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Abstract
Elma Shaw’s 2008 novel, Redemption Road: The Quest for Peace and Justice in Liberia, provides an important model for thinking through creative possibilities for individual and collective justice in Liberia after the civil wars from 1989 to 2003. This essay engages African women thinkers including Lauretta Ngcobo and Desiree Lewis to expand the frames of Judith Butler’s work on precarity and Jacques Derrida’s model of inheritance. Shaw’s complex female protagonist, Bendu Lewis is a victim and perpetrator of crimes during the war who works to find justice for her community by founding an NGO and reclaiming her lost daughter. I argue that this kind of practice comprises the foundation for an individual and collective “bodily redemption” that turns from a reliance on systemic justice to the female body as a site of individual and collective pain, agency, and healing.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See, for example, Anderson (1983), Bhabha (1990), or Ahmad (Citation2008).
2 Beyond the extent of her involvement with the civil wars, President Sirleaf was criticized for not following through with some of her pledges to improve the quality of life for women in Liberia. In particular, much of the SGBV perpetrated against women and girls during and after the war was not adequately prosecuted (see Debusscher or Kalwinski 2007 142–9).
3 In fact, the publication of the novel predates the release of the TRC report by one year–even though some of its underlying work is similar.
4 A great deal of recent scholarship on Liberia in the social sciences focuses on doing justice for Liberian women through legal or political institutions. In particular, many take former President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to task for her sluggish legislative reform (see Kodila-Tedika and Asongu or Debusscher 2017 86–101 and de Almagro 2016 293–316) or the United Nations for not being attentive enough to the interests of local women in accomplishing its missions (see Beber et al. 2017 1–30).
5 See, for example, Gbowee, Press (2010 23–9), Ellis (2006), or Hardison-Moody (2016).
6 See, for example, Bryant-Davis et al. (2011 314–30).
7 For a more specific, detailed account of the status of women in Liberia Mary H. Moran has published extensively on this topic in The Violence of Democracy (2011), Abramowitz and Moran “International Human Rights, Gender-Based Violence, and Local Discourses of Abuse in Postcolonial Liberia: A Problem of ‘Culture’?” (119) or “Our Mothers Have Spoken: Synthesizing Old and New Forms of Women's Political Authority in Liberia” (Moran 2012 51–66).
8 For a detailed account of the particular forms this violence took, see Swiss (1998 625–9) and Jennings et al.
9 Some scholars such as Dara Kay Cohen and Amelia Hoover Green (2012 445–8; 2016) put the rate lower.
10 See, for example, Kalwinski (2007 142–9), Bryant-Davis et al. (2011 314–30), or Cohen and Green (2012 445–8; 2016).
11 See Fuest (2008 201–24) or Press (2010 23–9).
12 Organizations include Women in Action for Goodwill, the Abused Women and Girls (AWAG) program in 1990, and the Christian Health Association of Liberia (CHAL) (Liberian Women Peacemakers).
13 Leymah Gbowee includes many powerful examples in her memoir Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War. One woman shouts “You are our children! We’ve born you! We are tired! We want you to go to Ghana for peace talks! People are dying and you must listen to us!” One of the male leaders responds “Well, mothers, because of you, we will go” (143).
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Stefanie Sevcik
Stefanie Sevcik, PhD is a Lecturer in the Department of English at Georgia College and State University. Her research engages with questions of gender and resistance in contexts across the Global South including Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Liberia, and Syria. She recently published an essay on shifting representations of women in the work of Kateb Yacine during the Algerian war for independence from France in Research in African Literatures. In addition to a project analysing Tunisian women’s creative participation in the Arab Spring uprisings, she just completed a chapter on Syrian women’s prison art. These pieces fit into a larger book project titled Bloggers, Bombers, and Babies: Women’s Resistance Across the Global South.