Memories of War and the Bodies of Eritrean Women Fighters
Dr Sondra Hale
The representation of Muslim women’s bodies in times of war, conflict, and armed struggles for liberation is a complex subject, often neglected by academics and researchers. Eritrea, where Muslim women entered the struggle earlier than their Christian counterparts (1) and suffered the highest casualties, is no exception in this regard. (2)
Conflicts often change the way women think of their own bodies. For example, I was struck by an exchange I had with one of the Eritrean Muslim women combatants that I interviewed. When asked about sexual violence against female fighters, she responded that Muslim women kept their bodies “in reserve,” and confided that her greatest fear during combat was being captured and raped. “It is better to be killed. Death is kinder to a Muslim woman’s body than rape.”
Eritrean society – approximately half Orthodox Christian and half Muslim – is highly conservative with regard to women’s bodies, sexuality and the cultural positioning of women. For women to participate in combat, to live with men in bunkers, and to think of themselves ‘like men’ for the purposes of combat, was a striking departure from the norm of gender relations in pre-war Eritrean society.
When women entered the combat arena of war, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) (3) , later the ruling party, had to make a rapid switch from representing women as fragile, moral, pure and in need of protection to depicting female fighters of the war of liberation as strong and brave women who were equal to men in every way.
Female fighters’ bodies took on a different meaning. Their bodies had lost their sacred and profane signifiers. At least ten women I interviewed said that they ‘became men’ when they entered the field. Women’s bodies had become desexualised and neutralised, enabling men and women to develop new notions of privacy while living in the same bunkers.
During the war and a few years after, the icon of the brave woman fighter became the norm. Female fighters were systematically portrayed as strong, statuesque, liberated women, sporting an afro and wearing khaki pants and leather jackets. By contrast, the image of female fighters whose bodies had been mutilated, scarred, disabled, tortured, or sexually violated were hidden and only suggested when State ideology required the use of a ‘fragile’ representation of women’s bodies.
During the second, even bloodier war with Ethiopia (1998-2000), some 20% of the combat force of the Eritrean military was comprised of women. However, in March 2000, rumours spread that captured women were being raped. Consequently, it was announced that Eritrean female soldiers would leave the frontlines – i.e. combat – ostensibly to be transferred to training programmes. (4)
In my view, withdrawing women from combat after such successes during the first war reflected ideas about the sanctity of women’s bodies, which had begun to filter back into national consciousness. Women's bodies were, again, to be protected, hidden, secluded, segregated, feminised and, as my Muslim respondent above said, withdrawn and “kept in reserve.” Women were again exalted as mothers and protectors and socialisers of traditional mores. Women's seemingly ‘free bodies’ in the war zone were again constrained.
This seemed like a setback. After all, an integral part of the ideology and platform of the secular Eritrean ruling party was to build a newly gender emancipated population among the fighters. During the liberation struggle, the national discourse developed by the EPLF represented women as full participants in the military struggle – not as substitutes, but as full-fledged citizens of revolutionary Eritrea.
Practice closely followed this ideology. Close to the end of the first war, women comprised more than 30% of the fighting force and had served in all capacities, as "active organisers, teachers and administrators, as well as mechanics, electricians, electronic engineers, watch repairers, tailors, barefoot doctors and village health workers." (5) This is not the usual history of militaries where women have been used selectively, and mostly in jobs seen as extensions of their domestic labour. (6)
By most accounts, women experienced a high degree of emancipation while in the liberated zones – getting an education (academic, political, and military), learning new skills, and coming into a new identity. (7) It is, nonetheless, easier to build the kind of camaraderie in the bunkers that might look like egalitarianism than in a civilian ‘democracy,’ where daily life may feel less empowering for women.
The transition between the end of the armed struggle and the entry into civilian life revealed many changes in the ways in which women warrior’s bodies have been configured and reconfigured to serve the State. The bodies of women warriors had to meld into the national myths about the indispensability of Eritrean women in the struggle for liberation. In everyday practice, however, women's bodies had to return to a central reproductive role.
In 1994, 1996, and 1999 I interviewed more than 35 women from the EPLF and asked them to narrate their experiences as fighters, and stories about returning to civilian life. During my first visit in 1994, I observed many scarred and disabled female fighters. However, by the time I returned in 1996 most of the disabled fighters, primarily the amputees, had disappeared from public spaces. Many were withdrawn into their homes, tucked into the bosom of their families.
It seemed clear that by 1996, many Eritreans did not want to be reminded of the horrors of war and the toll that the war took on women's bodies in particular. So, the bodies of disabled female fighters, a large portion of whom were Muslim, all but disappeared from Asmara, the capital of Eritrea.
The EPLF and its extension, the government- controlled media, avoided sensationalism about the fate of women fighters and other women caught in the struggle against Ethiopia. I tried without success during my visits, to ascertain the numbers of women who were killed in the war(s), but there are no public figures on these disabled, mutilated, tortured, raped, or deceased women.
