A major part of this class has been shattering the misconception that peace comes after war. In all of the artist’s presentations, and in the readings from this week, we see tangible expressions of how war, militarization, and violence remains deeply entrenched in oppressive forms of systemic structures and societal thinking. Abiya’s and Evelyn’s experiences provide very real examples of how survivors of war and gender- and sexual-based violence continue to deal with the long-lasting repercussions of past conflicts. I was surprised to hear about the false perceptions many Ugandan’s have about Evelyn’s complicity to “stay” in captivity for so long and not being able to escape.
As I was reading Chapter 7 of her book, I was struck by how many dreams she had about Kony and other LRA warlords, as well as how quickly traumatic memories will come back to her (like how she is reminded of the bullet wounds she used to nurse in the bush after seeing a woman who has had a motorcycle accident in the hospital). In some of these stories, Evelyn writes about how her body reacts and becomes heightened in remembering some of the traumas, serving a physical reminder of her past in the present.
Another key learning from this class has been that people are complicated and multiplicitous. The introduction in Evelyn’s book discusses how she had to “depend on the very persons who were the cause of all her pain.” In both the podcast and her book, Evelyn talks about how grateful she was that Kony saved her life on multiple occasions, and how he had qualities that were human – how he liked dance parties and laughing. Kony is also responsible for launching her into motherhood and played a major part in the purpose and love she feels for children.
While I wasn’t able to read Evelyn’s book in its entirety, the questions I’ve been pondering as we wrap up the class are: What can be done about the lasting hurt and pain? How can we recognize and implement changes that bring justice to survivors of war and gender-based violence? Ketty Anyeko’s blog post on reparations after wartime sexual violence offered some tangible suggestions that “enable lived justice.” Anyeko’s findings about Place-based justice and land-rights have clear linkages with the conversations we had on murdered and missing indigenous women and children, climate change, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Over the course of the semester, I’ve been flip-flopping between feelings of hope and hopelessness – unsure of what justice can be achieved within the deep and complicated systems of power and oppression that govern us. But Anyeko’s recommendations, made in consultation with survivors and other key stakeholders, reminded me that there are real changes to be made – and even the small ones count.
With the bleak outcome of the U.S. elections and the general wave of authoritarianism globally, it feels like there’s no option but to believe in the justice and progress that can come from smaller-scale organizing and revolution.
Question:
What sort of reparations, if any, have been seriously considered among stakeholders in Uganda for survivors of LRA captivity?
Evelyn Amony’s life is a testament to Parashar’s (2013) words that “war lives with [people] long after it ends” (p. 618). While reading her diary entries, I felt the pain of remembering memories of war, while at the same time feeling the sense of solace in sharing these memories with others who had similar experiences. I am again reminded that things often do not exist in binaries—while Evelyn’s childhood was marked by hardship, she also looks back at this time with fond memories. Even though she was abducted and assaulted by Joseph Kony, she asks that people forgive him, for “he is just a human being like the rest of us” (p. 197).
After Ketty Anyeko—as wars are lived long after they supposedly end, justice must also be lived. It must also be enduring. Justice is reclamation; it is gaining your life back and finding power in rebuilding. For the victims/survivors of war in Uganda, this must come from tangible reparations such as having access to essential social services, acceptance in the community, and pathways to land ownership and job opportunities. Justice is finding ways to make painful memories lead you forward. It is having the chance to create your own identity and declare it. It is getting to live a mundane life, as seen through Evelyn’s trips to the market and school drop-offs. Therefore, justice is felt in the every day.
I was especially struck by the diary entry Evelyn wrote about her daughter, Bakita. While recalling memories together, she wrote, “I realized then that she had not forgotten what we went through. These things happened sometime back, and yet Bakita remembers them clearly (p.199).” I thought about how children of war, growing up in their most developmental years, make sense of their experiences as they grow older. What do they think of the world? How do they come to learn that things can be different? My experiences are not remotely close to wartime Uganda, but having immigrated from the Philippines as a child from forced migration, it is hard not to be consumed by grief for a life you lost. I remember the fear of leaving a life behind and the courage it takes to rebuild. As a child, I knew about longing and wishing that certain memories just hadn’t happened at all.
The Beading Memory video illustrated how art can bring people together, serving as an outlet to resist, reclaim, and reconnect. This is why I love storytelling and the arts so much—they hold the gift of giving voice to the unspeakable, of placing words to emotions that cannot be explained. Evelyn’s diary entries also show the power of writing to make sense of the past. Artists and writers have shown me how grief and other painful emotions can be reclaimed and transformed. They have taught me how to reconstruct my own grief to include hope, resilience, community, and moments of levity. Art exists to show us that justice can also look beautiful.
Question:
In what ways have you interacted with art in the aftermaths of your life?
During our trip to Dominican Republic for our GP2, when exploring Santo Domingo in the zone that is known as “Ciudad Colonial” (which basically just means the first parts of the city that were built when the Spanish people arrived on the island), there was a building with the inscription that said “¿Cual es la diferencia entre recuerdo, memoria e historia?” which translates to “What is the difference between a memory, memory and history”. When Khayria asked me what that meant, I had difficulty explaining it to her because in Spanish we use two different words for a memory and memory. I kept going back to that question when doing the readings for this week; how does a memory become part of memory? How does memory become part of history? Why is it important to treat all of three things with care and respect?
Reading the entry diaries from Evelyn Amony and the way she tells her story, her lived experiences, her memories, made me reflect on what gets told to other people as time goes on and who gets to tell them. Watching the video on the making of the Beaded Memory Project made me remember when I first saw it back in May, when I first started working with Erin. It is quite impressive, and I don’t know why I thought it wouldn’t weigh that much but the one time I helped Erin put it back up on the wall outside her office, I was surprised by its weight. Having had the privilege to see the tapestry in person, and then engaging with the other artistic ways in which the women in northern Uganda have come together, and shared their experiences with each other and with other people has been simply outstanding. In some ways, you can quite literally see the physical manifestation of their resilience, of their strength, and it was truly a privilege to see the artworks that the women made, both the tapestry and the body-maps they created.
Storytelling can take place in many different forms. It has been one of the ways in which histories and stories get passed generation to generation, with one of the purposes being to keep the memory alive. In other cases, it is a way of telling things that are unspeakable, due to their very difficult and/or traumatic nature. To read Evelyn’s book, as Erin says in the “Writing ‘I am Evelyn Amony’” portion of the book, is “To challenge readers to comprehend what they did not bear witness to”. It is also an exercise to recognize the many different roles women have played and continue to play in wars and armed conflicted, that go beyond the normative expectations of how women should behave. I am going to be honest, I don’t know where I am going with this post. I have so many thoughts just running around like headless chickens inside my mind and putting into words what I am thinking has been taxing.
I think my questions for this week are going to be the questions that I started this entry with:
how does a memory become part of memory? How does memory become part of history? Why is it important to treat all of three things with care and respect?
What strikes me most often in this class is the emergence of temporal interpretations as methods of resistance. Memory is an excellent example of this. What do we remember of what we endured? Who remembers? Who forgets?
In the diaries, memory is distinctively preserved; revealing both a personal and collective narrative within pages. To me, the diary reflects an ephemeral illustration of the quotidian. As a reader, I follow Evelyn into a hospital, into a dream, to Kampala, and when sweeping the house. I follow her, and I hear her voice. “I am Evelyn Amony”.
