by Minot, Susan
The dead Harry looked back at her from where he was with all the other dead people. His attitude was decidedly not, I am with you forever. He appeared calm, speechless and apart. His being seemed to express itself in a straightforward way. He did not even say it, but his being did. It said, I am not with you. I am not where you are. I am not alive. I am somewhere else entirely forever.
The only thing to do with loss is to bear it.
The question still pressed on: What to do? It was imperative that she do something, and that it be good.
She thought of the children. Harry would always be mixed in with them. She might do something more for the children. Maybe there was more to be written about them. She couldn’t take away what had happened. What had been done to the girl Esther Akello, that couldn’t be changed. You couldn’t pull the sorrow out of people. It was in them for as long as it lasted, showing in their faces, in the slow blink of their eyes. You could not take away what had been done and lend them good fortune. She couldn’t switch places with them. And would she anyway?
No, Jane couldn’t live anyone else’s life but her own. Though, looking back, she saw she had been trying hard.
She kept thinking, What is my life? What to do?
So many things in this world were cracked and sad, and still a glowing showed through and moments came when everything was lit and love happened. Every tree stood where it belonged, each bird had perfect feathers folded against its tiny body, each holding a heart beating madly. Life was a vibration of light and dark, and love illuminated that life. Then darkness descended and your heart was ripped apart. So that was part of it, a requirement of the miracle. Death stayed, lurking in the shadow of beauty. In the bargain, life both had meaning and had none. So, she kept thinking, what to do? What to do?
A pressure in her would not stop asking. There were not many things she could make better, not many things she could change. And yet … and yet … sparks of possibility still shot out. Unasked for, they came and randomly flew up.
Notes and Acknowledgments
The abduction of the girls from St. Mary’s College of Aboke, Uganda, is based on real-life events that occurred in the early-morning hours of October 10, 1996, following Independence Day on October 9. Sister Giulia’s story is based on that of Sister Rachele Fassera, a nun of the Comboni Order, who followed the rebels into the bush to retrieve all but thirty of her girls. The author acknowledges her experience and the telling of it as an integral part of this book. Of the real thirty girls of St. Mary’s, four died in captivity and the remaining twenty-six eventually escaped to freedom. In fact, the girls were held much longer than those depicted in this novel—many staying with the rebels up to eight or ten years. The last girl of St. Mary’s, Catherine Ajok, returned after being away for thirteen years. She had with her a baby boy.
CAAFIG
“Child soldiers” is a vastly misused term. Children who have been abducted are not technically child soldiers, which describes children conscripted into the established armed forces of a country. A more precise acronym exists, though it’s rather unwieldy: CAAFIG. Children Associated with Armed Forces in Groups.
LRA
The Lord’s Resistance Army was named in 1994. In 1986, when Yoweri Museveni became president of Uganda he ousted Acholi soldiers from the army. They formed a group in the north, Uganda People’s Democratic Army, which was galvanized by a healer named Alice Lakwena, who took control after being visited by a spirit at Murchison Falls. The tipu took the unlikely figure of a ninety-year-old Italian World War II veteran who had drowned there while visiting the tourist site. In 1987, Alice Lakwena led an attack on Kampala, which failed, after which she was forced out of the country. She was purportedly a relative of Joseph Kony’s, sometimes called an aunt, sometimes a cousin. Kony took over the LRA in 1989.
An estimated thirty thousand children were abducted by 2012. The LRA in 2011 consisted of about six hundred people, four hundred of them children. By 2012, the numbers had dwindled to a couple of hundred. Since then Kony and the LRA have left Uganda, continuing their activities first in Rwanda and now disappeared in Congo.
THE AUTHOR WISHES particularly to thank Melanie Thernstrom for her article “Charlotte, Grace, Janet and Caroline Come Home” (New York Times Magazine, May 8, 2005), from which she shamelessly lifted details and wove them into fiction in the name of telling a version of the story of these girls. She also acknowledges threads gathered from the following work:
The Scars of Death, Children Abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, based on research conducted by Rosa Ehrenreich, edited by Yodon Thonden and Lois Whitman (1997, Human Rights Watch).
The Anguish of Northern Uganda by Robert Gersony.
“Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Among Former Child Soldiers Attending a Rehabilitative Service and Primary School Education in Northern Uganda” by Emilio Ovuga, Thomas O. Oyok, and E. B. Moro, African Health Sciences, September 2008.
“Report of Religious Beliefs of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army,” 2005, compiled by Lt. Col. Richard W. Skow, an American defense attaché to the U.S. Embassy (with contributions by Brigadier Kenneth Bama, Dr. Ray Amiro, and Major Jackson Achana, LRA technician to 1994 acting peace coordinator).
For more on the nonfiction terrain of this particular story, you might look at “This We Came to Know Afterward,” published by the author initially in McSweeney’s (Winter 2000) and subsequently in The Best American Travel Writing 2001, edited by Paul Theroux and Jason Wilson (Houghton Mifflin).
If it had not been for Angelina Auytum, head of the Concerned Parents Association in Uganda, and her efforts to inform the world of the plight of the abducted children, the author might never have learned of it, never come to know more about it, and never have written this book. Many thanks go to her.
And finally to Jordan Pavlin, beloved editor, for her incomparable attentions and care, the author is forever grateful.
A Note About the Author
Susan Minot is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, and screenwriter. Her first novel, Monkeys, was published in a dozen countries and won the Prix Femina Étranger in France. Her last novel, Evening, was a worldwide best seller and became a major motion picture. She teaches at New York University and lives with her daughter in New York City and on North Haven island in Maine.
Other titles by Susan Minot available in eBook format
Evening • 978-0-307-75878-1
Poems 4 A.M. • 978-0-307-95875-4
Rapture • 978-0-375-41442-8
For more information, please visit www.aaknopf.com
ALSO BY SUSAN MINOT
Poems 4 A.M.
Rapture
Evening
Folly
Lust & Other Stories
Monkeys
