Musings on the Global Culture of Rape: History and the Congo

I want to thank Shecodes of Black Women Vote! and Danielle Vyas of Modern Musings, both of whom encouraged bloggers to post today, April 13, about the Congo rape epidemic and who have also raised awareness that today is a global day of solidarity to stop the genocide in Darfur. And, as I always draw inspiration from Professor Black Woman, I want to thank her for reminding me of last week's 14th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide and of the recent attacks over there on the Rwanda Memorial.

Last but not least, I want to thank filmmaker Lisa F. Jackson for shaking me to my very core last week with her brave and unflinching documentary film, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, and for modeling the kind of feminist solidarity so desperately needed between white women and black women, between women of the Global North and South, especially in light of less than exemplary behavior of some white bloggers and publishers of late.

I remember, in debriefing with a friend, after watching the program, about how unfathomable it was to think of the horrendous suffering of women in war - in particular African women, whose voices are often ignored and whose bodies are perpetually objectified - we started wondering if there was anything really new about the gruesome forms of sexual violence in the Congo. I'm not talking in the sense of, yes, such behavior is also mirrored in the present conflict in Darfur or in Iraq or in Afghanistan, but that such torturous, militarized sexual violence had also taken place during the Nicaraguan War in the 1980s, during the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Indeed, as Andrea Smith has documented in her book on Native American women's history, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, America was founded on the mutilated vaginas of indigenous women. So was Australia, and do I even need to mention Africa again?

When I think of the Congolese woman, whose rectum was burned out of her, I also think of those Carib, Arawak, Aztec, Mayan, Creek, Cherokee, Iroquois, Inuit, Kanaka Maoli, Warai, and Jingili women whose genitalia were routinely cut out of them and placed on sticks, spears, and hats for proud exhibition. I think of the Khoisan woman from South Africa, Saartjie Baartman, whose genitalia was also placed on proud exhibition - not on a spear, but in a scientific bell jar. I think of imperialism and racism, and how both ideologies depended upon the institution of misogyny to maintain supremacy. I think of this long, long, awfully long history of women in general - and women of color especially - who are often targeted for the most brutal forms of violence and then enveloped in silence so that we dare not dwell on the traumatic memories or, worse, on the traumatic future that is surely set for our daughters.

I think about all this when I reflect on the rape epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo because, like my friend asked me: why the hell are we, as women, still dealing with this atrocity when it is the year 2008? When is this going to stop? Why should we, as the daughters, the descendants of "those who chose to survive" (to quote from Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust), those who went through an unimaginable hell called the Middle Passage - where, on top of that Holocaustic journey, our ancestral mothers had to add rape to their experience - and still the hell wasn't over, why are we still bearing the same scars?

If there is anything to take away from the film, from knowing about this horrific and inexcusable outrage, it's that the women who told their stories survived. Those women broke their silence. Like our ancestral mothers before them, they found a song or they have created "a way out of no way." They are rebuilding their lives and coming together as women, not unlike what women have done in Rwanda, not unlike what we need to do here.

Celie from Alice Walker's The Color Purple said it best when she proclaims, "Dear God, I'm here! I'm here!"

Don't ever, for one second, doubt the tremendous victory it is when we survive because our enemies will not stop until they have completely annihilated us all. When, after such atrocities, we are here and "left to tell the tale," we have won.

Perhaps the important piece about my conversation with my friend is not so much why so many women are still suffering in the 21st century - despite all the so-called gains of the feminist movement - but what does it mean that for the first time in our long history we can loudly TALK about our rape experiences today and have language for it, to call the act what it is, without whispering or suppressing it. Indeed, we can loudly say "this happened to me!" in a film and have that media travel the world over.

Now that we're breaking the silence, will our daughters and our sons follow a different path, or will it still be the same old same old? What goals will we set for ourselves so that militarized rape does not have to pass down from generation to generation like DNA (don't let those evolutionary scientists fool you, boys and men! You can prevent sexual violence!)?

Right now, we will not be silenced. We will call out our perpetrators by their names (see my corporate rapists post), and we will say NO! to oppression and YES! to resistance and solidarity.

I end this post with a great musical piece by Zap Mama, founded by "Afropean" Congolese vocalist Marie Daulne, called "Abadou," based on an African story of a young woman trying to escape her fate. May we all succeed!