One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [112]
“He tells him that it is time for adults to speak and it is not right to listen,” the translator whispered. “He tells him to go play like the other boys.” With a quick pat, he sends Justin running off toward the game with the rest of the children.
“This boy is troubled. I try to make him forget,” the teacher said. “He does not play like the others and he thinks about the past very much.”
“Maybe this is his way of coping,” I suggested.
“No, I know this boy,” the teacher said, watching him join the game. “He will not be well if he does not play with the others.”
We watched the game together for a while, not saying much. Justin played reluctantly, hanging back, never rushing in to seize the ball. The others largely ignored him. As he played, he looked over at where we stood, his longing to return to our conversation obvious. He did not fit in, though his teacher was determined that he try to fit in.
I suggested Justin might not want to play soccer anymore.
“The children must be part of the community.” He said no more about it. Sigmund Freud also wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents: “There is indeed another and a better path [to happiness]: that of becoming a member of the human community.” I cannot imagine this teacher had read Freud, but through his own observation he came to the same conclusion as the founder of psychoanalysis. In order to survive, one must be part of something. We are social creatures; we cannot do it alone. Not he, not I, not little Justin.
Within a few minutes, Justin had the ball and maneuvered it down field. One of the other boys knocked it from him. He chased after it and kicked at the boy’s legs. The boy stopped playing, threw a punch that connected with Justin’s shoulder. Justin smacked him back. They scuffled a moment, and the teacher beside me simply watched. The second fight of the game was brief and dusty and when it ended, the game resumed. Justin, visibly angry, kept playing. Within minutes he was part of the game again, smiling and shouting with the rest of them, having what looked like a good time, the scuffle forgotten, though his eyes flashed with anger whenever he passed near the boy who punched him. But the others seemed, for the moment, not to care that he was an outsider, a Tutsi among the Hutu, an orphan among the parented. They played together because that was the task at hand. Though Freud’s “inclination toward aggression” emerged for a moment, it was a form of love, the Eros of play, that won the day. The children played and kept the drive toward death at bay, at least for a few more hours. Gunfire often ripped the night air in the refugee camp, Thanatos giving the children no quarter, even as they slept.
War’s children are not a lumpen mass, but a collection of little hopes and needs and impulses and desires lived out from day to day. They live their lives amid the backdrop of terrible violence and deprivation, amid constantly shifting loyalties and labels and dangers, but also amid the backdrop of going to school, of who-can-juggle-the-soccer-ball-better, of sewing torn pants, of funny pratfalls, and of family and friends. Of play. The children are a collection of all the things that happen to them, and the kinds of people they become is being decided every second, in the struggle of love versus death, in the battling of the primal urges and the relationships that form around them.
The most important factor for children in war is building a day-to-day life, having somewhere to go, something to do, someone to count on, seeing Eros in action rather than its destructive brother. Justin played soccer and, though it would not change a thing about the reality of the world in which he struggles, the minutes of play and happiness will weave themselves into his life, just as the horrors of death and destruction