Black.Light Stories
Black Sun
He travels incognito wrapped by night: a dark honeycomb throbbing the darkness. This man is exactly that, a black sun radiating negative light, a bulimic star sipping however much life happens around him. [...]
Matrioschkas
The battle cry of the rebels in Sierra Leone during the advance on Freetown in January 1999 had a terrifying simplicity about it: “No Living Thing.” A human being was not worth living, [...]
Dasia: When I first got here
A master narrative on violence, politics, justice, trauma and humanity by Dasia Masaquoi – in memoriam! A spoken moral essay, literally walking down Broad Street. “You see fear. Raw fear. And that raw [...]
Shivering in Ruins
One madman completely naked masturbates alone in the empty street, ignoring the soldiers running past him for shelter as the Katiuska mortars start to whistle and fall in the neighborhood. June 1998, Bissau: two [...]
The Zone
In the rebel area with Commander Alpha Mike, the only officer leading an outpost of child soldiers, all high on drugs and beer. “–Careful, get his weapon!–” Before a burst of gunfire could [...]
Die Gewalt ist in uns.
Je mehr wir davon sprechen,
desto schneller befreien wir uns von ihr.
Dasia: God was Good
“God was good to us, you know? When the killing was on, it was dry. When it stopped, the rainy season would start to wash all the blood away.”
Peanut Butter
In the ‘loyalist’ area (across the river from Al- pha Mike) with Commander Peanut Butter, the last general fighting for President Charles Taylor – with child soldiers too. “They’re not real children. These types [...]
Mikado
Logging in forest sanctuaries to fund the war: The prospector finally indicates the trunk he identified in a previous survey. His job ends there. The tree’s life – 20, 50, 100 years old, some [...]
Morie – Prince of the Dead
Morie was the only survivor of an all-day- long massacre of his entire village (1200 people). We traced the boy down in the swamps of Pujehun in 2003 and later we visited his teenager [...]
Birds of Pray
A group of women “tired of war, tired of having no voice,” has held weekly ecumenical demonstrations for peace at the airport. “What we want?” “Peace!!!” “When?” “Now!!!” One woman, apart from the group, [...]
No Shame!
Teene, former child soldier, aka Nasty: “At first I didn’t know anything about weapons. They forced me to fight, to join them. Then I decided to be worse than the others…” She has a [...]
My Dream was
In the Bombuna Mountains, in a remote ghetto for amputees. Balá Cissé knows how to drink water as dogs do,“just with my mouth.” He learned how to do that when they cut off his [...]
City of Rest
An evangelical institution for drug addicts in Freetown. Gospel exorcizes the addiction by force… “We have everything here, man.There are rastas, druggies, hippies, junkies, dreads, soldiers, rebels, thieves, murderers–” Wyclin stops to assess the [...]
No Monkey
“Bendu Sando metamorphosis was rapid and happened a short time ago: in June of this year, the rebels entered Bendu’s town and an armed man approached her and said, ‘I wanna fuck the girl. [...]
Dasia: The right Bloodshed
“The only hope for Liberia is for those gentlemen to be eliminated. Nothing else. My friends complain and lament that this here is a bloodbath. And I say: yes, it is–the wrong bloodbath. [...]
One Night in Florida
One long analysis on reporting violence and finding words for horror, when night falls back in “hotel” Florida –the ruins of a brothel, filthy with rats and roaches, run by an old Lebanese-, [...]