The Mission of Forgetting

Joshua Craze offers a sobering analysis of the fantasy that is the United Nations mandate and presence in South Sudan, where civil war is the order of the day. The organisation’s peacekeeping mission, Craze argues, is based on the fundamental logic of the UN’s functioning: to recreate the image of its membership wherever it goes – regardless of context – and to enforce a neutrality that wilfully ignores reality and guarantees an incoherent response.

Everyone is waiting for everything to stop. The patrols. The water shortages. The endless reports to headquarters. The long walk out to the toilets at the edge of camp that must be taken early in the morning, before the sun casts its dominion over the sky and the urine starts to steam. The peacekeepers have run out of movies to watch. They want to go home. Everyone is waiting for South Sudan to stop, and for life to begin again.

I am in a United Nations (UN) base just outside Renk, at the tip of Upper Nile State, in the far north of South Sudan. This close to the Sudanese border, the sun is still radiant and the ground dusty, though it is June, and the rest of the state is already mired in rainy-season mud. We stand at the edge of a football field that doubles as a landing pad, and we wait, scanning the sky, hoping for a helicopter. For the last month, the South Sudanese army, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), has repeatedly cancelled flights into Renk. Perhaps today will be different.

It is June 2015, and it is war. Last week, SPLA attack helicopters destroyed a hospital in Kodok, a small town on the west bank of the Nile held by the rebels. Government forces are massing to the south of where I stand, intent on retaking Malakal, the state capital. Since the civil war began in December 2013, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced. No one knows how many have died. Renk’s South Sudanese inhabitants live abbreviated lives. Everyone is waiting for the war to stop, and the world to begin again. 

Ahmed, a genial Jordanian peacekeeper, stares into the sky, bereft. He recounts his travel plans. A helicopter flight to Malakal, and then onwards to Juba, South Sudan’s capital. Only then, when he’s sitting in the departure lounge, will he allow himself to imagine the flight to Dubai, the connection to Amman, and the moment he gets to see his family again. He tells himself he deserves the break. South Sudan will still be here when he gets back, and anyway: what can one man do in this madness? He hasn’t seen his kids for four months.

[Ahmed’s name has been changed to protect his identity, as have the names of all the other UN staff mentioned in this essay.]

Renk is a hardship station, and like Ahmed, almost all the peacekeepers here are due leave. The lucky few who manage to game the intricacies of the UN’s bureaucracy and get themselves onto a flight out spend their last few days saying goodbye to their colleagues. At the appointed hour, with bags packed and expectant eyes, they assemble by the landing pad. Then the flight is cancelled and work begins again. There will be innumerable last days. Most of the peacekeepers have had months of suspended departures. After a while, no one bothers saying goodbye. All that remains is absence and patrols through a country they have already left.  

There is nothing in the quiet blue sky, not even a cloud in whose suggestive shape we could divine the presence of a coming helicopter. After a while, the sun forces us to retreat to a nearby container. The peacekeepers don’t talk of their families, or of South Sudan, but of the pragmatics of leave. How to make sure your leave days don’t include travel days. How to snag extra time in Juba before deployment to Upper Nile. What signatures need to go where, and on which form. Leaving South Sudan is the common language uniting the peacekeepers mandated to protect it. After an hour, the conversation dies down. Dimitry, a baby-faced Russian, flicks through his Facebook feed. Over the radio we hear reports of clashes on the east bank of the Nile. Then we get the message. The helicopter from Malakal to Renk is cancelled again. Ahmed sighs, “War fucks everything up.”

***

In July 2011, world dignitaries dutifully assembled under the unrelenting Juba sun to congratulate South Sudan on successfully seceding from Sudan. The UN was to join arms with the new nation, building a state and expanding its mission in lockstep. Only 30 months later, in December 2013, the streets of the capital were lit up by gunfire, as militias linked to the president, Salva Kiir, went door-to-door, killing Nuer civilians. The Nuer are South Sudan’s second-largest ethnic group, and that of Riek Machar – the former vice-president, and now leader of the rebel forces. The UN was taken by surprise. “No one,” I was repeatedly told, “ever expected this." 

What began in December 2013 as a political crisis within the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the political wing of the SPLA and the ruling party in South Sudan, quickly became a civil war that spread to the states of Upper Nile, Jonglei and Unity. In the international media, there were initially two accounts of the conflict. Either it was inter-ethnic strife fermented by age-old hatred, or else a struggle at the top between power-hungry politicians. Not infrequently, the two stories were combined: cunning politicians manipulate ancient antagonisms.

Neither story really gets at what is happening in South Sudan. The first turns the current conflict into ancient history, immutable and inexorable, while the second transforms it into a game of Risk, played by calculating politicians. Both stories implicitly rely on there being a qualitative difference between peace and war – a crisis in need of explanation. That same assumption, that peace is different from war, underlies the international community’s approach to South Sudan: keen to invest in the South Sudanese state, it has looked forwards, and paid little attention to the complex history of the country. The current conflict is better understood as an intensification of antagonisms and patterns of conflict that date back to Sudan’s long second civil war (1983–2005), but that were also present during the period of peace from 2005–13. 

Since 1956, and Sudanese independence from Britain, southern Sudan – the area that is now South Sudan – has spent 41 years at war. What the international media sees as an exception is better understood as the normal state of things. War has touched everyone in South Sudan. There is no one without a relative who has taken up arms, and the line between civilians and fighters is not clear: soldiers return to their fields come planting season, and the man sitting by the side of the road, drinking tea and waiting for better times, probably also once fought, and may yet do so again. For hundreds of thousands of young men, war has been a way of life, and one of the principal means of finding sufficient resources to live. For the country’s Nilotic elite, war has long been the central way to accumulate what matters most in life: cattle, money and wives.

During the second civil war, commanders in South Sudan made power bases in the regions of their birth, largely recruiting their forces from among their own kin. The civil war, and the imported guns it brought with it, allowed these commanders to entrench their positions of dominance in their kin-group, just as their kin provided the manpower that allowed these men to become powerful commanders. They taxed trade in areas under their control, and bought and sold commodities. Bridewealth payments among South Sudan’s Nilotic populations all involve cattle, and livestock looted from enemies during the war was redistributed to the commanders’ followers, or else used to build alliances through marriage.

In 2005, the SPLM and the Sudanese government signed a peace agreement. The international community heralded the end of the war, and the beginning of a new era for southern Sudan. Less changed than one might imagine. The commanders remained secure in their personal fiefdoms, and the logic of accumulation continued unabated, even as the resources shifted. Cattle raiding and pillaging were at least partially replaced by political battles over oil revenue and government cash. Mundane bureaucracy also became increasingly effective as an instrument of war.

In Upper Nile, the White Nile pushes north, past Malakal and up to Renk, cleaving the state in two. On its west bank live the Shilluk, South Sudan’s third-largest ethnic group. They also lay claim to the east bank of the Nile, and Malakal, which lies on it. Since 2005, their eastern neighbours, the Padang Dinka, have become increasingly powerful in the government of Upper Nile, and have created new counties under their control on the east bank of the Nile, forcing the Shilluk west. These counties were eligible for state funds, and international NGOs moved in to support the nascent administrations, blind to the political stakes. Seen from the UN offices in Juba, these developments were evidence of the increasing power of a strong central state. Viewed from the west bank of the Nile, however, the expansion of government in Upper Nile had marginalised the Shilluk community, and intensified antagonisms in the state.

The conflict waged through county border delimitations and selective government and NGO investment from 2005–13 continued after the current civil war began. Following the December 2013 massacres in Juba, the SPLM lost control of much of the SPLA, which was dominated by Nuer fighters who joined Riek Machar’s rebellion. In Upper Nile, the army was saved by Johnson Olonyi, a Shilluk commander who until April 2013 had been fighting a guerrilla war against the SPLA over his community’s political marginalisation. A gruff, military man, Olonyi is suspicious of the politicians in Juba.

