In Imagine: Reflections on Peace, reporters and photographers return to countries they covered in war, but this time to cover them in peace. The main chapters—looking at Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia, Colombia, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, and Rwanda—present reportage by top magazine writers and world-renowned photographers. But the team producing the book also wanted first-person accounts from people who lived through the conflict in their home countries. We wanted to hear from them. For the most part, they were astute observers, so eloquent as to give us moving testimonials, but not necessarily used to the first-person form—or writing in English. As the primary text editor, I was a kind of eyewitness-whisperer, listening to their stories and then helping to shape them for our readers.

Margarita Martinez

One account was that of a Colombian making a documentary about the peace negotiations in Havana, Cuba. Margarita Martinez speaks English beautifully but is a filmmaker, not a writer. Her piece was about the dynamics of the negotiations. We decided to start by setting the scene. That presented challenges, she said, because it was probably the blandest room in Havana—a charmless corner in one of the hemisphere’s most charming places! And the characters? The negotiators were so bland as to be almost indistinguishable from one another.

It is always a special challenge to make something boring become interesting on the page. I started asking questions. What was the affect of the peace negotiators? “Stiff,” she answered, and in her first draft she wrote that there was “a tension, like you can cut the air with a knife.”

I pushed further. “What did the room look like? Were there windows, curtains? What was the furniture?”

Just banal rectangular tables, she answered.

“What were the tables made out of?” I asked. “What were the characters wearing, exactly?”

Margarita consulted her film to refocus on details, rather than relying on memory. She had been a fly on the wall, observing everything, getting it on film, but I was asking her to get it on the page. As a film director, she wasn’t as accustomed to chalking up writerly details or capturing characters in prose.

We sent drafts back and forth. Finally, we had a vivid scene:

“Imagine being in Havana, Cuba, in perhaps the only room in the entire Caribbean city devoid of charm, with its long beige curtains and particleboard tables set in a fixed rectangle. Seated at these tables, facing each other, are two delegations, each exhibiting a froideur that matches the setting. (The berets, scarves, and necklaces that one side wears, though, do offer a whiff of rakishness.) Fingers twitch back and forth like the antennae of anxious insects. Eighteen people—nine in each delegation—wear poker faces, changing their expressions only slightly to issue an icy ‘good morning.’ Occasionally, someone rises and starts pacing, the steps measuring the tension like the beat of a metronome. It is the first moment of the first day of torturous negotiations between bitter enemies, the Colombian government of President Juan Manuel Santos and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).”

Bingo!

Elvis Garibovic

The most collaborative writing happened with Elvis Garibovic, a Bosnian Muslim ethnically cleansed from his village at age nineteen. He and his brothers and cousins ended up at a concentration camp, and he was probably days from death when the prisoners were discovered by the international press and then liberated. My colleague Fiona Turner, the project director, gave me his name and told me that he spoke English, that he lived in Australia, and that he was willing to participate. I sent an email and got an email back. Elvis asked if we could talk by phone. In the first conversation, we established a rapport. Elvis asked how we might collaborate on his account. I said, “Why don’t you just tell me your story now; then I’ll write that down, make an outline, and send it to you? You can fill in the outline and send it back.” That’s basically what we did. Many times over.

Elvis’s first draft was just five hundred words, and it was a sketchy, broad chronology. I asked myself, “Where is this story going to start, where is it going to end, and what’s the arc of it?” I imagined that the day he realized Serbs were coming for him and his family would be one key moment, so I wrote a question right into his draft: “Where were you? How many days had you been in this place?”

He sent the draft back with his answers to this and other questions. I’d smooth out the English and send it back to him with more questions. I was always trying to get character, scenes, and landscapes. It was a patient back-and-forth. As I pressed, Elvis would offer more details. The more I asked, the more he remembered. I had the feeling that I was causing him to surface memories that had been buried.

We spent a lot of time on that key moment when he realized that the thing we came to call “ethnic cleansing” was beginning. I asked, “When did you realize the conflict was coming to your village?”

And he said, “Well, I heard trucks coming down the road.”

