Date sent: Tues 18 Jul 95
From: Chris Lowe, Reed College
<Chris.Lowe@directory.Reed.EDU>
Thanks to everyone who has sent in responses to this inquiry so far
(which I also posted on another list & apparently cross-posted
elsewhere by someone else).
A couple of interesting things have emerged. One is that the most
frequent response has been references to Di Sica's film "Two Women."
Also, General Patton's anecdotes apparently were one of Susan
Brownmiller's sources, and one other response mentioned an article in
Fentress & Wickham's *Social Memory* which was also one of my
colleague's starting places.
A possible independent scholarly account may be in Anthony Clayton,
*France, Soldiers, and Africa* (London, Brassey's Defense Publishers,
1988), according to one private response, but the respondent was not
sure if that was the location of the article he was thinking of.
The limited number of sources, and the mass-media and folkloric
character of many of them, lend support to Cora Presley's cautions.
This might reflect Anglophone bias, and also maybe sub-Saharan
African bias on the lists I posted to.
Another personal respondent said that when living in Morocco she had
met Italians who knew of Moroccan soldiers in Italy "but recounted to
me that 'comfort women' accompanied them." The same respondent
pointed out rape on the part of American soldiers who invaded
Casablanca, and the refusal of American authorities to take seriously
a complaint by a Swedish woman she knew. This contextualization
seems an important complement to the ones which Presley has raised.
I believe the kind of contextualizing Cora Presley is calling for,
including both the possibility that the rapes didn't occur, and that
they did, is what my colleague is trying to think about, in a
comparative way and a theories of power-oriented way (he's a
political scientist).
The relayed oral testimony jibes interestingly with Professor
Presley's concerns. If Moroccan soldiers brought "comfort women"
with them, portrayed as an alternative to rape by my respondent's
informants, that seems to increase the likelihood of a propagandic
origin to the rape stories.
But it raises other questions about militarism, sexual exploitation
and use of sexual terror as a weapon in wartime. "Comfort women" in
the Korean/Japanese context were colonized women violently and
involuntarily forced into that role by a colonial power. Was
something similar true of the women accompanying the Moroccan troops?
Such a picture might shift the central responsibility from
dark-skinned rapists to European military or "logistical"
authorities.
Or if there were indeed women accompanying the Moroccan troops, were
they there in some relatively more voluntary capacity, as "camp
followers"? If so, how did they come to be there? Obviously any
question of "voluntariness" here would be a relative thing, which
would need to be analyzed in terms of how the violence, destitution
and social disruptions of war limited colonial women's choices.
Whether "comfort women" or "camp followers", a presence of
accompanying colonized women would be compatible with the efforts at
racial isolation by rumor of the sort which Presley mentions (or
with efforts to counteract German racial propaganda among Italian
civilians). Yet they would not be incompatible with rapes being a
reality. The widespread prevalence of rape in warfare cross-
culturally, and anti-woman willingness to downplay the issue,
suggests that we should not be any quicker to assume rapes didn't
occur, than we should be to assume that they did occur, given
contexts of colonial racism.