Searching for Normal in the Wake of the Liberian War. Sharon Alane Abramowitz
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habits of violence that had been instilled in youth over the long period of war took years to fade away. Boundaries needed to be re-created around physical, domestic, and privately controlled space, and the battles to reenact those boundaries were often public, heated, and intensely personal.
In the relatively closed social, economic, and spatial boundaries of the postwar period, Liberians were transformed into beneficiaries of a massive, uncoordinated, and decentralized project of humanitarian social engineering. This included modernist practices of social persuasion like media campaigns, mass education initiatives, radio shows, theatrical presentations, and communal instruction in human rights, gender-based violence, and “peacebuilding.” In a parallel social universe, churches and mosques were used as vital locations for trauma healing, national forgiveness, and conflict resolution (Heaner 2010). People sought the Good News and instructions for living a good and moral life at church services, prayer meetings, and Bible groups, which also imposed elaborate social rules and behavioral restrictions on believers’ everyday lives. In addition, in such places of worship war criminals, war barons, prostitutes, and nearly everyone else sought, and gained, forgiveness and redemption for their wartime pasts.
Because the median age of the population during the postwar period was eighteen and because the Liberian war lasted, on and off, for approximately thirteen years, by the time the war ended, more than half the Liberians left alive had almost no memory of life before the war, and the balance of the population had spent most of their adult lives as transients. In contrast to the situation in neighboring Sierra Leone, where many rural communities remained intact during the war, many Liberian youth had no adult relatives in the country who could tell them what life had been like before the onset of the political violence of the Samuel Doe era. The change promised by the postconflict transition wasn’t just ephemeral—it was epochal, and very strange and unknown.
From the center of Monrovia, I watched the human environment of postwar subjectivity and tried to gauge social, cultural, and psychological resilience. From my perch, it seemed that the norms of West African life were turned inside out. On the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, in 2005, I visited Mahtahdi, a suburban Monrovia neighborhood, for a community-based psychosocial training. There, I watched from the back of a truck as a surge of youth rioted around an NGO vehicle and started to throw rocks, while a dozen boys and girls trampled over old people in order to rip their sardine sandwiches and juice drinks out of their hands. On the main streets of Monrovia, and in the vicinities of the important markets, young men and women milled outside, seething with anger and loss, looking for what to do next with their lives. They pressed their bodies against doors and gates, and when they opened, they were forcefully shooed away by guards. Women hunched over squat cooking grills roasting bananas and raged over the cost and poor quality of commodities. The food vendors along the sides of streets had very little to sell, and it was of terrible quality. Impoverished youth, handicapped men and women, and street children climbed on top of NGO Land Rovers stuck in traffic and pelted NGO cars with rocks. Lebanese shopkeepers humiliatingly castigated Liberian employees. Even the nuns seemed angry.
The economics of postconflict life are almost never quantified in humanitarian policy research, but they ought to be. With the end of the war, economies of housing, food, and transportation were inflated by the vast international presence and by the country’s total dependence on imported goods for every alimentary, construction, and transportation need. Food, clothing, and construction materials were scarce and prohibitively expensive as hundreds of thousands of Liberians sifted through the broadest reaches of the city trying to reclaim land and rebuild housing structures. In the meantime, they imposed on the uncertain hospitality of friends and relatives, squatted in abandoned buildings, or took rooms in dense and partially exposed housing arrangements at inflated rents.
At the same time, the humanitarian industry was, without a doubt, the single biggest formal employer in Monrovia and it was the largest, most reliable, and most certain source of scarce capital in a cash-poor environment. The need and desire for jobs in the humanitarian economy led thousands of Liberians to make great personal sacrifices. Psychosocial workers I interviewed left their children alone, together, in cities halfway across the country so that they could take field-based positions for a global NGOs, and worried about their children’s welfare under the oversight of strangers. Men and women abandoned parents and marriages in order to relocate for NGO jobs, and from afar, fretted about their spouses’ fidelity, their parents’ health, and their siblings’ spending of salary remittances. People spent half of their salaries on complex transportation arrangments in order to retain the jobs that promised the distant possibility of promotion and capital accumulation.
In contrast to the rapid restoration of normative social order that Coulter describes in Sierra Leone’s postconflict recovery, Liberian social life was filled with what James has called “routines of rupture,” or “multiple ongoing disruptions to daily life rather than single traumatic events after which there is a ‘post-’” (James 2010, 132). Rupture itself became a part of everyday discourse, as Liberians talked about their daily experiences of ruptures in the language of trauma. “All of Liberia is traumatized,” I heard time and time again. Borrowing NGO lingo, people said of each other, “There isn’t the human capacity. People are totally traumatized.” When Liberian government officials, expatriate NGO workers, repatriating Liberian refugees, and UN staffers used the word “traumatized,” the term indexed a social pathology of an inability to participate in the “normal.” Cultural space was filled with radical questioning, uncertainty, doubt, and fear, which manifested themselves in humanitarian trainings, education programs, and occupational training initiatives. Within this artificial time frame, everyone present was intent on combating the latent potential for the reversion to violence. Veena Das wrote, “It is not only violence experienced on one’s body in these cases but also the sense that one’s access to context is lost that constitutes a sense of being violated. The fragility of the social becomes embedded in a temporality of anticipation since one ceases to trust that context is in place. The affect produced on the registers of the virtual and the potential, of fear that is real, but not necessarily actualized in events, comes to constitute the ecology of fear in everyday life” (Das 2007, 9).
Change had its euphoric and dysphoric potentialities. Time seemed to drag endlessly, but there was a sense of panicky haste around emerging political and cultural possibilities. Women who sought greater political participation rallied behind the presidential candidacy of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (“Ma Ellen”) and held billboards that read, “Now is the time for us to get on top.” Social roles were being redefined in people’s intimate relationships, norms and morality were being challenged, and histories underwent recodification. In postconflict time, there wasn’t just a possibility of transforming the self into a new form of social citizen; there was a moral imperative to do so. Politicians, pastors, and humanitarians called upon each and every Liberian citizen, saying, “Now is the time”: to change, to search for their own culpability in perpetuating the war, and to take upon themselves the mantle of responsibility for change.
Among humanitarian actors, state bureaucrats, and Liberian civilians, I found a vocal diversity of interests, intentions, and wills to govern, as well as an intense debate over the meaning and application of sovereignty in their daily lives. Across Liberia, people negotiated the pragmatic meaning of postconflict human rights, which promised autonomy and independence in their everyday lives, as well as the rights, goods, and services they were entitled to from the Liberian state (and its proxy, international NGOs). And across Liberia, UNMIL media campaigns issued a call for the restoration of law and order through advertising methods like peace concerts, billboards, posters, and radio jingles.
Postconflict life in Liberia was life outside of the law, in search of law and order. In the early years after the war, when Liberian civilians assembled themselves into community watches to protect against murderous bands of armed burglars, international observers both hailed vigilantism as a sign of civil society and denounced it as a sign of lawlessness. The courts were in disarray, the police forces were effectively demobilized, and the legal system was in a state of suspension, while international consultants and local leaders sifted through twenty years of changes to the Liberian constitution and Liberian legislation in search of the letter of “the law” that was to be restored. In the meantime, the daily violence of postconflict life involved minute, nuanced,