 “I have a doctorate in fighting,” he frequently proclaims, a rebuke to Riek Machar, who has a PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of Bradford. Fighting for the government, Olonyi won battle after battle, driving the rebels from the west bank of the Nile. In Malakal, they composed songs praising his feats. His ascendance was a direct threat to the Padang Dinka elite in Upper Nile. In April 2015, Dinka militia groups began attacking his forces, killing his deputy and driving Olonyi away from the government. He turned on the SPLA, eventually joining Machar’s rebels in an uneasy alliance. Forcing this split initially seemed like an enormous tactical blunder for the SPLA; Olonyi’s forces took Malakal and advanced up to the edge of Paloich, the only functioning oil field in South Sudan and the country’s financial life-blood. By June, however, government forces had stepped back from the abyss, recovering territory and pushing Olonyi’s forces onto the west bank of the Nile. What the Dinka politicians around Stephen Dieu Dhau, the minister of petroleum, had attempted to achieve de jure from 2005–13, they were now achieving militarily, using the weapons of the state: the forced displacement of the Shilluk from the east bank of the Nile, and Padang Dinka control of the state government.

Little of this is visible to the peacekeepers I talked to on that sun-drenched June afternoon. I asked Dimitry what he had observed on patrol yesterday. He looked up from his Facebook feed, and shrugged. He seemed tired of this country and its incomprehensible politics. He hoped the government would retake Malakal. Then, perhaps, the helicopter flights would stop being cancelled.

***

“A holding pattern!” he says, turning away from me, “a bloody holding pattern. That’s the official line from the top. A billion-dollar peacekeeping operation and we aren’t doing anything.” The UN worker slumps in his chair and reaches for my cigarettes. Everyone I speak to in the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) seems lost. There is a civil affairs division devoted to building relationships between South Sudan’s communities. The division is effectively out of work. No one, he says, is being very civil at the moment.

Back in 2005, creating the South Sudanese state was the UN mission’s priority. Hundreds of millions of dollars were poured into “capacity-building” before the state began killing its own people. Within a year of the war beginning, Bentiu and Malakal, two of the largest and most cosmopolitan places in South Sudan, were ghost towns.

The UNMISS mandate was revised in 2014, and state-building dropped as an objective. The emphasis now is on protecting civilians. Hundreds of thousands have gathered inside UN bases in Bentiu, Juba, and Malakal. The rest of the country, however, receives no help. The UN doesn’t have the troops, the weapons, or the political will to effectively intervene to protect civilians in South Sudan. The SPLA regularly prevents its patrols from accessing conflict sites. The UN remains quiet. The army fires on its barges on the Nile. The UN remains quiet. To criticise the South Sudanese government would be to announce the failure of the mission, and to acknowledge it cannot protect the civilians of South Sudan. So it stays inside its bases. Plans evacuation strategies. Licks its wounds. Waits for the war to stop. For state-building to begin again.

***

In Renk, a strange scene plays itself out every morning in front of the single-storey building complex that houses the Upper Nile government-in-exile. After Olonyi took Malakal, the government fled north, and occupied what used to be the Renk county government offices. By 8am each day, people are huddled under the cuei trees drinking tea. This is the bureaucratic labour force of the state government, and everyone is waiting for their wages. Some haven’t been paid in months. After the state authority fled Malakal, it issued an announcement: come to Renk or else you will not be paid. Those whose places of work are in rebel-held areas aren’t paid anyway. Nor are most Shilluk functionaries. Some have come from as far away as Khartoum – Sudan’s distant capital – to collect their salaries. The wages are considered an obligation of the state, rather than payment for work done. This isn’t laziness, but the reality of a country that war has dragged to a stop. Those who aren’t paid sit disconsolately under the trees, or hang around the offices. Tomorrow, perhaps, will be their day.

Those who are paid leave the complex, and go to one of the many places in Renk where one can drink tea and watch the world pass. One morning in June 2015, I am sitting with a government worker in the shade of a half-completed building, one of many schemes put on hold by the war. Malonj, my companion, has moved his family to a refugee camp just across the border in Sudan, and is waiting for his salary. I thought, though, you just got paid. Yes, he says, for January, but it is June now.

As we sit, a plume of smoke, careening down Renk’s rough-dirt main street, announces the arrival of a UN patrol. I ask Malonj what he thinks of the UN. Well, he responds philosophically, they do like driving a lot. The UN vehicle parks next to us, and I wave to Ahmed and Dimitry. “Seen anything interesting?”

For the UN peacekeepers, South Sudan is experienced from a vehicle. Regulations mean that no one can go out alone, and the emphasis of these patrols is on getting information visually. Despite the difficulties of gathering intelligence in a war-zone, the real barrier to the UN’s ability to gather information is to be found within the mission itself.

As one UN officer in Malakal later explained to me, “We only trust what we see. What people say…Well, they could be saying anything, and the South Sudanese lie all the time.” The same UN officer, when I later quiz him on information he had obtained from someone in the SPLA, consulted his notes. “Ah yes,” he said, “I was told that by Major General something something,” and laughed.

There is a basic epistemological suspicion of the country among the peacekeepers. Thrown into a strange place, without any of the language skills or historical knowledge that would make it comprehensible, the peacekeepers become minimal empiricists: do I see it? If so, I shall send the information back to Juba. The rest is chaos. Unknowable.

But what do the peacekeepers see? From the back of a jeep, the world is flattened. They see men with guns. Almost everyone in South Sudan has a gun. Out there, under the cuei tree, there is a world of difference between the Dinka of Renk, and those of Melut – an intricate set of sectional and affinal distinctions as complicated as any UN hierarchy. They can’t see any of that from the back of a jeep.  

It is a different set of categories that populate UN reports. “Armed men”, “bandits”, “unknown assailants”. For the peacekeepers, the world is full of threats, and these threats, first and foremost, are to the UN itself. Like any great bureaucracy, the UN’s first duty is its own preservation. In one document I read, there were vague reports of bandits on a road used by UN patrols, and then the line, “Assume the worst until something is known.” Patrols were suspended due to the threat. It was impossible to find out anything else. That would have required leaving one’s vehicle. Assume the worst becomes a modus operandi when nothing can be known.

I don’t blame Ahmed and Dimitry, as they finish stocking up on cigarettes and soda from the shop next to us, and roar away back to the base. They are soldiers in a strange land. Their job is to put information into boxes, and send it back to Juba. In many ways, their lives are the one success story of the UN mission in South Sudan.

In 2011, I was researching prisons. I wanted to go to a prison in a place called Tonj, and so went to Wau, the nearest state capital, to talk to the UN corrections officer who was supposed to be overseeing it. In her office, Magdalena greeted me reluctantly, and we talked about life. In Nigeria, she had earned US$300 a month as a prison guard. Working for the UN, she earned more than four times that. Her rotation in South Sudan had radically transformed her existence back home, and she had been able to build houses for herself and her parents. She had not, however, been to the prison in Tonj. It is far away, she told me, and the road is dangerous. 

A week later, I returned from Tonj, and told Magdalena about the prison. There are, I said, six people tied to a tree in the burning sun. She looked up slowly from her computer, her eyebrows arching, as if to say, “What do you want from me?” She phoned Tonj once a week, and they told her if they were holding any children. They were never holding any children. Magdalena had a simple remit. Fill in the paperwork, keep her head down, don’t cause a fuss within the UN, or with the South Sudanese government, and her life in Nigeria would be transformed. Throughout a UN system whose peacekeepers come from India, Nigeria and Bangladesh, similar financial transfers are transforming lives all over the world. I look forward to a happier future time, when South Sudanese peacekeepers, stationed in whichever country the UN deigns to help next, are also able to send money home.

For Ahmed and Dimitry, just as for Magdalena, most of life is contained within the boredom of a UN base. The containers are laid out like a mini-grid system, narrow stone pathways between them, and come dusk, and the closing of the offices, you can feel the throb of the generators, and hear the gentle hum of Nigerian and Indian movies playing. To help South Sudan, the UN mission has decided to have as little as possible to do with it.

