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So the title of my book is
Conflict Bodies: The Politics
of Rape Representation in
the Francophone Imaginary
and I really use that title
Conflict Bodies as a way
to begin to think
about this term
conflict zones which
is well-known to people
especially in the
context of politics.
The conflict zone refers
to places around the world
where there is a high level
of armed conflict or recurrent
war or civil strife.
And a lot of times in
these conflict zones,
you also hear about the
frequent rape of women.
And I really wanted
to think about the way
that this notion of
the conflict zone
and the notion of the
context of the conflict
becomes sometimes more
important than what's
actually happening to the body.
So my choice of this
title Conflict Bodies
is a way to signal a
shift from attention
to the idea of the zone,
the space where the conflict
happens, to the actual body.
So to focus on those
survivors of sexual violence,
those people who are
actually the ones whose
bodies are being penetrated
and are being wounded.
But to do it not
in a symbolic way,
but rather in a way that
really pays attention
to both the psychic
and psychological costs
of that violation and
how it's represented.
The other parts of the title--
The Politics of Rape
Representation--
I think is also about,
for me, this question
of representation.
So what does rape look like
on screen, on the page,
whether it's in a literary text,
a novel, a poem, a documentary,
or in photography?
But what are the
politics behind that?
So what are some
of the ways that we
can put together the poetics,
as we say in literary studies?
So the way that you know what it
looks like, how it's described,
as well as-- and what techniques
the artist uses to describe
it--
as well as its meaning.
So, again, not just what
it symbolizes, but what
it might mean for the survivor
in the context and outside.
And then Francophone
is, of course, you
know places outside of France
where French is spoken.
And I use Francophone
countries both in Africa
and in the Caribbean.
And then the
Imaginary is, for me,
the idea of the
Francophone Imaginary
I use that because I focus
on so many different forms
of representation.
And I'm interested
in not only the way
that rape is represented
in the text and the context
that I look at, but
also how has rape
been represented in the
history of Francophone studies?
The cover image for me really
emblematizes my argument.
This is a piece of art by a
well-known Haitian artist named
Edouard Duval-Carrie.
And he does a lot of works
that also talk about the role
that Haiti occupies in
the global imagination.
Right?
So thinking about Haiti--
the title of the piece
is actually Poor
Little Crippled Haiti.
And it's really a
commentary on the way
that Haiti is looked at as a
beleaguered, so-called third
world nation.
This is Haiti post
the 2010 earthquake.
Haiti as the place where
there have been all
these dictatorships and coups.
And as a place where there
is a history of conflict
and also disease as
well and poverty.
And that image of
this little tree
slash woman standing
on the globe
is, to me, really
an example of how
that image of a beleaguered
nation or a beleaguered place
is embodied by a female.
Right?
So its a picture of a tree.
But that the tree
is clearly female.
It's gendered as female
with the dress on it.
And even just that
look of the tree being
conflated with the landscape.
Right?
So this idea of a tree woman.
One of the things that I
talk about in the book a lot,
or that I describe
in the book, is
how the women's
bodies are easily
conflated with the landscape.
And that we can hear, for
example, the expression
the rape of the land.
So for me that image
really encapsulated
three of the main things
that I'm talking about,
which is number one, the idea of
a conflict zone or of a place--
in this case Haiti--
that has been thought about in
relation to poverty and disease
and catastrophe and
political strife.
And then also the way
that the female body
is used to symbolize that
in that the female body can
stand in to can stand in place
of this kind of conflict.
When I was in graduate
school, I became
very taken by the idea
of [SPEAKING FRENCH]
or the politics of literature,
engaged, committed literature,
it's translated.
And that was I was taking
20th century classes.
And I had read
Jean-Paul Sartre and I
became very curious about
how this question of
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
manifested itself
for the Francophone
author and particularly
for Francophone women writers.
And so I wrote my dissertation
on the representation
of violence in the works of
Francophone women writers.
But at the same time that I was
doing this intellectual work
and that I was in graduate
school taking classes
about literature, I
was also very engaged
as an activist in the
fight to end violence
against women and girls.
I was volunteering at the
Boston Area Rape Crisis Center.
I was on the board.
And I was performing
and lecturing
for a nonprofit
organization that
uses the arts to end violence
against women and girls.
And a lot of survivors
were actually
disclosing their
stories of rape to me.
