Comics as a tool for research on gender violence: interview with Nayanika Mookherjee on the graphic novel Birangona: towards ethical testimonies of sexual violence during conflict (2019)

Comics As a Tool for Research on Gender Violence. Interview With Nayanika Mookherjee on the Graphic Novel Birangona. Towards Ethical Testimonies of Sexual Violence During Conflict (2019) A Banda Desenhada Como Ferramenta Para Investigação Sobre Violência de Género: Entrevista com Nayanika Mookherjee Sobre o Romance Gráfico Birangona. Para Testemunhos Éticos de Violência Sexual Durante Conflitos (2019) https://doi.org/10.21814/vista.4109 e022011 Nicoletta Mandolini Conceptualization, formal analysis, supervision, validation, visualization, writing – original draft, writing – review & editing Nayanika Mookherjee Conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, funding acquisition, investigation, methodology, validation, visualization, writing – original draft, writing – review & editing © Autores Comics As a Tool for Research on Gender Violence. Interview With Nayanika Mookherjee on the Graphic Novel Birangona. Towards Ethical Testimonies of Sexual Violence During Conflict (2019) https://doi.org/10.21814/vista.4109 Vista No. 10 | July – December 2022 | e022011 Received: 30/07/2022 | Reviewed: 27/09/2022 | Accepted 27/09/2022 | Published: 27/10/2022 ______________________________________________ Nicoletta Mandolini https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9137-9380 Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Sociedade, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal Nayanika Mookherjee https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8994-4769 Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences and Health, University of Durham, Durham, United Kingdom ______________________________________________ Comics and the recently emerged graphic novel format are among the art forms that researchers have chosen to disseminate and provide a visual representation of their work. This relationship between comics and research, which is part of a practice labelled as “arts-based research”, has been facilitated by comics’ recognised narrative and didactic abilities. Research on gender-based violence has not been deaf to the call of comics art, and, in some rare but interesting cases, it has exploited the features of the medium to visualise and circulate research findings. An example is the graphic novel Birangona (Mookherjee & Najmun Nahar, 2019; Durham University), authored by the researcher Nayanika 1 Mookherjee and by the comics artist Najmun Nahar Keya, which was circulated, both in an online and paper version, with the aim of popularizing a set of guidelines on how to conduct oral history data collection with survivors of wartime rape. This interview with Professor Nayanika Mookherjee, the coauthor of the graphic novel and the anthropologist who conducted the research with wartime rape testimonies from which the guidelines were taken, has the objective of presenting the arts-based research project Birangona and discussing, in a scholarly fashion, the implementation of visual arts methodologies (and comics-based methodologies in particular) to research gender violence. Keywords: arts-based research, gender-based violence, wartime rape, Birangona, comics, graphic novels A Banda Desenhada Como Ferramenta Para Investigação Sobre Violência de Género. Entrevista com Nayanika Mookherjee Sobre o Romance Gráfico Birangona. Para Testemunhos Éticos de Violência Sexual Durante Conflitos (2019) A banda desenhada e o recente formato de romance gráfico estão entre as formas de arte que os investigadores escolheram para divulgar e fornecer uma representação visual do seu trabalho. Esta relação entre banda desenhada e a investigação, que faz parte de uma prática rotulada como “investigação baseada nas artes”, tem sido facilitada pelas reconhecidas capacidades narrativas e didáticas da banda desenhada. A investigação sobre a violência baseada no género não tem sido indiferente ao apelo da banda desenhada, e, em alguns casos raros, mas interessantes, explora as características do meio para visualizar e fazer circular os resultados da investigação. Exemplo disso é o romance gráfico Birangona (Mookherjee & Najmun Nahar, 2019; Durham University), da autoria da investigadora Nayanika Mookherjee e da artista de banda desenhada Najmun Nahar Keya, distribuído em versão digital e em papel, para popularizar um conjunto de orientações para conduzir a recolha de dados de história oral junto de sobreviventes de violação em tempos de guerra. Esta entrevista com a Professora Nayanika Mookherjee, coautora do romance gráfico e antropóloga que conduziu a investigação com testemunhos de violações em tempos de guerra dos quais foram retiradas as orientações, pretende apresentar o projeto de investigação baseado nas artes Birangona e discutir, a nível académico, a implementação de metodologias