Page 34 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

A few months later, I dreamed again:

I am on the battlefield of Gallipoli, walking through heavy artillery fire. I seem to be in a parallel reality.

Bombs explode around me, clumps of earth and gore are bursting at my feet. Bullets whiz past, zinging

right next to my ears. I walk, safe from injury, witnessing everything in slow motion. As I watch, a circle

of women appears. One by one, they step onto the battlefield. Each of them claims a fallen soldier -­‐ a

husband, a brother, a son tenderly kneeling by the corpse, lifting him into her arms, caressing his face

as she weeps. Each of them is singing her lament. A beautiful, terrible keening rises up, columns of

wailing and grief.

These dreams and others led to everyday gandhis hosting Liberia’s first post-­‐war traditional Mourning

Feast. During a Mourning Feast, the extended family and community of a deceased person gather to

resolve their differences and put any lingering conflicts to rest with the dead, who are then sent ‘across

the river’ with drumming and dancing, taking the community’s conflicts with them. The ceremony

concludes with a communal feast during which the act of eating from the common bowl is an oath of

reconciliation. (I found out two years later that local dreamers had dreamed that the dead had told

them: We, the Dead, have come together. We are united. It is time for you, the living, to do the same.)

As in most traditional/indigenous cultures, in Liberia it is well understood that if it weren’t for our

ancestors, we wouldn’t be alive today. Therefore it is our pleasure and our obligation to honor them.

But, since the war that consumed the country from 1989-­‐2004, over 250,000 bodies were left

scattered helter-­‐skelter across the land. These rites had not been performed and the deaths had not

been grieved, leaving the country in the lingering paralysis of unhealed trauma and unexpressed grief

along with the anguish of failing to honor their dead.