Transforming Displaced Women in Sudan: Politics and the Body in a Squatter Settlement, and: War and Survival in Sudan's Frontierlands: Voices from the Blue Nile (review)

It is particularly timely to be reviewing these books in the lead-up to South Sudan's secession, for both books focus on communities whose position after the division of Sudan is far from secure. Rogaia Abusharaf explicitly describes Transforming Displaced Women in Sudan as 'urgent anthropology'. But like the vulnerability of southern displaced people around Khartoum, the uncertain future of the people of the 'Transitional Areas' between north and south also lends a sense of urgency to Wendy James's War and Survival in Sudan's Frontierlands. The books share a great deal more; neither describes itself as conventional ethnography, and both seek to present the extended testimony of their informants directly. In doing so they reveal the evocative metaphors with which people describe displacement: becoming like wild animals (James), discarded tails of lizards, or flour scattered on thorny fields (Abusharaf). Suffering and loss is thus presented without sentimentality or pity, and is all the more powerful for it. Both authors describe their research sites as 'microcosms' of Sudan as a whole, and wrestle with the complexities and ambiguities of identity and power upon which this claim rests. The presence of death also pervades both books, as a constant companion on long migrations, as the loss of lives and ways of life, and even as a longed-for liberation from current suffering. Yet even more powerful is the will to live, and to create and recreate social and cultural lives in the face of their destruction.

Transforming Displaced Women examines the multiple marginality of southern Sudanese women displaced to the shanty-towns around Khartoum, and it argues that their social relations with and cultural adaptations to the 'host' societies around them reveal the complexity and dynamism of identities. Poverty and gender unite women from different backgrounds; indeed they view their gender as the source of their adaptability and inter-communal understanding: 'Women are more open in this way than men, who resist change', says one young woman in the shanty-town (p. 70). The Introduction and first two chapters are an extended discussion of the need to understand the transformations and individual agency inherent in displacement; at times the points feel repetitive, but given the prevailing international simplifications of Sudan's conflicts and depictions of both women and internally displaced persons (IDPs) as passive victims, these are important arguments to labour. The high point of the book is Chapter 3, which discusses southern women's adoption of northern cultural practices, including female circumcision and smoke-baths. Abusharaf sensitively explores understandings of these rituals among both northern and southern women, the complexity and variety of their decisions as to whether to practise them, and the questions they raise of power and cultural dominance. Chapter 4 turns to women's role in peace initiatives, forming an interesting counterpoint to the study of marginalized and impoverished women by focusing on women 'empowered' by feminist and rights initiatives to campaign at higher political levels. This chapter lacks some of the critical analysis of the rest of the book, slipping somewhat into the language of advocacy and celebration. But it too is revealing of women's own notions of power, including a perceived historical role as peacemakers, and even their use of sexual politics to control the violence of men, a source of power that northern women also claim to gain through circumcision.

Abusharaf explains that her book is not a longitudinal study of the multiple displacements experienced by her informants, and suggests that no anthropologist could produce such a history without generalizing about the past (p...