A Sea of Insecurity

Abstract

This chapter describes the way that insecurity both functions as a deep psychic wound and generates affect, which serves as a register for repair. The inhabitants of eastern Congo have always lived in a menacing environment, at the foot of an active volcano, on the shores of a methane-containing lake. When conflict erupted in 1993, the threat of physical violence compounded that posed by the region's topography. Where more than 132 armed groups are fighting to control a geographic area smaller than Texas, people in eastern Congo continue to live with the threats of violence and of repeated displacement. By narrating one particular period of insecurity, the chapter queries the affective experience of living in bad weather, as Christina Sharpe calls antiblack regimes, at the convergence of death, disaster, and possibility. Where violence looms, destruction is always a risk; but inhabiting affect offers healing, as victims and perpetrators work together to create anew.