Voices from Mozambique

I’ve been struggling quite a bit with (re-)shaping and (re-)writing the section on Mozambique for my current book-writing project, “Violence and its legacies”. Actually, the conference I went to on Sunday/Monday on transitional justice etc has really helped me to solve a problem in the writing.
At one point during the conference, I remarked out loud on the fact that there we all were, some 45 people, nearly all from “western” or “northern” cultural backgrounds, all earnestly discussing a bunch of problems/issues that disproportinately affect people who come from very backgrounds very different from ours.
“We need to get more people from Africa, from the ‘south’ generally into the room and the discussion here!” I said.
A little later, Maurice Eisenbruch, who’s a professor of Multicultural Health and indeed the Director of the Centre for Culture and Health at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, took my suggestion a little further… He conjectured what a Cambodian or East Timorean traditional healer might conclude if he had been a fly on the wall during our meeting thus far…
(I hadn’t met Maurice before. He was one of a number of really interesting people I met there.)
So okay, the problem I’d been confronting in my writing was mainly this: How to “shape” all the many really significant and interesting things I heard people say in Mozambique last year as I gently elicited their views on the efficacy of the peace process their country went through in 1992-94, as well os whether they might have liked to see war-crimes courts or truth commissions brought to bear on the situation then. (The answer to both those latter questions was almost always a resounding “No!”)
So I had to figue out how to shape (i.e. edit) all the interesting things I’d heard from them, for two main reasons. (1) To get the material to fit into the end of an already overcrowded chapter. And (2), so that my own analytical frame would control the narrative.
After what happened at the conference, I thought…

Heck, I don’t need to control this narrative. Let the people speak, Helena!
Then I thought, too, heck, I don’t need to cram this all into the end of the chapter I was writing: I can give it its own chapter!
So that’s what I started to do today. The existing chapter that I have feels pretty good, and is a good length for a chapter– 10-K-plus words. And this next chapter that is almost writing itself for me from my notes also feels pretty good.
I suspect I’ll probably end up doing the same with the Rwanda and South Africa sections of the book…
I have another three writing/publishing projects of various sizes that are all also coming to a climax right about now. The smallest (from the perspective of my input) is the interview I did with Frontline last week about the Rwanda genocide, that is going to be part of the web archive for the 2-hour special they’re running tomorrow evening. For that, all I had to do today was run thru the trasncript they’d made of our phone interview and correct/clarify a few things. The transcriber did a pretty good job.
The “middle size” one is the fairly lengthy piece on Gaza etc that I wrote for Boston Review last month, which is also due to come out tomorrow or thereabouts. (I’ll let JWN readers know when they get the full text up on their website.)
And the largest project has been this lengthy process of co-authoring a whole book-length manuscript with 13 other folks, most of them Quakers, on the Israel/Palestine situation. The book is almost ready!!! I can’t believe it! We are down to fine-tuning issues on the cover, the maps, and some last-minute rights issues… But I went through the page-proofs fairly rapidly yesterday, and it’s looking beautiful.
It is called: When the Rain Returns: Toward Justice and Reconciliation in Israel and Palestine. Of course, when it comes out, I’ll let you all know and give you ordering information!
Anyway, all of this stuff going on means I haven’t had much time recently to blog. Dead-tree publishing projects keep getting in the way here!