Although fragmented, pieces of her life, her ‘self’, and her conditions materialize on the page. And as the entries persist, I witness the days persisting with her as well. A friend was sharing old adages their grandfather passed down to them. “Time and tide wait for no man”. As December turns into January, and January into February, I am increasingly aware of how life continues, and Evelyn’s resistance lies in that continuing rhythm.
Beading memory, is also a continued rhythm. Every woman puts bead to needle, carefully impaling fabric with a predestined bead, ultimately illustrating the image hung up by Erin’s office. Intention and care thus find itself in the hands of these women. You cannot look at that tapestry without considering the hands that once touched each bead, that held each thread. I interpreted beaded memory as hope that echoes—a result of collaboration done in tandem and despite. Despite what? Well that depends on the person. But I think of nimble hands carrying the sorrows of yesterday with the colors of tomorrow.
Tomorrow, when I see you all, when we gather, I will think of this tapestry. You have been my continued rhythm, with whom I feel I have have picked up a needle and thread. I thank you all for creating such a beautiful classroom environment, where intention and care are centred. This is my feminist future (in a present moment).
Throughout this class we have reflected on the false dichotomy between war and peace times. Evelyn’s reflections and stories of life after abduction are an insightful look at the way that war continues to affect her and her family even after freedom from abduction. I was personally struck by the expectations placed upon Evelyn while she supports her children on her own, others still demand more from her, for example her brother who expects her to pay his children’s school fees when she cannot even afford to send her own children to school or get them consistent access to the medical care they need. Yet, whenever she can, Evelyn does provide support, care, advice to her community and those who come to visit her.
We also see how the memories and experiences from her time in abduction are carried with her, through dreams of past experiences or individuals who were a part of that life, skills of nursing or traditional medicine which she had to learn, reflecting on time passing, for example when she is able to celebrate Christmas with her family, she recalls Christmases past “Even if I am celebrating Christmas here, I am abducted”. Her reflections on what it means to be free were very moving, freedom to celebrate as she wishes, freedom to practice womanhood as she sees fit on Woman’s Day, freedom to carry her children as she wishes, not as she is told. Evelyn finds freedom, good things, in days which are still filled with sadness, anger, and frustration. All of these things coexist in Evelyn’s life she continues to work to reclaim her identity as Evelyn Amony, while followed around by a past she did not ask for yet cannot escape. I found the example of Evelyn’s refusal to continue to practice herbal medicine to be really interesting example in this idea of the power of memory. This is an extremely useful skill which she possesses, yet it is inextricably bound to her trauma and a terrible past. After her abduction other people in the community call her a witch for this skill and knowledge, recognizing that she learned it due to her proximity to Kony. Despite this, during times of need she looks put this aside to help her brothers wife, caring for her family. Overall, through these readings I am reminded that memory is a powerful tool which does not always function as we want it to.
I also really enjoyed the video about women’s beading as a practice of storytelling an community building. From start to finish the women are responsible for every single part of the production of their mural , making the beads and sewing them onto their cloth. The act of recording and sharing this memory is painful, yet for some women acts as a form of healing, a form of what Dr. Anyeko calls lived justice. Art as justice, healing, storytelling. These women lived through this experience and have created a material record, difficult to forget, hard to look away from. Beautiful and terrible. I find myself reflecting on this dichotomy (terrible, beautiful) as well as that of peace and war as I work through this weeks content.
Question
Who does memory belong to? How do we share it?
How do we transform memory into history, and then into feminist futures?
Coming in hot: when we think about the course of human existence, so much is lost to forgetting. It is such a miraculous rarity that things are written down and bound and available to us in the afters and it reveals so much about choices made in the afters and whose histories and memories we value. One thing I appreciated about I Am Evelyn Amony was Erin’s note in the beginning that there was no editing for details without evidence. These are truths according to Evelyn, who lived them. That is the history we are preserving for the future – the truths according to someone who lived them. Often in this class, I find that my reading-notetaking strategy wherein every item on a syllabus is broken down into formulaic parts that make up the whole is either impossible, inadequate or misleading, and I find myself instead with a collection of quotes I retyped into a Word document with no context whatsoever. This is the history I am preserving and I think it reveals me.
In the podcast, Evelyn says that Kony had an “insistence on war,” and Erin borrows from Juliane Okot Bitek to write that Evelyn’s narrative “insists on itself.” I was trying to figure out what to say about this and where I see the distinctions, so I Googled the definition of insist, which reads as “to demand something forcefully, not accepting refusal.” I think the comma should be a semicolon, because to me, insistence on war is a forceful demand, and insisting on oneself is to reject refusal.
War is so phenomenized from the outside, and one thing that struck me reading Evelyn’s recorded days-in-a-life is the way she muses about the conceptual complexities that shape her context: is Kony a good person? What can be done about financial precarity in the extreme? Damn, malaria. When does war end? So much of what was written is also so very familiar, and not because we’ve read so many war stories but because it is also what keeps me up at night: “death is a thief” (200), “the good thing that happened today is that I did what I could” (193), “as usual, as a woman, I woke up and did what I was supposed to do” (201). Reading, as Alyssa highlighted, Evelyn’s surprise at Bakita’s memory of their life before returning, reminded me of Khayria’s cousin telling her that they had “lived a lot of life since then, but I can tell you’re still there.” (Khayria, I hope you forgive this imperfect quote. I have thought about this every day). I will admit that I always read everyone’s blog posts as/before I write mine, and I was also struck by Elena’s questions about how memories become capital-M Memory. What tricks our minds play on us by saving what they save despite how hard we work to supersede them. Despite all our attempts to decide what we remember and what we try to forget, we remember what we remember. To some degree, I think it is this unpredictability and these different rememberings that give way to Ketty Anyeko’s conceptualization of justice as pluralistic and exceeding the law, but that justice must be lived.
I also enjoyed how funny Evelyn was in these retellings, in the same way that we all slip wit into retelling what is normal to us: “I thought about how money makes people behave like children,” “she asked me to give her advice, and I reminded her that she was not the only person to suffer on this earth,” “I fear this uncle because he talks a lot.” Mostly, I am very grateful for the generosity that both Erin and Evelyn demonstrated to write this down and bind it and make it available to us in the afters.
Khayria beat me to the punch but to some degree, we are creating the futures and afters in how we want them to be and I am so grateful to you all for showing me how GOOD it can be. Thank you for showing me how to “catch the whirlwind in your palm,” as Juliane Okot Bitek writes in “Scars,” which opens I Am Evelyn Amony.
—
Whose insisted stories become collective memory? To what degree has this changed, can it change, and how do we change it?
How do we know when capital-A Aftermath starts? When aren’t we in it and when are we?
Evelyn’s story seems to encapsulate many of the themes we’ve explored throughout this course. Through her storytelling, we are invited to examine questions around conducting ‘feminist research,’ while her daily diaries provide a poignant lens into how conflict and war continue to shape the lived experiences of those subjected to violence, both systemically and in visceral ways. For example, Evelyn recounts how her eldest daughter resembles Joseph Kony, serving as a constant reminder of all she and her children have endured. It’s evident that for women like Evelyn and others in the Women’s Advocacy Network, the war is far from over. But how can healing begin? I found the Beaded Memory Project to be a brilliant and loving idea. As Evelyn expressed, “I want my family to know what I went through, but I cannot just tell them, for they would just begin to weep” (Amony, 2015, p.13). Art, as we’ve seen throughout the course, provides a medium for communication when words fall short, enabling stories of pain and resilience to be shared in transformative ways.
