The murderous, ethnic conflict in Darfur has been talked about in the news and championed by celebrities, but those of us who live far away from such events struggle sometimes to emotionally connect with disasters we don't understand, events couched in a culture with which we have little or no experience. This is what gives war memoirs so much power. Finding similarities between ourselves and people we will never meet creates a bond that supersedes culture, that goes beyond race, and allows us to imagine ourselves entrenched in a fight against a people trying to end our way of life. Tears In The Desert not only forges this connection, it launches us on a journey we won't soon forget.
Halima Bashir did not have much while she grew up in Darfur, but then no one else did either. A tribal life does not involve itself much in economics, preferring the simpler exchange of bartered goods and inter-family bonds which knit the tribe together in shared action and effort. And so Ms. Bashir does not seemed to have missed Western conveniences as she describes, in the first half of her work, her mostly care-free childhood in a place where possessing even a radio was a luxury. Plenty of characters come to life around Ms. Bashir: her dogged father, her ignorant grandmother, her slightly overwhelmed but diligent mother. Through each of them, we see how a culture perpetuates its customs and its eccentricities, no matter the cost in pain and blood. Ritual has, for thousands of years, bound various people into a collective unit and that's vividly demonstrated here.
The memoirs second half finds Ms. Bashir a woman grown. Having strived to attend university, she is one of the lucky few Darfuri who earn a placement at the University of Khartoum where she experiences, first-hand, the Sudanese government's strides towards violent despotism. Ms. Bashir studies to be a doctor while her country slowly, achingly, falls apart.
The rest is terrifyingly inevitable. War washes over her world, imperiling her family while Ms. Bashir herself is stationed in a village, serving the medical needs of the people there. Death and the worse aspects of man's nature stalk her and her country, shattering her and everyone around her with the powerful fist of ignorance. As such, it is easy to imagine Ms. Bashir as Darfur, for what is done to it is done to her, scattering the pieces of herself so thoroughly, it requires years for her to put them back together. A life overturned and permanently re-directed onto a path no one should have to walk.
Ms. Bashir's story is an inspiring example of both human endurance and the human capacity to heal, physically and mentally. But the greatest tragedy, the one which Ms. Bashir illustrates so well, is that those limits had to be tested at all. Why? For ethnic unity? For profit? For power? What are these things when set against the destruction of someone's way of life, someone's freedom? A hard, dark, and difficult read, but well worth it. We must understand what we are capable of, light and dark. Only then can we maintain the former and use it to burn out the latter. (4/5 Stars)
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