they are left with the choice of accepting a deadened world or creating a livable one. It is the imagination--creativity--that bridges the abyss, if not to reconstruct the past, to make the present livable. . .


There are no cultural canons, no legal doctrines, no religious texts in a society that specify how to treat these wounds of war and how, exactly, to rebuild in the face of destruction. . . wars continuously engender new kinds of violence and innovative responses to it. No one war can prepare people for the lived intricacies of another war or another day of war. What worked yesterday may not work today. One act of resistance is counteracted by a new form of violence and oppression. And new forms of resistance are forged in the face of these. Violence is constructed as a tool of repression. Creative responses are then set into play by the population to unmake the power and the potential of violence. . . these cultural precepts about violence and peacebuilding are about power, the abuse of power, dignity, and the truth of survival." -carolyn nordstrom