| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Shari Eppel Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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Could you tell us about a case, how this works its way through the community?
Sure. We have many cases which are interesting, but one which stands out for me is a case of a man who came to us in his late thirties, and was very keen for an exhumation. His father had been murdered by Zipra during 1978, and buried in a grave, handcuffed to another man. He had been in the process of negotiating a bride price with this other man to marry one of his daughters, at the time of his death. And because of being killed in this process of labola, arranging the bride price, the family couldn't get married, nobody in the family could get married, because Ben, the spirit, was angry. And until Ben had a decent funeral, no one was going to get married in the family. So for twenty years -- he was finally exhumed in 1999 -- for twenty-one years, nobody in the family could get married. And for Israh, his son, to be in the late thirties and to be the head of the family, and not to be married -- that's just absolutely culturally unheard of. So we exhumed these two, and we were able to identify them, using the Argentinean forensic team's expertise, and we returned the bodies for reburial. And then had the most wonderful, traditional funeral, which was very fascinating, in terms of all the traditional rituals which are played out. Within a month of the funeral, Israh was married, and now, a year later, he has a child, and says, "My father's spirits are keeping blessings on my head because he is so happy that now he has been honored."
How would you characterize these living victims emotionally?
Traumatized, immobilized -- what other words come to your mind, to help us understand the emotional impact of this hidden history, both personally and for the community?
It is very interesting. I think there's a whole range of levels of coping and disorder around this, as you will find with anything. Some people have a great deal of resilience and cope well, others bear a wound that goes on for decades. Israh was a very competent person. He wasn't somebody who was depressed, he didn't have PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], he didn't have any emotional problems, but he was just stuck. Culturally, he couldn't get married. My perception of it from where I'm sitting as a Western person, looking at the situation, what I noticed at the funeral was that a traditional ritual took place, where Israh turns the spear of the Idabeli warrior, goes ahead of the coffin, and when his father is buried, he breaks the spear in half and buries the handle with his father's coffin. His first role to signify taking over the headship of the family is to fashion a new handle for the spear. This is the public transfer of power from the deceased to the living. This had not happened in a publicly witnessed ritual, and therefore Israh did not feel empowered to do something like get married; he didn't feel okay in that role. He needed this funeral, he needed this public ritual of taking the headship of the family, in order to be able to get married. I'm not sure how one defines that in terms of race and psychology, but we could say he was stuck, his life in a particular area was stuck, and he was going to be stuck there forever, as long as he couldn't go through that ritual.
What is the political implication of this? If a family or a community is devastated in this way, it must lead to a political passivity, which is consistent with what the perpetrators of the original crime had in mind.
Absolutely. This is one of the most iniquitous consequences of violence. These emotions that people have are enormous. You can imagine. You know, you've seen half your village massacred. Perhaps you're a child and you've seen your parents killed, your mother raped, whatever. And you're told to just deny that these things ever took place. The feelings linked to that are there. So what I see is a huge amount of energy being tied up in anger and pain, and suppression of anger and pain. Of course, subterraneally, these emotions will find a way up. But what they tend to do is come up and cause dysfunction in the community, where people point fingers at each other, they accuse each other of being sell-outs because it's much safer to blame your neighbor as a sell-out than it is to point a finger to the government and say, "They are murderers." That's a very, very threatening thing to do. So you blame your neighbor. What you're left with, then, is a dysfunctional community, a community that can't mobilize the energy or cooperation to make something like development succeed. It's one of the major contributing factors to underdevelopment and failed development initiatives, probably throughout the Third World.
In your project, the next step is to link development projects to these kinds of healing processes.
Yes. And, again, this is community-driven. Apart from this enormous "What can you do about the angry spirits?" and "What can you do about the bones?" which was the major demand, we also had, "We want an irrigation project." And for a long time, we kind of said, "Listen, guys, we're psychologists, we don't do pipes." But eventually we did, because there was an awareness that if you're talking about empowerment, emotionally re-empowering a community, you also have to talk of economic empowerment, more or less in parallel. These are very poor communities, and you can't heal people, you can't do away with anxiety and depression if people are still going to be hungry and wake up hungry, and without skills and without occupation.
One of the arguments in the international human rights debate is cultural relativism -- how can you enforce universal norms or apply them in particular parts of the world. But what you're suggesting in your description of your work is an openness to a redefinition of what these human rights terms mean in a particular setting.
Sure. I think there's a misconception that psychological disorders and definitions of them are culturally mutual things. People pay lip service to the fact that they aren't, but, you know, it's no more than lip service on the whole. Something like post-traumatic stress disorder -- it's a very culturally-specific disorder in many ways. It's something which grew out of Vietnam War veterans, basically; it's a very American idea. I'm sure we will see some of those symptoms in our communities, but the point is, is that important? Is that important to the communities? What's important to them is the angry ancestral spirits, and the way they interpret those symptoms. They may have what an American psychologist would call nightmares, and they call them visitations from the spirits of the dead. And because they're defining them in that way, what's needed to control the symptom is going to be different.
So I think another very, very important lesson that I have learned is that when you're working in a community which defines itself first and foremost as a community, you realize how individualistic Western psychology is. And this is not helpful in our situation.
When you say "community," you're actually talking also
about a broader group than the victims, because you've had cases where perpetrators have appeared at your door to ask to revisit the site where they have committed crimes. Tell us about that.
Yes. We've had a very interesting case that we've been working on for quite a few months now, where we had two murderers come to us asking for help, because they were being haunted by the spirits of one of the people that they had murdered. The victim was a headmaster, whom they had strangled in the dead of night back in 1985, just before our first independent election, when a lot of people, community leaders, had been disappeared and murdered. They put a rope around his neck and he had been strangled upright, standing, by people pulling this rope. The Fifth Brigade [soldiers] who came to us were among these perpetrators, and they had been haunted by the spirit of the person that they had killed. They had what is known in that culture as engorsi, and they wanted to be freed of the spirits. They felt what the spirit wanted was an exhumation and a reburial.
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