The war... but which war?

War, a single word capable of conjuring the most horrifying images of human suffering that one can possibly conceive. The current situation in Palestine is a good example- if we dare to call this unequal exchange of warfare and global power a war that is. Yet, (and just like the little over 70 years old 'war' in Palestine that seems to have found its way to the headlines, again, to pick it up right where Ukraine left it) most war zones in the world today are characterised for being in a situation of protracted conflict but low intensity armed violence.

And... contrary to popular believe, in these landscapes, or rather warscapes, although the scalation of conflict(s) into armed violence, or violence(s) into armed conflict, is a constant possibility, this is a latent one; and thus, people live in a twilight zone between the atrocities of warfare and normality.

Nothing reflects this phenomenon as clearly as the ways in which warscape's inhabitants themselves use the term 'war'.

I was listening some of my interviews today, and I could not help noticing that through the telling of their personal experiences, the protagonists of my stories seem to attribute two very distinct meanings to the word.

The first one is abstract and refers to the phenomenon itself, the larger context, the general sense of their country being in war... and the very vivid consequences that come with the armed conflict itself: death, social dislocation, protracted mobility, lack of infrastructure, services and goods, unemployment, the militarisation of society, the availability of violence, and the worst form of poverty there is: the impossibility of a future. Here, the war represents the larger structuring structure that has become part of the fabric of society, intangible, static, always latent, omnipresent, the devil himself.

The second one, however, is liquid. It changes form and size, it comes and goes, it ebbs and flows. It is only physically present during an specific period of time in a given particular location. Yet, this is the tangible one that makes your skin crawl, the one that will get you if you are in the wrong place, at the wrong time, or maybe even just with the wrong group of people? Interestingly enough, this is the one that comes up more often during my interviews... and the protagonists of my stories never refer to it as just the war, but:

• When the war arrived...

• It was war so...

• Who brought this war?

• The war was there...

• We scaped the war together...

• We came back once the war passed...

• After the war it was different....

This semantic duality behind the vernacular use of the term 'war' calls our attention to something commonly neglected: There is normality in war.

While the 'war' and its social and material consequences are always present, the bursts of armed violence are only temporal; and for most of the time, people seem to live what passes for an ordinary life: they go to the market, to school and to work, they complain about their superiors, mourn the lost of loved ones, worry about looking good in the morning, go on dates, day trips, salivate over breakfast after a night out, and any other mundanity that you can think of.

Therefore: the 'war' does not represent a passing phenomena, a state of emergency, a brief rupture from normality, but rather a durable condition- a new normal. And as such, people have learnt to live with it, through it.

The fact that people have somehow normalised living with the war, does not however imply that they do not make a distinction between what their situation is and what it ought's to be, but merely sheds a light into the fact that while the war may punctuate people's lives, it does not dictate them.

When analysed from the vernacular, the use of the term 'war' reveals than there is more to warscapes than the armed conflict itself. In a way, the conflict has 'simply' become the background of everyday life, the new normal; and hence, warscape inhabitants do not live in constant fear of violence and terror... nor do their dreams and ambitions evaporate overnight. Life goes in these spaces, and as such, people's daily preoccupations and occupations are to be found somewhere else, beyond the realm of the armed conflict; and ignoring this, is a very reductionist way of portraying warscape inhabitants simply as subjects of a larger force, empty vessels without needs nor wants beyond the 'war'.