One of the biggest questions that came to mind as I reflected on Evelyn’s daily experiences ties back to something we’ve previously discussed: what is hope? We’ve explored feminist future-building, incorporating ideas of transformative peace, abolition movements, and true social justice. For me, hope often arises in moments where I believe in the possibility of such a future. Yet, in reading Evelyn’s story, I began to realize that what makes this vision believable for me may not resonate the same way for others. In fact, I started to wonder if hope might, in some ways, serve as a means of reconciling ourselves to the reality of inevitable lived experiences. Evelyn captures this sentiment in her February 7th entry when she reflects on comforting another woman formerly in the LRA. She wrote: “I know that if she has hope and love, she will be consoled. This is what I decided to say because it is painful to hear those with problems similar to mine. It is very painful and very hard. These things happen in people’s lives. You pass through them. Whether you were abducted or not, you pass through them. You will go through what you are supposed to go through” (Amony, 2015, p.211).
This reinforced my belief that hope is hard to sustain without the possibility of justice, especially when even basic needs remain unmet. Ketty Anyeko’s (2022) article explores what justice means for women who have endured wartime sexual violence and forced marriage, emphasizing the significance of justice that is place-based, needs-based, compensation-based, and relationship-based. Evelyn’s daily diaries vividly illustrated this idea; her everyday experiences revealed how her livelihood—and that of her children—was often jeopardized through no fault of her own. Without justice to address these harms, envisioning a hopeful future could become incredibly challenging.
My questions are around this idea of hope in the aftermaths:
Is hope just the possibility of an idea? What tangible needs must be met for us to have hope for the future? How does privilege influence how we conceptualize hope in a post-conflict setting?
Reflecting on this week’s readings, I have come to understand that the nature of justice is complex and multifaceted. One key insight is that the healing process for survivors of war and sexual violence is often overlooked in reparation efforts across most contexts. This highlights the insufficiency of conventional justice mechanisms in rebuilding the lives of survivors, particularly women and children.
Evelyn’s narrative illustrates her daily struggles after escaping the LRA. Her challenges revolve around meeting basic needs for herself and her children, maintaining a home, and confronting systemic barriers such as limited education, economic opportunities, and societal acceptance. While meeting basic needs may not pose a significant challenge for some people, it is a critical concern for individuals like Evelyn. This kind of contrast highlights the importance of the various dimensions of justice discussed in Anyeko’s article, particularly the need for tangible support and recognition to achieve meaningful justice for women survivors. Evelyn’s reflection, “I was thinking of the past…if I had not been abducted, I would not be going through all this,” captures the lasting burden of her experiences, which extend far beyond the scope of courtroom justice.
Anyeko points out that women’s issues, especially the stories of survivors in post-war and post-conflict settings, are often marginalized in discussions about transitional justice. To address this, she advocates for a survivor-centered framework, which encompasses four dimensions: place-based, needs-based, compensation-based, and relationship-based justice. Evelyn’s life exemplifies the relevance of this framework, as her experiences reflect the critical need for justice that addresses tangible, emotional, and societal dimensions. Her struggles with poverty, lack of land, and limited education underscore the importance of land ownership for stability and belonging, while her challenges in providing for her children reflect the need for reparations and basic services. Additionally, the societal rejection and stigma she faces emphasize the importance of relationship-based justice, as survivors require acceptance and reintegration to heal from trauma and rebuild their identities.
Evelyn’s story underscores the profound and enduring trauma that war inflicts on women survivors, which is difficult to heal. Yet, tangible justice remains elusive and challenging to achieve through traditional legal systems. While legal prosecutions, such as the ICC’s conviction of LRA commanders, are symbolic and represent an important step in transitional justice, they do little to alleviate the material and emotional burdens that survivors endure. Evelyn’s assertion that she survived to tell her story demonstrates an effort to reclaim her agency and demand accountability. This, in turn, contributes to addressing structural inequalities and empowering survivors to regain their agency and dignity.
Question:
What lessons can we learn from Evelyn’s experiences to inform future transitional justice efforts in other conflict and post-conflict settings?
Reading about the daily lives of survivors deeply resonated with me, reminding me of the profound challenges womanhood can bring—challenges no one should ever have to endure. It compelled me to revisit my own journal, where I once penned raw and powerful emotions that I had long silenced until now.
Evelyn’s diary is a compelling example of how she endured a life shaped by conflict, offering deep insight into its aftermath through her daily struggles. As a breastfeeding mother and wife of Joseph Kony, she faced immense poverty and lacked financial independence, becoming entangled in a web of hardship. Evelyn’s story reveals the harsh realities of her life and the unending battles she faced. While the LRA is notoriously perceived in a negative light, Evelyn’s narration adds a nuanced perspective. She recounts haunting memories of LRA members, wrapped in polythene bags, and how the bushes became a source of violent recollections where children were forcibly taken from their mothers. These memories carry extreme violence, silence, and unanswered questions.
Evelyn highlighted how her community helped her raise her children, balancing motherhood and household responsibilities, and expressed deep gratitude for their support. Her resilience shines as she confronts the trauma of her abduction while seeking solace through prayers and community connections. Her forced marriage to Joseph Kony and her journey toward healing reflect both her strength in accepting her circumstances and the enormity of her challenges. She portrays Kony as both kind and understanding, while still grappling with the weight of her lived experiences. Evelyn’s story is a poignant reminder of how survivors live day-to-day, hoping for justice and a brighter future. Her reflections on subtle acts of kindness and the support of her community underscore how even small gestures can become the greatest source of strength for those left to battle trauma and societal stigma.
Dr. Ketty’s two decades of work and her profound question, “What about us?” highlight how the impact of violence is often reduced to compartmentalized issues, neglecting the diverse realities of victimhood from a human rights perspective. Dr. Ketty’s workshops with survivors, civil society, and policymakers emphasized key recommendations to address wartime violence against women and children. Survivors’ anticipation of an apology from the Ugandan government and the LRA is a bare minimum, alongside the need to recognize gender and children’s rights through equity-driven approaches. Dr. Ketty’s work offers practical strategies for community-centric recommendations that prioritize equity and justice.
The Beading Memory project inspired me with its powerful message of healing and resilience. The women who channel their pain and grief into art have created a collective strength that transcends monetary value. This artistic expression stands as both a tool for healing and a profound form of communication, reflecting their strength and solidarity.
Questions I Have
How can we ensure that recommendations are effectively translated into actionable implementation, particularly in the context of the global Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda?
Where does the cycle of suffering end? While the past cannot be undone, the aftermath of everyday challenges remains immense. Can victims ever truly be free?
There are a few themes that particularly stand out to me from this week. One of them is the power of time: how trauma can persist over time, how healing can take place in the aftermaths of violence, how time can pass at a different pace depending on the context we’re in, and how we can be instantaneously transported to a moment in our past via a reminder in the present.
