What: 11 Women Facing War
Where & when: to April 21 at the Canadian War Museum
Click here to see videos of the women on the Museum’s Youtube channel
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New photographs at the Canadian War Museum are a journey through the depraved and indiscriminate violence of war, and yet there are inspiring moments of courage and even hope, for some.
The exhibition is 11 Women Facing War, and the women have paid heavily for being innocent witnesses to fighting in Afghanistan, Colombia,the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Israel and the Palestinian territories. The women and girls were photographed by British photojournalist and filmmaker Nick Danziger first in 2001 and again approximately 10 years later.
During the decade some of the women had rebuilt their lives and started again, even with their physical and psychological scars. Some still remained trapped in endless mourning for lost husbands or sons. Not all survived.
In 2011 Danziger returned to Afghanistan to find Mah Bibi, a girl who 10 years earlier had told him, “This morning I had no food for breakfast and I ate grass.” She died a few years later. In Danziger’s portrait from 2001 Mah looks into the camera with dark, riveting eyes, the face of a child who has seen real horror.
Mah Bibi in 2001 in Afghanistan. She died a few years later. The portrait is from Nick Danziger’s 11 Women Facing War at the Canadian War Museum.
Others survived, somehow. Mariatu Kamara was 12 when her village in Sierra Leone was attacked by rebel soldiers, most of them boys. She watched one boy chop off the head of a mother who was holding a baby. Then a boy chopped off Mariatu’s hands.
She recounted in her 2008 book, The Bite of the Mango, how the boy soldier took two swings of his machete to fully sever her hands. “He brought the machete down again in a different spot, higher up on my arm. This time, my hand few from the rock into the ground. The nerves kept it alive for a few seconds, and it leapt from side to side, as trout did when we caught them from the river.”
Even before the rebels destroyed her village she had been raped by another man, so as her arms healed her belly grew. She gave birth to a son, who died months later of malnutrition. She lived in a sprawling refugee camp and begged for coins each day. All this before her 14th birthday. She wrote in her book, “My hatred toward the world began anew each morning.”
Today Mariatu has an air of serenity and beneficence. She is 26 and lives in Toronto, is studying to be a social worker, and tells her story wherever she can. She’s in Ottawa for the launch of the exhibition and I ask her, how did you not give up on humanity?
She says, “ I could easily sit down and commit suicide, no one would question me why. But why would I end my life when I know, deep inside me, that God has a purpose for me. The purpose is going out, sharing my story and many other (similar) stories. . . It’s better for me to let go of the past. Let me do my best and make live worth living.”
The other nine surviving women have found peace as they can. Amanda was 11 when she was forced to fight with the guerrillas in Colombia, and then spent 10 years in prison. Now she lives in the suburbs with a young son, but her partner has disappeared. She says in the photo text, “I’m afraid that he is dead.”
All the women have lost family. Some never found the bodies, others did only years later. It’s difficult to imagine a photograph with more pathos than the final image of Olja, from Serbia, whose husband’s body was returned to her four years after his death. She says in the text, “The only place I feel good is at the grave of my Rade. It is all I really have now.”
In the photograph Olja polishes the black marble of Rade’s grave. The surface gleams, and reflects the weary face of another women left behind.
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Mariatu Kamara in Sierra Leone in 2001, from Nick Danziger’s 11 Women Facing War at the Canadian War Museum. Photographs of Mariatu in 2011 show her cooking and putting on her own makeup, despite having no hands.