***

The main UN base in Juba is far from the city. You must head towards Jebel Kujur, the mountain that towers over the capital, until the buildings thin out. Finally, you can pass through the UN checkpoint and arrive at a series of office buildings, overlooking the plain below. Smartly dressed young men in suits move quickly between them, as in the commercial district of any major city, while armed patrols amble by. The base combines a bank and a summer camp. Everyone is always passing through South Sudan on their way elsewhere – a fine posting in New York, perhaps, or else Mali at least, somewhere the world pays attention, if only for a minute.

South Sudan is a rung on a ladder, and to climb that ladder one needs information. Endless reports circulate among offices. At meetings, the competition is to show who knows more. Since the war began, the game has become more intense, as if the less the UN can do outside the fortified walls of its camps, the fiercer the battle for control inside – information as fictional mastery of a situation one is powerless to change.

Sections of good reports are copied and pasted into others. Errors are thus magnified, but such is the difficulty of obtaining reliable information in South Sudan, they are rarely corrected. This uncertainty about the country further intensifies the desire for information: in a place where few facts can be verified, everyone is obsessed with facts. The reports of Ahmed and Dimitry take on a gravitas that would shock the people of Renk. Things glimpsed from the back of a jeep are gravely discussed in urgent meetings, and new evacuation strategies are planned. There are superiors to impress, and better positions to be gained.

Not all information is welcomed, however. Too often, I have given talks only for my explanations of historical circumstances and marriage alliances to be waved away as ‘context’. Needlessly complicated. South Sudan is at war, and only certain facts get to count in the UN information economy. Troop movements and battles are what are important. UN military officers sit playing endless games of Risk, moving imaginary units around bad maps, the names of places hopelessly incorrect: the result, in part, of running a billion-dollar mission in which perhaps only two non-South Sudanese officers speak any of the indigenous languages of the country.  

In this historical vacuum, a Kremlinology has developed around the president, Salva Kiir, as conspiratorial as the darkest days of the Cold War. Rather than divining the internal policies of the Politburo from the speeches of apparatchiks, this new South Sudanese form of prophecy involves a patient attention to Kiir’s house. What does it mean, everyone wonders, that there used to be two T-72 tanks hidden at the entrance, and now there is only one? Endless analysis beckons. Kiir’s health is also a concern. Did you think he looked a bit grey during that last speech? Yes, I thought so. Who might succeed him? Coups are plotted and dissolved within half-an-hour at the table of UN intelligence officers. The long history of Upper Nile State becomes a series of conspiracy theories.

***

In this information economy, there is one thing that everyone knows and that is not spoken about: the international community itself. Its conduct does not appear as a subject for analysis in the learned reports of the UN. It appears in no report of military threats. Peacekeepers don’t count as military actors. Rather, they are only ever threatened by the South Sudanese. The international community is all over South Sudan, but appears nowhere in its understanding of the civil war. Yet during South Sudan’s long history of conflict, one resource has remained constant: aid. During the second civil war, commanders like Riek Machar proved adept at using the aid industry as a tool of war. Civilians would be forced into towns under his control, and obliging aid agencies would then supply them with food, some of which would be diverted to feed his soldiers. Most of the commanders fighting in the current civil war fought in the last one, and it is business as usual. 

From April to July 2015, the SPLM gave a free hand to the SPLA and its associated militias, which then raped and pillaged their way through the south of Unity State, leading to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians. It was a conscious policy of mass population transfer. Elsewhere in the south, the government set up ‘safe zones’ to which the civilians could flee. These zones allowed the government to control the civilian population – and eliminate rebel sympathisers – while also appealing to the international community for help: the World Food Program (WFP) drops rations, which can then be purloined, and obliging aid agencies provide medical care. Meanwhile, the rest of the south of Unity State was abandoned, as civilians fled to the UN base in Bentiu – the state’s capital – and into the safe zones, leaving the militias to take their property and livestock. It’s good cop, bad cop, on a demographically astonishing scale.

It would be tempting to think that the NGOs and the UN don’t know what’s going on. Redeemed by ignorance, there can then be the hope that knowledge might save them. Some hope.

After Olonyi rebelled in May 2015, the SPLA denied flight clearances to NGOs trying to get sorely needed food and medical supplies to the west bank of the Nile. Dinka militia forces fired on NGO boats attempting to cross the river from Malakal. It was a concerted attempt to destroy a population, and the deprivation of aid was one of the SPLA’s principal weapons. The government encouraged the WFP to drop food where it granted clearances, in government-held areas. I remember meeting a WFP officer in Juba, shortly after I came back from Upper Nile. “You are being manipulated,” I said. The officer shrugged. “It isn’t like the people in government-held areas don’t need food too.” For the WFP officer, this war has produced only victims.

The humanitarian community is determinedly neutral in the conflict. It is this neutrality that allows the government to instrumentalise the aid industry, while the humanitarians keep their hands clean. Every human is worth something, they insist. The politics of neutrality, however, also allow for other forms of instrumentalisation.

***

By September 2015, I was back in Chicago, and preparing to teach. About a week after I arrived, I got an email from a researcher working for a UN agency. She had been asked to do a study of pastoralism and raiding in South Sudan. Might we have a chat?

We spoke one warm evening, before the bleakness of Chicago’s winter set in. She explained that problematically, she only had a month to do her study. It was an impossible task. Getting around South Sudan is challenging at the best of times. It is an enormous country, and since the war began there have been no commercial flights. Worse, the rainy season – then at its height – rends asunder the most conservative of travel plans. Doing research is even more difficult. After decades of conflict, it can take months before someone trusts you.

I asked her why she had such a short period of study. There had been a delay, apparently, in getting the donor funds released, and now they had only a brief window in which to spend them, otherwise they would have to return the money. It is a familiar situation for many NGOs: a lot of cash, no time, and not a lot of knowledge. Her research, she explained, was in any case just a pilot study for a much larger project: aid agencies setting up workshops all over South Sudan to convince the country’s pastoralist communities to stop raiding. All her attention was focused on a meeting with the relevant stakeholders. For a brief moment, I thought she meant she was organising a meeting of all the elders of the pastoralist communities in South Sudan. No, she meant the UNDP, VISTAS, UNMISS, Concordis – all the NGOs that work on pastoralism and raiding. As with so many projects run by the international community in the country, the principal points of reference were not the South Sudanese, but other NGOs, each of which, in a genteel version of a turf war, takes a particular place and theme, and looks for donor funding. I asked her what she had discovered so far. “Raiding is really bad right now. Really bad. Everything was much better before the war.”

Before the war. I taste the phrase. So many UN and NGO reports hinge on that word, before. It is salutary to read the grey literature from the 1990s, during the height of the second civil war – the endless NGO reports and policy briefs that are discarded the moment the situation changes amid breathless demands for more information. These reports might not tell you much about contemporary South Sudanese politics, but you learn a lot about the international community, past and present.

During the 1990s, the before of the international community was the time before the second civil war. From 2005 to 2013, the NGOs also needed a before – a bright and rosy time of happy coexistence, the better to contrast with an ominous present – and so the before became traditionally. Before is never historical; it is the time just out of reach. Each wave of aid workers that steps off the plane at Juba’s beleaguered airport brings with it its own before. The international community ceaselessly resets the clock, as institutional memory disappears on the return flight to Nairobi. The oldest institution in southern Sudan is Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). It does valuable, important work – but ever since it arrived here, decades ago, it has been in a state of emergency, tending to one crisis after another. The humanitarian community endlessly attends to the present, and its before is not the beginning of a historical analysis, but a way to cast out the realities of a present sutured by the past.

Before is instrumental. It sets up a crisis into which one can intervene, the ghosts of previous interventions forgotten. The UN researcher I spoke to was an honest, earnest person. She wanted to do good work, but the project was a fig leaf, its conclusions prefigured. Its goal was not to understand the situation in South Sudan, but to justify funding for yet another large-scale intervention. The whole project began from two absurd assumptions: that raiding is considered morally bad, and that the international community can stop it.