In Chapter 7 of I am Evelyn Amony, Evelyn realized that one of her daughters had not forgotten the hard journeys they made across the Imatong mountains, “these things happened sometime back, and yet Bakita remembers them clearly” (December 22, 2009). For Evelyn’s daughter (and Evelyn herself, as evidenced by the various memories she experiences of her time in the bush throughout Chapter 7), although much time has passed since the initial experience that makes up her memories, she is able to recall them easily. On the flip side of this is Evelyn’s experience reuniting with her family, which is mentioned in the podcast. She could not recall the appearance of her family members, who grew upset with her over her lack of recognition, even though she had been in the bush for around 12 years in total. Trauma is often easier to remember (or even an automatic recall) over the happiest of memories, particularly if large periods of time stand in the way.
And in reverse, processing and healing is linked to time and the advocacy for rights post-conflict. With enough time and mutual support, Evelyn and other co-wives spoke to Kony’s family about the lack of familial involvement in their children’s lives: “You do not accept that these are your children. Since we came back, we have waited for you to recognize them for a long time. It is now six years for some of us” (February 14, 2010). On another day, Evelyn sees a woman who has photos of her daughter as a baby and wonders “how she kept those photos after all these years of war… I thought the lady was very wise to have kept her daughter’s photo all this time” (February 24, 2009). And finally in the Beaded Memory Project, women spent months constructing a beaded art piece to visualize their war memories, but also to heal from them by externalizing their experiences instead of keeping their hurt bottled up.
This interactive healing property between art and time reminds me of James Darin Corbiere, who is an Anishinaabe artist from Wikwemikong First Nation on Manitoulin Island. He has created hundreds of art pieces surrounding colonization, Indigenous history, and his own negative experiences with the church. I interviewed him a couple of years ago and learned that he used to see colours surrounding people as a child, before those negative experiences, and he uses bright colours in his artworks today (almost replicating what his view would have been as a child). He mentioned that his artwork has been “very good for the soul” and “helped a lot with the healing”; certainly, the healing power of art has been incredibly clear throughout the presentations we have seen from our classmates.
Beyond active healing, art also moves us to action, ideally in a way that can demand place-based, needs-based, compensation-based, or relationship-based justice, as mentioned by Ketty Anyeko. My questions for this week are: what kinds of justice typically take longer than others to occur? How do we recognize that time is a crucial element to healing without prolonging the amount of time that survivors of political violence have to wait before receiving justice? How soon after violence can one begin the pursuit of justice (if not during it)?
I have referenced this quite extensively, but I grew up in a very Catholic space, and while I don’t feel particularly religious myself, I think Catholicism lodged itself in my brain quite firmly, and the concepts and questions that were really on my radar have an identifiably Catholic air. Unsurprisingly, this week I found myself drawn to the concepts that came up in the readings related to justice as “lived” (Anyeko), including forgiveness and apology, and for me this brought to mind ideas like reconciliation, reparation, atonement, multiplicity, and absolutely complicated and sometimes seemingly contradictory ways “aftermaths” manifest and are navigated.
I find myself coming back to the idea of reconciliation in these contexts. I actually tend to refrain from voicing this thought because I can never tell if it’s a personal qualm or a legitimate qualm and so I don’t think it necessarily has a place in conversations about reconciliation, but I often feel kind of icky about the term reconciliation being used in relation to anti-colonialism, especially given the way it has such a Catholic connotation to it. My experiences with reconciliation were an uncomfortable mishmash of not understanding why I, a child, had fundamental sin I needed to apologize for, and at the same time, not understanding how harm could be settled in a booth with a priest and a few Hail Mary’s, without necessarily talking to the person I harmed. This obviously became more intense as I understood more and more the lack of action on an institutional level to address harm. These memories raise a lot of questions that I find very confusing and troubling related to forgiveness and reparation, and resonated with the questions these readings raised for me- who gets to administer “forgiveness”? Do we even need forgiveness? How do we even begin to repair harm? There’s so many layers that I can only begin to grapple with- Anyeko’s research identifies the need for compensation-based justice, and we know that this is an absolutely necessary component of meaningful justice, however it can’t be the only dimension- in this context I think about Gil Scott-Heron’s question, “Who’ll pay reparations on my soul?”.
In the CBC podcast, the interview with Evelyn talks about how there are reasons she likes Joseph Kony and reasons she doesn’t. She also states “forgiveness is hard, and it doesn’t help me”. At the same time, in “I am Evelyn Amony”, her diary details that she has encouraged people to pray for Joseph Kony and forgive him, because he is a human being too. I don’t point out this complicatedness out of any desire to question Evelyn’s feelings about Joseph Kony, nor to invalidate them- I raise this point because I think it seems to me that it demonstrates the extent to which feelings about things like forgiveness can be incredibly complicated, changing, and at times, perhaps even seemingly contradictory.
I think in some ways the answers to my questions seem almost obvious– we don’t necessarily need forgiveness, we begin to repair harm by listening to survivors, and the solutions are in providing choice and options so survivors can access a form of justice that feels meaningful to them. What does justice and reparation mean to survivors? There are probably as many definitions of justice and reparation as there are survivors. And yet, I still feel lost in the nuances. If we understand, as the introduction of Amony’s piece indicates, that in situations of war, conflict, violence, and so on “each decision, each choice, [is] weighed against a backdrop of coercion”, then how can we ensure that in our responses to violence we don’t inadvertently replicate patterns of coercion “after” conflict (whatever after means).
I don’t know that I’ve arrived at any concrete answers here, but I think my main reflections are about how we can honour the multiplicity of experiences and conceptualisations of justice when seeking to address harm. I also wonder how we can even begin to grapple with the immensity and depth of these concepts and considerations, although I know while I sit here and stress people are actually grappling in real time.
I only have two questions this week:
How can we arrive at an understanding of forgiveness that honours a huge range of experiences, beliefs, and personal conceptualisations?
This week’s topic of “aftermaths” was highly relevant to the work some of us were doing during our GP2 fieldwork.
When I went into the fieldwork, I had the assumption that I was to find ways in which the Kenyan government and NGOs could increase female ownership of land in the coffee industry. However, upon interviewing 30 female farmers working to provide for themselves and their families, my team and I realized that they didn’t necessarily want to own land. They wanted to create networks of support, resilience and care in which they could speak freely, provide for their children and care for themselves while empowering each other. Land ownership was not a priority for Kenyan women in the same way it is for Kenyan men. The community among women was more important.
When watching the video of the Women’s Advocacy Network, I immediately thought of how difficult it would be for the women to recreate these experiences visually, to see their trauma laid out in front of them, assuming it would re-traumatize them, since that is what I feel like I would experience in the same exercise. However, it was clear that this was an opportunity that encouraged them to rely on each other and relieve themselves of the trauma they had been holding in.
The women in Kenya needed to rely on something other than the government or on programs that provided empty promises of supporting and empowering women. The women relied on themselves and created weekly financial support programs called merry-go-rounds and table banking, in which they would financially support each other every week and pay each other back with interest, creating systems dedicated to their resilience.
Community is crucial for empowerment, understanding, and resilience, particularly among women, particularly in supporting children. Trust and hope create community. And these women still have hope and kindness in their hearts despite the systems that work against them. They strive to empower their children to ensure they don’t experience what their mothers did. They uplifted each other regardless of the patriarchal values and mindsets pushing them down.
My brain is a jumbled mess, but these are my thoughts for this week.
How can we learn from these women who have been intergenerationally disempowered and who still strive to create systems of learning and support for each other against all odds?
