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WOMEN AND MILITAN CY: NARRATIVES FROM GUATEMALA,
INDIA, AND SOUTH AFRICA

By

Basuli Deb

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

2007

ABSTRACT

WOMEN AND MILITAN CY: NARRATIVES FROM GUATEMALA,
INDIA, AND SOUTH AFRICA

By

Basuli Deb

Moving beyond the Subaltem Studies paradigm of negotiating national
narratives between the state and its disenfranchised, this post Subaltem Studies
dissertation makes three major arguments. The ﬁrst asserts that the category of the
“postcolonial woman” disputes the logic of revolutionary nationalist unity since the
contest for power between the state and its insurgents is oﬁen played out over women.
The next signiﬁcant claim is that in the postcolonial context of human rights abuse
during militancy the violated woman is not a passive victim to be rescued by
imperialist interventions, but embodies the empowered return of the oppressed herself
to counter such atrocities. Finally, this study contends that literary productions that
narrate the postcolonial nation’s violence against women can galvanize transnational
human rights politics to restore justice to women. Disseminated in global circuits
mediated by intellectuals, these stories are both testimonials of persecution and
instances of activist solidarity for justice between the powerless and the empowered.

Bringing human rights discourse and feminism, both of which have often been
marked as propagating Eurocentric liberal individualism, together with postcolonial

theory, this dissertation foregrounds human rights concerns peculiar to postcolonial

women. The purpose is to understand how literature can revise the current frame of
human rights discourse dominated by the male as the political actor, and hence the
endangered target, that renders the political labor of women and the distinctively
gendered effects of conﬂict on them invisible. The intersection of gender and the
postcolonial nation-state is examined through geopolitically speciﬁc categories—
indigeneity in Guatemala, caste in India, and post-apartheidism in South Africa. The
ﬁrst chapter which focuses on the testimonials I, Rigoberta Menchu and _(;r_o_sslrg
Meg argues for a human rights paradigm that recognizes sexual violence against
women as a political weapon in conﬂict zones, and examines the unique interventions
of the female leader in the state sanctioned genocide of the Mayans in Guatemala.
Exploring the convict narratives India’s Bandit Queen and The Bandit Queen of India,
the second chapter studies the life of a lower caste woman bandit, bellicose against
the anomalous caste-democracy of India, and questions the violent criminalization of
such militant poor women. Chapter three discusses the viability of novels like David’s
Story and Mother to Mother in the struggle of women intellectuals against the
discursive violence of post-apartheid South Africa which silences the narratives of the
liberation movement’s own violence against women. Finally, examining the national
reconciliation projects of Guatemala, India, and South Africa, my dissertation asks if
historical wrongs against women during revolution can at all be addressed by post-
conﬂict nation-states. It explores if a more adequate forum for reconciling the rights
of violated women with those of the state is transnational feminist politics, despite the

need to guard such venues against the pitfalls of neo-imperialist impositions.

Capyright by
BASULI DEB
2007

To all who taught me to feel the pain and the spirit of those on the losing end of life

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A dissertation like mine which studies the suffering and resistance of people at the
threshold of human tolerance brings with it its own peculiar emotional demands on the
researcher. In the bastion of institutionalized cognitive development—the Euro-American
academia—the project of formal education markets a philosophy which stages emotional
insights into an issue as inversely related to an intellectual grasp of it. Such an
indoctrination reﬁises to acknowledge how emotions enhance cognition and vice versa,
and hence the validity of emotional development itself within the academia. This isolates
scholars whose research experience have pushed them beyond the bounds of cognitive
mapping and market value of their research interests to embrace the intense upheavals of
emotions that accompany intellectual understanding of issues. My work on human rights
violations of women in zones of collective suffering was such an intense experience of
writing ﬁ'om within the academia and the simultaneous alienation ﬁom the world of
institutionalized research. Faced with this excruciating pain of birthing myself anew
while I wrote, I anomalously turned to alternative spaces within the academia itself.

Without the sustenance to overcome the emotional pain of writing about the
trauma of people at the bounds of human forbearance, this project would not have been
completed. When almost no one around seemed to understand the toll this project was
taking on my health, I turned to Lisa Davidson. Her gentle and generous guidance toward
health realization and in centering me despite the ache of navigating through various
states of mood and mind released fresh emotional energy and gave me clarity to carry on

with the project. Off campus Annette Barton’s ability to continue the work that Lisa had

vi

begun to help me ﬁnish my dissertation was the long term sustaining factor behind my
research and writing. Annette’s empathy with me by virtue of being an MSU alumnus
herself and her ﬂexibility in accommodating my impromptu out of town trips forged a
relationship between us beyond the boundaries of traditional health realization work.

One person without whom my research, my thinking, and hence this dissertation
would never have taken the direction that they did was Michael Brandon Crow. My
turbulent connection with him while he was a psychology intern at MSU and the clash of
our respective disciplinary training led to an excruciating but necessary process of self-
excavation. It was a process through which this dimrtation and I myself were
empowered to challenge not only disciplinary knowledge across the spectrum, but also
institutionalized modes of cognitive research and thinking. Brandon’s insistence on
breaking down cognitive defenses to connect emotionally, his humanitarian work ethics
to foreground the health of the researcher in the face of a high-pressure system which
prioritizes high-powered research, and his ability to push me to uncover years of
ideological conditioning about the demarcation between the personal and the professional
has brought untold wisdom to the research and writing of a dissertation which has refused
to be written according to the strict tenets of clockwork academic research. It was written
only in moments of creative inspiration; it was written only when I could intensely sense
the palpable pain of the characters that I was researching on. In other words, the writer in
me remained unstiﬂed by the researcher. I

My guidance committee held my hand all through this difﬁth test of endurance.
Their faith in me ﬂagged never for once, even in the face of a daunting task of re-

envisioning the entire project midway through writing it. In this regard I am more

vii

indebted than words can express to my advisor Kenneth Harrow for his unquestioning
acceptance of my decision to rewrite the project and his unconditional prioritizing of the
interest of the project before the niceties of hierarchical decision-making. My admiration
for such an advisor is uncontested. My gratitude to Salah Hassan for his bold and
assertive move to step up as co-advisor of my dissertation when Ken was away in
Senegal and take responsibility for helping me reimagine and boost the project is
boundless. His ability to move back and let J yotsna Singh help out whenever it was
necessary was a tremendous positive inﬂuence on this challenging project. Jyotsna’s
quick insights into how the dissertation will move fast toward a conclusion and her ability
to extend a supportive hand of friendship to a researcher in crisis was once again tested
through her meetings with me over the winter and the summer breaks. Over the years my
thinking has been inﬂuenced strongly by Scott Michaelsen’s discussion on issues of
social justice. Throughout the project Scott remained an inﬂuential friend and mentor on
my committee, often negotiating between other committee members and me. His
investment in my project was immense, but his ability to stand back and let the project
move was exemplary.

Amidst all this the Dean of Graduate Studies, Karen Klomparens, was a tower of
unconditional support and understanding, sometimes in the face of the incomprehensible
logic of a foreign student who was operating according to the principles of an academic
system back home. Tony Nunez, the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, was a source of
support in the pre—defense stage. In Judith Stoddart, the Assistant Dean of Graduate
Studies, I found an unfailing ﬁiend who stood by me during the trials of dealing with the

intensity of a dissertation on human rights violations. Throughout my graduate career

viii

Scott Juengel has remained a ﬁ'iend, philosopher, and guide, never for once turning me
away from his door, more than once accommodating me unquestioningly in his
impossible schedule to take the pressure off me.

This dissertation would never have attained the clarity of perception that it has if
it had not been for my research on the ground in Guatemala and India. My debt to
Carmen Carney who co-founded the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission will remain
unforgotten. Her generous gesture to serve as my reference, escort, and interpreter to help
me gain access to various government and non-govemment organizations paved the way
for my highly successful research trip to Guatemala. Paul Menchu, the Director of the
Rigoberta Mencht'r Foundation threw open the organization’s archive to me as Marvyn
Perez patiently, hour after hour, translated documents to me. Ileana Alamilla, the head of
the alternative news agency, CERIGUA, whose journalists deﬁed torture and death to
resist state repression, even at the peak of the genocide, offered me perspectives on the
revolution that no text or research material that I came across recorded. The hospitality
and help that Miguel Angel Albizures and Ruth de Valle of Alianza Contra la Irnpunidad
extended to me for facilitating my research at their organization is a testimony to the
unconditional commitment of Guatemalan human rights workers. Besides, Anabella
Noreija and Gabriella Ostrich of Defensoria de la Mujer, Engma Azuzena Socoy of
Defensoria de la Mujer Indigena, Christina Laur of CALDH—the legal action cell for
human rights, Jorge Arriaga of SEDEM, Sandra Moran of Sector de Mujeres, and Jose
Alberto of the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission accommodated me in their
extremely demanding schedules. The warmth and welcome I received in Guatemala is

inexplicable. For my research on the ground in India, I extend my deepest appreciation to

ix

Kumarappa, the Assistant Librarian and Information Ofﬁcer of the National Library in
India, who went out of his way to extend personal help in facilitating my material
collection. The welcoming environment of the Center for Studies in Social Sciences and
the scholar-ﬁiendly attitude of its library staff were key factors in my very positive
research experience in Kolkata. Raghu Chakraborty of APDR—Association for
Protection of Democratic Rights—was dedicated in extending any help for research on
human rights abuse in India. Mahasweta Devi’s ﬂexibility in accommodating me during
my tight schedule in India speaks only of her grace, and once again attests to her intense
commitment to the cause of the indigenous groups in India. At Delhi the Indian Law
Institute Library proved a goldmine for my research. The Jawaharlal Nehru University
library, the Nehru Memorial Museum archive, and the National Human Rights
Commission also extended their services to facilitate my work. My research in Delhi
would not have been so smooth without the help that Pritwish Dutta extended in acting as
my escort. For my research on South Africa, Peter Limb, the bibliographer of African
Studies at Michigan State University, proved an invaluable force and resource. Without
his guidance, my work on South Aﬁ'ica would have taken much longer to complete.
Last but not the least, this dissertation would have remained a fantasy if not for
the unquestioning faith of my parents in me, and their ability to let me go. Since the day I
caught my ﬂight as a foreign doctoral student to the United States, they have borne the
agony of separation from an only child, sometimes for years together, when I did not go
home during the breaks for fear of interrupting the intensity of my research and writing.
Despite consistently realizing and reminding me of the effects of isolationist research,

they put their best foot forward when I needed them, not only as parents, but as

experienced academics and mentors. During my research in India my father, Dhiren Deb,
not only traveled with me during my research trips on a highly controversial topic in
India, but also spent hours by my side skimming through research material to help me
out. My transcontinental telephonic discussions with my mother who is a retired English
professor generated ideas for my research and made the struggle so much easier. The
sustenance that I drew ﬁom my phone conversations with my parents in India over all
these years of doctoral study in the US cannot be recorded in words. But above all, I
remain thankful to my parents for their emotional strength to understand a daughter
whose research on a brutal topic had for years turned her into a complete stranger, their
pride in my ability to endure the rigor and the strain of doing human rights work, and

their belief in my springing back to LIFE once the dissertation would be done!

xi

PREFACE

Though the category of oppression has been a major lens for doctoral research in
literature departments within the United States academia, the study of the struggle for
human rights through literature is an emergent dissertation genre. A critical approach to
literary texts as public memorials that not only commemorate crimes against humanity,
but also aim to galvanize social movements against such atrocities on collectives opens
up possibilities for reading literature as a culture of resistance—as activism. However,
having inherited a legacy of resistance to British colonialism by the accident of birth in
post-independence India and into a revolutionary family, the logic of my postcolonial
reading of human rights violations steers clear of much of Eurocentric human rights work
which ends up strengthening the imperial claim that certain parts of the world are
essentially violent, and hence need to be saved by the disciplined coalition of Euro-
America. Instead, my dissertation traces the sustaining linkages between colonial and
postcolonial violence. This methodology is crucial in contesting neo-imperialist invasions
of the postcolonial world in the name of a protectionist ideology of intervention in human
rights abuses without any attempt to address the unequal division of international labor.
Such a division feeds the structural inequalities of postcolonial geopolitics that is more
often than not the mainstay of postcolonial violence on women, as my dissertation has
throughout argued. Last but not the least, though this dissertation on women’s militancy
against the continuum of colonial and postcolonial violence has challenged
institutionalized units like the traditional family, the project was nonetheless inspired by
the stories that I was an heiress to—the narratives that my mother handed down to me

about the anti-colonial militancy of my grandmother against the British Raj in India.

xii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER ONE
The Fourth World Revolution: Indigenous Women’s Testimonials ........................ 14
I. Introduction ...................................................................................... 14
11. History of the Revolution: The “Small Voice” of Mayan Women ....................... 15
III.Scaffold for Textual Analysis: Women, Guerrilla War, and Testimonials .............. 18
IV. Sexual/Textual Violence: Re-membering Women within Genocide? ........................ 27
Rape ......................................................................................... 30
Forced Impregnation ...................................................................... 35
Military Politics of Discursive Silence vs Common-Front Politics of
Representation .............................................................................. 41
V. Transgressing Sexual/1‘ extual Violence: Red-Green Feminist Politics .................. 48
Revolutionary Maternity .................................................................. 52
Ecological Activism ....................................................................... 68
Inscribing the Cosmopolitan Self and Mediating the Iconic Indigenous
Subjectivity ................................................................................. 75
VI. Conclusion ...................................................................................... 78
CHAPTER TWO
The Global Movement Against Discrimination: Lower Caste Women’s Convict
Narratives ............................................................................................ 80
I. Introduction ....................................................................................... 80
11. History of “Disobedience”: Legends of India’s Unruly Daughters ...................... 82
III. Scaffold for Textual Analysis: Women, Banditry, and Convict Narratives ............ 92
IV. Criminalization of Women: Penalized for Being Socially Devalued? ....................... 97
The Girl Child ............................................................................. 98
The Concubine ............................................................................ 113
V. Defying the Deﬁnition: Recast(e)ing the Woman Criminal ............................. 118
The Warrior Goddess .................................................................... 119
The Border-Crossing Feminist ......................................................... 127
VI. Conclusion .................................................................................... 136
CHAPTER THREE
The Supranational Struggle for Desegregation: Women’s Post-Apartheid Resistance
Novels ............................................................................................... 139
I. Introduction ..................................................................................... 139

11. History of Radical Protest: Violent “Stories” and South Africa’s Resilient Women 143
III. Scaffold for Textual Analysis: Women, Anti-Apartheidism, and Post-Resistance

Novels .............................................................................................. 156
IV. Violent Nationalization: United in Revolutionary Silence? ..................................... 163
Masculinist Nationalism ................................................................ 164

xiii

Womanist Nationalism ............................................................... 175

V. Refusing to be Gagged: The Outcry of Nation-less Women .......................... 183
Postcolonial Writing .................................................................. 185
Postcolonial Research ................................................................. 192

VI. Conclusion .................................................................................. 195

CONCLUSION ................................................................................. 199

BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................................. 214

xiv

INTRODUCTION

Women and Militancy: Narratives from GWuth Africa
studies the relationship between the postcolonial nation and its women in literary texts
that map popular insurrection in the three diverse settings of Guatemala, India, and South
Africa. However, in each case the intersection of the literary tropes of nation and gender
are examined through different categories that have evolved out of the geopolitical and
cultural milieu of each nation—indigeneity in the context of Guatemala, casteism in that
of India, and post-apartheid democracy in that of South Aﬁica. The basis of each case
study is the narratives of or about militant women within armed struggle against state
despotism directed at subjugating selected populations of the nation. By foregrounding,
within people’s revolution, human rights concerns linked particularly to being female, my
project aims to address how women’s insurgency within resistance movements can be
located within a framework of human rights. This attempts to revise the myopic domain
of human rights largely deﬁned by the hegemonic image of the male as the political
agent, thus rendering the female political actor invisible. My perspective of postcolonial
feminist humanism will interrogate if state sovereignty can be reconciled with the rights
of the fiinge populations of the postcolonial nation around the speciﬁc issue of political
women of disenfranchised groups.

The ﬁrst major claim in this study is that the category of the “postcolonial
woman” within militancy forecloses the possibility of a uniﬁed myth of revolutionary
nationalism. Caught in the contest between state patriarchy and the revolutionary
patriarchy, the female ﬁgure becomes symptomatic of the ideology of ownership of

women that marks both the state and the revolution within projects of postcolonial

nationalism. As such, my dissertation challenges the power of the nation to prescribe the
identities of the people solely in terms of national afﬁliations and argues for transnational
forums of restorative justice for women in conﬂict zones.

The second signiﬁcant argument in this dissertation is that though the ﬁgure of
the postcolonial woman is a site of oppression, it also reconﬁgures itself as the site of
resistance to that oppression. This claim is an attempt to resist the Eurocentric discourse
on human rights violations in postcolonial contexts that often portrays the violated as
victims needing to be rescued by Brno-American intervention. As a corollary of this
resistance to imperialistic claims on postcolonial women, my work also contends and
demonstrates how postcolonial violence on women is a legacy of colonial violence.

The ﬁnal claim that my dissertation makes is that cultural productions about
postcolonial violence on women can galvanize a global politics of women’s human rights
in the material world of activism by opening up avenues for transactions between the
postcolonial nation and transnational feminism. The drive is obviously toward how texts,
with their transnational readership, become sites of revitalization of the image of different
victim groups as agents of their own history.

My enterprise can be seen as a post-Subaltem Studies project.l Subaltem Studies
surfaced as a discipline in 1982 with the publication of the ﬁrst volume of Subaltem
Studies: Writings on South Asia_n Historv and Society. It attempted to alter the elitist

ofﬁcial liberation history of India documented both by colonial British historians and

 

1 The word “subaltern” ﬁrst used by Antonio Gramsci—the Italian communist—in his Prison Notebooks
denotes an emergent class as opposed to the elite or dominant groups in power. See Antonio Gramsci,
Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio GramscL eds. and trans. Quintin Home and Geoffrey
Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971).

postcolonial Indian historians who had strong ideological and class alliances with the
British Raj. South Asian Subaltem Studies ventured “to rewrite the history of colonial
India from the distinct and separate point of view of the masses, using unconventional or
neglected sources in popular memory, oral discourse, previously unexamined colonial
administrative documents” (Said vi).2 The Latin American Subaltem Studies Group,
which emerged in 1992 having modeled itself on the South Asian Subaltem Studies
Collective, also asserted how the histories of the disenfranchised are overwritten by the
governing discourses of statism. But it approached this discursive gap differently: “While
the South Asian Subaltem Collective was criticizing the postcolonial liberal state and the
nationalist independence and the anticolonialist movements ﬁ'om the Left, we were
criticizing leftist states and party organizations for their liberalism. It was the same
question attacked from pre- and postrevolutionary ﬁ'onts” (Rodriguez 3-4). The aftermath
of the Soviet collapse and the positions of women and indigenous peoples within anti-
imperialist and nationalist movements of the left led to the disillusionment of Latin
American Subaltem Studies with the Marxist tradition. Though there is no identiﬁable
Subaltem Studies scholarship on Aﬁica, a tradition of South African Subaltem Studies
can be gleaned from the accumulating critique of the very foundation of post-apartheid
national unity—the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The
Commission is said to have synthesized a truth about apartheid in league with the

political goals of the militant resistance group—AN C (African National Congress),

 

2 In 1988, by injecting the woman question into the hermeneutics of the ﬁeld, Gayatri Spivak’s
interventionist essay “Can the Subaltem Speak?” forced South Asian Subaltem Studies to interrogate its
own elitist negation of gender. See Gayatri Clmkravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltem Speak?” Marxism and
the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 1988) 271-313.

thereby silencing narratives of betrayal by the post-apartheid state headed by AN C. The
most scathing among such critiques are perhaps works like Mahmood Mamdani’s
“Amnesty or Irnpunity? A Preliminary Critique of the Report of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission of South Aﬁica (TRC)” and “The Truth according to the
TRC.” My project attempts to go beyond the Subaltem Studies mode of negotiating
national narratives between the state and its subaltems. It argues that a Subaltem Studies
framework remains trapped in preserving the paradigm of the nation-state rather than
theorizing a possibility for just governance of all citizens. Moving past such a paradigm
of the nation to that of the ‘trans-nation,’ my post-Subaltem Studies project examines
transnational ﬁctional narratives about postcolonial violence on women as well as
testimonials produced collaboratively between elite activist-writers and dispossessed
women in postcolonial conﬂict zones. My enterprise also explores how such narratives
about state sanctioned human rights violations of women and their dissent against the
state can be positioned within an argument that tries to negotiate between the postcolonial
claim to national sovereignty with respect to internal dissent and the transnational
contention of global justice, and hence the privilege of intervention in crimes against
humanity. The analytical frame of human rights that my work brings into conjunction
with my post Subaltem Studies methodology is that of collective human rights rather than
individual human rights. Hence, the focus is on the rights of social groups.3 A classical
liberal theory of individual human rights contests “the statist perspective of the inviolable
sovereignty of the nation-state” (Felice 25) by placing the individual subject of liberal

humanism above the nation-state as a free-ﬂoating atomistic monad, unattached to any

 

3 For an understanding of collective human rights, see William F. Felice, Taking Suffering Seriously: The
Wee of Coﬂective Human Rights (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).

group claims. On the other hand, a theory of collective human rights locates the
individual as part of a suffering group whose collective claims are above that of the
nation-state. As such, transnational social movements become a means of pushing the
collective claims of suffering groups onto a global civil society.4

My choice of literary texts speciﬁcally about Guatemala, India, and South Africa
as nodes of analysis vis-a-vis human rights concerns of dissident populations has been
strongly inﬂuenced by the global political scenario ﬁ'om the 19803 to the present.
Published in 1983, L RigobeLta Menchjj is the testimonial of the indigenous leader from
Guatemala, Rigoberta Menchr'r. It catapulted the Mayan Indian resistance to the
Guatemalan state onto the international podium, and became an iconic human rights text
about indigenous self-determination. In 1992 Menchr'r was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Peace, and the UN declared 1993 as the International Year of the Indian Peoples. Menchr'r
was selected as the Goodwill Ambassador for the year. The years 1994 to 2003 were
proclaimed by the UN as the International Decade for the Indigenous Peoples and
Menchr'r was appointed as its spokesperson. Crossing Borders, published in 1998, is a
sequel to mgObertaMenchﬁ that recounts Menchr’r’s experiences as an indigenous
woman in global leadership of the aboriginal peoples. The context of India is seminal to
an understanding of caste-based discrimination. Though casteism affects other countries,
its discussion in the international arena has mainly been blocked by the Indian
government. Nonetheless, in 2000 the UN passed a resolution against “Discrimination on

the Basis of Work and Descent.” 5 At the WCAR (World Conference Against Racism,

 

’ Felice 99.

5 See Peter Prove, “Working Paper on Discrimination On The Basis Of Work And Descent: Call for
submissions,” online posting, 6 Nov. 2000 <http://www.ambedkar.org/UN/WorkingPaper.htm>.

Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance) between August 27 and
September 1, 2001 the issue was staged for the ﬁrst time at the UN. This came in the
wake of the assassination on July 25, 2001 of Phoolan Devi, a militant bandit chief turned
political leader of lower-caste Indians. Msgandit Queen and The Bandit Queen of
India explore the revolt of lower caste Hindu women of India against a democracy which
anomalously upholds a Brahminical ideology. 6 The crucial importance of South Aﬁica
lies in that its liberation from white racial oligarchy on April 26, 1994 marked the end of
apartheid. The UN General Assembly had adopted the Declaration on the Granting of
Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples in December 1960, and in 1962 a
Special Committee on Apartheid had been created to deal with the racial practices of the
Republic of South Africa.7 However, South Aﬁica remained the last country in Aﬁica to
be freed from racial apartheid, and in its violent transition to non-racial democracy some

South Africans in the post-apartheid state came to be deﬁned as more “authentic national

 

6 In the Hindu pyramid of castes in India the Brahmins or the priestly caste is at the apex of the caste
system, followed by the Kshatriyas or kings. The Vaishyas or merchants form the next step in the pyramid
and the Shudras, comprised of laborers and artisans, make up the lowest caste within the hierarchy.
Stigmatized by the kind of labor they performed, the scavengers found no place within the Hindu caste
pyramid and became the untouchables or the outcastes. They are identiﬁed as the Dalits in contemporary
India. Despite the fact that the constitution of postcolonial India banned untouchability and put in place
af’ﬁrnmtive action policies for the Shudras and the Dalits, caste discrimination still prevails in India today.

7 See Roger s. Clark, “Human Rights Strategies ofthe 1960s Within the United Nations: A Tribute to the
Late Kamleshwar Das,” Human Rights Quarterly 21.2 (1999): 316-317.

subjects” than others.8 AN C’s masculinist nationalism strived to construct a new South
Aﬁica by silencing the testimonials of pain that Sindiwe Magona’s Moth_er to Mother and
Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Story portray.

All the texts that my project involves can be positioned against the UN Decade for
Women: Equality, Development and Peace (1976—1985). A World Plan of Action for the
Decade impelled the UN General Assembly into adopting the Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women in 1979. With women on the
international human rights agenda, a plethora of women-centered texts were published
both by scholme and non-scholarly, feminist and mainstream presses. My project draws
on such texts published between 1983 and 2003. The women in development agenda of
the UN Decade for Women also saw the initiation of a dialogue between women of the
“North” and those of the “South.” In July 1985 at the Non-Govemmental World
Conference of Women in Nairobi women researchers and activists from developing
nations presented a reportnDeveloment Crises Qd Alternative Visions: Third World
Women; Perspective. In it they underlined that in addition to the weight of cultural and
political processes through which women across the world have less access to resources
for development, the poor women of the postcolonial South bore the heritage of
colonialism. With the establishment of a transnational feminist dialogue around the

impoverished women of developing countries, the publishing industries in both the North

 

8 Ivor Chipkin, in her study of the violent conﬂicts in three South Aﬁican townships, through a perspective
which distinguishes between the nation and a democratic community, deﬁnes the members of a nation as
“authentic national subjects” who may also be citizens with democratic rights and the members of a
democratic community who merely are citizens with democratic rights but who do not bear the national
mission like authentic national subjects. See Ivor Chipkin, “Nationalism As Such: Violence during South
Africa's Political Transition,” Public Culture 16.2 (2004): 316.

and the South disseminated accounts of and about these women.9 Among these many
were about gender linked violence against women and aimed at redeﬁning the patriarchal
epistemology of human rights itself ﬁ'om within a feminist paradigm. By raising human
rights concerns typical to postcolonial women within political resistance, my project
intends to situate itself within this revisionist paradigm of women’s rights as human
rights.

Women and Militancy: NarrLiws from Guatemala Indigand South Africa is
divided into three chapters which are framed by an introduction and a conclusion. This
introductory chapter lays down the schematic overview of the project and its claims and
locates it at the intersection of postcolonialism, feminism, and human rights. It positions
my post-Subaltem Studies project with respect to Subaltem Studies, attempting to
provide a corrective paradigm to the latter. By situating the literary texts in the global
political scenario of the 19803 to the present, this chapter justiﬁes why this project draws
on primary texts which are particularly about the postcolonial contexts of Guatemala,
India, and South Aﬁica. The introduction locates my project vis-a-vis the UN Decade for
women, thereby underlining the revisionist paradigm of women’s rights as human rights
which make up the critical scaffold of the project. Finally, the chapter highlights the key
points and the speciﬁc claims in each chapter which lead to a coherent argument that
underwrites the whole project.

Through a reading of I, RigobertaMenchﬁ and Crossing Borders. the ﬁrst chapter

of this dissertation, “The Fourth World Revolution: Indigenous Women’s Testimonials,”

 

9 For this history of Third World women’s intervention into the UN Decade for Women, I am indebted to
Pietilla and Vickers. See Hilkka Pietilla and Jeanne Vickers, Making Women Matter: The Role of the
United Nations (London & New Jersey: Zed Books), 1990.

examines the particular conﬁguration of Mayan women within the contest between
indigenous self-determination of the Mayan Indians of Guatemala and the sovereignty of
the Guatemalan military state. The chapter attempts to feminize the present masculinist
epistemologies of revolution through a study of the literary and political representations
of indigenous women’s leadership in guerrilla narratives about postcolonial Guatemala.
The subaltem position shared across locations of militancy between the female leader and
the masses is explored through the portrayal of the sexual atrocities of rape and forced
impregnation of Mayan women during the state’s counterinsurgency genocide against the
indigenous population. However, my reading of the themes of revolutionary maternity
and ecological activism emphasizes how the ﬁgure of the Mayan woman returns to
contest her victim status and reclaim herself as the agent of her own history. National
reconciliation between state patriarchy and revolutionary patriarchy which follow internal
dissent often involve an ideology of concession that includes forgetting the traumatic past
of indigenous women. Such schemes not only legitimize as natural the gender-speciﬁc
oppression of women during mutiny, but also co-opt indigenous resistance into the status-
quo, in the process re-congealing national sovereignty. By opting for texts like I,
ﬁgoberta Menchr'r and CrossingBorders that replace the leadership of the indigenous
patriarchy by staging the indigenous woman as the militant leader of the revolution, my
dissertation intends to circumvent the rubric of a compromise between the national
patriarchy and the revolutionary patriarchy based on a politics of forgetting. My project
claims that an analysis of indigenous movements against state repression needs to refrain
from legitimizing the category of the nation by locating popular insurgency at the

intersection of Fourth World transnational revolution and global feminist cultural politics.

Such a paradigm will enable human rights discourse and politics to address the gendered
violations of indigenous women within revolutions from within a feminist epistemology
of Fourth Worldism rather than from within an ideology of national compromise. Thus,
unlike Latin American Subaltem Studies, my work does not merely problematize the
status of women and indigenous people within left nationalist movements that resist the
colonial legacy of imperialism. It offers an alternative possibility for indigenous women’s
activism by relocating indigenous insurgency from within the revolutionary left to a
transnational Fourth World politics of feminism.

My second chapter, “The Global Movement Against Discrimination: Lower Caste
Women’s Convict Narratives” is an analysis of Ln_di_a’s Bindit Queen and The Bandit
Qgeen of India. This chapter explores the violent criminalization of resistant lower caste
women who challenge Brahminical power-structures like the caste system that remain
anomalously interlaced with the cultural base of the constitutional democracy of India.
Such violence is upheld both by the structures aligned to the nation-state like family,
marriage, law, and the penal system as well as those mutinous ones beyond the pale of
the nation-state’s law like banditry. Sitting through the characters of the girl child and the
concubine offers insights into the logic and effect of caste violence in this incongruous
caste-conscious democracy. Nonetheless, in a colossal comeback the lower caste woman
revitalizes herself as the warrior goddess and the border-crossing feminist to not only
militate against caste injustice within the nation, but also to resituate caste marked human
rights violations on the global map of discrimination based on work and descent. The
violence experienced by lower caste, outcaste, and non-Hindu tribal women in India is

structured by a caste system that is a vestige of precolonial feudalism and that which has

10

been diversiﬁed in its manifestations by a bureaucracy left as a legacy of the colonial
administration. By engaging in revolutionary politics against caste hierarchy, women like
Phoolan Devi have violated the cultural order of Hinduism as well as the privileged status
of masculinity within politics. The punishment for tainted political women like Phoolan
Devi who transgress their caste and gender boundaries is criminalization. In selecting
works in which lower caste women ﬁgure as insurgent leaders against casteism, this
chapter seeks to underline the double bind of caste and gender politics—a bind which
argues that caste based abuse against women in India cannot be addressed through a
framework of national reconciliation between the state patriarchy and the revolutionary
patriarchy. Moreover, the chapter contends that casteism itself needs to be positioned
within an international framework of discrimination rather than within a national
ﬁamework of Hindu culture. My project claims that a study of the violations of lower
class women within political struggle against the state should be located at the junction of
a discourse against discrimination based on work and descent and one of transnational
feminist politics. Such a discursive ﬁeld will enable human rights to deﬁne an
epistemology of justice for lower caste women, equipped to resist a common front Indian
patriarchy which co-opts brutalized yet resistant female bodies through an ideology of
state protection offered to the lower castes during national reconciliation. Thus, my work
intends to transcend the paradigm of South Asian Subaltem Studies which merely
critiques the bourgeois nationalism of the anti—colonialist independence movement and
the failures of the postcolonial Indian democracy to offer just governance to all its
citizens. In my post Subaltem Studies reading the category of caste has returned to forge

new opportrmities for progressive politics through transnational political citizenship.

ll

The third chapter, “The Supranational Struggle for Desegregation: Women’s Post-
Apartheid Resistance Novels,” focuses on Mother to Mother and w. Through
the theme of masculinist nationalism and its variant of womanist nationalism, the chapter
questions the very notion of truth in the South African national reconciliation hearings
through which certain kinds of violence against women during the apartheid era were
suppressed by the post—conﬂict nation building project. The project of national catharsis
foregrounded spectacular violence and silenced the deep structural violence in the
everyday lives of South Aﬁican women. Moreover, the reconciliation scheme
individualized victims and perpetrators of human rights violations during the apartheid
regime into two distinct categories, thereby muting the patriarchal violence against
women which marked the revolution itself. However, through the transnational ﬁgures of
the writer and the research scholar, my chapter underscores how these stories are
resuscitated. The supranational discursive militancy of transnational writers of South
Aﬁican heritage like Sindiwe Magona and Zoe Wicomb as well as that of scholars from
postcolonial cultures researching in the metropoles of the world unleash these muted
stories of national embarrassment onto the visible forum of a transnational feminist
politics. Thus, such feminist hermeneutics cuts across the national reconciliation mission
that scripts “his story” of the post-apartheid state and chronicles the traces of “her story”
left by the gaps and silences within the national archive. My post-Subaltem Studies work
claims that such a discursive politics aims to challenge the post-apartheid rhetoric of the
“nation” replacing it with the global governance category of the ‘inter-nation’ in which
feminist gender politics remains insubordinate to the patriarchal politics of the state,

contesting through a common front feminism the boundaries of the nation which repress

l2

the narratives of national shame. A ﬂedgling ﬁeld of Aﬁican Subaltem Studies can be
deﬁned around a critique of post-conﬂict national reconciliation. Recognizing texts as
sites which generate discursive resistance, my post-Subaltem Studies project extricates
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission from the political grip of the post-apartheid
state to question its premises from the perspective of a supranational struggle against both
raced and gendered segregation.

Without forgetting the dangers of foreign intervention in domestic politics, the
conclusion attempts to provide a corrective to a human rights paradigm in which the
nation-state remains the basis of just governance. Critiquing the national reconciliation
projects of Guatemala, India, and South Africa vis-a-vis the categories of indigeneity,
caste, and apartheid, the conclusion foregrounds the project of transnational justice
through the Pinochet trial. However, my postcolonial conceptualization of transnational
justice for women differs signiﬁcantly from the “Pinochet paradigm” which allows for
the legal intervention of the courts of any country in the internal justice system of another
country in situations of crimes against humanity. A postcolonial understanding of
transnational justice for women neither ignores the possibilities of imperialist
intervention in the name of justice for violated women, nor the likelihood of proprietorial

tyranny over women by the state as well as the revolution against the state.

13

CHAPTER ONE
The Fourth World Revolution: Indigenous Women’s
Testimonials

I. Introduction

This chapter speciﬁcally examines the literary and political representations of the
subaltem position shared across locations of militancy by the testimonial self of the
militant indigenous female leader and the Mayan masses in the guerrilla narratives of I,
Rigoberta Menchr’r: An In_d_i_an Woman in Guatemala and its sequel Crossing Borders.
This contention is complicit with the theoretical ﬂame of the larger project of this
dissertation. In this chapter rape and forced impregnation serve as signiﬁcant tropes that
deﬁne subalternity as a link between the woman leader and the masses. However, the

”I

collective politics troped as “revolutionary maternity and ecological activism are keys
to an understanding of the resistance that emerges ﬂ'om within the ranks of indigenous
women to such sites of violent marginalization. The project addresses the crucial issue of
transnational or transethnic solidarity politics around texts produced collaboratively
between subaltem women and their transcultural mediators, in spite of the unequal power
relationship between them. Through such a selection of literary texts that foreground the
indigenous woman as the militant leader, this chapter makes a gesture of resistance
against locating testimonials of indigenous self-determination vis-a-vis state repression in
a post-insurgency ﬂame of national reconciliation between the state patriarchy and the

revolutionary patriarchy. Such reconciliations are based on a politics of forgetting the

traumatic past of the nation’s women and its masses, and thus they co-opt indigenous

 

' See Ileana Rodriguez, W0 Guerril and Love: Understandin War in Central Ameri
Ileana Rodriguez and Robert Carr (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 160.

14

militancy into the status quo, thereby re-congealing state sovereignty. Instead, this
chapter avoids validating the category of the nation and attempts to feminize the existing
epistemologies of revolution against the nation-state by situating guerrilla texts about

popular insurrection in a Fourth World episteme of global feminist cultural politics.
II. History of the Revolution: The “Small Voice” of Mayan Women

In “The Small Voice of History” Ranajit Guha cites how the male leadership’s
account of the Telengana People’s Struggle (1948-51)2 in India erased the “small voice”
of its female participants.3 Guha asks: “But suppose there were a historiography that
regarded ‘what the women were saying’ as integral to its project, what kind of a history
would it write?” (11). For Guha, in a revisionist history of popular insurgency that
integrates the small voice of female political actors, women are agents rather than
“passive beneﬁciaries” of the movement whose voices once heard will galvanize and
make audible the other small voices. The other small voices of children and the masses
do resonate in harmony when the small voice of Mayan women is activated in the
following rewriting of the history of the guerrilla insurgency of the indigenous people in

Guatemala.4

 

2 The Telengana People’s Struggle was the armed guerrilla resistance of peasants waged against the feudal
oppression by the Muslim ruler of the Nizam dynasty and the Hindu landlords of Hyderabad in south India.

3 Sacriﬁcing the discursive authenticity of myriad revolutionary voices for the unity of the struggle, the
avant-garde narrative replicated the homogeneity of a statist discourse that refuses to hear the “small voice”
of the people. Ranajit Guha, “The Small Voice of History,” Subaltem Studies IX: Wrﬁi_ngs on Sogth Asia_n
Histog and Socim, eds. Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty (New Delhi: OUP India, 1996) 8-9.

’WhileresearchinginGuatemalainthesummerof2004andintheUnited Statesafterthatlcouldﬁndno
historical texts pertaining exclusively to the activism of indigenous women dining die insrn'gency and the
counterinsmgency in Guatemala. So, to incorporate the “small voice” of Mayan women in the history of
the civil war I was largely dependent on truth commission reports and on feminist anthropology.

15

In the nineteenth century indigenous communal lands were seized by the
Guatemalan govermnent for redistributing them to coffee plantation owners for
promoting coffee export. Again, in the twentieth century communal lands were
reallocated to the US enterprise——the United Fruit Company—for banana plantations.
This was symptomatic of Guatemala’s bid to join the ﬂee market economy.5 The Mayan
revolution against the Guatemalan state started as an armed struggle over appropriated
indigenous land. The thirty-four years (1962-1996) of civil war culminated in a state-
sponsored genocide of the Mayan Indian population. The Report of the Commission for
Historical Clariﬁcation (CEH) records 42,275 victims. Of the fully identiﬁed victims
eighty-percent were Mayan and seventeen percent were Ladino (l 8).‘5 Ninety-three
percent of the human rights violations that CEH documented were state-sponsored (20).
A quarter of these were women who were

killed, tortured, and raped, sometimes because of their ideals and political and
social participation, sometimes in massacres or other indiscriminate actions.
Thousands of women lost their husbands, becoming widows and the sole
breadwinners for their children, often with no material resources after the

scorched earth policies resulted in the destruction of their homes and crops. (23)

 

5 For my understanding of the relationship between the indigenous insurgency and the Guatemalan
oligarchy’s attempt at modernizing Guatemala I am indebted to the works of Cambranes and Dosal. Julio
Castellanos Cambranes, Coffee and Peasants: The Origins of the Modern Plantation Economy in
Guatemala, 1853-1897, rev. Carla Clason-Hook, (Guatemala City, Guatemala: University of San Carlos,

1985) and Paul J. Dosal, Doing Business with the Dictators: A Political Histog of United Fruit in
Guatemala 1899-1944 (Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 1993).

6 Ladino implies someone of mixed Indian and Spanish heritage. Today any Guatemalan who has rejected
Mayan Indian values, irrespective of individual economic status, is called a ladino. Rigoberta Menchu, I,

Rigoberta Menchr’r: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, trans. Ann Wright, ed. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray
(London and New York: Verso, 1984) 249.

16

More often women were the ones to be left behind after counterinsurgency attacks on
suspected guerrillas in which their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons were destroyed
or disappeared. Nevertheless, through their collective gender-based experiences within
political repression many of these Mayan women fashioned political spaces for the
emergence of a new indigenous feminism. Surfacing as political protagonists of the
Guatemalan nation, these women’s organized struggle against impunity came to be read
as structured and staged social movements. Widows who comprised a large social sector
affected by violence came together to form CONAVIGUA—National Coordination of
Guatemalan Widows. Their demands went “beyond the search for relatives to protest the
militarization of the countryside and particularly, forced recruitment [of indigenous
people by the army]” (REMI-II 85). In 1984 two dozen people, mostly women, formed
GAM--Mutual Support Group. Its membership consists of
relatives of some of the estimated 42 thousand people who “disappeared” in
Guatemala over the past three decades. [. . .] They went to government offices to
demand that the authorities investigate crimes against their families. [. . .] As they
marched in silence every Friday in front of the national palace with placards
bearing the photos of those who had disappeared, they ruptured the official
silence, bearing testimonies with their own bodies about those who have
vanished. (Green 240)
The revolution also saw indigenous women like Rigoberta Menchr’r playing out their
leadership roles on the global stage through their testimonials about the war. Challenging
“ofﬁcial histories of Guatemala and romantic representations of Maya women,” these

guerrilla texts, with their international readership, became sites of revitalization of the

17

image of Mayan women as agents of their own history: “Rigoberta’s standing in the
world community as Maya, female, and campesina [rustic] was transformed by her book
and multiple speaking engagements in Europe and the United States. Thus, Rigoberta
came to represent the antithesis of stereotypes of Maya women as silent, traditional,
static, without politics, and without agency” (Sanford, “From I, Rigoberta” 17).
However, the testimonial self of the indigenous female leader never constructs herself as
an elite vanguard alienated ﬂom the insurgent masses. Rather, she forges a political space
for solidarity not only between women guerrillas and the indigenous masses, but also

between women guerrillas and the transethnic mediators of their narratives.

III. Scaffold for Textual Analysis: Women, Guerrilla War, and
Testimonials

The critical scaffold of this chapter brings into conjunction the discourses of
postcolonialism, feminism, and human rights to examine subalternity as a mode of
activism against state repression through narratives of female leadership within common-
ﬂont politics. My readings of women’s guerrilla narratives in this section draw on
contemporary critical perspectives in Feminist Guerrilla Studies, Latin American
Subaltem Studies, and Testimonio Studies.

I attempt to resist the hierarchical logic of patriarchy in insurgency literature that
constitutes the revolutionary vanguard as male, and women and the collective as mere
instruments of social transformation. Examining the very different literary representation
of power by cultmes of insurrection when women occupy the political ﬂontier, my work
argues for the democratization of revolutionary power. Such an egalitarian paradigm is
based on a reconﬁguration of subalternity in which the revolutionary vanguard and the

collective share a peripheral social location that becomes a site for solidarity politics. The

18

discursive ﬂame of my analysis draws on Women, Guerrillgs_,_and Love: Understanding
War in Central America by Ileana Rodriguez. In her work she offers a consequential
critique of the epistemic violence operative in the masculinist literary tradition of
twentieth century Central American guerrilla texts which depict women “now as ‘repose
of the warrior,’ now as ‘revolutionary pussy.’ ” Rodriguez contends: “since women are
located in the same discursive and geographic spaces as people, masses, and bases, the
site of woman draws attention to the typology of political ideology that (re)constitutes
“democracies” as autocracies” (xvii). As opposed to this received tradition of guerrilla
narratives based on a hierarchical relationship between men and women/masses within
collective politics, Rodriguez understands the feminist methodologies of women
constituting women as “solidarity in aﬂ'mity”—a paradigm in which the revolutionary
woman is an ally of the masses, sharing a common cultural context of repression with
them (168). The subsequent sections portraying sexual violence on women during
genocide and transgressive sites of women’s militancy which challenge such brutality
will draw on this democratic paradigm to examine the relation in which the militant
female leader stands vis-a-vis the masses. For Rodriguez, the crucial signiﬁer of the
democratization of the revolutionary process is the recognition of female eroticism:
“what we women still dream of is a sincere acceptance of our sexuality and ﬂeedom of
choice, expressed mainly as our possession of our bodies—womb, vagina, and brains. We
want to make the personal political, to write our rights to our own bodies into the
legislation” (xxi). What we have here is not only the desire for the sanctioning of woman
as revolutionary subject, but also an appeal for the enﬂ'anchisement of women’s sexuality

within politics. Rodriguez summarizes: “My argument is that the casting of women as

19

corpse, and the gradual exclusion of love ﬂom literature, signals the nation-state’s
deconstruction, and the people’s de-nationalization——the representation of love for
women and love for country operating in tandem” (xix). Nevertheless, Rodriguez’s
emphasis remains on reading the nationalist nature of contemporary Central American
literature which entvvines “the fates of nations, women, and the people in the process of
revolutionary nation-building” (xxv). In sharp distinction to this conﬂation of the trope of
woman with that of nationhood, in my work the category of the nation as a venue of
justice for women and other subaltems is called into question. Moreover, whereas
Rodriguez urges for the legitimization of women’s sexuality within revolutionary
discourse through the acknowledgment of their desire for romantic love, in my work the
female body ﬁgures in the trope of state sanctioned sexual violence against indigenous
women through rape and forced impregnation. The discursive recognition of the gendered
torture of women during repression contests the male-deﬁned norms of human rights
discourse that renders the female political subject invisible.7

This chapter is directed at comprehending how testimonial literature of cultures in
revolution helps them to establish sites of resistance against structures of state terror to
move toward deﬁning an epistemology of justice. For examining this futuristic drive of
testimonials, I draw on Victoria Sanford’s Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Ri ts in
Guatemala which is a study in forensic anthropology of the state sponsored genocide of
the indigenous Mayans. Sanford examines how post-conﬂict justice can be constructed

ﬂom collective local memory through testimonials that remember, retell, and historicize

 

7 In the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment
adopted in 1984 the universal masculine pronorm deﬁnes the legal subject of torttn'e as male. Charlotte
Btmch, “Women’s Rights as Human Rights: Toward a Re-Vision of Human Rights,” The Politics of
Human Rights, ed. Obrad Savié (London & New York: Verso, 1999) 39.

20

violence. A crucial intervention in human rights discourse, Sanford’s anthropological
exhumations are also excavations of the collective truth of the Mayan Indian experience
of violence and terror as the unearthed relics are contextualized against eye-witness
accounts of the gendcide. The North American anthmpologist’s ﬁeld-work and the act of
generating discursive evidence of injustice ﬂom it becomes a practice in transnational
solidarity with the violated community. Just as the exhumations symbolize the regaining
of indigenous agency through the “retaking of public space” (17), similarly “giving of
individual testimony represents an expansion of both potential and real individual agency
that, in the collectivity of testimonies, creates new political space for local community
action” (72). Sanford’s work offers a valuable theoretical perspective on the interplay
between memory, violence, and truth telling as a process of healing the collective trauma
of a community. The exhumations and testimonies of the “living memory of terror” were
part of the research project of the Commission for Historical Clariﬁcation that formed the
basis of national reconciliation between the state and the URNG guerrillas.8 This was
integral to Guatemala’s transition ﬂom the violence of authoritarian statism to the justice
of popular democracy. The forensic anthropologist’s methodological rmderstanding of
testimonials as generative of political spaces for survivor communities to reclaim their
human rights through solidarity politics between the subaltem testiﬁer and her
ethnographer becomes a signiﬁcant lens for my analysis of guerrilla testimonials as sites
of common-ﬂout politics. However, unlike Sanford’s work which imagines an economy

of post-conﬂict justice for the indigenous through national reconciliation via truth-telling,

 

8 Sanford identiﬁes seven phases of violence which she refers to as the “phenomenology of terror”:
premassacre commrmity organizing and experiences with violence, the massacre, post-massacre life in
ﬂight in the mountains, army captures and community surrenders, model villages, ongoing militarization of
community life, and the living memory of terror. Victoria Sanford, Bmied Secrets: Truth and Human
Rigm in Guatemala (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 123.

21

my analysis of violence asserts that the category of the nation is inadequate for restoring
justice to women of the nation and all those who share her subaltem subjectivity.
National reconciliations, being negotiations between the state patriarchy and the
revolutionary patriarchy for preserving the category of the nation, re-crystallize state
power since such reconciliations are based on a politics of forgetting the painful past of
the people. In her introduction to The Latin Americgn Subaltem SmdiegReM Ileana
Rodriguez underlines that acts of speaking for the people are “unfortunately pervasive not
only in liberal nationalist projects but also in those organized in the name of socialism”
(3). In fact, the inclusion of the subaltem voice in ventures of the left like that of the
Guatemalan insurgency to enunciate a common-ﬂout politics between the elites of the
left and the subaltems becomes the project of Latin American Subaltem Studies.
However, my post-Subaltem Studies project is an endeavor to go past the Latin American
Subaltem Studies paradigm of left nationalist projects to re-imagine the “trans-nation” as
the Site for just governance of the subaltem.9 I argue that women’s testimonials are
opposed to the narrative genre of national truth commissions that enable reconciliations
merely between the fathers of the state and the fathers of the revolution. In fact, the genre
of testimonials which testiﬁes to state atrocities against a collective before a global
readership is a signiﬁcant medium for enabling justice for the nation’s women and the

masses through Fourth World venues of transnational politics.