Since the beginning of the civil war, I have spoken to many people whose villages have been burnt, their cattle stolen. They are angry, lost, and they want to go raiding, and get their cattle back. That isn’t to say that all raiding is considered good, but that cattle raiding is part of a complicated moral economy, full of shades of grey, and not simply the antithesis of a good life, lived under the watchful eye of the UN. The social and political reasons for raiding fly under the radar of NGO schemes. Pastoralists attend the workshops on human rights and sustainable livelihoods, mouth the same banalities as the UN, and then return to their lives. So many NGO and UN interventions in South Sudan don’t touch the fabric of the country, but pass over it, as money comes in from US donors, and goes straight back out again, in the pockets of ‘conflict resolution’ experts expensively imported to provide workshop training. 

The international community has affected a form of blindness in relation to its own past in southern Sudan. Each intervention begins again, context-free, and is easily manipulated by the South Sudanese government. I wondered though, after speaking to the UN researcher, whether this blindness isn’t wilful: a particularly lucrative form of learned ignorance.

***

There is a growing literature that says the problem with UN peacekeeping missions is their habitus – the way they act – and that the solution is knowledge. The UN’s separation from the countries in which it works allows it to function. Hundreds of different nationalities, all within one structure, and all those differences effaced, replaced by a single, primary distinction: the UN versus the world outside. While this division allows the UN to function, the literature claims, it also unfortunately leads to many missed opportunities, because the UN misreads the local situation. What the UN needs, it is argued, is knowledge. If the UN knew more, and was more sensitive to the lived realities of a place like South Sudan, it could be saved.

I trained as an anthropologist, and naturally enough, anthropologists like this idea. It suggests a role for us: we can be the bridge between the UN and the world, explaining particularities, and setting up cultural-sensitisation workshops for the UN. (There is nothing that cannot be saved by a workshop.) The problem with this idea is that it assumes knowledge makes a difference. Anthropologists write reports for the UN all the time, and they are shelved. No one responds. It isn’t that UN officers don’t understand South Sudan – some do, some don’t. Rather, the problem is that the most learned UN veteran, with ten years on the ground, and the most fresh-faced Russian peacekeeper, act in exactly the same way: they fulfil the dictates of the mission. There are reports to be filed, which allow no place for context, and there is a mission mandate to be accomplished.

A central platform of the UN mandate is that it does not take sides. The UN’s insistence on neutrality is its rhetorical armour. Despite all the indications to the contrary, it refuses to see that in South Sudan there are no neutral gestures, and everything that one does changes the political calculus on the ground. To refuse to see the truth of that is the willed ignorance that sustains the technocratic fantasy of the mission. It allows the UN to see the problems of South Sudan as only so many logistical challenges: how to get food from point x to point y. Neutrality allows the UN to stand apart from the war: they are saviours from afar, not – so the rhetoric goes – a constitutive part of the political economy of the country.

Without this rhetoric the UN would be even more immobile than it already is. For if it were to acknowledge the political realities of the country, and that every intervention is necessarily political, what could it do? It has no political constituency, and no means of deciding whether to support one side or another: this is expressly not part of its mandate. Neutrality is the myth of innocent intention that allows the UN to act, and for those actions to have consequences that are never part of the UN’s self-image; its very neutrality becomes a political instrument for the South Sudanese government, who can control where food aid goes, take some off the top for its soldiers, while the UN proclaims that all human lives are equal.

The UN mission is predicated on an active and forceful forgetting. It forgets, every day, that its mission is impossible. There is no state to be built. There never was. There were instead powerful feuding interests that manipulated the UN at every turn. The UN forgets, every day, that it cannot protect the civilians of South Sudan. From April to July, when the militias swept down into Unity State, raping and pillaging as they went, the UN staff remained in their base in Bentiu, despite a Chapter VII mandate (that allows for the use of force) to protect civilians. In December 2015, MSF said that “there has been a complete and utter protection failure on UNMISS’ part in southern Unity”. UNMISS, of course, rejected the accusation. Its 11,350 troops had been active, the mission insisted: they had been on patrol.

***

The more money that is put into UNMISS, and the longer it stays in South Sudan, the harder it will be for it to admit that it has failed. It is not the fault of the peacekeepers – outnumbered and undergunned – or even of the self-important officers in Juba, pontificating about Kiir’s health around the poolside. The failure is in New York: in the crafting of a mission whose mandate is a fantasy. No one wants to hear that.

In 2011, when South Sudan seceded, what the world wanted to hear was that a new nation was born, and a new state could be created. We wanted to hear the story of a successful South Sudan. The UN, that strange child of all the world’s nations, was going to help. That it conceived of the assistance it could provide in purely technocratic terms is hardly surprising: in its commitment to neutrality, it disavows politics; in its immense and lumbering bureaucratisation, which holds together workers from so many nations, technocratic efficiency has become its lingua franca. It helped to create a capital, Juba, when everyone needed a capital: the NGOs needed to deal with a unified government to get donor funds, the oil companies needed a minister with whom to negotiate. If the heady days of Juba, unexpected boomtown, seemed like a fantasy, it is because they were.

Now the dream of nation-building has been put on hold, and with the people of South Sudan at war, the world wants someone to save the day. Enter the UN, version II. Its own role in constituting the conflict forgotten, it announces that it will protect the civilians.

The novelist Amitav Ghosh once wrote that the “UN represents the totality of the world’s nation-states, and the fundamental logic of its functioning is to recreate the image of its membership wherever it goes… Yet the entities that result from these efforts are clearly not nation-states in the traditional sense, since the nation is by definition sovereign and, so to speak, self-created – an entity that has brought itself into being.” The UN intervention into South Sudan predates its government, which was formed in 2011. From the beginning, the government learns from the UN. The true stakes of politics are hidden, just as the manoeuvring of powerful nations in New York finds no place in the UN’s official rhetoric. The language of the South Sudanese government is technocratic: everything is capacity-building, enhancing the state, while real politics goes on under a cover of neutrality. The UN is the model for unaccountable, technocratic government in South Sudan. 

The government talks of human rights, and bombs hospitals. The UN talks of protecting civilians, and stays in its bases. Both are waiting for better days. For the war to stop. For state-building and donor funding to begin again.

"A new report from the Small Arms Survey’s Human Security Baseline for Sudan and South Sudan describes, for the first time, details of ongoing efforts by the Padang Dinka elite in Upper Nile to forcibly displace the Shilluk from the east bank of the Nile—with support from the Government of South Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). The campaign has included the killing of civilians, the razing of villages, and forced displacement as tools of war. The SPLA has collaborated by cutting off food and humanitarian access to the communities under attack. Furthermore, evidence reveals that the attack on the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) protection of civilians (PoC) site at Malakal on 16–18 February was a carefully planned assault by the SPLA and Padang Dinka militia forces backed by the state government. UNMISS is unable and unwilling to protect the Shilluk civilians at the PoC site and elsewhere in Upper Nile.

The report, based on previous fieldwork and investigations, interviews with key informants, and a review of public and confidential documents, also finds that the implementation of the partition of Upper Nile into three new states, as directed by South Sudanese president Salva Kiir, is a tool in this campaign, and is a ‘fundamental obstacle to peace’. 

‘A War Waged on Civilians’, released today, describes how, since March 2015, the Padang Dinka military and political elites of Upper Nile have carried out a sustained and systematic campaign to push the Shilluk off the east bank of the White Nile. The campaign has targeted Johnson Olonyi’s Agwelek forces, using Mi-24 Hind attack helicopters to strafe his troops’ bases on the west bank of the Nile. These operations have been aimed at consolidating control of the east bank of the Nile, including areas contested by the Shilluk: Akoka, Nagdiar, Pigi, and Malakal, the state capital. 

According to the report, the Padang Dinka elite has used militia forces in a campaign that is fundamentally a war waged on Shilluk civilians. Padang Dinka militias have burned Shilluk habitations, raped Shilluk women, and forced the Shilluk to flee to the west bank of the Nile. The SPLA has assisted in this campaign by systematically denying humanitarian actors access to Shilluk populations, limiting the Shilluk’s access to food, and using attack helicopters to strike at civilians. 

The militia forces engaged in these attacks are from Akoka, Baliet, Melut, and Renk counties. They were formed in 2014 and operate outside of the SPLA’s military command structure, although they often work with them. They receive their arms and ammunition, including Israeli Galil ACE assault rifles, from the Internal Security Bureau of the National Security Service. Funding for the militias is provided by the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, in which China has a 40 per cent stake, and administered by Stephen Dhieu Dhau, the Padang Dinka minister of petroleum.

