Daughters of the Bloodshed

WORLD

Daughters of the Bloodshed

by Monserrat Martinez Medellin

“It’s so good that you live over here now, since so many women die in your country. It’s horrible,” said the lady at the counter in the GGD office when I stated my nationality. I robotically nodded, half-ashamed, yet willing to overlook the sting of irritation her comment had caused. I thanked her for processing my Dutch QR code, yet her words lingered in my head throughout the rest of the day.

"Today, at least 10 women are murdered in Mexico every day."

A lot of the perceptions about how violence affects Mexico have been reinforced by popular culture. Country songs praising the crimes of drug kingpins — known as narcocorridos — have become increasingly popular since the 1970’s, as has other narco-related content. Narcos: Mexico’s third season was the most viewed show according to the first of Netflix’s Top 10 lists of November 2021. In the span of a week, it had collected 50.3 million hours of viewing, beating Squid Game by 7.5 million hours. Showcasing drug lords’ lavish lifestyle and the depiction of gruesome turf wars satiates viewers’ morbid curiosity. The overrepresentation of Latines in stereotype-plagued roles, which is yet another facet of the issue, also remains: a 2019 study showed that 29.8% of Latin-speaking characters and 39.5% of top-billed Latines across 100 movies of 2019 were depicted as criminals.

As much high-production value, glamorized media abounds, the numbers remain… and they speak for themselves.

As of today, Mexico is the 4th highest-ranking country in criminality levels, according to the Global Organized Crime Index of 2021. By April 2021, the world’s six deadliest cities — meaning, cities with the highest number of homicides per 100,000 inhabitants — were all located in Mexico. More than 36,000 homicides were reported in 2020. Unfortunately, Mexico often features within the top 10 of countries with highest levels of gender violence. In 2020, 969 out of the out of the 3,752 murders of women reported were investigated as femicides. Today, at least 10 women are murdered in Mexico every day.

Like most Mexican women, I’ve grown to remember that number, as if it has become a duty not to forget. I thought of it as the GGD lady uttered her indiscreet sympathy. While she had seemingly good intentions and a valid source for her argument, I was hurt.

However, as I wrote this article, thinking about the lady’s comment — and how it acts as a microcosm of prevailing thought about the country in general — my emotions became somewhat… ambivalent.

I was initially angry at the misinformed impression that I was nothing more than the violence of my country. To me, this continuous practice overshadows noteworthy achievements and strides made by Mexican figures. For example, 22-year-old figure skater Donovan Carrillo recently made history for being the first Mexican to advance to the final round of the free skate program at the 2022 Winter Olympics. LGBTQ+ activist Fausto Martinez was the first person to receive the non-binary gender marker in their birth certificate after winning a constitutional appeal process — a significant step toward legal recognition of non-conforming genders in Mexico. Seven Mexican students were selected by NASA to join an exclusive group of 60 scientists at the International Air and Space Program; the three selected initiatives are all led by women. News like this gets constantly drowned out by alarming figures and depressing rankings. Now, as I watch footage of the feminist march that took place on March 8th, as areal shots of the downtown streets in Mexico City show rivers of lavender- and greenclothed protesters, as mothers raise banners with the faces of their missing daughters, it strikes me that in becoming offended by matter-of-fact-laced condolences (as patronizing as they were), I have deliberately overlooked that number 10. Those ten women murdered every day. The protesters — grieving parents, groups of young, starry-eyed girls, indigenous women chanting for the victims — wailed and cried, they screamed the names of all the abducted and massacred women in a desolate yet moving roll call, and raised their clenched fists to the scorching March sun.

"Was keeping my patriotic ego intact worth refusing to recognize the conditions that affect thousands?"

To refuse to acknowledge this systematic violence is a disservice to the dissatisfied masses who demand change from a complicit, neglectful government. I understand this is a contentious opinion, and I don’t condemn any Mexicans who refrain from speaking about the issue out of discomfort.

In my case, was keeping my patriotic ego intact worth refusing to recognize the conditions that affect thousands? What makes that different from when government officials insist on burying the truth about cases of disappearing civilians in lieu of more palatable news?

I lack the right of overlooking the acts of perpetrators and feeling defensive for as long as families in my country have lost daughters to grieve.

You Cannot Ever Explain War to

Yourself by Taisiya Brundukova

It gets worse day by day, your head is messed up and your feelings take up so much space that articulating becomes impossible, but also needless. All you know is that life has changed. It has changed in a day. And I always feel ashamed for saying this in relation to myself. I feel a lot of pain, but my pain is not the pain faced by the Ukrainian people. Yet I fear, yet I do not understand, yet I am completely lost and do not believe that all life from the 24th of February was interrupted so violently, that this war is ruining the lives of so many Ukrainians and Russians. I have learnt that you cannot ever explain war to yourself. You cannot grasp it because it is not a sum of terror and pain, it is much more, and far beyond comprehensible. And no one can ever spell out to you what to feel, how to act, what to say, how to speak, how to live with it. You only know that living like you used to is no longer possible. You know there is evil. An evil so great that it is hard not to be crushed by it.