And I began to ask about--
so as I was working
on this dissertation
on the representation
of violence,
I really was also
thinking about rape,
sexual violence in
particular, in all
these different contexts.
And I thought when I moved
from the dissertation
to the book, what
I really want to do
is just focus on
the sexual violence.
And I wanted to focus
on sexual violence
because it kept coming
up as a recurrent image.
But to me, it was often one
that was emptied of meaning.
And so I really
wanted to investigate
what are some of the
ways that we can really
analyze and theorize sexual
violence in a way that
is not just symbolic.
Right?
One of the other ways
that I think about this
is that relationship between
the words [SPEAKING FRENCH]
and [SPEAKING FRENCH]
in French, right?
So [SPEAKING FRENCH]
is feminine.
And then [SPEAKING FRENCH]
is masculine.
And that's really about a
grammatical designation,
I think that it's
important for us
to think about where
is [SPEAKING FRENCH]..
What happens to
[SPEAKING FRENCH] in
[SPEAKING FRENCH]?
If we are so, because
of colonialism, because
of slavery, because of
genocide, because of civil war,
because of war,
there has been a lot
of attention given to violence
and the representation
of violence, especially
in the Francophone worlds.
But I felt that there
was less attention,
less critical attention, being
given to sexual violence.
And so for me it was
really a marriage
almost between these
two areas of my life--
the activist side of myself
and the academic side.
And I wanted to
think about how can I
bring these two
aspects of myself
together in an academic
text that is critical,
that is rigorous, that
asks these questions,
but that also has a significance
in a broader context.
I would say that the
relationship between violence
and representation is
always a tense one,
is almost an ambiguous one, in
the sense that there is what we
call mimesis, or the inability
of text to fully convey
their social realities, right?
So there's this tension
between the reality
and the representation.
So can a literary
text or a film ever
really capture the
experience of violence?
No, it cannot.
And I think that
what we also see
is that there is this
struggle within the text
that the artist usually wages.
And it's a struggle where
you see this effort to try
to represent violence.
So this is something--
I have a chapter in my book on
representations of the Rwandan
genocide.
And this is something that
you see these authors that
are really struggling.
Veronique Tadjo who's an Ivorian
writer from Cote d'Ivoire.
Who is part of a collective
called [SPEAKING FRENCH]..
And it was a collective
of African writers
who went to Rwanda,
visited sites of genocide,
and then wrote about
what they found.
And with each of these authors,
you really see this struggle.
How do you represent genocide?
How do you put on
the page or render
through the text something
that is so catastrophic, so
traumatic, so enormous.
This is also the same thing that
we see a lot in the Caribbean
and in African-American
authors as they
try to write about slavery.
So there is a violence
that exists that perhaps
the literary text
cannot express.
But what I'm
interested in is how
that tension, how that
inability to express violence
manifests itself
through different
literary and stylistic choices,
through narrative choices.
That you see really
this struggle.
So, for example,
Veronique Tadjo's texts
which I was talking about
about the Rwandan genocide,
it's a text without a genre.
It's part of it is
a travel narrative.
At some points, it's prose.
At some points it's poetry.
At some points it's almost
like a journalistic account
of her experience.
She incorporates myth into it.
She incorporates all these
different genres in one book.
And I interpreted that
as really her struggle
to be able to render genocide.
Her struggle to be able
to put onto the page what,
for her, was first
something that she herself
did not experience but was
witnessing, experiencing
as a belated witness.
But that struggle, that
tension, that tension
between reality and
representation, I think,
really manifests itself.
Or in the text that
I privilege, it
manifests itself as I would
say a struggle, right?
As a struggle on the page.
Right?
So on the one hand, it's
a struggle between reality
and representation, but
then it's also this struggle
that you can see in the
different texts that I look at.
So I would say the
relationship between violence
and representation is
fraught, on the one hand.
But I do also think that the
way that we represent the world,
or the way that we
represent violence,
or the way that violence
is represented in a text
can tell us something
about society.
So, for example, if you take
one of my original premises,
which is that there is an
under theorization of rape
in relation to this kind
of hyper representation
of violence, that that is
actually reflective of the way
that rape--
the stigma against rape.
The fact that rape
is often silenced.
The fact that rape survivors'
voices are muffled voices.
And so the text that
I look at really
tried to explore those
silences and push
against that underrepresentation
of sexual violence.
