Introduction: The Gender of Humanitarian Narrative

It all begins with telling someone else's story and the dilemmas with which that telling may burden the teller. The novelist Nuruddin Farah recounts how, when he was a child in Somalia, illiterate adults would ask him to write letters for them in exchange for a small "tip." One day a man came to him and asked him to write a letter to his wife, who had been absent for some time from the man's home. As Farah tells the story, "He says, what I want you to do . . . is to tell her in this letter, she's been away far too long. I want her back. And I will give her three months. If she does not come—tell her in the letter, and make sure you tell her this—if she doesn't come back, I'm going to go to the place where she is, break every single bone in her, drag her all the way back to where we are standing now." Farah continues, "Instead of writing, 'If you don't come back, I'm going to break your legs, drag you all the way back here,' I wrote down, 'If you don't come back within three months, you will consider yourself divorced.' " The woman, after receiving the letter and having it read to her, took the letter to a judge, who declared her and her husband to be divorced. Six months later, the man went to where his wife was and found she was already married to another man. In the end, the man "came back, spoke with my family, and I was instructed never ever to write anything for anyone again." ¹

The story, though told with a puckish sense of the absurd, raises the serious question of the extent and the limits of the writer's power: writing other people's words shapes outcomes in those others' lives, but in ways the writer cannot fully predict. Just what the boy Farah thought he was doing is not clear. (Was he trying to spare the woman a beating and the humiliation of being dragged back home? Or just shielding her from being hurt by her husband's brutal words?) But he ended up, for better or worse, precipitating her divorce. The power of writing to intervene in real events here intersects the author's inability to control what that power does, once it is released into the world as text; an awareness of that power and its limits calls for sober recognition of responsibility toward those people whose stories we bring into writing.

For us, the editors of this dossier, Farah's words also raise two other sets of questions, one about reporters' responsibilities generally and the other about the gendered dimensions of human diversity. First, how are our responsibilities as authors of human rights and humanitarian representations to be made concrete and palpable if, unlike the boy Farah, our words are unlikely ever to be answered by a person whose future our words have affected, and if there is no one to forbid us from writing again if we get the story wrong? When we convert what we know about a complicated and unpredictable world into forms that we think our audiences will easily assimilate, are we to be held accountable for shaping their knowledge and hence affecting their ability to make an ethical response?

Second, and for our purposes most important, how does the gender of the people suffering, the reporters of their pain, and those who would respond exert an influence over the content and shape of humanitarian and human rights messages? Farah saw his judgment bent by looking at the threat of harm through the prism of gender and, more specifically, he took the misstep of underestimating a woman's capacity to shape her own destiny in adverse circumstances, authorizing himself to intervene without her leave instead of trusting her to choose how to protect herself. Though we do not look at the world through the eyes of children, is our judgment about how to navigate between inaction, solidarity, and...