de artes visuais (metodologias baseadas em banda desenhada em particular) para investigar a violência de género. Palavras-chave: investigação baseada nas artes, violência baseada no género, violação em tempos de guerra, Birangona, banda desenhada, romances gráficos 2 Comics As a Tool for Research on Gender Violence. Interview With Nayanika Mookherjee on the Graphic Novel Birangona. Towards Ethical Testimonies of Sexual Violence During Conflict (2019) “Arts-based research”, or “artistic research”, as some prefer to call it, is far from being a new methodology in the field of scholarly production. Arts-based research practices started to emerge between the 1970s and the 1980s, when a climate of growing experimentation resulted in the implementation of artistic methods in the field of psychological and medical therapy, which consequently opened to the use of art in other fields of research (Leavy, 2015, pp. 25–26). Despite still struggling to gain full academic recognition and legitimation, the use of creative methodologies in research is now a reality in various fields: from business and management (Ward & Shortt, 2020), to education (Morris & Paris, 2021), to social and health sciences (Gerber et al., 2020). One of the most recurring applications of arts-based research is in the area of research dissemination. Arts such as photography and audio-visual creation are nowadays frequently employed by scholars who want to guarantee a wide and accessible circulation of their research findings. Comics and the recently emerged graphic novel format (Eisner, 2012) are among the art forms researchers have chosen to provide a visual representation of their work. Comics’ recognised narrative and didactic abilities have facilitated the relationship between comics and research. As suggested by the frequently used label of “graphic narrative”, which is now widely employed to identify works that avail of the comics medium, comics are characterised by a high degree of narrativity. That is guaranteed by one of the dominant principles of comics semiotics: sequentiality, which is to say, the juxtaposition, either in a strip, grid or less structured tabula, of panels that, if read in succession, assign temporality to the series of single images, thus allowing the storytelling practice (Groensteen, 1999/2007, p. 9). Moreover, comics have proved efficient as a didactic and teaching tool, as confirmed by scholarly research in the field of comics pedagogy and education (Kirtley et al., 2020) as well as by the new emerging editorial trend of the graphic guide, a label aimed at identifying informative texts built combining words and images 1 . In the course of their recent history, comics studies have frequently resorted to the medium of comics itself to provide readers with a clear and metareflective dissertation on comics’ characteristics and potential. Two pivotal examples include the groundbreaking Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art (Tundra Publishing, 1993), a volume 1 Examples of popular graphic guides in the field of gender education include Gender: A Graphic Guide, by Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele (Icon Books, 2019); Feminism: A Graphic Guide, by Cathia Jenainati, Jen Milton and Judy Groves (Icon Books, 2019); Queer: A Graphic History, by Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele (Icon Books, 2016). 3 on comics theory explained through comics by the American cartoonist Scott McCloud, and the more recent Unflattening (Harvard University Press, 2015) by Nick Sousanis. But these are not the only examples of arts-based research in the field of comics. The blooming area recently labelled as “comics science” demonstrates the growing trend of selecting comics for scientific communication, dissemination and education (Farinella, 2018; Tatalovic, 2009). Research on gender-based violence has not been deaf to the call of comics art, and, in some rare but interesting cases, it has exploited the features of the medium to visualise and circulate research findings. An example is the graphic novel Birangona (Mookherjee & Najmun Nahar, 2019), authored by the researcher Nayanika Mukherjee and by the comics artist Najmun Nahar Keya, which was circulated, both in an online and paper version, with the aim of popularizing a set of guidelines on how to conduct oral history data collection with survivors of wartime rape. Birangona contains a fictional story, that of the young woman Labony, who discovers that her grandmother is a birangona (the name, meaning “brave woman”, used for victims of sexual violence raped in the 1971 war that resulted in the formation of Bangladesh) during a research she is asked to carry out in the context of a school project 2 . The comics’ fictional story functions as a framework within which the instructions for ethically dealing with witnesses who suffered wartime rape are carefully outlined. The graphic novel and the short video