The current campaign is the latest in a series of historical actions by state-supported actors against the Shilluk communities of Upper Nile. Since 2005, and the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the Shilluk have been steadily marginalized in the state. Meanwhile, the Padang Dinka—previously one of the less influential Dinka lobbies—have risen to prominence, under the general leadership of Dhau. Shilluk marginalization has been evidenced by the creation of new counties during this period, including Akoka and Pigi counties, which places territories contested by the Shilluk under exclusive Padang Dinka control. 

In the context of Upper Nile, Kiir’s decree of 2 October 2015, which split the state into three new states, should be seen in light of this longer-term trend. The decree turns the east bank of the Nile into a Padang Dinka-majority county called Eastern Nile state. This new entity includes Malakal, leaving the Shilluk with a non-contiguous Western Nile state that is intended to legally formalize the occupations that the Padang Dinka have already achieved militarily. 

Although the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement has made claims to the contrary, the new states continue to be implemented. Chol Thon Balok, the governor of Eastern Nile, has appointed a cabinet and commissioners for the counties. His appointments for county commissioners include militia leaders. He has also terminated the contracts of Shilluk civil servants. This latter measure builds on a campaign of harassment against Shilluk civilians that continued throughout 2015, when Shilluk members of the Upper Nile administration were denied their pay.

Kiir’s new map of Upper Nile is a fundamental obstacle to peace. It is the culmination of the Padang Dinka campaign to control the east bank of the Nile. It will never be accepted by the Shilluk. The result is likely to be an interminable war, with the Shilluk resisting from the west bank of the Nile. Meanwhile, the SPLA and the Padang Dinka militias are likely to continue attacking from the east bank, both on the ground and through air assaults, so as to erode the capacity of the Shilluk to support themselves—while simultaneously heralding a humanitarian catastrophe.

As of mid-February 2016, the only significant Shilluk presence on the east bank of the Nile was in the UNMISS PoC site. This population represented a problem for the Padang Dinka campaign. The SPLA and Padang Dinka militia attack on the PoC site on 16–18 February was part of its overall attempt to remove the Shilluk entirely from the east bank of the Nile, through forcible population displacement. Despite UNMISS claims about ‘youths clashing’, the attack was a carefully planned assault by the SPLA and the militias. UNMISS is unable to protect the Shilluk civilians at the PoC site. Its peacekeepers are unwilling to use force to protect civilians, despite a mandate that enables them to do so. In March 2016, further attempts by armed Padang Dinka to enter the PoC site indicated that the possibility of a further assault on the site is very real.

While the Shilluk have been displaced from Upper Nile, the South Sudanese government has been relocating Padang Dinka from Equatoria to Upper Nile, to settle in areas in Baliet and around Malakal from which the Shilluk have fled. This indicates the degree to which the Padang Dinka war on the Shilluk has national backing. It is also a strategy familiar to the Government of Sudan: occupy an area militarily, displace the population, and then try to sanction one’s land-grab by moving civilians into the area. It is a massive campaign of forcible population displacement—waged militarily, politically, and demographically. 

- # # # -

In late 10th-century Baghdad, a book-seller named Ibn al-Nadim (d. c 998) created a catalog of his holdings. His collection was extensive, covering a vast world of literary output, with texts on Arabic grammar and lexicography, history and biography, law and tradition, philosophy, mathematics, medicine, romances, magic, and alchemy, to name just a few. His list, named Kitāb al-Fihrist (Book of Lists), contained some 7,000 titles with bio-bibliographic information about writers, poets, and literature. Al-Nadim kept meticulous notes on the comings and goings of the literary world. (His Book of Lists, for example, is where we learn about Hazar Afsana, which becomes 1001 Nights.) It was in his world that there lived the great poet (and neo-prophet) of Arabic, al-Mutanabbi (d. 965).

In 1258, Baghdad was plundered and burned by the Mongols, marking the end of an era in which cultural and scientific programs of collection and translation had flourished. The leading scholars, writers, poets, sufi masters, jurists, and historians would leave Iran and Iraq and create new centers of learning and new literary diasporas across Asia and Africa and Europe. Delhi or Istanbul or Damascus or Cairo would become other Baghdads, sites of translation and research and poetry for the centuries that followed. Most of the volumes catalogued by al-Nadim were lost. Yet the index remains.

for they are gone…

Let us ask you to remember March 5, 2007. On that day along Al-Mutanabbi Street, the historic book-selling district in Baghdad, a bomb detonated, killing 27 and obliterating the cultural and literary heart of the city. Baghdad has not stopped burning. 

We also want to be neo-futurists. To take a page from Borges’ imagination, and bring into being that which already exists. To commemorate Ibn al-Nadim, and to remember Mutanabbi Street, we call on you, our fellow writers, to help us reimagine al-Nadim’s literary world. Left with the skeleton of his collection, we solicit brief imagined reviews of the titles in al-Nadim’s Book of Lists. Join us as we take a small step in reconstructing the heart and history of literary Baghdad, and to tie us all in knots closer and tighter than we acknowledge elsewhere.

*

I responded with a review of the apparently anonymously authored book, The Lover of the Hand. It's anonymity, as I make clear below, is a dangerous deception.

A review of The Lover of the Hand

We in Baghdad have our differences, I know. The dust had not even settled over al-Balkhi's disagreement with Ahmad ibn Fadlan about whether the known geographical world can reoccur again in perfect form, before Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari saw fit to reignite the debate with the Christians over whether the Trinity can be understood through human perception. 

Despite these differences, my reader, about one thing we can all agree. The perilous doctrine of acquisitionism has no place in our land. 

The book in front of us is a most dangerous manuscript. This anonymously published edict purports to be a description of a man met by Abu Sahl 'Isa ibn Yahya al-Masihi on his travels near the Caspian Sea. 

The man in question, who in the book is only known as J., spends hours in front of the waves, moving his hands this way and that, like a dancer, in search of what he terms, "the true gesture." By this nonsensical term, the author claims that J. intends to be searching for a unique gesture, one that has not been made in the history of humanity. J., apparently, loves hands so much, that he believes them capable of individuality. 

As must be clear to you by now, my dear reader, this story is a sham, designed to sneak acquisitionism into Baghdad. The author of this book places his argument in the mouth of al-Masihi, who refutes J.'s claims in the following manner. All actions of man have already taken place, in the actions of God. Man merely acquires stage dramas, already scripted—for only God is capable of innovation and novelty, and so man must be an imitator.  

In one fell swoop, the author of the book destroys J.'s search for a unique gesture, and introduces his iniquitous doctrine. For if God originally created all gestures, 'al-Masihi' claims, then ultimate moral responsibility for the actions of the hands of men must lie with God: even the actions of a heretic such as J., who, in his search for a novel gesture, wishes to dethrone God. Thus, 'al-Masihi' claims, God himself searches for his own abnegation.  

God guide us against such heresies! Even the silliest ass, perusing the pages of Al-Kindi, realizes that God creates only grammar, and not actions. God creates the scope for actions, which, while not novel, are human.

If, say, a fire were to sweep the streets of Baghdad, setting ablaze the delicate pages stored in Ibn al-Nadim’s book store, we can be certain that God provided us only with fire, and not with action, and that the blaze set in motion can only be understood in reference to human hands. And if, say, fire wreaks havoc in the great city of Baghdad, in the years to come, again and again, through the hands of local idiots and foreign invaders, we look in vain to God to provide answers: for God provides grammar, and humans, politics. 

We are now writing a book about the trip, On Passage, which is composed of a series of meditations on passage: for each stage of the trip, we both write about a moment of our journey, and then reply to the other's text. It is a conversation in fragments. Slowly, we are building up a patchwork of intersecting meditations on the theme of passage. Below the fold is a series of excerpts from my side of the exchange, meditating on Gurs. You can read earlier excerpts here and here.

1. 

I am worried that we will miss Gurs. 

