Paper short abstract:

This paper is about the strategies of Ethiopian women political prisoners to cope with the separation from their children and to maintain the emotional bounds damaged by imprisonment. It analyses the lasting impacts of political repression on societies, precisely because it attacks the intimate.

Paper long abstract:

Scholar working on women political prisoners narratives in Africa and other continents demonstrated how political repression is a process where the intimate and the political are inextricable; where individuals, families, and the larger society are together affected.

After three decades of silence, Ethiopian women activists recently published autobiographical accounts of their experience of the revolution of 1974 that overthrown Haile Selassie, and the Red Terror that followed. Between 1974 and 1978, the Derg, a military committee that embraced Marxism-Leninism, seized power and eliminated the civilian Marxists who were demanding a civilian government. Tens of thousands disappeared in mass killings, suffered extreme tortures, and were imprisoned.

Based on women activists' published testimonies, in Amharic and English, completed by interviews, I will analyse their experience as mothers and political prisoners. What collective strategies have they put in place to cope with the separation from their children, in addition to the brutality and living conditions of the prison? How did they struggled to maintain and rebuild the emotional bounds damaged by years of imprisonment? This experience is embedded in tensions between embodied social expectations for women (being mothers) and their transgression of gender norms (being a revolutionary activists).

In their writings, Ethiopian women activists give a striking testimony of the lasting impacts of repression on societies, precisely because the repression attacks the intimate, and because the intimate is immersed in social relations.