Thank you dear Anjum for asking me to participate in the B & W photo challenge, which started in Turkey as a campaign against femicide and violence against women. Without using the hashtag, I would love to celebrate kick-ass women of color from the global south.
This is Bushra al-Maqtari, a Yemeni woman.
‘When the war broke out in Yemen five years ago bringing death, destruction and devastation in its wake, Bushra al-Maqtari refused to desert her beleaguered homeland.
An activist-writer and novelist from Taiz, al-Maqtari opted to stay back and travel across the length and breadth of Yemen to capture the trials and tribulations of her fellow countrymen, caught up in a war inflicted on them by two competing regional powers, hell bent on punching a hole in each other?s sphere of influence. She visited the families of war victims and chronicled the tragic stories of their nearest and dearest, who were either killed or maimed in brutal bombing, indiscriminate shelling and missile attacks.
In her book “What you left behind? Voices from a forgotten war-torn country”, published in Arabic by Beirut-based Riad El-Rayyes, al-Maqtari is less concerned with narrating the chronological facts and figures or the political undercurrents of the war; what bothers her instead are the civilian casualties. She makes the victims of the war, those who are bearing the brunt of it, the focus of the book.’