In 2003, the Sudanese government and Janjaweed dramatically escalated their campaign of violence against the people of Darfur, killing thousands, forcing millions from their villages, and turning the once-stable region into a wasteland of starvation and disease. Upon arriving in Darfur, Marlowe writes: "I had been to other scenes of large-scale devastation. In all those places, people seemed to spring up out of the remnants the way weeds stubbornly grow in cracks of a sidewalk... But here, it was different. It was almost entirely depopulated... Even the birds had left. The only sound was the wind and the hard sand crunching beneath our feet" (75-6).
I was prepared for either a detached historical report driven by dates and events, or a gutwrenching depiction of hunger, sickness, and mass graves. On the contrary, Darfur Diaries consists of a series of interviews and conversations with displaced people, refuges, and members of the makeshift Darfurian rebel army, interwoven with the author's impressions of the landscape, the people, their customs, and their challenges. How do they live? How do they survive dispossession, lack of food and water, familial fracture, lack of medicine, and the intense desert heat and cold? How do they cope with the brutalities of rape, injury, mass murder, and widespread material destruction? How do they sustain their sanity? Where do they find hope?
I was impressed with the openness of the questions asked, which allowed the interviewees to speak from the depths of their own experiences, rather than responding to some pre-set agenda on the part of Marlowe and fellow documentarians Adam Shapiro and Aisha Bain. The result is a complex weave of human personality: dignity, humility, anger, humor, gentility, forgiveness, desperation, and hard endurance.
Most amazing to me was the persistent emphasis on education. Education is a priority held as high among the Darfurian people as life itself. Volunteer teachers work with children in refuge camps in clusters under the leafless skeletons of trees, sand blowing in their faces--no books, nothing to write with, or on. Some of these children sit through a day of lessons without food or water.
In fact, Marlowe's striking insights into the impact of the hardships and violence on the Darfurian children demonstrate a piercing depth of empathy. Towards the beginning of her journey, she writes: "Knowing what I did, I wanted to find some way to protect them: from their pasts, which I could scarcely imagine when looking at their quick smiles, and from their futures, which were so precarious" (33). In a Chadian refuge camp on the border of Sudan, she recalls "A small boy, around four years old, settled into the sand next to me... He rested his hand on my arm. He wanted to make sure I knew he was there" (34). Indeed, Marlowe knows they are there. She never fails to notice the tiny silent faces peering on from behind the torsoes of their remaining family members.
Darfur Diaries is an incredible effort to bridge the gap between the dire realities of genocide and America's resistance to fathom the atrocities that are steadily eroding Darfurian society and culture. One thing I did not realize until I read this book was that the government is actually bombing its own people!! The situation is utterly intolerable, especially given the luxuries we Americans take for granted on a daily basis, and yet, life goes on, and this is the story of the lives left behind.
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