Christine has that layer under her skin that cuts off her outside from her inside and allows no communication between the person she once believed she could be and the person she has in fact become. The does not acknowledge the other's existence. The women from war are like that, a new kind of being that no one knew one before, not exactly male but no longer female.
How easy it is to become unlikable and to act atrociously when one feels as though, perhaps not without reason, that the cards are stacked against one and that, regardless of what one does to improve one's lot, one is destined to fail... Add to that trauma which causes woman to disengage from herself, to become harsher than she would likely have been without the trauma of being a woman in a man's world, of belonging to a post-colonial country recovering from war.