Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the contrast between women’s stories of wartime and domestic conflict in Sierra Leone. I argue that both the ‘private’ realm of intimate relations and the ‘public’ realm of political violence are equally governed by a regional aesthetics of concealment and secrecy.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I reflect on 3 months of fieldwork in Sierra Leone to explore the contrast between women's stories of wartime conflict and domestic conflict. I show how women's stories of wartime violence were subject to a gendered aesthetics of concealment and secrecy that has developed in response to a regional history of political violence, including slave trading, raiding, warfare, colonial rule and electoral politics. In contrast to their highly contained and scripted "war narratives", women recounted their stories of domestic conflict with husbands, lovers and boyfriends relatively more openly. Nonetheless, the fragility of intimate relationships between women and men in Sierra Leone reflects broader societal, ritual and ideological attempts to sexually and verbally contain women's power. Drawing on the insightful work of anthropologists such as Mariane Ferme and Rosalind Shaw, I argue that political relationships in the so-called 'public' domain - and political violence in particular - structure gendered relationships and women's social and domestic roles at the most intimate, 'private' levels of the family and the body; and vice versa as my case studies of women's stories of wartime violence will show. In Sierra Leone, the personal is indeed deeply political. By examining the relationships and disjunctures between stories of gendered violence, abuse and neglect in marital relationships on the one hand, and stories of political violence on the other, I argue that in West Africa the categories of gender and secrecy are key to understanding the structural continuity of violence between the political ('public') and domestic ('private') domains.