Book: Breakup: A Marriage in Wartime
Author: Anjan Sundaram
Publication: Simon & Schuster
Price: Rs 699
“The violence was absurd.” These are the words that come to Anjan Sundaram — he gave us Bad News and Stringer, unveiling for the world the disastrous consequences of the collusion between power and violence in Africa — as he registers, processes, the mayhem in the Central African Republic that is smeared with sectarian strife and ethnic cleansing. Breakup is replete with scenes and evidence that echo the absurd: a woman emerges from a forest, runs down the deserted central avenue of Camp Bangui (picture, left), terrified, abandoned and, yet, retaining an innate humaneness that makes her clutch Sundaram’s hands and whisper, “Thank you”; this is also a republic that has suffered as many as five coups since its independence, trapping it “in a state of perpetual rebellion”; astonishingly, despite the years of bloodshed and suffering, “People,” one of Sundaram’s companions on this tryst quips, “know more about the moon… than of this war.” There is perhaps only one way of describing this global amnesia: absurd.
But the absurd, much like the Central African Republic, can be a twilight terrain. The scale of the violence that Sundaram witnesses — it is this urge to be a witness, to record, that, Sundaram confessed in an interview, draws him to broken lands — does not numb his reasoning: human depravity, the writer knows from his experiences in Congo, defies scale and depth. But he does encounter something seemingly unfathomable, even absurd: a perceptible distancing, an alienation, from his other life — home, wife, kid — as he travels closer to the heart of the war. Sundaram’s initial confusion with and ultimate recognition of what this duality is makes Breakup peculiarly political and private, harsh and tender, at the same time.
What is noticeable is the economy of language that Sundaram employs to describe the implosions of his two — twinned — worlds, within and without. Even though he is surrounded by war and its attendant horrors, the tone of Sundaram’s narrative remains spartan. There is an equal sense of quietude in his intensely painful, but dignified, description of the falling apart of his private life involving his wife, Nat. The interrogation of the breakup, Sundaram’s emotional turmoil notwithstanding, is sensitive to the extraneous pressures on all modern relationships: distance, the failure to drop anchor, the limitations of language, mutual antagonism regarding domestic chores and so on. Sundaram’s ability to combine perceptiveness and vulnerability enables Breakup to avoid the usual trappings of sentimentality and voyeurism in this context.
In its scrutiny of imploding terrains, Breakup welds the nation to the person in a manner that is not absurd but enchanting.
