Women, Resistance and Revolution (34 page)

Fanon describes the frequency with which the unveiling of Algerian women appeared as a theme in the dreams of French males as a symbol of rape. The passivity and complete subordination of the colonized woman fascinated the white imperialists; with her they could
act out the fantasies of domination they were forced to suppress with their own women. The right to possess his own woman thus becomes a kind of madness in the mind of the colonized man as he takes off the white mask. With it develops the idea of invading and desecrating the white man’s women. These are the means out of humiliation. He wants to act out the domination he has been made to suffer by imperialism. He has taken over the same structure of sexual fantasy as the white man. He is still trapped within the white mask; he has simply inverted its facial characteristics. The white woman is in an ambiguous position. She comes from among the powerful but she finds herself at once humiliated and reverenced by the men she was taught to regard as both forbidden and inferior. In going towards the colonized man she implicitly rejects the male of the dominant race, but she keeps her own skin, the passport back into imperial protection. She is looked down upon and secretly envied by women of her own kind, while colonized women resent her as encroaching on their own underprivilege.

Though solidarity between the women can help it must be the colonized women who shatter this legacy of humiliation and domination. Here a male-defined movement regardless of its social aims is not sufficient. The liberation of women in developing countries required the revolutionary emergence of the colony within the colony. Without this not only will one section of society continue to be despised, but the creation of Che Guevara’s new ‘man’ will prove impossible because revolutionary men will only understand liberation as their power to control other human beings. When women in the colonized countries articulate a revolutionary feminist consciousness, it becomes possible to see their previous situation and conception of the world in a different way. We are only just now recognizing the embryo. The whole human being has yet to be born.

Vietnam

When citadel walls collapse, it’s the business of the king. There is no reason for the widow to worry about it day and night.

Vietnamese proverb

How tragic is the destiny of women,

How sad is their fate,

Creator why are you so cruel to us?

Wasted are our green years, withered our pink cheeks.

The woman who lies here was in her lifetime the wife of all.

Yet after her death, her soul wanders in loneliness.

Kiêu; eighteenth-century poem about a courtesan

Guerrilla Woman:

The night is shorter than the road

its path more intricate than the tiny lanes

that curve the surface of my baby daughter’s palm.

Yet I will wound this land, our own, with trenches,

With pits for the French when they march this path,

beds for the French to sleep in,

groves in the land for the enemy of the land.

The ditches must go deeper than my hatred.

The work must fly faster than my tears …

You can drown the calls of my children,

but you can never hush the rhythm of my naked hands

clawing the frozen mud that will contain you.

After To Huu 1948, translated by Robin Morgan

The Vigil:

She should write him, perhaps that she is pregnant,

What to name this child with his almost forgotten face?

If it is a girl, Napalm.

If it is a boy, M-14 or Shrapnel,

so as not to forget, never to forget

that he is fighting for the land –

twenty years of war minus twenty years of suffering

equals nothing.

Each evening she waits for sleep until dawn.

She should write him, perhaps

but watches him, instead, behind closed eyes,

seeing him high in the wooded mountains happy enough

to display the unwritten letter to his comrades.

When women massively become political the revolution has moved to a new stage.

Vietnamese women at a conference of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, Off Our Backs,
14 December 1970

We are all Vietnamese.

Line from the poem of ‘The one who burns herself for Peace’,
Phan Thi Mai, May 1967. Buddhist student leader

In many ways the oppression of women in Vietnam resembled that in China. There was the same system of forced marriages, women could not inherit, and owed complete obedience to their fathers, their husbands and finally to their eldest son. Confucian ethics supported male authority and condoned the subordination of women. According to the Book of Rites, ‘Morals forbid her to step out of her room. Her only business is the kitchen.’ Rebellion should be severely suppressed. ‘The populace and women,’ said Confucius, ‘are ignorant, filled with bad instincts, and hard to educate.’
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At the bottom of the scale were concubines, like the girl in the poem Kiêu, whose soul wandered in loneliness after her death. During her lifetime a girl who was a concubine held the same rank as the first wife’s children. Peasant women maintained an undercurrent of resistance, possibly because they toiled with their men in the fields and were less enclosed than upper-class women. Folk songs record a common resistance to oppression. More than a thousand years ago a twenty-three-year-old girl from a peasant family in Tranhoa called Trieu Thi Thrinh dreamed of a different world. She told her brother: ‘My wish is to ride the tempest, tame the waves, kill the sharks, I want to drive the enemy away to save our people. I will not resign myself to the usual lot of women who bow their heads and become concubines.’
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Together with her brother she led a peasant uprising against the Chinese feudal lords and when this failed took her own life rather than submit to serfdom. Sometimes folk songs carried an alternative idea of women’s importance, or they hinted at the right of the young to love by choice rather than arrangement. When the French invaded Vietnam in the nineteenth century many women joined the fight against them.