 

9 I use the word “re-imagine” to enforce my awareness of both Beverley’s and Rodriguez’s deconstructive
reading of the trans-nation as the site for the ﬂow of global capital which is both the precondition for and
challenge to subaltemization. See John Beverley, Testimonio: On the Politics of TruLh, (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) 8-12 and Ileana Rodriguez, Womeh, Guerrillas, and Love:
Understanding War in Central America, trans. Ileana Rodriguez and Robert Carr, (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) xviii. Also see Footnote 8.

22

For my contention I draw on John Beverley’s critical paradigm of the Latin
American postcolonial testimonio as an activist practice. Beverley’s Again—WM
and Testimonio are crucial to my understanding of this aspect of the genre. In Testimonio
the author argues that the genre “is located at the intersection of the cultural forms of
bourgeois humanism, like literature and the printed book, engendered by the academy
and colonialism and imperialism, and subaltem cultural forms” (52). He claims that by
staging the voice of the voiceless, narratives like Lﬂgobertg Menchr’r assert “the
authority of oral culture against processes of cultural modernization and transculturation
that privilege literacy and written literature as norms of expression.” Furthermore “as an
énoncé—that is, as something materialized in the form of a transcript or text” it extends
“what counts as expression in civil society” (19). Hence, by articulating gender speciﬁc
atrocities against women by the state, testimonials inject the subaltem female voice into
the public sphere, both at the national as well as the global levels. Beverley contends:
“[Since] [t]he situation of the narrator in testimonio must be representative (in both the
mimetic and the legal-political senses) of a larger social class or group” (Agh'arLst
Literature 74), the powerful textual assertion of the testimonial voice “evokes an absent
polyphony of other voices” (75). Beverley’s emphasis is on the reality-effect of the
testimonial produced by its constructed nature as an “aesthetic-ideological” tool for
political propaganda This is in sharp distinction to the claim that testimonio embodies
the real and hence the singular truth of the referent. In Beverley’s words:

the presence of a “real” subaltem voice in the testimonio is in part an illusion; we
are dealing here—as in any discursive medium—with an effect that has been

produced, in the case of a testimonio by both the direct narrator—using devices of

23

an oral storytelling tradition—and the compiler, who, according to literary norms
of narrative form and decorum, makes a text out of the material (81).
However, such solidarity work between the narrator and the compiler is not ﬂee ﬂom
complications. Because of the lack of writing ability of the narrator (74), educated
mediators of oral testimonies who are often positioned differently in the racial and
geopolitical power structure “begin to enter into direct relation with the forms of political
agency of subaltem social groups” (18). In Testimonio Beverley forcefully summarizes
the potential for violence in such crossover alliances:
In its very situation of enunciation, which separates radically the subject positions
of the emitter and the receiver, testimonio is a form of the dialectic of oppressor
and oppressed, involved in and constructed out of its opposing terms:
master/slave, literature/oral narrative and song, metropolitan/national,
European/indigenous or African, elite/popular, urban/rural, intellectual/manual
work. (60)
Nevertheless, the argument is that despite being generated by political solidarities ﬂaught
with tension, the genre of testimonial is a form of global cultural politics that challenges
hegemonic structural relations that the alliances themselves embody:
In the creation of the testimonial text, information and control of representation
do not just ﬂow one way: someone like Rigoberta Menchr’r is also manipulating
her metropolitan interlocutor in order to have her story reach and inﬂuence an
international audience, something that, as an activist for her community, she sees

in quite utilitarian terms as a political task.” (Against Literature 80)

24

Testimonio engages the reader’s “standards of ethics and justice in a speech-act Situation
that requires response. [. . .] Testimonio in this sense has been important in maintaining
and developing the practice of human rights and solidarity movements, both within
regions and countries and in transnational circuits of cultural representation” (78). The
global circuits of production, distribution, and consumption of Menchu’s testimonial did
indeed activate an international recognition of the indigenous cause of self-determination,
culminating in her Nobel Peace prize in 1992.

In Testimonio Beverley argues how the reading of testimonials itself as human
rights discourse has been transformed. Beverley states: “Generally speaking, protagonists
of testimonio in the Cold War years, like myself, saw it as a narrative form linked closely
to national liberation movements and other social struggles inspired by Marxism.” The
author adds that he continues to see in testimonio a way to re-imagine the identity of the
nation. But there is also another contemporary trend of interpreting the testimonio:
“[t]oday the context in which testimonio is read and debated is not the Cold War but
globalization, not a bipolar world but one dominated by US. military and geopolitical
hegemony, not national liberation movements or big Communist parties but the so-called
new social movements, often operating at sub- or supranational levels” (x). Though I
draw on Beverley’s work, my reading of Menchr'r’s testimonials diverges ﬂom his
understanding of the genre in that I read testimonio against social movements that link
the subnational and the supranational. Beverley resists the contextualization of testimonio
against subnational and supranational social movements because he asserts that such a
critical scaffolding of the genre assumes that the ﬂow of global capital, which

deconstructs national borders resulting in transnational alliances, is the necessary

25

precondition for the mobilization of the subaltem. He argues that global capital is rather
both the precondition for subalternization of labor and the premise for challenging such
subalternization. For Beverley, the ﬂame of the nation-state is crucial for disrupting the
hegemony of global capital (8-12). Through its differential relation with the identity
politics of the state, the subaltem “ ‘interrupts’ the ‘modern’ narrative of the transition
ﬂom feudalism to capitalism, the formation and consolidation of the nation-state, and the
teleological passage through the different stages of capitalism (merchant, competitive,
monopoly, imperialist, now global)” (Testimonio 18). My attempt, on the other hand, is
to inject the gender question into the race and class question of subalternity in a context
where the genocidal activities of the Guatemalan state against the indigenous Mayans is
networked closely with the capitalistic ambitions of a Cold War US in a contest for
global hegemony. In my work the nation and global capital are not oppositional
categories, but form a resistant alliance that perpetrates the silencing of gender related
physical and psychological violence by both the state patriarchy and the revolutionary
patriarchy within national borders. Other deﬁant coalitions like that of women and the
masses across locations of militancy, connecting the subnational indigenous and the
supranational global elites, can provide points of intervention into women’s human rights
violations that challenge the category of the nation itself by highlighting its inability to
include subaltem voices in a meaningful way even in post-conﬂict reconciliations.
Beverley argues that though the political and the ethical-legal aspects of
testimonio sometimes overlap (xvii), the genre is linked to the political identity of the
nation rather than to the ethical-legal conceptualization of human rights. Nonetheless,

despite Beverley’s contention that his choice of I, Rigoberta Menﬂ as a representative

26

testimonial for his analysis of the genre was guided by his feminist sympathies (xi), his
theorization of the genre refuses to examine how his reading of testimonio, through the
rubric of the postcolonial nation-state, addresses the Speciﬁc issue of gender and left
nationalism. On the contrary, my point of entry into the analysis is the category of
women and the ethical-legal dimensions of human rights violations of women and
children (read as the masses) in the contest for ethno-nationalism. Vis-a-vis women and
children, my work goes on to underscore the dangerous essentialist bias in a politics of
crystallized cultural identity on which ethno-nationalism is based Thus, in my contention
the unit of the nation itself marked by violent ethnic politics proves an inadequate
analytical model for negotiating subaltem human rights. A more appropriate mode of
advocacy lies in transnational commonality across varied locations of politics, connecting
the sub and the supranational. Through this model my post-Subaltem Studies project on
transnational feminist politics aims to transcend the Latin American Subaltem Studies
endeavor to provide a corrective to the exclusionary politics of left nationalism ﬂom
within nationalism itself.
IV. Sexual/Textual Violence: Re-membering Women within Genocide?
My examination of the textual representation of state violence against indigenous
women during the genocide in Guatemala will foreground the relationship between
restorative justice for brutalized women and collaborative postcolonial texts like I,

Rigbertg Menchr’i.lo Scholars like Victoria Sanford have argued about the vital

 

m For this perspective on postcolonial writing I am indebted to Annedith Schneider’s Call for Papers for
the ﬁfth Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference held in Urbana-Champaign in June 2004. The panel
was titled “Writing Violence: Explorations and Solutions in Postcolonial Literatrnes.” In my analysis
justice for tortured women is initiated by testimony and the collective’s re-witnessing of brutality through
it. The testimonial voice disseminates itself through print in the form of a public appeal for restorative
justice through a change of an oppressive social order based on military dictatorship.

27

importance of activist writing like forensic anthropology in documenting violence--a
crucial stage in helping a culture of protest heal and make a transition ﬂom violence to
justice through truth telling. Through her argument Sanford has laid out the political
solidarity between the violated and forensic ethnographers who transcribe violence.
Forensic anthropological excavations of genocidal massacres formed the basis of truth
telling for the Guatemalan national reconciliation. Sanford’s contention about the activist
potential of forensic anthropology and hence of ethnographers to enable truth telling can
be usefully applied to guerrilla testimonials as well. In the logic of counterinsurgency
human rights abuse, violence as state sanctioned torture silences the dissenting voice
through pain and terror. Guerrilla testimonials like Mencht'r’s redeem the silenced terrain
of dissent through its commitment to a genre of narration that testiﬁes internationally to
the gagging of the dissenting voice through statist torture of the indigenous collective.ll
In the terrain of silence and telling an understanding of the narrative possibilities of
testimonials against the state, like Menchr'r’s, are augmented when contextualized against
the then legal status of the tortured voice in international law to testify against the
torturer.12 As such, landmark verdicts by the International Tribunal and United Nations
conventions and declarations will signpost my analysis of state violence against women.
The aim is to underline that those violent acts of the state which exist in legal vacuums
and hence cannot be legally narrated as evidence against the torturer can be forcefully

deﬁned, if not codiﬁed, as torture by the narrative power of the testimonial voice. An act

 

“ Joseph Slaughter’s “A Question ofNarration: The Voice in International Human Rights Law” has been
a resource in clarifying my perception about the tortrn'ed voice. Joseph Slaughter, “A Question of
Narration: The Voice in International Human Rights Law,” Human Rights Qu_a_rt§rly 19.2 (1997): 422.

‘2 Slaughter 428.

28

of “retaking public space” by unsilencing the collective truth drawn from the local
memory of terror, Menchu’s testimonials, like Sanford’s anthropological discourse, thus
forge new political spaces of indigenous agency. Nonetheless, testimonials by indigenous
women about state violence are themselves caught in unequal power relationships when
mediated by the educated elite to represent collective trauma through a singular
testimonial voice. Hence, a judicious handling of Sanford’s ﬁame needs to problematize
the notion of re-presentation of the cultural memory of violence as common-ﬁont
political practice for justice.

The politics of historicizing violence raises critical questions about representation
and ethics—about the violence of representation itself when, by repeating violence
discursively, it re-creates as textual violence the material violence that it is recording. 13
On the other hand, accurate description remains a high priority in the responsibility that
comes along with archiving violence for generating justice through the pressure of public
opinion. Hence, co-ordination of affect through explicit descriptions rather than
aestheticized ones becomes singularly important for making the readership sense the
impact of the material violence. However, within a patriarchal frame of social reference
the literary portrayal of sexual violence against women takes on the prurience of violent
pornography that objectiﬁes women, as through the disseminating circuits of the
publishing houses the brutalized female body becomes commodiﬁed as a spectacle for
mass consumption. Acknowledging the dilemma that texts are caught in with respect to

literary representations of gendered atrocities, the ﬁnal goal here is to examine whether

 

'3 Wendy Hesford’s reading of the trope of rape was especially helpful in my analysis of rape as a textual
construct of material violence. See Hesford, Wendy S, “Rape Stories: Material Rhetoric and the Trauma of
Representation,” Haunting Viol_a_tions: Fe4minist Criticism and the Crisis of the “Real.” eds. Wendy S.
Hesford and Wendy Kozol (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001) 13-46.

29

postcolonial writings that reiterate such violence and hence are complicit in it can also be
recuperated as transgressive sites of political praxis against such material/rhetorical
violence.14 In this section the literary tropes of rape and forced impregnation provide a
ﬂame for my analysis of how postcolonial texts like LﬁgobertaA/lenchﬁ articulate
sexual brutality against poor indigenous women. The dynamics of voicing gender
violence is then contrasted with the politico-military strategy of silence about sexualized
torture of women. The goal is to underscore how testimonials like I, Rigoberta Menchr'l
that are collaboratively produced by the indigenous and the elite who, despite being
unequally located in structural relations of power, generate sites of activist alliances
through the joint witnessing of injustice. By reclaiming petriﬁed words so long unable to
structure traumatic experiences at the limits of human endurance, such mediated stories
of collectivities, in spite of being enunciated by an iconic voice, resist the violence that
erasure of women’s wartime history of sexual trauma by the military state unleashes.
Rape: Of central importance here is the fact that the original Spanish version of 1,
Rigoberta Menchl’l was published in 1983, long before the Hague International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1998 publicized rape of women as a systematic

method of torture by state actors during genocide. '5 Against this historical context of

 

" By praxis I am suggesting the intersection between discourse and practice.

'5 Geofﬁ'ey Robertson, Crimes Against Humanig: The Struggle for GloglJustig (New York: The New
Press, 1999) 306-7. According to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading
Treatment or Punishment adopted in 1984: “the term ‘torture’ means any act by which severe pain or
suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inﬂicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining
from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has
committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for
any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inﬂicted by or at the
instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an ofﬁcial
capacity.” The Convention, however, remains silent about the issue of rape as a method of political torture.
“Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, 1984,”
Basic Documents on Human Rim ed. Ian Brownlie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) 38-51. Till 1998,
through its silence about rape of women as torture, human rights law and practice privatized political rape

3O

human rights jurisprudence vis-a-vis the tortured voice of the object of genocidal state-
rape, what is the ideological role of the rape narrative in LEgobertaLMenchﬁ?

In Menchr'r’s testimonial genocidal rape is deﬁned through the torture and
assassination of her mother by the Guatemalan army after she was kidnapped. During
sexualized torture of the female body the targets of violence are the sites of difference
ﬁom the normative male body. As such, the pain of the victim is objectiﬁed as a sexual
commodity for the pleasure of the state patriarchy.16 In examining the power of
postcolonial testimonials of genocide to politically bargain for tortured women it is
imperative to critically explore the dynamics of the narrative itself. Does the sexual
violence depicted in the text engage in re-commodifying the sexual agony of the victim
for mass consumption by the readership? The testimonial narrator recounts:

My mother was raped by her kidnappers, and after that they took her down to the

camp—a camp called Chajup which means ‘under the cliff.’ They have a lot of

pits there where they punish the people they have kidnapped and where my little
brother was tortured as well. They took my mother to the same place. There she
was raped by the ofﬁcers commanding the troops. After that she was subjected to

terrible tortures. (198)

Rather than foregrounding the rape of the female body in an exhibitionist attempt at

constructing a spectacle of ofﬁcial sadism, the testimonial voice embeds the rape within

 

as personal acts of sexual depravity by individual men rather than addressing it as ofﬁcial violence. Lisa M.
Kois, “Dance, Sister, Dance!” An End t_o TorturLe: Strateg'es for its Eradication, ed. Bertil Dunér (London
and New York: Zed, 1998) 90.

'6 Kois 94.

31

the narrative of abduction, disappearance, and captivity. '7 The disintegration of the body
of Menchr’r’s mother is played out through the spectacle of assassination which I deal
with in the next section rather than through the narrative of rape. By refusing a
pornographic detailing of the ofﬁcial rape of a speciﬁc female body the narrative
generates a paratext of terror for the readership in which abduction of women during
genocide often results in rape. ‘8 Underlining the difference between the abducted male
and the abducted female, the paratext of emotions thus makes a distinctive case for
women’s human rights during genocide without objectifying the female body. By
exposing the censored chronicles of the state, and engraving the muted wartime histories
of ofﬁcial rape of women in the cultural consciousness, the rape narrative consolidates
the state as the object of sexual terror in the paratextual zone of the reader. With the state

denuded, the borders of the text become sites of praxis as political onslaughts by

 

'7 In my analysis of the rape narrative I have claimed that rape was an ofﬁcial strategy in the context of
the Guatemalan genocide. The Ofﬁcial Report of the Human Rights Ofﬁce of the Archdiocese of
Guatemala argues: “A premeditated strategy of violence speciﬁcally targeting women cannot be inferred
from the information compiled by the REMHI project. The testimonies do indicate, however, that the
army’s counterinsurgency tactics against women were consistent at different places and times and formed
part of its strategy of mass destruction.” The Report adds: “This counterinsurgency tactics acquired certain
genocidal characteristics. It attacked the community social fabric at its foundations by attempting to
exterminate women and children in their capacity as vessels for the continuity of life and the transmission
of culture.” See REMHI (Recovery of Historical Memory Project), Guatemala: Never Again, (Guatemala
City: Archdiocese of Guatemala, 1999) 79-80. Since the counterinsurgency policies did assume a genocidal
make-up and rape consistently played a signiﬁcant part in disintegrating the community, I argue that
though rape cannot be directly documented as an oﬂicial policy of counterinsurgency, its vital role as a
weapon for ﬁagmenting the indigenous community in the context of genocide makes it imperative to read
rape as a deliberated strategy of state violence rather than a manifestation of indiscipline of a few aberrant
soldiers. Irene Matthews makes a similar case about rape as a state sanctioned strategy based on its role in
an ofﬁcial policy of ethnocide: “Organized rape plays a special role in a policy of ethnocide; it violates the
rules and customs of the group, spreads fear, morally and physically disintegrates the family and the
community, and submits women to the most monstrous evidence of the power of violence.” See Irene
Matthews, Translating/ Trarrsgressingfl‘ortru'e...,” Frontline Feminisms: Women War and Resistance ed.
Marguerite R. Waller and Jennifer Rycenga (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000) 99. In this
context it is also important to remember Kois’s argument cited above that the privatization of political rape
as the personal depravities of a few sexual perverts had largely hindered the treatment of political rape as
torture till 1998. See Kois 90.

 

1‘ By “paratext of terror” I refer to the interface between the text and the reader—a region beyond the text
haunted by the emotions generated in the reader by the text, which in turn inﬂuences its reading.

32

informed global opinion initiate a process of stripping the terrorist state of its power. This
is the logic of advocacy that underwrites postcolonial texts like L Rigoberta Menchr'l that
vocalize women’s human rights.

However, despite the powerful textual representation of the rape of the female
body, the political aesthetics of the portrayal of male sexual trauma in the text is
problematic. The sexual violence on the male body is explicit in the lurid description of
the torture of Menchr'l’s brother: “They tied him up, they tied his testicles, my brother’s
sexual organs, they tied them behind with strings and forced him to run. Well, he couldn’t
stand that, my little brother, he couldn’t bear that awful pain and he cried out, he asked
for mercy” (I 74). The body of the male guerrilla does not bear the same burden of sexual
objectiﬁcation within a patriarchal realm of gender construction. Nonetheless, the public
performance of private narratives of male sexual trauma destabilizes the romantic notion
that women’s oppositional discourses against violence unarguably deconstruct violence.
When the only woman in captivity with Menchr’r’s brother and twenty other men is
remembered, however, once again the narrator is reticent about the details of the rape. All
she says is: “They had raped her and then tortured her” (174). There is no voyeuristic
circulation of women’s trauma through a re-scripting of the material rape on the
rhetorical body of the woman guerrilla.

In the narrative scheme of LRigrberta Mench_r’r where violence mediates literary
truth and textual representation the trope of rape becomes a metonymy for the shared
subaltem subjectivity of all indigenous female bodies in the text. In the testimonial
economy of counterinsurgency sexual terror the rhetorical bodies of the female guerrilla

leader and that of all indigenous women are linked through their metonymic correlation

33

with the high possibility of being raped.19 This leitrnotif of rape in I. Rigﬂerta Menchr'l is
also pivotal in interpreting how the text constitutes subalternity as a political practice
across unequally empowered locations of militant cultural activism. The rapeability of the
guerrilla leader’s body connects it with raped bodies as well as what I call “imminently
rapeable bodies” in the testimonial. In the rhetorical domain of rape these imminently
rapeable female bodies take on different valences of marginalization which, instead of
ultimately precipitating rape, get refunctioned as vantage points for indigenous collective
politics. Mobilizing feminine youth and beauty as people’s weapons, pretty young girls in
Menchl'r’s testimonial successfully ambush soldiers without being violated, and thus in an
astormding subversion of the hegemonic narrative of state rape female sexuality gets
recoded as indigenous power. Menchr'r’s text also reconﬁgures the disability of the
imminently rapeable aged body when old women unable to withstand life in ﬂight stay
back only to trap and fatally assault soldiers instead of getting raped. Hence, imminent
rape of the aged body gets re-scripted as militant cultural politics. Thus, in a metonymic
reading of rape in Lﬂgoberta Menchl’r the unraped body of the leader, the raped bodies,
and the imminently rapeable bodies all stand ideologically related to each other across

varied locations of common-front politics.

 

'9 The raison d'étre of my metonymic reading of the trope of rape as connecting all rapeable bodies has
been drawn from that of George B. Handley’s metonymic reading of the genre of testimony. In “ ‘It’s an
Unbelievable Story’: Testimony and Truth in the Work of Rosario Ferré and Rigoberta Menchu” Handley
argues that in a metonymic reading of testimony “one accormt only points to the possibility of, indeed the
need for, further accounts rather than seeking to stand in their stead” (65). In Handley’s contention, unlike a
metaphorical reading in which one testimonial can silence another through an effect of substitution, a
metonymic reading links various attempts at reconstructing history despite their differences in testimony.
George B. Handley, “ ‘It’s an Unbelievable Story’: Testimony and Truth in the Work of Rosario Fen'é and

Rigoberta Menchu,” Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women’s Writing as Tmiog, ed. Deirdre
Lashgari (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1995) 65.

34

Forced Impregnation: By the same logic of a metonynric reading of rape, bodies
marked by rape induced pregnancy also share in the subaltem subjectivity of raped and
rapeable indigenous women in Menchr'r’s text. What is historically signiﬁcant here is the
fact that forced impregnation gained juridical recognition only in 1998 in the context of
the Balkan genocide,20 ﬁﬁeen years after Menchr'l’s testimonial about the Guatemalan
genocide was published. In this pre-Balkan-genocide political imaginary of women’s
wartime human rights, what is the role of the narrative of rape induced pregnancy in I,
Iﬁgoberthenchr’r?

In Menchr’l’s excavations of the cultural memory of the genocide in Guatemala,
the collective truth of Mayan women’s experience of mass rape culminates in a narrative
of forced impregnation and subsequent abortion. Rape induced pregnancy as biological
warfare is based on an ideology of patrilineal descent which traces the identity of the
child through the paternal gene, and hence delegitimizes the child’s genetic link with the
mother.21 Even when impregnation is not an ofﬁcial policy to systematically erode the

victimized culture but an aftermath of ofﬁcial rape, the deﬁning potential of women’s

 

2° Nonetheless, forced impregnation was identiﬁed as a war crime only to help in framing rape as genocide
by underlining the power of rape induced pregnancy as an ofﬁcial policy for fragmenting the target culture.
Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, 1949, states “Women shall be especially protected against any
attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault”
However, since before 1998 rape was not perceived as torture jurisprudentially and forced impregnation
was not even juridically acknowledged as a wartime phenomenon, the enlisting of “torture or inhuman
treatment” among the grave breaches in Article 147 did not in any way offer a legal means to address the
issue of rape induced pregnancy as a serious contravention of wartime ethics. Incidentally, the Fourth
Geneva Convention pertains to the protection of the noncombatant population. “Geneva Convention
relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War,” 12 August 1949, Ofﬁce of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights, 2002, Ofﬁce of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human

Rights, Geneva, Switzerland, 24 January 2006 <http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/92.htm>.

2’ R. Charli Carpenter, “Surfacing Children: Limitations of Genocidal Rape Discourse,” Human Rights
MET—1‘1 22.2 (2000): 457. In this context it is important to point out that I am not assuming that the
soldiers were not Mayans. Rather this argument is based on the observation that soldiers of Mayan origin
who were involved in forced impregration as a terrorizing strategy are seen as being lost to the ladino
culture, and hence the enemy as well.

35

reproductive capacities is sinrilarly erased. In a critical analysis of postcolonial
testimonials of state terrorism as sites of political praxis to negotiate for women’s human
rights, a close reading of the reproductive politics that emerges through the narratives of
rape induced pregnancy and abortion in the text is crucial. Concurrently, exploring the
ethics of representation of sexual violence against women remains vital to assessing the
activist potential of the genre. The testimonial voice in LRigoberta Menchr'r reminisces
about the excruciating dilemma of two indigenous women impregnated during the
military gangrape of four Mayan women:
While I was living in the house of one of my friends who was pregnant, she told
me: “I hate this child inside me. I don’t know what to do with it. This child is not
my child.’ She was very distressed and cried all the time. But I told her: ‘You
must love the child. It was not your fault.’ She said: ‘I hate that soldier. How can I
feed the child of a soldier?’ The compaﬁera aborted her child. She was ﬁom a
different ethnic group than ours. Her community helped her by telling her that it
wasn’t unusual, that our ancestors did the same when they were raped, when they
had children without wishing to, without any love for the child. But my two
ﬁiends suffered very much. I didn’t know what to do, I felt helpless. (142-3)
Once again, the testimonial declines to present wartime atrocities against women through
titillating spectacles of violent impregnation. Neither are graphic images of sexual
violence rejected only to be replaced by an aesthetic sublimation of military brutality
through ﬁgurative language. Instead, through a candid and unembellished narration of the
exchange between the raped woman and Menchu, what comes across is the trauma of

women impregnated through military rape. In the interface between the reader and the

36

text the rape victim’s agony at her prospective mothering of a military child translates as
affect intended to stimulate public consciousness about women’s human rights. This
tactic of advocacy endorsed by postcolonial texts testifying to gendered violence against
women by the state is a campaign for global pressure as a counteroffensive to state terror.
Nonetheless, a more rigorous study of the narrative of forced impregnation
reveals the ideological intricacies that underlie the two philosophies of rape induced
motherhood that surface in the account.22 If the expletive “I hate this child inside me”
becomes the template for reading the narrative of forced impregnation, what emerges is
the raped woman as the atomistic legal subject of liberal individualism entitled to her
right to abort a rape induced pregnancy. Within such a discursive logic “This child is not
my child” is interpreted as a victim of rape acting as a free agent by terminating a
pregnancy violently forced upon her.23 However, the referential possibilities of language
in the above excerpt open up alternative routes of discursive resistance against structures

of state terror like rape induced pregnancy, in the process questioning the philosophical

 

22 Feminist legal critical studies and discourses on children’s human rights that emerged in the wake of the
Balkan genocide resisted the containment of the language of forced impregnation by a discourse of rape,
and respectively insisted on constructing it in international law as an independent category of war crime,
tortme, and genocide against women and children. Drawing on these discursive trends, this critical analysis
re-locates the rhetoric of abortion after state rape in Menchr'r’s text from the discursive terrain of rape to

that of ethnocide. War Crime Under International Law: A Smial Remrt of the International Progra_m
(New York: The Center for Reproductive Law & Policy 1993) and Carpenter 428-77.

23'Mary Poovey’s “The Abortion Question and the Death of Man” has been an inﬂuential resource in my
reading of abortion of rape induced pregnancy in LRigoberta Menchr’r. Like Poovey, I question the
discursive justiﬁcation of abortion based on the metaphysics of substance which assumes that abortion is an
act of an individual’s free will (241). In my analysis I locate the abortion issue in a matrix of collective
politics like Poovey. However, while Poovey’s argument locates the issue in peacetime civil society in
which women’s decision to abort their pregnancies are connected to social systems like family,
employer/employees, health care, social-welfare, and the tax systenr, my examination of forced
impregnation in testimonies of genocidal rape by the state situates the narrative of abortion in the
revolutionary collective’s proprietory politics over the reproductive identity of the raped woman, hence
challenging a positivist reading of all abortions as acts of reproductive autonomy (252). Mary Poovey, “The
Abortion Question and the Death of Man,” Feminists Theorize the Politig, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W.
Scott (New York and London: Routledge, 1992).

37

premises of a narrative of abortion in the context. If the raped woman’s hatred for the
fetus is contextualized against her dilemma expressed in her agonizing admission “1 don’t
know what to do with it,” the import of the narrative of forced impregnation shifts as the
reference point is no longer the assumption that the raped woman’s act of abortion is an
operation of resistant agency. The parameter of reference here is the immobilized
condition of the raped woman resonated by her anguished question: “I hate that soldier.
How can I feed the child of a soldier?” In this philosophy of rape induced motherhood in
which maternal genetics is completely invalidated, woman becomes merely a
reproductive vessel to transmit the father’s gene to the child whose identity is tracked
through paternal genetics.

Against this ideology of imperiled motherhood represented by the masses, the
female revolutionary leader bargains for a philosophy of motherhood based on deﬁant
love: “You must love the child. It was not your fault.” The rebel leader’s philosophy of
resistant love opens up a discursive space that contests the ideology of protection that the
revolutionary community draws upon in its archetypes of violated women ﬁom Mayan
history who aborted rape enforced pregnancies. Such a protectionist ideology which
contends “our ancestors did the same when they were raped, when they had children
without wishing to, without any love for the child” crafts the raped woman as an agent of
her own reproductive history who, like her ancestors, re—appropriates her raped body by
terminating a forced pregnancy as an act of individual will. In constructing the abortion
as an act of choice, such an ideology of protection suppresses a symptomatic reading of
the raped woman’s internalization of a brutal ethics of revolutionary ethno-nationalism

based on the socio-sexual policing of women’s bodies. Within such a violent patriarchal

38

ideology the maternal genetic link in a rape induced pregnancy is denied and the civic
and ethnic identity of the child of rape is traced exclusively through paternal descent.24
The ethno-nationalist contest between the state patriarchy and the revolutionary
patriarchy is thus staged on the pregnant body of the raped woman through violent acts of
appropriation of her sexual autonomy, demonstrating how revolutionary communities
themselves are fractured along gendered faultlines.25

However, though philosophically a terminated pregnancy like that of the
forcefully impregnated indigenous women in Mencht’r’s text does not result in the legal
personhood of children conring into existence as rights bearers, a reading of forced

impregnation as ethnocide remains incomplete without examining how the narrative of

 

2’ In this context I would like to underline that my analysis does not intend to deny that rape induced
pregnancies are often aborted by women as an attempt to erase the traumatic reminder of sexual violence
on them. However, the trauma of rape that individual women experience is magniﬁed by the patriarchal
logic that the child of rape is merely the child of a violent rapist.

25 For this argument I am indebted to Anna M. Agathengelou’s study of how ethno-nationalism was
recuperated by capitalizing on ethnic rape in the state-sanctioned sexual violence against women during the
1974 Turkish military invasion against the Greek Cypriot population in Cyprus and against women during
the 1991 disintegration of the erstwhile Yugoslavia. Like Agathengelou, my argument on abortion of rape
induced pregnancy emphasizes how a feminist understanding of the politics of consolidating cultural
identity in an ethno-nationalist strife can “make visible suppressed inequalities and struggles concealed by
discursive nationalism’s solidarities, and violences against women of the Third World (12-13).
Agathengelou examines how in the 19905 the re-stabilized Greek Cypriot state, in its continuing wrestle
with Turkish Cypriot nationalism, strategically manipulated the global attention to the mass rape in
disintegrated Yugoslavia. The Cypriot state centralized its suppressed history of Greek Cypriot women
raped during the 1974 aggression in order to campaign for global recognition of its brutalized female
bodies as testimonies for the ethno-nationalist cause of Greek Cyprus. The premise of such a communal
philosophy lies in the proprietorial conﬂation of the bodies of indigenous women with the body of the
community. By insisting on maternal love for a child of rape, Menchr'l resists the indigenous community’s
discourse of abortion, and hence challenges its attempt at deﬁning its ethno-nationalist boundaries through
the bodies of pregnant women. Later on, I will contend how Menchr'r’s testimonial, despite negotiating for
the Mayan cause with global politics, challenges a patriarchal ideology of ethno-nationalism by contesting
the category of the nation itself through transnational solildarities. Such a critical scaffold will explore how
sexual violence against women needs to be understood not merely as wartime state terror, but as regional
manifestations of material conditions premised on unequal global structural relations of gender and socio-
economic power. Ann M. Agathengelou, “Nationalist Narratives and (Dis) Appearing Women: State-
Sanctioned Sexual Violence,” Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme 19.4 (2000): 12-21.

39

abortion is theoretically premised vis-a-vis the rights of the child.26 The woman’s
termination of her pregnancy is an attempt to pre-empt the birthing of a child who, by
being identiﬁed solely through his/her paternal genetic link in an ethno-nationalist
context, will be marked by the immediate family and the community as the enemy. In
addition to being marked as a child of rape and an illegitimate child, the child also
becomes a constant reminder of the violation of the reproductive identity of the
revolutionary community—an identity signiﬁed by Mayan women who produce racially
pure Mayan children. The logic of genocide based on group cohesion is hence operative
not only through structures of state terror, but also within the revolutionary community
itself as children with contested identities are excluded ﬁom membership in the insurgent
ethnic group. Mencht'r’s text needs to be historicized against the fact that the Convention
on the Rights of the Child was adopted by the United Nations in 1989—six years after I,
_Rr_'gobert§ Mench_r_'r was published. This offers an enhanced understanding of the political
space for the agency of children of war rape that is opened up by testimonials that
identify spaces of statist mass injustice that fall outside the scope of international

humanitarian jurisdiction.27

 

2‘ My analysis of forced impregnation with respect to children’s human rights draws on Carpenter’s
analysis of the limitations of ﬂaming genocidal rape only as a gender issue. Like Carpenter, I demarcate
children’s human rights vis-a-vis rape induced pregnancy as distinct from a war rape discourse on women’s
rights. However, Carpenter’s analysis maintains that since the right to life of unborn children is contested in
international law, the claim that a child of rape is a victim of human rights violation only holds for born
children. Unlike Carpenter, my examination of children’s human rights during ethnic conﬂict is argued
from the premises of aborted rape induced pregnancies. Carpenter 447.

27 The Convention on the Rights of the Child ensures children against discrimination based on “the child’s
or his or her parent’s or legal guardian’s race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion,
national, ethnic or social origin, property, disability, birth or other status.” “Convention on the Rights of the
Child,” 20 November 1989, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2003, Ofﬁce of the
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Geneva, Switzerland, 5 February 2006
<http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/k2crc.htrn> Incidentally, the Declaration of the Rights of the Child
was proclaimed three decades before the Convention.

40

My study of rape induced pregnancy as a war crime demarcates its treatment as a
gender issue ﬁ'om its exploration as a children’s rights concern. Nevertheless, in the
rhetorical terrain of forced impregnation both pregnant mothers and potential war rape
orphans are connected through their shared subalternity. Consequently, in my literary
analysis in this section the testimonial self of the female revolutionary leader stands
linked with both women and children via her metonymic relationship with the raped
bodies of the pregnant women through her vulnerability to gender violence in a war zone.
Drawing on the above study of the textual representation of a genocidal ideology of rape
and forced impregnation, the concluding section of this chapter will challenge the
category of the state itself by arguing that subaltem human rights can be meaningfully
negotiated only through a Fourth Worldist common front politics on the global stage.
Military Politics of Discursive Silence vs Common-Front Politics of Representation:

In stark contrast to women’s conscientious reconstitution of social memory that
attempts to rupture the misogynic military-police structures of the state as well as the
logic of revolutionary patriarchy, silence about gender-speciﬁc torture of women
characterizes discourses of the Guatemalan state even at the peak of repression. This was
during the regimes of Lucas Garcia (1978-1982) and Rios Montt (1982-83). The Digital
National Security Archive preserves 2,071 declassiﬁed documents about US. relations
with Guatemala between 1954 and 1999. The particular emphasis is on human rights
violations by the Guatemalan military state. However, there is no statement by either the

Garcia or the Montt regime about the sexual atrocities against women.” These discursive

 

2’ Digital National Seem“ Archive, 2005, Proquest, 13 February 2006 <hgp://nsarchive.chadﬂck.com/
introx.htm>. Moreover, extensively researched books on the Guatemalan military project, like Schirmer’s,

indexes “Women” in three pages, out of a total of three hundred and forty-ﬁve, without any mention of

41

gaps underscore the violence of patriarchal social relations between a military state and
its female citizens that erase the wartime history of the gendered torture of women, and
hence their claim to human rights. In The Guatemalan Military Proiect: A Violence
Called Democraﬂ Jennifer Schirmer succinctly summarizes the conception of human
rights in the Guatemalan military state. Human rights “become ‘securitized’:
continuously subject to qualiﬁcation or denial whenever they are deemed to be in conﬂict
with security interests of the State” (135). Thus, in this jlnidical ﬁamework indigenous
women’s political dissent is perceived as a threat to the security of the state, deﬁned and
controlled by masculine authority that mark the military profession.29 In the militaristic
culture of Guatemala “the principle of consent (i.e., the socially approved use of force as
the distinguishing element of law), upon which the philosophy of human rights is based,
is blatantly ignored (135).” As such, what is particularly pronounced in such a philosophy
is a state-arbitrated rather than a democratically sanctioned use of force against dissident
women who challenge the gender deﬁned public order maintained by a hyper-masculine
ethos of militarism}o In this logic the punishment for tainted women who violate their
gender roles is sexual brutality or whoredom: “One of the essential ideas behind the
sexual slavery of a woman in torture is to teach her that she must retreat into the home

and ﬁrlﬁll the traditional role of wife and mother [or daughter]” (Bunster 110). In such a

 

attacks on them. Jennifer Schirmer, The Guatemalan Miligry Proiect: A \Litience Caged Democracy,
(Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) 345.

29 For an analysis of the relationship among women’s political resistance, the military state, and sexual
torture in the Latin American context, see Ximena Bunster, “Surviving Beyond Fear: Women and Torture

in Latin America,” Surviving Beyond Fear: Womeh, Chilc_Ir_e_n, and Human Rights in Latin Amerig, trans.
Janice Malloy, ed. Marjorie Agosin (New York: White Pine Press, 1993) 98-125.

3° The “subculture of obedience” to authority that mark the armed forces profession condition the military
state to view the voice of dissent in civilian society not as an exercise of political ﬁeedom, but as a
subversive threat to the militaristic ideal of public order based on “disciplined civic solidarity.”

Schirmer 255.

42

context, sexual sadism against any woman of the collective which is identiﬁed as
insurgent is perceived as a step toward eliminating dissent. The documentary ﬁhn on the
Guatemalan civil war—When the Mountains Tremble—shows a clip from a national
television broadcast in which the then president, Rios Montt, declares: “One thing is
certain. We are at war. In a war one has to impose his will on another. We have been
saying that Guatemala is marvelous. But we need a change. And this change consists in
imposing your will on another.” In this political topography disciplining of women’s
dissident behavior against the state through rape gets naturalized through presidential
rhetoric as a wartime imposition of one’s will on another. Moreover, what is erased in the
process is the narrative of an unequal contest between poor indigenous women and the
security apparatus of the state. The former is a makeshift revolt of women fought with
“people’s weapons” like “machetes, stones, sticks, chile and salt” (Mbertaidenchﬁ
137), while the latter is oﬂicially organized, funded, and technologically empowered into
a military-police structure comprised mostly of men.31

Erasure of the story of women’s sexual agony in the unequal contest for power is
symptomatic of the discursive violence in Guatemalan military narratives. On the other
hand, the potential for violence in the articulation itself of gendered trauma also requires
questioning on more levels than the one addressed in the above discussion on literary re-

presentation. When sexual atrocities on poor indigenous women’s bodies are

 

3' For a discussion about the differences between state violence and indigenous violence see William
Westerman, “Ofﬁcial Violence and Folk Violence: Approaching I, Rigoberta Menchri ﬁem the
Perspectives of F olklife and Peace Studies,” Teaching and Testimony: Rigoberta Menchl’l and the North
American Classroom, eds. Allen-Carey Webb and Stephen Benz (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1996) 91-104. However, whereas in Webb’s and Benz’s work indigenous violence and state violence
are presented as binaries, my work on violence aims to deconstruct monolithic oppositions between the
stateandthesubaltanbynMonlyexmnhhgvmiouslocaﬁonsofsubaltemmihmncy,bmdsoby
exploring how militancy itself is ﬁssured along faultlines within a subaltem ideology.

43

disseminated by a singular indigenous voice like Menchl’l’s, there is a strong possibility
of violence through misrepresentation. David Stoll’s RrjgrbertaLMenchu hnd the Story of
All Poor Guatemalans is precisely an argument against the violence of such totalizing
representations of the oppressed indigenous. Stoll’s text claims that by privileging the
testimony of one Mayan voice over the others, the academic left is feeding its own
ideological prerogative of uniﬁed guerrilla warfare against state oppression of the
Mayans. However, through the tropes of rape and forced impregnation my above analysis
has argued how the testimonial voice is metonymically/associatively rather than
metaphorically/substitutively related to the collective’s experience of structures of
organized violence. What is necessary is an understanding of the testimonial voice as a
textual construct, shifting its valences from the radical subjectivity of the indigenous
female leader to its metonymic relationship with the experience of the collective.32 As the
factual truth of parallel and divergent individual experiences gives way to a conceptual
truth of the collective trauma of the Mayan community, the conﬂictive space of
Menchl'r’s text destabilizes the semantics of the ethnographer’s text and its agenda of re-
presenting the “real” indigenous through a complete access to a singular truth. Beverley’s
reading of LRigoberth Menchr’r as a tense textual space sustaining a political alliance
between the indigenous narrator and her mediators is thus extended to embrace the

relationship between the testimonial voice and the collectivity.

 

32 My reading of I, Rigoberta Mencht'l as a terrain in ﬂux between the leader’s subject position and her
relationality with the community has been inﬂuenced by the work of Sénchez-Casal who argues: “the
narrator emerges at the end of the text as a multiply situated, nonuniﬁed self, a revolutionary survivor of
and witness to a historical cataclysm whose experience and agency has been equally marked by material
structures and by exceptional, transgressive, individual choices.” See Susan sanchez-Casal, “I Am [Not]
Like You: Ideologies of Selﬂrood in I, Rigoberta Menchli: An Indian Woman in Guatemala,” Haunting
Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the “Real” eds. Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001) 78.

 

When testimonies of indigenous women are transliterated ﬁ'om its oral narration
into a written text by elites like Elisabeth Burgos-Debray and translated by the privileged
like Ann Wright, the question about violence is also raised on the level of truth-telling
through transnational common-front politics. In transcribing testimonials like I, Rigoberta
_M_ehc_hh Mayan cultural history is converted from its indigenous lengua memorial—
Quiché--into castellano--the language of Spanish colonialism.33 It is then translated into
English-the language of global imperialism for transnational routes of production and
consumerism.34 Hence, the repertoire of possible textual violence against tortured women
is now extended ﬁom the voyeuristic consumption of their bodies to a postcolonial
reiteration of colonial violence and its structural relations of unequally raced and classed
power between the European and the indigenous. As Menchl'r and her mediators engage
in a conﬂicted negotiation in a tense “contact zone,” 35 the question of gender intersects
with that of race and class. Menchl'r’s project aims to deﬁne the Mayan insurgency as a

function of unequal distribution of material resources. She introduces her testimonial

 

33 However, such cultural-linguistic transactions can also be read as empowering: “For her, appropriating
the Spanish language is an act which can change the course of history because it is the result of a decision:
Spanish was a language which was forced upon her, but it has become a weapon in her struggle.” See
Rigoberta Menchu, I, Rigoberta Men_chl'l: An Indign Woman in Guatemalg, trans. Ann Wright, eds.
Elisabeth Burgos-Debray (London and New York: Verso, 1984) xii. Moreover, there is a transformative
process operating in borrowing the politically dominant language: “Rigoberta’s Spanish is qualitatively
different from that of the ‘ladinos’ who taught it to her. And her testimony makes the peculiar nonstandard
Spanish into a public medium of change.” See Doris Sommer, “Not Just a Personal Story”: Women’s
Testimonios and the Phlral Self,” Lifegihes: Theonzrhg' ' Women’s Autobigggphy, eds. Bella Brodzki and
Celeste Schenck, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988) 128.

3’ Irene Matthews, ”Translating/Transgressingfl‘orture. ..,” F rontline Feminisms: Women_, War, and
Resistance eds. Marguerite R. Waller and Jemrifer Rycenga (New York and London: Garland Publishing,
2000) 85.

 

3’ Marie Louis Pratt theorizes “contact zone” in the context of imperial travel writing. A ‘contact’
perspective “treats the relations among colonizers and colonized, or travelers and ‘travelees,’ not in terms
of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and
practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power.” See Mary Louis Pratt, Immrial Eyes:
Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) 7.

45

with: “My story is the story of all poor Guatemalans” (1). Later on in the text she reﬂects
on how the systemic deprivation shared by the poor ladinos and the Mayans who worked
together on the plantations is sustained: “I wondered: ‘Why is it that when I say poor
ladinos are like us, I’m spurned?’ I didn’t know then that the same system which tries to
isolate us Indians also puts up barriers between Indians and ladinos” (119). Breaking
discursive and hence political solidarity with her ethnographic subject, in her introduction
to the text Elisabeth Burgos-Debray erases the identiﬁcatory marks in Menchr’r’s
narration of a distinct geopolitical crisis that links the indigenous with the poor ladinos.
Though the ethnographer is aware that “Rigoberta Menchl'r is not ﬁghting in the name of
an idealized or mythical past” (xiii), she renders Menchr'r into the transcendental signiﬁed
who represents both the living and dead of indigenous history in seamless essentialism:
Her life story is an account of contemporary history rather than of Guatemala
itself. [. . .] What she tells us of her relationship with nature, life, death and her
community has already been said by the Indians of North America, those of
Central America and those of South America. The cultural discrimination she has
suffered is something that all the continent’s Indians have been suffering ever
since the Spanish conquest. (xi)
Robert Carr offers a clinching observation of the effects of mythologizing the indigenous:
“In the construction of the transcendental signiﬁed, we can note, the instances of guerrilla
warfare, labor exploitation, and genocide that dominate Me Llama Rigoberta Menchli
dissolve into thin air” (159). The ethnographer’s tendency to romanticize the subaltem

into a monolithic category devoid of agency in designing her own political text is

46

nowhere more evident than in Burgos-Debray’s attempt at “concealing the impure or real
conditions of the text’s production” (Sénchez-Casal 82):
I soon reached the decision to give the manuscript the form of a monologue: that
was how it came back to me as I re-read it. I therefore decided to delete all my
questions. By doing so I became what I really was: Rigoberta’s listener. I allowed
her to speak and then became her instrument, her double by allowing her to make
the transition from the spoken to the written word. I have to admit that this
decision made my task more difficult, as I had to insert linking passages if the
manuscript was to read like a monologue, like one continuous narrative. I then
divided it into chapters organized around the themes I had already identiﬁed. I
followed my original chronological outline, even though our conversations had
not done so, so as to make the text more accessible to the reader. (xx)
In acknowledging the “colonial signs” of anthropological questioning in the encounter
between the ethnographer and her subject at the “contact zone” Burgos-Debray once
again aims at presenting the indigenous as the seamless “real,” thereby negating
Menchr’r’s agency in using her testimonial as what Beverley calls an “aesthetic
ideological” construct for political propaganda. In doing so the ethnographer also mutes
the history of colonialism which marks the “perturbing history of cultural politics and
struggle present in this new encounter of native informant and Latin American
intellectual.”36 This textual play of the colonizer—colonized dynarrrics between her
mediators and Menchl'r is intensiﬁed in Ann Wright’s English translation that deletes the
manifesto of the Committee of Campesino Unity (CUC). The manifesto condemns the

exploitation of both indigenous and ladino labor and the abuse of natural resources by

 

3‘ sanchez-Casal 32.

47

Guatemala’s tyrannical oligarchy which is supported by multinationals and the
governments of Europe, Japan, and the United States. Carr argues: “What is silenced is a
historical speciﬁcity that opens onto the role of First World economic interests in the
superexploitation described in the book, and a call to arms” (161). In my next section I
argue how this conﬂictive space of ethnographic contact which attempts to restrain the
agency of the indigenous is destabilized by the radical exceptionality of the ﬁgure of the
militant female leader which nonetheless, across locations of militancy, links her to the

collective.
V. Transgressing Sexual/Textual Violence: Red-Green Feminist Politics

This section explores how the radical exceptionality of the leader gets troped as
revolutionary maternity and ecological activism in L Righbertg Menchl'r and its sequel
Crossing Borders. They also become transgressive sites of female empowerment,
contesting the leitrnotifs of sexual violence against women that the earlier section has
examined. The tropes of revolutionary maternity and ecological activism portray the
indigenous peoples’ ﬁght for social justice at the national and the international level
under the leadership of women. These narrative strategies serve to activate public
consciousness for the indigenous cause, and thus deﬁne the relationship between
postcolonial testimonials of indigenous women and restorative justice for their people.
The section also considers how these tropes delineate the “contact zone” of ethnographic
struggle between the mediators and the testimonial narrator. The “contact zone” is shaped
as much by the radical subjectivity of the leader who deﬁes prescribed gender roles for
Mayan women as through her mediators who launch her iconic subjectivity as a Mayan.

