ABSTRACT
The experienced violence of war is mostly not visible as marks on the body surfaces of the DFs I interviewed. Instead, many of them expressed internal sensations of discomfort, even physical pain. While these strange bodily feelings were found difficult to interpret, many still argued that they were caused by “thinking too much.” These negative thoughts, as they evaluated, were provoked by the accumulative effect of present-day worries coming together with their (sensory) memories of the war. Chapter 4 focuses on how these violent memories still shape the ex-combatant body and how the meanings of these war experiences are negotiated today. It also discusses how the violent history of contact between the (Frelimo-)state and the ex-combatants is implicated in this meaning making and remembering. The meaning of independence, as the chapter shows, is not a historical fact but strongly debated in the present. Moreover, “peace” as an embodied experience involves a continuous negotiation over the senses and meanings of past and present experiences of violence. This points to how the key political notions of the wartime nationalist discourse are intimately linked to sensory ways of knowing and thus tied to the individual and collective bodies of the war veterans.
