Breakup: A Reporter’s Marriage amid a Central African War

A few words from Anjan: 

“At Bellagio, I was revising a draft. I reshaped the frame of the book while there to bring in my personal story as a new dimension.” 

Quote from Breakup: 

“I moved away from the world and my family gave me refuge. In my wife’s embrace, in the bliss of my home, I believed I could never again be alone, never again be helpless. 

In July 2013, I became a father. Raphaëlle’s birth reinforced our family. She looked fragile, so obviously mortal. She brought me new obligations, as a father: to work and earn money.

But she did far more. I looked down over her, and lifted her up in my arms, and thought she could not be all that I left behind, of myself, in the world. My work acquired a new significance. It became a way to nourish and shelter her, and also to take distance from her. I searched my past, seeking work to which I felt an old connection, that had shaped me, and to which my link felt elemental, pure, necessary.

The most isolated major war in the world was then underway, in a country called the Central African Republic, among the world’s most sparsely populated places. This conflict was perhaps even more deadly than the Syrian war, which at the time dominated newspaper headlines.

But Central Africa, home to several long-running wars, rarely made the first page.”

Synopsis:

After ten years reporting from central Africa, Anjan Sundaram is living a quiet life in Canada with his wife and new-born. But when preparations for genocide emerge in the Central African Republic, he is suddenly torn between his duty to his family, and his moral responsibility to expose the conflict.

Soon he is travelling through the CAR, driven by a possible spy — discovering ransacked villages and locals fleeing imminent massacre, fielding offers of mined gold, and hearing of soldiers who steal schoolbooks for cigarette paper. When he refuses to return home, journeying instead into a rebel stronghold, he learns that there is no going back to the life he has left behind.

“Breakup” illuminates the personal price paid by those bearing witness on the frontlines of humanitarian crimes across the globe. This brilliantly introspective, strikingly grounded account of perilous warzones and inner turmoil is sure to become a modern classic.