You know for me as
a literary scholar,
my training is as
a literary critic,
I was really interested
in looking at texts,
close reading these texts, to
see what they were telling us
about sexual violence.
And so it began
as a project where
I was looking at these
canonical texts about violence,
like Frantz Fanon's
Les Damnes de
la Terre The Wretched
of the Earth or [FRENCH]
and looking at these
really canonical texts
by postcolonial
Francophone writers
and seeing what they are
telling us about violence.
So how do the critical
reading strategies,
how does close reading,
help us to understand
what is really going on when
the author does talk about rape?
So this goes back to what I
was saying about rape being
only present symbolically.
And I noticed the same
kinds of patterns.
That rape was used to symbolize
the violence of the colonizer
against the colonized.
That rape was used to kind of
as an allegorical manifestation
of this violence, so you
know, for example, you see--
I think I said the
rape of the land,
but also this idea
of colonial conflict
is also a part of that.
And it's also normalized.
Right?
So the other thing that
you hear is that rape--
you know you see
this representation
in a book like this
Les Soleils des
independances by
Ahmadou Kourouma,
you see that this woman who
was raped, it's kind of normal.
When you read the experience
of the survivor, the way
that it's written into the
text it's not a big deal.
It's not really questioned as a
significant event in the text.
And these are patterns that
I saw in the literature
that I then wanted
to see, OK, well
what happens when we take
this to another genre?
So when you take, for example,
the question of representing
sexual violence to a film, there
is a different relationship
there because there's
a visual experience
that the audience has.
And what I noticed there were
some of the same patterns where
there was a lot of
attention being given
to how do you
render this of rape
manageable for the audience?
So in the final chapter I
talk about this in relation
to the play Ruined
by Lynn Nottage.
And I talk about audience
affect and the way
that the story, the rape
narrative in that drama,
changes at the end.
And it becomes
essentially a love story.
And I read that as
a way to make it
something that the audience
would be able to digest.
Because you have this
horrific experience,
or this horrific scene
of sexual violence,
how do you give
that to an audience?
Right?
So I think that when you look
at these different genres,
for each one, I deploy
critical reading strategies
based on my training
as a literary scholar.
But I think that when you
think about it in terms
of cultural studies, it's
also important to consider
how is this operate?
How does this text operate
in relation to the genre
that it's in?
Right?
So like I was saying with the
drama, because of the audience
or with the film,
how was the camera
moving to show us
what is happening?
There's one of the films
that I look at look
at is Sometimes in
April by Raoul Peck.
And in that film there
is no scene of rape,
but we see the aftermath.
So you see men who are buckling
their pants and women who
are cowering on the ground.
And I think that that is a
way that the filmmaker uses,
again not to show us
the horror of rape,
but also doing it kind
of through the eyes
of the survivors is a way I
think of still privileging
their point of view.
So I think that what
ties each of these forms
together, whether it's the
photography, the documentary,
the novels, the poetry, or
the drama that I look at
or the film, is
that in each case,
we see an attention
given to rape.
Whereas in some of the texts
that I talk about, specifically
in the first chapter,
there is, like I said,
that symbolic or
allegorical turn
in not really giving
attention to how
rape affects the actual person,
the survivor, in the text.
And so we see that
rape is also processed
through the eyes of the
person who's experiencing it.
And we also see a refusal
to spectacularize it.
Right?
And this is again something
that we see, especially
in these so-called
conflict zones.
Where, when you talk about
rape in the Democratic Republic
of the Congo, this
language of the spectacular
is used over and over again.
But these texts that I'm
looking at each time,
it really causes us to pause
and think, this person's life--
This is something that happened
to them in this person's life.
But we're seeing the person
subsequently as well.
And that literature, the
writing or the image,
allows us to see that.
So in the photographs,
for example, we
know that the photographs
document someone who is a rape
survivor, but we don't see her.
Actually, we don't
see her being raped.
We see her in the aftermath.
But we see her over
and over again doing
these different things as though
she's piecing together her life
in the aftermath of rape.
And I think that each of the
forms of cultural production
that I explore is
really protective
of that subjectivity
in that way and tries
to negotiate that
subjectivity through a range
of different strategies.
This was something that
I thought about a lot
as I was in the process
of rewriting the book,
or going from the
dissertation to the book.
And I was really committed
to doing a comparative study,
because part of
what I'm examining
is related to a global
phenomenon of sexual violence.
Right?
