No Time to Mourn: An Anthology by South Sudanese Women ed. by Hilda J. Twongyeirwe and Elizabeth Ashamu Deng (review)

What does it look like when women seize the stage to tell their stories of their nation? What does the story of war, peace, and nationhood sound like when heard straight from the hearts of women? No Time to Mourn!

No Time to Mourn is an anthology of raw and personal stories of love, war, and life in South Sudan told by South Sudanese women. It is a collage of eighteen short stories and memoirs, forty-eight poems, twenty-one photographs and artworks, and a song. This symphony of different art forms is the fruit of a six-day women’s retreat for eighteen South Sudanese women on the shores of Lake Victoria in Uganda. Inspired by the desire to do something more about the conflict in South Sudan, OXFAM and FEMRITE collaborated to empower South Sudanese women so that they could support one another to embrace their stories and lend their voices to the oft-dominated male narratives of South Sudan.

Decentering what Cynthia Enloe calls “conventional historicized investigations” and centering womanhood, erotics, home, and practices of everyday life, No Time to Mourn offers striking imageries for reckoning the cost of war and reimagining the untranslatable (2010, 4). War is plucking out the only eye of a cripple, watching as chickens fight over a long intestine from a dead body. War is where a mother chooses between her life and her child’s, when it is an unaffordable luxury to mourn your dead.

These women invite their listeners to encounter the dreams and hopes, anguish and misery, needs and vulnerabilities, joys and motivations that drive people—arm-full and arm-less—during violence. How might we unpack the willful decision of a sixteen-year-old girl to join the SPLA (Sudan People’s Liberation Army) even when it was a taboo in her family to do so? Allowing readers to experience both the present and generational effects of violence on women, children, and men, these women remind us that we are all victims of violence. Everyone. “Can’t you see that the same pain with me is the same as one with you?” Veoulla Baker Ayul asks. “Mine is just easier for people to view.”

As an anthology of personal stories of survival and resilience from the people who bear the brunt of conflict—women—No Time to Mourn challenges us to take seriously the things that keep these women going amid inconceivable suffering. For these women, it is the power of sister-hood, memories of their babies, memories of Sunday school songs, hope for a new South Sudan, faith in God. No Time to Mourn bears witness to the deep faith of these women. Theirs is a faith that is forged in the fire of suffering, refuses any sort of cheap answers, wrestles with God, and so is able to provide a ground for their hope.

Might this account for the strikingly hopeful language of these women? Although scarred by war and gendered violence, their language is neither vengeful nor disheartening. Remarkably, their voices, while sharply critical of the present, are marked by hope, courage, and compassion. Emmanuela Erasto’s love letter to Jamal, who shockingly abandoned her and their pregnancy, ends with unbelievable compassion:

Do you want to know what happened to our baby?Peace and Light,Your Queen.”

The fire in these women’s hearts seems unquenchable and so they are able to see and point to a new future for South Sudan where, as Nyibol Ajang Adier dreams, “my children cook and spice their little food in salsal tins.”

As they offer new ways of reimagining wars and reckoning its cost, these women challenge ideas about the end of war. “Do wars end with cease fires?” Lucy Kiden Lulu asks. When is the end of war if reckoning the cost of war involves accounting for slaughtered dreams, lost homes, naturalized hatred...