Thus, the uniqueness of women leaders is not deﬁned through an ‘unsubalternizing’

48

gesture of their liberation from the struggle of the masses. Rather it is marked by their
radical re-subalterrrization that links them with their people despite the local, regional,
and global recognition of their leadership at the ﬁ'ontiers of revolutionary thinking and
action. The radical exceptionality of Menchr'r’s mother in alchemizing her personal
anxiety into an opportunity to lead communal political action at the local level cannot but
remain linked to the people that she unites. Again, it is this connection between the
Mayan base and Menchr’r’s iconicity as a human rights crusader that enables a feminist
politics of justice for all indigenous people on the world stage. The ﬁgure of the female
revolutionary leader, discursively and politically linked to the masses, has been a crucial
paradigm for Ileana Rodriguez. In her work this paradigm, with its democratic prospects,
deconstructs the male deﬁned tradition of a strongly hierarchical leadership in Central
American guerrilla narratives. However, for Rodriguez “the terrain of the struggle for
power” between men and women/masses is through deconstructing language.37 On the
other hand, my study of the tropes of revolutionary maternity and ecological activism as
linkages between the female leader and the Mayan people engages in their literary
analysis through red-green feminist thought. Such critical scaffolding brings into

conjunction the perspectives of red feminism and green feminism.38

 

37 The author argues: “Language empowers us to moor ourselves fast in the place where signs shift, where,
writing the peasantry or women, the revolutionary writer discloses his own unconscious—or positivistic,
bourgeois, colonial, elitist thinking. [. . .] But grappling with, and proposing alternative meanings for, the
text is a way of writing women within the narratives of social change. ” See Rodriguez, Womeh, Guerrillas,
and Love (xvi).

 

3" Teresa L. Ebert outlines the project ofred feminism as “transformative politics”: “Red Feminism does
notrejectthe cultmal ordiscursiveas sites ofpolitical strugglebutratherarguesthatthese needtobe
understood in their speciﬁc historical connections to the relations of production and the class struggle in
order to open up a space for an emancipatory politics to end the exploitation of women and all people
globally.” Ebert adds: “It is based on a historical materialist theory and praxis and works dialectically,
engaging the interconnections between base and superstructure; between relations of production and
signifying practices.” See Teresa L. Ebert, “The Knowable Good: Post-a1 Politics, Ethics, and Red
Feminism,” Rethinking Marxism 8.2 (Summer 1995): 40.

49

In an earlier section the literary analysis of rape and forced impregnation was
largely ﬂamed by the discursive, materialist reasoning of red feminism. Such a
methodology based on the transformative politics of writing combined literary analysis
with a historiographical approach to political change.39 This section uses the same
method. But it speciﬁcally foregrounds red feminism which upholds an emancipatory
ideology for women based on their historical contribution to the productive work of the
entire community.40 In my critical use of this frame of international socialism the
boundaries of the family and hence of private property are contested by women’s
political work as mothers of the whole social group. This becomes instrumental in
bargaining for the collective economic rights of the community. This red feminist
scaffolding of revolutionary maternity, deﬁned through women’s militant political labor
for the community, intersects with a green feminist paradigm.

Green feminism calls into question ecological degradation brought about by the
patriarchal logic of corporate nationalism and global imperialism. As such, it helps us

understand how abuse of the bionetwork affects indigenous people whose physical and

 

’9 In this context it is worth mentioning that critics like Florencia Mallon have traced the tension between
the two distinct trends of textual analysis (of both historical documents and literary texts) and political
transformation in the ﬁeld of Subaltem Studies (1498). In discussing these, Mallon has lmderlined the
constructed nature rather than the transparent reality of both the archive and the text (1507), as well as that
of subaltem political alliances with their shifting solidarities (1500). The discursive material feminism that
forms the groundwork for my Post-Subaltem Studies project combines such a textual approach with one of
material activism, the necessity of which Mallon points out. See Florencia E. Mallon, “The Promise and
Dilemma of Subaltem Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History,” The American Historical
Review 99.5 (Dec 1994): 1491-1515.

 

’0 According to Ebert, “The issue is not that women’s work within the home is not productive labor but
that the condition of women’s lives and their ‘rights’ depend on whether their labor directly contributes to
social production (to the ‘work of the whole community’) without being mediated through (and often
owned by) the patriarchal family and its male ‘head’——and, second, whether women have direct
(umnediated) access to the products and value their labor produces.” Hence, the breakdown of the
monogamous family premised on private property releases women from domestic labor so that they can
earn a wage labor and own property through social contribution. See Ebert 50.

50

cultural survival is often closely related to the preservation of the local ecosystem.
Indigenous women’s resistance against ecological violence in testimonials like Q‘gging
1391M emblematically opposes textual spaces portraying sexual violence on Mayan
women. In such a green feminist reading of women’s transgressive politics postcolonial
thought is brought into a critical conversation with ecological ooncems.“l Postcolonial
thinking is committed to unfolding the colonial legacies of abuse that structure the lives
of decolonized populations across the world. In an era of global imperialism postcolonial
nations still act as resource centers for the neocolonial empire. Concomitant with
industrial imperialism is the ecological mismanagement of resources that affects large
numbers of indigenous people in postcolonial nations who draw their sustenance from the
ecosystem. This creates a forum for a dialogue between postcolonialism and ecological
integrity. At the interface between them stands the ﬁgure of the female revolutionary
linked through her leadership role to a postcolonial indigenous population which has
witnessed violence on its ecosystem.

In my critical ﬂame of red—green feminism indigenous women’s leadership as
revolutionary mothers of the community at the level of local action is bridged with their
spearheading of the ecological justice movement at the international political ﬂ'ontline.
This challenges both the borders of the family and that of the nation. For my reading of
the trope of revolutionary maternity in _I_,_R_ig@ertg Menchl’i and Crossing Borders, I draw

on the portrayal of the leadership roles of Mencht'r’s mother and Menchl'l. The trope of

 

4' For my critical paradigm situated at the crossroads of postcolonialism and ecocriticism, I am indebted to
Graham Huggan’s perspective of how postcolonialism with its obligation to formerly colonized people is
compelled to address the issue of ecological abuse: “[P]ostcolonial criticism has effectively renewed, rather
than belatedly discovered, its commitment to the environment, reiterating its insistence on the inseparability
of current crises of ecological mismanagement ﬂ'om historical legacies of imperialistic exploitation and
authoritarian abuse.” See Graham Huggan, “Greening” Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspectives,” Modem
Fiction Studies 50.3 (2004): 702.

51

ecological activism will be discussed largely through the role of Menchr'r’s leadership
depicted in Crossing Borders.

Revolutionary Maternity: Reading the trope of revolutionary maternity through a red
feminist perspective is particularly useful in my corrective effort, in the tradition of Ileana
Rodriguez, to demasculinize the geography of revolutionary hermeneutics. Like the
tropes of rape and forced impregnation, the trope of revolutionary maternity constitutes
the female militant leader as woman. By not constructing her in the image of the
normative male political agent of the literary/social text of transformation, the tropes
resist defeminizing her.42 Thus, in contrast to a liberal feminist ﬂame of equality
premised on sameness between men and women, my postcolonial feminist scaffolding
argues for a revolutionary unity between them based on the politicization and
mobilization of differences. My postcolonial feminist approach incorporates a red
feminist ﬂame of study. In this model the trope of revolutionary maternity radicalizes
maternal labor into militant leadership against the postcolonial state. Radicalizing
maternity through the recognition of women’s revolutionary work for the collective
deconstructs the biologically determined nature of motherhood into the political category
of social motherhood. With this, the mother’s labor no longer remains invisible in its
contribution to maintaining the family and the structures of private property that sustain

it.43 Narratives of the modes of production that identify male labor with public space and

 

’2 This is one of the major premises of my argument in this chapter, and I have explained it more
thoroughly in the section entitled “Critical Scaffold”

’3 In this regard it is important to underline that the two characters which deﬁne revolutionary maternal
labor in my analysis-Manchu and her mother—were never conﬁned only to the domestic space of the
family home, but worked outside it on the plantations. Hence, their agricultural work was visible wage
labor, deconstructing the association of women solely with the private space of the home. Even so, their
labor went into the upkeep of the structures of the patriarchal family and its private property, and hence was
owned by the male ‘head.’ As a result, these women’s access to the products and value of their labor was

52

conﬁnes female labor to the realm of the domestic are thus challenged.44 The limits of the
family itself are contested as biological linkages get politicized as insurgent communal
solidarity. The socialization of maternity through political participation of revolutionary
mothers has become an archetypal political phenomenon through the weekly gatherings
of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina. Since 1977 they have regularly met to
protest against the disappearance of their dissident children by the military government
during the Dirty War in the country between 1976 and 1983. The social motherhood of
the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo will serve as a template for my reading of
revolutionary maternity in I, RigobertagMﬁerlchu and Crossing Borders.45

The new mode of collective maternal behavior upholds the relatedness between
the home and the plaza. In I, Rigoberta Menchr’r the testimonial voice describes how for

the ﬁrst time the women of the Quiche' community of the Mayans in Guatemala

 

controlled by patriarchy. With their leadership in the militant movement of the collective, their labor gets
truly socialized.

“ While discussing Claribel Alegria’s ﬂev Won’t Tgki Me Alive: Salvadorean Women in Sﬂggle for
National Liberation, Rodriguez points out that because Eugenia, the protagonist, “is critical of the gendered
division of labor and gender roles, she is culturally mandated to prove herself as a man. In the process, she
disapproves of any ‘little’ deference given to her by her companions-in-arms.” The author adds that
“[e]quality, male and female, is deﬁned here as identity (sameness)” and that “[t]he underlying assumptions
for this récit are, naturally, narratives of modes of production, for they acknowledge the division of labor—
masculine/feminine—as one of their primary structlu'es.” See Womg, Guenillas, and Love 159.

’5 My exploration of the trope of revolutionary maternity based on the phenomenal politics of the Mothers
of the Plaza de Mayo is indebted to Marguerite Bouvard’s analysis of this exceptional spectacle of radical
maternity. In the context of my red feminist analysis of the revolutionary labor of mothers, it is important to
remember the relationship in which working class women stand with respect to discourses on feminism.
What Bouvard highlights about the Mothers of the Plan de Mayo can be used to understand the Quiche
women in Menchr’r’s text: The Mothers “did not theorize about gender differences, the Mothers of the Plan
de Mayo were determined to project their experience of attachment and affection onto their political style
and goals. Like working-class women in other societies they rejected the label of feminism while
developing ideas and concerns falling within the repertoire of feminism.” See Marguerite Guzman
Bouvard, RevolgtionizingMotherhood: The Moth_ers of the Plan de Mayo, (Wilmington, Delaware: SR
Books, 1994) 221. My study of the trope of revolutionary maternity also draws on Rodriguez’s study of the
treatment of familial love in women authored revolutionary literature. See Ileana Rodriguez, Womeg,
Guerrillas and Love.

 

53

organized themselves under the leadership of Menchr'l’s mother to protest against the
disappearance of children of the community:
I remember when my little brother disappeared, our whole community united and
joined together in a protest, after my mother had gone to enquire after him at the
police, and the army, and had received no reply. So, they all went, all of them.
The community acted together for the ﬁrst time; the majority of them were
women. (1 96)
Thus, the text traces the futile search of the solitary mother for her missing son at the very
centers of political detention and torture of dissenting citizens, like the police station and
the army outpost. 46 The questioning voice of the mother creates an ethical space of
maternal love, both discursively and materially, that ruptures the violent spaces of
interrogation of dissidents at the police station and at the army outpost. These feminine
sites of insubordination resist the sexual atrocities against women discussed in the earlier
section. Thus, a symbolic transgression of state violence against women happens both on
the level of the narrative as well as on that of material politics. As the courageous mother
replaces her thwarted attempts to ﬁnd her son with her militant leadership that uniﬁes the
Quiche women, her personal mission turns into a shared quest of all mothers for the

missing child of the community. Collective maternal fury transgresses and inﬁltrates

 

’6 Bouvard summarizes the sense of powerlessness that a family experiences after political disappearance
of a member: “When a family suffered the disappearance of one of its members, it was propelled into a
netherworld where there were no rules, no institutions to which one could direct one’s concern, and no
death to mourn. The family lived in a surreal limbo; deprived of all information and recourse and stripped
of social support and comprehension, relatives found themselves in complete isolation.” See Bouvard 36-7.
Disappearance of dissenting relatives plunges a family into a trance-like state that cannot be brought to a
closure through mourning the dead. It leaves behind the silhouette of the disappeared not to be
commemorated through the socio-historical space of the grave.

54

bureaucratic public spaces of rigid masculine authority:47 “They reached the town,
occupied the administrative ofﬁces, and took the mayor prisoner. If he saw justice was
done, they would respect him, but if he turned his back on justice, he would be executed”
(197).48 The anger of a politicized motherhood demands the restoration of justice for the
indigenous by imprisoning and threatening to annihilate representatives of establishment
power like the mayor. Suspending governmental power, once again political motherhood
symbolically resists textual/material sites of state violence like rape and forced
impregnation against Mayan women.

This powerful image of red maternity in public spaces of governmental
administration is not only “a stark reminder of the state’s brutal interruption of maternal
tasks,”49 but also serves to reinterpret the concept of motherhood vis-a-vis the men,
women, and children of the collective. The “demonstration of women and children,”
directed by Menchu’s mother, exposes itselfto the risk of possible massacre to protect
the men of the community ﬂom being kidnapped and tortured. The presence of men in
the political arena of dissent would be more threatening to the state authorities than a
contingent of women and children. Article 38 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the

Child, adopted in 1989, empowers the state to prohibit children below ﬁfteen ﬂom

 

‘7 Likewise, the Mothers in Argentina demonstrated at the Plan de Mayo that has been the seat of
governmental authority since the eighteenth century. Francesca Miller, Latin American Women and the
Search for Social Justice (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1991) 8.

 

“ In this regard it is important to recognize the difference in political mode of these mothers in Menchr’r’s
text and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The latter “have become a metaphor for the thousands of Latin
Americans who have dared to protest the practice of state terrorism against the populace through nonviolent
means.” See Bouvard l l. The Mothers’ nonviolent means proves “that it is possible to work openly with
democratic values in authoritarian settings, contradicting a political history in which those oppressed by the
state have in turn often adopted oppressive methods.” See Bouvard 239.

‘9 Bouvard, 182.

55

participating in armed conﬂict.50 In such a ﬂame the mothers of the revolution in a post-
Convention milieu can be held accountable by the state for initiating children into
dangerous political activism in violation of international humanitarian law. At the same
time the state can refuse to acknowledge the enlisting of child soldiers within the ranks of
its own army.5 1 This problematizes the UN’s approach to protecting human rights
through the instrument of the nation-state. In I. Rigoberta Mencht'l the narrator
reminiscences: “My mother used to say that through her life, through her living
testimony, she tried to tell women that they too had to participate, so that when the
repression comes and with it a lot of suffering, it’s not only the men who suffer. Women
must join the struggle in their own way” (196). Under the leadership of Menchu’s mother
the women do contribute to the struggle in their very own way by initiating children into
political participation to contest the state’s appropriation of Mayan children. As the
kinship unit of the Quiché Mayans restructures itself into political comradeship
irrespective of gender and age, the revolutionary leadership of Menchl'l’s mother
effectively links men, women, and children of the collective across various locations of

militancy. The leader herself remains closely connected to the people in her need for their

 

5° The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child emphasizes that in the context of armed conﬂict “States
Parties shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons who have not attained the age of ﬁfteen years
do not take a direct part in hostilities.” See “Convention on the Rights of the Child,” <http://www.unhchr.
chlhtml/menu3/b/k2crchtm>.

5‘ In fact, the maternal army of indigenous women, linked in solidarity with children, was a signiﬁcant act
of resistance against a system of coercive recruitment of indigenous children in the Civil Defense Patrols
(PAC), set up under President Rios Montt (1982-1983). Menchr'l testiﬁes to this system in Crossing
Borders: “For years, our young men have been captured and forced into the barracks. Many, ﬂ'om the age
of ﬁfteen, go into hiding to avoid it They are brutally beaten when found. No one has been able to change
the system. Many of those who have tried have died horribly” (164).The PAC drafted Indian peasants ﬂ'om
the war-zone into a permanent military reserve force, and refusal was considered to be a subversive act
against the state. George Black states: “For all able-bodied men between the ages of 15 and 60, the patrols
were obligatory. In mountain villages, it was not uncommon to see children of ten or eleven drilling with
wooden riﬂes” (147-8). This was a counterinsurgency method of the Guatemalan state to disintegrate the
indigenous community.

56

collective wrath that translates itself into the political power of demanding the return of
her disappeared son. Children, in rally with their revolutionary mothers, evoke a potent
image of children of the collective reclaiming their political voice silenced through the
disappearance of Menchr’r’s brother--a child of the community. In Revolutionizing
Motherhood Marguerite Guzman Bouvard points out how the political behavior of
women and children in such contexts can be read as “a form of street theater.” In the
19803 in Argentina
artists working for the Mothers created white masks representing the disappeared.
Thousands of young people wearing these masks paraded down the main streets
in a display aimed at keeping the plight of the disappeared in the public
consciousness. The artists have also created props of life-size white silhouettes for
the Mothers’ marches. Watching a parade of hundreds of ghostly silhouettes or
chalk-white masks ﬁle silently through the streets is a powerful, emotionally
jarring experience. (232)
Bouvard underlines how the Mothers of the Plan de Mayo, convening publicly to
demand justice for their missing children, “came to include in their new view of
maternity not just their disappeared children but all the present and future youths of
Argentina” (181). Flouting “the passive, grieving model of motherhood held up in the
tradition of marianismo” (248),52 the mothers break down the boundary between the
private and the public spaces with their love and care for their children taking up political

valences outside the home.

 

’2 Bouvard underlines: “As the secular expression of the homage rendered to the Virgin Mary, marianismo
holds the woman as morally superior to the man on the basis of her humility and self-sacriﬁce. In popular
culture she is portrayed as a grieving woman, draped in a black mantilla and praying for the souls of her
sinﬁll menfolk to whom she is nonetheless submissive.” See Bouvard I84.

57

The private-public construct repeatedly disintegrates in Menchu’s text in the
context of maternal grief directing political destiny. Menchr'l describes the anguish of her
mother politicized into anger that permeates the private space of other family homes aﬁer
the assassination her brother:

My mother traveled through many provinces organising. She actually went to the
women and said that when a woman sees her son tortured and burned to death,
she is incapable of forgiving anyone or ridding herself of that hatred, that
bitterness. ‘I can’t forgive my enemies,’ she said. [. . .] [Y]ou didn’t have to go to
a meeting to talk to my mother because she’d go to houses and recount her
experiences while they all made tortillas. (196)
When politics leaves the rally to enter the kitchen, maternal labor, like preparing tortillas
for the family, gets radicalized as the time for the mother’s stories about her dead child
overlaps with the time when other mothers prepare meals for their families. Collective
maternity replaces individual maternity as the motherhood of the women in the kitchen
gets politicized through their shared plight in a regime of terror where the possibility of
children being radicalized against injustice is high, and all dissident children risk a cruel
death. Similarly, every woman in the rally outside with Menchr’r’s mother becomes the
mother of all the children of the collective. These revolutionary mothers and their activist
children together move beyond crippling fear to a remedial anger that unlocks a social

space of uninhibited moral protest. 5 3 Faced with arbitrary detention-disappearance of

 

53 The 1984 annual report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights states: “habeas corpus
remedies were ineffective during the Government of General Eﬂain Rios Montt, either under the state of
emergency or otherwise.” It adds: “nearly one thousand habeas corpus writs presented by the Guatemalan
Human Rights Commission [. . .] in connection with the disappearance of persons under this Government
have nearly all been declared null.” “Guatemala,” Mintion of American States, 1984, Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights, Washington, DC, USA, 2005 <http://www.cidh.org/annualrep/ 83.84.
eng/chap.4c.htm>. The writ of habeas corpus is a judicial mandate to a prison ofﬁcer to produce a detained

58

children and with no judicial protection of the disappeared through habeas corpus writs,
the mothers defy their inaccessibility to the power structures of the state through their
performance in the street play. The open moral space of voicing that emerges in the
process reestablishes the political existence of abducted children in the face of a secretive
politico-military system of disappearance, torture, and assassination of the political
opposition. The family is the unit of the nation because it is the site of production of the
good citizen through good mothering.54 By abducting delinquent children ﬂom their
families, the state demolishes dysﬁlnctional units of the nation-state. Through political
mentoring of children in common-ﬂont politics in public spaces of demonstration against
the state’s tyranny, the mothers resist locating their children in the family which is the
building block of the nation-state that is supposed to school them in the ways of correct
nationalism.

The trading of biological motherhood for revolutionary maternity founded on a
shared political calling with the children of the kinship group is nowhere more
pronounced than in the ﬁgure of the testimonial narrator herself in I, Rigoberta Menchr'r.

Mencht'l rejects marriage and biological motherhood for her commitment to her political

 

person before the court to ensure that the detained has been lawfully imprisoned. It protects citizens ﬂ'om
arbitrary state actions.

5‘ Bouvard describes how the media in Argentina tried to instill a sense ofguilt in the families ofthe
disappeared of the Dirty War about how they raised their children. It was an attempt by the government to
“create a link between political dissidence and social deviance in public opinion and to isolate the families
of the disappeared.” See Bouvard 176. In Chile the erstwhile dictator Augusto Pinochet consistently
highlighted the relation between the family and the nation with regard to the woman’s role in deﬁning it:

‘ “The family is the basic unit of society. It is the ﬁrst school . . . , the mold in which the moral character of
web citizen is founded. . . The Nation is truly the reﬂection of the hearth.” According to this doctrine, the
Chilean woman must understand the importance “of her mission, the superior destiny of her maternal
vocation, her role as wife and educator.” If she does not, if she “rejects her feminine identity,” she can
easily fall into error: “Animals do not form families. They unite temporarily in order to procreate. . . .The
animal has no spiritual liberty, simply instincts. . . . [For humans] the family is an institution of natural
order. It is necessary to inculcate in woman the fundamental importance—for the future of society—of
making a home. It is especially important to insist—as we already have in speaking of patriotic values—on
the dignitywhichemanatesﬂmntheconceptofservice.” SeeMilleerl.

59

leadership. This deﬁnes the radical exceptionality of the leader who disregards the
Quiche cultural precept “to multiply the seeds of [. . .] her ancestors” to make a
transgressive individual choice of politically mothering the whole community instead:55
[Tjhe time came when I saw clearly—it was actually when I had begun my life as
a revolutionary—that I was ﬁghting for a people and for many children who
hadn’t anything to eat. I could see how sad it would be for a revolutionary not to
leave a seed, because the seed which was left behind would enjoy the ﬂ'uits of this
work in the future. But I thought of the risks of having a child. It would be much
easier for me to die, at any time or place, if I weren’t leaving anyone behind to
suffer. (224)
This is in sharp contrast to romantic narratives which contain the dangers of feminine
sexuality through the culmination of the romance in marriage. In revolutionary women’s
testimonials the “risks of having a child” for an insurgent leader whose life dances on the
threshold of death irnperils coupling in heterosexual love through marriage.56 So, the
traditional patriarchal narrative of biological maternity captured in the clinching image of
the seed that is not left behind is rewritten into the subversive account of social

motherhood where the combative mother struggles to feed all the children of the

 

5’ 1 am indebted to Casal for helping me think through the radical singularity of the leader and the
relationship in which it stands with the homogenizing trends of the culture of the Quiche community:
“Menchl’r’s agency is conﬁgured in the motivated relationship between the needs of the “I” and those of the
“we” and in the complex effects of Menchl'l’s epistemological travel between these two locations. In other
words, the speciﬁc human image of Menchl'r constituted in the text is produced in the uneasy conjunction of
representative and exceptional (individual) sites.” For Casal, the “complex agency of Rigoberta Menchu
materializes in this shifting chronotype of the self.” See Casal 87-9. Casal’s reading has helped me
reinforce the female leader’s unique position within militancy, without either divorcing her ﬂom the
collective or essentializing her into a monolithic Quiche space of reductive culturalism, devoid of political
agency for women. It is aligned to Rodriguez’s paradigm of linking which I draw upon, and thus
strengthens my postcolonial feminist understanding of revolutionary unity as common-ﬂout politics across
social locations of activism.

56 My study of the relationship between heterosexual love and revolutionary narratives has been inﬂuenced
by Rodriguez’s reading of the same in Womeg, Guerrillas, and Love.

60

collective. I. Rigoberta Menchl'r portrays women’s insurgent leadership of the
community’s children as collective maternity. As such, in constructing the female
revolutionary leader soldiering is never constituted as antithetical to mothering, and
hence the militant woman never gets resigniﬁed as male. Despite the narrative linking of
the subjectivity of the leader with that of the collective that she leads, her radical
individuality circumscribed by the reiterative “I” of the speaking subject remains in
tension with the “people” of the collective. This strain between the “I” and the collective
is set in relief as, through her radical choices, the leader dismantles patriarchal notions of
authentic indigenous motherhood. In her essay “I Am [Not] Like You” Susan Sénchez-
Casal argues: “By staying close to shifting subject positions, we can expose the
signiﬁcant causal link between “ I” and ‘Sve” and at the same time challenge exotifying
readings of the text that have viewed Menchr’r’s collective consciousness as essential
native selﬂrood” (89).

With Menchr'r’s entry into the realm of love, coupling, marriage, and maternity in
Crossing Borders—the testimonial sequel to I, Rigoberta Merging, the radical
exceptionality of the leader’s life choices are reconﬁgured into a more inclusive
narrative. Such a narrative entwines the sentiments of individual maternity with the
radical story of the mother of the collective at the vanguard of the revolution. Mg

Borders depicts the sham kidnapping of Kalito—the son of Menchr'r’s niece Cristina, by

 

his own parents. Publicizing the auto-kidnapping by the family became the regime’s
weapon against Menchr'l to discredit her contribution in the voter registration drive for the
presidential elections in 1995. The episode evokes the trials of child raising for the

revolutionary mother as Menchl'r expresses the ultimate maternal apprehension that the

61

state will harm the child as vengeance against the politicized mother: “I was also terriﬁed
at the thought that they had got mixed up and had thought Kalito was my son. Kalito and

my son look very much alike” (30). This is what Rodriguez in Women. Guerrillas and

 

L93 calls the “New behavior” of revolutionary parents engaged in a space where “prior
private and public categories” struggle, where “the military and romantic narratives seek
to strike a balance” (164). This
New behavior is mandated by regulations that mothers and fathers—mainly
“revolutionary” mothers—must acknowledge. Freedom to have children means
freedom to have them live on the edge of death and danger. [. . .] For to accept
one set of premises—-military insurgency, for instance—is to accept the other——
children on the verge of a nervous breakdown. (Rodriguez 164)
In I, Rigoberta; Menchr'l we learn about the sixteen-year-old daughter of a union leader
who was gangraped by the state troops because her mother had organized a campaign for
the release of forty peasants detained by state forces: “[T]he girl was saved but went out
of her mind. She couldn’t talk or move her body because of the repeated rape. They gave
her three hours to leave the country and now she is out of the country, but she still can’t
speak or move” (23 5). However, the narrative of heterosexual love, individual maternity,
and parental trauma breaks out of the precincts of the family as Menchr'r’s concern for
Kalito links her maternal existence on the brink of horror to the searing pain and anguish
of all mothers/masses searching for their disappeared children: “Now that it’s all over, I
have an even better understanding of a mother’s pain; the pain of those who lmve had

children kidnapped, and who have searched for them with passion and desperation. How

62

long will this go on?” (44). Once again the narrative of mutiny leaves the home and
marches toward the plan with the mothers of the revolution.

As the mothers of the plan politicize the home, the bourgeois morality of the
state that conﬁnes child rearing to the private space of the family breaks down. What we
witness with that is not only the entry of children into politics, but also the mother’s
schooling of the children for the maternal army. In I, Rigobertanenchr’r the maternal
narrative tells the story of how children came to be included as soldiers in the new army:
“We began forming groups of women who wanted to join the struggle. And I saw that
teaching the children how to act when the enemy came was part of the struggle too”
(122). In this politico-emotive account the networking of grass-roots attempts by women
and children reconﬁgures maternal and ﬁlial love as uniﬁed dissent against the state.57
The metonymic association between the subaltem groups of women and children marks
itself off ﬂom military narratives of homosocial bonding between able-bodied males,
standing in for the nation through metaphorical substitution. In these discursive/material
moments of political mothering radical ideology politicizes blood-ties with the biological
parents as well. Children of the community become prudent political actors for whom the
family becomes the site of revolutionary solidarity as they guard the political secrets of
their parents from children of other villages, and hence serve as sentry to their own: “We
began teaching our children to be discreet. They’re usually discreet anyway, but we
advised them not to say a single word to any children who weren’t ﬂom our village about
what their parents were doing” (I 25). As the narrative of revolutionary maternity unfolds,

we learn the story of children acting as spies for the community: “But our children can

 

’7 I am deeply indebted to Rodriguez for her reading of the differences between politico-emotive narratives
about women and politico-military narratives about men in Womg, Guerrillas, and Love.

63

easily recognize soldiers, by the way they walk, and dress, and everything about them, so
the lookouts knew they were soldiers in disguise” (135). The children risk abduction,

torture, and death to warn the community of the army raid on the village. In Women

 

Guerrilla§,_and Love Rodriguez directs us to how radicalizing childhood is related to
radicalizing motherhood: “Bringing up children as revolutionaries ﬂ'om an early age,
enrolling them in revolutionary activities as informants, might not easily be accepted. The
idea of children growing up within a collective, conﬁned to a party cell, explodes
bourgeois ideas of maternity” (163). The representation of children as militants is
politically charged with the implication that children in a revolutionary community are
not only tied through their bloodline to their natural mothers. They share ideological
bonds with a collective maternity through which all women within the community
become their mothers. This strategic essentialism of communitarian politics deconstructs
any notion of motherhood as biologically determined.

The solidarity of women and children extends even to death as the biological
itself becomes the ideological when the revolutionary leader defends her guerrilla
children unto her destruction:

The ﬁrst day they shaved her head, put a uniform on her and then they said:

‘If you’re a guerrilla why don’t you ﬁght us here.’ But my mother said nothing.

While they beat her, they asked her where we were, and said that if she made a

confession, they’d let her go. But my mother knew very well that they did that so

that they could torture her other children and would never let her go. She

pretended she knew nothing. She defended every one of us until the end. (198)

In this description of the death of Menchr'r’s mother the text tropes the postcolonial
maternal body as a site of both oppressive violence and a politic of resistance against it.
The politico-emotive story of enduring maternal love in the face of violent annihilation
splits open the politico-military narrative of criminality that the state constructs around
the ﬁgure of the recalcitrant mother. The tormenting images of the mother’s shaved head
and of her body clad in a guerrilla uniform, both of which are punitive markers to signify
criminality, are ruptured by the mother’s steely determination not to reveal anything
about her children. This is resonant in the reiteration of “nothing” as in “But my mother
said nothing” and “She pretended she knew nothing.” In Menchr'r’s literary construction
silence takes up different valences in different contexts. My work has already explored
the repressive function that silence takes on in the context of rape and forced
impregnation of indigenous women. On the contrary, speechlessness becomes
empowering in the assassination episode of Menchu’s mother as her resistant silence
ﬂ'ustrates military atrocities on women operating at the limits of human tolerance and
resilience. My contention about the torture of Menchr'l’s mother is presented both here
and in my previous argument about the rape narrative. I have examined how the text
encases an austere delineation of the rape of the maternal body in a narrative of
abduction, disappearance, and captivity, instead of projecting it as a spectacle of gender
trauma. I have argued that by avoiding a spectacle of sexual torture I, Rigoberta Menchr'r
resists the voyeuristic circulation of the female body with its attendant weight of sexual
objectiﬁcation in a patriarchal ambit of gender formulation. Nonetheless, following the
reticent narrative of rape is the lavish spectacle of the violent disintegration of the

mother’s indigenous body. Through a stage by stage showcasing of the details of the

65

grisly episode, Menchl'l inventories how on the third day “they cut off her ears,” then “cut
her whole body bit by bit,” how the ﬁrst tortures “became infected,” and how they
“didn’t give her any food for many days” till her mother “began to lose consciousness
and was in her death throes” (198). The mother’s tortured body is medically treated and
fed to revive it for the continuation of torture. But the story of the brutal assassination of
the mother is not restricted to a literary economy of sensibility in which the experiential
evokes the presence of the individual subject of the patriarchal bourgeois family.58 The
narrative of maternal affection/protection constructs a woman who belongs neither to the
patriarchal realm of the family nor to that of the nation-state. She is the social subject
whose experience of pain is her ethical politics—her contribution to the political labor of
the dissident collective. As the mother’s clothes are displayed by the army in the town
hall in Uspantan as bait to lure her guerrilla children to their deaths, the children
reinscribe the story of the mother’s vulnerability with their own story of immunity.
Emulating the emotional resilience of the martyrs of the movement, Menchl'r and her
brothers afﬁliate with their dying mother not only as her children but also as comrades in
solidarity: “We have to keep this grief as a testimony to them because they never exposed
their lives even when their grief was great too” (199). As the absent children pay their
tribute to the revolutionary mother by replicating her political agency through the
resistant act of silence before extreme anguish, the military extends the pageantry of
torture into the landscape as they leave the dying mother under a tree. The testimonial

construction of the dead maternal body as a disintegrating site, festering with ﬂies and

 

5‘ Rodriguez 152. On the other hand, it might be argued that such a description aimed at the coordination of
affect sanitizes reality and censors the truth. Thus, representation becomes falsiﬁcation. Such an argument
does not take into accormt the importance of conceptual truth as opposed to factual truth which becomes
key in dealing with the violations of marginalized communities whose voices are erased under regimes of
terror. As such, factual truth becomes a difﬁcult cornerstone in representations under repression.

66

worms and urinated upon by the soldiers, becomes a narrative act that places the army
within a discourse of bestiality, strengthened by the cannibalistic image of the sentry as
“they ate near her” even as “she started to smell very strongly” (199). The conﬂation of
the soldiers with the animals is reinforced as the image of the soldiers feasting by the
rotting body overlaps with Menchr’r’s description of preying birds like zopilotes, dogs,
and other scavenging animals who together devour the carcass. By refusing to surrender
herself to save the mother’s tortured and disintegrating body, the daughter honors the
mother’s determination to protect her children. Irene Matthews argues that the daughter’s
text about the “terrible ethical dilemma” of sacriﬁcing the mother unravels the complex
role of mothering and daughtering in war: “A daughter’s denial of a normally ‘attentive’
response, her refusal to comply with the torturers’ demands that she present herself, may
have been the only way to break the cycle that was destroying her family—her father,
brother, and now her mother—and her people” (101)?9 In preserving herself the daughter
also conserves her own voice to articulate the story of maternal love at the borders of
human strength. But, the story of this daughter is not only one of relational pain, nor is it

merely a story about her family. Through the story of her mother the daughter tells the

 

’9 My reading of the mother’s assassination has deliberately foregrounded the resistant silence of this
particular mother and her children in the face of pain as a political act of communal integration. This
contests the alternative interpretation of the mother’s cnlmbling body as a symbolic disintegration of the
indigenous community. The latter conﬂates the woman’s physical integrity with the cultural integrity of the
community. I have resisted this stance in my reading of the trope of forced impregnation. The
understanding of the female body as a metaphor for the community leads to a reductive ideology of
protection for women that enables the appropriation of indigenous women’s bodies both by the state and by
the revolutionary collective, as my examination of forced impregnation has underlined. Also see footnote
25. However, at the same time it is important to perceive how the torturing of the mother’s body “might ﬁll
varying categories of ‘otherness’ that conﬂate the imperialistic, masculinist, racist, and professional
inversions of an ‘orphaned’ military based on often reluctant recruitment and socialized into ‘selfhood’
through techniques instilling fear, obedience, alienation, objectiﬁcation, and brutality.” See Matthews 101.
Grouptortureofthe ‘other’ thusdeﬁnesnotonlyasenseofself, butalsoasolidaritywiththegroupby
participating together in a ritual initiation into selfhood. See Matthews 99.

67

story of her community, and in her lead(er)ing her people through storytelling about their
oppression, daughtering transforms itself into mothering.

Ecological Activism:60 When we meet her in the sequel Crossing Borders published in
1998—- ﬁfteen years after I, Rigoberta Menchu, the labor of this daughter-mother has not
only left the precincts of the family home and the kinship group; it has transgressed
national boundaries to clamor for global justice for indigenous peoples. Through her
latter testimonial what repeatedly comes across is how violence against the ecosystem
translates into violence against the indigenous population worldwide. Menchu’s
leadership contests the conceptual ﬂamework of the nation-state as inadequate for
resisting this violence. Instead, she offers a transnational paradigm of Fourth World
Revolution which is located at the crossroads of postcolonialism and ecocriticism, red
feminism and green feminism.

In Crossing Borders the struggle for Mayan land in Guatemala translates into the
politico-textual representation of women’s campaign for the global preservation of
indigenous cultural heritage, and its associations with the earth. Menchr'l explains the role
of the land in deﬁning the indigenous people and their relationship to each other, and
hence to the collective:

Mother Earth, for us, is not simply a symbolic expression. She is the source, the

root, the origin of our culture and our existence. Human beings need the earth,

and the earth needs human beings. This balance of co-existence on earth has been

 

6° I have deliberately used the word ‘ecological’ instead of ‘environmental’ to lmderline Menchu’s plea for
systemic changes in the handling of natural resources. Andrew Dobson has helpfully pointed out the
distinction between the two categories: “[E]nvironmentalism argues for a managerial approach to
environmental problems, secure in the belief that they can be solved without fundamental changes in
present values or patterns of production and consumption, while ecologism holds that a sustainable and
fulﬁlling existence presupposes radical changes in our relationship with the non-human natural world, and
in our mode of social and political life.” See Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thor_lgl_lt (London and New
York: Routledge, 1990) l.

68

slowly eroded. According to our forefathers, the ancient civilizations, the ‘ﬁrst
peoples’, possessed these values. In all aspects of life there should be harmony
and one of the most important sources of this harmony is the community. That is
precisely what has been lost today. People do not remember that the earth is their
mother. They no longer remember their duty to the community” (152).
Refusing to annex nature with the struggle of a particular nation, Menchu, nonetheless,
brings nature into conjunction with a sphere of radical global politics.“ What is
signiﬁcant here is the fact that Crossing Borders was published after Mencht'l won the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. Following this the UN declared 1993 as the International
Year of the Indian Peoples. Menchu was the Goodwill Ambassador for the year. The
context of this testimonial is largely that of Mencht'l’s work at the UN and beyond as the
spokesperson for the International Decade for the Indigenous Peoples (1994 to 2003). As
such, in her representational practice the Guatemalan land struggle is not to be lodged in
a discourse of Mayan patrimony. Instead, the leader ties all indigenous peoples in a
communal relation through their ﬁlial link with and claim to “Mother Earth.” She also
links all humanity through a discourse of duty to each other by protecting their common
link with the archetypal mother. Personifying the earth as the mother of all human beings
and representing her as engaged in a relationship of mutuality with them, Menchu’s
rhetoric is an effort to authenticate the need for reestablishing a “balance of co—existence
on earth” between nature and its human children. In this radical ‘politicscape’ the borders

of the nation-state are disrupted as the indigenous peoples’ bioethical value of harmony

 

6‘ Neil Sammells’s work was helpful in ﬂaming my argument about the representation of nature as an act
of radical politics against legitimating the nation in Menchu’s text. See Neil Sammell’s “Wilde nature,”
Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature, eds. Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells (London
and New York: Zed Books Ltd, 1998) 132.

69

between the natural world and the human world is legitimized as a global mode of living.
This way of life, maintained by the “ﬁrst peoples” of “ancient civilizations”, is validated
even as Menchl'l questions the notion of a pure cultural space of essence through her
conception of culture as “dynamic,” “a kind of dialectic,” and “something that progresses
and evolves” (152).
Menchu’s resistance against ecocultural insensitivity to indigenous philosophy is

even more sharply deﬁned in her criticism of the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
By voicing the irony of the Earth Summit—the very site of ecological deﬁance against
global capitalism——ﬁrmly in the grips of an ethos of business proﬁt, Mencht'l engages in a
textual practice of ecological activism by travestying elite venues of nature protection.‘52
She exposes them as phony sites of money making and “fad”(173):

I had gone to ﬁnd out what their idea of the earth, plants and nature might be,

and what I found was a commercial version of ecology. There were T-shirts

with tigers, lions and parrots painted on them, and plastic bags with animals’

faces. It was a case of businessmen making money out of the environment.

They usurped indigenous wisdom, and made ﬁlms to sell to make even more

money. (1 72)
Once again, the boundaries deﬁned by the Earth Summit are that of the entire globe as an
ecological site in need of protection, not that of the nation-state. Concomitantly,
Menchu’s critique of the Summit is aimed at the commercialization of the global
environment, not of any speciﬁc landscape or the de-auﬂlentication of any particular

indigenous community. Underlining the superexploitation of the ecocultural resources of

 

‘2 For an analysis of how ecocriticism, postcolonialism, and globalimtion can be thought together despite
philosophical tensions, see Susie O’Brien 140-180.

70

indigenous mainstay, Menchl'l archives the incompatible images of T-shirts and plastic
bags together with the images of tigers, lions, and parrots. The former signiﬁes a global
economy of mass consumerism cutting across geopolitical divides and the latter stands
for a borderless wilderness. However, this wilderness is domesticated since the value of
the fauna lies only in its ability to enhance the consumptive worth of the T-shirts and the
plastic bags by exoticizing them. In the context of globalization, with its reaches in the
nooks and crannies of human experience, in Menchi'l’s text the commercialization and the
circulation of “indigenous wisdom” as saleable ﬁlms in the international market takes on
the analogy of prostitution. Commercialization of indigenous culture thus becomes as
taboo as the commodiﬁcation of an intensely private experience like sex: “They
prostituted the thoughts of the indigenous peoples” (172). Menchu’s challenge to such
acts of appropriation of the indigenous culture by the systemic structures of knowledge
within capitalism’s increasing global reaches is evident in her ﬁnal statement that closes
I, Rigoberta Menchu: “Not even anthropologists or intellectuals, no matter how many
books they have, can ﬁnd out all our secrets” (247). The narrator’s representational
practice speaks to the nature/culture split that entered the epistemological horizon with
capitalism, and which led to the exploitation of the natural world for the beneﬁt of
culture. Her resistance to selling indigenous “secrets” to capitalism points the reader in
the direction of an alternative culture which is metonymically associated and in harmony

with nature.63

 

’3 M. Killingsworth’s and Jacqueline Palmer’s essay offered me insights into this split as the source of
overexploitation of nature. See M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer, “Ecopolitics and the
literature of the borderlands: the ﬁontiers of environmental justice in Latina and Native American writing,”

Writing the Environment, 197.

71

Menchu’s critique of the nature/culture relationship gets ﬁ‘amed through an anti-
globalization rhetoric that also draws attention to how nature can be made instrumental in
the social construction of difference through the policing of variously raced bodies, and
hence in the formations of different postcolonial identities.64 In this role nature charts
how colonial practices of unequal distribution of resources along racial identities get
translated into postcolonial contexts, and are subsequently refunctioned as economic
practices of globalization. ILRl;ggbert_a MengLI'; tells us the story of an oligarchy, largely
of a mixed European and indigenous ancestry which, through land appropriation,
continues the legacy of colonial oppression of the indigenous people in postcolonial
Guatemala. Crossing Borders. in addition, traces how such postcolonial structures of
tyranny are bolstered and held in place by an alliance between global ﬁnance and the
national politics of neocolonial elites. Mencht'l summarizes how such alliances result in
material manifestations of extreme economic disparities within a postcolonial population:

How can the World Bank allow huge areas of land to be used to pasture a few

cows, so that land-owning and bourgeois families can spend their weekends

killing deer? How can they allow this at a time when millions of people are
starving because they have no land? How can it permit huge land concessions that
destroy the natural world by trafﬁcking in wood, rare animals and archaeological

remains? (175)

What Mencht'l clamors against is the ongoing extractive ambitions of colonialism,
demonstrated at the turn of the twentieth century in the form of global imperialism that

devastates ecological reserves by facilitating deforestation, extinction of rare animal

 

6’ See Gretchen Legler, “Body politics in American nature writing. ‘Who may contest for what the body of
nature will be?” Writing the Environment 7 3-4.

72

species, and business in archaeological heritage of places through technological
capitalism. Previously conquering peoples still control the structures of global economies
like the World Bank. As such, the prerogative is theirs to use international ﬁnance to
order the distribution of natural resources among postcolonial populations of nation-states
along the boundaries of ethnic and cultural differences, privileging social bodies marked
as racially and culturally similar to the distributors. Hence, acute material differences are
sustained and protected by a global coalition of elites, as bourgeois leisure is entitled to
more ground for hunting in the wild than the starving millions are to land for food
cultivation for daily sustenance. Through afﬁliations with and surveillance of national
territories global capital thus upholds at the same time as it dissolves “imaginary yet fatal
lines that divide First from Third World, brown people from white, haves from have-nots,
North from South” (Killingsworth and Palmer 198). The enslavement of the indigenous
peoples thus continues. The regional symptoms of these material conditions, based on
unequal global structural relations of socio-economic power, ﬁnd expression in
insurrection and counterinsurgency violence. Menchr'l’s indictment of the structures of
global ﬁnance deﬁnes the conquest of natural resources in terms of the conquest of her
people:
I have been very critical of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World
Bank. I think these organizations deal very badly with problems of human-rights
violations and the environment. If they didn’t deal with them so badly, the
scorched-earth campaign in Guatemala could have been prevented, and new laws

governing land distribution introduced. (175)

73

The scorched-earth campaign of the Guatemalan government, in an effort to destroy
guerrilla bases, massacred four hundred villages in Guatemala. By testifying to the link
between global ﬁnance and the genocidal violence, the indigenous leader delineates the
relational bearing of human cultural and economic practices to the material world. The
discursive and material value of Mencht'l’s ecofeminist activism lies in foregrounding the
interconnection between the health of the ecosystem and that of all humanity. But the
revolutionary labor of the leader also rests in acknowledging the asymmetries of cultural
and economic practices that affect ecological health: “To personify humanity, using the
pronoun ‘we’, as the perpetrator of environmental damage, is to mask important
differences. ‘We’—men, women, different cultures, rich and poor—are not all in the
same way responsible for ecological damage” (Kerridge 6). Therefore, ecofeminism
continuously brings into conversation with global ecology the small narratives of the
local ecosystems and the differing accountabilities of the agents of ecological destruction
along various lines of identity. In the process, it reconstructs and deconstructs the grand
narrative of a global ecosystem linked to a global humanity. Kerridge says: “This makes
ecologism a vital testing-ground for relations between post-colonial pluralism and new
‘globalization’ ” (7).

Finally, it needs to be underscored that through the global dissemination of the
“green stories” of the indigenous peoples Menchr'l transforms her testimonial labor into
ecological praxis.65 This red-green feminist paradigm is founded on the logic that

narratives play crucial roles in shaping and altering material practices.66 The transmission

 

65SoeDohsonm.

6" See Susie O’Brien, “Articulating a World of Difference: Ecocriticism, Postcolonialism and
Globdintion,” Canadian Literature 170-171 (Autumn 2001): 150.

74

histories of such narratives are marked by a particular politics of representation that, by
its international appeal, affects economic circuits of production, distribution, and
consumption globally.
Inscribing the Cosmopolitan Self and Mediating the Iconic Indigenous Subjectivity:
The link between the individual and the collective, the exceptional and the
representative in Menchu’s testimonials offer an index to the relationship between the
political value of the texts and their standing in the global market:
While some critics of the testimonio have sidestepped the more critical
ambiguities emerging in testimonial narratives, muting a critical discussion of
native exceptionality or radical individuality by asserting that “it does not matter
who speaks,” clearly it not only matters but plays a determining role in the
commodifying of texts for the international market and in the testimonio’s
function as a political tool—think of how the singular image of Mencht'r has been
exploited to facilitate the sale and circulation of I, Rigoberta Menchri and to
attract the focus of international attention to the systems of oppression directed by
the Guatemalan state. (Sénchez-Casal 101)
What Sénchez-Casal highlights is how in Lﬂgoberta Menchﬁ the representational
politics of Elisabeth Burgos-Debray in constructing Menchu’s “radical individuality,”
signiﬁed by the cosmopolitan globe trotting Mayan peasant woman, becomes a political
ploy to campaign for the human rights of the Mayans. This is possible because despite
her exceptionality the leader is at the same time iconic of the oppressed indigenous
population. The leader’s exceptionality and iconicity respectively set her apart and allows

her to symbolize the collective emergence of the Fourth World as a new force in

 

75

transnational indigenous politics. In CrossingBorders the exceptionality and iconicity of
Menchl'r is to a large extent constructed through her role as the Goodwill Ambassador and
spokesperson to the UN for the indigenous peoples. In these capacities Menchl'l
underscores the possible role of the UN in deﬁning a Fourth World indigenous identity,
cutting across the borders of the nation-state across the world:
One of our aims was to secure a Universal Declaration of the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples. If the UN were to declare indigenous people legal, they
would have a legal framework within which to work. At present, national
constitutions do not recognize indigenous peoples, nor do international law and
institutions, because we don’t appear as speciﬁc peoples in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. We simply do not exist; we have no rights. The
UN, however, could recognise our legality. (144-5)
The signiﬁcance of a corrective paradigm of global governance is repeatedly designed in
Menchr’r’s discourse as the political ground that challenges the colonial legacy of nation—
states built on delegitimizing the indigenous population by excluding them ﬁom the
dominant legal ﬂame—European in case of colonial law and Euro-American in the case
of international law. Mencht'l pays homage to Chief Descage, the ﬁrst indigenous leader
to go to the League of Nations at Geneva way back in the 19208 because perhaps he
understood “that international organisations might some day defend the rights of
indigenous peoples” (141). Thus, the identity of the female leader is marked by her
world-wide travel as the UN representative—an identity that intersects with her
communal subjectivity. The communal subjectivity of the leader is in metonymic

association with the physical and cultural disintegration of the indigenous peoples of the

76

world. Standing at such crossroads, the leader subverts monolithic narratives of national
belonging at the same time that her Mayan heritage foregrounds the Guatemalan human
rights crisis.” Through this correlation between testimonial and human rights, of
international politics and literature, acts of remembrance “enter and travel through global
circuits of exchange that affect the import of the stories: through ofﬁcial UN mechanisms
for recognition and redress; through national inquiries and international tribunals”
(Schaffer and Smith 5). In other words, these global intersections of cultural productions
and politico-legal discourses are marked by circuits of production, distribution, and
consumption of human rights texts for various purposes. The global forces of
consumerism further out across national boundaries as publishing houses convert
women’s testimonials of human rights violations like Menchu’s into stories with an
international readership.68 Such a reading public is invested in narratives of suffering that
generate transnational coalitions of human rights activism, often with strong feminist
wings in them that are particularly interested in deﬁning the unique ways in which
women experience human rights violations in situations of state terror. Thus, despite the
conﬂictive space of ethnographic contact between the transcriber and the transcribed that
has been discussed in the previous section, the radical exceptionality of the militant
female leader undermines the tense power relationship at the “contact zone.”
Destabilizing the conﬂictual power relationship by the sheer force of her radical
individuality, the leader links herself through the narrative act with the indigenous base

and launches a collective politics of Fourth World self-determination on the global stage.

