16 Days - Day 8: The Bigger Picture
Posted by Ann Jones on December 2nd, 2007
 Women carry heavy loads like this every day, often walking long distances to and from the fields or market. Photo: Bile Marie Louise |
| The International Rescue Committee is working with writer, photographer and long-time women’s advocate Ann Jones to give women in war zones an opportunity to document their own lives with digital cameras and make their voices heard.Ann is blogging from West Africa, posting new photos and stories each day for 16 days, starting November 25 — the kick-off of “16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence.” You can catch her earlier posts here and sign up to get e-mail alerts about new posts at theIRC.org/join16days.
Yamoussoukro, Cote d’Ivoire—The first photo assignment for our teams in all three villages where Global Crescendo is underway is a simple one. Take as many photos as you want to show what life is like for women in your village; include three images of things that are problems in your life, and three images of things that make you happy. Finding problems was easy. Women took photos of a woman badly beaten by her husband who then denied her the money she needed to go to the health center. Photos of a man brandishing a log with which he had clubbed his wife. Photos of a man pinning his wife down in the dirt. Photos of a man hitting his wife with a stick. Photos of a penniless young woman with three tiny children living in the open under a thatched roof, abandoned by her husband. The last is most troubling to the women. The threat of abandonment is what makes women suffer all other forms of abuse in silence. Anything is better, they say, than to be left homeless and alone.
Most of these women actually feed and clothe themselves and their children by working their farms, selling produce in the market, making beer or other items for sale. But the house belongs to the man, together with everything in it and the land it stands upon. And money is needed for extras, like visits to the doctor and medicine—money the husband may give or not. Husbands are responsible for “important” things like funerals. They pay the expenses. They invite the guests with whom they sit and drink beer. It’s the women, of course, who do the work. What makes women happy was easy too. Like the photo of a man who, when he saw that his wife was exhausted as she labored over dinner preparations, actually took the buckets and went to the well himself to fetch the water for his bath. There were other amazing photos of men in action: sweeping the courtyard, helping their wives pound maize, drawing water, carrying firewood home on their bicycles, and in a few cases actually holding babies. (One woman asked: “Why can’t men bathe children?”)
And the other photos? In a week, some women had taken hundreds. They showed women working in the fields with mattock and hoe, women chopping firewood with machetes, women building fires, women cooking over fires with cauldrons and grills, preparing rice, smoking fish, boiling fermented maize for beer, braising bananas and plantains, stirring sauces of eggplants or peanuts or tomatoes with onions and chilies, women peeling manioc with machetes, grating manioc, boiling manioc, women washing dishes and clothes and children, women sweeping house and yard, women carrying burdens of all sorts on their heads—stalks of plantains, basins of tomatoes, bundles of firewood, bags of laundry—walking to the field five kilometers away, or the market five kilometers in the opposite direction, or the river. By the time this project ends in Cote d’Ivoire, in the space of a few weeks, I will have thousands of photos of village women doing chores. Most photos show a woman alone, often surrounded by her young children, engaged in heavy labor.
My French tutor, a forward thinking Yamoussoukro school teacher, is ready to repudiate village traditions. Only the custom of polygamy must be maintained, he says, because the hard work necessary to support a man is too much for one woman to do alone. The idea that a man might share “her” work has not occurred to him. Yet what other solution is there? Freeze-dried peeled and grated instant manioc will not be available to village women anytime soon, and if it were, they would still have to haul the wood and build the fire to cook it. In the villages, tasks are not allotted by physical capacity but by gender alone.
What emerges from these massed photos is a bigger picture, a broader definition of gender-based violence. It is not just wife beating or rape or sexual slavery. It is not just psychological tyranny and threat. For village women gender-based violence is life itself—a life that demands relentless forced hard labor because they are women. I want to hire an immense cavernous exhibition hall and cover the walls with thousands of small photos these women have made. At the exit I will put a single message to those who come to view the exhibition: “If you got tired of looking at these photographs, imagine how the women feel about the work.” |
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December 2nd, 2007 at 1:42 pm
Such a moving story. Why do many men and cultures have to continue to behave in such negative ways to feel important? America also has some misogynist men often claiming that right by Religion and the Bible. They also inflict their sick thinking on others. I wonder how many males are reading 16 days and are willing to stand up to misogynistic males and make a positive difference for all women.
December 2nd, 2007 at 2:17 pm
I am exhausted just looking at this. I wonder why these women continue to put up with this, why they don’t band together and fight back against this tyranny. Then I read how the men use the Koran (as they interpret it) to substantiate the mistreatment. The first thing I think is needed to cause this abuse to change is for the women to learn to read so that they can see for themselves that the Koran does not support this kind of treatment: that it says to be kind to women and children, that women actually have rights under Islam and have since before they were given rights under Christianity. In many societies, women have been kept subservient just by the method of keeping them illiterate, just as the slaves were in the U.S. before the Civil War. Education of both women and men is imperative for change.
December 2nd, 2007 at 3:35 pm
I could never be tired of these photos….
Thank you.
December 2nd, 2007 at 3:43 pm
I wish I could send a pile of little red wagons or buy a donkey & cart or 2, just to help with the hauling. Is there any way for the abandoned women to set up house together. Use teamwork to get through their daily routines? my son wishes he could go & keep guard for these women & thrash those men beating their wives. He is 17. We send our prayers to you. Any way we can set up direct correspondence? Snail mail? Email? We would love to send a pic to say hello from Nicickousemenecaning First Nation.
December 2nd, 2007 at 4:38 pm
The nonmisogynist males that aren’t reading “16 Days” are probably afraid that the misogynist males will think that they are losers for standing up to women.
December 2nd, 2007 at 8:16 pm
Thank you Ann, fantastic work.
May I say to some of the women posting comments that we are not all misogynists! Perhaps it is not so much about ‘men hating women’ as it is about being brought up to be blind to the prolific inequality and violence against women.
This is perhaps similar to the way in which those of us in the minority (or ‘developed’ world) are blind to the grinding poverty of the majority world (or ‘developing’ world). Will we be remembered as the generations who sat back and ate ourselves to death while the rest of the world suffered?
There are many guys who do genuinely care about violence against women. It is in men’s interests after all to loose our blindness to the genderd violence perpetrated against women if we want to live in a peaceful world founded on respect for human rights. The White Ribbon Campaign was after all started by guys who had to protest violence against women. If you would like to check out the Australian White Ribbon blog go to http://whiteribbonday.wordpress.com/
December 2nd, 2007 at 9:50 pm
Of course the men don’t want the women to learn to read and get educated. They know that with all the work the women do, they couldn’t survive without them! How wonderful it would be if the women could realize how much power they really have. I like GG’s idea of the abandoned women living together and helping each other out. Perhaps entire villages of women who want change could collectively decide to stage a work strike until they are treated with the respect they deserve. I realize though that it could be very dangerous for many of them given the male-dominated culture. The photos are so enlightening. I hope to be able to see them all some day.
December 3rd, 2007 at 12:38 am
Todays pictures are nice. This shows the lifestyle. The first photo is so clear, which is an example for livelihood base. Good pictures.
December 11th, 2007 at 1:43 am
Dear Ann:
Unbelievable, and I can see from your picture that you have been there and have a mission for sure. Beautiful. We had a male caregiver from Kenya and he exhibited all these traits. It took a while but sure enough by the third week he was wielding authority in our house and playing mind games on me. I had to get rid of him, too bad, he was a very good caregiver but I was mad as hell. Now I see the link with what you’re showing here. God Bless You for your work!