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Woman See Lot of Things: Female ex-child combatants in Sierra Leone

I went to the Brunei Gallery at SOAS with Vuyani and Bongeka today. SOAS (School of Oriental & African Studies) is part of the University of London campus and is barely a block north of the British Museum and covers tons of ground like African and Asian language studies, arts & culture, political science and economic studies, and many other things Africa/Asia.

Anyhow, today was the opening of Woman See Lot of Things, an interdisciplinary art installation that touches on the lives of three women's experiences during the war in Sierra Leone & Liberia. So you walk into the basement of this gallery, through a burlap curtain and into a low, deep room. The ground inside the exhibition is covered in sand but the perimeter is surrounded by an electric fence. Though I doubt UK Health & Safety laws will allow they to electrify the fence, it still feels really prohibitive. And more perplexing are the clear long tubes filled with a clear burgundy liquid - 3 of them - linked to a large tin bucket in the middle of the sandy floor. I stand there, observing bits of video that come up on two burlap screens, but I really have no idea what this red tube snaking around the floor signifies. The first video is of a woman talking about ways to lead your troupe in the jungle, being quiet, talking with your eyes and arms, and not getting dead. Things like sleeping tied together are the strategy because then you all stay together: no one gets dragged off. Check. This isn't stealth bomber warfare. This is sit for days, unfed, try not to go crazy, get dead, captured, and if you're a woman, not raped, impregnated, or both.

I move on to the literature which describes the situations in Sierra Leone during the war, this installation specifically covering three different women from different areas of Sierra Leone & Liberia with very different stories. One woman, Anita (who was there tonight), was raped by several men when she was 17, after her father and another family member were murdered. She became pregnant, running from town to town over massive distances in only a couple of months as cities started getting ransacked. The baby died at 6 months but afterwards, Anita kept finding abandoned babies and adopted them. She eventually became a nurse but was heavily involved in the war until it's end.

The other two woman also have brutal stories, being child combatants, one being raped in her school when she was six. Many of these women become pregnant, sometimes not even knowing the father, and forced into violent, polygamous marriages. One woman named Chris (the one raped very young) was forced by her "husband", an army leader, to guess the sex of pregnant women's babies and then forced to slice open their stomachs, pull out the child and announce the sex. One of the women also talks about many of the men being totally crazed on drugs and the fear of not knowing what they would do...that they could rape other women at any time.

Anyhow, I decided to enter the exhibition, as some of the other visitors had done. Behind one of the screens is a small living space with a bucket and tube, sucking the liquid in and back out again. On another part of the sand is a shanty with one of the tubes entering inside, leading to another tub. I look inside and see the fetus of the baby in it. And this is a large baby...like maybe just under 7 months. Not what I expected. The shanty is of corrugated metal, the room cold despite the heat, with quiet radios playing static and the random sound bits that can get through. I could not imagine being in that hovel, for however many days, having had a stillborn or aborted baby, probably grown from a man who raped me and left me in a position where I was hiding in the woods fearing I would be shot, raped or killed.

Now I get the blood.

Behind the other screen is the third tub, also filled with blood but to my relief, no baby. There is also a poster on woman combatants from Liberia, as though it were saying, "Yeahhhh. Get your guns ladies. Things need shooting. We can do it", as though it were a Rosie the Riveter poster. But at this point, I realise more what this is all about. I exit the enclosure, avoiding the electric fence, walking past the comment books that cover things like abortion or FGM or violence. Looking at this whole thing I am not sure what to say about these three women; strangers who faced some of the worst things humanity has to offer. They don't now appear to be sisters or friends with a new bond that links them. The tubes through the sand signify something much more jarring, like their flesh tying their experiences, their blood carrying the scars, waste and purity, death and rebirth of their lives.

It's jarring. It doesn't make you sick necessarily. But, it does make you wonder how you would ever survive being in that situation, in the end feeling only a tiny fraction of the incredible stories that these women intimately share like they were giving you their blood. It's humbling.

The exhibition is named after Majorie, whose name in her language means "woman see lots of things." She is the 8th child of a woman who continually gave birth to children who were stillborn or died shortly thereafter. After finally surviving, her mother abandoned her, and she said it was because her mother wanted her to hurt. So, Majorie thinks the significance of her name is appropriate for women's experiences.

It was interesting though because the directing artist of the exhibition was pregnant. So it's interesting to see both pain, death and the mess that the world has to offer and yet be around something so common and yet beautiful and a new life. She may not have planned it that way but her own body was a quiet counterpoint to these three other women. It was nice.

If you are interested in FACE_WSLOT Woman See Lot of Things, check out the bodylab art foundation.