Vivian Chenxue Lu
Rice University
We meet Amito, heartbroken and waiting. Of the many possible narrations of Amito’s story, the most conventional would be a tale marked by child abduction into the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda and forced marriage to become the sixth wife of a soldier. Yet we meet Amito, as Dubal does, over a decade after she has left fighting in the bush (lum), melancholically transitioning to civilian life, waiting for her husband to return, and slowly integrating herself into his family. Her story, and others in Against Humanity, follow in the wake of violent rebellion but are narrated elsewise by its participants. In these stories, violence is “not exclusively something destructive that must be coped with or survived, but can also be creative, producing new forms of mutual belonging” (177). Indeed, Against Humanity continually pushes us to consider how violence generates, not simply destroys, intimate socialities.
This uneasy provocation is one of many in Against Humanity, which seeks to unsettle Western liberal discourses of humanitarian, medical, and developmentalist interventions in Africa. Through an exploration of former rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), Against Humanity troubles foundational liberal categories like rationality and humanity, calling for their abolition rather than expansion. It builds on a critical tradition of dismantling liberalism’s entrenched grip on the Western political imagination, that illustrates how “humanity” as an idea necessarily creates unsalvageable and disposable ‘others’ (Hartman 1997; Wynter 2000; Weheliye 2014; Lowe 2015). Following this critique, any invocation of ‘humanity’ is and should be suspect; humanity as a conceptual weapon is mobilized only in instances to define its outsiders. The LRA rebels are a classic example of this in the 2000s internationalist humanitarian context. Dubalsituates the LRA in the history of colonial violence and its ongoing postcolonial echoes, while carefully emphasizing that this historicization is not intended to be an explanatory or emancipatory mechanism to reclaim a kind of rebel humanity. Rather, by interrogating the category of humanity itself, Dubal builds on a tradition of radical activist-doctors, who relinquish all moralizing pretense of abstractly doing good for humankind. Instead, Dubal calls for us all to make our political projects explicit, as anthropologists, doctors, activists, kin, friends, and worldly co-habitors.
Rebel kin
Amidst fighting, violence and love are conjoined. The story of Amito centers on the concept of militant and rebel kinship, which Dubal describes as mutual belonging and mutual being. Rebel kinship is forged out of collective experiences of forced conscription, fighting, and living in the lum. Uncomfortably, this idea of kinship centers violence in the formation of intimacy, both as content and context for sociality (Thiranagama 2011; Garcia 2010; Lubkemann 2008).
The complexity of the rebels’ time in the lum emerges not simply as a wound or trauma in need of healing. Indeed, our protagonist Amito is under no illusion that while in the bush she wished to leave it. And also, upon leaving, she experiences a recursion of memories, her mind doubling back over and over again, recalling her marriage: “Forged in violence, their relationship endured, held together by strings of love and networks of kinship stewed in rebellion, and holding strong in the face of competing civilian loves and kinships. It was through violence that they had proved their love for each other” (172). As both mutual belonging and mutual being, rebel kin became “husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, and children, caring for one another” that “challenged and often overtook conventional relations” (176). Branching from anthropological expansions of conceptions of kinship to fictive or chosen kin, militant and rebel kin is not a question of agency or genealogy but one grounded through contingent circumstance and collective and shared traumas. The lum is thus undoubtedly a transformative experience, made all the more close to the heart through the experience of violence.
After leaving the lum, Amito becomes embroiled as the centerpiece of a familial conflict around widow inheritance. Her husband’s lengthy and indeterminate status in the lum—confirmed neither to be alive nor to be dead—compels his rebel brother to pursue her in accordance to practices of widow inheritance by brothers, while her husband’s mother refuses to entertain possibilities of his death and parting with Amito on any terms. Thus, rebel kin layers onto preexisting forms of clan kinship upon return to civilian life, both offering significant challenges to it and extending the temporality of the lum and the experience of war beyond the battlefield.
The question of consent haunts public discourse concerning the LRA and frames the possibilities of ex-militants transitioning to civilian life. The idea of consent—and a lack thereof—figures centrally in charges against the LRA for committing crimes against humanity, particularly regarding child soldier abductions, forced marriages, and inflicting violence writ large. Dubal, however, shows us that from the vantage point of former militants, the idea of consent obscures more than it illuminates. In humanitarian discourses, the moment of abduction represents a symbolic break that morally nullifies all interest in subsequent experiences. In addition to foreclosing ideas of sociality like rebel kin, humanitarian discourse and abduction narratives doubly de-humanize soldiers like Amito, as child soldiers and perpetrators of militant violence, and firmly locates the LRA outside of modernity itself. That is, LRA violence was not only understood to be ‘against humanity’ but also rooted in ‘tradition,’ ‘tribalism,’ and spirituality that counters modernist Africanist postcolonial nationalist visions. Yet the rebels experience violence in its full multiplicity, taking the form of victims and perpetrators and the blurred lines in-between, with love and kinship perhaps being the recognition and acceptance that one is both and all of these.
