Yes, Chinua, Things do fall apart

Watch this on NY Times.com.
It is a short news blurb on the women of the Congo.
Some of the women I worked with in Uganda were refugees from the Congo. I feel anxious when I think about how big, how long, how devastating this war has been to so many thousands of people.

With the recent peace talks I wonder who will be the first to surrender. Surrender in Military definition is when soldiers or nations stop
fighting and become prisoners of war. Of course, nobody every mentions
that the white flag is usually conditional. There is always something
we just can't give up. Something we will still die to hold onto. And
what happens if there are multiple truths, perspectives, ideas we are
all clinging to the death for? Who surrenders what? So we negotiate
surrender. I'll give this up if you give that up, and then are we
even? Men sit around in suits and sign pieces of paper that are
contracts on other peoples lives. Surrender becomes the compromise,
and at once, the center of the story.

Its kind of like, Yes, Chinua, Things do fall apart: I can't talk my
way out of it. or into it. Just have to lay still and accept the
uneasiness as it washes over my broken body. a wave, pushing over
sand. And sometimes, when I wake, I am no longer who I thought I was
At ALL. I am only the pieces held together with blood and piss and
tears. Chaotic energy sparking into ash at your feet, blending into
the Earth as a molecule of something bursts into nothing and is gone.

Women of East Africa. Women all over who have been violated in the name of a battle being waged by men. Women who give birth and die for political violence.
I offer you my hands. My heart. My voice, which I am so privileged to have been taught how to use.
And yet I feel as powerless as you. When one woman is violated, we all are. Rape as a tool of war makes all of us prisoners. How do we shift what has already devastated? In the hearts of the men who rape. In the boys who are now growing and being raised by mothers who conceived and gave birth in violence. How do we shift the cycle?

These photos were taken by me in Uganda. Child Mothers to the left, and a TBA with a child she caught in an IDP camp to the right.