Omar El Akkad

... elle comprenait que les malheurs de la guerre représentaient le seul véritable langage universel au monde. Ces locuteurs vivaient à des endroits différents de la planète, les prières qu'ils récitaient n'étaient pas les mêmes, et les superstitions vides de sens auxquelles ils s'attachaient n'étaient pas les mêmes, et pourtant, elles étaient semblables. La guerre les brisait de la même manière, leur inspirait la peur, la colère et la vengeance de la même manière. En temps de paix et de bonne fortune, ils ne se ressemblaient en rien, mais une fois privés de tout, ils devenaient frères. Le slogan de la guerre tel qu'elle l'avait appris était simple : si ça avait été vous, vous n'auriez pas agi différemment.

The waking hours were the most unkind. She lay still in bed, the mind aflame, the body paralyzed, unable to face the day. She clutched her mother’s butterfly brooch in her hand, its faded emerald stones smooth under her fingers. The nurses let her keep it, after they ripped the pin from its back.
This was in the days before – before Julia Templestowe became the rebel SOuth’s first martyr, its first killer, the patron saint of its war. It is often forgotten. There’s always a before.
The rebels recruited her with the bandages still fresh around her wrists. They found her in a bar on Farish Street across from the abandoned Alamo Theatre, its blue vertical sign missing its first and last letters. She was wearing a stranger’s throwaway dress, given to her by one of the nurses. She was drunk and alone once again with the terrible illness in her brain.
They knew how to find the ones who were most likely to do it. They kept watchers in the hospitals, where they looked for suicide attempts, and in the schools, where they looked for outcasts, and in the churches, where they looked for hard-boiled extremists feverish with the spell of the Lord.
From these, they forged weapons.
On the day the President was set to come to Jackson, they drove Julia to an abandoned farmhouse ten miles south of the city, where they outfitted her for death. She was to go in the guise of a pregnant woman. Within the cavity of her false belly they packed a thick paste of fertilizer and diesel fuel, planted with seeds of iron nail. They called it a farmer’s suit. A wire ran up along her chest and back down her left arm, covered by the sleeve of her shirt, and ending at a detonator taped to her wrist.
They’ll remember you for ever, they told her. When this is over they’ll build cities in your name.

Il lui semblait raisonnable de chercher la sécurité, de chercher un endroit où s'abriter des bombes, des Oiseaux et des dommages quotidiens de la guerre, mais quelque part dans sa tête, une idée commença à germer : peut-être que cette quête de sécurité n'était qu'une autre forme de violence - la violence de la couardise, du silence et de la soumission. Après tout, qu'est-ce que la sécurité sinon le bruit des bombes qui tombent sur la maison de quelqu'un d'autre ?

When I was young, I collected postcards. I kept them in a shoebox under my bed in the orphanage. Later, when I moved into my first home in New Anchorage, I stored the shoebox at the bottom of an old oil drum in my crumbling toolshed. Having spent most of my life studying the history of war, I found some sense of balance in collecting snapshots of the world that was, idealized and serene.
Sometimes I thought about getting rid of the oil drum. I worried someone, a colleague from the university perhaps, would see it and think it a kind of petulant political statement, like the occasional secessionist flag or gutted muscle car outside houses in the old Red country – impotent trinkets of rebellion, touchstones of a ruined and ruinous past. I am, after all, a Sautherner by birth. And even though I arrived in neutral country at the age of six and never spoke to anyone about my life before then, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that some of my colleagues secretly believed I still had a little bit of rebel Red in my blood.

She thought about how much easier it would be for everyone if all these would-be statelets were simply allowed to break free from the Union, to form their own miniature nations along the fault lines of region or creed or race or ideology. Everyone knew there had always been fissures: in the Northwest they were constantly threatening to declare the independence of the proud, pacifist Cascadia; south of Cascadia so much of California, Nevada, Arizona and West Texas was already under the informal control of the Mexican forces, the map of that corner of the continent slowly reverting to what it was hundreds of years ago. In the Midwest the old-stock nativists harbored a barely restrained animosity toward the millions of coastal refugees who descended onto the middle of the country to escape rising seas and severe storms. And here, in the South, an entire region decided to wage war again, to sever itself from the Union rather than stop using that illicit fuel responsible for so much of the country’s misfortune.

They wore tattered uniforms of no consistent color or style, composed of whatever was available to them – black jeans, cargo vests, duck hunter’s camouflage, fatigues from foreign armies smuggled aboard the aid ships at the request of the rebel leaders. Their weapons were also smuggled in, or else salvaged from the attics and basements of parents or grandparents – the guns often older than the boys who carried them. They were, to a man, untrained and ill-equipped, and ahead of them to the west lay certain death at the hands of a superior army. But behind them, in the dead-end towns where they were born, lay a slower kind of death – death at the hands of poverty and boredom and decay.

Karina détestait voir les veuves en noir. A ses yeux, elles faisaient d'elles-mêmes des reliques, figées dans un respect permanent pour des hommes imprundents, insensés ou simplement malchanceux, qui reposaient six pieds sous terre pour toujours.
Les maris ne portaient jamais de noir. Les maris n'étaient jamais réduits à cette déclaration passive, jamais obligés d'avoir l'air triste partout où ils allaient pour le restant de leurs jours, comme de véritables symboles de deuil sur pattes. Les maris avaient le droit de s'emporter, de se mettre en colère, de venger leur perte en infligeant à d'autres ce qu'on leur avait infligé.

Si tu prends les armes pour te battre pour une cause, tu as intérêt à ne pas changer d'avis. Que tu aies raison ou tort, tu assumes ce pour quoi tu te bats et tu ne changes jamais, jamais d'avis (p219)

Après tout; qu'est ce que la sécurité sinon le bruit des bombes qui tombent sur la maison de quelqu'un d'autre.

Après tout, qu'est-ce que la sécurité sinon le bruit des bombes qui tombent sur la maison de qelq'un d'autre ?