 

‘7 Schaffer and Smith, 19.

6’ Schaffer and Smith 23.

77

VI. Conclusion

In the ﬁnal analysis, I would like to point out that in testimonials like L;R_igobe;_rta
M11 and Crossing Borders produced collaboratively by indigenous women and their
elite mediators, “the subaltem, by deﬁnition not registered or registrable as a historical
subject capable of hegemonic action [. . .], is nevertheless present in unexpected
structural dichotomies, ﬁssures in the forms of hierarchy and hegemony” (111). As this
Founding Statement of the Latin American Subaltem Studies Group suggests, the
subaltem in these testimonials are “not only acted on, despite the tendency in traditional
paradigms to see it as a passive or ‘absent’ subject that can be mobilized only ﬁom
above; it also acts to produce social effects that are visible” (111-112). In other words,
though the subaltem is incapable of assuming a dominant position, she erupts through the
cracks of the hegemonic order as Menchr'r’s testimonials burst open the seams of a
militaristic state based on an alliance between the political and the business elite and
terror and torture of the subaltem. Into this rigid structure of the nation-state Menchr’r
intervenes through her transnational network, not only forged through her collaborative
testimonies of oppression with ethnographer Elisabeth Burgos-Debray and translator Ann
Wright, but also through the global activist alliance for the Mayan cause that she inspired
across various locations of militancy. The female revolutionary leader’s alliance with
both survivor witnesses of the Mayan genocide and its observer witnesses worldwide
deconstructs the idea that the testimonials are the stories of a particular individual’s
experience. It becomes the story of individual human rights under collective threat, and
the fact that the international community witnessed the massacre, activates corrective

energy that circulates worldwide as the trace of state brutalities in a particular

78

geopolitical context. Of special importance here is the relationship between the author-
witness and the reader-reviewer as the latter, despite not being in the same pain, stands in
relation to it and hopes to end that pain for others.69 Framed differently, women’s human
rights narratives like Menchu’s which uncover the unique ways in which women
experience the tyranny of the state in situations of political crisis generate Fourth World
transnational alliances which, through the cultural politics of human rights activism,
challenge the despotism and the absolute power of the nation-state over its citizens.
Marking such disenﬁ'anchised citizens as global denizens with afﬁliations to other
solidarity groups beside the nation-state, global human rights movements challenge the
category of the nation by legitimating processes of telling and listening against the

nation-state.

 

6’ I am immensely indebted to Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg for her insightful paper “Authenticity and the
Distanced Observer Witness: Reading Pat Barker and Youssef Chahine” at the Resistance to Tyranny:
Representing Human Rights through Literature conference hosted by the New York College English
Association between April 28-29. It has helped me think through the signiﬁcant politics of the observer
witnesses that generate societal transformation.

79

CHAPTER TWO
The Global Movement Against Discrimination: Lower Caste
Women’s Convict Narratives

I. Introduction

As its main contention, this chapter focuses on the representation of lower caste
Indian women’s leadership in resisting caste hierarchy in postcolonial narratives from
India. More speciﬁcally, through a study of life-writing it explores the relationship in
which women who resist caste atrocities stand with respect to criminality. The chapter
goes on to examine the potentiality for cross-caste feminist politics that emerges out of
such lower caste militancy. Finally, my argument inquires how contesting the Indian
caste system leads into the international politics against discrimination on the basis of
work and descent.l This builds up the broader argument of transnational feminism that is

pivotal to my dissertation. India’s Bandit Queen: The True Story of Phoolan Devi and

The Bandit Qu;e_en of India: An Indian Woman’s mg Journey from Peasant to

 

International Legend are the central texts considered here. These works are about
Phoolan Devi who was born into a lower caste sharecropping family in India in the
19603. She transformed herself from a violated girl into a tough outlaw, avenging caste
outrage. In 1983 she negotiated her surrender to the government of India, and was elected
to the Parliament in 1996. She was ﬁnally assassinated in 2001. Reading life writings of
Phoolan Devi as convict narratives that allow for a reconstructive reading of women’s

criminality, the chapter analyzes the caste politics of the criminalization of women

 

' The UN resolution of 2000, passed against “Discrimination on the Basis of Work and Descent”, forms
the basis of this attempt to classify caste based oppression as part of the global movement against
discrimination based on labor and lineage.

8O

through the organizing characters of the girl child and the concubine. Subsequently, using
the ﬁgures of the warrior goddess and the border-crossing feminist, I examine the social
militancy of these women against such caste oppression. Thus, the chapter reads the
ﬁgure of the lower caste female leader as a site of both oppression and resistance.

The short story “Draupadi”, written by the Indian author Mahasweta Devi, will
offer a historical template for understanding the complicity between colonial and
postcolonial law concerning the criminalization of certain communities in India. More
speciﬁcally, the critical frame of the chapter will draw on complementary ﬁgures of
delinquent women, like Draupadi, from Indian literature to study the relationship between
caste and law in the criminalization of females. Linking postcolonial resistance ﬁgures
like Draupadi and Phoolan Devi with oppositional women conﬁ'onting the colonial state
will be useful not only in constructing a history of women rebels militating against
colonial and postcolonial law and order, but also in highlighting a continuity in women’s
disobedience for resisting the continuum of violence.

This chapter will be structured to uncover texts like India’s Bandit Queen and m
Bindit Queen of India as activist prison writings by disobedient women that rupture such
a continuum between the violence of the colonial and the postcolonial legal systems.
Contextualizing such texts against India’s colonial history through readings of historical
and critical writings, the framework will set the stage to expose how the ideological
myths of colonial criminality extend their legacies into the existing legal apparatus of the
contemporary Indian state. The context will reveal how such myths came to be
constructed arormd certain castes and tribes and codiﬁed into colonial law. Since this

dissertation speciﬁcally engages with the paradigm of women’s human rights, my interest

81

lies in historicizing this nexus of criminality and caste politics by deploying the ﬁgure of
the woman through her absence/presence in colonial/postcolonial criminality.

Like the historical frame, the theoretical scaffold of the chapter will destabilize
the continuum of violence between colonial and postcolonial law by presenting a frame
that allows for a re-constructive reading of women’s criminality. The critical ﬂame of
this chapter builds itself upon colonial discourse analysis, socioeconomic colonial history
of caste, and convicted women’s writing. This framework brings together Parama Roy’s
Indian Trafﬁc: Identities in Question in Colonial_ and Postcolonial lndig, Susan Bayly’s
Caste. Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Centl_lry to the Modern Age, and
Barbara Harlow’s Barred: Women. Writirtg,_a_n_d Poliﬁgal Detention. The subsequent

 

literary analysis of the life-writings about Phoolan Devi will explore both her
criminalization as a lower caste woman and her transgressive politics against the caste

system in the context of its negotiations with transnational feminist issues.2

11. History of “Disobedience : Legends of India’s Unruly
Daughters

For insights into how, in the ﬁrst place, delinquency came to be deﬁned with
respect to identity in both colonial and postcolonial Indian criminality, it is crucial to
probe into historiography. This helps us in comprehending the politics behind
determining what constitutes crime. Of special interest as to the parameters of this
chapter are the colonial and postcolonial discourses on the gendered history and practice

of “crime” when confronted with the ﬁgure of the female delinquent. An archetypal case

 

2 Inthiscontextitwillbehelpfultomentionaboutthetwosystemstocomprehendthecategoryofcaste—
the national system of ‘varna’ and the local system of ‘jati.’ Following the national system of caste
classiﬁcation, the Brahmins (priests) occupy the top of the ladder, followed by the Kshatriyas (warriors),
the Vaishyas (traders and artisans), and lastly the Shudras (laborers). Within these four groups are many
sub-castes which vary regionally. See Joanna Liddle & Rama Joshi, Daughters of lndmdence: Gender,
Caste and Class in India (London, UK & New Delhi, India: Zed & Kali for Women, 1986) 58.

82

in point in colonial female criminality can be conceptualized around the role of the
women “rebels” in the historical battle of 1857 when native soldiers in the British army
of the East India Company rose up against their British officers for the injustices they
faced within the military.3

To trace how the representation of women’s insubordination in 1857 was marked
by colonial politics, a brief historical overview of the causes that culminated in these
women’s dissidence is in order. The annexation policy of the British Governor-General
Dalhousie was arguably the most decisive factor in impelling women to join the battle of
1857. Dalhousie’s “stance toward states whose rulers died without natural heirs was in
fact an established and tested doctrine: lapse of the state to the British” (Lebra-Chapman
25).4 In many of these cases the appropriation of the state was tantamount to the
conﬁscation of women’s and children’s private property. Such was the case with
Lakshmibai, the Rani (queen) of Jhansi, who in Indian iconography has become

emblematic of anticolonial female militancy.5 Though the Rani’s husband-—Raja (King)

 

3 One of the most notorious causes of the 1857 war was “the introduction of the new Enﬁeld riﬂes, whose
percussion caps were greased with the fat of cows and pigs and thus deﬁling to Hindus and Muslims alike.
This, if nothing else, served to unite the Sepoys [soldiers] in their antagonism to their ofﬁcers and helped to
precipitate the ﬁrst spark of revolt when those ofﬁcers called their men to parade to prove their loyalty.”
See Joyce Lebra-Chapman, The Rani of Jhansi: A Stug in Female Heroism in India (Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, 1986) 3. According to Manmohan Kaur, On April 24 “[o]ut of ninety Sepoys present, 85
refused to accept the new cartridges. As a result they were court-martialled and were sentenced to various
terms of imprisonment extending upto 10 years.” On May 9 they “were deprived of their uniforms and then
were handed over to the smiths for fastening shackles around their arms and legs.” That evening prostitutes
taunted the rest of the soldiers for their cowardice and their indifference to the humiliation of their peers
who refused to “swerve from their creed.” This inﬂamed a spirit of revolt among the soldiers against

British injustice. See Manmohan Kaur, Role of Women in the Freedom Movement (1857-1942) (Delhi &
Jullundur, India: Sterling Publishers, 1968) 37.

‘ Dalhousie’s mine (1848.56) “saw the absorption of nothing less than eight States which meant that a
quarter million square miles of [Indian] territory was added to the East India Company’s territorial limits.”
See Kaur 36.

5 The following bwkground to Rani Lakshmibd’s involvement in the battle of 1857 has been drawn from
Lebra-Chapman.

83

Gangadhar Rao—on his deathbed in 1853 adopted a ﬁve year old relative as his legal heir
and “entrusted the charge of the state during his heir’s minority to Rani Lakshrrribai”
(Lebra-Chapman 25), Dalhousie declined to recognize the adoption. Jhansi lapsed to the
British in 1854. So, when the 1857 war spread to Jhansi, it fed into the injury of
annexation. In the ensuing battle queen Lakshmibai led her own troops and died ﬁghting
the British.

Begum (queen) Hazrat Mahal, was another primary ﬁgure of female deﬁance
against the British in 1857.6 In 1856 the British deposed her husband Wajid Ali Shah, the
king of Oudh, to annex his kingdom. As such, by joining the war of 1857 the queen tried
to reestablish native rule over Oudh. Yet another leader in the revolt of 1857-1858 was
the Rani of Ramgarh, Awanti Bai.7 When her husband, Raja Lachman Singh, died in
1850 leaving behind a mentally disabled son, the “British authorities, true to their policy
at this period of increasing their territorial limits took over the management of the estate”
(Kaur 68). The Rani led her own troops to join the revolt of 1857 to redress the situation.
There were also dissident queens like Rani Jindan Kaur, wife of Maharaja (Emperor)
Ranjeet Singh of Punjab, who aided the rebel cause of 1357 from outside the country.8

Critical to unlocking how political privilege came to deﬁne female colonial

criminality in 1857 is the recognition of the fact that British colonial historiography

 

6 For the following history ofBegum Hazrat Mahal’s rebellion, see Kaur 38-45.
7 For the history of the Rani of Rarngarh’s rebellion, see Kaur 68—9.

8 Shewrotetothe MaharajaofKashmirinciphertorngehim“toinitiateanattackonBritishterritory
when erg Bahadln' would simultaneously descend from Nepal.” See Kaur 71. Besides, Maharani
(Empress) Baiza Bai, wife of Maharaja Daulat Rao Scindia of Gwalior, Basti Begum, the daughter of
Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last King of India, Chauhan Rani, the wife of Raja Pratap Chandra Singh of
Anoopshahar, Rani Tace Bai, a descendent of Gangadhar Govind, the former Raja of Jalourr were few of
the othernamesofwomen warriorsthatweencormterinthehistoryofthe 1857 battle. SeeUshaBala&
Anshu Sharma, Indian Womir Freedom Fighters 1857-1947 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1986) 35-62.

 

84

constructed the war as the “Sepoy (Soldier) Mutiny,” while native history conﬁgured it as
part of the liberation struggle.9 How did such colonial and native discursive politics
construct women rebels who joined the battle against the British in 1857? Did caste
politics play a role in redeﬁning the transgressive acts of these women in colonial and
postcolonial history? To track this nexus between historiography and criminality, it is
vital to examine how the ﬁgures of these disobedient daughters of India took on different
valences in the British colonial imagination and in the ethos of Indian nationalism.

The historiography of the classic case of the Rani of Jhansi enables a perceptive
appreciation of the modalities of representing colonial female criminality. The historian
Joyce Lebra-Chapman asserts: “Whether or not she [the Rani] was actively implicated,
the assumption that she was nevertheless became ofﬁcial with English administrators,
who planned to bring her to trial and punish her for her alleged offenses” (164). The
author also underlines how the genre of historical ﬁction written by English authors
“tends to portray Lalcshmibai as either murderous and treacherous in her political
dealings or as lascivious and unscnrpulous in her sexual relations, generally with British
ofﬁcers” (164). A signiﬁcant example is George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman in the
Great Game (1975), a novel about a military hero Flashman who is sent to Jhansi to
investigate into the portentous “Sepoy Mutiny.” The arrogant lasciviousness of Flashman
is evident from his ﬁrst encounter with the queen after which he imagines “what that

voluptuous tawny body would look like when I peeled the sari off it.” He speculates “on

 

9 “Hundreds ofmilitary memoirs and regimental histories chronicled the events of 1857 ﬁom the British
perspective and witnessed the honor and shock felt by English men and women both at home and in India.
The Indian perspective was of course different, and Indian historians for many years have described the
Rebellion as the ﬁrst phase of India’s war of independence, a glorious war fought by passionate heroic

patriots.” See Lebra-Chapman 1-2.

85

the novel uses to which the pair of us could put that swing of hers, in the interests of
diplomatic relations” (81). In a crude portrayal of her alleged sexual exploits with the
imperial agent, the Rani is in the pavilion “thrusting up and down like a demented
monkey on a stick, raking me with her nails and giving little shrieks into my mouth, until
the torchlight procession which was marching through my loins suddenly exploded, she
went limp in my arms.” The narrative continues: “I slid gently to the ﬂoor in ecstatic
exhaustion with that delightful burden clinging and quivering on top of me” (99).
Flashman’s post-coital sleep is interrupted by thugs attempting to murder him, and a
sneaking suspicion creeps in his mind about the Rani’s involvement in the plot. Fraser’s
endnotes to the text claims that in the milieu of the “mutiny” “Lakshmibai was credited
with every vice [ . . .] but there is no evidence that her private life and behaviour were not
entirely respectable” (340). Fraser however adds: “That is not to say that she would not
use her feminine power (or any other weapon) for political ends; in this may be found a
logical explanation of the pavilion incident. [ . . .] To lead him on, to lure him to the
pavilion, and to arrange for an attack on him by professional assassins, was simple; that
something of the sort actually happened is indicated by the confession which Ilderim
Khan extracted ﬁom the captured Thug” (340).

On the other hand, Lebra-Chapman argues that the unlawful behavior of the Rani
criminalized by the politico-discursive privilege of the British administration was
reconﬁgured by native history as a glorious act of resistance to British imperialism: “the
legend of the Rani grew through political reinterpretations and served the interests of the
nationalist movement. In the ﬁrst three decades of the twentieth century the Rani’s image

was particularly useful as a metaphor for resistance to the British, which could not be

86

voiced openly” (142). With India’s independence in 1947 “it became possible for the ﬁrst
time for Indians to write freely about 1857.” Banned previously, Vrindan Lal Verma’s
novel on the Rani, published in 1946, depicts the events of 1857 as “an early stage of the
freedom struggle.” Verma “credits the Rani with being the ﬁrst woman in Indian history
to encourage women to become a ﬁghting force” (147). Thus, the criminalized Rani is
reconﬁgured in native history as a liberator ﬁom foreign rule. The gloriﬁcation of the
Rani, however, also became part of the discursive repertoire of the British after her death:
“Alive, for the English, she was ‘the horrid Ranee,’ the ‘Jezebel of India,’ ‘the Indian
Boadicea,’ and ‘perpetrator of the most heinous crimes.’ Dying valiantly in battle,
however, she was puriﬁed almost overnight in British eyes, transformed into ‘the best
and bravest of the rebels,’ in Rose’s famous phrase” (120).10

However, I argue that a key factor in the resurrection of the criminalized Rani was
her elite status as a Brahmin in the Hindu caste hierarchy and her aristocratic marriage to
a Kshatriya. My contention is based on the differential treatment of the participants in the
185 7 war whose social locations were either outside the caste structure or lower down in

it.11 The solidarity of the “hill tribes” with the 1857 anti-colonial resistance movement

 

'° Lebra-Chapman emphasizes how the “rehabilitation of the Rani” really started with the battle narrative
of General Rose, the Rani’s opponent: “It was partly through the prism of English military romanticism,
then, that the legend of the Rani had its inception. General Rose’s comparison of the Rani to Joan of Arc in
his battle report served a signiﬁcant function.” According to Lebra-Chapman: “The Rani’s valor, ﬁerce
determination, discipline, knowledge of weaponry and horsemanship, and excellent tactical instincts were
all traits with along and honored tradition in British military annals and ethos” (120).

" As the caste Hindus like Rani Lakshmibai, theirs was an anti-annexation movement: “hill tribes
determinedly resisted the attempts by the British to annexe their land for establishing plantations, and to try
and use them as plantation labour.” The author adds: “A number of tribal chiefs, especially in the north,
participated in the 1857 events, and earned the title of traitors and renegades with the British governmen ”
See Meena Radhakrishna, “Dishonoured by History,” The Hindu Folio July 16, 2000 <http://www.
hinduonnet.com/foliolf00007/00070240.htrn>. In this context it is important to remember that none of the
communities led by the rebel queens of 1857, whether Hindus or Muslims, came under such legislative
surveillance after their insurgencies. In fact, in the case of Rani Awanti Bai, her last words before she

87

became a key historical factor leading to the colonial legislation which identiﬁed entire
communities as unlawful through the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 , later known as the
Criminal Castes and Tribes Act of 1911. The Government of India denotiﬁed them in
1952, but in 1959 passed the Habitual Offenders Act which is almost a repetition of the
Act of 1871.12 Not only was the continuity of the colonial state reassured by the
legislative philosophy and policy of the postcolonial administration,13 but, this act, in
conjunction with the Permanent Settlement Act of 1793, would be instrumental in
unleashing a dynamics that would alter caste transactions in India.

At this juncture of historical analysis of the caste bound criminalization of lower
caste peasant women like Phoolan Devi and non-Hindu tribal peasant women like
Draupadi, it is vital to understand how the legacy of the colonial ruling class was handed
down to their postcolonial counterparts. The answer lies in the legislative violence
unleashed on native land and property relations by foreign rule. Such legal onslaughts

facilitated the imposition on the indigenous feudalistic arrangements of local agrarianism

 

committed suicide, admitting that she incited her people to rebel, could absolve her entire community ﬁ’om
blame in the insurrection. See Kaur 69.

'2 See Mahasweta Devi, “Badge of All Their Tribes,” Times of India Jan 5, 2000: 14. <http://www.lib.
virginiaedu/areacsmdies/mahasweta/badge.htrnl>.

‘3 However, the last pre-liberation constitution of the British colonial rule in India--the Government of
India Act of 1935—also introduced the colonial category of “Scheduled Castes” to deﬁne all sectors of the
subject population that would qualify for aﬂirmative actions. India was officially liberated from British
colonial rule on August 15, 1947. The Constitution of independent India, which went into effect in 1950,
adopted the rubrics of colonial anthropology-caste and tribe, and categorized this citizenry as “Scheduled
Castes” and “Scheduled Tribes.” See Constitution of India. Art. 341 <hhp://www.astro.virginia.edu/
~sk4zw/india-const/pl6341.html> & Constitution of India. Art. 342 <http://www.astro.virginia.edu/
~sk4zw/india-const/pl6342.htrnl>. Moreover, the Constitution also made provisions for the “backward
classes.” See Constitution of India. Art. 340 < http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~sk4zw/india-const/pl6340.
htrnl>. As Human Rights Watch deﬁnes it: “Referred to as “other backward castes” (OBCs) in
administrative parlance, backward castes are deﬁned as those whose ritual rank and occupational status are
above ‘untouchables’ but who themselves remain socially and economically depressed.” See Human Rights

Watch, Broken Pe_gple: Caste Violence Agaﬂ' t India’s Untouchables, (Human Rights Watch: New York,
Washington, London, & Brussels, 1999) 37. As a shudra, Phoolan Devi belonged to this group.

88

of colonial administrative structures with their world market interests.14 The Permanent
Settlement Act of 1793 legislated the recruitment of landholders as revenue collectors for
the colonial state. This administrative strategy spread from Bengal to other parts of
India. I 5 Under pre-colonial customary law the property of landlords could be used by
peasants as long as it was not damaged.16 The colonial legal code altered this by granting
absolute ownership of land to the landlords, and pressming them into collecting
impossibly high rates of revenue from cultivators. '7 This transformed the feudal relations
of patronage and loyalty between the landlord and the peasant as productivity now
became a criterion for tenancy. The Rent Act of 1859 did eventually protect the tenancy
rights of peasants cultivating the land for at least twelve years,18 but the non-Hindu
nomadic tribes and migrant peasants, mostly lower caste Hindus, remained unprotected. '9
The oppressive system was intensiﬁed when another group of intermediaries——the
jotedars—entered the chain of command.

The vulnerability of women of these sharecropping class/caste groups was

increased by their gendered experiences of sexual abuse by landlords and intermediaries.

 

'4 See Rabindra Ray, The Naxalites and their Ideology (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988) 179.

’5 However, the British attitude toward intermediaries underwent a change till in 1856, after annexing
Oudh, the colonial administration tried to circumvent the landed gentry in collecting revenues from the
region. Ray 192.

'6 “By the fact of the peaceful defence of proprietary interests—whether of the intermediary or of the
tenant—heritable, alienable rights to the usufruct were created that could be delegated.” See Ray 195.

‘7 See Marius, Damas. 11th g Naxalbali (Calcutta, India: Radical Impressions, 1991) 112.
'3 Ray 194.

‘9 “At the time that intermediaries were the only sources of revenue-collection they were known as,
zamindars inBengal andelsewhere, andtaluqdalsinOudh. Jotedars [. . .]wereavariety ofsub-infeudatory
or a mass of such, that gradually grew up between the zamindar or taluqdar and the actual cultivators [. . .]
The situation that prevailed at the time of independence was that of a series of individuals arranged in a
hierarchy based on legal agreements appropriating parts of the surplus of the cultivator, before the portion
due to me government was delivered up to it.” See Ray 182-3.

89

These women contributed to social production through their domestic as well as ﬁeld
labor. They were subjected to gender based wage discrimination. During the 1943 Bengal
famine the colonial authorities ignored the suffering of the Bengal peasantry to possibly
deny that Britain’s participation in the Second World War led to the diversion of food
stocks for military needs. They continued to export grains and the bureaucrats made
proﬁts from emergency supplies for civilians.20 In resistance to this Bengal’s rural
peasant women led—“the combined anti-feudal and anti-colonial agrarian movemen ”--
the Tebhaga Uprising (1946-7). It started as “a movement of sharecroppers to retain two-
thirds share of the produce for themselves and thereby to reduce from one-half to one-
third of the produce the rent paid to Jotedars” (Singha Roy 48).21 Historians have
claimed, “In terms of class leadership Tebhaga was a peak in the history of women’s
resistance!” (Custers 11). The legacy of subaltem insurrection against the colonial state in
the Tebhaga Movement was inherited by the Telengana People’s Struggle (1948-51)
against the postcolonial state. It was a guerrilla insurgency of peasants against the feudal
oppression by the Muslim ruler of the southern state of Hyderabad and the Hindu
landlords there. Agricultural women “moved militantly into the struggle for land, better

wages, fair rent, reasonable interest in cash and grain loans” (Kannabiran and Lalitha

 

2° For this background to the Tebhaga movement, I am indebted to Casters. See Peter Custers, Women in
the Tebhaga Uprisings: Ru_ra_l Poor Womenand Revolutiongy Leadership 19415-1947 (Calcutta: Naya
Prakash, 1947). 24-31. For many such works on subaltem uprisings, I am indebted to Pardra Chatterjee,
Director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Kolkata, India for allowing me access to the
Centre’s collection and its critical resources on Bengal’s subaltem history during my research in India in
the spring of 2005.

 

2‘ The bulk of the population in Khanpur village—the hub of the Tebhaga movement—was comprised of
the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and an err-tribe. In the zamindari system the Naib was the direct
representative of the zamindar. The naib and the jotedars belonged to the upper castes. Being

moneylendergmeyappropﬁatedmostofthe landfromthepeasantsinlieuofdebtsandmortgages. See
Debal Singha Roy, Women in Peasant Movements: Tebhaga, Naxalite, and After. (New Delhi: Manohar,

I992) 52.

9O

182).22 In addition to their exploitation as laborers, these women had been subjected to
sexual violations like rape and adi bapa.23 When the revolution ended in 1951 the Nizam
had been dethroned, and the abolition of forced labor and a resistance to the jagirdari
system had been achieved.24 As in the Tebhaga and the Telengana struggles, in the
Naxalite movement (1967-71) of Bengal “women were in the forefront of the struggle
with the police, in forcible harvesting of the crops, in the meetings and campaigning and
organising activities, in supplying food and maintaining communication network among
the underground activists and in stimulating the moral strength for resistance” (47). The
target of the Naxalite movement was also “the long—established oppression of the landless
peasantry and the itinerant farm worker, sustained through an unofﬁcial government-
landlord collusion that too easily circumvented the law” (Spivak, Foreword 6-7). In this
conﬂict the women of peasants groups suffered in very different ways than men, and their
militant politics against the system took on different valences of criminalization than did
men’s in the postcolonial nation—state.

This question of political resistance and the caste politics behind the

criminalization of women is pried open by Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Draupadi”

 

22 “The peasants on the Nizam’s personal estate were practically bonded to the ruler. Under the jagr‘rdari
(tenurial system in which lands and/or revenues were granted by the State either for services rendered or in
lieu of debts and advances) system various illegal taxes and forced labor were exacted from peasants by the
landlords. Apart from this there were the deshmulrhs and deshpandes (principal revenue ofﬁcers of a
district who became landowners over time), or tax collectors of the Nizam who grabbed thousands of acres
of land and made it their own property. Peasants thus became tenants-at-will.” See Vasantha Kannabiran
and K. Lalitha, “The Magic Time: Women in the Telengana People’s Struggle,” Recasting Women: Essays
in Colonial Histgy, eds. Kumkum Sangari and SM Vaid (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989) 201.

23 “Rape was an everyday reality, the undenied right of the landlord or moneylender. Adi bapa or
concubinage was prevalent. Adi bapa was a form of concubinage peculiar to Telengana, where a young girl
usually from a bonded family, had to accompany the bride to her husband’s house to tend to her mistress,
andtoprovidesexual servicetothemaster. Hervhginitywasthereforeas importantasthebride’s.”
Kannabiran and Lalitha 182.

2‘ Kannabiran and Lalitha 202.

91

which will serve as my paradigm of bahujan crossfeminist discourse to explore the
convict narratives about Phoolan Devi. Unlike Phoolan Devi who was a shudra and under
constitutional law belonged to the category of backward castes,25 the ﬁctional character
of Draupadi was a Santal and hence was a member of the Scheduled Tribes. Furthermore,
while the former draws her revolutionary ethos ﬁ'om the practice of social banditry, the
later hails from the realms of Naxalite insurgency. However, what makes them literary
complements of each other in my work is the shared plight of lower caste Hindus and
non-Hindus in a democracy anomalously operative on the Brahminical ideology of work
and descent. Caught in the vortex of violence generated particularly against such women
by the imposition of colonial modernity on a feudal tradition, and the coexistence of both
in the postcolonial nation state, both Phoolan Devi and Draupadi who are landless
laboring women become militants challenging the caste/class politics of the landed
patriarchy patronized by the structures of the postcolonial state. What emerges in my
reading of the criminalization of the deﬁant politics of these women is the intractable
complicity between the violence of colonial and the postcolonial legislation against the

lower castes and the non-Hindu tribes of India.

III. Scaffold for Textual Analysis: Women, Banditry, and Convict
Narratives

The women rebels of 1857 constitute a crucial node in the history of the
criminalization of women in terms of my work. On one hand, they can be seen as

precursors of peasant women like Draupadi, militant in the Naxalite movement against

 

25 In her preface to “Draupadi” Spivak states: “As Mahasweta points out in an aside, the tribe in question is
theSananotmbeconﬁrsedwiﬂiatleastnmeotherMmdauibesdlatmhabhlndia Theyarealsonotto
be confused with the so—called tmtouchables, who, lmlike the tribals, are Hindu, though probably of some
remote ‘non-Aryan’ origin.” See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Draupadi: translator’s foreword, Breast
Stories by Mahasweta Devi, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Calcutta; Seagull, 1998) l2-13.

 

92

the postcolonial state and outlawed by it—non-Hindu tribal women who are violently
tortured in police custody in independent India. On the other hand, the deﬁance of the
women rebels of 1857 against the colonial state connects them to the thuggees of Central
India who, together with the Rani of Jhansi in the First War of Independence, “posed a
threat to British power in early 1858, a threat both political and military” (Lebra-
Chapman 78). Phoolan Devi belonged to this tradition of rural banditry. The rebel Rani is
“now part of the legend of the Chambal Valley” where Devi operated (Sen rod).26

Caste Soci and Politics in India from the El teenth Cen to the Modern
Age Susan Bayly explains the link between colonial racism and the legislative violence
of a caste based construction of criminality. She underlines how “rather than proven
individual acts of criminality”, at “the end of the nineteenth century, this principle of guilt
by collective genetic or social inheritance was extended very widely under the
enactments of colonial India’s notorious Criminal Tribes and Castes Acts (1871, 1911)”

(118).27 About the discursive constructions of criminality by scholar-bureaucrats like

 

’6 See Mala Sen, Introduction, India’s Bandit Mn: the true Sm of Phoolan my (New Delhi:
HarperColliins, I993) xxi. Sen adds: The history of rural bandin in the Charnbal Valley dates back to the

twelfth century when Raja [King] Anangpal Tomar, driven out of Delhi by his cousin Prithviraj Chauhan,
took refuge in the ravines just south of Agra. From here he made repeated attacks, without much success,
on his cousin and on Delhi. Ever since that time this terrain has been known as baghi—or rebel—territory.
Later, in the sixteenth century, when the Moghuls took control of Delhi, the region served as a buffer zone
between Muslim powers in the north and Hindu kingdoms of the south. Still later, when the East India
Company enteredthefray, openinguphaderorrtestlratskirtedtheseforestsandravineauavelers were
constantly killed and robbed by gangs of Thugs.” Sen xx-xxi.

27 According to Bayly: “This is consistent with the adoption of measmes which allowed supposed Thugs to
be convicted of criminality solely on the testimony of a so-called approver (a confessed Thug), who
deposed that an accused person had either been initiated as a strangler or was the offspring ofa Thug.” In
other areas colonial law operated on traditional British legal philosophy based on “evidence and deﬁnitions
of personal guilt” (118). However, Indian scholars like Meena Radhakrishna have argued that unlike in
England, “hereditary crime in India never got seriously linked to biological determinism [. . .] because of a
particular view of Indian social structlnes.” According to her hereditary notions of criminality in India were
based“on crimeasaprofessionpassedonfromonegenerationofcriminal eastetoanother”. SeeMeena
Radhakrishna, Dishonoured by Histtog: ‘Criminal Castes’ and British Colonial Policy, (New Delhi, India:
Orient Longrnan, 2001) 5.

93

William Sleeman,28 Bayly adds: “These accounts certainly made much of the contrast
between the rational white man and the ﬁendishly depraved ‘oriental’ ”, heralding the
discourses “in the wake of the Mutiny-Rebellion about the ever-present dangers that
could threaten British interests in India, and about the role of the eternally vigilant
intelligence-gatherer as a civilizer and guardian of empire” (117).

Parama Roy’s Indian Trafﬁc Identities in Question in Colonii and Postcolonial
_In(_li_a tracks this category of the native criminal—{huggee—through its discursive
formation in British India. Roy states: “The thugs, as they are represented in nineteenth-
and twentieth-century colonial representations, were a cult of professional stranglers who
preyed on travelers—though never on Englishmen—as an act of worship to the popular
Hindu goddess Kali” (45).29 In Roy’s own words, her work “examines the phenomenon
designated thuggee by colonial authority in nineteenth-century India, a phenomenon
whose emergence, codiﬁcation, and overthrow was to become perhaps the founding
moment for the study of indigenous criminality” (41). This becomes “an enabling
moment for the colonial state in its quest for the consolidation of judicial power” (42).
However, Roy’s interest lies in the “performative subjectivity of the thug, as it is
constructed in the discourse of the thuggee” (43). She resists reading thuggee as an
anticolonial subculture to avoid demonizing the category further. In sharp distinction, this

chapter acknowledges the resistive potential of the postcolonial criminal in convict

 

2‘ William Henry Sleeman was appointed to head the Thugee and Dacoity Department of the East India
Company administration in 1829, and became a critical ﬁgure in the “interventionary reform” of the
orientalist project of ‘discovering India’ (41). Roy credits Sleeman for the emergence of the “grand
narrative of thuggee” (43). See Footnote 2.

29Afterthe18303“thetermcametoincludeallkindsoforganizledandcorporatecriminalactivity

(including poisoning and the kidmpping of children) that was understood to be hereditary and/or itinerant”
(48). Ibid.

94

narratives recounting violence against them. My work inquires into the textual dynamics
of criminalization that unravel how and why certain caste identities came to be
demonized. However, the weight of my analysis is borne by examining how the ﬁgure of
the woman criminal, in particular, comments on this dynamics of othering. In my analysis
of convict narratives I contend that postcolonial constructions of delinquency in India are
founded upon this violent colonial legacy of demarcating and marginalizing certain
sectors of the population in a caste informed system. This amounts to a vision of a
pristine postcolonial nationhood marked by a legal, executive, and judicial system which
monitors and segregates populations along bloodlines.30

I have identiﬁed the genre of the texts that I examine here as the convict narrative
rather than its well theorized cormterpart—the prison narrative—because neither of the
texts deal with the prison system as such, and neither India’s Bandit Queen nor '_I‘_h;e
B_andit Queen of Indi__a was written ﬁom inside the prison. However, Barbara Harlow’s
Earned: Wome_n, Wrig' g, and Political Detention offers me a frame to negotiate with
narratives like these to forge a link between their status as convict discourses and their
site of production outside the prison walls. Harlow problematizes the penal and judicial
systems themselves by questioning the politics of criminalization. The author emphasizes
the “intimate and ideological relationship [. . .] between criminal (or social) and political
prisoners.” She underlines how radically “reﬁ'aming the stories of their individual
‘crimes’ as constituted by a sociopolitical system of economic exploitation and political

disenﬁanchisement” can become a site of praxis for convicts against the authority of the

 

3° “[TIhuggee, later rewritten as dacoity, continues to function within the law-and-order context in the
colonial and postcolonial state formations as a trope for the unruly and unreformable energies that cannot
easily be accommodated to the needs of the civilizing mission.” See Parama Roy, Indian Trafﬁc Identities

in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) 56.

95

state to deﬁne what constitutes criminality (1 I). In other words, Harlow is highlighting
the critical role of convict literature in writing human rights--writing that can generate
judicious witnessing through which the reading experience can be translated into moral
responsibility to rally for social justice.31 Thus, discursive politics opens up possibilities
of material dissent against the corrective violence of state technology. What remains
central to both Harlow’s work and mine is how the “demands of women for access to the
public modalities of confrontation and processual change” force “a radical rethinking of
the mobilizational tactics and structures of contestation that historically have been
articulated on masculinist grounds”. Women’s “need to circumlocute the cultural
traditions and social mores that prescribe their positioning in the inherited arrangement of
public and private space” are enunciated as discursive and material struggles both against
the state and the opponents of the state—both bulwarked by patriarchal thought structures
(33). However, while Harlow’s focus is on the writings of female political detainees, my
work attempts to address the writings about the criminalization of the abject female who
engages in antisystemic endeavors for self preservation from the limits of the political.32
It is as the ﬁgure of the politically unrecognized female abject that the protagonist of
Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Draupadi” allows us to theorize a space for the

criminalized as the revolutionary. Devi’s text about the violence against the adivasi

 

3' Harlow draws upon H. Bruce Franklin’s concept of the politicized aesthetics ofthe criminal in this
regard: “[T]he spectacle of prisoners actually publishing books which were being received as literary
achievements or intelligent social analysis or both was fundamentally threatening.” See H. Bruce Franklin,
The Victim as Criminal and Artist: Literature from the American Prison (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1978) 161. Like Franklin, D. Quentin Miller explains this in the context of the American penal
system: “The very publication and circulation of this literature compromises the ability of the state to
isolate, to suppress, and to deprive prisoners of the rights afforded to all Americans”. See D. Quentin
Miller, Introduction, Pros and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States, ed. D. Quentin Miller
(MacFarland & Co.: Jefferson, North Carolina & London, UK 2005) 4.

32 See Dylan Rodriguez, Forced Pasgges: In_rm’gned Radical Intellectuals and the US Prison Regim. e
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006) 5.

96

women of postcolonial India also embodies a site of radical cross caste/class praxis
between the intellectual and the subaltem against the machinery of the state. This is
particularly resonant in the context of “Draupadi” since the Naxalite movement was a
coalition between the peasant and the intellectual. In her foreword to the story, Gayatri
Spivak alludes to the “gentleman revolutionaries” in the movement who “persistently
engaged in undoing class containment” by unlearning “the opposition between reading
(book learning) and doing” (7-8). Devi’s story itself unabashedly eulogizes this category
of grass roots intellectuals: “They keep company with the poor harvest workers and the
tribals. They must have forgotten book learning. Perhaps they are orienting their book
learning to the soil they live on and learning new combat and survival techniques” (27).
Nonetheless, Spivak is cautious enough to point out the cumulative structures of privilege
that makes it impossible for the benefactors of institutionalized learning to “inhabit a
clearly deﬁned critical space free of such traces” of complicity with the “object of her
critique” (Foreword 3). It is this discursive-material site of radical praxis through
intercaste/interclass human rights advocacy against the caste regulated criminalization of
women that is scrutinized in my work as much as the sites of correctional violence
against lower caste women and their resistance to it.
IV. Criminalization of Women: Penalized for Being Socially Devalued?
Gender, caste, and class oppression intersect to express social malady in distinct
ways. Such social deprivation, manifested as criminality, is violently penalized by the
state’s legal mechanism of social control. Mona Danner argues that the “material reality
of women’s lives within social structures” that leads to their militant challenges to the

social order is disregarded (31). By patrolling, monitoring, and ptmishing such conduct

97

rather than eradicating the causes that culminate in such expressions, what actually gets
violently criminalized is social deprivation. Danner adds: “The criminal justice system
assists in the maintenance of inequality through the process of criminalization whereby
the law is selectively applied in a manner detrimental to those groups and persons most
disadvantaged in unequal relations” (31).33 Phoolan Devi’s stories narrate how, in the
context of India, lower caste women’s resistance to caste based social devaluation leads
to their criminalization. The postcolonial state thus reiterates the politics of colonial
governance as lineage and collective social inheritance once again becomes a marker of
criminality, thus keeping the population segregated along caste lines as the Criminal
Tribes and Castes Acts did As the thuggee became a preoccupation of the colonial
authority in nineteenth-centln'y India, the ‘bandit queen’ became an obsession for the
postcolonial state. My reading of _In_di_a’s Bandit Queen and The Bandit Queen of Indin
emphasizes the revisionary attempts of convict narratives to portray how and why the
postcolonial phenomenon of the ‘bandit queen’ came to be. What role does lower caste
women’s struggle against gender roles, regulated both by the state and its adversaries,
play in their criminalization?

The Girl Child: In the introduction to TellingLives in India: Biomhy, Autobiogmnhy,
nnd Life Hintog David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn emphasizes that the central
objective of their anthology “was to examine life histories in order to question the view

that Indian society is dominated by collectivities.” This would “demonstrate the

 

331am indebted to Danner forthis insightful perspective on the relationship between gender and
criminalization. However, while she argues that “state apparatus assumes the task of controlling the
behavior of women where superior male advantage is threaten ” by women’s access to material resources,
mine is a postcolonial reading of how caste plays a signiﬁcant role in the criminalization of women. See
Mona J.E. Danner, “Gender Inequality and Criminalization: A Socialist Feminist Perspective on Legal
Social Control of Women,” Race, Gender, and Class in Criminolggy: The Intersection, eds. Martin D.
Schwartz and Dragan Milovanovic (New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1996) 39.

98

signiﬁcance of individual agency and of notions of self in a region of the world where
people have historically been seen to identify themselves in terms primarily of caste, but
also kinship and religion” (1 9). The authors underline that in their edited collection,
nevertheless, the life histories brought together do not reliably or unequivocally bring to
light the monadic self. Rather they reveal what the editors call a “formulation of self-in-
society.” Though Arnold and Blackburn had set out to contain the logic of colonial
construction which subsumed Indian society under the overarching category of caste
collectivity, from their editorial encounter with at least the Indian life writings that go
into their collection they witness individual Indian lives within a network of “larger
frames of reference, especially those of family, kin, caste, religion, and gender” (19).
Though I hesitate in an essentialist understmrding of Indian life as generating the
condition for “self-in-society”—an epithet that can make an argument for any life in any
form of contact with another, the lower caste girl child becomes a particularly eloquent
phenomenon to explore how the battles of the Indian “self-in-society” take on unique
characteristics at different social locations. As opposed to individual choice through
which a person can afﬁliate oneself with others when it comes to ﬁiendship, the
categories of family, kin, caste, religion, and gender are custom sanctioned and
prescriptive which often overwhelms the individual self. This is piercingly visible in the
girl child in the accounts of Phoolan Devi.

Devi’s stories construct the biological family as a highly contested site for
women. Ms Bandit Queen depicts how the devaluation of women starts even before
the conception of the girl child. The pathos is especially strong as the text portrays how

the deep parental anxiety for preventing the birth of girls becomes the ground for

99

exploitation of the intensely poor like Devi’s father—Devidin.34 The narrative recounts
the “sad” story of the birth of Devi. A “Holy Man” had advised Devidin “to feed his wife
a crushed pearl on the night of the next new moon. It would guarantee the birth of a boy.
Devidin walked into a jeweller’s shop for the ﬁrst and last time in his life to buy a single
pearl.” In addition, the “Holy Man” “had to be paid and fed in a manner more lavish than
their own”(56). Nonetheless, thwarting all expectations, their second daughter—Phoolan
Devi--was born. The succession of girl children in the family culminates in the refusal of
the mother to nurse the fomth child, and in The Bandit Queen of In_d_in Devi recormts how
the onus of ﬁghting for the newbom’s survival fall on the other children: “If a goat
strayed near our house [. . .] we milked it quickly [. . .] We mixed the milk with water and
gave it to Bhuri. I knew it was wrong to steal, but surely God hadn’t meant her to have no
milk”(15). That the girl child would be mercilessly beaten in such a family setting at the
slightest provocation comes as no surprise then. When Devi’s younger sister Choti
complains to their mother that Devi was unwilling to graze their calf, Devi’s mother
grabs her by the hair and beats her with a stick, leaving her paralyzed with pain. Devi
nanates the after effects of this motherly “disciplining” of the undutiﬁrl girl child: “There
were two big weals on my left buttock, and another came up the following day, as
swollen as a mango.” The journey through pain continues as the little girl cries through

the whole day: The abscess grew bigger each day and it burned as though it was eating

 

34this needstobecontextualizedinlndia’s socioeconomic structrneinwhichthebirth ofa daughter
implies the impossible ﬁnancial bin-den of paying dowry for a daughter’s marriage. In the absence of state
welfare for the poor who reach old age without any ﬁnancial security through savings or pensions, the male
child also becomes the prop for old age, ill health, and disability. The daughter in such situations becomes
an “investment” with no retrn'ns.

100

my ﬂesh. Soon I couldn’t even walk. I had to lay on the khat and I couldn’t even go to the
ﬁeld to relieve myself” (42).

In this regard, the notion of domestic violence which is conﬁned to “marital or
intimate violence” in India can be useful in comprehending the domain of parent-child
relationship.” This feminization of violence through the character of the lower caste
mother challenges the linkages between masculinity and abuse when it comes to domestic
violence against women. It also offers an insight into the workings of same sex violence
as the overburdened mother ﬁnds an outlet for her anger against an unjust caste society
throughtheonly otherﬁgure who is less empoweredthanher. Thisisnottodenythatthe
ideological sanctioning of violence to discipline children in India does not play a role in
this mother-daughter relationship. What Nata Duvvury, Madhabika Nayak, and Keera
Allendorf say in the context of marital and intimate violence can also help us to
understand the philosophy 1mderlying such parental control over children: “If physical
violence is perceived as instrumental for maintaining order, use of violence may be
perceived as a duty, not a choice” (63). Hence, arbitrary violence against the girl child
can also ensue ﬁom any perceived threat to the family order and gets sanctiﬁed as
“parenting.”

The ﬁgure of the girl child in Phoolan Devi’s life writings also becomes an

especially poignant site because it uncovers the alliances between the extended family

 

35 See Nata Duwrny, Madhabika Nayak, and Keera Allendorf, “Links Between Masculinity and Violence:
Aggregate Analysis,” Domestic Violence in India: Ennloring Strategies, Promoting Dialogne, (Washington,
DC: International Center for Research on Women, 2002): 62. From a children’s rights point of view I argue
that the category of domestic violence needs to extend itself to include not only child spouses, but also
violence in parent-child relationships, even when they do not tantamotmt to sexual abuse.

101

and the state in criminalizing her poverty.36 Devi’s prison diary enabled Mala Sen to
reconstruct her through the biography Indﬁs Bandit Queen. Quoting from the diary, Sen
contextualizes Devi’s criminalization against violent socioeconomic deprivation. Devi’s
literate uncle—Bihari—had cheated her illiterate father—Devidin—by bribing the village
headman “who kept the land records, to transfer all [. . .] [of Devi’s] grandfather’s '
property into his name” (L112 31). It is the setting in motion again of this class connection
between the empowered male relative and the civic structures which initiates the
criminalization of Devi. In Devi’s mediated autobiography—The Bnn_dit Queen of Inning--
when the family seeks justice from the law after Bihari’s son—Mayadinnsteals their tree,
the policeman retorts: “ ‘How dare you accuse Mayadin? He is already a rich man,’ [. . .]
‘what would he want with your tree?’ ” (63). The tree was reserved as Devi’s marriage
dowry.37 In a touching metaphor of her social death through the loss of personal property,
the tree becomes the slain husband of the widowed girl: “He was in Mayadin’s cart, dead,
and cut into pieces! They hadmurderedhim! Thatwasthenoiselhadheardinthe night,
the noise of axes dismembering my handsome tree. I saw the pinkisheyellow heart of the
tree bleeding its rich juice” (58). The little girl’s fury fails to be contained by the
authority of her older male relative, and the seam of the narrative bursts open with her
indignation at the proud display of his markers of class conceit: “when I saw Mayadin
climb up on his rich man’s cart in his clean white dhoti hanging loose between his knees

and his silk kurta buttoned up to the neck, I ﬂew into a rage” (59). A violent tussle ensues

 

3° Rajeswari Sunder Rajans’s understanding about the relationship among women, institution, family, and
the state has been helpful in shaping my argument about the ﬁgtne of the girl child in Phoolan Devi’s

convict narratives. See Rajeswari Sinrder Rajan, The Scandal of the State: Womg, Law, and Citizenship in
Postcolonial India (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2003) 97-106.

