Conversation with Ximena Borrazás
Episode 10 of The Fading Causes Podcast is here. It made me wonder about who concocted the term ‘sexual violence’?
Obviously a half-hearted bureaucrat or, perhaps, a semi-detached academic – with a misplaced sense of fastidiousness. Because the term actually reveals nothing of meaning or feeling around one of the most horribly personal acts of horror.
Having witnessed much rape and sexual torture in several places – especially Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, northern Iraq – during a lifetime spent in and around wars and conflicts, I was thinking of the inadequacy of our curiously-abstracting or de-personalising language, in the latest episode of my podcast with the irrepressible María Ximena Borrazás, photo and film documentalist.
Travelling through the lens of Ximena’s camera is a shortcut into the minds and souls of both victims and perpetrators of such violence. Like, for example, the soldiers who raped the women of Tigray on an industrial scale during the recent civil war in Ethiopia that also involved Eritrea.
We all know that all types of atrocities are fairly routine during today’s wars. But what type of war-rapist leaves behind written messages indicating his intent rolled-up inside the brutalised genitalia of his victims? And why? To call it just perverted is to excuse the perps and those orchestrating such acts. It seems that in an era where warmaking tech is advancing apace, the old-fashioned rape-as-weapon-of-war is not being left behind.
What is Ximena thinking when she is photographing such stuff? And what is she feeling while doing it? What does she want us to do with the knowledge she insists on sharing with us though her profoundly-moving images? Or is this just a form of voyeurism? The problem is that once her photos have been seen, they can’t be un-seen.
We mull over these and related questions in our conversation.
