Mariatu Kamara, whose hands were cut off during Sierra Leone’s civil war, is among 11 women portrayed by British photojournalist Nick Danziger.
A young woman poses in front of the camera, wearing a dress patterned with leaves and branches and a simple chain around her neck. She looks off into the distance, leaning against a post and supporting her chin with her arm, cut off just below the wrist.
Now in her mid-20s, Mariatu Kamara lives in Toronto, but this photo was taken shortly after a group of young soldiers attacked her and cut off both of her hands with a machete during the decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone.
Kamara, then 13, was found and brought to live at a camp with other amputees, including children as young as two.
In 2001, British author and photojournalist Nick Danziger photographed Kamara and 10 other women affected by armed conflict in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Colombia, Gaza, and Israel for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
In 2008, he embarked on a three-year journey to photograph them again. Danziger tracked down each woman except for one: 10-year-old Mah-Bibi, an orphan living in a refugee camp in Afghanistan with her two younger brothers. She had died in 2006 at the age of 15.
Danziger’s photographs (black and white from 2001 and colour from 2011), along with short films in which Kamara, Mah-Bibi and nine others deliver first-hand accounts of their lives, will be on display at the Canadian War Museum from Feb. 8 to April 21 in an exhibit called Eleven Women Facing War.
Danziger has long used his talents to bring attention to those affected by conflict. His exhibit Missing Lives, which followed the attempts of 15 families to find lost loved ones after war ravaged the Balkans in the 1990s, appeared at the war museum in 2011.
Danziger has described how his exhibits pay tribute to victims of conflict and the families of the dead and missing who want their stories told.
On his website, Danziger says he hopes the testimony of the women he photographed for Eleven Women Facing War “will help put a face to all those who continue to suffer in silence.”
Andrew Burtch, a post-1945 historian at the war museum, says the stories of the women presented in the exhibit are ultimately stories of conflicts that have affected much larger groups of people.
"It will be an informative exhibition, but it's very much an intimate one," Burtch says.
“Visitors are going to encounter these women’s stories and walk away understanding a little bit more about what people in different parts of the world go through,” Burtch says.
Carleton University sociology professor Augustine Park says it’s important that exhibits such as this empower women by placing their voices at the centre, enabling them to articulate their own stories and solutions.
Park says the personal, biographical nature of the exhibit speaks to audiences in ways that “anonymous” images of women in war cannot.
She plans on bringing her graduate students to the exhibit to discuss the difference between voyeurism and bearing witness to other people’s suffering via photography.
Burtch says the overall message of the exhibit is one of resiliency, and one that many Canadians can relate to.
“War has shaped Canada,” he says. “I think the stories told here can relate to instances where new Canadians have arrived (here) fleeing conflict, where conflict has had a role in shaping their lives and their worlds.”
Kamara knows what it means to live a life irrevocably altered by armed conflict. She is now an author and a UNICEF Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict, and will be amongst those celebrating the Canadian debut of Eleven Women Facing War.
“An eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind. My plan is to make life go forward,” Kamara told Kitchener newspaper The Record in 2011. And she has.