5 - Living with & within Revolution: Challenges to Unity & Community

Summary

Overview

The women, I can say, they were the ones who saw the war much differently from the men because they were staying here [in the Protected Villages]. Whereas when you are staying in towns, there was not much pain there. What pain would you have? The [women] were more affected because they were the ones staying here, seeing every problem that comes there. (Joanne)

This chapter addresses the impetus for survival by women caught up in revolutionary war. The underbelly of women's experiences is found in their struggles for everyday survival and the strategies they devised to mitigate the most adverse effects of living through war. The struggles for survival along with the parameters of everyday social relations (with the District Assistants (DAs), the guerrillas, and their community) are key to understanding women's participation and consciousness in the liberation war. The Protected Villages (PVs) transformed community space and relations and created the militarised context wherein the pervasive reach of state surveillance extended into the daily fabric of women's lives. The DAs were the personification of the state and women's interactions with them were bound by the everyday mechanisms of power practised through the control of time and space, harassment through searches and sexual advances and arbitrary punishment and brutality. Whilst supposedly protected from the ‘terror’ of the guerrillas, women faced new threats in their everyday lives. Guerrilla surveillance also adapted to the Keeps and turned the community against itself as distrust and fear thrived in the culture of misinformation and the identification and punishment of sell outs.