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Literary Review
Voices in the wilderness
ONE has seen and heard about communal violence and war-related atrocities against women. In 1998 when SPARROW organised a workshop on communal harmony and invited two Sikh women to come and speak about their1984 experiences, after 14 years they still choked when they spoke about their experiences and there was not one dry eye in the audience. We found ourselves crying with them, for them, and for ourselves who sat there with impotent anger. A lot of thought-provoking pieces have been written on how women are affected by war situations in the country and in the continent. But a recent visit to Kampala in July for a conference made me realise what war means to women in certain parts of the world and it also made me realise how difficult working for peace is when all you have with you is righteous anger.
The conference had some sessions on Peace and Conflict. And outside these sessions also many discussions took place on the subject. We shared what we had heard and what we knew and often a great sense of despair engulfed us even though we were determined to do something about it. A friend narrated what she had heard a Sudanese woman speak about war experiences. The rebels entered a Sudanese woman's house and killed her son. When she was about to bury him, they told her to burn his body. She proceeded to do so, afraid for her own life. They stopped her half way to violently rape her. They told her to pick up the half burnt body of her son and cook it. And they stood there watching it and then told her to eat what she had cooked. Those of us who heard it could not believe that human beings could do this to another human being.
And one after the other, similar stories came out, one worse than the other. Women from northern Uganda spoke about young women being kidnapped by rebel soldiers to cook for them and otherwise serve them and being made to walk through the jungles. The women sometimes have to carry pots kept on the fire for cooking on their heads when an attack takes place and many of them get scalded and have burnt scalps. I attended an interesting session on web casting and at the end of it three women from Congo were asked to give an impromptu talk for an unknown audience to be web cast then and there. They spoke in French and as they spoke we saw them earnestly speaking into the mike making some kind of an appeal. It was when the interpreter broke down when she translated what they had spoken that we realised that they had spoken about war in their part of the world and were appealing to the world to bring about peace. Speaking to a faceless audience who they believed was listening to them somewhere, made them come out with their innermost feelings and fears. The session on web casting suddenly became a session on casting our voices in the wilderness for kindred souls to pickup and act upon. It somehow made us feel that one is heard and it was a very comforting experience.
Attending one of the panel sessions as a guest was a village woman from northern Uganda on a wheel chair. With her were a six-year-old girl and a small baby. The person giving the keynote address told her story. The young woman, on her way to work in the fields, had stepped on a land mine and had lost her legs below the knees. Her husband brought another woman home and she is now dependent on charity. The woman could not understand English but when everybody began to look at her she realised that her story was being told and slowly tears began to well up in her eyes and softly she began to weep. Her little girl who was carrying the baby on her back looked at her mother a little bewildered and the little baby began to cry. She took the baby in her arms, continuing to cry and her daughter stood by her. Like many others I could not accept the making of such human exhibits. A woman's sorrow has to be shared and dealt with but she cannot be presented as an exhibit. Yes, living women with burnt faces, or women with legs destroyed by land mines do become living symbols of violence in war and such symbols do speak very loudly. But the woman must tell her story in her own language to share her experience and to educate us who know so little. And she should sit on the dais telling her story and not be an illustration for a keynote address, however passionate the speaker is about peace work, is what many of us felt. All that I could do was to gesture to the little girl and ask her to sit on my lap. I hugged her tight as if to tell her that I care for her and that I am just as helpless as her in this situation. As if sensing my feelings she leaned back and smiled at me.
And that was all that I could do for a little girl from a village in northern Uganda at that point of time. But maybe those who believe in peace sometimes have to act in ways which cannot bring about immediate results but which, in the long run, make such emotions yield some concrete results.
C.S. LAKSHMI
C.S. Lakshmi is an independent researcher and a writer. She writes in Tamil under the pseudonym Ambai. She is the founder-trustee and director of SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women).
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