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You understand that you have to appreciate being alive and being in safety, that you have to nurture love and do good, but at the end of the day, when you pretend to have a normal life, you feel immoral and disgusted with yourself. When you fully let your feelings in and all that is happening inevitably breaks you, you suffer and you mourn but you know that it is absolutely senseless, destructive and unfair. Unfair to the people of Ukraine. And then you just do not know how to live with this painful dilemma of the human feeling. And no one can tell you how to live with war.

"You know there is evil. An evil so great that it is hard not to be crushed by it."

My language cannot encompass all that is happening and my pain revolves around different things everyday. Today I am fully rewriting everything that I thought was the most important yesterday. But every day I fear, I am disgusted, I feel helpless and I feel angry. Every Russian who understands what is happening grieves learning each day how Ukraine is being killed, but our Russia is also disappearing. Our home is being destroyed, not with arms and bombs but with moral suffocation and evil. Here I say “our Russia” because if before the war it was still possible to imagine that those supporting Putin and those opposing him shared the same country, now it has become hardly imaginable. The internal division is horrifying, no one knows any longer if the people who support the “special operation” – the language of Newspeak – are so brainwashed by the propaganda and full of hatred, or are mistaken that deeply.

Every one of us who was against the war became “a stranger among his own”, a Russophobe, an enemy, a traitor. Russia is split and now I know that there is no home for us. We are the villains, within Russia and outside of it.

And I cannot believe that I am saying this, and these words paralyze me, but as Russia, soon to become completely shut off from the world, is turning towards fascism, we await mass repressions and internal genocide.

Outside is not our home either and I guess it never will be. We do not know the ways to stay abroad yet and we do not know what reaction we are going to face for our nationality and for the deeds of our country. We know that we will have to carry this stigma and we are unsure about our future. Many of us are terrified of living under the current regime. Many people had to flee, for all of them it was a forced exile. Some were too scared and too devastated to stay, some afraid of mobilization. Many of my friends left into the unknown. Many made such a hard decision in 5 hours or in a day. And none of them were ready for this decision. But many stayed, some out of bravery, some out of not having a place to go, out of not having the sources, out of having commitments and family, and I am really scared for them.

"Our home is being destroyed, not with arms and bombs but with moral suffocation and evil"

Many of my friends stayed. My family stayed. Now I do not know when I am going to see them, I do not know if they will be free or even alive. And I am scared of these thoughts, I am scared to use these words but they became a part of my reality. Now I know that the future is not guaranteed for all of us but I hope we will somehow find a way in it.

I wish peace, I wish love. Glory to Ukraine, freedom to Russia.

There Is No More Russia, There

Is No More Home by Ilya Genov

Disclaimer: I am not Ukrainian and I, of course, cannot even imagine what people who are in Ukraine right now have to go through. I can only express my complete and unconditional solidarity with them but obviously I cannot speak for them and their experience. In everything that will follow in this article, I will share my own perception of the current situation, of how it develops and how it affects my home (Russia), my future, and the future of the people I love.

On the 24th of February, I woke up and my life was divided into two parts: before and after. And not only my life of course: the lives of millions of Ukrainians, Belarussians and Russians have changed forever. Every day I am reading the news, every day I am calling my family and friends to check on how they are doing (or more to check that they are doing at least something) and every day I feel anxious, terrified, weak, powerless, guilty, and more and more hopeless.

What do I see in the Russian news? I see the ongoing bombings, I see photos of Ukranian people hiding in shelters, I see reports about missiles hitting residential buildings, hospitals and schools. And then I see videos from protests in Russia: I see how people are being arrested and beaten up by the police for speaking up against war, I see how students are being expelled from universities because of their participation in anti-war demonstrations, I see how more and more independent media sources are being blocked and shut down by the government, I hear the recordings of political detainees being physically tortured and humiliated at the police station, I see huge rises in prices and empty shelves at the supermarkets. I see no justice. I see no future. I see no hope.

"the lives of millions of Ukranians, Belarussians and Russians have changed forever"

What else is in the news? Big corporations are leaving Russia, leaving millions of people unemployed. Bank cards stop working for Russian people abroad, making their survival in forced exile even harder. The European Court of Human Rights stops processing violations of human rights in Russia, leaving the vulnerable groups within the country protected even less against their own government – now their worst enemy. In various places all over the world, Russian people become ineligible for student grants, get boycotted from academic conferences, artistic communities and social organisations. Our reputation is stained by the ugly mark of Putin’s terror, I myself am now hesitant to tell people that I am from Russia.

We are hated for the war which we did not choose, a war which millions of Russians find inhuman, horrifying and completely unacceptable, a war which we now see in our nightmares, a war which again and again makes us cry from our own helplessness. Because we are helpless: for participating in anti-war protests one can go to jail for up to 6 years now, and for spreading ‘fake information’ (read as truth) about war on social media, for up to 15 years.

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