A major part of this class has been shattering the misconception that peace comes after war. In all of the artist’s presentations, and in the readings from this week, we see tangible expressions of how war, militarization, and violence remains deeply entrenched in oppressive forms of systemic structures and societal thinking. Abiya’s and Evelyn’s experiences provide very real examples of how survivors of war and gender- and sexual-based violence continue to deal with the long-lasting repercussions of past conflicts. I was surprised to hear about the false perceptions many Ugandan’s have about Evelyn’s complicity to “stay” in captivity for so long and not being able to escape.
As I was reading Chapter 7 of her book, I was struck by how many dreams she had about Kony and other LRA warlords, as well as how quickly traumatic memories will come back to her (like how she is reminded of the bullet wounds she used to nurse in the bush after seeing a woman who has had a motorcycle accident in the hospital). In some of these stories, Evelyn writes about how her body reacts and becomes heightened in remembering some of the traumas, serving a physical reminder of her past in the present.
Another key learning from this class has been that people are complicated and multiplicitous. The introduction in Evelyn’s book discusses how she had to “depend on the very persons who were the cause of all her pain.” In both the podcast and her book, Evelyn talks about how grateful she was that Kony saved her life on multiple occasions, and how he had qualities that were human – how he liked dance parties and laughing. Kony is also responsible for launching her into motherhood and played a major part in the purpose and love she feels for children.
While I wasn’t able to read Evelyn’s book in its entirety, the questions I’ve been pondering as we wrap up the class are: What can be done about the lasting hurt and pain? How can we recognize and implement changes that bring justice to survivors of war and gender-based violence? Ketty Anyeko’s blog post on reparations after wartime sexual violence offered some tangible suggestions that “enable lived justice.” Anyeko’s findings about Place-based justice and land-rights have clear linkages with the conversations we had on murdered and missing indigenous women and children, climate change, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Over the course of the semester, I’ve been flip-flopping between feelings of hope and hopelessness – unsure of what justice can be achieved within the deep and complicated systems of power and oppression that govern us. But Anyeko’s recommendations, made in consultation with survivors and other key stakeholders, reminded me that there are real changes to be made – and even the small ones count.
With the bleak outcome of the U.S. elections and the general wave of authoritarianism globally, it feels like there’s no option but to believe in the justice and progress that can come from smaller-scale organizing and revolution.
Question:
What sort of reparations, if any, have been seriously considered among stakeholders in Uganda for survivors of LRA captivity?
Evelyn Amony’s life is a testament to Parashar’s (2013) words that “war lives with [people] long after it ends” (p. 618). While reading her diary entries, I felt the pain of remembering memories of war, while at the same time feeling the sense of solace in sharing these memories with others who had similar experiences. I am again reminded that things often do not exist in binaries—while Evelyn’s childhood was marked by hardship, she also looks back at this time with fond memories. Even though she was abducted and assaulted by Joseph Kony, she asks that people forgive him, for “he is just a human being like the rest of us” (p. 197).
After Ketty Anyeko—as wars are lived long after they supposedly end, justice must also be lived. It must also be enduring. Justice is reclamation; it is gaining your life back and finding power in rebuilding. For the victims/survivors of war in Uganda, this must come from tangible reparations such as having access to essential social services, acceptance in the community, and pathways to land ownership and job opportunities. Justice is finding ways to make painful memories lead you forward. It is having the chance to create your own identity and declare it. It is getting to live a mundane life, as seen through Evelyn’s trips to the market and school drop-offs. Therefore, justice is felt in the every day.
I was especially struck by the diary entry Evelyn wrote about her daughter, Bakita. While recalling memories together, she wrote, “I realized then that she had not forgotten what we went through. These things happened sometime back, and yet Bakita remembers them clearly (p.199).” I thought about how children of war, growing up in their most developmental years, make sense of their experiences as they grow older. What do they think of the world? How do they come to learn that things can be different? My experiences are not remotely close to wartime Uganda, but having immigrated from the Philippines as a child from forced migration, it is hard not to be consumed by grief for a life you lost. I remember the fear of leaving a life behind and the courage it takes to rebuild. As a child, I knew about longing and wishing that certain memories just hadn’t happened at all.
The Beading Memory video illustrated how art can bring people together, serving as an outlet to resist, reclaim, and reconnect. This is why I love storytelling and the arts so much—they hold the gift of giving voice to the unspeakable, of placing words to emotions that cannot be explained. Evelyn’s diary entries also show the power of writing to make sense of the past. Artists and writers have shown me how grief and other painful emotions can be reclaimed and transformed. They have taught me how to reconstruct my own grief to include hope, resilience, community, and moments of levity. Art exists to show us that justice can also look beautiful.
Question:
In what ways have you interacted with art in the aftermaths of your life?
During our trip to Dominican Republic for our GP2, when exploring Santo Domingo in the zone that is known as “Ciudad Colonial” (which basically just means the first parts of the city that were built when the Spanish people arrived on the island), there was a building with the inscription that said “¿Cual es la diferencia entre recuerdo, memoria e historia?” which translates to “What is the difference between a memory, memory and history”. When Khayria asked me what that meant, I had difficulty explaining it to her because in Spanish we use two different words for a memory and memory. I kept going back to that question when doing the readings for this week; how does a memory become part of memory? How does memory become part of history? Why is it important to treat all of three things with care and respect?
Reading the entry diaries from Evelyn Amony and the way she tells her story, her lived experiences, her memories, made me reflect on what gets told to other people as time goes on and who gets to tell them. Watching the video on the making of the Beaded Memory Project made me remember when I first saw it back in May, when I first started working with Erin. It is quite impressive, and I don’t know why I thought it wouldn’t weigh that much but the one time I helped Erin put it back up on the wall outside her office, I was surprised by its weight. Having had the privilege to see the tapestry in person, and then engaging with the other artistic ways in which the women in northern Uganda have come together, and shared their experiences with each other and with other people has been simply outstanding. In some ways, you can quite literally see the physical manifestation of their resilience, of their strength, and it was truly a privilege to see the artworks that the women made, both the tapestry and the body-maps they created.
Storytelling can take place in many different forms. It has been one of the ways in which histories and stories get passed generation to generation, with one of the purposes being to keep the memory alive. In other cases, it is a way of telling things that are unspeakable, due to their very difficult and/or traumatic nature. To read Evelyn’s book, as Erin says in the “Writing ‘I am Evelyn Amony’” portion of the book, is “To challenge readers to comprehend what they did not bear witness to”. It is also an exercise to recognize the many different roles women have played and continue to play in wars and armed conflicted, that go beyond the normative expectations of how women should behave. I am going to be honest, I don’t know where I am going with this post. I have so many thoughts just running around like headless chickens inside my mind and putting into words what I am thinking has been taxing.
I think my questions for this week are going to be the questions that I started this entry with:
how does a memory become part of memory? How does memory become part of history? Why is it important to treat all of three things with care and respect?
Not us both writing about memory three minutes away from each other. DR locked us in.
What strikes me most often in this class is the emergence of temporal interpretations as methods of resistance. Memory is an excellent example of this. What do we remember of what we endured? Who remembers? Who forgets?
In the diaries, memory is distinctively preserved; revealing both a personal and collective narrative within pages. To me, the diary reflects an ephemeral illustration of the quotidian. As a reader, I follow Evelyn into a hospital, into a dream, to Kampala, and when sweeping the house. I follow her, and I hear her voice. “I am Evelyn Amony”.
