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Holi and its overall significance within Indian society is the perfect opportunity for widows to state loud and clear their claim to catharsis and respect.
- Overview
- 2. BURYING THE PAST, Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina
- A Family of Widows
- 3. ENFORCING THE LAW, Mukono District, Uganda
- A Widow Fights Back
In some cultures, the death of a husband has meant exile, vulnerability, and abuse. But bereaved women are beginning to fight back.
This story appears in the February 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine.
The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting provided a grant to support this story. View its related lesson plan here.
1. RETURNING TO LIFE, Vrindavan, India
Long before sunrise the widows of Vrindavan hurried along dark, unpaved alleys, trying to sidestep mud puddles and fresh cow dung. There’s a certain broken sidewalk on which volunteers set out a big propane burner every morning and brew a bathtub-size vat of tea. The widows know they must arrive very early, taking their place on rag mats, lifting their sari hems from the dirt, resting elbows on their knees as they wait. If they come too late, the tea might be gone. Or the puffed rice might be running out at the next charity’s spot, many alleys away. “I can’t rush in the morning—I’m not well,” a widow complained. “But we have to rush. You don’t know what you will miss.”
It was 5:30 a.m., a cool dawn, a sliver moon. A few widows had wrapped themselves in colorful saris, but most wore white, in India the surest signifier of a woman whose husband has died, perhaps recently, perhaps decades ago. In the dim light they moved like schools of fish, still hurrying together, pouring around street corners, a dozen here, two dozen there.
When the first call came from the forensic identification center, Mirsada Uzunović was home with her 13-year-old son and so willed herself to stay calm. The voice on the other end was gentle. Remains of Uzunović’s husband, Ekrem, had been identified by laboratory testing, the voice said. The remains were … small. A partial skull. Nothing else. If Uzunović wished a burial, in the new memorial cemetery, that could be arranged.
No.
For three months she told no one. “In the nighttime, that was the difficult part. I was alone with my thoughts. From the big man I knew, only a piece of skull. I couldn’t imagine. OK, they killed him. But why didn’t they bury him? He was scattered around. I didn’t know where. Where were those bones? Where was he?”
That initial call came in 2005, a decade after Bosnian Serb forces killed more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men—the number remains in dispute, but this is the figure on record at the International Court of Justice—during a single week of the three-year Bosnian war. From July 11 to July 19, 1995, the men were killed in and near the town of Srebrenica, on the eastern edge of the Balkan nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Some were forcibly separated from their families and bused to execution sites; most were shot as they tried to escape to safer Bosnian Army–held territory. Ekrem Uzunović, whom Mirsada had loved since they met at a village dance when she was 15, was wearing black trousers and a T-shirt the last time she saw him, and in his backpack carried a loaf of bread she had baked that morning. He bent down to kiss their son, turned away, and ran. He thought he might escape by hiding in the woods.
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Best friends from childhood, married to brothers killed in the Bosnian war, Fata Lemeš (at left) and Hamida Lemeš now live and garden with four other war widows in the village of Skejići. “This beautiful landscape,” Fata says, “actually brought so much evil.”
Bosnia
Best friends from childhood, married to brothers killed in the Bosnian war, Fata Lemeš (at left) and Hamida Lemeš now live and garden with four other war widows in the village of Skejići. “This beautiful landscape,” Fata says, “actually brought so much evil.”
Their son was two. Ekrem was 27. In Tuzla, the city in which Uzunović and many other Srebrenica war widows were resettled, there is today a two-room office whose inside walls are covered to the ceiling with photos of dark-haired Bosnian men like Ekrem, all dead or presumed dead. Stacked albums hold thousands more, and in the photos the men are smiling or smoking or looking celebratory with drinks held out mid-toast. The photos also show boys barely in their teens and men old enough to have been Ekrem’s grandfather. Uzunović: “In every yard there was the same scene—the men running out of their houses. Women and families were crying for them, and the men didn’t react or anything; they were walking toward the woods, not looking back. There was this blackness, with the forest behind it. A river of men. Yes, I have had nightmares, especially during this time of the year. After my psychotherapy it didn’t get easier. But my doctor gave me pills, for July, so I can cope. I still have dreams. But it’s better, because of the pills.”
