What can we learn from this story of reconciliation?
The collective narrative of war is a powerful framework for shaping the South Sudanese culture and justifying the continual cycle of revenge and violence. There are many personal stories of pain and suffering that feed into and strengthen it. These stories generate combative politics and are driven by the local, national, and international conflicts currently impacting South Sudan–but there are few stories that demonstrate something different. Nyok’s story of reconciliation has a different focus for a different outcome: it shifts the dynamic of the past, that of victim/perpetrator, to a new reconciled relationship in the present, in order to create a future that resolves conflicts peacefully.
Nyok takes this story of reconciliation and uses it strategically: to make sense of himself as a peacebuilder, and then to communicate to his audience the steps of evolution in becoming a peacebuilder–a change in ideology and a way of building new relationships across conflicts. It is a shift from public politics to personal vulnerability. In this process Nyok tailors his story to be able to be heard by all sides of the conflict and to introduce them to the idea of reconciliation. This story demonstrates that it is possible to change the dominant cultural war narrative. When one person changes, it shows the war narrative is not a given, and that current violence and bloodshed are not the only way forward.
70
The conversations generated by this story in reconciliation meetings are focused social engagements between divided groups. Even when people do not agree with the idea of
reconciling, they can still see the reality of a reconciled relationship in front of them. Why would the audience put aside the protection of their tribal and political alliances in order to be
vulnerable? Because in the end the war is making everyone and their families continually
vulnerable, not only to the risk of relatives being killed, raped or turned into refugees, but also to the vulnerability of being manipulated by divisive politics, and caught in a continuous cycle of trauma, anger and grief.
This story not only demonstrates an alternative to violence and division, it models how to go about reconciliation. Nyok is widening the concept of how South Sudanese can respond to conflict in the same way that his own experience and thinking have been widened by the
reconciliation stories and experiences of others. Ochs and Capps describe the strategy and work that stories can be used for:
“Whether or not a narrative offers a resolution for a particular predicament, all narratives, through dialogue, action, and reflection, expose narrators and listener/readers to life's potentialities for unanticipated pain and joy. Herein lies the spiritual and therapeutic function of narrative activity. Artists and healers alike use narrative to confront audiences with unanticipated potentialities, by either (a) laying bare the incommensurabilities of a particular lived situation, (b) luring the audience into an imaginary, even shocking, realm where prevailing moral sentiments do not apply, or (c) improvising a form of narrative expression that unsettles status quo principles of a genre” (Ochs and Capps, Narrating the Self 1996, 29-30).
Nyok’s reconciliation story works on all three levels outlined here by Ochs and Capps. (a) He struggles within the dilemmas of his own people about how to respond to the conflict, to either attack or be helpless victims, and challenges the narrative of victimization, and at the same time challenges the status quo of perpetuating the cycle of violence. (b) He demonstrates an alternative of reconciliation within the conflict, from his own lived experience, and viscerally
71
demonstrates this in the meetings through his friendship with Peter Kaka, creating a new imaginary that turns the current relationship code upside down. He also resituates the power structures of a militarized cultural, by establishing new networks of trust across cultural
boundaries, working informally, and recalling older tribal traditions that were/are inclusive and adaptive to each other’s needs. (c) Finally, Nyok unsettles the status quo by not allowing his story to be shut down by formal networks of power, within either the Dinka or Murle
communities, by setting up an alternative space where all tribal groups are welcome to be a part of the reconciliation process. Once they enter that space, he switches from blaming and trading political power points, to sharing about specific relationship changes and trust-building actions, and creates a platform for open dialogue, which invites others to be vulnerable too.
The protracted violence of the war in South Sudan continues to wreak havoc in tearing relationships apart between the communities, but over time an informal network of peacebuilders has grown out of the work of SSAPI, other peacebuilding groups, and individuals taking their own initiatives to reconcile. This network brings together the “not-like-minded and not-like- situated” to work together in healing the “social fabric” for all the South Sudanese community, and particularly those that are most vulnerable. These unseen and informal networks of trust are the foundation of formal and permanent institutions for peace. Each conflict and culture have their own particular way of building such networks; this is one story of how the South Sudanese diaspora are doing it.
72