created by assembling the images of the graphic novel are both available in English and Bangla, and they are freely downloadable at the following link: https://www.ethical-testimonies-svc.org.uk/. The interview with Professor Nayanika Mookherjee, the co-author of the graphic novel and the anthropologist who conducted the research with wartime rape testimonies from which the guidelines were taken, was carried out virtually in May 2022. It aims to present the arts-based research project Birangona and discuss, in a scholarly fashion, the implementation of visual arts methodologies (and comics-based methodologies in particular) to research gender violence. N. Mandolini: I would like to start by asking you to elaborate on the project that led to the publication of the graphic novel Birangona. Towards Ethical Testimonies of Sexual Violence During Conflict. What is the core of the research project, and how did it develop into the publication of an artistic work that selects comics as its medium of expression? N. Mookherjee: The graphic novel Birangona draws on my book The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971 (Mookherjee, 2015). The Spectral Wound documents and analyses the public memory of wartime rape perpetrated by the West Pakistani army and local Bengali men in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) during the Bangladesh war of 1971. It seeks to explore: how is the raped woman invoked in the public memory of 1971? What is the relationship between this public memory and the experiences 2 Birangonas were recognised by the state of Bangladesh and were sustained by national funding, which helped them find government jobs. The number of women affected by wartime rape in the Bangladesh war is approximately 200,000. See Mookherjee (2021b). 4 of women raped in 1971? The book tries to counter the limited and Orientalised understanding of the impacts of wartime rape, whereby the raped woman is only understood to be an “abnormal”, horrific, dehumanized victim abandoned by kin. It ethnographically analyses the social life of testimonies, examining how the stories and experiences of raped women of the 1971 war became part of a broader set of national discourses and debates, bringing together testimonies and visual representations. It also examines how visual and literary representations of raped women create a public culture of “knowing” and remembering that, in turn, informs the processes of testifying and human rights policy-making. The book argues that identifying raped women only through their suffering creates a homogenous understanding of gendered victimhood. It also suggests that wartime rape is not experienced in the same way by all victims. The Spectral Wound instead seeks to highlight the varied experiences of wartime rape during 1971 through a political and historical analysis of wartime rape. Addressing how the experiences of 1971 manifest today among women who are survivors themselves and their families, this book triangulates the narratives with various representations (state, visual, and literary) as well as with contemporary human rights testimonies. The volume thereby examines the circulation of press articles, a range of oral accounts (interviews, discussion, observation, rumours and gossip), images, literary representations, and testimonies of rape among survivors of sexual violence, their families, and communities, the left-liberal civil society, different governments and state actors. The Spectral Wound (Mookherjee, 2015) also reflects on the silence relating to the violation and rape of men and juxtaposes it with the public memory of the rape of women. That allows a theorisation of the relationship between the nation, sexuality, and masculinity and identifies issues of demasculinization in the husbands of raped women. One of the central findings of The Spectral Wound (Mookherjee, 2015), which is also the focus of the graphic novel Birangona, is a critical understanding of the testimonial process. Interviews with survivors of wartime sexual violence show that with the focus on documentation of the experiences of wartime rape: (a) inadequate attention is paid to the conditions under which such testimonies are recorded; (b) as a result, ethical practices of documentation can be flouted by journalists, human rights activists, government officials, non-governmental organization (NGO) personnel, researchers in their pursuit of recording wartime rape, (c) hence, survivors can experience a double set of transgression in the very process of testifying to their violent experiences during wars, (d) hence, there can emerge a critical disconnection between survivors needs and transitional justice processes. The project of the graphic novel picks up on this central focus of how to ethically document testimonies of sexual violence in conflict and intertwines it with an intergenerational story through which accounts of these guidelines are narrated. The