How A Shocking Book Tells Stories So Well
THE AUDIENCE WAS SILENT THROUGHOUT, only stirring to hush some people from the venue who had started a whispered conversation at the back of the hall. When the time came for them to question the author, they slowly began to raise their hands. They seemed still to be trying to understand what they had heard.
On Thursday this week, I was at The Conduit in central London to hear Christina Lamb talk about her book Our Bodies Their Battlefield: What War Does To Women. It had been on my reading list since it was first published, so I made sure to buy a copy–a copy that I began reading while waiting for the event to start, and both horrified and stirred by the conversation that followed, immediately continued reading on my journey home.
Lamb is one of the greatest international correspondents of her generation, and Our Bodies Their Battlefield does what all great journalism does: tells an important story that has either been ignored, or not given the prominence it deserves, and it does so by asking others to tell it. The storytellers in this case are women who have been subjected to sexual violence in war.
Lamb anticipates possible cynicism and resignation among parts of her audience, and sweeps away any complacency that might cause it. ‘Maybe you think of rape as something that has “always happened in war”‘, she writes, then warns, ‘Over the last five years, I have seen more shocking brutality against women, in country after country, than I have witnessed in more than three decades as a foreign correspondent.’
‘Should be required reading for all,’ is the endorsement from the historian Peter Frankopan. He is the author of the first chapter of the other book I have started reading this week, What is History, Now? The title of this new collection makes reference to the seminal work What is History? published by E.H. Carr in the 1960s. One of the editors of the new book is Carr’s great-granddaughter, Helen Carr.
Frankopan is most widely known for his books The Silk Roads and The New Silk Roads: studies of how travel, trade, and the resulting exchanges of goods and ideas have shaped our world.
Both these books help us to understand the evils that are peculiar to our contemporary world. For what we are seeing now on the border between Belarus and Poland–where migrants are trapped as they seek to enter the European Union–is the human suffering that has resulted from a remarkable confluence of global and historical forces.
That border zone is where the dividing line has fallen in post-Cold War Europe. While many countries of the former Soviet bloc (although only the Baltic nations from the Soviet Union itself) have joined the EU, Belarus has not. Affordable air travel made the migrants’ journey as far as Minsk relatively easy–even if they seem to have been lured there at great expense, and with false reassurances that passage onwards to the EU would be straightforward. And consider where many say that they have come from: the Kurdish area of Iraq: their desire to leave driven by the wars of recent decades, their fate as a people without a state arguably linked to decisions even further back in history, when the Ottoman Empire fell.
My career in journalism started as the Soviet Union was coming to an end. In the early 1990s, I also covered the Iraqi Kurds’ attempts to establish their own political system in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. Anyone–especially journalists who cover international news today–who wants to understand the different forces that have shaped our complex contemporary global politics and confrontations will learn much from these books. They draw on perspectives that have not previously been sufficiently publicized to tell stories that have not been told as widely as they should have been.
