Rip Hopkins
Rip Hopkins

Nimule
© Rip Hopkins, 1995

Nimule? Dinka? Nuer? Shilluk? What are you talking about ? Who are they? Where is Sudan? Why do you say South Sudan? Why are you telling me things that I don't understand, that I don't know, that I've never heard of? More refugees, more displaced people, war again, weapons, children in distress. As if horror was repeating itself everywhere. As if there were too many of these tragedies for me to reckon with. And you tell me that this has been going there on for half a century. And I didn't know. Perhaps I knew it once, before other bombing, other famines, other exiles, elsewhere, took the place of this information that time has drowned in the litany of lost causes which remain unresolved for too long. Yet I want to know, I must see, so that my conscience can widen its field of indignation. So as to sadly convince myself of my anger's irony and to try despite everything else. A man is worth any other man, we must at least say that we know and tell whilst feeding the hope that everyone will find their home once the guns are silent. I want to see, I have seen, I know it and I say it. And I repeat it. I dream that the echo and the wind will carry these words to Nimule because now I know where it is.

Christian Caujolle


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