I have always loved the written word above all else – my earliest memory is being ridiculed on the school bus for furiously attempting to finish my latest chapter book. In my tormentor’s defense, I did live three blocks from our middle school. As I grew older, this love for writing and literature only intensified. So when I took our action for Day 13 – reading Halima Bashir’s Tears of the Desert – I was both excited and terrified. As part of the Save Darfur team that works to raise awareness and action around sexual violence, I was all too familiar with the horrors the book would hold. In discussing this issue, we often use clinical, colder terms – “gender-based violence,” “moment of assault,” “psychological implications.” In many circumstances, we as an activist community write our way around the truest and most difficult word – rape.
Stalin famously said that “one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic.” Unfortunately, these words often ring true – not only in the international community’s reaction to mass killing, but in how we react to mass sexual violence. While statistics are hard to come by and those who were to collect them have been either expelled or intimidated by the Sudanese government, we know that thousands upon thousands of women in Darfur have been raped by governmental forces and the janjaweed militias. But this story of mass rape is actually a much more horrifying story – it is the story of a single rape, an unbearable experience that no one should have to suffer through, experienced thousands and thousands of times. In many ways, it is harder to read or hear a single testimony than to write a paper about its prevalence. This understanding was at the core of my apprehension – to read is not only to know, but to embody an experience for a certain time. What euphemism and convention can obscure, the written word lays bare. This is the source of its power.
Tears of the Desert is, however, a majestically crafted memoir – one which I am a fuller person for reading. For the past four years, I have studied the history of genocide intently and for the past two I have been engaged in research on genocide memorialization, both formal and informal, in Rwanda. In a period of six weeks, I traveled to nearly every recognized memorial in the country – frequently traveling to four memorials, attending a remembrance ceremony and conducting several hours of survivor interviews in a single day. At that time, I realized that if I could not construct walls between myself and what I was studying, the reality of the situation would cripple me. At the same time, the reality is what spurs you to action. It is a strange and frequently uncomfortable tightrope to walk – between feeling and acting, between policy and testimony. And in the past year or so, in order to act and to write analytically, I constructed walls which became, at times, too large for me to see beyond. Tears of the Desert forced me to surrender this distance. The capacity for genuine compassion – literally “to feel with” in Latin – and to verbalize thought are the two elements that distinguish human beings from our animal counterparts. In many ways, this surrender was a kind of return to a deeper humanity – one which provokes pain, but also understanding, kindness, empathy and action.
For much of Bashir’s memoir, she speaks about her family, friends and community – the close relationship she shared with her encouraging father, her stubborn and fiery grandmother and her love of learning. While the details were different – from the kinds of food her family ate to the games they played as children – the broader relationships and experiences of her youth reminded me much of my own. It is through this kind of relation – our profound affection for the young Halima that her writing provokes – that the losses she suffers, the things she sees and the rapes she experiences later on are written so much more closely to our own hearts. Often people think of the genocide in Darfur and the violence in other parts of Sudan as remote, intangible and inapproachably complex. But Tears of the Desert, by telling a single story, reminds us that the women experiencing this suffering are intrinsically related to us – their relationships, desires and aspirations before the genocide were the same as our own, our sisters’ and our friends’.
Activists often speak about a moment of obligation – when they first realized that they could no longer “sit idly by.” My first moment of obligation was when I read We Wish to Inform You Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Phillip Gourevitch. That day in tenth grade, I made a choice to dedicate my life to working to prevent genocide and mass atrocities. In the years since then, I have become tired, frustrated and, at times, cynical at the lack of progress we as a human community have made. Reading Halima Bashir’s gorgeously written, deeply affecting and brave memoir was my second moment of obligation. Bashir’s story shows us that, as activists, we can never forget that people - their right to freedom, to have the kind of lives that they want to live - are at the center of our work. This is what we’re fighting for.
The opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Save Darfur Coalition.
Tags: 16 Days, Darfur, Day 13, Halima Bashir, Sudan, Tears of the Desert, Violence Against Women