Although fragmented, pieces of her life, her ‘self’, and her conditions materialize on the page. And as the entries persist, I witness the days persisting with her as well. A friend was sharing old adages their grandfather passed down to them. “Time and tide wait for no man”. As December turns into January, and January into February, I am increasingly aware of how life continues, and Evelyn’s resistance lies in that continuing rhythm.
Beading memory, is also a continued rhythm. Every woman puts bead to needle, carefully impaling fabric with a predestined bead, ultimately illustrating the image hung up by Erin’s office. Intention and care thus find itself in the hands of these women. You cannot look at that tapestry without considering the hands that once touched each bead, that held each thread. I interpreted beaded memory as hope that echoes—a result of collaboration done in tandem and despite. Despite what? Well that depends on the person. But I think of nimble hands carrying the sorrows of yesterday with the colors of tomorrow.
Tomorrow, when I see you all, when we gather, I will think of this tapestry. You have been my continued rhythm, with whom I feel I have have picked up a needle and thread. I thank you all for creating such a beautiful classroom environment, where intention and care are centred. This is my feminist future (in a present moment).
Throughout this class we have reflected on the false dichotomy between war and peace times. Evelyn’s reflections and stories of life after abduction are an insightful look at the way that war continues to affect her and her family even after freedom from abduction. I was personally struck by the expectations placed upon Evelyn while she supports her children on her own, others still demand more from her, for example her brother who expects her to pay his children’s school fees when she cannot even afford to send her own children to school or get them consistent access to the medical care they need. Yet, whenever she can, Evelyn does provide support, care, advice to her community and those who come to visit her.
We also see how the memories and experiences from her time in abduction are carried with her, through dreams of past experiences or individuals who were a part of that life, skills of nursing or traditional medicine which she had to learn, reflecting on time passing, for example when she is able to celebrate Christmas with her family, she recalls Christmases past “Even if I am celebrating Christmas here, I am abducted”. Her reflections on what it means to be free were very moving, freedom to celebrate as she wishes, freedom to practice womanhood as she sees fit on Woman’s Day, freedom to carry her children as she wishes, not as she is told. Evelyn finds freedom, good things, in days which are still filled with sadness, anger, and frustration. All of these things coexist in Evelyn’s life she continues to work to reclaim her identity as Evelyn Amony, while followed around by a past she did not ask for yet cannot escape. I found the example of Evelyn’s refusal to continue to practice herbal medicine to be really interesting example in this idea of the power of memory. This is an extremely useful skill which she possesses, yet it is inextricably bound to her trauma and a terrible past. After her abduction other people in the community call her a witch for this skill and knowledge, recognizing that she learned it due to her proximity to Kony. Despite this, during times of need she looks put this aside to help her brothers wife, caring for her family. Overall, through these readings I am reminded that memory is a powerful tool which does not always function as we want it to.
I also really enjoyed the video about women’s beading as a practice of storytelling an community building. From start to finish the women are responsible for every single part of the production of their mural , making the beads and sewing them onto their cloth. The act of recording and sharing this memory is painful, yet for some women acts as a form of healing, a form of what Dr. Anyeko calls lived justice. Art as justice, healing, storytelling. These women lived through this experience and have created a material record, difficult to forget, hard to look away from. Beautiful and terrible. I find myself reflecting on this dichotomy (terrible, beautiful) as well as that of peace and war as I work through this weeks content.
Question
Who does memory belong to? How do we share it?
How do we transform memory into history, and then into feminist futures?
Coming in hot: when we think about the course of human existence, so much is lost to forgetting. It is such a miraculous rarity that things are written down and bound and available to us in the afters and it reveals so much about choices made in the afters and whose histories and memories we value. One thing I appreciated about I Am Evelyn Amony was Erin’s note in the beginning that there was no editing for details without evidence. These are truths according to Evelyn, who lived them. That is the history we are preserving for the future – the truths according to someone who lived them. Often in this class, I find that my reading-notetaking strategy wherein every item on a syllabus is broken down into formulaic parts that make up the whole is either impossible, inadequate or misleading, and I find myself instead with a collection of quotes I retyped into a Word document with no context whatsoever. This is the history I am preserving and I think it reveals me.
In the podcast, Evelyn says that Kony had an “insistence on war,” and Erin borrows from Juliane Okot Bitek to write that Evelyn’s narrative “insists on itself.” I was trying to figure out what to say about this and where I see the distinctions, so I Googled the definition of insist, which reads as “to demand something forcefully, not accepting refusal.” I think the comma should be a semicolon, because to me, insistence on war is a forceful demand, and insisting on oneself is to reject refusal.
War is so phenomenized from the outside, and one thing that struck me reading Evelyn’s recorded days-in-a-life is the way she muses about the conceptual complexities that shape her context: is Kony a good person? What can be done about financial precarity in the extreme? Damn, malaria. When does war end? So much of what was written is also so very familiar, and not because we’ve read so many war stories but because it is also what keeps me up at night: “death is a thief” (200), “the good thing that happened today is that I did what I could” (193), “as usual, as a woman, I woke up and did what I was supposed to do” (201). Reading, as Alyssa highlighted, Evelyn’s surprise at Bakita’s memory of their life before returning, reminded me of Khayria’s cousin telling her that they had “lived a lot of life since then, but I can tell you’re still there.” (Khayria, I hope you forgive this imperfect quote. I have thought about this every day). I will admit that I always read everyone’s blog posts as/before I write mine, and I was also struck by Elena’s questions about how memories become capital-M Memory. What tricks our minds play on us by saving what they save despite how hard we work to supersede them. Despite all our attempts to decide what we remember and what we try to forget, we remember what we remember. To some degree, I think it is this unpredictability and these different rememberings that give way to Ketty Anyeko’s conceptualization of justice as pluralistic and exceeding the law, but that justice must be lived.
I also enjoyed how funny Evelyn was in these retellings, in the same way that we all slip wit into retelling what is normal to us: “I thought about how money makes people behave like children,” “she asked me to give her advice, and I reminded her that she was not the only person to suffer on this earth,” “I fear this uncle because he talks a lot.” Mostly, I am very grateful for the generosity that both Erin and Evelyn demonstrated to write this down and bind it and make it available to us in the afters.
Khayria beat me to the punch but to some degree, we are creating the futures and afters in how we want them to be and I am so grateful to you all for showing me how GOOD it can be. Thank you for showing me how to “catch the whirlwind in your palm,” as Juliane Okot Bitek writes in “Scars,” which opens I Am Evelyn Amony.
—
Whose insisted stories become collective memory? To what degree has this changed, can it change, and how do we change it?
How do we know when capital-A Aftermath starts? When aren’t we in it and when are we?
Evelyn’s story seems to encapsulate many of the themes we’ve explored throughout this course. Through her storytelling, we are invited to examine questions around conducting ‘feminist research,’ while her daily diaries provide a poignant lens into how conflict and war continue to shape the lived experiences of those subjected to violence, both systemically and in visceral ways. For example, Evelyn recounts how her eldest daughter resembles Joseph Kony, serving as a constant reminder of all she and her children have endured. It’s evident that for women like Evelyn and others in the Women’s Advocacy Network, the war is far from over. But how can healing begin? I found the Beaded Memory Project to be a brilliant and loving idea. As Evelyn expressed, “I want my family to know what I went through, but I cannot just tell them, for they would just begin to weep” (Amony, 2015, p.13). Art, as we’ve seen throughout the course, provides a medium for communication when words fall short, enabling stories of pain and resilience to be shared in transformative ways.
