Memory Work as Resistance: Eritrean and Sudanese Women in Conflict Zones

Abstract

Using field data from Eritrea and Sudan, Hale’s essay interprets women’s political memory work in contemporary conflict situations as forms of resistance. Few approaches are more epistemologically generative in analyzing conflict than the politics of memory in which, by recounting conflict situations through various renderings, those engaged try to override, cancel out, and morally supersede their adversaries’ renditions. People try to colonize each other’s pasts, and men try to colonize women’s versions of conflicts. Some strategies for colonizing the memory of violent conflicts involve annihilating culture; dislocating people from their homeland; and trying to shape and control the lives, bodies, and voices of women. In various Sudanese and Eritrean conflict situations, not only do competing ethnic groups and people with differing modes of economy remember their encounters differently, so do women and men. During conflict situations, men may try to recapture stories of the homeland through the bodies of women, a provocative process that sometimes leads to gender-based violence (e.g., Darfur, Sudan) or, by contrast, to gender-blind ideology (e.g., in Eritrea). By substituting their own poetics, women resist a biopolitics in which their bodies are used as a symbolic means of dramatizing conflicts. They have had to replace the everyday, for now, with a politics, polemics, and poetry that allows them to resist.

El papel de la educación superior en el desarrollo de la ciudadanía global en Eritrea

“…These provisions were based on critical pedagogy and emphasized all the principles of global citizenship including social justice and creativity (MINISTRY OF EDUCATION, 2008). During the armed struggle, the EPLF was also able to create an egalitarian society within its fighters where religion, ethnicity and other differences were neutralized (HALE, 2012).…”

Medicine Bag: An Autoethnographic Account of Learning to Use Memory and Indigeneity as Resources in College Advising

“…Though weight, age, and hairstyle have affected my appearance now to the contrary, my past includes presenting to others as multiethnic and, at times, androgynous. It is resistance work, my way of confronting and facing my memories as I conduct research and travel on my past-present-future educational odyssey (Hale, 2012). My autoethnographic memory is the place where my personal experiences and reflections serve to describe and understand wider social and cultural meanings that I will use in my role as an educator, advisor, and mentor.…”

“…I understood early on that the truth can sometimes be representative of those structures already in place, those already in power. The truth and role of memory may be simply stated as whose truth and whose memories (Hale, 2012).…”

“…Occurrences like this one are too often credited to chance, where I see such meetings as my scholarly spiritual expedition. Using the power and politics of my personal memory work may lead to empowerment instead of marginalization, and embodiment instead of disenfranchisement (Hale, 2012). My medicine bag of memories grows fuller and is richer because of these friendships.…”

“…Autoethnography reveals the significance of lived experience of one life to all, to display in narrative that our stories may be of value and interest to others (Kimpson, 2005). By employing autoethnography, one becomes the power behind the research, the spirit of the narrative, in a self-reflective way (Hale, 2012). It is both reliable and convincing to have both the researcher and the researched as one voice in storytelling; one voice standing alone as originator and initiator of knowledge.…”