With colonialism came poverty and famine. Peasants left the villages and went into the towns or into mines and weaving mills. As always, women experienced not just economic exploitation but their own specific oppression. When they were pregnant they tightened their belts so much that their children were often stillborn. Unmarried
mothers and their children were rejected and despised by everyone. They were outside all legal protection. In the towns brothels sprang up. A double standard of sexual morality pervaded. There was no mercy for ‘fallen’ women but the colonialists expected to make any woman they wanted whore for them. The upper-class Vietnamese colluded in this, ready to offer their wives to the French for the chance of promotion. Rape was barely an offence if the victim was Vietnamese. The sexual violation of a woman seemed nothing amidst the violation of a whole people.

In such circumstances it was impossible really to isolate the ‘woman problem’ from the expulsion of the French invaders. Small groups of women in the town tried to argue for equal rights in a moderate and reformist sense but they met too many impossible contradictions for such demands to develop into a strong movement. The Indochinese Communist Party, founded in 1930 (renamed Vietnamese Workers’ Party in 1951), made it possible to integrate the emancipation of women with class emancipation and the national liberation movement. The ‘woman problem’ was central from the start. A resolution at the party plenum in 1931 recognized the Vietnamese woman as the ‘most persecuted element in society’.
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The equality of the sexes was seen as among the principal tasks of the revolution. Women who had so little to lose and so much to gain entered the women’s organization of the party and resisted first the French, later the Americans. At first they worked underground, infiltrating factories, markets and workers’ areas, talking to people about the French and organizing sabotage. Many were killed. One woman who was tortured left a poem written in her own blood on the prison cell before she died:

A rosy-cheeked woman here I am fighting side by side with you men!

On my shoulders weighs the hatred which is common to us.

The prison is my school, its inmates my friends.

The sword is my child, the gun my husband!
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The unnatural circumstances of the unending war binds people together. The Vietnamese have a long tradition of resistance. Their history is one of continuing colonization and continuing rebellion in which suffering and martyrdom recur with an aching regularity and pain shuffles endlessly back and forth through forgotten time. The pain of the past is before them, the pain of the future is behind them.
Pain is the legacy of the parents to their children. One day a French patrol in the Mekong Delta came upon an old woman who was trying to hide a large pot of rice. They demanded to know where the guerrillas were, hitting her with their rifle butts. ‘The old woman raised her head proudly. “I am old,” she said, “and cannot carry a gun. But my children, and there are hundreds of them, all over the country, will kill you all, pirates. I am not afraid of dying.” ’
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The French, who could carry a gun, killed her, but the old woman was right; they drove out the French pirates only to find an even greater gang arrived: the Americans.

The course of the war has directly affected the lives of the women just as much as the men. Gradually women have been drawn into a situation of complete equality in suffering, and with them have come their children. Such developments did not occur all at once; they have depended upon the nature of warfare and there are obvious differences between the north and the south. During the guerrilla warfare against the French thousands of women in the north took part, but still in roles which were extensions of normal female activities. For example, mothers and wives blocked roads to stop lorries in which the French were taking their men away. They were in charge of supplies to the front and transported ammunition and food. They repaired roads and looked after the wounded, carried messages and provided hide-outs. These were all vital tasks and many women found themselves for the first time responsible for the citadel; but they were not exactly equivalent to the part the men played in terms of strategy and leadership at the front. In the south, probably because there is a less clear distinction between a military front and the rearguard, women have slowly moved into a position of outstanding significance.

The stages in the emergence of women in the south is well illustrated by Mme Binh’s own life. When she was eighteen the Second World War ended and the Japanese were expelled. She had vague patriotic ideals. She saw how her people were despised by the French. She was hopeful of independence. When the French came back in 1945 her father took up arms against them. It seemed too bitter now simply to submit again. She herself worked in the resistance movement first as a student and then with the women’s organizations and later with groups of intellectuals. No one was clear what to do, they had to learn from experience. Their political activity was non-violent and within the bounds of the law.

‘We organized protest marches against the arrest of patriots, we distributed leaflets, we met and discussed.’ Within the context of colonial occupation however this was enough to produce violent repression. When she was twenty-four she was imprisoned and tortured by the South Vietnamese under French direction: ‘mercenaries who torture their own for money’.
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In prison she found that ‘there were hundreds and hundreds of women with me who did not even know why they were there. They asked what have we done. They did not know when they came but when they left they knew. They left as patriots.’
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Imperialism is a great educator.

Released at the time of the General Agreement in 1954, she was part of the crowds celebrating freedom when Dien’s police opened fire and killed one of her girl friends. In the fifties she and other women still tried to organize peaceful protests, but these became increasingly impossible because marches and protest became simply a guarantee of certain arrest. In 1957 Mme Binh left Saigon and went into the country to live quite literally underground, coming up for air only at night. Under these conditions she bore her first child, while organizing villagers to fight. In the towns women continued to demonstrate:

On 17 December 1960 in Mython sixteen-year-old Truong Thi Bay, carrying a banner, marched at the head of a demonstration. Police shot her dead. Her place was immediately taken by eighteen-year-old Nguyen Thi Be who in her turn was mortally wounded. A third young girl took the lead and was killed. But the demonstrators continued to surge forward; the soldiers lowered their weapons.
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