Trigger Warning
As is always the case in wars of cultural erasure or genocide, women are forced to suffer in ways that men are not. You know what I’m talking about. Yesterday, I read that there is widespread rape of Ukrainian women by Russian soldiers, but all of these women are so terrified and ashamed that they cannot bring themselves to speak out publicly. These women have lost their homes in a country suddenly under siege, and to have been raped as the bombs continue to fall around them is a trauma beyond description.
In addition to this, the bombing of children’s and maternity hospitals in Mariupol was clearly aimed at Ukraine’s next generation, and those who would bear that generation. As observers, we are appalled by the outrage of attacking hospitals, places where there is absolutely no threat to an invading enemy. The attack of these hospitals in particular have a distinct meaning and intention behind them.
In one chapter of my book, I center on a novel that forms an allegory of the future aftermath of the Darfur genocide in Sudan. By writing in the post-apocalyptic genre, the writer, Nnedi Okorafor, was able to reimagine the ways in which a maternal character, otherwise a paradigm for victimization in war, possessed the magical power to save her people. Unfortunately, that powerful supernatural being does not exist in Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, or any other group of people subjected to the “ethnic cleansing” that is always centered on women’s bodies. In writing this fantastical narrative, Okorafor seems to emphasize the tragedy and trauma that emerges from this violence.
Weaponized rape and the killing of children is part and parcel of the attempted erasure of an entire nationality or ethnicity. We have been seeing footage of numerous women and children who have escaped the violence by crossing into a neighboring country, but there are equally numerous women who could not risk travel due to their late term pregnancy, or who were otherwise victimized before they could escape.