"The humble petition of Tumushabe Clare Glorious showeth as follows.” In Uganda legal documents are composed in flowery, colonial-era English, and on a midsummer morning an attorney named Diana Angwech balanced two thick files on her lap, thumbing pages, reviewing. The improvised courtroom was a small red building between a corn patch and a stand of banana trees, an hour’s drive from the capital, Kampala. Inside, on the concrete floor, a few wooden benches faced the magistrate’s desk, which atop its clean surface displayed only a calendar, a Quran, and an old Bible held together with string.
A guard at the door stepped aside, and the people came in, filling the benches beside and behind Angwech. The widow Clare Tumushabe carried her two-year-old daughter, the youngest of her six children, and sat down in the fourth row. Tumushabe had once been a more timid woman, but her head was now high as she studied the courtroom around her; she had been pregnant with this daughter when her husband died—a sharp headache, a hospital unable to revive him—and she was learning how to speak with clarity and passion about what happened to her next.
She was summoned—mourning, pregnant—to a meeting of important members of her deceased husband’s family and clan. They informed her that the children now belonged not to her but to them; directed her to keep her hands off all crops on the household plot, as they also were no longer hers; and presented to her the brother-in-law—her husband’s oldest sibling, 20 years Tumushabe’s senior—who would move into the home at once and take her as the third of his wives.
The house and three acres Tumushabe’s husband had inherited from his father must pass wholly to them, the in-laws said. As the widow, Tumushabe, by tradition, was essentially part of the property, like the coffee bushes and the jackfruit trees.
Tumushabe told them this was nonsense. She said she would never take this man into her bed, that her husband had left papers proving the land passed to her. The in-laws said she had apparently bewitched and stupefied her husband and that she might want to see just how much help he would be to her now, from that freshly dug grave in which he lay. Tumushabe summoned police. She harvested some crops and chopped trees for firewood. Threats escalated; epithets were directed at the children. One day a man from her husband’s family appeared on the property shouting that today Tumushabe would die, and because Tumushabe’s hand was cut during the encounter by a panga—a broad-bladed African machete—Diana Angwech had an assault charge with which to haul one of Tumushabe’s tormentors into court.
UGANDA
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In the days after Solome Sekimuli’s husband died of diabetes last summer, while the traditional mourning fire was still burning outside their home in the central region of the country, men from her husband’s family barged into the bedroom they had shared. They flung open her wardrobe and threw Sekimuli’s clothes out the window to burn on the fire; these relatives wanted her gone at once. Preparing for church soon afterward, a frightened and grieving Sekimuli is comforted by her fellow parishioners.
UGANDA
In the days after Solome Sekimuli’s husband died of diabetes last summer, while the traditional mourning fire was still burning outside their home in the central region of the country, men from her husband’s family barged into the bedroom they had shared. They flung open her wardrobe and threw Sekimuli’s clothes out the window to burn on the fire; these relatives wanted her gone at once. Preparing for church soon afterward, a frightened and grieving Sekimuli is comforted by her fellow parishioners.
These are things traditional Ugandan culture does not easily concede to a widow. The constitution, rewritten in 1995 and a source of national pride, promises gender equality. Modern statutes explicitly extend inheritance rights to wives and female children. But in practice, especially in the rural areas that make up most of Uganda, it’s still widely assumed that only men should own or inherit land, that widowhood terminates a woman’s social legitimacy, and that it’s up to her husband’s family and clan to decide what happens next—who will take the property, who will take the children, who will have sex with her now. “Plus the stigma,” Asiimwe said. “If you’re a widow, bad luck. You’re cursed. You’re blamed for the death of your spouse. It could be that he had several homes, several wives, that he brought HIV into the house. But when he dies, it’s you. You killed him.”
Mar 7, 2016 · Many communities in India still shun widows and they are abandoned by their families due to superstition.
May 2, 2013 · Vrindavan. Thousands of widows have been making their way to one particular town in the north of India. Cast out by their families, or simply alone in the world, some travel hundreds of miles to...
Mar 7, 2014 · Stories of sexual violence against women have made repeatedly made headlines in India. But there are other hazards for Indian women, and particularly for single women.
Nov 6, 2012 · We investigate the lives of Indian women as they become widows, focussing on the causes of their husband’s mortality and the ensuing consequences of these causes on their own lives and identify the opportunities and challenges that widows face in living healthy and fulfilling lives.
Feb 10, 2017 · Shunned by their own families, thousands of Hindu widows make their way to the holy city of Vrindavan in northern India to find solace. But most also end up impoverished and neglected.
