Excerpts

So, I'm in Anthropology of War and Peace-Making, and we've been assigned a multitude of interesting readings. I'm now in the habit of highlighting lines or paragraphs that create pictures in my mind and inscribing (in the margins) "Write this". Tonight, I had the time and spent the last hour writing responses, or scenes based off the excerpts. The excerpts I felt were worth sharing so here they are, short and powerful.

Obviously the excerpts below are not my work, and the name beside each excerpt is the author in whose work the excerpt is found:

“They took everything, they tied up the house staff, and I had a son who was nine months old—they left grenades with him. He was there playing with a grenade in the living room, for three hours.” (Gourevitch)

“The war started long ago, in the house. The men took too many wives and had too many children. They then abandoned them because they could not support them. The children grew angry; they wanted revenge on their fathers. War was the opportunity they needed” (Richards)

“You see, if you kill someone, their soul stays with you” (Nordstrom).

“As one story goes, a brave woman with a baby on her back went to the garrison demanding to see her husband. The soldiers claimed he was not there, but she knew they were lying because his dog was standing outside the gates and the dog never left his side. Either they still had him, or they had already killed him. She demanded to know which and told them to go ahead and kill her and the baby because she had nothing more to lose. Today she is a widow.” (Green)

“The disappeared are among what Robert Hertz (1960) has called the ‘unquiet dead,’ referring to those who have died violent or unnatural deaths.” (Green)

“He was roughly marched to the nearest military checkpoint, where he was tortured by soldiers and the attachés. One area resident later told us that the prisoner’s screams made her children weep with terror.” (Farmer)

We all live in the same world, and yet...