Worldly demands
The experience of moving between worlds is at once disorienting and clarifying, illuminating the contours and limits of each. This process can also render both worlds unsatisfactory; ‘rehabilitated’ rebels psychologically straddle the offerings of civilian life and militant life, often with ambivalence and nostalgia, in contrast to what rosy internationalist developmental accounts might suggest. Against Humanity argues that LRA rebels come to embody “chameleon millenarians” that inhabit fragmented worlds; “Sometimes, the LRA were soldiers of God; other times, they were human-rights defenders of the Acholi people; still other times, they were slaves to a divine will that was uncertain and unknowable….LRA ideology is chameleonic and multiple because it confronts multiple, dynamic forms of governance in the postcolony” (141). This is not a bricoleur story of making do or just getting by; instead, Dubal insists that this chameleonic millenarianism offers an opening to rethink the world itself, forcing a reckoning with multiple rationales, temporalities, visions, scales, and relationships to violence and livelihood.
Against Humanity challenges biomedicine to conceptually expand beyond the individual body as a site of injury and healing. Moving between the worlds of medicine and anthropology, the book also challenges the depoliticization of humanitarian medical practice. Dubal suggests simply that this depoliticization can and often will serve the side of the oppressor (see Dubal 2012 for a call towards “Radical Political Medicine”). Such insights are drawn both from ethnographic fieldwork as well as Dubal’s own experiences as a politically-active medical student and doctor (see Abdou 2009 for his co-authored statement “In Solidarity with Gaza” in The Lancet explicitly calling for a ceasefire). The strength of modern medicine draws from its hyper focus on portioning, isolating, and treating specific parts of the body with technical precision; this is, arguably, also its largest blindspot, in that it excludes broader considerations of causality. As Dubal notes, the politics of medical afflictions are thus rendered invisible and outside of the doctor’s frame of analysis. In the vein of activist-practitioner-scholar medical anthropologists (Bourgois et al. 2017; Metzl and Hansen 2014), the book forcefully argues that “Rather than recognizing the structural causes behind medical symptoms, we must strive to see disease as the embodiment of these structures” (233).
Ultimately, Dubal argues that the concept of humanity obfuscates more than clarifies; it is discursively constantly retooled to “meet the shadowy demands of different discourses (colonial, modern, humanitarian, and so forth) originating in the West, including moral claims on technology, rationality, freedom, and so forth” (24), and forecloses understandings of violence and its consequences as lived experience. Indeed, violence in the book takes on many forms; it is the corporeal violence of tactical war, battle wounds, sexual assault, killing. It is also the violence of colonial and postcolonial trauma, historical memory, the social losses of relocation to and from the lum or bush. In Amito’s case, characterized as ‘creating love out of violence,’ violence is also being thrown into the seemingly impossible, or unbearable, that can only be survived and borne by crafting kin and new forms of relationality. This is not a romanticized form of sociality but an urgent one. It is sociality forged in the violence of uncertainty, of time’s passing in your absence. Like Amito, we wonder about the possibility of return. We wonder, and like Amito, we wait.
Works Cited
Abdou, R., Romm, I., Schiff, D., Austad, K., Dubal, S., Kimmel, S. and Schiffe, E., 2009. In solidarity with Gaza. The Lancet, 373(9660), p.295.
Bourgois, Philippe, Seth M Holmes, Kim Sue, and James Quesada. 2017. “Structural Vulnerability: Operationalizing the Concept to Address Health Disparities in Clinical Care.” Academic Medicine: Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges 92 (3): 299.
Dubal, Sam. 2012. “Renouncing Paul Farmer: A Desperate Plea for a Radical Political Medicine.” Blog: Being Ethical in an Unethical World. <samdubal.blogspot.com/2012/05/renouncing-paul-farmer-desperate-plea.html>
Dubal, Sam. 2018. Against Humanity: Lessons from the Lord’s Resistance Army. University of California Press.
Garcia, Angela. 2010. The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande. University of California Press.
Hartman, Saidiya V. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press on Demand.
Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke University Press.
Lubkemann, Stephen C. 2008. “Involuntary Immobility: On a Theoretical Invisibility in Forced Migration Studies.” Journal of Refugee Studies 21 (4): 454–75.
Metzl, Jonathan M, and Helena Hansen. 2014. “Structural Competency: Theorizing a New Medical Engagement with Stigma and Inequality.” Social Science & Medicine 103: 126–33.
Thiranagama, Sharika. 2011. In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus. Duke University Press.
Wynter, Sylvia. 2000. “Africa, the West and the Analogy of Culture: The Cinematic Text after Man.” Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image, 25–76.