37 Money, valuables, or property that the bride’s family offers to the husband’s family during marriage.

102

as little Phoolan tries to stop the tree being carted away by grabbing “the rope harness
that ran through the nose of one of the bullocks.” As Mayadin whips her and four men try
to stop the bleeding girl’s determination to ﬁght injustice, the extended family becomes a
Signiﬁcant site of physical brutality against the girl child.

The construction of Indian masculinity and femininity through the respective
characters of Mayadin and Devi in this episode makes for an interesting comment on the
social issue of dowry in India. The Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961 prohibits the
demanding, giving, and taking of dowry in marriage. It was amended in 1986 to include
dowry deaths as a separate category of murder}8 But, the practice of dowry continues to
exist in India.39 However, feminist legal critical scholars, such as Julia Leslie, have
argued for an inheritance perspective of dowry: “a daughter clings to her dowry because
that is all she is likely to see of her parental inheritance. Men (father, brother, male
relatives) resent having to ﬁnd large sums of cash and moveable items as dowry, but they
would rather pay dowry than give a daughter or a sister equal inheritance rights” (25).40
The ﬁacas between Devi and Mayadin is reﬂective of the gender politics between the

bride and her male relatives around the issue of dowry. What Mayadin attempts to deny

 

3’ the l986amendmenttotheactstates: “Wherethedeathofawoman iscausedbyanybtn'nsorbodily
injury or occurs otherwise than under normal circumstances within seven years of her marriage and it is
shown that soon before her death she was subjected to cruelty or harassment by her husband or any relative
of her husband for, or in connection with, any demand for dowry, such death Shall be called ‘dowry death,’
and such husbandorrelative shallbedeemedtohavecausedherdeath” (60). See “TheLawin India,”

Bride Burning and Doggy, Special Issue of Kali’s Yug: Women & Law Journal March 2001: 59-82.

39 A marker of status, for a long time the lower castes and outcasts were outside its clutches, though in
imitation of high caste customs they have also adopted the system of dowry. See Julia Leslie, “Dowry,
Dowry Deaths, and Violence Against Women,” Bride Burning and Dow, 21.

4° The dowry is always smaller than what the brother will inherit in terms of immoveable property. Leslie
argues forthebride’s ownership ofherpropertyinstead ofthetransaction ofherpropertybetweenher
biological and conjugal families. She insists that to combat dowry related violence, the law needs to focus
itselfon dermding inheritance rights for women. Thus, she opposes a legal realism that refuses to take into
accormt the sociological framework within which dowry operates. Leslie 25.

103

Devi is her parental inheritance—her only means of economic empowerment. His class-
gender politics aims to obstruct the power that Devi’s dowry can purchase through her
marriage into a rich family. In other words, the brother who grudges his sister any
immoveable property and hence has to accommodate the lesser of the two ‘evils--parting
with moveable property given to his sister as her dowry—gets re-signiﬁed as the male
cousin who secures his own socioeconomic position by seizing his cousin’s dowry. This
episode where the girl attacks her older cousin in retaliation also sets the stage for the
criminalization of the girl child for her resistance to the physical and psychological
violence committed upon her.

In the episode of the girl child’s marriage to the widoweruPutti La], this pattern
of corporeal and emotional violence is again manifested in the vulnerability of the girl
child created by poverty, gender, and age. The Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929,
enacted by British colonial governance, prohibited the formalization of child marriages.
However, once the marriages were conducted, they were not marked as illegal or null.
India gained its liberation from British foreign rule in 1947. The postcolonial state in
197 8 amended the act to only increase the age of consent to eighteen for women and
twenty-one for men.“ In In_diar’s naught Queen Mala Sen situates the Indian penal code in
the socio-economic realities of the postcolonial nation: “Present laws in India prohibit

both child marriages and the payment of dowries.” However, “[t]hey are only used to

 

4' “The Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929 had raised the age ofconsent from 12 to 14 for females and
l4to 18 formales. Theagelimithadbeenﬁn'dlerraisedﬁ'om l4to 15 forfemalesbyanamendmentin
1949.” See Siddharth Narrain, “Ambivalence in the Law,” Frontline 22.14 (Jul 02-15, 2005)

 

<http://www.hinduonnet.com/ﬂine/ﬂ22l4/stories/ 20050715004802300.htm>. However, under the Hindu
Marriage Act of I955, amended In 1976, a girl can repudiate a child marriage before attaining maturity,
whether the marriage has been consummated or not. See National Council for Teacher Education,

 

(Delhi, India: National Council for Teacher Education) 8.

104

extract bribes and intimidate those whom the authorities wish to prosecute. Otherwise,
age-old traditions are not only allowed to continue but encouraged within village society”
(3 6).42 In the absence of sincere national efforts to eradicate poverty, the criminalization
of these marriages often amounts to the penalization of poverty rather than crime, as with
that of Devi’s sister—Rukmini. This is because poor parents are frequently compelled to
secure their uneducated daughter’s future as soon as possible. However, The Bandit

ueen of India depicts how such parents are both able to protect their daughter’s future
as well as her present welfare through the local custom of gauna. Gauna is an agreement
guaranteeing a certain time only after which the child bride moves in with her husband.
An illustrative case is that of Rukmini’s marriage to Rarnpal after which she stays on at
her parents place till she is sexually mature enough to lead a conjugal life. Against all
customary laws, Devi is compelled by her husband to follow him soon after her marriage.
Thus, it is really the violation of the customary law of gauna that leads to the domestic
violence that Devi experiences in her conjugal family. The atrocity of the marital rape of
an eleven year old Phoolan by the thirty year old Putti Lal is emoted through images of
bestiality and monstrosity. Putti Lal becomes “a man who ate women,” a strong demon
with “hairy limbs,” who “smelled disgusting, like a hyena,” causing the child bride
unbearable pain with his “nauseating serpent” as he threatened to knife open her hymen

for his pleasure (99). Physical violence follows the child’s ﬂight from rape. She feels her

 

’2 The Bandit meen of India recounts how Devi’s uncle——Bihari—“managed to put a stop to three
marriages” arranged for her sister—Rukmini: ‘The girl is a minor,’ he told them [the groom’s family].
‘She’s only fourteen years old and her father wants to sell her! It’s against the law.’ He conspired with the
Pradhan [village leader, probably Brahmin] and they brought the police with them. The groom was ﬁ‘om a
good family, and they had been so embarrassed they tinned around and went back without a word to my
father.” The traumatized Rukmini contemplated suicide after the incident. Powerful relatives can thus
harnesstheresources ofthestatetoconspireagainstthegirl childandherpoorfamily. See Phoolan Devi,

Marie-Therese Cuny, & Paul Rambali, The Bandit Queen of India: An Indian Woman’s Amazing Journey
from Peasant to International Lege_nd (Guilford, Connecticut: Lyons Press, 2003) 51.

105

“scalp on ﬁre as he yanked out whole tuﬁs” of her hair to discipline her into submission
to his sexual desire (105). It is the girl child’s breakout from this horriﬁc marital abuse
that consolidates the criminalization of her marital status by both her extended family and
her conjugal family. In the name of family dishonor Mayadin rebukes Devi’s father: “
‘Your daughter has blackened our family name in ﬁont of the whole village. She is a
delinquent. Send her back to her husband immediately’ ” (131). Putti Lal and Mayadin
initiate a criminal proceeding in the panchayatnvillage council-against Devi’s family for
kidnapping her from her husband, though the case is ultimately lost.

The Protection ﬁorn Domestic Violence Bill was introduced in India only in 2002
to protect women ﬁom marital or intimate abuse.43 But, though marital rape is not a
criminal offence under the rape laws encoded by Article 375 of the Indian Penal Code,44
it enshrines that sexual intercourse between a man and his wife “with or without her
consent, when she is under sixteen years of age” amounts to rape of the wife. This rape
law was operative in the 19703 when Devi was married to Putti Lal. But the rape of the
child bride—Phoolan—also needs to be understood through the construction of marital
sexuality itself. In her essay “Sexual Violence, Discursive Formations and the State”
Veena Das underlines how judicial grammar and judicial semantics “comes to mediate
the everyday categories of sexuality and sexual violence, sorting and classifying the
normal and the pathological in terms of marriage and alliance” (2412). The author claims

that underlying rape laws is the state’s concern with the regulation of male and female

 

‘3 See Dipa Dube, “Domestic Violence Bill: A Critique,” Indian Bar Review xxxz & 3 (2003): 442.

 

‘4 The Indian Penal code of 1860, drafted by r. B. Macaulay among others, is still operative in India. The
1860 Penal Code was based on Victorian sexual mores. The draﬁers “presumably assumed that a woman,
through marriage, foregoes forever her right to refuse sexual intercourse with her husband and the husband,
thereby acquires an unconditional & unqualified licence to force sex upon his wife.” See K. I. Vibhute,

“ ‘Rape’ and the Indian Penal Code at the Crossroads of the New Millennium: Between Patriarchiast and
Gender Neutralist Approach,” Journal of Indian Law Institute 43 (2001): 27-8.

106

sexualities rather than the protection of the “body integrity” of the woman. She traces this
back to Macaulay’s framing of the 1860 Indian Penal Code which stated that sexual
intercourse between a man and his wife, if she is not under ten, is not rape. This law went
through subsequent legislative amendments till the age of consent was ﬁxed at eighteen
in the postcolonial state. However, I argue that the personal laws of the Hindus encoded
in the Manusmriti plays a signiﬁcant role in postcolonial society because of the British
policy of highly selective interest in the personal laws of the colonized population.45 The
laws of Manu state: “A man, aged thirty years, shall marry a maiden of twelve who
pleases him, or a man of twenty-four a girl eight years of age; if (the performance of) his
duties would (otherwise) be impeded, (he must marry) sooner” (195). Reading Veena Das
against the construction of marital sexuality in Manu makes for an insightful
comprehension of the violation of the customary law of gauna by Devi’s husband Putti
Lal—a law which poor parents use to protect their married girl children. Moreover, such
a reading also proves useful in examining how the culmination of Devi’s marital rape

results in the coalition between Mayadin and Lal in initiating a criminal proceeding

 

‘5 Liddle and Joshi highlight how the British were highly selective in their non-interference, and in their
dilly dallying with personal laws how they affected the rights of Indian women. They state: “Ofﬁcial
British policy was not to interfere in the personal law, a policy which was attacked for in inhibiting social
change, yet in 1772 Warren Hastings, the governor of Bengal, had decreed the religious texts of the
Brahmins [. . .] as the sole authority on Hindu law. [. . .] Personal law comprised those areas which
particularly affected women such as marriage and inheritance, and each religious community had its own
law, usually a body of local custom.” Nonetheless, from 1864 Hindu pundits were no longer consulted for
interpretation; instead Western-educated judges decided personal law on the basis of developing precedent.
The result was to rigidify legal interpretation by tying it to past precedent, and to impose the moral
constraints of upper-caste women on women of all castes in the form of binding legal statute” (26). In 1934
the All India Women’s Conference demanded a reform of the Hindu Code reforming areas of personal law
as marriage, divorce, and inheritance. The contradictions within the nationalist movement became clearly
visible in the opposition of nationalist men to the demands: “They supported the principle of sexual
equality and its implementation through women’s suffrage, which undermined Britain’s position of power.
But they opposed the implementation of the principle in marriage and inheritance, which threatened their
own privileges as men in the family.” The Hindu code was ﬁnally enacted alter the ﬁrst general election in
independent India (36-7). See Liddle and Joshi. However, many other personal laws remain in need of
reform in the postcolonial state which makes it difﬁcult for women to attain distributive justice at par with
men, not to say anything about restorative justice for cumulative structures of dispossession.

107

against Devi for deserting her husband and tarnishing family honor. According to Das:
“In Hindu society, the young girl, with her body unmarked by sexual desires (lusts) of
men, is considered the appropriate gift in marriage that establishes alliance between men.
[. . .] The sexual offence of rape against a young girl thus becomes an offence against the
code of alliance”(2416). In the intersection between the discourse of sexuality and the
discourse of alliance the relation between men are not threatened when the rapist is the
husband as it creates no disturbances in the social order of exchange of women which
consolidates the relationship among men of different families. As Das argues, rape is
only criminalized “if acting out this ‘instinct’ leads to stigmatising men as husbands or
fathers” (2421). As such, the unformed bodies of girl children like Phoolan become the
husband’s property despite laws on the contrary. The state has no vested interest in
protecting the integrity of these bodies. The manied girl child’s “body has been so
sexualised by the experience as to make it unexchangeable in marriage” (2416). So,
marital rape does not threaten the order of alliance among men that constitutes ‘family,’
and hence the state itself. launching themselves on their conﬁdence in the construction
of married girl children’s sexuality, men like Mayadin and Putti Lal can sum up the
courage to catapult an ideology of honor onto legal platforms like the village council,
despite laws that encode sexual intercourse with an underage wife as rape. In this
ideology of honor the husband’s pathological sexuality gets normalized as “marital right”
simultaneously as the little girl’s terror of rape gets pathologized and re-signiﬁed as
deviant and unwifely sexuality.

Devi’s texts trace how rebellion becomes the only means of attaining justice for

the poverty-stricken lower caste girl child. At fourteen or ﬁfteen, Devi realized that she

108

“was a woman who belonged to a lowly caste” and “[ﬂaced with power and rupees
[Indian currency]” “used any trick [. . .] [she could].” Deprived of the inherited land by
Bihari, the family turns to sharecropping which is rife with the exploitation of women’s
labor, and the girl’s resistance to it: “I encouraged the other girls to sabotage the crops if
the landowner wouldn’t pay us” (ﬁll 155). In one such episode the daughter of the
Pradhan (village leader) turns violent when Devi’s family declines her demand for free
labor from them. The Pradhan intervenes as Devi opposes his daughter’s attack on them.
This culminates in the episode where Devi unleashes her wrath publicly against the upper
caste Pradhan by grabbing him by his genitals when he beats her in retaliation. This can
be read as the culminating episode deﬁning the girl child’s aberrant sexuality: “1 had
become a disreputable girl in the eyes of the villagers, someone the young men thought
they could treat how they liked because she belonged to no one, she had no husband to
protect her” (169). She attracts the attention of the son of the sarpanch (village headman)
as she earns a reputation as an erotic object of men’s desire. Her defense against his
sexual advances leads to her gangrape at gunpoint before her parents. Mala Sen recounts
her ethnographic encormter with this myth of Devi’s sensuality. The young girl’s
romance with her married cousin, Kailash, is circulated as folklore long after his death:
“One old woman told me, ‘Phoolan Devi used to dance naked in the moonlight for that
man!’ ” (1139 48). As her deviant sexuality becomes an expression of resistance to the
traditional concept of femininity, state technology needs to place her gendered body
under surveillance and control. She is falsely implicated in a dacoity (robbery) at
Mayadin’s house. This is also framed to prevent her ﬁ'om addressing the land dispute

between her family and Mayadin’s in the high court where Mayadin did not have

109

connections. The police custodial torture of the young girl starts with stripping her in
front of her father and coercing her to admit to the crime she had not committed. In The
Bandit Queen of India Devi recalls: [T]he ofﬁcers dragged me naked out of the cell and
down the corridor into another room.” Grisly torture follows: “They put my hands under
the legs of the chair, and one of them sat down on it. Some of the others stepped on my
calves with their heavy boots (196).

Veena Das underlines the gendered ideology often underlying the sexualized
torture of “husbandless” girls: “women who are described as of easy virtue, ‘habituated to
sexual intercourse’ with men who are not their husbands, do not have rights to the
protection of the state” (2418). Her illicit desire “places her within the power of any man
and especially within the power of the agents of the state such as policemen” (2422). The
author asserts: “I believe it is this deﬁnition of certain kinds of sexual violence as
stemming ﬁom the order of nature, which allows agents of the state such as policemen to
commit rape and sexual assault on those women, who have come within their jurisdiction
due to the disturbances in the code of alliance” (2420). My reading of the social
construction of Devi’s transgressive sexuality as rapeable and violently useable also
intends to underline how the potentiality for such gender violence is dependent on the
relationship in which such single women stand with respect to social structures of
protection. Women like Devi lack security ﬁom caste and class status derived ﬁ'om
‘belonging’ to upper caste/class men—fathers, husbands, or sons, and hence are not

safely ensconced in systems of patriarchal alliance.46

 

4"’“Inchildhoodafemalemustbesubjecttoherfather, inyouthtoherhusband, whenherlordisdeadto
her sons; a woman must never be independent.” See The Laws of Mann, trans. G. Buhler (Delhi, Varanasi,
Patna, India: Motilal Banarsidass, 1964) I95.

110

The narrative of selective torture of lower caste women in police custody in India
is reﬂective of the custodial brutality inﬂicted on tribal women in India. The custodial
abuse of the childless widow Dopdi Mehjen in the short story “Draupadi” by the Indian
author, Mahasweta Devi, portrays the plight of one such woman. Arrested for murdering
the landowner, Surya Sahu, who refused “untouchable” sharecroppers like Dopdi water
ﬁ'om his well during a severe drought," Dopdi is gangraped in police custody and “her
breasts are bitten raw, the nipples tom” (35). The intensity of police custodial torture of
untouchables like Dopdi can only be imagined through cosmic magnitudes. So, “a billion
moons pass” and so do “a billion lunar years” before Dopdi wakes up and “the bloodied
nailheads shift from her brain” (34). But, “ she feels her arms and legs still tied to four
posts. Something sticky lmder her ass and waist. Her own blood. Only the gag has been
removed. Incredible thirst. In case she says ‘water’ she catches her lower lip in her teeth.
She senses that her vagina is bleeding. How many came to make her ” (34). The
traumatic objectiﬁcation of the female body in rape is reﬂected in the metonymic
dismemberment of psyche through the image of the bloody nails in the brain. The
cataloguing of body parts—arms, legs, ass, waist, lip, teeth—culminates in the image of
the raped and bleeding vagina which is the site of the psychic and physical alienation of
the woman from her integrated self. This fragmented female body also stands for the
ideological other of the consolidated structures of masculine hegemony that the
bureaucratic structures of the state like the police force stand for. The representation of

custodial violence like this in convict narratives are really commentaries on the

 

‘7 “Untouchability” was abolished in 1950 by the Constitution of independent India, and its practice in any
form has been forbidden: “The enforcement of any disability arising out of “Untouchability” shall be an
offence punishable in accordance with law.” See Constitution of India Art. 17. <http://indiacode.nic.in/
coiweb/welcome.html>.

lll

criminalization of lower caste and tribal women in India who are caught in the throes of
social devaluation. In a moving passage on how the woman criminals come to be, Devi
summarizes: “I had become a dacoit in the minds of the elders of my village. [. . .] I knew
little of the world and its laws. I had refused the fate marked out for me by my birth; I
had ﬂed my village, my family and my community. That was my only crime” (m1 188).
This kind of social rejection is merely symptomatic of women’s lack of private property,
exploitation of women’s labor, the patriarchal domination of women, and the role of the
nation-state in upholding caste-gender deprivation.

The above narratives about the lives of outcaste women like Dopdi Mehjen and
lower caste women like Phoolan Devi are part of the current discourse around the
criminal justice system in India. The very ﬁrst section of the National Human Rights
Commission of India’s anthology of instructions/guidelines between 1993 and 2004 is
entitled “On Custodial Deaths/Rapes.” The ﬁrst letter in the compilation addresses the
Chief Secretaries of all states and union territories of India, laying down that in case of
custodial rapes or deaths District Magistrates and Superintendents of Police should report
such cases to the Secretary General of the Human Rights Commission within twenty-four
hours of their occurrence. Moreover, the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes
Prevention of Atrocities Act was passed by the Indian government in 1989.48 The Code
of Conduct for Law Enforcement Ofﬁcials and the Convention against Torture mid Other

Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, adopted by the UN General

 

’3 See Human Rights Watch, Broken Pmle: Caste Violence Agg'm India’s Untouchables,
(Human Rights Watch: New York, Washington, London, & Brussels, 1999) 218-45.

112

Assembly in 1979 and 1984 respectively, has inﬂuenced the judiciary.49 Nonetheless,
custodial atrocities, especially of lower castes, outcastes, and the poor remain a pervasive
social justice issue in India, and numerous Dopdi Mehjens and Phoolan Devis in
contemporary India remind us of the untold stories of caste oppressed women which have
not been heard.

The Concubine: In_d_ia’s Bandit (been and The Iiandit Queen of [Ldia not only narrate
caste injustice upheld by structures of the state, but also chart the complex terrain of caste
that operates within communities in resistance against the postcolonial nation-state. This
section explores how lower caste women who join such communities to protest against
injustice are further quarantined within them. The ﬁgure of the concubine in Devi’s
convict narratives launches a robust critique of how statist criminalization of resistant
women’s sexuality is extended by the subversive community of bandits. This is played
out over the body of the lower caste woman through a violent caste politics.

The social hieroglyphic of caste that the trope of concubinage within postcolonial
banditry inscribes articulates the female subaltem as the singular-within—collective—a
space left void by the colonial thuggee discourses of British India. The colonial thuggee
archive is curiously bereft of the ﬁgure of the woman thug or accomplice, and the
criminal community of thugs is discursively constructed ignoring the realm of sexual
difference within it. A possible reason might lie in the fact that the sphere of native

sexuality was the domain of caste and domesticity regulated by the personal laws of the

 

‘9 “The Supreme Court of India has declared any form of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,
deathincustodydrning investigationorotherwisetobeaviolation ofrighttolifeandwithinﬂleinhibition
of Article 21 [Protection of Life and Personal Liberty]. Thus, “the Supreme Court has elevated immunity
against torture and deaths in police custody to the status of fundamental right under Article 21 though it
does not speciﬁcally enumerate it as a fundamental right in the Constitution” See Balvinder Kaur, “Torture
and Deaths in Police Custody—A Violation of Right to Life,” National mind Law Journal Vol. II (1997):
1 09- 10.

113

Brahminical legal ideology. So, even when communities operated at the edge of the
domestic, women did not come within the purview of the colonial administration. They
were the subjects of native ideology. The corporeality of their bodies within the
community was deﬁned by an absence that exceeded the legality of the British colonial
administration which ironically crystallized its judiciary by its vehement attempt to
annihilate the criminal “community.” But, the postcolonial archive has been marked by
the woman thuggee as the singular-within—collective through convict narratives of women
bandits like Phoolan Devi. These narratives construct the corporeality of the female
thuggee’s body not as social discourse, but as literature. In this regard, Debjani Ganguly’s
comment on the political power of literature is especially signiﬁcant: “1 [. . .] carry over
the notion of the discursivity of caste by shifting the focus from hegemonic articulations
in academic-knowledge formations to representations of caste in the domain of art and
narrative. I argue that the mythographic and the literary can give us insights into the
‘political’ that social science by itself can never give” (125). The re-signiﬁcation of the
girl child as the concubine in my reading attempts to attack precisely those lacunas in
social discourses about the thuggee which bear the potential to uncover the formation of
the postcolonial thuggee. Such an uncovering is not to be achieved in the isolated legal-
administrative discursive construction of a criminal community of male thugs, but in its
everyday practices of relationships between men and women within the bandit
community, as reﬂected through literature. It is such a reading that pleads for the ﬁgure
of the concubine to understand the self-in-collective of the gendered subaltem within

such communities.

114

As with the character of the girl child, the narrative constructs caste-gender
violence as initiated by the alliance among patriarchal structures—this time of the family,
state, and banditry—as Devi is “convinced that Mayadin had been the instigator” of her
abduction by the bandits. This would assure Mayadin’s future assistance to the gang: “He
was, after all, a ‘senior citizen’ of the village and had inﬂuential friends in the panchayat”
(EQ 70). The character of caste based female criminality is movingly captured through
Mala Sen’s citation of an ofﬁcial press conference in 1983. In it Devi stands the logic of
criminalization on its head, as state authorities become social offenders for negligence of
their duty to protect citizens under the threat of violence: “Today I am a criminal who
should be hanged. But what happened when I was abducted and raped? Where were the
police then? I had gone to the police on the day of my abduction to ask for protection, yet
today the policemen are officers and Phoolan Devi a murderer” (_IBQ 124).

This caste war on the level of the bureaucratic structures of the nation-state is
again enacted through the contest for leadership of the bandit gang. The brutal rivalry
between Babu Gujar Singh and Vikrarn Mallah is played out on the body of the lower
caste woman. Babu Gujar Singh was “a Gujar, on a par with Thakurs, both belonging to
the same warrior caste of Kshatriyas.” On the other hand, “Vikram Mallah ranked among
the lowest, belonging to a sub-caste of Sudras, as did Phoolan Devi, Madho Singh, Bharat
Singh and a handﬁrl of others.” Under the leadership of Babu Gujar Singh, “the hierarchy
in the gang had more or less reﬂected the social order as it stands in villages” By killing
Gujar and “taking over leadership of the gang, he [Mallah] had completely reversed the
balance of power within it” (75). The violence between Gujar and Mallah is provoked

when Gujar “repeatedly raped her [Devi] during the ﬁrst two days of captivity” (72). That

115

the rape is not merely the rape of Devi by Gujar, but the rape of the lower caste body
politic by upper caste phallic arrogance is depicted through the dehumanizing sequence
on the second day when a drunk Babu Gujar “dragged her [Devi] by the arm ﬁ'om one
man to the next, asking if anyone wanted ‘a taste of this Sudra [low caste] whore”.
Reading Mala Sen’s biography against Devi’s mediated autobiography--The Bandit
Queen of India, enables us to understand how Vikram Mallah’s intervention between
Gujar and Devi renders Devi’s body merely into a sign of caste honor: “ ‘Why are you
trying to protect her?’ asked one-eye. ‘Why her?’ We’ve had so many other girls before.
What is it about this one?’ Mallah replies: “I told you not to touch her. She belongs to my
community” (240). Returning to M’ﬂaindit Queen, Gujar says that no “Mallah dog”
would stop him, and declares: “I’ll teach you to remember that this is a gang made up of
Thakur men . . . not ﬁshermen” (74).50 The fracas ends in Mallah shooting Gujar dead.
However, for the only woman in the band protection from violence can only be
bartered: “That night, at another campsite, Vikram Mallah informed her that she was now
his woman and therefore beyond the reach of other men.” Mala Sen offers a clinching
summary of the groundwork of the relationship between Mallah and Devi which later
ﬂourishes into ‘love’ and ‘marriage’: “When asked by a journalist, soon after her
surrender, why she had become Vikram’s mistress so readily she replied: ‘A piece of
property has no choice’ (76). In another touching reﬂection of her complicated feelings,
Devi confesses in her testimonial: “But many years later, thinking about it, I would ask
myself why didn’t this man, if he loved me as he said, just let me go? Then I wouldn’t

have become a bandit like him” (ml 270). For all intents and purposes, the woman

 

5° As Thakurs and Gujars are subcastes of Kshatliyas, ranked just below the Brahmins, the Mallahs are
subcastes of Sudras, who belong to the lowest rung of the caste system.

116

bandit thus remains sexual property for both upper caste and lower caste male leadership.
Hence, romantic love within bandin is secured by caste politics as well as by the contest
between male prowess.

As Mallah’s upper caste mentor—Shri Ram—is released ﬁom prison and joins
the band, the caste war is re-staged in the conﬂict between mentor and protégé over Devi.
Mallah is killed, and in a culminating spectacle of public shaming for transgressing caste
hierarchy by repelling Shri Ram’s advances, Phoolan Devi is paraled naked through the
villages of the Chambal valley in northern India: “I saw crowds of faces and I was naked
in ﬁont of them. Demons came without end hour the ﬁres of Naraka [hell] to rape me”
(370)

The theme of concubinage brings together the stories of Phoolan Devi and Dopdi
Mehjen in Mahasweta Devi’s “Draupadi”. The name Dopdi is the dialectical version of
Draupadi in the classical epic Mahabharata. Draupadi was married to ﬁve husbands, and
provides an exceptional instance of polyandry, “not a common system of marriage in
India”. Her honor is waged in a game of dice between her husbands and their rival
cousins. Mahasweta Devi’s short story rewrites the classical epic “by placing Dopdi ﬁrst
in a comradely, activist, monogamous marriage and then in a situation of multiple rape”
(Spivak Foreword 10). Resembling stories of non-Hindu tribal women such as Dopdi
Mehjen, the convict narratives of lower caste Hindu women like Phoolan Devi revise
conventional notions of the feminine in the founding epics of Hinduism by re-signifying
the wife as the concubine to unlearn the discourse of male protection. This redeﬁnes the

traditional relationship of the protector and the protected between men and women.

117

V. Defying the Definition: Recast(e)ing the Woman Criminal

The ﬁ'aming of the lower caste woman as the goddess and the feminist becomes a
point of entry to extend my argument about the caste dynamics of criminalization into the
domain of Indian electoral politics and the transnational human rights politics. Of
particular regard here is the transformation of these textual accounts into material
politics, and the unsettling of the ideological assumptions about caste-gender identity
through such politics. In this respect, it is crucially important to mention that the trope of
the warrior goddess in this section is not a means to glorify lower caste counter-violence,
but a lens to examine how violence begets violence. Lower caste women who have been
violated to the limits of human tolerance turn to violence for “empowerment.” For a
human rights project like this the critical need is to dissociate violence ﬁom
empowerment on both sides of the divide. Nonetheless, to examine how the cycle of
violence can be stopped, it is of signiﬁcance to examine the reaches of its brutality if it is
not halted. It also remains vital to separate personal faith that empowers and personal
faith that “empowers” through violence. My examination of the trope of the warrior
goddess intends to examine the nuances of such an understanding of the leitmotif of the
goddess. I aim to underscore the violence underlying the prescriptive clamp down on the
religious practice of faith as much as the violence inherent in championing violence as a
project of faith. Through the study of how the image of the warrior goddess operates in
Devi’s text and the politics that it can generate, this section attempts to go beyond the
left-liberal nationalist project of questioning the validity of popular religious faith and its
potential for violence and seeks to identify a representational politics of caste that can

relocate such faith nonviolently on the transnational map of cultmal praxis for human

118

rights. Hence, the goddess is re-troped as a nonviolent border-crossing feminist who
forges problematic yet productive alliances with both men and women across the globe.
But the trope of the goddess can be called into question in other ways too.
The Warrior Goddess: When the lives of lower caste women, militant against the Hindu
caste system, are mythologized as the exploits of Hindu warrior goddesses, it leads to an
uneasy and ironic realm of signiﬁcation. However, can there be an alternative and a more
empowered reading of such an allegorical representation? What kind of values do such
goddess identiﬁed lower caste women take up in the context of caste marked minority
politics on the national and the global platform?

Durga and Kali become the reigning metaphors for the mythical subtexts of
Incﬁr’s Bandit Queen and The Ba_ndit Queen of Inga. The searing agony of Devi’s
marital rape by Putti Lal invokes the ﬁerce iconography of Durga: “There was nothing I
could do to stop him. But I swore to the goddess Druga who drank the blood of demons
that he would pay for the pain he caused me” (_B_(LI 127). She returns to castrate Putti Lal
and leaves him bleeding and naked by the wayside. Exulting in her own code of justice,
Devi celebrates the relief that accompanies her gruesome assault on Putti Lal: “That
night, for the ﬁrst time in my life, I had tasted revenge. I had tasted it for myself! [. . .]
The onlythingtodowithmenlikethatwastocnrshtheirserpents, sothatthey could
never use them again! That would be my justice!” (282). The text is again articulate with
Devi’s goddess-identiﬁed rhetoric of empowerment after she survives the police custodial
torture for her alleged dacoit)» at Mayadin’s place: “I began to wonder if there was some
force in me they were all trying to crush, a force that made me retaliate, a force that drove

me desperately to stuvive. [. . .] I resolved to hang onto this force that was a gift of

119

Durga” (200). Finally, in a mythic tableau in which Devi literally reincamates Durga’s
slaying of the demon—Mahisasur, Devi unleashes the rage of the goddess in a bedlam of
castration and carnage. In a spectacle of sexual revenge, she strips the village men who
had once protected her torturers who had raped and paraded her naked through the
village. Likewise, she marches them naked through the village. The text inscribes the
sadistic jubilation that records the event: “I beat them between their legs with my riﬂe
butt. I wanted to destroy the serpent that represented their power over me . . .” (396).
Devi is ecstatic in her bloody jouissance: “I crushed burned, impaled! “396). Her
orgasmic euphoria continues: “And then I laughed to see them leap like castrated horses
and fall at my feet and cry like women, begging and pleading for mercy, as I had” (396).
Not only does Devi avenge her own wrongs, but for her social banditry becomes a means
of restorative justice for the socially devalued: “Being a bandit meant taking from the rich
and giving to the poor, punishing the rapist and chastising the cruel landowner to make
them understand that women and poor had their dignity too” (465). The translation of
personal vengeance into social reordering reconﬁgures itself as cosmic retribution, and
Devi’s dance of destruction comes to signify the embodiment of peace for the
panfeminine. Her narrative scripts the allegorical sacriﬁce of the violent upper caste male
before the warrior goddess. He had outraged the village women, raped his daughter and
daughter-in-law, engaged in bestiality, and pedophilic violations of young boys: “This
thakur was a pervert and a sadist. Nothing could satisfy his greedy lust [. . .] His serpent
ﬁrstthenhishandsﬁhenhis feet . . . I cutthem off. I did itbeforethe image ofthe
Durga, to give her peace” (398). This is the resilient rage of Mahasweta Devi’s Dopdi

Mehjen. Unlike the classical Draupadi who prays to Lord Krishna to prevent her public

120

stripping by her husbands’ cousins, Dopdi “remains publicly naked at her own
insistence.” Spivak summarizes: “the story insists that this is the place where male
leadership stops” (Foreword 11). Emasculating her torturers like Phoolan Devi by
reﬁrsing to continue in the realm of shame, Dopdi declares: “There isn’t a man here that I
should be ashamed. I will not let you put my cloth on me” (36).

However, it is only with the unprecedented massacre of twenty-two high-caste
men by Devi that her avenging spirit gains national recognition. Her ﬁerce devotional
justice is transmogliﬁed into the politics of caste votes which mark the electoral politics
of postcolonial India. In her introduction to India’s Bandit m Mala Sen frames this
ironic interplay between the feudal dynamics of caste and the electoral politics of the
modern democratic nation-state:

Never before in the history of rural banditry had a low-caste woman been accused

of killing so many high-caste men. The incident created a political furore in the

country, particularly in Uttar Pradesh (UP), where the men she was said to have
gunned down controlled the rural vote. The Thakurs (landowners) of UP
organized demonstrations in neighbouring towns calling for justice, and the
government in Delhi, led by Indira Gandhi, could not ignore their protest, for they
delivered “block votes” from just such isolated hamlets scattered throughout the

region. (xix)

With her entry into the realm of national politics, the press reconstructs Devi in the image
of Kali rather than Durga. She “was called the Bandit Queen, a poor mallah girl who,
ever since her lover was killed by thakln's, wielded the fearsome sword of Kali, the patron

saint of thuggees” [bandits] (408). Sarah Caldwell argues: “Whereas Kali embodies the

121

pure power of destruction and is a manifestation of ultimate disorder, Durga is self-
controlled and protective, a representative of the true cosmic order” (174).51 Joanna
Liddle and Rama Joshi’s analysis of Indian goddesses offers an interesting caste subtext
to the signiﬁcance of this symbolic metamorphosis of the bandit queen:
Kali is malevolent because her uncontrolled passion is liable to introduce impure
blood into the caste and to dissipate [upper] caste wealth, making a mockery of
patrilineal inheritance and the accumulation of property, and thereby destroying
the caste system itself. Unconstrained, mortal women are much to be feared as
potential destroyers and robbers of the patriarchal heritage—cultural and
material—as are members of the lower orders. (68)
On the other hand, despite her role as the slayer of demons, Durga destroys them to
restore cosmic order, not to disrupt it. The shift in Devi’s iconicity ﬁom Durga to Kali is
also played out on the eve of Devi’s conditional surrender to the Indian government. The
event becomes a social text in itself which is read as a pilgrimage to the shrine of the
warrior goddess to worship her mythologized triumph over the nation-state:
Thousands of villagers had walked many miles to witness the event (of her
surrender). Phoolan Devi was a national legend. Songs had been written about her
exploits, although she did not know that at the time. Clay statues of her dressed in
a police uniform carrying a gun, sold in the markets of Kanpur at sixteen rupees a
piece, next to statues of ‘gods, goddesses and other national leaders of the year’,

as one report put it. Women had begun praying to her, whispering in conﬁdence

 

5 ' Caldwell’s argument has been particularly helpful in locating the goddess discourse in The Bandit (keen
of India. See Sarah Caldwell, “Subverting the Fierce Goddess: Phoolan Devi and the Politics of

Vengeance,” Plaﬂ'ng for Real: Hindu Role Models, Religio_n, and Gender, eds. Jacqueline Sutln'en Hirst &
Lynn Thoma (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) 160-78.

122

that she was the reincarnation of Kali, warrior goddess worshipped throughout the

Chambal Valley. (LEO 215)

Nonetheless, such a reading of female criminality can be criticized as problematic
in the current Indian context of majoritarian Hindu politics against the Muslim minority.
Critics like Raj eswari Sunder Rajan have questioned the “deployment and role of a
majority religion’s idiom in a postcolonial ‘secular democracy,’ India” (212). 52 Rajan
claims: “Hindu goddess worship is radical in so far as the goddess is not inscribed in the
mainstream of deities and her devotees are drawn largely ﬁ'om lower castes, women and
even non-Hindus, thus clearing certain spaces of alternative belief and practice in the
monolith of Brahminical Hinduism” (213). Rajan acknowledges the “rise and
dominance” of “folk heroines like Phoolan Devi” who “have been accommodated and
accepted within the cognitive ﬁarne provided by goddesses or the allied
historical/mythological ﬁgures of the viranganas” (215). However, she also warns us
against the dangers of Hindutva feminism, especially in the current context of Hindu
religious revivalism in postcolonial India,53 underlining “women’s agency (like their
empowerment) can neither be viewed as an abstraction, nor celebrated as an unqualiﬁed
good” (220). Rajan also questions the political valence of Hindu goddesses as icons of
feminist empowerment vis-a-vis the lower caste and religious minority women of a
democratic nation-state who might fail to identify with them. Rajan’s argument gains

ground in the context of the Rashtra Sevika Samiti-the women’s wing of the paramilitary

 

52 See Rajeswari Slmder Rajan, “Feminism and the Politics of the Hindu Goddess,” Feminist Locations:
Global and Local, Theog and Practice, ed. Marianne DeKoven (New Brunswick, NJ, & London: Rutgers
University Press, 2001) 212-26.

‘3 See218.

123

Hindu nationalist organization—Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—mobilizing the ﬁerce
divinity of Bharatmata and Ashta Bhuja. They are symbolic of a violent feminine Hindu
nationalism against a demonic Muslim male sexuality.54

However, I argue that the ﬁgure of the goddess identiﬁed woman bandit opposes
such majoritarian politics because Phoolan Devi’s warrior goddess is not derived from
maj oritarian Vedic Hinduism, but from the Tantric and Shaktic practices of the Hindu
minority who the Sangh was to exclude from citizenship.55 In India Tantric and Shaktic
practices of Kali have been traced to pre-Aryan times via archaeological evidence of the
worship of fertility through the mother goddess.56 David Kinsley has more to offer on the
Kali as the goddess of the liminal population: “Kali’s association with the periphery of
Hindu society [. . .] is also seen in an architectural work [text] of the sixth to the eighth
centuries, the Mona-sam-silpa-sastra. There it is said that Kali’s temples should be built
far from villages and towns, near the cremation grounds and the dwellings of Candalas
(very low-caste people)” (118-9). Kinsley adds: “Many texts and contexts treat Kali as an
independent deity, unassociated with any male deity” (116). She represents “Durga’s
personiﬁed wrath, her embodied fury” (116). Kinsley traces Durga back into the

indigenous non-Aryan cultures as well:

 

5‘ See Baechetta, Paola, “ ‘All Our Goddesses are Armed’: Religion, Resistance and Revenge in the Life of

a Militant Hindu Nationalist Woman,” Ag§1_n' st All Odds: Essays on Womﬂ, Religion and Development
from India and PM’ , eds. Kamla Bhasin, Ritu Mennon, Nighat Said Khan (New Delhi, India & Quezon
City, Philippines, 1994) 134-7.

55 See Zakia Pathak & Saswati Sengupta, “Resisting Women,” Women and the Hindu Rigm: A Collection
of Essays, eds. Tanika Sarkar & Urvashi Butalia (New Delhi, India: Kali for Women, 1995) 293. Also, see
Bacchetta 135.

5‘ Liddle and Joshi 54.

124

In addition to there being no similar goddesses among the deities of the Vedic
tradition, many early references to Durga associate her with peripheral areas such
as the Vindhya Mountains, tribal peoples such as the Sabaras [. . .] Although

Durga becomes an establishment goddess in medieval Hinduism, protecting the

cosmos ﬁ'orn the threat of demons and guarding dharma [order] [. . .], her roots

seem to be among the tribal and peasant cultures of India, which eventually
leavened the male-dominated Vedic pantheon with several goddesses associated
with power, blood, and battle.
Thus, it was the Brahminical religion of the Aryans who migrated to India around
1500 BC which restricted the powerful sexuality of these female divinities by “providing
orthodox male deities as husbands for the mother goddesses” (Liddle and Joshi 52-4). In
a Tantric/Shaktic reading of Phoolan Devi as the militant goddess, the lower caste woman
resists being appropriated by Vedic Hindutva in which the woman remains
“inconsequential without relationships with men.” Through her Tantric/Shaktic practice
she “maintains the world and ﬁghts without male directions and support against male
demons” (Pathak & Sengupta 295). Like Durga, she “challenges the stereotyped view of
women found in traditional Hindu law books [like Manusmriti I” (Kinsley 99).

Such an understanding of militancy refuses Rajeswari Sunder Rajan’s democratic
feminist argument that salvaging the goddess to empower women will inevitably lead to a
majoritarian stand. Hindu goddesses here serve as routes of multiple modalities through
which the lives of India’s millions can be imagined. Nonetheless, this brings us to the

problematic conjunction between the popular and the communal.57 The South Asian

 

’7 “Power is strategic for the state and it exercises and retains power by actively institutionalising a
hegemonic masculinity. And it is this masculinity that is the underbelly of street power and a lumpen

125

Subaltem Studies Group has recently tried to address this in the context of the
appropriation of the popular by the Hindu elites in the service of Hindu communal
polities.58 They have theorized the popular as the co-optable while the subaltem remains
an emergent category of politics at the edge of the dominant. However, for many lower
caste women in India, like Phoolan Devi, bhakri (devotion) to the warrior goddess
remains a matter of personal faith—an everyday practice rather than an institutionalized
religion.59 I argue that Phoolan Devi’s bhakti remains a subaltem rather than a populist
faith because of its subversive political valence. Rightfully so, because the Samajwadi
Party with a largely lower caste constituency, instrumental in Devi’s release ﬁom prison
and in shaping her political career, failed to contain her resistive feminist vision of a
separate women’s wing of the party. Bhakti is “widely recognized as a historical
challenge from within to the caste-ﬁxed inﬂexibility of high Hinduism” (Spivak “Moving
Devi”126). As a subcultural practice which gave “the lie to caste and scripture,” bhakti
“opened doors for women’s agency” (127). By overwriting the faith of lower caste

women in the interest of national unity in the secular democratic nation-state, one fails to

 

cultln'e that Iegitimises and provides popular support for the state with all its contradictions arising from its
communal, caste and class interests.” See Vasanth Kannabiran and Kalpana Kannabiran, “The Frying Pan
or the Fire? Endangered Identities, Gendered Institutions and Women’s Survival,” Women and the Hindu
Right: A Collection of Essays, eds. Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia (New Delhi, India: Kali for Women,
1995) 131.

5’ See Swati Cluttopadhyay and Bhaskar Sarkar, “Introduction: The Subaltem and the Popular,”
Postcolonial Studies 8.4 (2005): 359.

’9 Debjani Ganguly emphasizes the importance of deﬁning caste as everyday practice rather than through
historical movements against injustice. However, I explore how convict narratives deﬁne caste through
everyday practices like that of bhalm‘ which nonetheless take up revolutionary dimensions, oﬁen
inﬂuencing the international arena of anti-discrimination politics through collaborative storytelling.
Ganguly’s insistence on the need for a subversive theorization of bhakti has triggered my interest in the
issue: “Even Ranajit Guha, who formulated a way of interpreting the domain of power and politics in South
Asia that would resist both secular-historicist readings of India’s past and the paradigm of modernization, is
unable to theorize bhalcrr'. He does not, however, talk of the democratic potential of bhakti.” See Debjani

Ganguly, Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Mode_rng' : Notes on a Postcolonial Hermeneutics of Caste
(London and New York: Routledge, 2005) xxii, 175.

126

step out of the colonial ﬁame which established the nation-state as the marker of political
identity and indigenous faith as an impediment to modernization. In the transnational
realm of feminist politics it is lower caste women like Phoolan Devi who unsettle the
dominant logic of Euro-American political correctness. In this secular agrostic world of
left elitism she injects her own brand of faith—bhakti—derived ﬁ'om practical rather than
scriptural Hinduism—itself a minority culture in the global scenario.
The Border-Crossing Feminist? Through her convict narratives that transcribe the
social text of caste for the international human rights community, Phoolan Devi relocates
her caste experience in the continuum between national and global feminist politics. She
both resists and harnesses cross-caste male and female, national and the transnational
alliances with the lower caste woman. Despite asymmetrical relations of power in these
coalitions beyond borders, they enable the disenﬁanchised who is “rewritten and
visualized in the global media” to exert “pressure on sign systems that uphold existing
political and moral hierarchies” (Bishnupriya Ghosh 461). This transnational praxis of
lower caste women lies in inﬂecting the material politics of human rights through the
transcription and circulation of their stories. It contests a representational philosophy that
attests to subaltem subject-constitution either through the complete silence of the
subaltem or a problem of discursive politics that allows for only an interventionist
representation of the subaltem by the elite.

In fact, in their discussion about the outcastes of India, Josiane Racine and Jean-
Luc Racine have powerfully articulated the necessity of mediation as an empowering
praxis for the subaltem. Asserting themselves against the taboo of interventionist

representation, they claim: “In intellectual quests, as well as in the politics of identity, the

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urge for absolute purity—and its counterpart, absolute doubt—is dangerous.” For them
the politically correct niceties of representation take a backseat when it comes to waging
a war against a system in which power is deﬁned through the written word and the only
voices which are audible are those which can inscribe their life histories onto a readable
cultural text. The authors nail their argument about the value of representational politics
in this subaltem war with a clinching summary of their contention: “The inner world of
Dalit [outcaste] illiterates can only be heard or read through mediation. As is true for
subaltems around the world, they have to be heard” (277). Mediated convict narratives of
illiterate lower caste women such as Phoolan Devi contain precisely this counter-
inscriptive potential to challenge what loan Davies in the context of prison writing calls
“the imposed texts.” Through their narratives these disenﬁ'anchised women cut “against
the grain of the plethora of texts that would deﬁne them out of existence” (92). In other
words, Phoolan Devi’s collaborative narration resists the dominant inscription of a certain
Indian caste ideology that argues for violence as a mode of maintaining caste order as
well as a global penal philosophy which champions institutionalized violence for social
control. In its onslaughts against legal discourse that is the foundation of criminology,
cultural texts of “criminals” formulate a counterculture that question received social
practices entrenched by law: “Ultimately, the ideal of law as an equitable principle, after
being fought over by governments and ﬁ'eemen, landlords and peasants, jurors and
lawyers, becomes enshrined in the folklore of constitutional practice. The enormous
script of common and legislative law becomes the terrain within which rights and
ﬁeedorns are negotiated, because it embodies both the form within which any discourse

can take place and also the experiences of earlier negotiations.” It is this topography of

128

postcolonial law as given and set by tradition rather than law as contextualized justice
that the countercultural narratives of convicted women, transcribed by intellectuals, aim
to contest, despite the ongoing tensions within such an unequal collaboration itself. The
colonial prison of British India between the mid 1890s to the mid 18403 saw quite a
number of educated middle-class men and women.60 These “political prisoners often
authored life stories for those ‘common criminals’ who left no written record of their
own” (Arnold 31). In the globalized context of postcolonial India it is once again the
educated class who mediate the life stories of the abject underclass of postcolonial
“criminals.” This time these scribes are the global elites who, despite being physically
free to trot the globe, remain “prisoners of conscience” in an unjust world, traveling back
and forth to tell the stories of injustice in India to the world. In the process they often
come under attack by the very abject lives they recount.

The role of cultural texts in forging such necessary but problematic alliances
between the elite and the subaltem is powerfully demonstrated by the narratives as well
as the ﬁlm on Devi’s life. The movie Bandit Quien (1994), based on Mala Sen’s
biography, meandered through severe censorships for “misrepresenting facts”, placing
Devi’s “life and security in jeopardy”, and “violating Devi’s “right to privacy” by re-
raping her in public through the portrayal of her rape (Shohini Ghosh 154). Devi
withdrew her litigation after Channel 4 of UK which commissioned the ﬁlm, and the

director-Shekhar Kapur—made an out of court settlement with her by paying her forty

 

6° See David Arnold. “The Selfand the Cell: Indian Prison Narratives as Life Histories.” Telling Lives in

India: Bimhy, Autobiography, and Life Histog (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 2004) 52.