goal of this project was and is to contribute to the welfare of survivors by ensuring that their process of giving testimonies does not prove to be another source of trauma, along with past experiences of sexual violence. This can be possible by making academic work more accessible to non-academic individuals and organizations and by inviting them to implement the research 5 findings of The Spectral Wound. N. Mandolini: Your project is an example of arts-based research where research findings are conveyed through artistic means or by a specific creative practice (in Birangona’s case, comics and a short film based on the same comics). In the introductory note to this issue, Ece Canlı and I argue that art-based research is extremely well suited to talk about gender violence and to convey research on the same topic (Canlı & Mandolini, 2022, p. 7). But I would like to know your opinion on this matter. What reasons led you to select this practice to discuss the ethical issues implied in research on gender violence? And how was the idea of carrying out an arts-based research project developed in terms of collaboration and production? I am thinking here about the relationship with the artist who drew Birangona, Najmun Nahar Keya — also a Bangladeshi woman, I suppose not by coincidence — and about the organisation of the work with her. N. Mookherjee: Drawing on the long trajectory of comic books in South Asia that we, as children, grew up on, the decision to produce a graphic novel was initially based on my long-term engagement with ethics, which was core to my findings on wartime sexual violence. In 2003, I contributed an article on how to ethically record testimonies of sexual violence as part of an activist organisation and raised money for survivors. Thereafter, as the ethics officer of the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) of the UK and Commonwealth, I had, in consultation with the ASA members, updated the ASA ethics code to update it with the complexities of overt and covert research in the light of Human Terrain System where social scientists and psychologists were being hired by armies in Iraq and Afghanistan to give the occupied forces an insight into “cultures” to enable better compliance from local people. When my book was published in 2015, the interest in it and the kind of invitations I was receiving also made it imperative to develop a set of guidelines on how to ethically record testimonies of wartime sexual violence. These guidelines were central to my ethnography among the survivors. After the publication of my book in 2015 and its South Asian version in 2016, I was invited to have a book launch event at the Centre for Women, Peace and Security at the London School of Economics in October 2016. The panellists for the book launch included academics as well as NGO leaders and government officials. I was also invited to speak at the Dhaka Literary Festival in November 2016 about the book and also launch the South Asian edition. I took this invitation as an opportunity to initiate the first collaborative workshop with my partners’ Research Initiatives Bangladesh as well as invited participants, which included survivors who were in the public eye, academics, researchers, government officials, policymakers, NGO representatives, feminists and human rights activists, journalists, filmmakers, and photographers. To be mindful of the survivors’ concerns and not sensationalise their experiences for the purpose of testimonies, it is essential to have a set of guidelines to record their experiences. Guidelines that serve as a list of ethical practices were codeveloped through these workshops and are visualised through various 6 illustrations in a graphic novel, making them more accessible. These guiding principles help to raise questions among those seeking to record testimonies. Before the first workshop, I had started developing storyboards, and I was collaborating with Najmun Nahar Keya (a Bangladeshi visual artist) to develop the graphic novel. It was essential that it was a Bangladeshi graphic artist who co-authored this graphic novel with me to be able to capture the nuances and complexities of the history of sexual violence during 1971. Before the November 2016 workshop, I pre-distributed a set of guidelines based on my monograph; we developed these further based on the workshop participants’ feedback. In the second half of the workshop, we developed the initial plans for the graphic novel. After that first workshop, we further developed the guidelines via email, and the graphic novel came together through online exchanges across a 6-hour time difference over a span of 2 and a half years, with support from the Economic and Social Research Council’s Impact Acceleration Account and Durham University’s Research Impact Fund. I did the storyboards, wrote the script, shared images with Keya and explained to her the kind of representational aesthetics I had in