July 12, 2010
Ordinarily, I don’t write strict commentaries or even specific narratives, but after the events of July 11 in Kampala (Violent Image Warning on Link), I felt the need then to organize my thoughts, same as I feel the need now to post them here. And, for that reason, it’s taken some time to edit and select what to say. Forgive me if this departure is stark in comparison or overly prosaic and a bit late. I promise there’s backlogged entries here to compensate. Kampala remains a place full of such overwhelmingly beautiful stories that it would be a shame if this was the only one you read.
To say, I could have been there wouldn’t necessarily be true. I really wouldn’t have been there. I’ve been to the Ethiopian Village, and I’ve been to Kyadondo Rugby Club. And, I’ve even watched one of the World Cup games outside the house this past week. But, I wouldn’t have been there–not tonight. But, that doesn’t change the tangibility of what just happened.
It’s palpable in the air. It hangs. Like the layers of the moisture changed their form, a new thing that feels old hanging over us all, wrapping this whole city in uneasiness, pangs of fear in the humidity. And, though violence is something that Uganda has known in its history and regionally, it feels foreign to me to be so unsettled on these streets I know so well. It’s not normal to step out of a taxi well before the park to avoid a crowd, or to be home just as the sun sets.
Even now, Al-Shabbab, a Somali militant group, is claiming these attacks. And, I can’t help but wonder why anyone would claim this? Why would someone want this to be theirs? And, it makes me think of “the problem.” Someone reminded me that Al-Shabbab means “The Youth,” and most likely, these bombings were perpetrated by those younger than me. Young men poisoned by something that says bloodshed is the way to God. And, the problem isn’t that their young, or even what tells them that bloodshed is the way to God, or that they don’t know something, or that they inherently are some horrible thing.
The problem is poverty. It’s certainly not Islam. It’s not some thing stored up in humanity’s hearts, secretly hidden, tied to their nature. If it’s that, then we’re all murderers, rapists; we’re all gunshots and bullets and bombs. But, we’re not all that. When you strip us bare, though, how different are we? Any extremist ideology has to have its breeding ground. The ideologies can always be swept from the streets, but if the circumstance remain the same, the next ideology will come up and run rampant and violence will follow. Or, sickness. Or, whatever malady might spring up in the other’s place. As long as the circumstance remains the same, as long as the systemic problem remains, the symptoms will always continue.
In the day after these horrible acts of violence, I sat in a familiar place: the pews of Namirembe Cathedral. I used to spend every Tuesday morning here, seated in the long wooden pew, poring through my journal, trying to make celestial sense of what was unfolding before me, reading the works of Wendell Berry and Elaine Scarry. Now, a Monday, I do nearly the same. I leaf through A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979 – 1997 and find this passage:
“Great deathly powers have passed:
The black and bitter cold, the wind
That broke and felled strong trees, the rind
Of ice that held at last“Even the fleshly heart
In cold that made it seem a stone.
And now there comes again the one
First Sabbath light, the Art“That unruled, uninvoked,
Unknown, makes new again and heals.
Restores heart’s flesh so that it feels
Anew the old deadlocked“Goodness of its true home
That it will lose again and mourn,
Remembering the year reborn
In almost perfect bloom“In an almost shadeless wood,
Sweet air that neither burned nor chilled
In which the tenderest flowers prevailed
The light made flesh and blood.”– Wendell Berry, 1980, III
The words remind me. It’s not pedantic. It’s people. Youth, gathered to watch the spectacle of sport, seated in white plastic chairs, as Spain and Holland dragged out a stalemate in the first half, couldn’t suspect that they would go from rapture to panic. Young men, their hearts bursting at the thought of the life they left in Somalia or the life they lead now in circumstances so dire we could never comprehend them if we have the means to even access the words on this imaginary page, held that unseen coercive power. And, it struck like lightning, grand and incomprehensible–so much so that it felt like it had been suspended in the sky above us. Now we walk through the aftermath of a storm as the Sabbath light breaks.
And, in that light, whatever sense I try to make from it, falls through my fingers like grains of sand. It’s about poverty, yes. It’s that poverty strips us all, haves and have-nots, of our collective humanity. It’s about vulnerability. But, it’s not all that.
It’s young men and women who’s lives have been cut short, and there’s little sense we can make from any of that.
This is me writing off the top of my head.
Is it poverty? Or maybe, if such a thing has such power, we should capitalize the “P”. “Poverty.” Maybe it’s poverty. It probably has a lot to do with it. But I think it’s poverty and something else. More than monetary poverty, it may be a poverty of the self, poverty of the soul. It’s possible that these youth have not lived at a higher level of wealth than that of their ancestors. But the rest of the world has grown rich with things, and what was not poverty, now is. Where there was contentment in work and simplicity, there is now anger and powerlessness. Powerlessness. Maybe that should be the other capital “P”. When there is power, there is also a lack of it. Poverty and powerlessness are not simply material and political. They are, but that is not all of it.
You’re reminding me of Jayakumar Christian talking about Poverty & Powerlessness. And, I recall the four dimensions as well: srama, desa, kala, and guna–don’t worry, I’m poring through the text as I type this, that didn’t come from pure recollection.
And, you’re right, it’s not strict, socio-economic poverty, it’s whole poverty–a poverty of being and opportunity.
But, what I think he concludes and I’m coming to is that poverty fundamentally alters one’s power to construct and participate in a social reality. And, exclusion and incapability really do creative a palpable void that can be filled by any damaging ideology: extremism, despair, and so on.
I like where your heads at Chuck; I’m tracking. Let’s change the world, man.
Powerful and well written, my friend.
Keep them coming.
I really like that, Chuck.
I truly think the volatile fodder behind circumstance is Powerlessness. Humanity will go to drastic measure to remember or assert that they are Human. I feel where both of you are heading.
Where I think I disagree with you, Joel, is that there is something within all of us that is murderous and hateful and scared. It’s only something I feel intuitively; has no words or scientific backing. Because as a development student, relevant poverty is pernicious. And even if Somalia, Congo, Chechnya, Romania, and Burma economically developed, there’d always be somewhere that the West asserts “isn’t far enough along”. If we all got to a certain level of well-being, I don’t believe these incidents would completely go away, just subside a little. As a sociologist foremost, I definitely think it’s our environment that dictates whether that dark thing inside us sees ignition.