129

thousand pounds." The authenticity of Mala Sen’s script also came under severe
interrogation. In a brilliant reverse perforrnative the thuggee reappeared in the social text
of material dissent. The female outlaw who ventured “into the terrain of lawlessness”
because of her “conviction that legal systems can neither provide protection nor deliver
justice” (Shohini Ghosh 152), stepped right back into civil law to reclaim her citizenship
rights by litigating against upper caste intellectuals like Kapur. Nonetheless, riding on a
wave of lower caste political mobilization, Devi “used the ﬁlm as part of her campaign
for political ofﬁce in 1996 where she and a surge of other lower-caste politicians were
elected to parliament” (Longfellow 238). Produced in UK, directed by an Indian, based
on a script by an Indian journalist moving between India and UK, “the ﬁlm functions as a
postcolonial object par excellence, generated and capitalized, as it is, in a continuous
shuttle between East and West” (239). So do Mala Sen’s biography India’s Bandit meen
(1993) and the mediated autobiography The mmueen of India (2003), the latter
published in the United States and collaboratively produced by Phoolan Devi with the
Parisian author Marie Thérése-Cuny and the Paris based British journalist Paul Rambali.
The production process of this text was quite unlike that of the biography India’s Bandit
M or the ﬁlm Bandit Mn, challenged by Devi. The Bandit ueen of India bears
the traces of a postcolonial subaltem subjectivity that participates and authorizes the
cultmal production of the self. Published posthumously after the assassination of Devi in
July 2001, the transcribed manuscript of the text was read back to Devi for comments and

each page was certiﬁed by her signature (Rambali xii-xiii). Otherwise, the politics of

 

6' Shohini Ghosh, “Deviant Pleasures and Disorderly Women: The Representation of the Female Outlaw in

Bandit Queen and ADJMJ’ Feminist Tenains in Lega_l Domains: Interdisciplinary Essays in Women and
Law in India, ed. Ratna Kapoor (New Delhi, India: Kali for Women, 1996) 153-4.

130

translation between the disenfranchised like Phoolan Devi and elites like Thérése-Cuny
and Rarnbali would reconﬁgure the politics of Senanayak in “Draupadi”.

Senanayak is both the “specialist in combat” [against Naxalite revolutionaries like
Dopdi] and an expert in extreme-Left politics: “Whatever his practice, in theory he
respects the opposition. [. . .] In order to destroy the enemy, become one. [I]n his written
work he will demolish the gentlemen and highlight the message of the harvest workers”
(22-3). The ﬁnal trajectory of information retrieval ﬁom the enemy that this scholar-
bureaucrat, Senanayak, embarks on results in the violently sexualized interrogation of
Dopdi which is designed by Senanayak. It unleashes her resistant rage, and in a ﬁnal
sequence of the return of the repressed, Dopdi tears the piece of cloth which Senanayak’s
men throw over her raped and brutalized body to cover her humiliation. Refusing to buy
into a patriarchal construction of the raped female body through an ideology of shame,
Dopdi walks toward Senanayak with “her head high” as “the nervous guards trail
behind.” In her subversive rage she “stands before him, naked. Thigh and pubic hair
matted with dry blood. Two breasts, two wounds” (36). Shaking with indomitable
laughter, she stops to spit a “bloody gob” at Senanayak’s white shirt, “pushes Senanayak
withhertwo mangledbreasts, andfortheﬁrsttime Senanayakisafraidto standbeforean
unarmed target” (36). Writing about another “untouchable” tribal woman in Mahasweta
Devi’s short story “Douloti the Bountiful,” Gayatri Spivak says that the author’s narrative
terrain “contains problematic representations of decolonization after a negotiated [Indian]
political independence”(97). This space of the postcolonial bonded laborer like Dopdi
and Douloti does not operate within the organized labor of imperialism and capitalistic

logic. This is the landscape of internal colonization of the subaltem: “Mahasweta invites

131

us to realize that, in the context of this ﬁction, “Empire” and “Nation” are
interchangeable names, however hard it might be for us to imagine it” (97-8). It is this
space of “superexploitation” of subaltems like Douloti, Dopdi Mehjen, and Phoolan Devi
that “makes the agenda of nationalism impossible” (113). In fact, it is this space of the
empire-nation that activates the wrath of Dopdi against Senanayak, a possibility in
‘benevolent’ elite-disenﬁanchised collaborations like Shekhar Kapur’s as well.

The are of subaltem political and cultural agency in such a translational praxis
needs to be located in the contradictions of postcolonial citizenship in democratic India
vis-a-vis gender and caste. The colonial legacy to the postcolonial state in the form of the
of sovereignty, constitutionality, and laws of governance marking the “public” sphere of
British administration are often at cross-purposes with the “private” domain of culture
ruled by personal/customary laws of Indians which the British left largely untouched.62
As such, there is a disjunction between the two. As Rajeswari Sunder Rajan asserts: “The
difﬁculties posed by this dispute for, among other things, justifying women ’3 rights and
equality as citizen-subjects are obvious and emerge most clearly in the conﬂicts around
personal law”(5). Thus, while the concept of citizenship atomized Indian nationals as
individuals with their ties to an impersonal state replacing the former ﬁlial bonds of the
populace with a landed gentry that in turn were tied to paternalistic lungs,63 in the sphere
of customary laws Indians still retained these codes of “piety.” In this infrastructural

chaos of colonial imposition, male and female citizens were affected differently because

 

6’ See The Scandal ofthe State 4.5.

‘3 “During most of India’s history, however, there has not been a single centralised monarchy. Instead there
have been hundreds of small princedorns and a pattern of local governance involving representative
committees, called panchayat (a cormcil of ﬁve).” See Mark Juergensmeyer, “The Rise of Hindu
Nationalism,” Ethical and Political Dilemmas of Modern India, Ninian Smart and Shivesh Thakur (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993) 235.

132

of their differential access to the structures of government as well as their dissimilar
experiences with the extent to which they were regulated by cultural prescriptions.
Similarly, the everyday practice of caste which the colonial government used as a marker
of Indian identity largely remained in the realm of “culture,” except for the
administration’s use of the category to monitor certain sectors of the subject population
as in the Criminal Castes and Tribes Act. In this colonial transaction between government
and culture lower caste female citizenship in the postcolonial state came to bear the
legacy of “culture.” It is only by bringing the status quo of the postcolonial state to a
crisis that the female outlaw can forge “a speciﬁc conjuncture for the constitution of
female subjectivity in the reactive mode” (30), and refuse to participate in the notion of
citizenship which the state has used to deﬁne her out of “political” existence to conﬁne
her to the “cultural.” In my reading of caste and gender as cultural constructs the category
of culture is the site of public protestation by the postcolonial female outlaw for a
transnational realm of feminist praxis that contests the category of the state.64 With the
colonial thuggee archive largely marked by the absence of the female thuggee, the
production of thuggee as difference marked the superiority of respectable British
masculinity over the deviance of Indian masculinity. Into this social text marked by the
absence of female criminality, enters the postcolonial female thuggee informed by the
gendered history and practice of a caste identiﬁed social banditry in independent India. In

the light of the above examination of the contradictions of postcolonial female

 

6’Iwouldliltetopointout,inthisregard,tlratbothSlmderRajmrandlclairnaboutthepoliticalroleof
“culture” in women’s lives. However, whereas her understanding of cultm'e is invested in negotiating
beneﬁts for women with and through the existing institutions of the state, my approach to culture lies in its
subversive role in contesting the state through the postcolonial mapping of “culttn'e” as political onto
transnational feminism through collaborative cultural projects between the global elite and the postcolonial
subaltem.

133

citizenship, especially of the lower castes, it is not surprising that only after her
criminalization that Phoolan Devi is able to enforce her constitutional right to protection
by the law.65 Her criminality can thus also be constituted as her ironic entry into the
realm of constitutionality and governance that she ironically ruptures.

Devi’s entry into “law” happens not only through her litigation in the ﬁlm case,
but also as she negotiates the terms of her surrender to the Indian government in 1983:
among her claims was reprieve ﬁom death penalty, land, heuse, and employment for her
family, adequate food in prison and a certain amount of ﬁ‘eedom, and rehabilitation after
her release (m 212-3). In the ﬁlm Bandit M the last advice of Vikram Mallah to his
paramour underlines the politics of the postcolonial state in dealing with its segregated
crinrinalized population when the lower castes of the state threaten to upset the status quo
vis-a-vis its upper castes: “If you kill, kill twenty, don’t kill one. [. . .] If you kill one,
you will be hanged. If you kill twenty, you will gain infamy. They will call you a
revolutionary. The government will nm after you. They will pay you.” Irrespective of the
caste complexion of the gang, surrender of bandits thus becomes the high moral ground
for the non-violent reconsolidation of upper caste state power. However, when such
negotiations involve lower caste women like Devi, the urge to arrest her resistive
potential and reform the female outlaw into the in-law takes new directions. The Queen
of Chambal Valley is domesticated as “a brave gir ” by the negotiating ofﬁcer—Rajendra
Chaturvedi (LBQ 211). Among a spectacular populist support, she enacts the surrender of
her accomplished outlaw career, joining her palms to greet the then Chief Minister of

Madhya Pradesh—Arjun Singh-in a gesture of daughterly humility (471). Indian

 

6’ The Scandal ofthe State 231.

134

feminists, however, remained “unenthusiastic about embracing militant feminist models”
like her (The Scandal of the State 216). Brahminical feminism’s “highly selective
understanding of women and their lives” does not allow for differences in the experiences
of Indian women as they live through a diverse range of patriarchies. Having “the luxury
[. . .] to escape their caste persona through a turn to the (progressive) problem of gender
and “women”, Brahminical feminism asserts that “feminism and caste cannot sit
together” (Rao 278). In this vacuum stepped in lower caste patriarchy to reclaim its
prodigal daughter in the name of a caste constituency in the electoral politics.66 The
Samajwadi Party president—Mulayam Singh Jadav—rallied caste votes for his party
around the image of the anti-heroinenPhoolan Devi--whom he not only released ﬁ'om
prison after the party came to power in 1992, but also recruited into the party. She
provided a foil to Mayawati—the charismatic leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party,
Samajwadi’s chief political rival. Devi also became iconic for the possibilities of lower
caste lives, and when she became a member of the Parliament in 1996 Samajwadi
became symbolic of the route to re-determining the status of the lower castes as entitled
citizens.67 Devi remained political capital for lower caste electoral patriarchy even in

death, as against the wishes of her family who wanted to cremate her in Delhi, she was

 

’6 The following political history has been drawn from my intimate contact with India as an evolving
student of cultural history, both while I lived in India and after my relocation in the US. In the latter case,
the history came through to a diasporic Indian like me through the numerous telephonic conversations and
my visits back to India.

’7 Bahujan literally translates as many (bahu) and people (ian) in Hindi, the national language of India. It
implies the “majority of the people.” Till 1994 the long term goal of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) of
India, formed in 1984, “was the political consolidation of caste and religious minorities in India, who
collectively constitute a majority of the population, in opposition to the Hindu upper castes.” See Kanchan
Chandra, “Why Etlmic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India,” Tthgy and Research
in Commive Social Analysis Paper 8 (2003): xxxii <repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article
=1013 &context=uclasoc>. The Samajwadi Party (SP) which came into force in 1992 offered signiﬁcant
competition to BSP for lower caste votes within the state ofUttar Pradesh.

135

cremated at her constituency in Mir'zapur. Mulayam Singh Jadav declared that “his
Samajwadi Party was her family” (am viii).
VI. Conclusion“

Nonetheless, though her mortal remains were appropriated by the state, the
lower caste woman did rescue her spirit from both national and transnational
‘benevolence’. Challenging both the feminist and patriarchal constructions of Indian
women as lacking in political agency and hence in need of being rescued, she claimed a
postcolonial and transnational feminist advocacy against caste oppression and human
rights violations of women on her own terms. Despite deﬁning her choice of a personal
faith in proto Hindu religious icons, her convict narratives uphold her militancy against
the oppressive social conﬁguration of Hinduism. Nonetheless, it needs to be underlined
that though Devi did not step into it, there is surely an ongoing postcolonial reclamation
of the lower castes through the mobilization of goddesses in the interest of Hindu
religious revivalism in India. All the same, one cannot discount the fact that the category
of caste has returned to forge new opportunities for progressive politics through
transnational political citizenship. Caste is haunting the postcolonial nation-state, not as
tradition but as the “critical enrunerative category” (Dirks 302) of modern electoral
politics, based on an oppositional mobilization of lower caste votes (314). It has placed
the lower castes and the casteless on the national and the transnational map of historic
injustice by relocating caste ﬁ'om the realm of culture to that of racial discrimination.

Though caste politics affects other countries, its discussion in the international arena had

 

68 Nicholas Dirks’ insightful understanding of the progressive role of caste in the postcolonial context has
been specially useful for my comprehension of a postcolonial-transnational politics of caste. See Nicholas
B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2001).

136

so long mainly been blocked by the government of India.‘59 In the wake of the
assassination on July 25, 2001 of Phoolan Devi, between August 27 and September 1,
2001 caste was staged for the ﬁrst time by the UN at the World Conference Against
Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.70

Nevertheless, it needs to be reinforced that women’s oppression within caste
discrimination is implemented through gender speciﬁc modes of oppression, and the
issue of caste remains incompletely mapped in the transnational terrain of resistance in
the absence of international laws to complement the struggle against caste injustice.
Though the Convention Against All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)
was ratiﬁed by India in 1993,71 the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman
or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) remains unratiﬁed by India.72 Since police
custodial torture of outcastes and lower castes often results in torture and even death, in
the case of women torture more often than not resulting in sexual atrocities, refusal to
ratify the CAT affects the remapping of the terrain of caste at the transnational level of

human rights politics. Though the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture

 

‘9 See Footnote 1.

7° It is important to note that this can be read as a strategic move in many ways. With its colonial history,
India has been a party to the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination since 1968 As such,
mapping caste as race is a construction that is politically viable to pressure India into acknowledging the
injustice of discrimination in the postcolonial context. See Amnesty International, “India: The Battle
Against Fear and Discrimination: The Impact of Violence Against Women in Uttar Pradesh and

Rajasthan,” m (May 2001) 4.

7' See Ajay Pandey, “Granting the Right to an Individual Petition, Optional Protocol to CEDAW Comes
into Force,” Kali’s Yug 103.

72 “It is an irony that the individual human being is still on the margins of international human rights
instruments, even after ﬁfty years of the Declaration. The basic reason for this marginalintion is the focus
on the state as the basic unit in international relations. In this situation the plight of women, who are almost
half of the population, yet so marginalized a section in society, is more worrisome. A right to petition under
human rights treaties, though a very limited right, is a step towards putting individuals at the centre stage of
the international system, and thereby heating them directly as subjects of international law, wherein they
could claim their rights as well as be held accountable for violating others.” See 101.

137

(OPCAT) which is to monitor the implementation of CAT by states has come into force
in 2006, it is binding only for states which have ratiﬁed the CAT.73 As such, the only
platforms for caste justice, as of now, still remain conﬁned to the nation though the
relocating of caste in the transnational topography of the 2001 World Conference Against
Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance has at least allowed
a global witnessing of caste discrimination as injustice rather than culture for the ﬁrst

time.

 

7’ See “Dialogue on Globalization: Fact Sheet on the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture,”
8 (August 2006) <http://www.fes-globalizationorg/publications/FES%20Fact°/o20No8°/oZO-
°/o200PCAT.pdf >.

138

CHAPTER THREE
The Supranational Struggle for Desegregation: Women’s Post-
Apartheid Resistance Novels

1. Introduction

This chapter deals with the politics of postcolonial ﬁction in representing intra-
racial and interracial violence against women in post-apartheid South Aﬁica. It is
organized to trace, through the ﬁgure of the woman, post-apartheid violence as a
continuity of the social dislocations of the apartheid era, and hence of the incomplete
process of decolonization. The chapter also studies the very notion of truth and
reconciliation which attempted to construct a post-apartheid “democracy” by silencing
the stories of South Aﬁican women. However, expatriate writers and scholars from
postcolonial cultures researching in the metropoles of the globe resuscitate and remap
these tongue-tied stories of national shame conﬁscated by the nation onto the audible
platform of a transnational feminist politics. The novels that I examine in this chapter are
Mother to Mother (1998) by the New York based writer Sindiwe Magona and MEI—3
Sto_ry (2000), a narrative by Zoe Wicomb writing from Britain, both authors being of
South Aﬁican heritage. Mothar to Mothﬁ is imagined as a ﬁctionalized address by
Mandisa, the mother of Mxolisi, to Amy Biehl’s mother. Mandisa’s son Mxolisi was part
of the violent mob of black South Aﬁican youth who assassinated Amy Biehl, a white
American Fulbright scholar from Stanford, in 1993. She had been helping out in
developing voter registration programs for South Aﬁica’s ﬁrst democratic elections
coming up in 1994, and hence was brutally murdered by the very people whose cause she
was working for. David’s Stogy is a ﬁctional rendering of how post-apartheid South

Africa strived to construct a democracy by silencing the testimonials of pain of female

139

anti-apartheid activists who were betrayed and tortured by their male peers within the
revolution itself. It has a strong biographical component in that it is resonant with the life
of Rita Mazibuko, the only female revolutionary who has testiﬁed to sexual violence at
the hands of her own comrades. Examining novels about post-apartheid violence as a
legacy of colonial and apartheid violence, this chapter explores how the nationalist
project of post-apartheid South Aﬁican democracy has been achieved at the expense of
women through the dual phenomenon of “phallic nationalism” or masculinist nationalism
and “uterine nationalism” or womanist nationalism.’ (The term “phallic nationalism” and
“uterine nationalism” respectively signify the gendered expectations tlmt national
liberation movements impose on men and women in defense of the nation.) Nonetheless,
in the phenomena of transnational-postcolonial writing and the transnational-postcolonial
research which emerged in the wake of decolonization, my work attests to the resistant
power of women’s discom'ses to contest such material violations within nationalist

struggles. In the process the acts of writing and research themselves become material

 

II draw on the terms “phallic nationalism” and “uterine nationalism” ﬁlom Geraldine Heng’s and Janadas
Devan’s study of the gendered claims of nationalism on the reproductive capacities of upper and middle
class women professionals of Chinese ancestry in the context of Singapore. Such demands were made by
the state to offset the “inordinate reproductive urges” of the racial minorities of “working-class women of
Malay and Indian ethnic origin” (345). Heng and Devan draw our attention to the “sexualized, separate
species of nationalism” that Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew advocated for Singapore’s educated women in
1983: “as patriotic duty for men grew out of the barrel of a gun (phallic nationalism, the wielding of a
surrogate technology of the body in national defense) so would it grow, for women, out of the recesses of
the womb (uterine nationalism, the body as a technology of defense wielded by the nation). Men bearing
arms and women bearing children; maternal and/as military duty: the still-recent history of Nazi Germany
grimly but not uniquely reminds us that certain narratives of nationalism and dispositions of state power
speciﬁcally require the exercise of control over the body, the track of power on bodies being visited
differently according to gender” (348—9). See Geraldine Heng and Janadas Devan, “State Fatherhood: The
Politics of Nationalism, Sexuality, and Race in Singapore,” eds. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris
Somrner, and Patricia Yaeger, Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York and London: Routledge, 1992).
However, in my argument the concept of phallic nationalism, while retaining Heng’s and Devan’s
understanding of the concept as associated with force, seeks to impack how such an ideology is advocated
not only in national defense, but also becomes a premise for violence against both the otherized white
woman and the female peers within the revolution. Uterine nationalism, in my chapter, rather than
sustaining the notion of the woman’s womb in the service of nationalism, questions the nationalist
mythiﬁcation ofthe womb as a ground for revolutionary tmity between men and women.

140

activism which attempt to dismantle the socio-political structures that sustain gender
apartheid within nationalist revolutions. Thus, the female ﬁgure here will be examined
both as a site of violation as well as a site of contest against it.

Tracing the continuity among colonialism, apartheid, and post-apartheid
violations, this chapter will situate Mother to Mother and David’s Stog historically to
unmask how novels about the lives of women during radical protest against racial
segregation comment on truth and reconciliation in post-conﬂict South Aﬁica. Staging
the texts against this frame ruptures the myth of a uniﬁed post-resistance nationhood and
articulates how post-apartheid South Aﬁ'ica needs to come to terms with itself around
untold narratives of gender that ﬁacture the myth of revolutionary unity against the
apartheid regime.2 Of particular interest here is the examination of how the violence of
racial apartheid shaped the identity of South Aﬁican youth active in the nationalist
movement, and the relationship in which women stand vis-ﬁ-vis the project of
nationalism and its deployment of youth power.

The theoretical ﬂame of this chapter will draw upon feminist studies of the South
African nationalist struggle like Beth Goldblatt’s and Sheila Meintjes’s essay “A Gender

Perspective on Violence during the Struggle against Apartheid.” It is a feminist study of

 

2 The South African writerand scholarNdebele argues: “The problem istobe located inthe nature of
South Aﬁ'ican oppression and how its unabating pervasiveness has induced, almost universally in the
country, a distinctive manner of drinking about the socio-political realities, an epistemology in which
reality is conceived purely in terms of a total polarity of absolutes.” He adds: “[T]he greatest challenge of
the South Aﬁ'ican revolution is in the search for ways of drinking, ways of perception, that will help to
break down the closed epistemological structures of South African oppression. Structures which can
severely compromise resistance by dominating thinking itself.” According to Ndebele, “The challenge is to
free the entire social imagination of the oppressed from the laws of perception that have characterised
apartheid society. For writers this means ﬂeeing the creative process itself from those very laws. It means
extending the writer’s perception of what can be written about, and the means and methods of writing.” See

Njabulo S. Ndebele, Rediscovg of the Ordim: 1353an on South Aﬁ'iga Literature and Culture,
(Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006) 55.

I41

the truth and reconciliation process with regard to apartheid violence against women.
Mahmood Marndani’s “Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of the Report of
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC)” and “The Truth
According to the TR ” will help in positioning women in civil society during the
revolution not only as targets of violence by human agents, but also as objects of
structural violence in a system in which resources are unequally distributed according to
racial categories.3 Finally, Rosemary Jolly’s and Derek Attridge’s edited anthology
Writing South Africa: Literature. Apartheid, 84nd Democracy. 1970-1995 will provide a
framework for how cultural productions like literature can become meaningful sites of
political resistance that contest dominant discourses that shape human perceptions and
hence actions. In the textual readings that follow abuse of women will be explored
through the theme of TRC’s discursive violence, while the struggle against such violence
will be examined through the phenomenon of post-resistance literature. Recognizing texts
as sites which generate discursive resistance, this chapter extricates the TRC from the
political grip of the post-apartheid state to question its premises from the perspective of a
potential supranational struggle against both raced and gendered segregation generated by

cultural productions and academic activism.

 

3 For the incisive force of this argument 1 am indebted to Elimbeth Swanson Goldberg’s abstract of her
paper for the American Comparative Literature Association’s (ACLA’s) Annual Convention in Puebla,
Mexico in April 2007. Her paper is entitled “Living in the Awakened Dark: Race, Poverty, and Genocide in
Edwidge Dandicat’s The Farmin of Bones”. As one of the organizers of the seminar panel “The Politics of
Representation: Human Rights Violations, Witnessing, and Transnational Readership”, l was especially
fornmate to have access while writing this chapter, even before the convention, to Swanson Goldberg’s
reﬂections on the literary representation of the link between Haitian genocide of 1937 and “the structural
poverty and racism that caused Haitians to migrate en masse to the Dominican Republic—which was only
too happy to absorb their labor into the brutal economy of cane production.” See Elizabeth Swanson
Goldberg, “Living in the Awakened Dark: Race, Poverty, and Genocide in Edwidge Dandicat’s I_h§
Farming of Bones,” (American Comparative Literature Association, Puebla, Mexico; April 2007), Abstract.
26 February, 2007 <http://acla2007.complit. ucla.edu/restricted/papers>.

142

II. History of Radical Protest: Violent “Stories” and South Africa’s
Resilient Women

To study the literary rendering of how the effects of racial apartheid on South
African youth deﬁned both interracial and intra-racial violence on women, and how
women’s response to such violence formulate a critique of the patriarchal ethos of regime
change, the historical trajectory of South Aﬁ'ica’s transition from colonialism through
apartheid to post-apartheid national liberation needs to be mapped. Crucial to tracking
this history of regime change is the tracing of the ﬁgure of the woman, both in civilian
and revolutionary life, through the interaction between systemic violence and that
propagated by individual human agents.

South Africa’s liberation from white racial oligarchy in 1994 marked the end of
legal racial segregation or apartheid. European colonization of the region, now known as
South Africa, had begun in 1652 when the Dutch East India Company opened a
refreshment station for its ships in the region populated, among others, by the San
(Bushmen) in the north and Khoikhoi (Hottentots). Eventually, there came to be formed a
creolized Dutch or Afrikaans culture. During the Napoleonic Wars of the ﬁrst two
decades of the nineteenth century the British took over the Cape to protect its sea route to
India. The Dutch formally ceded the Cape to the British in 1814, but the animosity
between the Dutch farmers, also called the Boers, and the British lasted for another
century. This led to the Anglo-Boer War between 1899 and 1902 which concluded with
the defeat of the Boers. The British colonies of the Cape and Natal as well as the Boer
republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal formed a federation under British
control. Between 1908 and 1909 an all white National Convention met to frame a

constitution for a uniﬁed state. With the British Parliament passing the South Africa Bill

143

on May 31, 1910, the Union of South Aﬁica was formally recognized as a political
entity.4 Under this Bill though South Africa obtained internal self-rule under Afrikaner
and English white minorities, the Union achieved sovereign status within the British
Empire only with the end of British control over foreign affairs in 1934.5 Codifying white
supremacy, the 1910 constitution of South Africa granted civil and political rights to
whites only. Under the Black (or Natives) Land Act of 1913 most black Africans were no
longer able to rent or own land “outside of designated reserves (which amounted to
approximately 7% of South Africa's land, and which was ﬁnally increased to 13%). The
Cape was the only province excluded from the Act as a result of the existing Black
franchise rights which were enshrined in the South Africa Act During the Apartheid era,
the reserves were converted to Bantustans and later into independent states within South
Africa?”5 The Aﬁican National Congress (ANC), originally the South Aﬁican Native
National Congress, founded in 1912 was formed partly in response to this oppression of

black South Africans.7 In 1948 when the National Party came to power it introduced

 

‘For this colonial history ofSouth Africa, see The Closest of Swen: South African Women's Life
Writing, ed. Judith Ltltge Coullie (Johannesburg: Wits UP, 2001) 14-16.

5 In 1934 the Statute of Westminster is ratiﬁed by inference in South Aﬁica. See “1934 in South Aﬁica,”
Wikipgdia: The Free Encyclopedia, 2 September 2006, Wikimedia Formdation, Inc., USA, 6 February,
2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ l934_in_South_Africa>. The Statute of Westminster 1931 is an Act of
the British Parliament that established legislative equality between the self-governing dominions of the
British Empire and the United Kingdom. The Statute could, by inference, become domestic law within each
of the other Commonwealth Realms “alter the patriation of the particular Realm's constitution, to the extent
that it was not rendered obsolete by that process." The Statute marked the independence of these countries,
either immediately or upon ratiﬁcation. See “Statute of Westminister 1931,” Wikimia: The Free
Engeloﬂ'g, 31 January 2007, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., USA, 6 February, 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/ Statute_of_Westminster_l 93 l>.

6 See Alistair Boddy-Evans, “Pre Apartheid Era Laws: Black (or Natives) Land Act No. 27 of 1913”,
About: Aﬁ'ican Histor_y, Our Sm, 2006, The New York Times Company, 26 November, 2006 <http://
aﬁicanhistoryaboutcom/od/apartheidlaws/g/ N027ofl3.htm>.

7 See Coullie 46.

144

more laws to reinforce this racial segregation. It extended Pass Laws which monitored
and controlled the movements of South African blacks. The 1949 Prohibition of Mixed
Marriages Act and the 1950 Irnmorality Amendment Act barred interracial marriages and
any interracial sexual contact. The Group Areas Act of 1950 facilitated “the mass
relocation of any population, including whites, that inhabited areas designated for other
race groups. It had the effect of reserving 88 percent of the country for whites (who made
up about 14 percent of the population of some 42 million people)” (Schaffer and Smith
57). The Bantustan system demarcated separate homelands for the blacks, but
nonetheless was instrumental in keeping the various indigenous ethnolinguistic groups
separate. Through the Separate Amenities Act of 1953 all public amenities and facilities
were exclusive to speciﬁc racial groups, and the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act
authorized the suppression of all dissent.8 Finally, the
Bantu Education Act in 1953 further disempowered black South Aﬁicans by
replacing mission schooling, which ensured literacy for those blacks prepared to
convert to Christianity and fostered an educated elite, with a system of inferior
education, destined to prepare the majority of blacks for labor and service jobs.
Coupled with the Bantustan system, strict state-enforced censorship laws
functioned to contain knowledge production and dissemination. (Schaffer and
Smith 58)
Later on in 1976 the Bantu education system would trigger the greatest student resistance

against the apartheid state in the history of South Africa.

 

3 For this historical overview of the constitutional codiﬁcation of human rights violations of South African
blacks, I am indebted to Schaffer and Smith. See Schaffer and Smith 57-8.

145

At the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-6—a few years before the South Aﬁican
National Party launched apartheid as an ofﬁcial policy--Nazi leaders had been tried as
war criminals.9 As a preventive response to the atrocities of the Second World War, the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights had been adopted in 1948--the same year as the
National Party came to power. Subsequently, in 1960 the UN General Assembly adopted
the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples,10
and in 1962 a Special Committee on Apartheid was created to deal with the racial
practices of the Republic of South Africa.11 Nonetheless, in the wake of decolonization
the last country on the Aﬁican continent to be released from racial apartheid was South
Aﬁica. In transitioning ﬁom apartheid segregation to post-apartheid integration some
South African voices were muted by this new ideology of national unity just as they were
by the apartheid project of a white oligarchy. In this post-apartheid project of nation-
building untold narratives of women’s lived experiences during the apartheid that could
fracture the myth of anti-apartheid revolutionary unity came under special surveillance.
The South Aﬁ'ican Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as Schaﬁ‘er and Smith point
out, “limited the scope of its activities, placing certain stories inside and some outside its
scope.” Moreover,

attention was directed to killings and murders, abductions and disappearances,

and incidents of torture and physical maiming. Vigorous critique of these terms of

 

9 Robertson 211-220.

'0 See “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples,” 14 December
1960, _Qf_’fj_ce of the High Commissioner for Human Rim 2002, Ofﬁce of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Human Rights, Geneva, Switzerland, 6 Febnlary 2007 <http://www.unhchr.ch/html/
menu3/b/c_coloni.htm>.

” See Roger S. Clark, “Human Rights Strategies of the 19605 Within the United Nations: A Tribute to the
Late Kamleshwar Das,” Human Rights May 212 (1999): 316—317.

146

reference came ﬁorn women’s advocates who argued early in the process that the
focus on abuses of bodily integrity rights limited the purview of the Commission
in ways that erased women’s experience of apartheid ﬁom consideration [italics
my own] and thus limited the history collectively reconstructed through the
processes of the TRC. (68)
It is the goal of this chapter to historically situate and examine the ﬁgures of women
whose stories both of structural violence and violation of bodily integrity, caught in the
maelstrom of regime change and in the patriarchal precepts of national liberation, were
muffled in the interests of post-apartheid South Aﬁican solidarity.
In “I Saw a Nightmare”: DoingViolence to Memon/z The Soweto UDﬁsmgLLug

16 197 6 Helena Pohlandt McCormick makes representational space for articulating the

 

vanquished voices of women whose lives were deﬁned by the political violence that the
young men in their lives—sons—were both subjected to and adopted as a mode of
survival in apartheid South Africa. This kind of documentation itself is an act of political
signiﬁcance because of the apartheid policies of censorship as well as the racially marked
literacy levels that the apartheid enforced through the Bantu education system.12 “1%
Nightmare” recounts the 1976 student uprising in the South African township of Soweto
when schoolchildren who were demonstrating against the apartheid government’s
decision to impose Aﬁikaans—the language of the white ruling class—as the medium of

instruction within the Bantu education system were mercilessly shot by the apartheid

 

'2 Couillie argues: “social context is also crucial in determining who is likely to want—or be able—to
record their experiences, and whose texts will ﬁnd their way into public expression. [. . .] In the early
decades of the twentieth century, white males’ autobiographies dominated the ﬁeld Before the 19605, no
prose narrative autobiographical texts in English by black South African women appear to have been
published. [. . .] Until the 19503 most educational institutions for Africans were mission-run; thereafter, a
policy of state-controlled inferior education for blacks, known as Bantu education, was adopted. For young
black women, this disadvantageous situation was compounded by the widespread preference in traditional
communities for educating boys” (8).

147

police. What began as a peaceful protest by schoolchildren had soon turned into a
bloodbath of violence and mayhem as the apartheid police ﬁred into the demonstrating
crowd instigating the students to retaliate. As the ﬁrst two victims- thirteen year old
Hector Pieterson and seventeen year old Hastings Ndhlovu--were slain, Sam Nzima’s
photograph of the eighteen year old student, Mbuyisa Makhubu, carrying the dying
Pieterson in his arms made headlines in world news. In the photograph Pieterson’s sister
is running alongside Makhubu, eyes closed in horror and a hand warding off the
nightmare. Helena Pohlandt McCormick’s “1 Sam! a Nightmare: positions this
photograph in the archive of human rights photojournalism:
Like other famous photographs, such as that of the child running naked from
napalm bombs in Vietmm and of the student shot at Kent State, it has taken on
meaning beyond the original historical moment. This image became the symbol of
resistance. It became an icon of history—constituent part and instrument of
collective history and memory. (1-2)l3
Nonetheless, for the purpose of this chapter what is of critical import is McCormick’s
construction of the Soweto student uprising by injecting it with the individual voice of the
mother of the revolutionary student—Mbuyisa Makhubu. The author clearly underlines

the distinction between the two ofﬁcial versions of the Soweto uprising—those of the

 

‘3 See McCormick < http://www.gutenberg-e.org/pohlandt-mccormick/PM.c1p1.htrnl>. The violence
triggered by the police firing into the student demonstration lasted till early 1978. The violence had spread
to Cape Town and the Cape townships of Guguletu, Langa, and Nyanga. McCormick records: “Within two
months after June 16, violence had swept into 80 African communities, townships, and rural Bantustans
(homelands) (8).” Though the death toll was ofﬁcially recorded as 700 between June 1976 and October
1977, the other side of the story has been recorded by Tebello Motapanyane, former student and secretary-
general of South Aﬁican Students’ Movement at Naledi High School, who in his interview with
McCormick, rated the toll higher than 1,200. See <http://www.gutenberg—e.orypohlandt-
mccormick/PM.clpl .htrnl#txt21>.

148

apartheid state and of the ANC in exile—and the individual perspectives of the direct
participants and of the witnesses to the state violence against the uprising.

In “I Saw a Nightmare” Helena Pohlandt McCormick retrieves the voice of
Mbuyisa Makhubu’s mother—Nombulelo Elizabeth Makhubu—from the plethora of
testimonies before the TRC. The hypertext of “I Saw a Nightmare”, with its links to the
TRC’s hearing of the mother, enables the individual memory of personal suffering to
negotiate with the jubilant master narrative of the anti-apartheid revolution held in place
by AN C’s control over the public understanding of history. In this respect Nombulelo
Elizabeth Makhubu’s testimony before the TRC forms a subtext to McCormick’s work.
As opposed to the narrative of heroism that the photograph of Mbuyisa Makhubu bearing
the dying Hector Pieterson generated for the public memory, his mother’s account before
the TRC ﬂamed the event through the rhetoric of fatal mistakes: “Mbuyisa's sin was to
pick up Hector where he had fallen.”14 The trauma of the child-hero on the run with the
apartheid police on the hunt for him intertvvines with the nightmare of the family: “He
also met Nzima who took that photograph. From there we never got any rest because of
this photograph that was taken of him.”'5 Highlighting the systemic violence of
simultaneous global fame and domestic notoriety which destroys both Mbuyisa Makhubu
and his biological family, Nombulelo Elizabeth Makhubu eloquently jettisons the heroic
persona of Mbuyisa Makhubu—the Soweto revolutionary—and humanizes him as the

traumatized son of a poor black woman:

 

'4 See TRC <http://www.doj.gov.m/trc/hrvtrans/methodis/makhubu.htrn>.
'5 lhid

149

The police also came to me asking me how do you feel like being a mother of an
unsung hero. I said according to my culture Mbuyisa is not a hero he just did what
was natural because we are our brother's keepers, according to our culture. He just
saw Hector falling down. It would have been a scandal for nobody to pick Hector
Petersen up ﬁom the ground. As far as we are concerned he was never a hero for
picking up Hector Petersen.l6
Recounting the many contradictory and maddening versions regarding the whereabouts
of her son in exile, Nombulelo Elizabeth Makhubu deconstructs a heroic myth of
nationalist unity and sacriﬁce by claiming an inclusion of her fragmented narrative of
pain and betrayal by the post-apartheid nation: “I really want to know what has happened
to Mbuyisa. All of us are going to die but I do want to know how my child died and when
did my child die. And I've come here because this is my last hope, that maybe the
Commission could help me ﬁnd out what happened to my child.”'7 McCormick
underlines the continuity between the structural violence against women who lost their
children to apartheid atrocities and the psychological violence against them in a post-
conﬂict regime which is apathetic to tracing the whereabouts or remains of its lost
martyrs. McCormick’s text is eloquent with the contrast between the resistance
movement which gained international leverage ﬁom the image of the death—defying
Mbuyisa Makhubu and the painfully disorienting personal struggle of his mother that
followed when the high-proﬁle event ultimately forced him to ﬂee South Africa forever

in 1977:

 

‘6 [bid

‘7 Ibid.

150

The almost mythical proportions of this single photographic image, so often used
in representations of the struggle against apartheid, paled both before the enormity
of a mother's pain as she tried to make sense of her loss and before the
determination with which she argued for a son's rightful search for continuity with
his father's past.18
McCormick’s study injects into the text the mourning voice of Mbuyisa Makhubu’s
mother and reconstructs the son as the signiﬁer of individual loss and trauma within
liberation struggles. The mother’s voice in McCormick’s archival study of the Soweto
unrest attempts to resist deﬁning the demonstrating students as faceless ideologues of the
revolution. Rather “I Saw a Nightmare” portrays the state violence against the students
not only as racial violence against the black community, but also as brutalizing to the
individual psyche of the South Aﬁ'ican mother.19 With its analysis of the loaded signiﬁer
of the black township of Soweto and the 1976 student uprising in it, “I Saw a Nightmare”
also offers an insight into an apartheid era history of forced removals, black resettlement,
ghettoization, and segregated education. As such, it provides a powerful historical lens to

understand novels like Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother which unfolds around the

 

1' See <http://www.gutenberg-e.org/pohlandt—mccormick/PM.clpl.html>. Nombulelo Elizabeth Makhubu
testiﬁed to the existence of a grandson fathered by Mbuyisa Makhubu in exile in Botswana. The child
visited her in South Africa every year. It is the claim of this child to his father that McCormick refers to
here.

'9 In this regard McCormick’s reﬂections on the post-Soweto role of ANC is especially helpful in
understanding how the individual and collective agency of revolutionaries can be appropriated by political
parties: ANC “impressed its own meanings and interpretations on these events, quickly declaring the
participants heroes, publicly claiming its own hand in the organization of the uprising, while rapidly
organizing its own practical and discursive responses. The ANC faced its own set of challenges: Almost
immediately after the beginning of the uprising, it would need to organize itself to meet the needs of those
young participants in the uprising who were secretly crossing the borders out of South Africa to ﬂee police
persecution and who looked to the ANC for help and inspiration.” <httpj/www.gutenberg-e.orglpohlandt-
mccorrnick/PM.c3pl .html>.

151

murder of the white American student, Amy Biehl, by black youths in the segregated
South African township of Guguletu.

Helena Pohlandt McCormick’s insistent integration of the forgotten voice of
Mbuyisa Makhubu’s mother in “I Saw 3 Nightmare” to question the gender politics of a
post-apartheid South African democracy is only part of a pattern that women researchers
and writers are demonstrating. This pattern has been discussed more elaborately in a later
section. Like McCormick, in Mother to Mother Sindiwe Magona injects the lost voice of
Mandisa--the forgotten mother of Mxolisi. Mxolisi is part of the group of revolutionary
youths who assassinate Biehl. Like Nombulelo Elizabeth Makhubu’s, the maternal voice
of Mandisa articulates the stiﬂed stories about the unique ways in which women in post-
apartlreid South Aﬁ'ica inherited the violent legacies of apartheid.

However, the history of South Africa’s radical protest against apartheid is not
only marked by sustained assaults on familial relationships of women, but also by the
narratives of the revolution’s own violated women. These are the violent stories of female
activists of the ANC who were betrayed and tortured by their male peers within the
revolution itself. Through the TRC the anti-apartheid nationalism of the AN C strived to
construct a new South Aﬁica by silencing the testimonials of pain of these women
activists in the interest of a nationalist narrative of revolutionary unity against apartheid.
Nonetheless, the resilient voice of the revolutionary woman has come back to haunt the
official history of South African national liberation, and has garnered both solidarity and
suspicion ﬁom other women in the process. In effect, this has re—constituted the ANC

master narrative of racial desegregation as a crossover of the multiple narratives of South

152

Aﬁican revolution in which the ﬁght for gender justice is interwoven into the claims for
racial justice.

In March 1996 Beth Goldblatt and Sheila Meintjes spearheaded a workshop
called “Gender and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission” at the University of the
Witwatersrand. The workshop led to an in-depth submission to the TRC underscoring the
ﬂawed methodology of the gender-neutral truth ﬁnding that the TRC was adopting. This
resulted in TRC’S special women’s hearings at Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg.20
Goldblatt and Meintjes later observed: “Rita Mazibuko is one of the only woman to have
spoken about sexual violence at the hands of her own MK (umbrella organization of
AN C) comrades in Swaziland and Mozambique where she was accused of being an
informer” (Agenda 1997).21 In Country of M1 SE1 Antjie Krog highlights the silence
around sexual atrocities during the reconciliation process:22 “Although rumors abound

about rape, all these mutterings are trapped behind closed doors. Apparently high-proﬁle

 

2° Sheila Meintjes and Beth Goldblatt. “Brief Historical Background.” The TRC Rehgted File§ South
Africg; HistorxArchjLe University of Witwatersrand <http://www.saha.mg.za/collections.htm?
collections/AL31 l9f.htm>.

2' In the absence of my direct access to this rare document I am citing this from Jo-Anne Prins, “Mediating
Difference: Politics of Representation in Antjie Krog’s Chronicling of the Women at the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission in Country of My Skull.” Discourses of Difference and Oppression Conf.
University of Venda, Thohoyandou, South Africa, July 21, 2000 <http://www.geocities.com/culdif
/prins.htrn>.

22 In her introduction to Coungy of My Skull the journalist Antjie Krog who covered the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission’s hearings for the South African Broadcasting Company and later on published
the coverage in her book summarizes: “The commission was organized into three committees: Human
Rights Violations, Reparations and Rehabilitation and Amnesty. All told, commissioners took more than
20, 000 statements from survivors and families of political violence. They held more than ﬁfty public
hearings, all around the country, over 244 days. The Amnesty Committee, by law independent of the others
[. . .], received approximately 7,050 amnesty applications—fully 77 percent of them from prisoners. All
three committees were plagued by a huge workload and inadequate resources. And even Archbishop Tutu’s
most eloquent pleas could not persuade whites to come forward to testify in signiﬁcant numbers. Near the
end of the process, one poll suggested that the Truth Commission had done more to hurt race relations than
to promote reconciliation. Indeed, the commission itself had to confront internal allegations of racism.” See
Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: GuihPSorrowh and the Limits of Forg'veness in the New South Africa
(New York & Toronto: Times Books, 1998) xi.

153

women, among them Cabinet ministers, parliamentarians, and businesswomen, were
raped and sexually abused under the previous dispensation—and not only by the regime,
but by their own comrades in the townships and the liberation camps” (239). Krog
recounts Rita Mazibuko’s testimony before the TRC about her prolong and gruesome
sexual torture at the hands of her own AN C comrades. Mazibuko, after undergoing
military training in Angola and Mozambique, was stationed in Swaziland. She was
responsible for working out routes for cadres to move in and out of South Africa. When
nine cadres were shot, she became the target of AN C’s suspicion. The arbitrary nature of
revolutionary justice is underlined through the irony implicit in Krog’s statement: “The
fact that she [Mazibuko] had R35,000 (about $5,800) in her bank account was proof
enough for the AN C that she worked for the apartheid regime” (240). Nevertheless, the
difﬁculty of representing sexual brutality, especially those afflicted by one’s own
comrades is most eloquently and ironically brought to life through the comments of
Antjie Krog herself. She cites Sheila Meintjes who argues that the hypothesis behind the
sexual torture of men is that it will facilitate passivity and demolish political power,
“while the torture of women is the activation of sexuality” (240). In the same breath as
she cites Meintjes, Krog questions the integrity of Rita Mazibuko’s testimony of sexual
atrocities: “It is a strange testimony. Is this woman with the good-natured face, who
speaks of rape as if it is water, who emphasizes the youth of her rapists, nothing more
than a prostitute?” Krog’s cynicism about Mazibuko resounds as she wonders: “And is
her sexual history perhaps the reason why Phosa [AN C Executive Committee member]
says afterward that he has never heard of Rita Mazibuko or “Murnsy Khuswayo”——her

code name in the ANC?” (242). As if in support of her unease with Mazibuko’s

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testimony, Krog summarizes the TRC’s response to Mazibuko’s story: “The Truth
Commission does not utter a single word in Mazibuko’s defense. Not one of the
commissioners, not one of the feminists agitating for women’s rights, stands up and says:
‘We respect the right of Rita Mazibuko to tell the truth as she sees it, just as we respect
the right of Mathews Phosa to tell the truth as he sees it. But we expect him to do the
same’ ” (242). Responding to the distinction between manly honor and feminine wiles
that Krog’s discourse clearly encodes, in her conference paper Jo-Anne Prins has
scathingly declared: “Krog seems to fall into the patriarchal discourse of rape in response
to Rita’s testimony.”23
That the TRC denied the existence of gender-apartheid within liberation
movements through its silence over the sole testimony of Rita Mazibuko underscores that
though post-apartheid South Africa has made a concerted though controversial effort to
foster racial arrrity, when it came to a contest between race and gender justice, as with
Mazibuko, the TRC tilted in favor of racial unity in the new nation at the cost of
acknowledging past violations of AN C women by the liberation struggle itself. The
suspect voice of Rita Mazibuko before the TRC portrayed in Antjie Krog’s Counh'y of
My Skull provides a historical backdrop to Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Stog. Wicomb’s text
is a literary enactment of how the voice of the brutalized female revolutionary,
suppressed by the revolution itself, ﬁ'actures the monolithic narrative of anti-apartheid
militancy. It is a comment on the refracted nature of South Aﬁican national
reconstruction that ironically establishes racial unity by reinforcing the social and

epistemological structures of apartheid with respect to women.

 

23 See Ftnote 16.

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III. Scaffold for Textual Analysis: Women, Anti-Apartheidism,
and Post-Resistance Novels

Post-resistance novels like Mother to Mother and David’s Stogy are studies in the
complexity of relationship among the past, present, and future in South Africa—in how
the violent history of the apartheid era structures the lives of South Aﬁican women in the
post-liberation period. As such, they formulate a strong critique of the TRC through
which the post-apartheid state claims to have come to terms with its violent past through
forgiveness and to have moved toward national unity through reconciliation.

Understanding how the structural legacies of apartheid injustice inherited by the
post-conﬂict state deﬁned the discursive violence against women in the South Aﬁican
racial reconciliation process is vital to a study of the position of women in national
liberation militancy. In “A Gender Perspective on Violence during the Struggle against
Apartheid” Beth Goldblatt and Sheila Meintjes underscore how “[t]he sexual dimensions
of power relations” blatantly expressed in the state sanctioned torture of female dissenters
under The Terrorism Act of 1967,24 “also found expression within political movements.
Men from all quarters found it difficult to accept women’s growing prominence in
political movements.” The authors cite the example of Thenjiwe Mtintso who “had

difﬁculty as a woman in maintaining discipline among her comrades. [. . .] Men found it

 

2’ The Terrorism Act No 83 of 1967 allowed the indeﬁnite detention of an individual by a policeman of
rank lieutenant-colonel or greater since “the act allowed detention lmtil all questions were satisfactorily
answered or until no flnther useful purpose would be achieved by keeping the person in detention. Only a
magistrate could visit the detained once every two weeks, and no one else besides the police and security
services was allowed access. Moreover, “[u]n1ike the previous 90-day (General Law Amendment Act No
37 of 1963) and l80—day (Criminal Procedure Amendment Act No 96 of 1965) detention laws the public
was not entitled to information about people held, including their identity — this meant that people could
effectively 'disappear' for ofﬁcial legal reasons.” See Alistair Boddy-Evans, “Apartheid Era Laws:
Terrorism Act No 83 of 1967”, Aboﬂ: Aﬁcawstm. Our Stgy, 2007, The New York Times Company,
16 February, 2007 <httpﬁ/aﬁicanhistoryaboutcom/cs/apartheidlaws/g/No830f67.htm>.

