Boktips

Vid ett biblioteksbesök för ett tag sedan undrade jag om Leymah Gwobees, Nobels fredspristagare, bok ’Mighty be our powers’ fanns att låna. Det fanns den inte, men lades som inköpsförslag av den vänlige bibliotekarien.

Nu i mellandagarna fick jag så ett mejl som talade om att boken fanns på plats, reserverad för mig. Å, så härligt.

Det är en fascinerande berättelse av en kraftfull afrikansk kvinna. En berättelse som sällan får uppmärksamhet, den afrikanska kvinnans berättelse. Kan rekommendera er alla att läsa den.

Här kommer ett smakprov från bokens prolog, förvisso på engelska men ändå:

”Modern war stories often resemble each other, not because the cicumstances are alike but because they’re told in the same way. Commanders are quoted offering confident predictions of victory. Male diplomats make serious pronouncements. And the fighters – always men, whether they are portrayed as heroes or thugs-brag, threaten, brandish grisly throphies and shoot off their mouths and their weapons.

It was that way in my country, Liberia. During the years that civil war tore us apart, foreign reporters often came to document the nightmare. Read the accounts. Watch the video clips. They are all about the power of destruction. Bare-chested boys on foot or in pick-up trucks fire enormous machine guns, dance crazily in wrecked city streets or crowd around a corpse, holding up a victim’s bleeding heart. A young man in sunglasses and red beret regards the camera coolly. ”We will kill you, we will eat you.”

Now watch the video clips again, but look more carefully, at the background, for that is where you will find the women. You’ll see us fleeing, weeping, kneeling before our children’s graves. In the traditional telling of war stories, women are always in the background. Our suffering is just a sidebar to the main tale; when we’re included it’s for ”human interest.”

[…] This is not a traditional war story. It is about an army of women in white standing up when no one else would – unafraid, because the worst things imaginable had already happened to us. It is about how we found moral clarity, persistence and bravery to raise our voices against war and restore sanity to our land.

You have not heard it before, because it is an African woman’s story, and our stories are rarely told.

I want you to hear mine.”

  Om ni har möjlighet, läs den!