Anthropology’s Annual Visiting Lecture Series - Legacies of War

Love carried across mountains: testimonial tapestries and intergenerational memory

Speaker: Dr Erin Baines, University of British Columbia

Women in northern Uganda who survived abduction by the Lord's Resistance Army have turned to a quiet, tactile practice as a form of testimony: rolling paper into beads and stitching them into tapestries. For more than a year, their children have documented this practice, some creating tapestries of their own, others carrying their mothers’ work to be exhibited. In doing so, these children become something more than witnesses: co-authors of a testimony they did not live, and custodians of a memory that is at once inherited and their own to carry. Drawing on diary entries, poetry, and reflections from both generations, this talk asks what it means to witness a difficult history as descendants and traces the complex identities children hold in the aftermath of war-related sexual violence. At its center are the stories mothers wove into fabric, such as love carried across the Imatong Mountains to reach home, their children in tow, to build a new life together.