156

difficult to take orders from a woman, and attempted to undermine her authority by using
sexual innuendoes” (231-2). This gendered dimension of power relations within
liberation movements is poignantly portrayed in the depiction of the glass ceiling for
women activists and through the brutalization of the body of the female revolutionary in
Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Stog. However, unlike Mtintso who attributes her sexual
harassment “to the cultural norms of South Aﬁican society” (232), my analysis reﬁains
from a monolithic understanding of South Aﬁican cultural norms and endeavors to ﬂame
the gendered power structures in militancy within a socioeconomic parameter—a
discourse that can be glossed as African Subaltem Studies. Such a theoretical ﬂame
draws upon the criticism engendered around post-conﬂict national unity through truth
and reconciliation processes in various Aﬁican countries like Nigeria, Uganda, Senegal,
South Africa, and Rwanda, locating gendered oppression in a continuum with the
structural inequalities established through racial tyranny.”

In the context of South Aﬁica one of the most scathing critiques about the
selective silencing of apartheid violence by the post-conﬂict nation-state has come from
Mahmood Mamdani in his critical essays “Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique
of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Aﬁica ('I'RC)” and
“The Truth According to the TRC.” In the former essay Mamdani’s analysis of what he
calls the “racialized/ethnicized legal structure” of apartheid South Aﬁica offers a critical
scaffold to comprehend the intra-racial violence against women revolutionaries within the
ranks of the anti-apartheid militancy itself, which has been largely unrecognized by the

truth and reconciliation process. Mamdani underlines how according to the Natal Code of

 

25 See Iﬁ Amadiume & Abdullahi An-Na’im, “Introduction: Facing Truth, Voicing Justice,” The Politics of
Memory: Trhth. Healing, and Socihl Justice. eds. lﬁ Amadiume & Abdullahi An-Na’im (London & New
York: Zed Books, 2000) l.

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Native Law (1891) the officer governing the British colony of Natal was recognized as
the Supreme Chief. The authors asserts: “In addition to providing the legal basis for
absolute authority over natives, the 1891 law also laid out the legal basis for patriarchal
control over all minors and women in each kraal” (52). According to the law, all inmates
of the kraal, except married males or widowers, or adult males who were not relatives of
the kraal head, were minors. As such, women had no property rights. The head of the
kraal was the absolute owner of all the property of his kraal, and could inﬂict corporeal
punishment upon the kraal’s inmates for any just reason. The uniﬁcation of the country in
1910 meant that the united English and Afrikaans population of white South Aﬁica
would be ruled by democracy while the natives would be ruled by decree.
The rule of apartheid was bifurcated: the law simultaneously racialized and
etlmicized the population. Races were deﬁned as those not native, not indigenous;
whether they were accorded full civil rights (whites) or only residual rights
(Coloreds, Indians), races were governed through civil law. In contrast, tribes
were deﬁned as those indigenous, those native to the land; set apart ethnically,
each tribe was ruled through its own patriarchal authority claiming to enforce its
version of colonially sanctioned patriarchy as “customary law” (53).
This colonial administrative structure of native law-enforcing authority and its ethnic
subjects set the stage for the intraracial violence during the apartheid era. Contextualizing
Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Stogy against Mamdani’s argument, the intra-racial violence on
black women militants by their male comrades can be justiﬁably perceived in terms of
the structural violence against women unleashed by apartheid. The foundation of such an

apartheid project is built on colonialism which strengthened the existent patriarchy by

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reinforcing native customary laws. This adequately contests any notions of gender related
violence on women as symptoms of an essentialist South Aﬁican culture.

Mahmood Mamdani’s “The Truth According to the TRC” as well as Beth
Goldblatt’s and Sheila Meintjes’s “A Gender Perspective on Violence during the Struggle
against Apartheid” also provide a critical understanding of how the structures of
apartheid not only resulted in agential violence against women but also systemic and
structural violence against women. Agential violence against women, depicted in M
Shay, was recognized by the TRC, while much of the structural violence of which
women became the indirect but primary victims was not recognized by the TRC as
apartheid brutality. Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother offers a poignant exploration of
apartheid’s indirect violence against black women at the same time as it acknowledges
how such systemic and race-marked violence against black South Africans resulted in
retaliatory atrocities on white women. Mamdani’s as well as Goldblatt’s and Meintjes’s
critical essays thus provide crucial theoretical parameters for understanding apartheid
tyranny against women in South Aﬁica.

In “The Truth According to the TRC” Mahmood Mamdani criticizes the “highly
individualized notion of truth and responsibility” (182) which led to a political
compromise between state agents, largely deﬁned as perpetrators, and political activists
who formed only a small minority of victims. Mamdani underlines that without locating
“agency within the workings of a system” (180), “[t]he TRC deﬁned over 20,000 South
Aﬁicans as the ‘victims’ of apartheid, leaving the vast majority in the proverbial cold”
(178). This is what the author calls institutionally produced truth by the TRC “whose

search was so committed to reinforcing the new power” of the AN C (177). Institutionally

159

produced truth linked truth to power while individually produced truth opposed truth to
power. According to Mamdani:

An understanding of gross violations that would have included the violence done

to the 3.5 million victims of forced removals, and an understanding of context that

would have highlighted the colonial violence leading to the dispossession of land
and the militarization of labour, would have produced a different kind of truth. It
would have illuminated apartheid as a reality lived by the rmjority, a reality that
produced racialized poverty alongside racialized truth, both equally undeserved. It

would have redeﬁned our understanding of the victim of apartheid. (180)

In his article “Amnesty or Impunity?” Mamdani contests the distinction between bodily
integrity rights and subsistence rights which the TRC made, validating only the claim of
the former to enter the discourse of the TRC. This distinction between the political and
the economic—the direct oppression by the state and the structural inequalities created by
the market, Mamdani argues, falls apart when faced with injustices like coerced labor and
forced removal where “political power directly intervened in the sphere of economic
relations.” He asserts: “They could not be dismissed as structural outcomes lacking in
agency and therefore not signifying a violation” (39).

In “A Gender Perspective on Violence during the Struggle against Apartheid”
Goldblatt and Meintjes emphasize how women especially reconﬁgured the concept of the
apartheid victim. The authors acknowledge the direct violence on women by the agents of
the state and the revolution, but also highlight how the home itself was politicized as
women became indirect objects of violence through the loss and abduction of their family

members. In fact, the Detainees Parents Support Committee (DPSC) was one of the

160

forums which drew women out into the political struggle. Sindiwe Magona’s DIEM
M_oth_e; is such a narrative about the systemic violence on women’s relationship with
their children as the latter are brutalized and hardened by the structures of the apartheid
state. Goldblatt’s and Meintjes’s interview of Lydia Kompe, a former trade unionist and
campaigner of rural women’s rights who went on to become a member of the Parliament
in the post-apartheid era, succinctly deﬁnes the problematics around the understanding of
apartheid violence against women. The inﬂux control of the urban population by the
apartheid government severely restricted rural women from joining their husbands who
worked in the urban areas. Kompe asks: “Can one actually say it’s violence. . . It’s not as
serious as my husband being killed in jail. [. . .] So that’s what I always say to myself,
what is this violence? How can one express it to somebody who can actually feel
sympathetic? [. . .] And this was where it actually crippled me in my nrin ” (236). In this
context Goldblatt and Meintj es underscore the signiﬁcance of the Promotion of Truth and
Reconciliation Act which recognizes relatives or dependents of victims as direct victims
of human rights violations. However, the nebulous nature of violence that Kompe
underscores hinders the acknowledgement of structural violations that women
experienced under apartheid rule and leaves the maternal voice in Mother to Mothg
groping for the only sympathetic response it can expect in a landscape where truth about
violence is racialized and gendered—from another bereaved mother.

Texts like Mother to Mother and David’s Stog are about speciﬁc spaces of
otherized violence—on women—which ruptln'e the generalizations of the doctrinal

narrative of apartheid violence in South Aﬁica, and as such the ideological directives

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aimed at post-apartheid South African cultural productions.26 In their introduction to
Writingﬁmth Africa: Literature. Apartheid, and Democrag, 1970-1995 Rosemary Jolly
and Derek Attridge point out: “It was as early as the 19203 that Peter Abrahams, staunch
Communist and anti-apartheid writer, refused to accept the Party’s demands that he
submit his work to be vetted; and as recently as 1993 that Andre Brink expressed his
misgivings over the bureaucratic ‘management of culture’ by the AN C’s Department of
Arts and Culture” (7). The push is toward resisting the totalitarian control of intellectual
productions in the name of the political exigency of revolutionary justice so that the
master narrative of the revolution does not erase the smaller narratives of violence against
women that slice through essentialist notions of identity—of victims and perpetrators. In
the context of post-apartheid South Aﬁica ﬁctional literature like Mother to Mother and
David’s Story, through their imaginative rendering of repressed stories of revolutionary
injustice against women, reﬂect how ethical priorities for artists and intellectuals change
in response to power shifts in politics.” Such meta-narratives are reminiscent of the
apartheid era when “whole territories of historical consciousness [were] silenced by the

power establishment and invaded by the dominant discourse in order to make them

 

2’ “South Africa has passed through a period that has for obvious reasons produced a large body of what
one might call judgmental texts, both critical and creative; texts that assume an ethical sufﬁciency to exist
in the condemnation of apartheid and its agents. For this reason, the current South African situation forms a
productive arena for the exploration of the uses and limitations of, as well as alternatives to, judgmental
writing. For one can grant a historical strategic importance to judgmental writing in the struggle against
apartheid without denying the fact that it has produced a paucity of options for creative responses to post-
apartheid freedoms and their attendant challenges” (7). See Rosemary Jolly and Derek Attridge,

“Introduction,” Writing South Aﬁica: Litm AhaLtheig, and Demgcm, 1970-1995 (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1998).

2’ See Jolly and Attridge, 1. Such a call for artistic and cultural visions with “its capacity to expose

contradictions and reveal hidden tensions” had also come from Albie Sachs from within the ANC. See
Albie Sachs, “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom,” Writing South Afr-lg, 240.

162

inaccessible to other voices” (Brink 15). Thus, ﬁctional literature becomes a site of
historical praxis.28
IV. Violent Nationalization: United in Revolutionary Silence?

In her extensive study of the correlation between the South Aﬁican nationalist
struggle and the women’s struggle in Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South
Africa: Contesting Authority, Shireen Hassim observes: “As a discursive framework,
nationalism had an authoritative status akin to a master narrative, and within it there were
distinct and politically upheld boundaries to women’s agency” (34). These boundaries
typically deﬁned by the overwhelming male leadership in the anti-apartheid nationalism
thus limited women’s political agency within the parameters of the national struggle. On
the other hand, literary productions like Mother to Mother and David’s Story foreground
how the counter-discourse of truth and reconciliation, aiming to rectify the discourse of
apartheid, blocks out other narratives counter to itself. In the process these texts challenge
the TRC’s language of clemency, reconciliation, and national unity around which it
attempted to construct a post-apartheid non-racial democracy based on Archbishop
Desmond Tutu’s highly contested theology of forgiveness. In his book No Future
Without Forgiveness Tutu justiﬁes such a theology of national reconciliation, arguing
that the TRC’s approach to enabling a nation-wide closure on violence during the
apartheid era through post-conﬂict amnesty was founded upon the spirit of ubunm—
“restorative justice, which was characteristic of traditional Aﬁican jurisprudence.” In
ubuntu “the central concern is not retribution or punishment.” It is “the healing of

breaches, the redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationships, a seeking

 

2’ See Andre Brink, Writing South Afric_a, 18.

163

to rehabilitate both the victim and the perpetrator, who should be given the opportunity to
be reintegrated into the community he has injured by his offence” (55). By setting up
apartheid violence as an exchange between monolithic categories of perpetrators and
victims in No Future Without Forgiveness, ironically dedicated “To the women and the
‘little people’ of South Africa”, Tutu derecognizes the entire repertoire of structural
violence in apartheid South Africa which affected women brutally in ways distinct ﬁom
men. On the other hand, South African women’s ﬁction like Mother to Mother and
David’s Story form “a literary archive documenting the indivisibility of social and
economic rights from the civil and political rights that international human rights NGOS
spend most of their time addressing.”29 It is only by acknowledging the “deep structural
connection” between colonial and apartheid exploitation and their “attendant civil and
political brutalities” that affected both men and women in South Africa that restorative
justice for South Aﬁican women violated in distinctively gendered ways can even be
imagined.

Masculinist Nationalism: In my exploration of Motherfto Mothe_r and David’s Stogy
masculinist nationalism connotes not only defensive onslaughts but also the homoerotic
nationalist bonding among collectives of racially subj ugated men who empower
themselves by unleashing brutal violence on defenseless women from across the racial
spectrum. Mother to Mother which pivots around South Africa’s transition from
apartheid into non-racialism is a profoundly moving study in the gendered ethics of
nationalism—more speciﬁcally in the “hysteria of masculism”, to borrow Gayatri
Spivak’s phrase from A (Illigue of Postcolonigi Rm (134). A near portrnanteau term,

compounded ﬁom masculine and muscular, “masculism” asserts the rights of men in an

 

‘9 See Goldberg <http://ac132007.eomplit. ucla.edu/restricted/papers>.

164

already unequally empowered world—fractured along gendered lines of privilege. The
celebration of men’s privileges in such an unequal world further intensiﬁes the imbalance
of power to almost Dionysian levels of social disproportion, clinchingly signiﬁed by
Spivak as the hysteria of masculisrrr. The episode of Amy Biehl’s murder in Sindiwe
Magona’s Mother to Mother captures this orgiastic nationalism of South Africa’s sons as,
in a plethora of knife stabs, they inscribe and consolidate black youth power on the white
female body of Amy Biehl. As the jubilant crowd of youngsters approach Amy Biehl’s
car, Magona registers their “wild and thunderous, chanting and screaming, ﬁsts stabbing
air. Fists raised towards the blue, unsmiling heavens” (19). The vertical appeal to the
skies is not in the shape of a prayer, but in the form of ﬁst stabbing assaults against the
very injustice of the “heavens.” As the mythopoeic heavens of a politically transient
South Africa loom unsmiling on the reiteration of imminent racial injustice against a
powerless white woman, revolutionary zeal gets encoded not as just but as “wild”—the
force of its injustice “thunderous” as it chants and screams in orgasmic violence.
Magona’s muted rendering of the act of murder effectively encapsulates the unutterable
latency of such collective phallic behavior. As the author traces the reaction of Mandisa,
Mxolisi’s mother, while she learns about the event from her neighbor, Skonana, the novel
creates a literary world in which imagination trembles on the threshold of excruciating
agony, hesitant to envision the magnitude of obscenity in this bacchanalian revelry of
violence. In this world all that the mother of an assassin can do is pray so that
unspeakable acts of vehemence are rendered a little benign. Mandisa pleads to divine
benevolence: “How could a person die from the car she’s in being stoned? Terrible

visions of necklacing ﬂared before my eyes. Oh no! No! Not tlnrt! Dear God! Not that!”30

 

3° Necklacing was a common act of violence in South Africa where a person was garlanded with a tire

165

The brutal force of the mob violence against a lone defenseless woman is arrested
tellingly through the contrasting gentleness with which Skonana narrates Mxolisi’s “sin”
to his mother: “Knife,” she said quietly. Her right ﬁst, thumb up, plunged into the cupped
palm of the left hand, making a noise softer than that produced by two hands clapping
against each other. Softer and duller than a smack or ﬁst hitting hand. Harder, though. A
thank, lacking sharpness but heavy as hell. ‘They stabbed her’ ” (46-7). In the ﬁnal
confessional scene of Mxolisi’s repentance before his mother the herd psyche of
masculinist nationalism is in full display as the young revolutionary asserts: “Mama,
believe me, I was just one of a hundred pe0ple who threw stones at her car.” Mxolisi was
one of the “ ‘many people [who] stabbed her.’ ” The mother’s agony at her son’s
participatory role in this collective black masculine rite of passage is shrill: “Were you
one of them? One of the many people who stabbed the girl? Howl prayed, even as I
asked the question, how I prayed that the answer would be an unequivocal NO [. . .] Not
the knife. He had not plunged a knife into her body. Not even one of many, many knives”
(195). The bacchanalian orgy of violence attains a narrative closure in another orgasmic
sweep of emotions as the son unable to satiate the mother’s inordinate entreaties for his
confession of innocence in the act of murder breaks down in his mother’s arms to “cry
himself on and on till the sobs became dry gasps as of one ﬁghting for air” (196).
Tracing other narratives of masculinist nationalism enunciated through the
violence marking the bodies of helpless white women, the mother’s narrative places

Biehl’s assassination on a continuum with other racialized and gendered acts of mayhem

 

which was set aﬂame.

166

and massacre. Recalling the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960,31 Mandisa testiﬁes to the
“little difference it made to black people that some whites were sympathetic to their
cause.” She recounts how three young nurses ﬁom Belgium, hearing about the state
sponsored Sharpeville Massacre, came to South Africa. “[T]hinking the presence of
outsiders might act as a deterrent, they came to bear witness,” only to be beaten by a
group of South Aﬁican men “bearing sticks and God only knows what else.” The pathos
of such undeserved suffering ﬂows into the texture of Biehl’s undeserved fate as the pain
of the narrative voice resonates with that of the suffering women: “Three, defenceless,
unarmed women. Beaten by a troop of men. One suffered a broken jaw. Another, several
deep cuts at the back of her head. The third, a sprinter, twisted her ankle. As soon as
those poor women were discharged ﬁom hospital, they left the country. Back to
Belgium” (70). As a schoolgirl Mandisa had sung: “Oh, what abominable misfortune—in
East London/They burnt a nun—in East London.” In retrospect she traces the celebratory
violence underlying such songs: “we sang the song of the nun who was killed by black
people, Aﬁicans, in far-away East London. Sang the song when not one of the teachers

had taken the trouble of explaining to us that the people of East London should not have

 

3' The Sharpeville Massacre signiﬁes the beginning of armed resistance in South Aﬁica. It prompted
worldwide recognition and condemnation of South Aﬁica’s apartheid policies. On March 21, 1960 sixty-
nine people were killed when South African police opened ﬁre on approximately three-hundred
demonstrators. Unofﬁcial statistics of the injured goes up as high as three hundred. They were protesting
against the pass laws at the township of Sharpeville. See Alistair Boddy-Evans, “Sharpeville Massacre: The
Origin of South Africa’s Human Rights Day”, Abou_t: African Histm. Our Stog, 2006, The New York
Times Company, 28 February, 2007 < http://africanhistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa-
SharpevilleMassacre-ahtm>. Commonly known as the Pass Laws, the Natives (Abolition of Passes and
Co-ordination of Documents) Act, Act No 67 of 1952 required black people to carry identiﬁcation papers
with them at all times. A pass included a photograph, details of place of origin, employment record, tax
payments, and encounters with the police. Not being able to produce a pass when required to do so by the
police was a criminal offence. Black people could not leave a rural area for an urban one without a permit
fromthe local authorities. Onarrivinginanurbanareaone hadtoobtainapermittoseek workwithin
seventy-two hours. See Alistair Boddy-Evans, “Apartheid Legislation in South Aﬁica”, About: Aﬁican
History. 93 Story. 2006, The New York Times Company, 28 February, 2007 < httpzllafricanhistory.
aboutcom/library/bl/blsalaws.htm>.

167

done that” (74). Thus, Mandisa’s argument is not merely against violence toward her own
community; it is against perpetuating the cyclical pattern of violence.

Relocating these narratives of youth violence on white women in Mgthghtg
M_othe_r_ against the 1976 student uprising in Soweto, in an interview with David Atwell
and Barbara Harlow, Sindiwe Magona emphasizes how the violent legacy of apartheid
dehumanized South Aﬁican youth, resulting in retaliatory violence on women. Magona’s
stand is critical of the ideological rmderpinnings of the Soweto revolution: “there must
have been people who didn’t want to do this. This for me is 1976. [. . .] [T ]here was this
movement, this feeling that to advance we had to retreat.” Magona traces the continuum
between the student protest in Soweto and the mob violence that Amy Biehl encounters
in the black township of Guguletu. She questions the anti-apartheid str'uggle’s
exploitation of youth power dming the Soweto revolution and the cycle of violence that
was perpetuated by such an ideology of revolution:

every child should just abandon their education. [. . .] And when they stop going

to school, nobody's teaching them anywhere else? There are no alternative

arrangements until the end of the year, and then they don’t sit for exams? And
subsequently, the young people who were now not in school began to look to the
killing of people, and the necklacing, and the burning of people's houses if they

were suspected of being collaborators. (289)

Magona’s is the perspective of a parent with foresight into her children’s future. In her
interview she elaborates on how in the last public meeting that she attended at the
Anglican Church in South Aﬁica before leaving the country she had asked if children

were allowed to sink to the level of burning people’s houses how would parents recall

168

them back one day. Magona adds: “And I was dismissed, of course, because that was not
the revolutionary statement that was needed for this occasion” (290). She calls these
children “the lost generation”—children “who have no qualms in killing; young people
who have learned to get their way by force” (290). She is talking about a whole
generation lost to violence——as victims of violence as well as its agents. In a clinching
and daring analysis that fractures the monolithic anti-apartheid ideology of revolutionary
unity, Magona highlights how the coalition between parents and the revolution went a
long way in depleting the human resources of a whole generation of South Africans: “We
were there when the generation was getting lost, and we didn’t stop it. To allow children,
to let our children sacriﬁce so much, who is going to ever give them that back? Can I
give children who never went to school for ten years—can I give them those ten years
back.” (290). Magona’s words resound the TRC testimony of Nombulelo Elizabeth
Makhubu in which she pleaded for help from the post-conﬂict state in her search for her
sow-Mbuyisa Makhubu, the lost hero of the Soweto revolution. Magona continues asking
hard questions: “Do you hear the government or anybody else saying, ‘O.K., let's talk
now, let's go back. Anybody between the ages of this and this, go back to school for
ﬁee’? The county hardly has resources to cope with the current crop of young people
who should be in school. Never nrind that loss” (289). Magona’s argument is of critical
signiﬁcance in the discourse of a new South Africa.

As Meg Samuelson puts it, Magona’s “is a voice perhaps only made possible by
the demise of aparthei ” (232). The rigidly deﬁned boundaries around racial identities
during the apartheid era which also made possible an essentialist black political space

ﬁ'om which to launch offensives against the apartheid state is contested in the new South

169

Aﬁican writing. Thus, in Mother to Mother the narrative voice of Mandisa condemns the
masculinist nationalism of the mob of black youth in killing a white woman in the name
of retributive racial justice for black South Africans. Sarnuelson’s essay discusses the
tension in Mandisa’s narrative voice which refuses to be united in revolutionary silence
with black men when faced with their masculinist violence on other women and at the
same time upholds a systemic understanding of violence on South Aﬁican youth and
their dehumanization. Examining the different ways in which the narrative voice explores
the mob violence against Amy Biehl, Samuelson goes on to point out how through a
range of disturbing irnagistic comparisons between the crowd that attacked Biehl--ants,
millipede, forest, and pig intestines—the novel captures the anxiety of the narrator over
the collective identity of the black community. Moreover, on the morning of the killing,
the group “swallows” Mandisa’s son, Mxolisi, who is “lost” in the crowd.32 When the
crowd splits into two, Mandisa’s analogy for the mob is drawn from protozoan life
marked as simplistic in biological functional logic—unicellular and undifferentiated, and
hence headless: “[t]o facilitate mobility the amoeba divided itself” (15).

However, it is critical to ask if Magona’s critique of black nationalism is only

possible because Biehl was a white American rather than a white South African.33

 

32 See Meg Samuelson, “Reading the Maternal Voice in Sindiwe Magona's To My Children's Children and
Mother to Mother.” Modern Fiction Studies 46.1 (2000): 230.

 

33 “1 suggest, though, that Magona's attraction to this particular event has more to do with her location and
the spaces which living in America, as opposed to South Aﬁica, has opened up for her. We can conclude
that the ﬁgure of the white American mother instead of the white South African mother makes signiﬁcant
differences in the claims that l have been making for this text as a herald of the mythical "New South
Africa" [The Rainbow Nation]. The address to the white American mother does not necessarily imply the
dissolution of differences we have seen operating among South Aﬁican women. Once again a ﬁctional
device, this time of distancing, is used to resolve contadictions embedded in the text—here between a wish
to cross barriers and a lingering reluctance to make afﬁliations with white South African women.” See
Samuelson Modern Fiction Studies 46.1(2000): 234.

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Samuelson has argued that the narrator is caught between communal afﬁliations and
gender coalitions with women across racial barriers. Extending her contention, I argue
that despite this dilemma of the narrative voice, women of Mandisa’s generation is also
witness to the political passion of white South Aﬁican women like Ruth First for the
rights of South Aﬁican blacks. Biehl’s activism reiterates this passion of those women
who fought across racial divides for justice in South Africa.34 In her prison memoir L
wahich she composed during her incarceration under the Ninety-Day Detention Act
as a suspected ally of the accused in the Rivonia Trial,” Ruth First (a child of Jewish
American immigrants) ponders the unique social location of white South Aﬁicans

activists protesting against the apartheid. She says that though their consciences were

 

3‘ In this context I would like to mention that Sindiwe Magona’s use of the tape of the mother demarcates
itself distinctly from the biologically determined gender discourse of national liberation which stategically
deploys this as a cental tope to encourage women to bear the next generation of soldiers. Rather it is the
motherism tope of South Aﬁican indigenous feminism which “was shaped by the twin but not always
compatible needs to address the interplay of gender, race, and class identities, on the one hand , a moral
imperative to base women’s organizations on the idea of nonracialism—that is, on the notion of some
commonality of women’s interests that extended beyond apartheid-deﬁned identities. The link between
these goals was provided by the ideology of motherhood and the political language of ‘motherism’: a
celebration of women as mothers, a link between women’s familial responsibilities and their political work,
and an emphasis on this aspect of women’s roles as cutting across class and race barriers” (76). See Shireen
Hassim, “Voices, Hierarchies and Spaces: Reconﬁguring the Women’s Movement in Democratic South
Africa,” Politikoh, 32.2 (November 2005). The cross-racial bond between Mandisa and Linda Biehl is a
bond forged by the fears and worries of women whose children could fall prey to the brutal system
anytime. Hassim goes on to add: “This politicization of taditional roles was part of a revolutionary
nationalism in which woman, mother, and nation were part of a continuous discourse. Several campaigns
that included different races of women, such as protests against toops in the townships and against
detention of activists, were conducted under the banner of motherism” (76-7). See Hassim.

3‘ In 1963 under the Ninety-Day Detention Act Ruth First was detained in solitary conﬁnement without
warrant of arrest, charge, or tial. Due to her immediate re-arrsst after the ninety-day period, her
imprisonment lasted for one-hundred and seventeen days. Rivonia was the farm that was initially used for
the meetings of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK), the ANC’s armed wing Ruth First’s husband, Joe Slovo, was a
founder member of this group. See The Close§t of Stangers 201. Also see ﬁnote 18. Ten ANC leaders, one
of whom was Nelson Mandela, were tied in the Rivonia Trial and charged as “collectively responsible for
two hundred twenty-two acts of sabotage” (310). Mandela states: “We were charged with sabotage and
conspiracy rather than high teason because the law does not require a long preparatory examination (which
is highly useful to the defense) for sabotage and conspiracy as it does for teason. Yet the supreme
penalty—death by hanging—is the same. With high teason, the state must prove its case beyond a
reasonable doubt and needs two witlesses to testify to each charge. Under the Sabotage Law, the onus was
on the defense to prove the accused innocent” (308). See Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The
Autobiomphy of Nelson Mandela (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1994).

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clear in a guilt-ridden society, yet with the intensiﬁcation of the struggle this group came
to lead a “more and more schizophrenic existence.” With “complete absorption in
revolutionary politics and deﬁance of all the values of [. . .] [their] own racial group”,
“the privileges of membership in the white group were overwhelmed by the penalties of
political participation” (122). In my analysis of the critique of black masculinist
nationalism violently etching the bodies of white women that Mother to Mother embarks
upon, I argue that it is not merely Biehl’s identity as an American that unleashes the
vehement censure of her killing by the narrative voice of Moth_er to Mother. It is also the
fact that South Aﬁica has witnessed the involvement of prominent and dedicated ﬁgures
like Ruth First in anti-apartheid activism that makes such a critique of essentialist politics
possible. The silenced voices of South African women which ruptm'e the continuity of the
nationalist myth also recapture the violence of black nationalism on black revolutionary
women. In an interview with Hein Willemse, Zoe Wicomb outlines the problematic
nature of nationalism that she sets out to expose in all its complexity in David’s Stom:
“One of the things I am critical of in the novel is the value of military value. Again, how
would this have happened without these so-called nasty people who are prepared to take
up arms and are prepared to kill” (151). Advocating Spivak’s notion of “strategic
nationalism”, Wicomb underlines the absolute need for a South Aﬁican nationalism to
overthrow the old system of apartheid. However, in a clinching summation of her literary
project in David’s Stogy she asserts: “I’m simply interested to know what happens to that
nationalism once it’s not needed stategically” (151). In other words, Wicomb questions
the post-apartheid nationalism that proclaims enfranchisement for all and denies the

counter-narratives to South African unity that articulates the dispossession of certain

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people within the post-apartheid nation. Though David’s story is also the story of
Dulcie—the female AN C revolutionary, Dulcie cannot be fully articulated in the text just
as her aberrant story cannot be accommodated at the TRC hearings for it goes outside the
scope of the Commission’s prescriptive model of victims and perpetrators. Dulcie’s story
would claim the recognition of faultlines along which power distributes itself between
men and women within the anti-apartheid revolution itself.

It is this unrepresentability of the discourse of truth and tauma, especially with
respect to sexual brutality inﬂicted on revolutionary AN C women in a display of gender
power, which is portayed in David’s Stogy in the torture of Dulcie. The depiction of this
episode resists a clear narrative about whether Dulcie was tortured by her male peers
within the AN C or by the regime. This becomes a deliberate ploy to capture the
anomalous treatment that the TRC reserved for the female victims of sexual violence. As
Dulcie’s attackers undress her and wave the electrodes, one of them says: “Not rape, that
will teach her nothing, leave nothing; rape’s too good for her kin ” (178). This underlines
the asexualization of the female militant by the revolution that the text repeatedly
highlights though we can never know for sure if Dulcie’s attackers are AN C guerrillas.
However, that the revolutionary patriarchy did not hesitate to use the sexuality of female
militants as a weapon against them is evident when Dulcie is described as a woman “who
has turned her muscles into ropes of steel,” and “who even as an eager girl in the bush
wars resisted the advances of those in power, resisted her own comrades, having worked
out that fucking women was a way of preventing them from rising in the Movement”

(179).

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Phallic nationalism marked by gender violence against women is depicted in
David’s Story as a crucial marker of brutal hierarchy within the liberation movement.
Training the female militant to accept gender hierarchy becomes an integral part in
revolutionary training, as is vividly portrayed in the guerrilla education of David’s wife—
Sally. Though she enjoys the water, she performs poorly in her swimming class at the
training camp in Mozambique, “unable to confess her terror” as “the comrade with his
hand under her belly barked his instructions” (123). As the contingent walks back across
the sand he says:

A fuck, that’s what you need, and she saw his bulging shorts and knew that her

time had come, as She had known it would come sooner or later, this unspoken

part of a girl’s training. [. . .] [S]ince she had long forgotten the fantasy of the
virginal white veil, it did not matter, she told herself, no point in being fastidious,
there were more important things to think of, there was ﬁ'eedom on which to ﬁx

her thoughts. (123)

Fixing thoughts on national “ﬁeedom” erases the blatant and violent power divide
between men and women in the revolution. Denying the humiliation and pain of betayal
within the movement itself as her own fastidiousness about sexual propriety, Sally
excuses the heroes of the revolution as untarnished because of their devotion to the
greater cause of a democratic nationhood. Thus, violent and unattached passions get
unofﬁcially licensed by the revolution.

This “unspoken part of a girl’s taining” in liberation struggle in southern Aﬁica
was also portrayed in the controversial ﬁlm ﬂung, directed by Ingrid Sinclair. The

context is the civil war in Zimbabwe between 1972 and 1980. The untold stories of

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women combatants who fought with men in comradeship are also stories of women who
were violated by their comrades. In Sinclair’s ﬁlm, Florence, renamed Flame by the
revolution—the beautiful and dynamic militant who leaves home for the liberation war to
join the charismatic leader Danger--is raped by another comrade Che. The outcome of
this is a son who is not claimed by the father. In another particularly touching scene in the
ﬁlm, we see the women’s contingent starving since they are the reserve force, and in the
face of food shortage, meals were being distributed only to the active force of men. The
extent of physiological disruption of the starving women in the camps comes through to
us in the words of a woman who says that even her menstrual cycles have stopped in the
face of acute hunger. In such conditions of scarcity, sexual favors to leaders become
decisive in obtaining food for women. Thus, in both Ingrid Sinclair’s ﬁlm and Zoe
Wicomb’s novel the alliance of diverse agents of tyranny against women is a crucial
narrative vector that deﬁnes the relationship between women and nationalism.
Womanist Nationalism: In my reading of the two texts, womanist or uterine nationalism
stands for the critical nationalism of South African women. These texts restore the ﬁglne
of the black woman from the discursive terrain of nationalism and examine the stakes for
women in patriarchal strategies of nation-building. The critical nationalism of black
women, however, never fails to contextualize women’s stakes in revolutionary
nationalism against the legacy of colonialism and apartheid.

In depicting the relationship in which Aﬁican and European men stand with
respect to the reproductive bodies of South Aﬁican women like Sally and her Khoi Khoi
ancestor—Saartje Baartrnan, David’s Stogy offers a penetating insight into the meeting of

both black nationalism and European imperialism over the body of the black female. The

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uterine nationalism of South African women lies in re-appropriating their own
reproductive bodies ﬁom the discourses of nationalism and imperialism. The patriarchal
alliance between anti-apartheid nationalism and European imperialism is highlighted by
Wicomb as she draws out the afﬁnities between her revolutionary hero—David—and the
eighteenth century French scientist—Georges Cuvier—whose racialization of the natural
sciences led to one of the most dehumanizing of scientiﬁc spectacles known in history.
Saartje Baartmarr—a Khoi Khoi woman, later known as the “Hottentot Venus” became
an icon of racial inferiority and savage female sexuality as Cuvier’s imperialist scientiﬁc
research of black female anatomy brutally rendered her into an object for the European
gaze:
For it was not only the spectacular steatopygia [generous buttocks] that she
strutted in her cage for all of England and France to giggle at—no, the entire
world, thanks to Cuvier, could peer in private at those parts of which no decent
person would speak, let alone make drawings. [. . .] It was the shame in print, in
perpetuity, the thought of a reader turning to that page, that reﬁeshed David’s
outage. (33).
Enraged by the thought of another reader’s objectiﬁcation of the black female anatomy,
David nonetheless becomes the voyeur himself. Among six books in his hotel room
David chooses Cixjosities of Natural Histog and turns to the reference to Cuvier. David
ﬁnds “his interest deﬂected ﬁ'om outrage on Baartrnan’s behalf to fascination with
Cuvier’s mind, with the intellectual life tlmt he imagined for the anatomist. [. . .] That
Cuvier rejecting the obviousness of form, should have invented a system based on

features hidden ﬁ'om view appealed to the guerrilla” (32). Thus in spite of the racial

176

animosity, David makes connections between Cuvier’s racialized system of classiﬁcation
of organisms and the tactics of a guerrilla war that contest racial hierarchy. What serves
as a barrier between David and Cuvier is not an empathy with the personal story of a
suffering woman, alienated from her people, and displayed naked in a cage before the
eyes of the world, but a South African man’s outage at Europe revealing the secrets of
the black female body. In the process, the body of the Hottentot Venus becomes a terrain
of racial stuggle between David and Cuvier, as the psychological pain of the woman
who dies is lost and she becomes merely the Sign of European colonial victory over the
black man. Tracing the body of Saartje Baartnan in the discursive exchange between
Cuvier and David, texts like David’s Story become exercises in uterine nationalism of the
critical variety by women writers of South African heritage who attempt to restore justice
to such lost female bodies by returning them to the discourse of women’s critical
nationalism like that of Wicomb where they properly belong.

The link between the European colonizers of the past and the South African
liberators of the present is reinforced not only by David’s connection with Cuvier, but
also through the relational similarity in which the women of the past and the present
stand vis-a-vis the projects of imperialism and the nationalism. In David’s Stog
Baartman’s fabled buttocks become metonymic of women like Sally whose bodies are in
the service of men like David: “Steatopygous Sally, turning to the tune of the collapsed
springs of the mattress, presses a buttock into David’s thin hip, and offering warmth and
well-being that brings a sleep-smile to his lips, does not as yet know of the epithet or its
meaning” (16). With his inﬂuence in the movement David has released Sally from her

underground militancy so that she can become the homemaker for David and the mother

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of his children. Sally is offered the portfolio of a community worker for the revolution,
resulting in “an emptiness, a hollowness inside as if she had aborted, no miscarried, and a
rush of unfamiliar hormones left her listless for weeks.” After she marries David and has
a baby boy, Wicomb states that she looks like “an emaciated scarecrow of a woman with
uneven, vegetal tufts of hair and liverish spots on her brown skin” (14). The violence
with which women’s bodies are appropriated by sanctioned institutions like marriage and
colonial scientiﬁc research, and the ways in which their bodies are rendered into
insturnents for male beneﬁt at the cost of women’s well-being, inexticably connect
Sally to Saartje Baartman. This also serves to forge the crucial link between nationalism,
upheld by marriage and family which is the smallest rubric of the nation, and imperialism
bolstered by the inﬁ'astructures of scientiﬁc rationality, both achieved at the expense of
women. The post-resistance critical nationalism of South African women writers like
Wicomb challenges a monolithic reading of nationalism and imperialism as opposed to
each other by their incisive discourses of uterine nationalism that bring to light the
invisible connections between imperialism and nationalism around the female
reproductive body.

In Mother to Mother the authorial voice of Sindiwe Magona which is conﬂated
with the narrative voice of the protagonist—Mandisa—takes on the potent force of
uterine nationalism to scathingly denounce the legacy of apartheid that led to the
structural violence against black women whose children were dehumanized by the
system. In an interview Sindiwe Magona tells David Atwell and Barbara Harlow how
Mother to Mother came to be written in “empathy for the mother of the perpetator of

such a crime” when the author realized that one of the four men implicated in the murder

178

of Amy Biehl was her childhood friend, Mandisa (283). She says that the book also
expressed an urge to explain to the Biehls that “sometimes with the best intention in the
world, there are situations where parents cannot be effective parents.” Magona stands on
its head the reproductive demands on women (to bear soldiers) that conventional uterine
nationalism makes and instead launches an uterine nationalism that condemns the failure
of a nation to make parents available to raise their children: “The [apartheid] government
of South Africa was waging war against African families. If the father was working it
was never for enough wages. So the mother had also to be working; the children were
being brought up by who? And today we wonder that all these young people are lost”
(285). The authorial preface to Mother to Mothg succinctly contextualizes the murder of
Amy Biehl in the unequal stuctural division of global resources between the privileged
world of the United States and apartheid South Aﬁica. The author asks: “What was the
world of this young women’s killers, the world of those, young as she was young, whose
environment failed to nurture them in the higher ideals of humanity and who, instead,
became lost creatures of malice and destuction?” (v). Deﬁning “the legacy of apartheid”
as “a system repressive and brutal, that bred senseless inter- and intra-racial violence as
well as other nefarious happenings,” Sindiwe Magom holds apartheid responsible for
promoting a “twisted sense of right and wrong” (v-vi). Questioning a singular narrative of
the South Aﬁican people’s ﬁght against racial injustice, the author calls it “the warped
prism of the overarching crime against humanity, as the international community labelled
it” (vi). Magona’s is one of the polyphonic her-stories that enhance the meta-narrative of
black patriotism to identify spaces of grief that can bring the killer’s mother and the

victim’s mother together across the divide of racial anger.

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Openly declaring the terror posed by youth violence in the black townships,
Magona refers to the youngsters of the community as “these monsters our children have
become” (2). This condemnation is swiftly followed by an assertion of the systemic
violence of apartheid on black youth. In this unequally resourced system which deprived
black children of the amenities for healthy development, the responsibility for the
monstrous outcome in the form of violent children lies with the failed parenting of the
collective of all South Aﬁican parents that was brought about by the apartheid. Mandisa’s
is a cryptic rendering of the cycle of violence: “It’s been a long, hard road, my son has
tavelled. Now, your daughter has paid for the sins of the fathers and mothers who did not
do their share of seeing that my son had a life worth living” (3). This philosophy of
collective parenting of the community’s children is elaborated in the author’s interview
with Atwell and Harlow where she emphasizes the role of the extended family, the
community, and in fact the whole village in effectively parenting children: “it doesn't
matter if it is your child that I see going wrong, that child isn't only going to be a
nuisance to you when he is eighteen or twenty, he will be a nuisance to me too” (286).

The absence of the village in parenting South African children becomes an
important narrative strand in Mothgr to Mothg, underlining the connection between
youth violence and forced removals. Through the pre-apartheid and apartheid machinery
of inﬂux contol, black South Aﬁicans were compelled to move ﬁom their native villages

to black townships.36 Mandisa’s narrative voice testiﬁes to the disbelief with which the

 

3" The internal inﬂux contol and the migrant labor system were two factors that wreaked havoc on African
families during the apartheid era. See Samuelson M91611 Ficti_on Studi_es_ 46.1 (2000): 229. The policy of
“inﬂux contol” was “used to regulate the inﬂow of black Africans into South Aﬁica’s urban areas.”
Enforced by the Native (Black) Urban Areas Act No 21 of 1923, it “imposed a system of segregation which
allowed black Aﬁicans access to towns only to serve white labor needs. Domestic workers were allowed to
live in town, the rest would be resticted to ﬁnding housing in townships on the outskirts. Legislation in
1937 resticted black African males a window of 14 days in which to ﬁnd employment or return to the

180

people of Blouvlei greet the news that they would be moved to Nyanga. The “fantastic
sense of security” offered by the “sea of tin shacks lying lazily in the ﬂats, surrounded by
gentle white hills, sandy hills dotted with scru ” made it an absurd rumor. The incredulity
is all the more so because the community is “convinced of the inviolability” of their
“tremendous numbers,” “the size of the settlement, and the belief that [. . .] their dwelling
places, [. . .] their homes, and [. . .] their burial places were sacred” (54). In the absence
of civil and political rights for blacks in apartheid South Africa, the only access that
Blouvlei residents had to the Parliament was through white men and women like Mr.
Stanford and Mrs. Ballinger—“the official Native Representatives” (63). Mandisa
describes the chain reaction of the forced removals on the children of the community as
“Blouvlei awoke to ﬁnd itself under siege” as the army, the police, and volunteer
university students with vans, bulldozers, and tucks deﬁed “stubborn residents [who]
chained themselves to the doors of their homes” (64-5). The “long line of wearied
humanity” is bounded by government vehicles, their back prodded by bayonets till they
reach “the barren land tint the government has designated to be their new home” (66).
Here members of “solid, well—knit communities” ﬁnd themselves among strangers (29).
In this land the meager wages of the fathers needed to be supplemented by those of the
mothers who worked as domestic help in white homes. Here children came back ﬁ'om
schools to exhausted and angry mothers, and eventually spent a pmposeless life, loitering
from house to house like Mxolisi. It is this history of segregating black South Africans
into separate townships that returns to destoy Amy Biehl when she drives into Guguletu,

defying the racial claim that only blacks had to the township.

 

reserves.” Later this window was further decreased to seventy-two hours. See Alistair Boddy-Evans,
“Inﬂux Contol”, About: African Histm, Our Sm, 2006, The New York Times Company, 4 March, 2007
<http://africanhistory.about.com/od/apartheidterms/ g/def__inﬂux.htn>. Also see Ftrote 27.

181

However, the narrative voice also records this violence in relation to other
historical events--the Bantu education system and the 1976 Soweto student uprising. In
this world of confused value-systems, the narrator’s maternal voice is shrill with
desperation as “children are aided and abetted by adults we call leaders” and parents
“have become toothless dogs whose bark no one heeds” (73). These townships are rife
with children’s loud slogans: “Liberation now, education later!” and “One settler, one
bullet!” (161), where foreign nationals like Biehl working for social justice in South
Africa are brutally murdered for being white, and black men from Guguletu are
“necklaced” by children “mesmerized, dazzled by the brilliance of their handiwork.
Drunk with power.” Applauded by the leaders as a means to freedom, children execute:
“Without beneﬁt of tial, with neither judge nor jury. No due process. No recourse to
defence or appeal” (77). Johan Jacobs points out: “Mandisa interprets the descent of the
young into murderous gangsterism after the general breakdown of the in education in
197 6 as a disregard for ubuntu, or taditional humaneness. The barbarous execution by
“necklacing” represents to her a grotesque violation of language and of the very being of
these children who refer to themselves as ‘students’ or ‘comrades’” (182). This is the
world where four-year-olds like Mxolisi once innocently revealed the whereabouts of
their activist ﬁiends to the police only to see them being shot dead before their eyes. Here
such taumatized children not only lose their innocence but also their speech as they
become mute for years after such violence, only to grow up and reiterate murder and
mayhem. Magona’s interview with Atwell and Harlow makes it amply clear how this
emotional brutalization of South Africa’s children results in the psychological violence

against South Aﬁica’s women. Mothers like Sindiwe Magona are bewildered by the

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systemic effects of the apartheid legacy on gun-wielding burglarizing children. The
excruciating pain of these women is eloquent in Magona’s analysis of the selective
distribution of national resom‘ces according to racial categories. Her analysis of
resourcing black children later on in their lives instead of at the beginning is astute:
“Build bigger and better jails, where people are fed and clothed and get three meals a day,
for a child who has never had three meals a day. Suddenly when he's eighteen and in jail,
he can get three meals a day!” (291) Magona’s is among the polyphony of women’s
voices--marked by their understanding of the self-destructive cycle of violence
internalized and perpetuated by South Aﬁican history through colonization, apartheid,
and anti-apartheid resistance.37

V. Refusing to be Gagged: The Outcry of Nation-lass Women

Postcolonial writers of South African heritage like Sindiwe Magona, writing tom
the United States, and Zoe Wicomb, writing from Britain, have ﬁactured the talkative
tales of post-apartheid harmony. They have resuscitated, through their stories, the unique
experiences of women and the unrecognized cruelty against them during national
liberation which continues into the post-liberation era. The complexity of the relationship
among the past, present, and future of South Aﬁica is documented through the discursive
dissidence of these “nationless authors” who launch a transnational stuggle for women’s

human rights from the metopoles of the world.38 In the process they resist the TRC’s

 

37 See Samuelson Modern Fiction Studie_s 46.1 (2000): 238.

33 Though neither Magona nor Wicomb is in exile, I borrow the phrase ‘nationless authors’ ﬁom Valerie
Orlando’s presentation to deﬁne them because, like writers in exile, these writers writing from abroad
refuse an ideology of patriotism and critique their own nation. In their refusal to afﬁliate blindly with the
“patria” (fatherland), they become nationless. Valerie Orlando, “Nationless Authors and Literature without
Nations: Contemporary Francophone Writing of the Maghreb,” Questioning the Global, The Global
Literary and Cultural Studies Research Cluster, Michigan State University, East Lansing, November 3,
2006.

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juridical paradigm of deﬁning human rights violations during apartheid through a victim
and perpetrator model to push for a more complex transnational understanding of raced
and gendered human rights violations in South Aﬁica. This model attempts to view the
nuanced ways in which apartheid violations operate to deﬁne a complex continuity of
violence embracing everyone in its fold. The crucial import of these stories lies in the
sensitivity and accountability of a national and pan-national readership which acts as
witness to the nuances of oppression and rallies against such violence,39 as these
narratives highlight the maltreatment of women by diverse agents of tyranny within the
precincts of the nation itself. They aim to highlight ways in which transnational literature
like David’s Story and Mother to Mother circulate the narratives of women’s suffering
and relocate them onto global maps which galvanize a human rights politics of resistance,
opening up avenues for transactions between the postcolonial and the transnational.40
Thus, the aesthetics of “literature without nations” intersects with the ethics of human
rights campaign. The separatism of the domains of politics and literature upheld by
conservative thinking within the academia breaks down as the interdisciplinary study of
literature creates “[h]uman rights platforms and mechanisms [that] make possible a
legitimating process of telling and listening that demands accountability on the part of

states and international organizations” (Schaffer and Smith 3). Global researchers,

 

3’ In this regard it is vital to mention that such public response to human rights violations, however, is
unavoidably generated through the interface between postcolonial narratives and the forces of consumption.
Once such texts enter the global market, postcolonial violence is commodiﬁed concomitantly as awareness
of human suffering is raised through storytelling which establishes a relationship with human rights
politics.

4° Transnational texts such as Mother to Mother and David’s Stu facilitate exchanges between the
postcolonial and the tansnational through these global circuits of cultural productions, dissemination, and
consumption—interfaces that bring into conjunction public intellectuals and the forces of tansnational
ﬁnance and global publishing.

