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Conflict, Culture, and the Clinic: Finding new narratives<\/strong><\/p>\n Ayesha Ahmad<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n In a recent publication “Syria Speaks”, the book volume is a collection of various forms of narrative that have been born in conflict. In reflection, there is a line that says: “War ignites people’s anger, and acts against culture, which is the work of the mind and the imagination”.<\/p>\n I find this interesting because culture becomes a force, a current of an ocean that is our imagination\u2014our creativity, whereas war personifies all ways of life ending\u2014killing, being killed, dying, and seeing others die.<\/p>\n Conflict is not culture. Rather, conflict unearths the skeleton of our human condition at the same time as burying the flesh from the bodies that are returned to the ground.<\/p>\n The ground, or land, is the bedrock of a conflict. The soil is separated and territories are disputed. The fragmentation of the land is a replica of the falling down of humanity. Pieces of the land are fenced away, boundaries that keep people apart from their footsteps.<\/p>\n I recall a passage in a story of four seasons in an Afghan village, recounting the lives of women weaving carpets; their hands moving in ways their grandmothers patterned the stories of their lives into colors and shapes.<\/p>\n The book, The World is a Carpet<\/em> by Anna Badkhen, features a character called Amanullah. I was captured by the description of Amanullah walking “the trail by heart, steering from a memory that wasn’t even his own but had double-helixed down the bloodstream of generations of men who had travelled this footpath for millennia. A memory that was the very essence of peregrination, a flawless distillation of our ancestral restlessness”.<\/p>\n Our lives mirror our memories, and we carry our cultures; sometimes as treasures and sometimes as burdens.<\/p>\n I wonder about medicine. I wonder about a horizon where those walking from ancient paths like\u00a0Amanullah entered new landscapes. I wonder about the doctor who encounters the Amanullah’s reaching Europe as refugees; what is the body when the body is without land?<\/p>\n If culture is our embodiment of the soil of our cradle, then medicine must confront culture in the clinical setting, as a form of sight, of hearing, of tasting, of feeling and of expression.<\/p>\n Our “travelling cultures” (Ahmad, 2014) must not be forgotten. In the examination of the toll of such journeys, medicine is challenged with new boundaries of healing and of humanity.<\/p>\n The question that emerges and I leave open for thought is “can doctors find a new narrative for culture in the clinic that inherently holds hope for the suffering?”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n