So when we say that
one in three women
will be raped in her lifetime
that that is a statistic
that includes the
United States and Europe
and the African continent
and Asia and the Caribbean
and South America.
And
I wanted to be able to show
the breadth of sexual violence
by looking at different
countries that may be very
different from one another.
So I look at Haiti,
and Guadalupe, Rwanda,
and the Democratic
Republic of the Congo.
And for me it's also about
this transatlantic movement.
Right?
So in Francophone
studies, a lot of time
you do see people
separating it out.
So we have Francophone Caribbean
studies or Francophone Africa.
And so even if you look
at the publications
in my field in the
past several years,
there are fewer books
that are comparative.
That maybe about
20 years ago there
were a lot of books
that were comparative,
but then slowly it started
to get separated out.
And I really felt strongly
that part of what I was trying
to contribute to this field,
part of my intervention
in the field of
Francophone studies,
was to highlight what this
comparative analysis--
when you take a theme or you
take a topic and you take
a question--
how this comparative
analysis helps
us to see the bridges between
different kinds of text,
different places.
But that also that there's
a larger legacy rate
that each of these places
has inherited, whether it's
through slavery or
through colonialism,
going back to again,
that relationship
between [SPEAKING FRENCH] and
[SPEAKING FRENCH],, these places
are tied together as part of
the French speaking world.
And I think that,
increasingly, we're
thinking about
Francophone studies
as world literature
is in French, right?
So we're thinking about
it for how global it is.
And that was important
to me to kind of protect
some of that global
reach by having
a study that was focused
on these two major parts
of the Francophone world.
So my main intervention, my
main scholarly intervention,
with this book is to
intervene and unite
three different fields-- so
Francophone studies, which
we talked about a little bit,
transnational global feminisms,
and rape cultural criticism.
And each of these fields
comes with their own set
of methodologies.
So, for example, Francophone
literary studies,
as I was talking about before,
a lot of critical close
readings of these texts, really
thinking about the language,
thinking about because
these texts are written
in French well, why is
this tense being used
to describe the scene of rape?
Is she describing?
How do you describe
the aftermath of rape?
If this is someone experiencing,
if this is someone talking
about her rape in the present,
when the rape has already
happened-- we know
earlier in the book--
might that be a way of telling
us something about rape trauma
syndrome?
Right?
So that's where that
kind of reading that
focuses on tenses and
word use and grammar
also by uniting that with rape
cultural criticism-- which
is a field that tells us that we
need to think about how rape is
represented in different forms
of cultural; production--
and adding my own view to
this that the way that rape
is written about in other fields
like sociology or psychology
where they write about
rape trauma syndrome,
that those might
have manifestations
in a literary text as well.
So that's kind of one example
of how you unite those fields.
And then using transnational
global feminisms--
as a feminist scholar, I
really take seriously the idea
that feminism needs
to be something
that is not just local
but that is really global.
Right?
But that even that while it is
global, that the local is still
important.
So not having a
dichotomy or a hierarchy,
but really pausing
to think about
what does this mean
for gender, what
does this mean for sexuality?
And transnational
global feminisms
is really a product
of black feminism
as well where you think
about intersectionality,
the intersection of
race, class, gender,
sexuality, and then adding to
that ethnicity and language.
And so part of my method
was really considering
and theorizing, using the
intersectional approach
as a point of departure
for theorizing
what else the scene of sexual
violence could be telling us.
And, you know, this
goes back to-- again
as a feminist scholar I think
a lot about subjectivity.
How can a character,
how was a character
rendered as a subject versus
how a character may have
been rendered as an object?
And this is important to me,
because part of my contribution
was looking at this kind of
dominant narrative of how
violent rape had
been represented
in relation to violence
throughout Francophone literary
studies, but then offering
a counter discourse.
And that counter
discourse is one
that I was really
able to theorize
as a result of bringing that
feminist lens to the text.
So I also introduced
a number of texts
that push against this
dominant narrative.
So push against this what we
call a rape script, a script,
being one that in a novel
and a 20th century novel
you see rape
represented constantly
in relation to colonialism.
A way to push
against that would be
to represent rape
that's happening
during the colonial
period, but is not
the rape of the colonized, the
colonizer raping the colonized,
but rather a colonized man
raping a colonized woman.
And that becomes one
way to kind of push
back, inserting
the lens of gender,
inserting the lens of
class, sexuality, inserting
that intersectional lens.
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