There is no missing Auschwitz, or Birkenau. The roads that lead to the camps are extensively sign-posted, of course, but they are also sanctified sites: hard edges of truth and right angles of history—there is no mistaking these places for the fields that lie at their edges.

What makes their determination so resolute, I think, is that there is such definitiveness about their place in history. There are still arguments—endless arguments—about what the Holocaust means, or represents, with the sad figures of the deniers at the perimeter of the debate, but the historical landscape is largely contoured, and its equation clear: Nazism equals Holocaust equals concentration camps.

Gurs is more uncertain. Its passage, so to speak, cuts across WWII. The camp was constructed during the Spanish Civil War, when the Blum’s administration interned anarchists and members of the International Brigade, in an effort to mollify Franco’s fascist government. Just before the outbreak of WWII, the French administration then corralled the Germans living in Paris—including Hannah Arendt—and dispatched them to camps for undesirables such as Gurs. When the Germans occupied France, it was the turn of the Communists, Gypsies, and Jews. At the end of the war, the camp was not destroyed, but used again, this time for the hapless Spanish and other communists, as the French government, like so many others, announced that the era of the camp was not a momentary blip in the history of the world, but a logical way of dealing with those who find no place on the checkerboard of national identity.

There are too many reasons for the French to forget Gurs: for its place in the Nazi logic of Jewish extermination, with which so many French collaborated; for France’s continuing use of the camp after the war; and for its resonances with the camps used to detain asylum seekers today.

Part of a child's 'tour' through Gurs. The French reads: "Child's question: What is an undesirable? It is a man or women, generally a foreigner, of whom we are suspicious, often incorrectly. But the police prefer to lock them up." (c) Joshua Craze

Gurs is a monument to a longer history of national isolation of undesirable elements: a place where dreams of ethnic purity and the realities of state power collide. No wonder the French want to forget, when what they are trying to forget is so much of their present. 

After some uneasy minutes driving down the autoroute, my vision navigating industrial fields and placid cows, there is a small sign for Gurs, and we turn in. There are only two cars in the parking lot, which stands in front of a wrought-iron metal enclosure. 

As we get out of the car, I can see ‘Gurs’ etched into a concrete wall, with fake barbed wire curling around the word. This sort of disaster-kitsch serves to distance us from the camp, and consign it to some impossibly remote time that can only be conjured up by the sort of heavy reconstruction normally reserved for our most frivolous fantasies (Disney, medieval re-enactments). 

The enclosure was constructed in the 1980s, by the friends of Gurs; a private group of people whose relatives had been interned here. It is hard to recognize now how little the presence of such places was at issue immediately after the war. Of course, photographs of the concentration camps made the papers, but the Nuremberg trials were largely silent about the camps, and the patina of horror that settled on WWII is a product of the 60s and 70s, not the post-war period. So it is with a place like Gurs. Later, we will come to a cemetery for the Jews killed at the camp: repaired in 1962, it sat solitary and quiet, behind a covering of trees: a private memorial, far from the state’s memory.

Immediately after the last Spaniard was sent free, the camp fell into a very particular form of neglect. Over the main part of the camp, a forest grew. Standing in the drizzle of the main enclosure, I look out at the trees on my left. The trunks are regimented: the long clear lines of the forester, or the arrangement of the New York grid system. It is telling, I think, that it is a forest. Gurs is surrounded by agricultural land, and presumably the camp could have again been made into fertile fields (there is a tractor parked disconsolately at the edge of the forest). But Gurs seems tarnished: something happened here, and it cannot be put to use again. At the same time, the people want to forget, and do not erect a memorial: Gurs becomes a forest, and it is hoped that with the growth of the trees, the memories the soil contains will return to nature. Woodlands; an expansive and active forgetting.

I wonder about the lives of those who live next to Gurs. Opposite the forest there are some quiet detached houses. In the gardens at the front, some of the families have barbecue grills, and one struggles to imagine Monsieur de la Porte, on a Saturday, putting some sausages onto the charcoal’s flames, hearing the sizzle, and looking out onto the reconstructed huts of a concentration camp. 

2.

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.” Isn’t that what underlies your request, made with a hammering head, to the memorial in front of you? It tells me several things. It tells me you do not want to hear about the changing historical circumstances of European traditions of memorialization (as least, not for their own sake), nor do you want to receive a burst of information, to be dutifully digested and regurgitated at a dinner party, coming soon to a town near you. What you ask, instead, is that the entirety of this place’s history is placed into a single experience: a single moment of passion that touches you, and grounds you in the work of time. 

I am with you, father, in your demand. At the moment I am teaching a course on the history of the essay form. All my favourite authors: Montaigne, Emerson, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and one can pick up, in these writers, the same demand: for knowledge to be placed at the service of life, for the dead weight of an overly-sanctified past to be thrown off; for thought and experience to be in perpetual movement. 

But how to get there? It seems to me that leaving it as a demand for experience is a way to get to what you suggest: a theme park. The search for vicarious experience in and of itself ends in boredom: limit-experiences, one after another, with nothing to ground them: for these experiences (what Badiou, inLa Siècle, will call the passion of the real) go only half-way. 

It is right to demand from something only what is alive, only what is vital, but to get there requires going into the thing. There is a lot of wood chopping to be done. Platitudes, metaphors, received wisdom: all of this needs to be cut away: somewhere in that forest, there is something alive, hidden in a faux-log cabin. But we have to connect to it! That is the other half of the sermon. 

We work, we walk: we scan history for those moments of connection, in which we, as subjects, and history, as our object, can be transfigured. 

To get out of history, and into experience, we need history. A lot of it.

3.

Perhaps all that talk of history is a distraction. Perhaps. Amid all the questions of time and place, of historical becoming, lost inheritances, and forgotten debts, I think what I still look for—and what makes me a writer before a philosopher—are characters: condensations of the complexities of a time, who do not so much have to be analysed, let alone judged, but described, and allowed to speak, in such a way that life and experience expand before us. 

If I were younger, I would have held the image of Arendt in front of me as I walked towards the cemetery: the picture of a writer who thought with the greatest urgency about the dark times in which she lived. It is a curse, she noted, to living in interesting times. She thought it took her away from the proper contemplative work of the philosopher, this constant running into the edge of history. Some part of me, I suspect, is still young, and still believes in thinking in the world. Now though, history is gone, and I am left stalking around the edges of a refugee camp on the Sudanese border, not quite knowing how to notate the temporality of what I am experiencing. My voyages run the risk of being vicarious: a particularly painful theme park of suffering, but a theme park nonetheless.

Postcard bought by Alexandre Kojève during his visit to the Dom Church, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France. © Nina Kousnetzoff.My attention is directed away from Arendt, towards Monsieur de la Porte. In him I find a figure for our time: neither the fascists (banal or horrific) nor the crusading philosopher, but a short, pudgy man, who recently took retirement from the post office. On a Sunday, after church—a century-old habit—he sits out in his garden overlooking the woods of Gurs, sitting placidly before the ruins of Europe: empty fields and over-active woodlands. 

Isn’t this Sebald’s position? His writing has the deep-seated distance of someone who has separated from life: a calm and placidity etched out of the Anglia coastland. He used to walk Shingle Street, just as we did, perched between the British naval port where radar was invented and an American airforce base (talk about being written between empires!) But for Sebald it was different: East Anglia was afterward. Nachträglichkeit. The space of quiet after the catastrophe passed. 

Isn’t this also Adorno’s position? He of the grand proclamation: poetry is no longer possible after the Holocaust. If nothing else is possible, what else to do, but stop, and gaze out at our ruins? 

This doesn’t satisfy me, as far as the Holocaust goes: poetry was and is possible: the question that was (and is) posed is one of form. What new forms are required post-war?

Things die long before we realize they are dead. Relationships. Works. Even Gods. We keep pumping out the same old Shakespeare productions and psychologically realist novels long after the worlds they purport to refer to have vanished. We keep clapping along, too.

Monsieur de la Porte serves as a warning figure, then, against the self-satisfaction of nostalgia and ruin. 

I suppose the question that orientates me is still the modernist one: How to make it new? How to destroy history productively, in a way that takes it up and expands the present?

