Books: Chronicling the Toll of War
Anjan Sundaram, an award-winning journalist whose previous books covered the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo and totalitarianism in Rwanda, decided to leave the safe, if claustrophobic, confines of his home in a small fishing community on Canada’s Atlantic coast to chase a story involving the “world’s most obscure war.” He writes about the consequences in this memoir.
The Central African Republic (CAR), a sparsely populated and landlocked country, was gripped by a civil war a decade ago. “This conflict was perhaps even more deadly than the Syrian war, which at the time dominated newspaper headlines,” notes Anjan Sundaram in Breakup: A Marriage in Wartime (Catapult). “But Central Africa, home to several long-running wars, rarely made the first page.”
Sundaram craves to tell the story from the front lines because nobody else would. In doing so, he makes the difficult choice of leaving behind his wife and infant daughter in small-town Canada, a decision that eventually proves fatal to his marriage.
As he prepares to leave his infant daughter, Raphaëlle, Sundaram is filled with the dual emotions of anticipation and anxiety—anticipation for the uncertainties in wartime and anxiety in separating from his daughter: “So I felt a thrill at her presence along with a void—the sense of death as well as the opening to immortality. This paradoxical experience of procreation was charged, euphoric, troubling.”
Sundaram ventures into the CAR with a friend, Lewis Mudge, who works for Human Rights Watch, an organization that, among other things, documents crimes against humanity. The story’s crescendo is a moment of life and death for them at the hands of a maniacal army commander. A satellite phone call is made to higher-ups in New York, and word gets to Washington, D.C. about two “Western” men in danger. The military commander lets them go—and also abstains from massacring 3000 people holed up in the same church as Sundaram and his friend.
Sundaram returns home to a troubled marriage, complicated by what he perceives as his wife’s dismay at his continued quest for war-time experience to the detriment of his and his family’s safety. Their marriage flounders through minus two freezing winters on the Canadian Atlantic coast and putters out over a young couple’s differing understandings of commitment and belonging. A visceral sensuality permeates Sundaram’s work and one that comes from having lived, endured, and felt the experience of war, longing, belonging, and loss. However, the stark and stripped-down writing leaves the reader wanting more. The storytelling and journalism, while gripping and intense, struggles to stretch out a field experience that perhaps may have lasted but a few weeks. And the juxtaposition of the personal conflict and professional field experience at times feels forced, with not enough of the field conflict to balance out the storm raging on the home front.
The overall effect on the reader is one of a fever dream, fleeting images of war in the CAR, the turmoil at home, life and death moments, love and longing moments. The same treatment in the hands of another author would be laudable but knowing what we know about Sundaram’s talent, the memoir leaves the reader wanting more—more facts, more experience, and quite literally more of the fine writing that distinguishes Sundaram as a unique and compelling voice in long- form journalism.
But perhaps it is just as well that a story about conflict in the CAR is told in exactly this form. The Central African Republic is not a region, Sundaram reminds us. It is a country in the middle of Africa that is often mistaken for a geographical description. And we need to be reminded of this. As someone who works in global health and supports the delivery of public health services in the country, I know that it does not make for a compelling narrative. So perhaps it is just as well that Sundaram weaves the personal into the geopolitical in the hopes that such storytelling would be picked up.
In the end, though, this book is a must-read for the stark turn of phrase, for the crimes committed against forgotten people, and for that eternal pull and push between love, longing, and desire.
Girija Sankar, a freelance writer based in the Atlanta metro area, works in global health.
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