One of the biggest questions that came to mind as I reflected on Evelyn’s daily experiences ties back to something we’ve previously discussed: what is hope? We’ve explored feminist future-building, incorporating ideas of transformative peace, abolition movements, and true social justice. For me, hope often arises in moments where I believe in the possibility of such a future. Yet, in reading Evelyn’s story, I began to realize that what makes this vision believable for me may not resonate the same way for others. In fact, I started to wonder if hope might, in some ways, serve as a means of reconciling ourselves to the reality of inevitable lived experiences. Evelyn captures this sentiment in her February 7th entry when she reflects on comforting another woman formerly in the LRA. She wrote: “I know that if she has hope and love, she will be consoled. This is what I decided to say because it is painful to hear those with problems similar to mine. It is very painful and very hard. These things happen in people’s lives. You pass through them. Whether you were abducted or not, you pass through them. You will go through what you are supposed to go through” (Amony, 2015, p.211).
This reinforced my belief that hope is hard to sustain without the possibility of justice, especially when even basic needs remain unmet. Ketty Anyeko’s (2022) article explores what justice means for women who have endured wartime sexual violence and forced marriage, emphasizing the significance of justice that is place-based, needs-based, compensation-based, and relationship-based. Evelyn’s daily diaries vividly illustrated this idea; her everyday experiences revealed how her livelihood—and that of her children—was often jeopardized through no fault of her own. Without justice to address these harms, envisioning a hopeful future could become incredibly challenging.
My questions are around this idea of hope in the aftermaths:
Is hope just the possibility of an idea? What tangible needs must be met for us to have hope for the future? How does privilege influence how we conceptualize hope in a post-conflict setting?
Reflecting on this week’s readings, I have come to understand that the nature of justice is complex and multifaceted. One key insight is that the healing process for survivors of war and sexual violence is often overlooked in reparation efforts across most contexts. This highlights the insufficiency of conventional justice mechanisms in rebuilding the lives of survivors, particularly women and children.
Evelyn’s narrative illustrates her daily struggles after escaping the LRA. Her challenges revolve around meeting basic needs for herself and her children, maintaining a home, and confronting systemic barriers such as limited education, economic opportunities, and societal acceptance. While meeting basic needs may not pose a significant challenge for some people, it is a critical concern for individuals like Evelyn. This kind of contrast highlights the importance of the various dimensions of justice discussed in Anyeko’s article, particularly the need for tangible support and recognition to achieve meaningful justice for women survivors. Evelyn’s reflection, “I was thinking of the past…if I had not been abducted, I would not be going through all this,” captures the lasting burden of her experiences, which extend far beyond the scope of courtroom justice.
Anyeko points out that women’s issues, especially the stories of survivors in post-war and post-conflict settings, are often marginalized in discussions about transitional justice. To address this, she advocates for a survivor-centered framework, which encompasses four dimensions: place-based, needs-based, compensation-based, and relationship-based justice. Evelyn’s life exemplifies the relevance of this framework, as her experiences reflect the critical need for justice that addresses tangible, emotional, and societal dimensions. Her struggles with poverty, lack of land, and limited education underscore the importance of land ownership for stability and belonging, while her challenges in providing for her children reflect the need for reparations and basic services. Additionally, the societal rejection and stigma she faces emphasize the importance of relationship-based justice, as survivors require acceptance and reintegration to heal from trauma and rebuild their identities.
Evelyn’s story underscores the profound and enduring trauma that war inflicts on women survivors, which is difficult to heal. Yet, tangible justice remains elusive and challenging to achieve through traditional legal systems. While legal prosecutions, such as the ICC’s conviction of LRA commanders, are symbolic and represent an important step in transitional justice, they do little to alleviate the material and emotional burdens that survivors endure. Evelyn’s assertion that she survived to tell her story demonstrates an effort to reclaim her agency and demand accountability. This, in turn, contributes to addressing structural inequalities and empowering survivors to regain their agency and dignity.
Question:
What lessons can we learn from Evelyn’s experiences to inform future transitional justice efforts in other conflict and post-conflict settings?
Reading about the daily lives of survivors deeply resonated with me, reminding me of the profound challenges womanhood can bring—challenges no one should ever have to endure. It compelled me to revisit my own journal, where I once penned raw and powerful emotions that I had long silenced until now.
Evelyn’s diary is a compelling example of how she endured a life shaped by conflict, offering deep insight into its aftermath through her daily struggles. As a breastfeeding mother and wife of Joseph Kony, she faced immense poverty and lacked financial independence, becoming entangled in a web of hardship. Evelyn’s story reveals the harsh realities of her life and the unending battles she faced. While the LRA is notoriously perceived in a negative light, Evelyn’s narration adds a nuanced perspective. She recounts haunting memories of LRA members, wrapped in polythene bags, and how the bushes became a source of violent recollections where children were forcibly taken from their mothers. These memories carry extreme violence, silence, and unanswered questions.
Evelyn highlighted how her community helped her raise her children, balancing motherhood and household responsibilities, and expressed deep gratitude for their support. Her resilience shines as she confronts the trauma of her abduction while seeking solace through prayers and community connections. Her forced marriage to Joseph Kony and her journey toward healing reflect both her strength in accepting her circumstances and the enormity of her challenges. She portrays Kony as both kind and understanding, while still grappling with the weight of her lived experiences. Evelyn’s story is a poignant reminder of how survivors live day-to-day, hoping for justice and a brighter future. Her reflections on subtle acts of kindness and the support of her community underscore how even small gestures can become the greatest source of strength for those left to battle trauma and societal stigma.
Dr. Ketty’s two decades of work and her profound question, “What about us?” highlight how the impact of violence is often reduced to compartmentalized issues, neglecting the diverse realities of victimhood from a human rights perspective. Dr. Ketty’s workshops with survivors, civil society, and policymakers emphasized key recommendations to address wartime violence against women and children. Survivors’ anticipation of an apology from the Ugandan government and the LRA is a bare minimum, alongside the need to recognize gender and children’s rights through equity-driven approaches. Dr. Ketty’s work offers practical strategies for community-centric recommendations that prioritize equity and justice.
The Beading Memory project inspired me with its powerful message of healing and resilience. The women who channel their pain and grief into art have created a collective strength that transcends monetary value. This artistic expression stands as both a tool for healing and a profound form of communication, reflecting their strength and solidarity.
Questions I Have
How can we ensure that recommendations are effectively translated into actionable implementation, particularly in the context of the global Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda?
Where does the cycle of suffering end? While the past cannot be undone, the aftermath of everyday challenges remains immense. Can victims ever truly be free?
There are a few themes that particularly stand out to me from this week. One of them is the power of time: how trauma can persist over time, how healing can take place in the aftermaths of violence, how time can pass at a different pace depending on the context we’re in, and how we can be instantaneously transported to a moment in our past via a reminder in the present.
