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Books & arts
Tears of Hope: A Collection of Short Stories by Ugandan Rural Women
Edited by Ayeta Anne Wangusa and Violet Barungi
2005-01-20, Issue 190
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/26465
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Publisher: Femrite
Exclusively distributed by African Books Collective Ltd, The Jam Factory, 27 Park End Street, Oxford OX1 1HU United Kingdom
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When Frieda’s husband came home drunk and she was unable to provide him with the money he demanded, he went to the bedroom and came out swinging a panga.
“I have no money, please I have no money. You know I can’t have any,” Frieda begged. She escaped from the house and went to hide behind a tree, to which a goat was tied. Her husband, in a rage, swung the panga and split open the head of the goat, killing it instantly.
Frieda knew that the blow was meant for her. She knew that if she stayed with her husband any longer it would only be a matter of time before either her or her children were killed.
The decision to leave was the end of 14 years of constant battery. The odds were stacked against her – she returned to her parents, but received no support for the children from her husband. He began selling off possessions and property they had acquired during the marriage, but her attempts to access these resources where thwarted by a corrupt beurocracy heavily weighted in favour of her husband.
After a long struggle, she found out about a legal aid clinic that supported women in claims about land and property conflicts, domestic violence, rape and other abuses. The legal aid clinic helped her to achieve limited justice – her husband is prevented from selling their property – but she is still on the back foot in a society where the odds are stacked against her.
Frieda’s story is typical of the collection of short stories in ‘Tears of Hope: A collection of Short Stories by Ugandan Rural Women’. The eight short stories reflect the situation of African rural women in an overwhelmingly male dominated society. These are stories about the lived experience of women that demonstrate their suffering, pain and humiliation, but also show the enormous inner strength, courage and fortitude of women.
Each story is a window on the discrimination that women face. In ‘Where do I belong?’ we are shown that women are valued for the offspring that they produce and that that offspring had better be male.
‘Frieda’s World’ follows on this theme. Women are seen and chosen for their potential fertility and their ability to work hard and increase the wealth of their husbands. Women are seen to be nothing more than a bundle of flesh to be beaten into submission, even through they are more often than not the producer of food and nurturer of children.
Many of the stories, told in the first person, are extremely moving. In ‘Maria demands her share’, Maria describes her husband coming home form work some time in 1994, extremely worried. The setting is Rwanda and as her husband notifies her, it is time to flee because the situation has reached a stage where their lives are in danger. They lose everything and join a mass of humanity running for their lives. Maria’s husband is subsequently murdered by her own brother, who uses the confusion to settle an old family score related to Maria’s bride price. From that stage on, Maria’s life becomes a constant struggle for dignity.
The system of male domination breeds selfishness and oppression, not only from the male members of society, but also from women eager to hold on to whatever tentative positions they have established for themselves within the hierarchy. In that hierarchy, women can only exist by belonging to someone, by being a possession. Breaking out of that structure to go it alone is a hard road fraught with difficulties. So, for example, if a women finds herself in a situation of domestic violence she must not expect the authorities to take action. The only way to escape is to leave her husband, following which she will stigmatised for not being able to make her marriage work and face immense pressure to return to her situation of abuse.
Each story involves the main character finding out about and accessing her rights, and even though these laws might be limited in the protection they offer, they do more often than not offer some respite.
But the stories also show that standing up for these rights and using the law to fight their oppression is only half of the battle. In this sense it is not only about accessing rights within the framework of the law, it is also about confronting a hostile society who, even when the law is against them, do everything within their power to make sure that women are deprived and disempowered. If, however, the violence that the characters in these stories suffer at the hands of their spouses is relentless, so is the determination and courage of the women to make sure that their rights are enforced. This is the real inspiration of this collection of short stories: It is through the courage of women like the eight represented in these stories that society is forced to make shifts, forced to change.
Reviewed by Patrick Burnett, Fahamu
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