About the Book
From Christina Lamb, the coauthor of the bestselling I Am Malala and an award-winning journalist—an essential, groundbreaking examination of how women experience war.
In Our Bodies, Their Battlefields, longtime intrepid war correspondent Christina Lamb makes us witness to the lives of women in wartime. An award-winning war correspondent for twenty-five years (she’s never had a female editor) Lamb reports two wars—the “bang-bang” war and the story of how the people behind the lines live and survive. At the same time, since men usually act as the fighters, women are rarely interviewed about their experience of wartime, other than as grieving widows and mothers, though their experience is markedly different from that of the men involved in battle.
Lamb chronicles extraordinary tragedy and challenges in the lives of women in wartime. And none is more devastating than the increase of the use of rape as a weapon of war. Visiting warzones including the Congo, Rwanda, Nigeria, Bosnia, and Iraq, and spending time with the Rohingya fleeing Myanmar, she records the harrowing stories of survivors, from Yazidi girls kept as sex slaves by ISIS fighters and the beekeeper risking his life to rescue them; to the thousands of schoolgirls abducted across northern Nigeria by Boko Haram, to the Congolese gynecologist who stitches up more rape victims than anyone on earth. Told as a journey, and structured by country, Our Bodies, Their Battlefields gives these women voice.
We have made significant progress in international women’s rights, but across the world women are victimized by wartime atrocities that are rarely recorded, much less punished. The first ever prosecution for war rape was in 1997 and there have been remarkably few convictions since, as if rape doesn’t matter in the reckoning of war, only killing. Some courageous women in countries around the world are taking things in their own hands, hunting down the war criminals themselves, trying to trap them through Facebook.
In this profoundly important book, Christina Lamb shines a light on some of the darkest parts of the human experience—so that we might find a new way forward. Our Bodies, Their Battlefields is as inspiring and empowering is as it is urgent, a clarion call for necessary change.
384 pages (paperback)
Published on September 22, 2020
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“Around the world, a woman's body is still very much a battlefield and hundreds of thousands of women bear the invisible wounds of war.”
I read a lot of different stuff when I’m cooking plot points for the books I’m writing. This was one that flew across my radar a few weeks ago, and as soon as I saw it, I knew it was a book I absolutely had to read. I also knew it would be brutal, and difficult to get through, and I was not wrong. This might be one of the most important books I have ever read, but it is also one of the most harrowing, and one of the only books I’ve had to put down and walk away from before I could continue reading it.
Christina Lamb is a well-known journalist and author. She worked on I Am Malala and few other big-name projects. She has spent much of her professional life in war zones, reporting on crises and the like, and in this book she openly talks about her motivations for writing about this topic, as well as the emotional fatigue she dealt with while interviewing, researching, and writing. Both of these things prevented the narrative from every straying into the dusty, scholarly halls that some books of this nature wander down. Lamb’s personal interest, and the emotional toll it took, was clear throughout the book. Due to that, her narrative was personal, and it was probably that personal element that made it feel all the more jarring as I read.
“Rape is the only crime in which society is more likely to stigmatize the victim than punish the perpetrator.”
Our Bodies, Their Battlefields, is one of the most important books I have ever read, and it’s right up there with The Unwomanly Face of War and the Rape of Nanking in how difficult it was for me to get through, emotionally. Through the eyes of women in numerous parts of the world, readers are taken on a tour de force of war, and the often unmentioned and extremely high toll women pay for the battles men often fight. Rape used as a weapon, and then the social fallout from being a woman who was raped is what you'll read about, and yet it is the human perseverance and personal agony that really stuck to my ribs.
Rather than focusing on one area, each chapter (sometimes a few chapters) focus on a different region of the world, a different conflict, and different women, but the core of the stories told, regardless of location and regardless of the person interviewed, are the same. It is heartbreaking, and soul crushing, and impossible to look away from. This is a story that spans borders, and nationality. It’s a female story, and one historically rarely told. While men play at war, it has been the women who have suffered, voices muted, overlooked and relegated to the shadows.
Here, Lamb interviews Yazidi women, Boko Haram survivors and families of the missing, women who survived mass rape in Bangladesh, survivors of the Rwanda genocide, survivors of the Rohingya genetic cleansing, survivors of rape camps in the Bosnian War, and many more. She does not glorify the details, but neither does she deny them or gloss over them. With incredible care and respect for both the dead and the survived, she tells their unvarnished stories, never once glossing over the emotional, psychological, or physical tolls these women have paid.
“Rape is as much of a weapon of war as the machete, club, or Kalashnikov.”
What surprised me, perhaps, was the fact that she did not stop with the women who have undergone these personal traumas, but rather there are a few sections where she talks to the next generation as well, people who were born of these events, children whose birth parents are known by the ominous moniker of “the disappeared.” Born in horrible conditions, and then given to the jailers, the captors, those who were highly placed to be raised as their own children, their actual parentage erased from the records and from memory. Lamb details the plight of the families to try to find their missing members, and the struggle of the survived to, in some way, pick up the pieces of their lives.
Trauma leaves its mark, and it spans generations. In these stories, Lamb does not just discuss what happened to the women during these fraught, impossible times, but also to the children, to those who survived. The story of survival is often as brutal and heartrending as the war, the rapes, the abuse itself. There are no happy endings, or at least, there are very few. The war for some might end, but it seems as though it continues relentlessly on, carving a niche out of each woman's life, every day it is lived. An echo, a palimpsest of pain. In some places, the story is more hopeful than others, but the thread of misery is woven throughout.
“You meet these women, here in the city, or go out to the village, to Taba, and meet them and they seem normal. But I think when they go home and close their doors at night, there is a space inside them which no one can break into, no matter what you do.”
Ultimately, I feel like whatever I write about this book isn’t going to be enough, and I honestly can’t quite find the worlds to tell you just how powerful, important, and painful Our Bodies, Their Battlefields truly is. In the annals of history, it’s the stories about men we read more than those about women, but women are always present. We have been relegated to the margins, to the shadows, to the corners where the deepest wounds are often invisible, and the pain and blood is easy to overlook. Here, Christina Lamb gives voice to the voiceless, to those throughout history who have stood as battlefields, unrecognized and silent.
One of the most powerful books I have ever read. I firmly believe this needs to be mandatory reading.
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