There is something about Monsieur de la Porte that reminds me of our relationship to history, or, to speak more correctly, of our relationship to passage. 

I recall the story of X, who, upon the death of Y, held relentlessly onto her letters. The past was an object and a box: she put the letters in it, and she put her self too, trapped in its confines and its visions.

I much prefer your vision: destroy the past by accepting the work it does on the present. I wonder, though, about the finality of your memories. Isn’t that insistence on accuracy—your accuracy—a way of closing down the present, too. Of insisting on the one story, and holding onto it for dear life? 

I wonder if, in the end, the final historical horizon is not when one has let go of everything, but when one lets go of letting go—of the impulse to destruction that has a history, and has its causes, in both of us.

Perhaps, you say, but constant movement is one thing, and sitting in front of a model concentration camp is another.

Perhaps.

4.

The problem for you is the reality effect. How to ground our movements around this baroque memorial so that we are not tourists, reading just-so stories and eating up our made-for-measure emotions, but people connecting to a concrete reality?

Thus, also, your emphasis on the physical:theirpain,yourheadache. Just as if reading a novel, you find reality in the residues—not in the enormity of the numbers (this many killed, this many forgotten), but in the summer trails and the stubborn persistence of signs that indicate another historical era.

What worries you is the pornographer. It’s a common worry. That is not to denigrate it, but to say: it’s a symptom, a felt inadequacy. Today we have food porn, phone porn, ruin porn. Porn invades all things. Here, we run the risk of Holocaust porn, a vapid commemoration that occurs because that we seek, in the thing, the viewing of the thing. Today, this fear, which is Guy Debord’s, runs both ways. The contemporary dilemma, so well described by Don DeLillo inMao II, is to seek the viewing of the thing in the thing itself, and leave the thing in a hallway of mirrors in which the audience, slobbering at their keyboards, is presumed. 

So much of ‘trauma studies’ (a traumatic addition to the canon of parvenu disciplines) is pervaded by this sort of sentiment: that the present—us, in a field, surrounded by fake barbed wire and calm French houses—is sutured by a lack vis-à-vis a real past event. 

I am not so sure. If the internees who have written about Gurs are to be believed, what is noticeable about these camps is not that they were the highest ideal of the real, but that life felt so unreal, so lacking in any ground that would allow the internees to make sense of their experiences.

InWe Refugees, a text Hannah Arendt wrote forThe Menorah Journalin 1943, she ironically sketches a portrait of Mr Cohn. In Germany, before the Nazis take power, Mr Cohn is 150% German—he speaks better than the natives, knows Mahler better, and can quote Goethe freely. Soon enough, Mr Cohn is forced away from Germany, to France, where he becomes 150% French: Rimbaud rolls from his lips. Here, he thinks, I have finally attained a nationality. My experience of Germany simply allows me to see, in the present, what I lacked in the past: a genuine sense of home. Soon, Mr Cohn is fleeing again, this time to America, where he becomes—you guessed it—150% American, and amid his over-size refrigerators, in a place whose gustatory register runs from peppermint to bubble gum, he declares, I am finally at home. Poor Mr Cohn is neither German, nor French, nor American.

Arendt writes:

“A man who wants to lose his self discovers, indeed, the possibilities of human existence, which are infinite, as infinite as is creation. But the recovering of a new personality is as difficult—and as hopeless—as a new creation of the world. Whatever we do, whatever we pretend to be, we reveal nothing but our insane desire not to be changed, not to be Jews.”

In her essay, Arendt charts the desperate optimism of a population that has lost the co-ordinates that allow the world to appear as a real entity. Later, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt will write about the novelty of these circumstances: a population that cannot flee, but is instead trapped within the nation-state system, but without a place: an excluded included, with nowhere that will accept it. The impasse that she traces in her work is that of a population that is not not Jewish: a double negative that allows for no sublation. 

In 1938, Hans Mayer fled Austria to France, and thence to Belgium. The Belgians deported him as a German, back to France, where the government consigned him to Gurs, as a German alien. After escaping Gurs, he joined the resistance in Belgium, before being captured and tortured. During his torture, his classification was downgraded, from political prisoner, to Jew, and he was moved, first to Buchenwald, and then to Bergen-Belsen, where he remained until the end of the war.

You have never heard of Hans Mayer. He writes that he could no longer use his name, for, as he fled Austria, he realized that the home—the heimat—that had previously provided the most profound textures of his life, was a lie. It was not simply that his home was unavailable. He was not Heinrich Mann, who fled Germany after the Nazi’s took power, but who could console himself with the sense that he and his writing were therealGermany, and the Third Reich, a momentary blip. Home is a delicate fabric, weaved of relations and dreams. Meyer’s friends were informers and Nazis. The dialect of his home became hateful to him. The fabric was ripped to pieces. Mayer writes beautifully of the fate of his German, reduced to minimal conversations among fellow exiles in Brussels, mute words about passports. His German was not free from horror. He could not imagine other worlds, like Mann in California. Instead, Gehölzund Tal would carry the smell of death, and of the rejection of home. 

You have never heard of Hans Mayer. You have, perhaps, heard of Jean Améry, his anagrammatic reconceptualization of his self, created after his release from Bergen-Belsen. In one of the essays that makes upAt the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, entitled ‘How Much Home Does a Person Need’, Améry sketches out how profoundly his generation of German Jews experienced a loss of ground, and just how difficult it was for experience—even vivid, powerful experience, like one might have at Gurs—to count as real. 

Towards the end of the essay, Améry turns to one of the themes that will constitute a later book,On Aging. He writes: 

“But the credit of the person who is aging depletes. His horizon presses in on him, his tomorrow and day-after-tomorrow has no vigour and no certainty. He is only who he is. The future is no longer around him and therefore also not within him. He cannot plead change. He shows the world a naked present. But he can exist nonetheless, if in this present there harmoniously rests a ‘once was.’"

The credit of the future is transformed into the possibilities of the past. But not for Améry. There are no possibilities that remain from his youth: for they all end in the black spider, which reversed the expectations and dreams of home so completely. Thus Améry is denied not just a past, but also an old age. It is in such a world that self-sacrifice becomes impossible to imagine, for the world and self that one might sacrifice are already gone. Arendt, in ‘We Refugees’, is struck by the fact that most of the suicides of her generation are silent. There is relentless optimism, and then the novel use of a skyscraper. “Brought up in the conviction,” Arendt writes, “that life is the highest food and death the greatest dismay, we became witnesses and victims of worse terrors than death—without having been able to discover a higher ideal than life.”

Arendt and Améry converge at the end, in the hope that the one way to live—if not to flourish—in these conditions, is to realize where one is. For both, the situation of German Jews is unprecedented, but also a harbinger of a future world to come, in which homelessness, without blood or soil, is a condition of us all. This is the reality of unreality, of a world torn from its familiar signposts. 

The challenge for us, walking amongst the graves, and writing this walking, is to make of the experience something other than tourism: the vicarious thrill that Améry will describe as a piquant form of alienation. One can go on holiday in history, as much as one can now flee easily to Bali, all the better to celebrate the home to which one returns. 

One response to the tourists-dilemma is simply to make a home in these new surroundings: this it the historian’s calling in time, just as it is the anthropologists, in space. For Améry, however, this is simply creating ersatz homes—rebuilding intellectually the conditions denied to one emotionally, and in so doing, turning away from the dilemma posed by a place like Gurs. Historians and anthropologists alike run the risk of being Mr Cohn. 

But if we neither want to celebrate En Pujos, our home, through this vacation in history, nor make a new ersatz home, here among the skeletons, what is left to us? 

To listen, I think, and realize what in my own passage led me here. This passage, and my encounter with Gurs, lets me know where I am: not as a confirmation, but as a disfiguring, just as, when I return to my home after many months of traveling, I see it in new light, and realize, as the sun shines on a table that I haven’t looked at properly for years, that I never knew this place at all. 

Home persists, but in fractions. Amid an active forgetting.

