Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 15

Introduction: “During the war, I suffered most from things I didn’t
witness”
In the quotation that opens this article(Couto ����:���), not being a witness
does not imply the lack of awareness of what happened. Indeed, the
protagonist continues by exclaiming: “The atrocities that happened!” What
atrocities exactly the protagonist is referring to remains slightly opaque—
atrocities committed either during the independence war or the following
civil war in Mozambique. Although not having been a witness, she suffered.
Being a witness here refers to a conventional understanding in terms of
eye-witnessing. A witness is a spectator, someone “who is or was present and
is able to testify from personal observation.” � A typical example of such an
understanding of being a witness is the following line: “In ����, the African
American scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois traveled to Poland, where he
witnessed firsthand the rubble left behind by the Nazi occupation and war”
(Rothberg ����:���). In order to be a witness, you have to be on location,
witnessing—seeing with your own eyes—that to which you can subsequently
testify from own observation.
Recent writings in the social sciences and humanities, however, have expanded
the concept of being a witness by critically engaging with four elements: copresence,
contemporaneity, materiality, and eventness (Lindroos and Möller,
forthcoming). Being on location when something happened to which one
could testify based on own experience is not seen as a precondition for
being a witness any more. Furthermore, contemporaneity is no longer
required. It is possible to be a witness of something that happened a long
time ago. Thus, spatial and temporal distances do not mean that a person
cannot be a witness. The third element in the current further development
of the concept of being a witness is the identification of material objects,
for example photographs, as witnesses. Being a witness has also been deconnected
from tragic events and given an everyday dimension, a dimension,
however, that I will largely ignore in what follows.
In Mia Couto’s story, the protagonist suffers from the atrocities that her
husband, “behaving just as the enemy he called devils,” committed on the
battlefield, atrocities communicated to her in the form of rumors only. At
that time, the reports of massacres seemed to “ha[ve] taken place in another
�
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Vol. II, prepared by William Little,
H.W. Fowler and Jessie Coulson. Revised and edited by C.T. Onions. Third edition, completely reset
with etymologies revised by G.W.S. Friedrichsen and with revised addenda. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
����, p. ����.
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