If one wanted to engage in voyeurism about Eritrean women and torture, you would have to look to memoirs or fictionalised accounts by outsiders, such as Thomas Keneally. Keneally, an EPLF enthusiast, had travelled with fighters and lived for a time in the field. In his novel, Towards Asmara, Keneally details the annihilated body of a Muslim woman who, for him, stands in for the suffering of all Eritreans:
“”She had suffered electric shocks. She had been stretched across a stone, four-cornered and im- mutable, with ropes. They had destroyed her womb that way. She could not have children and so she considered herself a woman more in a political sense, said Masihi, (8) than any other. All her teeth had been pulled, and all her nails. There were burns everywhere on her body...They trussed her, her legs bent up her back, her arms behind her, wrists to ankles. They stood on her neck to do it. Trampling her... They hurled her ...down the stairwell. (9)””
In this passage, Keneally spoke the unspeakable about women's bodies. Silence about women’s violated bodies remains the rule. No one I interviewed told me about the torture of women in any graphic detail. No one even told about his or her own wounds. I gave a lecture once on the liberation movement to an English language class for demobilised female fighters who were disabled from the war. These women, half of whom were Muslim, did not display or discuss their wounded bodies.
The silence that surrounded women, in particular, with regard to their experiences of violence and the invisibility of disabled, scarred, and traumatized women, serves to underline a number of Eritrean attitudes about women's bodies. The unspoken view seems to be that it is a national shame that women could not be protected from these war atrocities at the same time that their courage and commitment are part of the national allegory.
One Eritrean woman fighter's narrative serves as a segue from a discussion of the traumas of war to the post-war problems. She described her life during combat in this way:
“In the field they [the EPLF] took care of us. No one
dared hurt us or abuse us in any way. Only the party
could discipline us. When we got sick we were taken
care of; we could go to school if we had not had a
chance before we entered the field. The men were
our comrades; they did not dare do anything that
was not respectful.”
“I am a Muslim and I married a Christian. When I got
back into the society [became a civilian], my family
forced me to divorce my husband and marry a
Muslim. This man, my cousin, had not been a fighter
so he did not know the ... [she uses an expression that
means ‘code of combat’] and so he did not forgive me
for marrying a Christian. He treated me like dirt. He
turned me into a servant in my own house. I have
left him because he hit me, but I have nowhere to go.
The law says that I can get a divorce, but the religious
authorities will not let us.”
This feeling of camaraderie and emancipation, however, faded with the end of the struggle and women had to, yet again, conform to traditional gender norms. As the Muslim combatant explained in the same interview:
It is a sense of abandon and seclusion that then prevailed amongst female fighters as they were left alone to face new health and economic struggles. As described by the same interviewee:
“I am staying with a friend now; she is a fighter like
me. I have no income because there are no jobs.
My husband got the custody of our one child. I was
wounded in the war. A bullet went through my leg.
I got good treatment in the field, but I need more.
I do not have the full use of my leg. Although I
am classified as a disabled fighter and given some
benefits, they are not the benefits I need most.
I need a job, rights to my child. I need physical
therapy and some help, some counselling for my
problems. I have nightmares about my friend who
had her face blown off, right in front of me. I see her
every night...”
“In the field my husband treated my body as if it was
almost sacred. When we were in combat, he treated
me like everyone else. But when we were close
[intimate] with each other, he was different. I had
some wounds and he used to touch them and look
at me with admiration. Since we have come home
he does not want to look at me anymore when we
have sex and he is a bit rough. I am embarrassed to
tell you these things, but you asked.”
As another testimony seems to indicate, it may well be in the area of sexuality where the greatest stresses among ex-fighters emerge. One Muslim woman told me:
Conclusion
In Eritrea, war is part of the national myth about self-sacrifice, self-sufficiency, liberation, freedom, and morality. An important aspect of the national myth changed, however, between the period of the protracted war and the entrance into civilian life of demobilised fighters. What often awaits women who return from military service is enormous pressure on them to cloak their bodies in traditional norms and contribute to an image of a return to normal life, a familiar pattern in liberation struggles. In post-war situations the State needs the labour of women, but it needs to channel it into appropriate labour (i.e. for the ‘common good’). For women, among other expectations, this takes the form of upholding the moral fabric of the society, no matter how traditional these views may be. The State, again, has taken control of women's bodies.
Reference
1 A large number of Muslim women joined the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), the leading independence movement in Eritrea during the 1960s and 1970s.
2 For additional information, please see: Sondra Hale, "The Soldier and the State: Post-Liberation Women: The Case of Eritrea," in Frontline Feminisms: Women, War, and Resistance, eds. Marguerite R. Waller and Jennifer Rycenga (New York: Routledge, 2000), 349-370; and "'Liberated, But Not Free': Women in Post-War Reconstruction," in Aftermath: Women in Post-War Reconstruction, eds. Sheila Meintjes, Anu Pillay, and Meredith Turshen (New York: Zed Press, 2002).
3 The Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) was formed in 1970 out of breakaway groups who splintered from the ELF. After achieving independence in 1991, it transformed into the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ).
4 For additional information, please see: "Eritrean Government Takes Women Soldiers from Frontlines," Channel Africa, March 11, 2000; and "Eritrean Women Soldiers Leave Frontline, but are Ready to Return," Agence France Presse, March 11, 2000. It may well be, however, that it is the fear of their capture that propelled the decision to remove women from combat. See also: " Eritrean POWs, including Women, Wait for War's End," Dehai News Online, June 29, 1999,
5 Jenny Matthews, Women and War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2003), 41.
6 Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women's Lives (Boston: South End Press, 1983).
7 The only full study of women warriors to emerge during the war is: Amrit Wilson, Women and the Eritrean Revolution: The Challenge Road (Trenton, New Jersey: The Red Sea Press, 1991). For more updated information, see Chapter 8: Lyda Favali and Roy Pateman, Blood, Land, and Sex: Legal and Political Pluralism in Eritrea (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).
8 This is a name of one of the characters in the novel.
9 Thomas Keneally, Towards Asmara (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989), 314-316.