In Chapter 7 of I am Evelyn Amony, Evelyn realized that one of her daughters had not forgotten the hard journeys they made across the Imatong mountains, “these things happened sometime back, and yet Bakita remembers them clearly” (December 22, 2009). For Evelyn’s daughter (and Evelyn herself, as evidenced by the various memories she experiences of her time in the bush throughout Chapter 7), although much time has passed since the initial experience that makes up her memories, she is able to recall them easily. On the flip side of this is Evelyn’s experience reuniting with her family, which is mentioned in the podcast. She could not recall the appearance of her family members, who grew upset with her over her lack of recognition, even though she had been in the bush for around 12 years in total. Trauma is often easier to remember (or even an automatic recall) over the happiest of memories, particularly if large periods of time stand in the way.
And in reverse, processing and healing is linked to time and the advocacy for rights post-conflict. With enough time and mutual support, Evelyn and other co-wives spoke to Kony’s family about the lack of familial involvement in their children’s lives: “You do not accept that these are your children. Since we came back, we have waited for you to recognize them for a long time. It is now six years for some of us” (February 14, 2010). On another day, Evelyn sees a woman who has photos of her daughter as a baby and wonders “how she kept those photos after all these years of war… I thought the lady was very wise to have kept her daughter’s photo all this time” (February 24, 2009). And finally in the Beaded Memory Project, women spent months constructing a beaded art piece to visualize their war memories, but also to heal from them by externalizing their experiences instead of keeping their hurt bottled up.
This interactive healing property between art and time reminds me of James Darin Corbiere, who is an Anishinaabe artist from Wikwemikong First Nation on Manitoulin Island. He has created hundreds of art pieces surrounding colonization, Indigenous history, and his own negative experiences with the church. I interviewed him a couple of years ago and learned that he used to see colours surrounding people as a child, before those negative experiences, and he uses bright colours in his artworks today (almost replicating what his view would have been as a child). He mentioned that his artwork has been “very good for the soul” and “helped a lot with the healing”; certainly, the healing power of art has been incredibly clear throughout the presentations we have seen from our classmates.
Beyond active healing, art also moves us to action, ideally in a way that can demand place-based, needs-based, compensation-based, or relationship-based justice, as mentioned by Ketty Anyeko. My questions for this week are: what kinds of justice typically take longer than others to occur? How do we recognize that time is a crucial element to healing without prolonging the amount of time that survivors of political violence have to wait before receiving justice? How soon after violence can one begin the pursuit of justice (if not during it)?
I have referenced this quite extensively, but I grew up in a very Catholic space, and while I don’t feel particularly religious myself, I think Catholicism lodged itself in my brain quite firmly, and the concepts and questions that were really on my radar have an identifiably Catholic air. Unsurprisingly, this week I found myself drawn to the concepts that came up in the readings related to justice as “lived” (Anyeko), including forgiveness and apology, and for me this brought to mind ideas like reconciliation, reparation, atonement, multiplicity, and absolutely complicated and sometimes seemingly contradictory ways “aftermaths” manifest and are navigated.
I find myself coming back to the idea of reconciliation in these contexts. I actually tend to refrain from voicing this thought because I can never tell if it’s a personal qualm or a legitimate qualm and so I don’t think it necessarily has a place in conversations about reconciliation, but I often feel kind of icky about the term reconciliation being used in relation to anti-colonialism, especially given the way it has such a Catholic connotation to it. My experiences with reconciliation were an uncomfortable mishmash of not understanding why I, a child, had fundamental sin I needed to apologize for, and at the same time, not understanding how harm could be settled in a booth with a priest and a few Hail Mary’s, without necessarily talking to the person I harmed. This obviously became more intense as I understood more and more the lack of action on an institutional level to address harm. These memories raise a lot of questions that I find very confusing and troubling related to forgiveness and reparation, and resonated with the questions these readings raised for me- who gets to administer “forgiveness”? Do we even need forgiveness? How do we even begin to repair harm? There’s so many layers that I can only begin to grapple with- Anyeko’s research identifies the need for compensation-based justice, and we know that this is an absolutely necessary component of meaningful justice, however it can’t be the only dimension- in this context I think about Gil Scott-Heron’s question, “Who’ll pay reparations on my soul?”.
In the CBC podcast, the interview with Evelyn talks about how there are reasons she likes Joseph Kony and reasons she doesn’t. She also states “forgiveness is hard, and it doesn’t help me”. At the same time, in “I am Evelyn Amony”, her diary details that she has encouraged people to pray for Joseph Kony and forgive him, because he is a human being too. I don’t point out this complicatedness out of any desire to question Evelyn’s feelings about Joseph Kony, nor to invalidate them- I raise this point because I think it seems to me that it demonstrates the extent to which feelings about things like forgiveness can be incredibly complicated, changing, and at times, perhaps even seemingly contradictory.
I think in some ways the answers to my questions seem almost obvious– we don’t necessarily need forgiveness, we begin to repair harm by listening to survivors, and the solutions are in providing choice and options so survivors can access a form of justice that feels meaningful to them. What does justice and reparation mean to survivors? There are probably as many definitions of justice and reparation as there are survivors. And yet, I still feel lost in the nuances. If we understand, as the introduction of Amony’s piece indicates, that in situations of war, conflict, violence, and so on “each decision, each choice, [is] weighed against a backdrop of coercion”, then how can we ensure that in our responses to violence we don’t inadvertently replicate patterns of coercion “after” conflict (whatever after means).
I don’t know that I’ve arrived at any concrete answers here, but I think my main reflections are about how we can honour the multiplicity of experiences and conceptualisations of justice when seeking to address harm. I also wonder how we can even begin to grapple with the immensity and depth of these concepts and considerations, although I know while I sit here and stress people are actually grappling in real time.
I only have two questions this week:
How can we arrive at an understanding of forgiveness that honours a huge range of experiences, beliefs, and personal conceptualisations?
How is justice lived?
This week’s topic of “aftermaths” was highly relevant to the work some of us were doing during our GP2 fieldwork.
When I went into the fieldwork, I had the assumption that I was to find ways in which the Kenyan government and NGOs could increase female ownership of land in the coffee industry. However, upon interviewing 30 female farmers working to provide for themselves and their families, my team and I realized that they didn’t necessarily want to own land. They wanted to create networks of support, resilience and care in which they could speak freely, provide for their children and care for themselves while empowering each other. Land ownership was not a priority for Kenyan women in the same way it is for Kenyan men. The community among women was more important.
When watching the video of the Women’s Advocacy Network, I immediately thought of how difficult it would be for the women to recreate these experiences visually, to see their trauma laid out in front of them, assuming it would re-traumatize them, since that is what I feel like I would experience in the same exercise. However, it was clear that this was an opportunity that encouraged them to rely on each other and relieve themselves of the trauma they had been holding in.
The women in Kenya needed to rely on something other than the government or on programs that provided empty promises of supporting and empowering women. The women relied on themselves and created weekly financial support programs called merry-go-rounds and table banking, in which they would financially support each other every week and pay each other back with interest, creating systems dedicated to their resilience.
Community is crucial for empowerment, understanding, and resilience, particularly among women, particularly in supporting children. Trust and hope create community. And these women still have hope and kindness in their hearts despite the systems that work against them. They strive to empower their children to ensure they don’t experience what their mothers did. They uplifted each other regardless of the patriarchal values and mindsets pushing them down.
My brain is a jumbled mess, but these are my thoughts for this week.
How can we learn from these women who have been intergenerationally disempowered and who still strive to create systems of learning and support for each other against all odds?