“What kinds of trucks?”

“T-84 tanks, buses, and trucks. One tank near us suddenly blew away a house fifty meters from us.”

After three or four exchanges, I still couldn’t visualize Elvis in the scene, so I asked,

“Where exactly were you when you heard the trucks?”

“We were out picking strawberries.”

Oh my. The innocence of summer. Of young, country boys. Of this simple, lovely thing, picking strawberries. The trucks barreling down the road, and the horror that followed.

Eventually, we built a 2,800-word story. The moment with the strawberries set the tone for the whole thing.

Dydine Umunyana

Dydine Umunyana was a very young child, three and a half, when Hutus came after Tutsi families like hers in Rwanda. We were working with the memories of a young child, but since she had already written a book about the experience, we had rich material to start with. I was especially entranced with Dydine’s description of what she was wearing when her family was captured. It was a white dress with colorful butterflies on it. She remembered that dress with this phrase: “The butterflies sat next to my heart.” That poignant image became central to framing the story; in fact, we used it for the title. Like Elvis’s strawberries, it jumped out as a metaphor and captured the humanity of the moment.

Dydine’s original essay was powerful, but there was something that we editors wanted to hear more about: her father’s experience of PTSD and how it affected the entire family. Dydine’s parents were Tutsi soldiers and had been out of the country during the massacre. Dydine was living at her grandparents’ house when the violence happened. When her parents came back, her father struggled. Dydine wrote things like, “My father was violent,” and she referred to his “problems.” But she didn’t dwell on the most difficult moments. Fiona Turner, my coeditor, and I wanted to draw out more, because we knew from research (reported in another essay in the book) that as damaging as incidents during the war are, PTSD creates additional damage after the war. Postconflict societies often have high incidences of domestic violence.

I tried to tread gently, listening to what Dydine told us and asking her questions one at a time, delicately, until more memories spilled onto the page. Dydine writes eloquently in English. Her final draft leaves an indelible impression of the confusion a parent’s PTSD causes in a daughter:

“Post-traumatic stress disorder was not something many people in my country understood. Instead we just talked of trauma. My dad had returned to Ruhengeri to save his family, but the entire family had been brutally killed. Nobody had survived. It seemed reason enough for a person to go mad, although my mother insisted that it wasn’t madness, that he was getting better.

“‘There is no life after this mass killing,’ my dad would say, sounding like a very old man. ‘When I close my eyes at night, I dream the Interahamwe are here. I see them raise their machetes to kill my children. My only comfort is the thought that I can take my gun and kill us quickly, before they hack us to death.’

“I was always puzzled by my father’s dark dreams. Why did he want us to die when we all had fought so hard to live?

“After one too many bad nights, my mother left my father, taking us children with her. We moved to new houses constantly so that he wouldn’t find us.

“I was in a deep sleep one night when an arm came through the window, trying to grab me. I heard a voice whispering my name and asking for help. I screamed so loudly that my mother woke and ran into my room. She shrieked when she saw my father trying to squeeze through the bedroom window. She corralled all the kids into her room. How had he found us?

“Dad’s voice called out, ‘Dydine, my darling, open up for me—you know I love you so much. Don’t be like your mother. It’s so cold outside.’ These were the first tender words I’d heard from an adult in so long. I started crying and trying to pull away from my mother to open the door. Mom wrenched me back so forcefully that I thought my arm would tear from its socket. Dad began gathering stones and throwing them through the windows. He smashed every window in the house. Terrified cries rose from the houses of our neighbors. No one knew this madman in the night.

“In the morning, my father was gone. He would be back, though—again and again, always at night, always drunk, cursing my mother and screaming for his children.”

I have always felt that editing is a creative, collaborative process. It has never been more so than when I had the honor of working with writers like these.

Constance Hale is a San Francisco–based journalist. Imagine: Reflections on Peace comes out October 6, 2020, in English (VII Foundation and SparkPress) and French (VII Foundation and Hemeria). It is available at all retail outlets. To learn more, visit https://reflectionsonpeace.org/.