I have waited for you for ages, for an eternity and a day. Unseen, unheard, yet, you were always there the fighter, the warrior. Come forth in all your glory and destroy, as you had destroyed the enemy once and for all the myth that the woman is weak and helpless.

– Sharmeen Murshid

Getting back up on the blogginghorse with a little exciting news to share.  The Aftermath Project, an incredible organization founded by Sara Terry that provides support to photo documentary projects that examine issues surrounding the aftermath of conflict, recently announced its 2011 grant winners and finalists – and a project that I’ve been working on here in Bangladesh was named as one of the latter!

The idea for “Women Warriors” first began to take shape last July in Hue, Vietnam during the VII/[EXPOSURE] there.  I spent that week riding around the back of a moto to the homes of six women who fought for the North Vietnamese Army during the war with the United States, speaking to them not only about their experiences during the conflict, but how it shaped their lives after they returned home.  The work was recently published in Global Post, which had a small accompanying interview that was never published – so here it is now!

Women Warriors On Global Post

In heading to Bangladesh to research the creation of narratives of the Liberation War, I knew that I wanted to work on a photography project while here, and to have one that tied into that research would add a rather interesting twist.  So the Women Warriors: Bangladesh project emerged, and it’s grown in some interesting and unexpected ways as of yet.  It is moving much more slowly – in both good and frustrating ways – than its Vietnamese counterpart, unfurling slowly as contacts grow and shift here.

The project focuses on three specific aspects of the lives of women who served in the Liberation War – as armed combatants, spies, nurses, caretakers, organizers, and so on – and the way that the war has defined them, their families, and their communities:

1. Personal History: Through personal portraiture and recorded testimonies of female Mukti Banini, I hope to add to the existing histories of the independence struggle and subsequent construction of Bangladesh. While such testimonies will include women’s wartime experiences, they will focus on their lives in the decades since, with their struggles to reconcile the dual roles they are expected to fill in Bangladeshi society.
2. Physical Scars: Bangladesh’s war of liberation was fought at the doorsteps of every home in the country – the battlefields were the streets, alleys, and corners of her cities and towns. Its scars exist within the souls of the victims and on the surfaces of the nation. I will visually explore, using individual memories as guides, sites and localities where personal histories were made, where personal traumas were defined.
3. Memory & Dreams: As photographer Shahidul Alam writes, “What of the photograph made out of nothing? What about painting with light? Is it photography? Surely if we can paint with light we can paint with dreams, create the morning mist or the afternoon glow. Is it fake? Hardly. Whatever else may be false in this tenuous existence of ours, imagination is not. All that we value, that we strive to uphold, all that gives us strength, has been made of dreams, and we must dream on. If pixels be the vehicle that realizes our dreams, be it so.” Using photography as a ‘vehicle’ for the imagination, I hope to evoke the intangible memories and dreams of this conflict, and the subsequent personal reconciliations experienced by these women. This photographic exploration will take place within the lives and communities of the women, in both past and present landscapes and sites, as well in those places they have yet to, but still hope to see. It will reveal not only what they have experienced, but also where they wish to go – the dreams they hold for both themselves and their children.

The narrative that has dominated in Bangladesh of women in the Liberation War up until the present has been one of victimhood – those who were raped en masse by the Pakistani army, those who watched their sons and husbands and brothers leave home to fight for the country’s freedom.  While official narratives fail to recognize the histories of these women, they remain deep within those who experienced them.  They face them day after day, developing ways to quietly process past experiences in an attempt to move beyond them. These women, who are raising the first generation of Bangladeshis born after 1971, have been guiding forces in shaping and forming the country and its identity. In learning the stories of these women, and understanding how their experiences in conflict have shaped them as mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives, this project endeavors to document the ways in which conflict not only affects those who experience it firsthand, but those that they nurture and raise – the next generation – and, in that way, how their experiences continue to live on in the nation.