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Women & War
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When I left class on Wednesday 21 March to get
home, I was confronted by some
officers, about eleven men hiding behind the flowers and
the university fence...The
first officer slapped me, kicked me, and then I saw what looked like
a gun butt coming... When
I woke up in a dark room, everything was gone. For thirteen days, I
was raped by I do not
know how many men..." University
of Liberia, a peaceful rally stormed by security forces, March 21st
2001
"...So
here I am, she reflected. Where I knew I would end up, from the moment
the shit
hit
the fan. Left behind by the heroes, down among the women. Reduced to
the status of
a
domestic animal -and getting fucked by the bastard who took over, because
I go with the
the
territory..."
CASTLES MADE OF SAND, CHAPTER 8: THE NIGHT BELONGS TO FIORINDA
Chretien
de Troyes, who is much closer to the Celtic traditional texts than
Thomas Malory, can be seen to be struggling
in his Romances, between the obvious chattel status
of the noble "heroines" in his source material, and the need
to provide
intelligent female characters with agency and wisdom,
for his readership and his patroness,at the court of Marie, Countess
of Champagne.... Thus, in the case of the lady in the
Romance, Yvain, or the Knight of the Lion, we see the witty and prudent
damosel Lunette arguing with her lady, whose husband
has just been hacked to pieces, that it would be very sensible and politic
to accept the victor as her new husband.... Which, after some
parley, she duly does.
(adapted from D.ROwen's Introduction to the Everyman edition)
Who knows, maybe Chretien's fantasy heroines had some meaning and some effect (Lunette is really cool). But agency and physical security are still hard to come by. You think the idea of a woman being burned alive in public is a fantasy? (Or stoned to death?) Think again. Current estimates say three women a day die in 'honor killings', in Pakistan alone. And that's in the peacetime, domestic ordinary world, they're killed by blokes with mobile phones in their pockets. We haven't even got back to the dark ages yet.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan stated that even though violence against women has been made illegal in many countries, such violence has, in fact, increased... www.amnesty.org.uk
Bringing it all back home: I didn't make
up what happens to Fiorinda, except for the fantasy element that says
the bad guy uses the body of a dead man as his instrument of torture...
which isn't much of a distortion of the truth. Dead men, men with no autonomy,
no self respect, easily become monsters in times of conflict. Dead men
are everywhere. You think the typical fantasy and sci-fi plot of mayhem,
rapine and slaughter is harmless escapism? And you could never do those
video-game things in real life, you just love the splatter and the feeling
of power... Well, I hope you're right. Wake up. Look around you. CASTLES
is not a wild dystopian vision, it's a displacement of what's happening
right now, right here, on this globalized earth, and getting closer to
where you live, every day. 