We are now writing a book about the trip, On Passage, which is composed of a series of meditations on passage: for each stage of the trip, we both write about a moment of our journey, and then reply to the other's text. It is a conversation in fragments. Slowly, we are building up a patchwork of intersecting meditations on the theme of passage. Below the fold is an excerpt from one of my more recent entries. You can read an earlier excerpt here. 

Excerpt from On Passage:

Traveling is never a question of ticking the boxes, but of either realizing the boxes don’t need to be ticked, or else seeing that it is between the boxes, in the passage, that the real journey occurs.

I guess I have always had something against boxes. 

When traveling, the procession of tick-boxes reminds me too much of the press-ganged tour-takers, quickly shuffled from one wonder of the world to the next. Site seen? Tick. Next!

In everyday life, equally, ticking boxes always feels like the stuff that I have to do to get to what I want to do: which is luxuriate in life itself, free from checklists, to-do lists, and instrumental tasks. In the worst moments of my existence, life feels like an unending list of boxes to be ticked, and life itself disappears in-between the cracks. 

There are boxes, of course, and they do need to be ticked: home and hearth must be attended to. On better days, though, it is still between the boxes that life occurs: not in the endless mundane practicalities of our journey, that will take us from car, to train, to bus, to car, and back again, but in the moments around the boxes—that sudden change of atmosphere in ourselves as we realize our train isn’t coming; the way the noise of the bus changes the landscape of travel, and makes certain types of conversation impossible, forms of speech that the train slyly encouraged. 

What I dislike most about boxes, though, my real j’accuse, is that they mislead me. I see the temptation in myself to just tick boxes, and forget anything else exists. I see the box ahead (get to the hotel), and everything else dissolves around it. Life becomes an obstacle course, and my spirit withers.

Part of our bonding, on this journey, must be through ticking boxes together: making it to Gurs and back (alive). Most of the time though, our bonding occurs here, taking a coffee by the side of the train station in Tarbes, the minutes ticking away, as we talk gently, or else share a silence. 

I write these words from the edge of Houston: my second motel in a week. This form of life—anonymous motels, solitude, the ease of leaving rooms and knowing that one will never return to them—suits me. I have never spent long enough doing this to know for how long I could keep taking the walk down the hall to get a bottle of Coca Cola, or stocking up on cashews and bananas to keep me going through the night’s writing. 

Wherever this is, this yellowed room by the edge of the airport, it can hardly be called a home. 

You mentioned that part of our preparation for this trip was reading an essay by Arendt, Gurs’ most famous detainee, We Refugees, which she published in 1943 in a tiny Jewish periodical, The Menorah Journal. It begins with a vicious satirical portrait of Mr Cohn, who is 150% German, 150% Viennese, 150% French, and 150% despised by them all.

Arendt writes of the desperation of assimilation, in a world in which to be stateless, as Arendt will later note in The Origins of Totalitarianism, is to be in a worse position than an imprisoned criminal, who at least can ask the law to answer. 

In fleeing to America, the Jews that Arendt writes about lose their selves, and:

“A man who wants to lose his self discovers, indeed, the possibilities of human existence, which are infinite, as infinite as creation. But the recovering of a new personality is as difficult—and as hopeless—as a new creation of the world. Whatever we do,whatever we pretend to be, we reveal nothing but our insane desire not to be Jews.”

Neither assimilated, nor Jew, but another category, defined in negation: not Jews. In a world of totalitarian states, the stateless peoples found themselves bearing the mark of their identity like a destiny, even as they tried desperately to remake themselves. 

The other approach, if another approach there is, would be to bear one’s name. This is not an answer of rootedness; Arendt was always hostile to nationalism, and subjected the Israeli state to a withering critique. It is, indeed, not an answer at all, but a question: what passage brought me to where I am, and what life does that open out towards? What, on the basis of what I can know about myself, can I become?

In passage, just as when writing, this question can be explored. Every time I move country it is not to adopt a new identity (impossible | hollow | brittle), but to pare down myself a little more. Each movement causes a series of minor deaths; moments and achievements gained in one place, now rendered useless. 

Travel is always full of great indignities and little deaths: people who don’t recognize what you were, who refuse to accord you respect (in moving, who you were is dead already), and lost possibilities (women you could have kissed, prizes you could have won) that wither on the vine as you pass by into autumn. 

Later that summer, after our trip to Gurs, I will be in Lisbon, and there will be exhibitions commemorating the city’s role in World War II. Last port of hope—along with Marseille—for the communists, jews, and faded aristocrats, all filling up the port’s cafes and hoping to hitch a lift on the last ships out of Europe before the continent turns off the light.

People reinvent themselves fantastically. Paperwork is available for a price. Men promise tickets to Brazil, take your money, and promptly vanish. Grand old Viennese families are selling off family heirlooms for a song. Others sit, bitter and resentful, unable to accept that their status in life—all those houses and goods taken away, all those endless stately dinner parties, deathly dull, and endured for nought—is now lost; they drink long into the evening on a tab that will know no closure. 

In the photographs of the era that I will see in Lisbon, the post office and telegram office are always packed. One call. One note. Might be the difference between death and deliverance.  

I prefer this hotel, anonymous and quiet, to my life in Berkeley, at least as it was over the last few weeks that I stayed there. Life there began to seem like an impoverished domesticity, as living alone so often does. One can cook for oneself, yes, but who shall be there to eat the daube and drink the bourgueil? 

One of the roots of my continuing sadness in California is that I have never found the friends who like to spend a long evening at the dinner table, drinking and talking until the early hours. It’s California: there are so very many boxes to be ticked tomorrow, and daube is too rich for these palates. My studio, as much as I love it, has increasingly come to resemble a haunt: a place that doesn’t feel free, but a reminder of everything that is absent. 

The hotel is better. It proclaims itself to be only what it is: minor geometric variations in the position of the television and microwave differentiate one hotel room from another, but, aside from that, it is anonymous, and I can write.  

What links writing and travel is the element of the test. In traveling, can you slough off your heavily earned distinctions? Those marks that, like aristocratic titles in the Lisbon of 1941, mean nothing in this new world. Can you accept that some parts of yourself will have to die (has already died), in order for you to live? In this process, of paring down, building up, and paring down again, I like to think a certain self gets honed. 

What is this self? It’s a test. It’s not certain. Ultimately: the wager is that there is a self which will endure, that is continuous, and cannot be knocked down as easily as houses and aristocratic titles. That’s not assured. Some experiences destroy even that self, as Jean Améry will write. But that is the enjeux. The wager.

So it is with writing, for me, which feels like a constant voyage through my selves and my worlds, with little sense of where I might end. If there is a home, for me, it rests in two things: 

In the voices I hear, on bad phone lines and in brief emails, from the friends and family that I love, and that root me in the world. Losing my friends would be a real loss, not like a house or a title. 

In a pen and paper. In the fact that, whatever is happening to me always has a double side: which is that I can write it down, and reflect on it. This is my saving grace, and I use the term advisedly. In so many situations, from boring parties to unbearable moments in relationships, from places where I am scared to places where I feel I can’t breath, some part of myself says, “this is such wonderful material.” 

Writing is freedom insofar as it is the indetermination of all these experiences: I hold them up, under my pen and paper, and examine them. 

I often wonder if there is an ethics of these moments. Is writing ethical? For houses and aristocratic titles, writing proudly has no ethics. It should be no respecter of decorum, and only a blockhead wrote for social advancement. 

I have no final answer to this question of the ethics of writing. We are in Weber’s sad fallen modern world, and my writing clashes against other imperatives—ethical and political—enough for me to know there is no true answer to the question.

One element of an answer, though, I would like to suggest. Something holds together my two loves, my friends and my writing. It is a question of freedom. To both, anything can be said, and accepted, and that acceptance does not lead to an easy relativism, but emerges out of love: out of a delicacy and tenderness towards the world, and towards each other. 

Sometimes, when I am in an argument with my partner, I try to write out what happens as if it were a novel. That movement to fiction, that removal, often allows things to become softer. Without recrimination, to say how the world is, and still, to love it.

On this trip to Gurs, I feel like I am heaven. I am in passage. I am writing about it. I am with someone I love, to whom I can say anything.