Birangona: Towards Ethical testimonies of sexual violence during conflict

This paper examines the role of graphic ethnography in mapping the objects and feelings of fear through the silence of images, through the aurality of this silence. By aurality, I refer to the sounds and feelings felt by the reader when seeing these images in their colours, visuality and contexts which is not brought out by words and texts alone. The paper explores the new sociographies that emerge from this intercitationality of visceral fear, from the aurality of this dread, that survivors of sexual violence during the Bangladesh war of 1971 feel till today.

The paper suggests that we need to go beyond the search for the ‘unsayable and unseeable’ to understand how survivors and their quotidian existence are intertwined with these objects of fear. Nothing is unseeable or unsayable for survivors here as they live through fear ‘as an environment’ (Virilio 2012). The paper explores the intertextual, intercitational registers between my book The Spectral Wound (Mookherjee 2015) and my co-authored graphic novel Birangona (Mookherjee and Keya 2019) in order to bring out the reparative aspects of graphic ethnography and the new forms of knowledge production