mind. She, in turn, brought her long-term experience as a graphic artist to our narrative to suggest ways of doing the graphic novel. After five consultative workshops in Bangladesh (Research Initiatives Bangladesh) and the United Kingdom (UK; Centre for Women, Peace and Security, London School of Economics), we coproduced the guidelines, graphic novel, and animated film in collaboration with various stakeholders in Bangladesh and the UK, support and participation by the Ministry of Liberation War Affairs of the Government of Bangladesh and the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative. The novel, film, and guidelines can be used by those who record testimonies of sexual violence in conflict (researchers, human rights activists, feminists, lawyers, filmmakers, photographers, journalists, and writers) and by future researchers and activists. It would also generate interest in sexual violence during conflict and enable sensitization of these issues among children (12 years old and above). N. Mandolini: Interestingly, you have just said that the popularity of comics books in South Asia was among the reasons for selecting comics as the art form for your project. Are there other reasons why you opted for the graphic novel format and, more generally, for the medium of comics? What characteristics of the medium you thought could be beneficial for ethically portraying the challenges of testimony collection? Moreover, research has shown how graphic narratives, despite the infamous sexist history of the comics book in its mainstream formats, superhero comics and manga (Cocca, 2014; Nishiyama, 2016), have recently been used by feminist artists and artivists to represent gender violence and gender-related trauma in an effective, accessible and complex way (e.g., Chute, 2010; Clarke Gray & Wright, 2017; Fedtke, 2019; Mandolini, 2020). Do you think comics are well positioned as a medium, even concerning the representation of the specific sub-phenomenon of wartime rape? N. Mookherjee: We were developing a set of guidelines in terms of what we 7 need to keep in mind before, during and after the testimonial process. As a result, it seemed apt to elaborate on the guidelines by visualising them. Visualising the guidelines animated them from being bullet-pointed to images which brought out the contexts of the guidelines even more. As a result, the intersectional subjectivity of the various interlocutors could also be brought out without it being explicitly mentioned, as it might have been the case when describing the contexts in a traditional text format. While words are able to generate textures of ethnography, images add another layer to bring out that texture. In fact, various images with or without text can bring out the “aurality of the images” (Mookherjee, 2022a). Various inanimate objects like the boots, the banging on the door, and the pole are resonant of the stories and sounds we collected and tried to reproduce in the graphic novel. Rather than linear narratives, the role of fragments within testimonies is also portrayed in terms of the context within which those fragments were articulated. Thus, on Page 24, when one of the survivors mentions that one day she was also in a storm like the one that is happening while the story unfolds, we could portray the ethnographic context of the oncoming cyclone, which is often common in Bangladesh. The subjectivity of the birangonas was also portrayed through the graphic novel, and Keya and I often had some interesting conversations on this matter. When drawing the sex worker Chaya Rani Dutta, for example, I wanted her to be sketched in the veil. Keya felt that, since she was a sex worker, she should not be portrayed in the veil. And yet, for me, Chaya, when meeting anyone, would not do so without the veil. Practising both Hindu and Muslim religions, she considered the red light district a place without religious boundaries. The life story of the birangonas thereby allowed us to bring out their various trajectories, and the presence of various objects/individuals around them also highlighted their intersectional positions. In the case of Ferdousy, it is her sculpture; for Moyna, it is the pole in front of her house; for Chaya, it is her veil and her daughter; for Shireen, it is the photographs in her place of work. On Page 18, we also allowed highlighting the everyday atmosphere of warmth (Mookherjee, 2022b) we established with the survivors and how that every day would also be interspersed with fragments of what happened to the survivors during the war. Above all, I think that the graphic novel allowed us to provide a depiction of the survivors and their contexts with words and images while being able to retain their anonymity and confidentiality. N. Mandolini: Comics is, as scholars in comics semiotics have pointed out (Groensteen, 1999/2007, p. 9), a prevalently visual medium. 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