184

especially women internationals traveling ﬁom the ex—colonies of the globe to the
metropolitan research centers of the world generate conferences and seminars that recycle
these postcolonial stories of gender violence against women to activate venues for
transnational feminist politics that cut across national identities to contest the power of
the nation-state to deﬁne women’s loyalties only in terms of the nation. These platforms
hold accountable the patriarchal structures of the nation-state in pre-revolutionary,
revolutionary, and post-revolutionary times. Across national boundaries, these forums
clamor for fair governance of all citizens in the post resistance milieu, and question the
asymmetrical organization of post-resistance state power that refuses to provide
restorative justice to women mistreated dming the revolution.

Postcolonial Writing: In David’s Stogy Zoe Wicomb articulates how ﬁctional literature
becomes a more authentic medium to recuperate the historical truth about South Africa
than the reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In the preface to the text
the female amanuensis recruited by the former AN C activist David to tell his story
(history) contends that the ﬁagmentary nature of David’s story ensues ﬁom the fact that
“he both wanted and did not want it to be written” (1). She adds: “David was simply
unable/unwilling to disclose all. He believed it possible to negotiate a path between the
necessary secrecy and a need to tell, a tension that caused agitation which in turn had to
be concealed, but it drove him to view the story of his life as a continuous loop that never
intersected itself’ (2). The play on “unable/unwilling” captures the stern demands of a
revolution against tyranny that in its turn dictated the sacriﬁce of both the voice and the
sexuality of its militants. Attraction in the world of revolution cannot be consummated in

physical passion: “To indulge in such passion is to betay the cause, and there is far too

185

much of that already.” Appropriating Dulcie’s voice, David speaks for her: “Besides,
Comrade Dulcie, herself a disciplined cadre, could not possibly have that kind of interest
in him, would, like himself, have nipped it in the bu ” (137). The silences and gaps in
Wicomb’s text that faithfully deﬁne a more nuanced relationship between victims and
perpetators and the complexities of their identities in the context of apartheid challenge
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s narrative about the apartheid era being
composed of monolithic categories of victims and oppressors. The contradictions in
Wicomb’s text themselves together forge meaning rather than any linear narrative of
torture, amnesty, and national unity. Referring to the omissions in the text, the
amanuensis tells the reader: “David instucts me to remove all references to a special
relationship between him and Dulcie’ (137). However, David’s talkative story about
rigorous anti-apartheid nationalism and revolutionary choice of privileging duty over
passion is contested as Dulcie, in the absence of speech, gropes for words to write down
her life. She believes that somewhere such a possibility exists though “she fears for any
such writing. Although they come in the early hours she has to be vigilant at all times.
Worse than any instrument of torture is the thought of such hard-found words being
ﬁngered by them—jabbed, clubbed, defaced into a gibberish that would turn the thing
between David and herself into nothing” (198). Accepting the fact that as a militant
woman she has no claim to private passions, she enshrines her love for David as the
secret of the text that she writes, and professes her text to be about a “private teenage
obsession,” nothing to do with “the weighty matters of the liberation movement” (198).

Seizing silence as a mode of refusal to enunciate her passions, Dulcie forges a space of

186

autonomy by standing on its head the repressive silencing of passions that the revolution
had enforced upon her.

Thus, the tuth about David’s Stogy can never be told since the tuth about
David’s Stog is also the tuth about Dulcie’s story, about Sally’s story, and about Saartje
Baartman’s story, all of which rupture the talkative tales of South Aﬁican national
unity—of a non-racial democracy of blacks and whites, of men and women, uniﬁed in
upholding principles of race, gender and class egalitarianism. In the afterword to
Wicomb’s text Dorothy Driver summarizes the dilemmas of post-revolution
representation that David’s Stogy illustates in two pointed questions: How can we be
post-apartheid (in the metaphysical sense) if tuth is still “black and white”? Moreover,
what kind of world do we live in where love constitutes political betrayal?” (251). The
inability of “post-apartheid” nationalism to articulate the tuth about the gender apartheid
that formed an enclave within racial apartheid literally makes tuth stutter across the
page. In the sheaf of notes on his life that David hands over to the amanuensis he has,
“having tied and failed”, displaced Dulcie “by working on the historical ﬁgure of Saartje
Baartman inst ” (134). However, Baartnan’s story also remains unﬁnished in David’s
version—“a mess, schoolboy scribbles that ought to have been thrown away” (135). In
the version of the amanuensis, David’s story is difficult to retell. Despite the inferences
the amanuensis makes ﬁom the last page, she does “not quite know how to represent it. It
is a mess of scribbles and scoring out and doodling of peculiar ﬁgures that cannot be
reproduced here. [She] [. . .] know[s] that it is his attempt at writing about Dulcie,
because her name is written several times and struck out” (135). The beginnings are

mapped all over the page, and underscore the possibility of alternative narratives which

187

remain untold. But in this form the ﬁction about David most faithfully captures the tuth
about TRC as the text admits: “Truth, I gather, is the word that cannot be written. He has
changed it into the palindrome of Cape Flats speech—TRURT, TRURT, TRURT,
TRURT—the words speed across the page, driven as a toy car is driven by a child, with
lips pouted as spit ﬂying, wheels squealing around the Dulcie obstacles” (136). As the
tuth about women falters in David’s Stogy, so does it stutter in the TRC hearings. The
TRC denied the existence of gender apartheid within liberation movements through its
silence over the sole testimony of Rita Mazibuko. This underscores that though post-
apartheid South Aﬁica has made a concerted though contoversial effort to foster racial
arnity, when it came to a contest between race and gender justice, as with Dulcie and her
real life counterpart Mazibuko, the TRC tilted in favor of racial unity in the new nation at
the cost of refusing to acknowledge past violations of ANC women by the liberation
stuggle itself.

Like D_avid’s Story. Mother to Mother also enunciates “a culture engaged in self-
critique at a critical historic juncture” (Jacobs 190). However, the self-critique in the
latter text establishes itself as a chiastic and polyglot discourse mapping out reciprocities
between the historically oppositional groups of blacks and whites.41 This discourse plays
out the taurnatic terms of “[t]he shift in cross-cultural relationships with the advent cf
democracy in South Africa from a vertical to a horizontal axis” (Jacobs 191). Mother to

Mother attempts to re-conceptualize this trauma into a relationship of empathy, across

 

4' “Chiastic conﬁgurations are both oppositional and reciprocaL and in their continual creation of
potentialities of relation, are premised on co-subjectivity, which is a condition for a cross-cultural
discourse.” See Johan Jacobs, “Writing Reconciliation: South African Fiction Alter Apartheid,” Resisting
Alterities: Wilson Harris and Other Avatars of Otherness ed. Marco Fazinni (Amsterdam & New York:
Rodopi, 2004) 185.

 

188

racial barriers, through which Amy Biehl’s mother becomes Mandisa’s “Sister-Mother”
with whom Mandisa is “bound in this sorrow” (198). The mothers share the gruesome
injustice of a racist system which demands a violent cycle of sacriﬁce ﬁom its children:
“Your daughter. The imperfect atonement of her race./ My son. The perfect host of the
demons of his” (201). Mandisa is angry at “all the grown-ups who made [. . .] [her] son
believe he would be a hero, ﬁghting for the nation, were he to do the things he heard
them advocate, the deeds they praised” (199). Nonetheless, after Amy Biehl is killed the
mother who was congratulated one day for bearing a son who saved a woman from being
raped becomes the “[m]other of the beast”, the [m]other of the serpent”, and the “Satan’s
mother” (115). She spends sleepless nights and “[fjood turns to sawdust in [. . .] [her]
mou ” as other children throw stones at hers. She despairs: “I am a leper in my
community” (199). TR ’8 “quasi-judicial and nation-building mandate” reﬁrses to
encompass within its orbit these unique experiences of violence that marked women
during apartheid (Samuelson 128). Sindiwe Magona highlights the everyday (as opposed
to the spectacular) violence against women that the apartheid unleashed. Fiona Ross’s
seminal text, Mg Witness: Women grid th_e Truth a_r_r_d Reconciliation Commission in
South Africa, which explores women’s relationship to suffering and testimony
underlines:

Forty per cent of the victims about whom women testiﬁed were their sons, while

husbands account for a further 16 per cent. Seventeen per cent of testimonies

concerned other male kin, 6 per cent, unrelated men, and 14 per cent of women’s

testimonies concerned their own experiences of gross violations of human rights.

189

Six and a half per cent of testimonies concerned women kin and a further half per

cent concerned unrelated women. (17)
Thus, women testiﬁed before the Commission mostly in their roles as mothers of sons.
Only one percent of men testiﬁed on behalf of their mothers (18). In contast, “Mandisa’s
act of witnessing [which] works against the constuction of Mxolisi as satanic ﬁgure by
humanising him as beloved son while simultaneously reaching beyond the racial binary
to address Biehl’s mother as a mother” (Samuelson 132), foregrounds the stuctural
violence that mothers experience tom their subject positions as mothers whose children
are subject to the violence of the system. By condemning the children and “instead [. . .]
placing her allegiance with the other mother” Mandisa creates “openings in the absolute
divide of ‘we-them’ [. . .] which ‘the children’ of Guguletu acted upon” (Samuelson
237).42 In the process she reclaims the parental authority that broke down in post-1976
South Africa by aligning herself with another mother to critique the behavior of children.

Despite this critical self reﬂexivity about her own community and her effort to re-
conceptualize racial relationships, Sindiwe Magona’s writing is deﬁned by a postcolonial
mode of subversive writing. This mode resists English—the language of the Sister-
Mother-as a feasible postcolonial medium for opposition to master discourses like that of
apartheid. The interspersing of the novel with “Xhosa words and expressions constantly
remind the reader that Mandisa’s linguistic world is not an English one.”43 It “conveys
something of the cross-cultural assirrrilations that have occurred in the multi-lingual

South African society, but the italicized non-English words and cultural idiosyncratic

 

‘2 See Samuelson, Modem Fiction Studies 46.1(2000): 236-7.

’3 Samuelson points out that in addition to isiXhosa, Aﬁikaans, and isiZulu phrases also intersperse the
narrative. See Modern Fiction Studies 46.] (2000): 233.

190

expressions also signify unbridgeable differences” (Jacobs 182). Reading this linguistic
resistance in Mother to Mother against the Asmara Declaration on African Languages
and Literatures oﬁ'ers insights into how postcolonial literature can be an avenue of
resistance to colonialism without denying the material and stuctural effects of
colonialism.44 The Asmara Declaration adopted by writers and scholars from across
Africa and the African diaspora in a historic conference entitled “Against All Odds:
African Languages and Literatures into the 21 st Century”, held in Eritea in January
2000, “identiﬁed a profound incongruity in colonial languages speaking for the
continent” and declared that in the new millennium “Aﬁica must ﬁrmly reject this
incongruity and afﬁrm a new beginning by returning to its languages and heritage.”45 The
linguistic medley, as a ﬂedgling oppositional discourses of the indigenous and the
colonial, in postcolonial texts like Mother to Mother is illustrative of how Anglophone
postcolonial writing itselfcan resist and refuse the imperialistic drives of the English
language, and hence of racist political stuctures like the apartheid. The occasional Zulu
or Xhosa term in this English text is oppositional without pushing toward an originary
myth of linguistic isolation that denies the colonial history of Africa that the Asmara
Declaration seems to argue for. Pumla Dineo qula argues: “Magona’s narratives suggest
that the route to nuanced ‘systems of representation’ does not lie in contrived narrative
consistency, static obstinacy, or political safety” (63). Magona entitles postcolonial

subjects like Mandisa to not only appropriate the gaze and to “generate knowledge” and

 

“ For this standpoint on postcolonial writing 1 am indebted to John Hawley’s Call for Papers from the
MLA Division of Literature in English other than British and American for the December 2007 MLA to be
held in Chicago. The panel is titled “Resistance to English in Anglophone Literature.”

’5 See “Against All Odds: Aﬁican Languages and Literatures into the 21st Century, Asmara, Eritea

January 11-17, 2000,” Outeach Penn State Universigy, March 13, 2007 <http://www.outeach.psu.edu/
C&I/AllOdds/declaration.html>.

191

“[lay] bare the processes of aparthei ” (qula 59-60), but also to acknowledge colonial
history as the trace in South Aﬁican cultural productions, and hence to renegotiate
postcolonial identities with colonial categories like the empire’s language. Thus,
Magona’s linguistic usage is merely a reﬂection of the tansnational thrust of her
thematic teatnrent.

Postcolonial Research: In the vein of expatriate postcolonial writers like Sindiwe
Magona and Zoe Wicomb,46 metropolitan women researchers, migrating from ex-
colonies to global centers of tansnational ﬁnance to reclaim “economic citizenship”
through the high-powered world of the Euro-American academc,47 militate against the
epistemic violence of postcolonial historiography and its erasure of women shaped by the
nationalist agenda of the post-apartheid archive.48 This does not in any way discount the
work of postcolonial scholars working ﬁ'om within South Aﬁica against the limitations of
the archive vis-é-vis historic knowledge formations about the legacy of unrecognized
violence against South African women. The argument here is about the unequal
international division of intellectual labor and its concomitant beneﬁts within a system of

tansnational capital in which academic labor in postcolonial geographies cannot be

 

’6 Magona returned to South Aﬁica in 2003 and is now writing from there. See Siphokazi Koyana,
“Intoduction”, Sindiwe Magona: The First Decade 11-12.

’7 See Gayati Chakravorty Spivak, A Critighe of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a Histoly of the Vanishing
Preseng, Cambridge, USA & London, England, 1999. 69.

’8 For the conceptualization of the erasures in South African women’s history through the metaphor of the
archive, I am particularly indebted to qula’s conceptualization of archival absences vis-h-vis the
narratives of the lives of slave women in pro-colonial and pre-Union South Africa. See Pumla Dineo qula,
“ ‘Like Three Tongues in One Mouth’: Tracing the Elusive Lives of Slave Women in (Slavocratic) South
Africa”, Women i_n Sou_th African History: Bﬁus'iimﬂkodo. bgwel'imihﬂbo / this! remove boulders and
cross rivers ed. Nomboniso Gasa (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2007). 21-41.

 

192

resourced by accessible research grants and conference funding.49 As such, the ease with
which intellectuals from postcolonial contexts working at the centers of global academic
power can launch a tansnational platform of a feminist cultural politics of human rights
onto conventional academic sites of discursive resistance differs signiﬁcantly from
scholars writing from within postcolonial geographies of resistance. Spivak calls the
former the “globe-girdling nationalist-undererasure Southern [. . .] subject”, emphasizing
the ideological aporia of the migratory intellectual subjectivity of the tansnational-
postcolonial (69). This postcolonial migrant “does not forsake the concern of local
populations, but rather recognizes the systemic relationship of national causes to global
capitalism” (Richards 20) at the same time as she denounces the nation-state’s
homogenizing of the aspirations of the local population with respect to the “cause”. The
historic sites of revolutionary praxis of this category of scholars are often publishing
houses and high-proﬁle seminars and conferences. The publishing industy that
disseminates critical works on postcolonial writings like Mother to Motlﬂ and Da_vid__’_s
_Sﬂy and the various circuits of cyberspace information like mailing lists which
distribute CFPs for populous international conferences that include panels/seminars on
such postcolonial texts become scholarly forums for reinforcing the resistant presence of
postcolonial cultural productions. As tansnational women researchers interpret and
reinterpret postcolonial discourse, attempting to revive the female voice in national

liberation movements, new modes of understanding anti-colonial resistance are

 

’9 My understanding of the international division of intellectual labor has been greatly enhanced in the
process of co-organizing a seminar for the American Comparative Literature Association in Mexico in
2007 as well as co-organizing a panel for the 2007 MLA scheduled to be held in Chicago. The wealth of
stong proposals from researchers in postcolonial geographies that we had to turn down because the
applicants did not have access to frmding to make space for presenters who had access to conference grants
was a statement in itself on cumulative stuctures of privilege that ironically mark radical and subversive
areas of research.

193

circulated. For instance, the 2007 seminar “The Politics of Representation: Human Rights
Violations, Witnessing, and Transnational Readership”, structured within the
internationally conspicuous American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)
convention, included two papers on South African literature-“Untold Stories of Women
in Post-Apartheid South Aﬁica: Truth and Reconciliation in David’s Stog and Red Dust”
and “Apartheid Spectacle: The Drama of Race in South Africa.”50 These historic taces
tom an alternative archive work in synergy with postcolonial ﬁction like Mother to
m and David’s Stog by rejuvenating the feeble stories of South Aﬁican women in
the post-apartheid state. Together they challenge the imperatives of the conventional
archive—the memory-spaces of the South Aﬁican TRC that catalogue and classify
according to monolithic and unproblematized categories of victims and perpetrators. By
speaking tuth to the power of the state-sanctioned archive which creates knowledge
systems that erase the tacks of South Aﬁican women’s suffering, postcolonial narratives
and research around them generate circuits of tansnational anxiety that stimulate human
rights politics for women.51 This is what Edward Said in his 1993 Reith Lectures for the
BBC called “the public role of the intellectual as outsider, ‘amateur’, and disturber of the
status quo” (x). This is the work of breaking down the “reductive categories that are so
limiting to human thought and communication” (xi)—-categories like those ironically

perpetuated by the South Aﬁican TRC’s amnesty and reparation process. “[F]igures

 

5° The proposal for the ACLA seminar was largely based on my dissertation work and was (to-organized by
Annedith Schneider from the Sabanci University of Turkey and me. Marian Eide of Texas A&M
University will be delivering the paper on “Apartheid Spectacle” and 1 will be presenting the paper entitled
“Untold Stories of Women in Post-Apartheid South Aﬁica”.

5 ' See qula, “Like Three Tongues in One Mouth” 37.

194

whose public performances can neither be predicated nor compelled into some slogan,
orthodox party line, or ﬁxed dogma” (xii), the labor of intellectuals is directed at
“scouring alternative sources, exhuming buried documents, reviving forgotten (or
abandoned) histories” (xviii). This is the heretical archive of postcolonial researchers like
Fatima Mernissi whose inquiry into the sacred texts of Algur’an and m is based on
her own memory archive of personal experiences, though she combines historical and
sociological analysis with it.52 This is also the death-defying archive of the Amy Biehls
of the world for whom the dangerous ﬁeld of liberation’s political work is also the
archive—an archive for radical research at the limits of death which deconstructs the
conventional demarcation between ﬁeld work and archival work, between scholarly life
and dangerous activism. Mernissi’s and Biehl’s are the kind of research that generate
theses, dissertations, articles, and books which engender tremendous anguish in the
conventional archive of state-contolled knowledge systems.
VI. Conclusion

My argument in this chapter has focused on the discmsive resistance of
postcolonial writers and researchers to the stuctural violence against women like
Mandisa that continues in the ANC-constituted rule of post-apartheid South Aﬁica as the

systemic legacy of apartheid, and the deep connection between such systemic violence

and the violation of bodily integrity of both white and black women like Amy Biehl and

 

’2 Fatima Mernissi is a Moroccoan intellectual whose 1973 doctoral dissertation from Brandeis University--
leohd the Veil became a key reference for the understanding of women and Islam. Mernissi’s
investnents in Islamic women’s rights have led her to contest and reinterpret the canon of Islamic religious
texts. See “Fatima Mernissi: Rebel for the Sake of Women,” 12 Oct 2003, Liberal Islam Netwohlg, 2001,
Bhasha Indonesia, 2006 <http://islamlib.com/en/page.php?page=article&id=46l>.

195

Dulcie.53 Thus, my work directly contests TRC’s foregrounding of the violation of bodily
integrity simultaneously as it denied any reparation for the pervading stuctural violence
of apartheid.54 Such an approach does not address the workings of gender power
disparities in the violence against women like Amy Biehl and Dulcie and how such
violence becomes an avenue to compensate for the racial and economic disempowerment
of black men.

The post-nationalist reconstuction of South Aﬁica has generated a whole
repertoire of criticism of the TRC which, in conjunction with the critique of the tuth
commissions of other Aﬁican nations, can be deﬁned as an emergent discourse of
African Subaltem Studies.55 The Subaltem Studies paradigm, as I have previously

argued, offers an analysis of the relationship in which the collective rights of the

 

’3 In this context it is critical to underline that the point I am making is that ANC saw black women as
victims of the stuctural violence of apartheid just as men, but denied the distinctive ways in which such
systemic violence was connected to violence against bodily integrity. That is why the South Aﬁican TRC
could so easily separate out and individualize victims and perpetators of the violation of bodily integrity
from systemic legacies of the apartheid. In her critical essay “ANC Positions on Gender, 1994-2004”
Natasha Erlank states that AN C’s developmental approach to women’s issues “views poverty, rather than
subordination, as the source of inequality between men and women. [. . .] The problem with this approach
though, is that it assrunes women’s development is prevented by stuctural constaints and ignores the
power relations which operate at a social level to prevent women challenging roles that marginalize them
(201). See Natasha Erlank, “ANC Positions on Gender, 1994-2004,” Politikon 32.2 (November 2005).
Erlank’s study of ANC’s gender policy needs to be read in conjunction with Shireen Hassim who declares
that though “[ﬂew other national liberation movements or political parties globally have incorporated
notions of gender equality to the extent that the ANC has done,” certain political issues were excluded tom
the gender equality policy of the ANC: “National liberation activists—women and men—placed issues of
sexuality, gender-based violence and reproductive rights in the category of ‘western ferninism’ and saw
women’s organizations’ attempts to deal with these as distacting from the key stuggle against apartheid”
(179). See Shireen Hassim, “Voices, Hierarchies and Spaces: Reconﬁguring the Women’s Movement in
Democratic South Africa.”

 

5’ The question deﬁnitely arises as to how this would have been possible on the scale of millions of people.

5’ “Thirteen counties have convened l6 tuth commissions to date. Nine of these commissions have been
held in Africa; Uganda held the very ﬁrst one in 1971 (and another in 1986). The Aﬁican National
Congress (ANC) sponsored South Africa’s ﬁrst in 1992 (the Skweyiya Commission) and its second in 1993
(the Motsuenyane Commission). The third was created by the Promotion of National Unity and
Reconciliation Act in 1995” (27). See Beth Goldblatt and Sheila Meintjes, “South African Women Demand
the Truth,” What Women Do in Wartime: Gender and Conﬂict in Afrig, ed. Meredith Turshen and
Clotilde Twagiramariya (London & New York, 1998).

196

disenﬁanchised of a nation stands with respect to the sovereignty of the nation-state. As
this chapter has underlined, critical discourses on the South Aﬁ'ican TRC like
Mamdani’s, and Goldblatt’s and Meintjes’s feminist critique of the TRC vis—a-vis human
rights violations of women in South Africa have argued about the injustice of a
reconciliation process which denied the overarching structural violence that sustained the
apartheid machinery and instead individualized victims and perpetrators. Iﬁ Amadiume
and Abdullahi An-Na’im have criticized the political compromise of a TRC in which
“reconciliation is dependent on amnesty” where “the security of the old order remains
intact.” Thus, “amnesty prevents the punishment of crime” and denies justice. The critics
also argue that the TR ’3 “memory is limited to only 30 years” (5). With no “programme
of radical redistribution” of resources, the TRC has no power for restitution (15).
However, Desmond Tutu’s African philosophy of ubuntu which formed the basis for the
principle of amnesty in the South African TRC, though his ideology of forgiveness has
also been resisted as Christian theology which excludes non-Christian South Aﬁicans,56
was also the only route to achieving a nonracial democracy without unleashing ﬁrrther
violence.57
The parameters of a post-Subaltem Studies project, however, allows for the
theorization of a transnational feminist venue for addressing the invisible ways in which

women in post-apartheid South Africa bear the brunt of the systemic legacy of

colonialism and apartheid. Such a platform would focus on the structural links between

 

’6 See Lyn S. Graybill, Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Miracle or Model? (Boulder & London:
Lynne Rienner, 2002) 39.

5’ Graybill also adds: “Supporters of amnesty maintained that to bring the National Party on board,
concessions were necessary, and that without the amnesty guarantee the NP would have walked out of
negotiations altogether. Amnesty was a compromise the ANC was forced to strike because it did not ride
victorious into Pretoria on tanks, but rather came to power through a negotiated settlement” (59).

197

socioeconomic deprivation and gender-speciﬁc violence against South African women—
a corrective response to the national reconciliation model which focused on individual
responsibility rather than collective and systemic ones. A forum like this would also
contest the patriarchal texture of the South African national negotiation in which
gendered injustice against women like Dulcie received a skeptical response from the TRC
itself. Unlike the TRC which prioritized an ideology of race over an ideology of gender,
whether through skepticism about intra-racial sexual violence or through denying the
violent effects of structural disparities on women, a transnational caucus of women would
address human rights violations of women to forge a politics of nonracial nonsexist
democracy in South Africa. In such a political scheme various forms of marginalized
identities would not be viewed as ideological oppositions that are competing for
reparation, but as ideologically aligned. Such a transnational forum of women
unafﬁliated to the nation-state would be able to negotiate with the fathers of the nation
for the kind of restorative justice that takes into account global standards of women’s
human rights as well as a workable justice for women within the geopolitical speciﬁcities

of South Africa.

198

CONCLUSION

This dissertation has sought to advance a tenacious critique of the colonial
category of the nation—state by critically exploring literature that maps the violence
against women which is unbridled from diverse directions when state machinery
functions without accountability to the inhabitants of the nation.1 The impunity enjoyed
by the nation-state in both situations of conﬂict and post-conﬂict reconciliation argues

against a notion of absolute state sovereignty because justice itselfcan be skewed

qr: “-77. “7'12 5%

according to the mandates of the heads of the state. Such an argument, however, never
forgets the colonial invasion of certain regions of the world, its violence, the historic
impunity of colonial rule, and its continuing predatory impulses in the guise of its neo-
imperial cousin, rendered highly conspicuous in the twenty-ﬁrst century by the US
invasion of Iraq. That violence within postcolonial nations cannot be de-linked from the
infrastructural violence of pre-colonial, colonial, and neo-imperial invasion is a central
contention of my dissertation. The complicity of colonialism and neo-imperialism in the
historic continuity of violence against indigenous women in Guatemala is borne out in
my examination of the violent legacies of Spanish colonialism and US neo-imperialism.
Effects of caste violence on women in post-independent India make it imperative to study
the intensiﬁcation of pre-colonial caste based violations by British colonization. My
analysis of brutalities against women in South Aﬁica is a study of the legacy of violence
left behind by Dutch colonization, British colonization, and the apartheid era which

continues as obdurate structtn’al inequalities in the post-apartheid nation. Exploring the

 

' Before colonialism many of the appropriated territories were divided into kingdoms (the region which is
now India) or empires (Ottoman empire). Colonial rule ministered these territories by dividing such
regions into nation-states.

199

narrativity of state power and its vicious underpinnings that unfold in each of these
contexts, this dissertation has throughout asserted the signiﬁcance of the “trans-nation” as
an alternative forum for violated women of dispossessed communities to seek justice. In
this concluding chapter my dissertation delves into the theoretical aspects of transnational
coalitions and asks if historical wrongs against women during revolution can at all be
addressed by post—conﬂict nation-states, or whether the only forum for reconciling the
rights of aggrieved women with those of the state is the venue of transnational feminist
politics. In doing so, my work bears in mind the precarious balance that postcolonial
thinking requires in the face of brutal state sovereignties as well as violent foreign
invasions. Hence, in conclusion my project inquires both into the ramiﬁcations of
national reconciliations between the state and its subjects and the implications of
transnational venues of non-nationalist justice that question the sovereignty of the state
vis-a-vis its subjects.

In any discussion of the compensatory negotiations that take place between the
nation-state and the selected populations of the nation whose human rights have been
violated the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clariﬁcation (CEH)2 and the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa need to be examined. In the case
of India there has been no nation-wide insurgency against caste violations on the scale of
the civil wars that Guatemala and South Africa have respectively experienced in regard to

the human rights abuses of indigenous and black people. As such, there has been no

 

2 My research on the process of historical clariﬁcation in Guatemala has been informed by three major
sources—Forsberg, Tuomas and Teivo Teivainen, The Role of Truth Commissions in Conﬂict Resolution
and Human Rights Promotion (Helsinki: The Finnish Institute of International Affairs, 1998), Christian
Tomuschat, “Clariﬁcation Commission in Guatemala,” Human Rights Quarterly 23.2 (2001): 233—258, and
Christian Tomuschat, Otilia Lux de Coti, and Alfredo Balsells Tojo, Guatemala Memory of Silence: Rgrort
of the Commission for Historical Clariﬁcation: Conclusions and Recommendations (Guatemala City,
Guatemala: MINUGUA, 1999).

200

oﬁ'lcial project of national reconciliation around caste issues in India. However, the
Mandal Commission of India can be perceived as somewhat akin to the project of
negotiation between the state and its disenfranchised population that Guatemala and
South Africa have embarked on, though in no way was India’s Mandal Commission a
colossal project of testifying to violence like the truth commissions in Guatemala and
South Africa.3

My inquiry into the testimonial representation of gender-speciﬁc atrocities on
Mayan women in LILigoberta Menchr'r and Crossingjorders has focused particularly on
the crimes of genocidal rape and forced impregnation. Besides, the CEH also reports on
“the opening of the wombs of pregnant women” during genocidal torture of the
indigenous population by state agents. However, though these unspeakable brutalities
against women were recognized by the CEH, the Guatemalan truth commission, with no
subpoena powers,4 got only nominal responses on inviting high-ranking military and

police ofﬁcers of the regimes to testify to human rights violations.5 Moreover, though

 

3 The Mandal Commission was established to make recommendations for afﬁrmative action in the interest
of India’s Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. For the terms Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes,
see Chapter 3, Ftnote 13.

’Subpoenaisawritnecessitatingappearanceincourtasatestiﬁer.

5 The Ministry of Defense was resistant to CEH claiming that it did not know the addresses of the ofﬁcers
to be invited and refused to deliver the letters to them (246). The Ministry of Defense also denied the
existence of files in the military archives about the conduct of military operations during the worst years of
the armed struggle. After a CEH staff member discovered “an evaluation paper assessing ex part catain
ﬁghting activities of that epoch” in a regional military headquarter, all direct assistance by regional
commanders to the CEH was forbidden by the Ministry of Defense. From then on all requests for
information had to go through a fruitless centralized channel through which the CEH accessed only “a
number of prospective annual campaign plans and some fairly insigniﬁcant statistical ﬁgures” (250). The
secret services were even more impenetrable. See Christian Tomuschat, “Clariﬁcation Commission in
Guatemala,” Human Rights Mﬂﬂ 23.2 (2001). Incidentally, Christian Tomuschat was the coordinator
of CEH—an academic specialist in constitutional and international law from Germany who represented the
United Nations. The other two members were Guatemalans—the Quiche Mayan academic Otilia Lux de
Coti and the lawyer Alfredo Balsells Tojo. In September 1994 the United Nations Mission for Veriﬁcation
of Human Rights and of the Accomplishment of the Global Human Rights Accord (WNUGUA) was
formed in Guatemala, and its presence there has been vital to facilitating the peace process. According to

201

CEH did not have the prerogative for penal prosecutions of parties responsible for the
armed atrocities, the CEH report has come under heavy criticism for its refusal to name
the perpetrators of violence. As such, there has been no identiﬁcation of perpetrators of
genocidal rape, forced impregnation, and other kinds of sexualized torture of women
during armed struggle. Because of what is considered a feeble ground for the national
reconciliation of Guatemala that CEH enabled, in 1995 the Catholic Church established
its own truth commission—Reconstruction of the Historical Memory of Guatemala
(REMHI) project--under the leadership of the Archbishop’s Human Rights Ofﬁce.6
Furthermore, though the 1996 Law on National Reconciliation provided that the amnesty
decreed by it did not apply to genocide, torture, forcible disappearance, and other
offences not subject to any statutory limitations, the Law of National Reconciliation has
been debated because it not only intensiﬁes impunity by leaving “open what kinds of
crimes can be considered ‘political’,” but also “removes those who have committed
‘political’ crimes during the armed conﬂict from the reaches of judicial responsibility,
which for many human rights groups is in itself a clear violation of both universal human

rights norms and the 1994 Global Human Rights Accord” (Forsberg and Teivainen 104).

 

the Global Human Rights Accord signed by Guatemala in 1994, the MINUGUA was responsible for
verifying whether CEH was fulﬁlling its responsibilities. See Tomuschat 23 8—41.

6 The REMHI project has collected 5180 testimonies, all tape-recorded and signed, many in Mayan
languages.” Its report published in 1998 “registered 55 201 direct victims, of which 25 123 were cases of
death. 0f the registered victims, the REMHI report attributes 91% to state security organs (army, police,
civil defense patrols, military commissioners, and death squads). The guerrilla is shown to be responsible in
9% of the cases” (100). The REMHI report recommends various forms of compensation like economic aid,
development projects, study programs, scholarships, memorial days, monuments, psycho-social treatment
for victims and survivors, and future policies of recompense and assistance. (107). See Ministry for Foreign
Affairs of Finland, The Role of anth Commissions in Conﬂict Resolution and Human Rights Promotion:
Chile South Africa and Guatemala: Research Report for the Department for International Develgpment
m UPI Working Papers 10, Comp. Tuomas Forsberg and Teivo Teivainen (Helsinki: The
Finnish Institute of International Affairs, 1998). On the other hand, CEH registered a total of 42, 275
victims. See Guatemala Memory of Silen_ce l7.

 

202

Within such a legal frame of national reconciliation, accountability for political crimes
against women is doubly erased, ﬁrstly because of the lack of penal strictures on political
violence,7 and secondly because the hegemonic image of the target of political violence
or the prisoner of conscience in human rights discourse is always male. In addition, in
this scheme of national reconstruction which grants amnesty to many political acts, the
everyday violence against women enjoys impunity as acts of political expediency.

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), brought about
by the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995, differed from the
CEH in disseminating the “truth” via public hearings covered extensively by the media,
integrating massive reparations for violations into the reconciliation process, naming
individual perpetrators and wielding immense investigative and witness protection
authority,8 and operating “alongside a relatively robust judicial system” that penalized
applicants who were not granted amnesty (Quinn and Freeman 1123-4).9 Nonetheless, as
my discussion on Mother to Mother and David’s Stog has amply illustrated, by deﬁning
apartheid violence through individual perpetrators and victims, the TRC has encountered
heavy criticism for its erasure of the structural violence of apartheid and its vicious

accompanying effects on women. Moreover, Desmond Tutu’s philosophy of ubuntu

 

7 See Susan Kemp, “The Inter-Relationship Between the Guatemalan Commission for Historical
Clariﬁcation and the Search for Justice in National Courts,” Truth Commissions and Courts: The Tension

Between Criminal Justice and the Search for mg; eds. William A. Schabas & Shane Darcy (Dordrecht,
Netherlands: Kluwer Academic) 69.

8 Unlike the CEH, the TRC had the power to summon people to appear before it, but could not “through
ordinary legal process, cross—examine people to determine the accountable truth” (69). See Frederik Van
Zyl Slabbert, “Truth Without Reconciliation, Reconciliation Without Truth,” After the TRC: Reﬂections on
Truth grid Reconciliation in South Africa eds. Wilmot James and Linda Van de Vijver (Athens: Ohio
University Press and Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 2001).

9 Joanna R. Quinn and Mark Freeman, “Lessons Learned: Practical Lessons Gleaned from Inside the Truth
Commissions of Guatemala and South Aﬁica,” Human Rights May 25.4 (2003).

203

(traditional Aﬁican jurisprudence based on restorative rather than retributive justice),lo
demanding superhuman powers of forgiveness from victims and kin of victims for
violence at the limits of human imagination,ll has raised crucial questions about the
powers, privileges, assumptions, and demands of the patriarchs of the nation in times of
national reconstruction.” Moreover, the Amnesty Committee of the TRC was scathingly
criticized by the scholarly and the activist community for breaching international law by
granting amnesty for gross human rights violations. The South African Court claimed
national sovereignty over international human rights law on the ground that it was not
incorporated into municipal law by acts of legislation, and refused to prosecute apartheid
cases brought to it. In effect, the pattern of reﬁlsing criminal prosecution of atrocities that
marked the apartheid era has continued through the post-apartheid Constitutional Court,
thus recirculating apartheid impunity in the post-conﬂict state.l3 Susan Kemp’s
comments in the context of the Guatemalan historical clariﬁcation seem quite relevant to
the South African reconciliation process as well. Kemp argues that taking a detour around
criminal law should be a ﬁnal resort in reconstruction “given that it not only subverts the
rule of law but violates the individual rights of hundreds if not thousands of victims to

seek protection and recourse through their legal institutions” (71). Kemp has rightfully

 

'0 For more details see Chapter 3, 24.

” In the context of Guatemala Kemp has pointed out the dangers of merely “[c]laiming that information
about the past is itself a form of accountability.” It validates the perpetratrlr’s resistance to penal justice and
further diminishes victims “who seek criminal accountability as out for revenge or as obstacles to ‘national
reconciliation” (72). Accountability which is a perquisite for democratic consolidation which both
Guatemala and South Africa targeted through their truth commissions has been undermined in the name of
truth seeking (73).

'2 Kemp argues that “the perceived negative effects of criminal justice on stability [. . .] can justify hasty
wide ranging amnesty legislation or other measures of direct beneﬁt only to parties brokering power
following the collapse of a regime or the end of armed conﬂict” (71).

‘3 Linda Van Vijver, “The Amnesty Process,” After th_e TRC. 131-2.

204

pointed out that among other factors “the nature of the regime-change” and “the
motivations of all interested parties to cooperate” determine the interrelationship between
truth seeking and criminal justice. Since the marginalized populations of neither
Guatemala nor South Aﬁica emerged clearly victorious, there was no accountability of
state power that brutalized women of these nations. The pervasive effects of both agential
and systemic violence against women and their children in South Africa remained
unaccounted for and uncontested in the “post-truth” nation. In Carrots and Sticks: The
TRC a_n_d the South African Amhestv Process Jeremy Sarkin highlights the criticism that
the TRC has faced in its dealings with the issue of rape. The ANC acknowledged the
serious problem of the sexual harassment of women in its exile camps, but claimed that
prompt remedial action was taken to stop the crisis. When the MK commander, Teddy
Williams testiﬁed that “young female recruits and wives of soldiers were commonly
sexually abused in an ANC camp in Angola”, the TRC did not allow the witness to testify
further and the Commission came under criticism for its bias in handling the case (346).
Moreover, the TRC refused to recognize rape as political torture and separated political
atrocities on women ﬁ'om the realm of the criminal.14 Cases of sexual assault and rape did
not qualify for amnesty, but the reason why it did not qualify for amnesty was because
TRC denied the recognition of apartheid rape as a politically motivated crime.

Though not a post-conﬂict truth commission, the controversial Mandal
Commission in India can be seen as a platform for restoring justice to people
marginalized by caste discrimination. In an earlier chapter my examination of The Bandit

ueen of India and ILdia’s Bandit Queen has pointed out how the Samajwadi Party was

instrumental in Phoolan Devi’s release from prison and the shaping of her political

 

'4 See Sarkin 353.

205

career. The Samjwadi Party which is largely the electoral constituency of India’s lower
castes was formed in 1992 in the wake of the Mandal Commission. The Mandal
Commission Report (MCR), published in 1979, had made recommendations for what has
been called “positive discrimination” for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes in India.15
Quotas were already operative in education and employment, but the MCR “by
recommending a further quota of 27 percent for the OBCs, had raised the percentage of
reserved jobs in government and public-sector organizations to 50 percent, thus leaving
only 50 percent for open competition on the basis of merit (Sengupta and Pathak 551-2).
When on August 7, 1990, the government of India under V.P. Singh notiﬁed its intention
to implement recommendations of the 1979 MCR, India witnessed the fracturing of the
myth of a united Hindu nationalism that marked India after the country’s decolonization
from British rule in 1947 and the partitioning of India into the nation-states of India and
Pakistan. Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana argue: “The methods of protest ranged
from street-cleaning and boot-polishing to self-immolation; the discourses deployed
[against reservation] signiﬁcantly were those of Unrewarded Merit and Salvation of the
Nation” (97). The authors particularly focus on how the resistance to the national
reconciliation project of the Mandal Commission was deﬁned through the foregrounding
by upper caste women of their citizenship rights to a democratic, secular, and egalitarian
nation. In so doing these women were basing their claims of merit, as opposed to
reservation, on an ideology of the ﬁ'ee will of the individualistic subject of liberal

humanism. Their argument constructs a myth of uniﬁed Indian citizenship,

 

‘5 For this historical sketch of the Mandal Commission, see Sengupta, Saswati and Zakia Pathak, “Between
Academy and Street: A Story of Resisting Women,” m 22.3 (1997): 551-2.

206

undifferentiated by cumulative structures of oppression and privilege which deﬁne merit,
and thereby redeploys Indian citizenship as upper caste, upper class, and educated.16
Thus, the possibility of women’s coalitions across caste to facilitate dialogue about the
gendered nature of violence that visits women of all classes is stalled as upper caste
women affiliate with upper caste men against lower caste and outcaste women.l7
Sukumar Muralidharan makes a powerful analysis of how caste fractures the myth of
Hindu nationalist unity, and the rift is strategically soothed over through upper caste
appropriation of the subaltem castes to reunify a Hindu citizenry against a demonized
Muslim minority.18 Thus, national reconciliation between upper caste Hindus and the
lower castes and the outcastes results only in a scheming pseudo Hindu uniﬁcation across
castes by demonizing religious minorities of the nation.

As an alternative to the failed projects of post-conﬂict transitional justice through
national reconciliation discussed above, my conclusion argues for legal constraints on
impunity through transnational jurisdiction. Roht-Arriaza says that the Pinochet case has
“strengthened the idea that proper accountability for such crimes is the business of justice

everywhere, and that domestic laws enshrining unfair trials or shielding perpetrators are

 

'6 See Tharu and Niranjana 95.
‘7 Ibid. 99.

‘3 Sukumar Muralidharan, “Mandal, Mandir aur Masjid: ‘Hindi’ Cornmunalism and the Crisis of the State,”
Social Scientist 18.10 (1990): 27-49. The author highlights how in the wake of the Mandal Commission the
Bharatiya Janata Party razed to the ground the Babri Masj id (a mosque in the northern Indian state of Uttar
Pradesh with a signiﬁeant Islamic population)—a disputed site between Hindus and Muslims. It was
believed that a Mandir (temple) once stood at the site of the mosque to commemorate the birthplace of the
mythological Hindu prince Ram. This temple is believed to have been destroyed by the Mughal empire in
the sixteenth century to construct the mosque in its place. Muralidharan argues: “ ‘Mandal’ and ‘Mandir’
work at cross purposes and tend persistently to undermine each other. [. . .] ‘Mandir’ as a metaphor seeks to
bring the entirety of the undifferentiated ‘Hindu’ community within its ambience, keeping out only the
Muslims, whose patriotism is allegedly suspect on account of their supposed extra-territorial loyalties.
‘Mandal’ cuts the ground from under this pretense, by bringing the deep divisions within the Hindu dharma
into prominence, and demanding their redressal” (28).

207

subject to outside scrutiny” (197). However, my conceptualization of transnational
jurisdiction differs ﬁom that which Naomi Roht-Arriaza underlines in her study of the
Pinochet trial-a universal jurisdiction “which gives the courts of any country authority to
investigate and judge international crimes no matter where committed and by whom”
(xii).19 A postcolonial conceptualization of transnational justice refuses to overlook the
fact that colonial injustice continues as neo-imperial invasion of ex-colonies by powerful
nation-states of the world. On the other hand, it refuses to forget the brutal dictatorships
that postcolonial populations have faced in the name of national sovereignty. Against this
historical backdrop, my postcolonial philosophy argues for transnational tribunals that
will enjoy subpoena powers over countries to try agents of states for crimes against
humanity under transnational criminal law rather than the domestic criminal law ofany
particular nation-state.20 The success of transnational investigations will exert pressure on
nation-states to alter conditions of the nation and the behavior of its agents that lead to
such criminal proceedings before the eyes of the entire world. Such transnational
prosecutions will not be based on the nationality of either the perpetrator or the victim.

For instance, in Rwanda “the National Tribunal has become a means of revenge”

 

'9 Later on in her study the author emphasizes how Chileans and Argentines prosecuted in an ex-colonial
country like Spain and Rwandans by another ex-colonial state like Belgium might make transnational
prosecutions appear like an act of colonialism, particularly when the defendants are from regions that these
countries once colonized. However, for the author this is a necessary evil since “it is easier to keep track of
dictators who travel to rich cormtries, where the exile and activist networks that sustain investigation tend
to be strongest.” See Roht-Ariazza, Naomi, The Pinochet-Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of
Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) I81.

2° On grounds of health, Britain’s stopping of legal proceedings against Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet,
for severe human rights violations timing his rule offers a seminal argument as to why domestic law is
inadequate in dealing with crimes against humanity. While Britain released Pinochet who was arrested in
October 1998 in London, Belgium decided to ﬁght the Pinochet case. One of the important grounds for
Belgium’s justiﬁcation to ﬁght it was that Belgian law did not grant exemptions on health grounds. From
this itisevidenthowifdomestic lawdossnotmovidejustiﬁablegrormdstocrhninalizeheadsofstate,
human rights violations cannot be prosecuted. Roht—Ariazza 61—2.

208

(Amadiume and An-Na’im 12), while in South Aﬁica the project of conditional amnesty
has been perceived as an unjust and paternalistic decision by the leaders of the nation.
Transnational law in international tribunals will supersede any amnesty law which
dominates domestic roundtables for reconciliation. Moreover, domestic courts are often
compromised when perpetrators still retain state—powers. But nonetheless, domestic
courts need to remain open to try cases of human rights violations by the state if the
victim prefers domestic prosecution.2| Meanwhile, truth commissions should reﬁain from
acting as tribunals and only engage in recording violations so that the need for restorative
justice for victims can be substantiated by tracing the legacy of injustice.22

In a discussion on transnational justice it is crucial to emphasize that national
reconciliation projects are even more shaky platforms for post-conﬂict negotiations vis-a-
vis human rights violations of women during internal conﬂict. Transitional justice in
post-conﬂict situations is typically negotiated between the state patriarchy and the
revolutionary patriarchy, and since the image of the dominant political actor is male,
violations of political women and women caught in the political crossﬁre are almost
erased from the rhetoric of post-conﬂict restorative justice. An excellent example is the
South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s hearings into which Beth
Goldblatt and Sheila Meintjes made an intervention with their lengthy report and
recommendation “Gender and TRC.” Using the category of gender to frame truth and

reconciliation, the authors brought about special hearings sensitized to atrocities on

 

2‘ Roht-Ariazza 195. I have explained the rationale behind such an argument in the following pages.

22 I have also explained the potential limitations of such transnational institutions later on in my argument,
especially with regard to their power in the context of global hierarchy.

209

women before an exclusively female audience.23 Drawing on the transnational tribunal
conceptualized above and the special hearings for women in the South Aﬁican TRC, in
my conclusion I argue for a permanent transnational court which deals exclusively with
abuses of women during civil war and genocide like in Guatemala and South Africa as
well as national stalemates like that in India around caste. The caste impasse in India led
to structural violence against lower caste and outcaste women in the same way that the
apartheid has left a legacy of structural violence in which women have been caught since
the inception of apartheid. The existing International Criminal Court (ICC) established in
the Netherlands in 2002 to exercise jurisdiction over crimes against humanity requires
states to be parties to the Rome Statute that established the ICC to try cases of state-
sanctioned violence like war crimes and genocide. The ICC will also try such cases only
when national jurisdiction is unavailable.24 The transnational court trying crimes of the
state against women, which I am proposing, will not wed signatures/ratiﬁcations by state
parties so that the states do not have any control over whether their citizens can appear
before the transnational court. In such a situation the verdicts of the transnational court
will not be binding only on those states which have ratiﬁed it. Moreover, it will be the
victim’s discretion whether to choose jurisdiction under domestic law or transnational
law to not only avoid expensive travel to the transnatioml court if she wants to, but also
to have autonomy over deciding the nature of the legal perspective that will beneﬁt her
case. Such a transnational tribunal is to be run only by women who will be vested with
subpoena powers and the authority to demand restorative justice and reparations for

victims from both individuals and states concerned.

 

23 See What Women do in Wartime 27-9.

2‘ See Robertson 324-68.

210

Nonetheless, such transnational institutions of justice for women are prone to the
same issues that all “[t]op-down institution-building efforts” suffer from in their “lack of
grounding in a speciﬁc local reality” (Roht—Arriaza 203). Moreover, despite its
autonomy, the transnational court for women will be dependent on money from states,
and thus strong states can always exercise control over the transnational court and
indirectly over weak states.25 In addition, the question remains as to whether such
transnational platforms can at all be neutral spaces of justice. Can they avoid being
marked by the unequal relationship along the international division of cultural and socio-
economic power which inﬂuences legal discourse? It is imperative to do a legal critical
discourse analysis vis-a-vis local and cultural justice as well as a study of the modes of
strategic control of justice by strong states. This is because only an understanding of the
relationship among legal, political, and cultural justice can attempt to undo centuries of
colonial/neo-imperial economic, political, and cultural dominance upheld through
discourse. Only then can we push for a truly just transnational court for women. Ideally
the court will reverse the “norms of power” operative in the existing legal discourse
conditioned by Euro—American values touted as universal ideas so that invisible cultural
violence on already brutalized victims is not recycled as justice.26 As for how to create
such a tribunal that would not be the instrument of those who create it and pay for it is
largely the work of political scientists rather than that of literary critics. It is here that the

role of the public intellectual comes in as academics sit together with policy makers and

 

2‘ Roht-Arriaza 203.

26 Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectugl: The 1993 Reﬂ Lecturis (New York: Pantheon Books,
1994) 98.

211

activists to forge a transnational politics of discursive and material justice. But as Edward

Said points out, “the intellectual is not an uncomplicated automaton” either (98).

212

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