Qissa Reviews: Wander Women

When we think of boundaries and barriers, I imagine for a lot of us our first thought is physical ones. Walls, border crossings, oceans. Then there are the boundaries that are invisible and thus maybe not considered so often: political, financial, societal. These might be harder to define, but the effects of these boundaries are just as coercive in keeping people in place, whether that’s a physical space or a particular mindset, class or relationship. Wander Women by Alexandra Blanchard and Alex Howlett does a great job of exploring all the different ways in which women can have their mobility restricted. From migration policies to housing, disability to sexuality, Blanchard and Howlett cover the whole spectrum.

The focus on voices that would otherwise fall through the gap is incredibly important in Wander Women. Stories range from those aged between 24 and 96, from Syria to the UK via Hong Kong and Palestine. We hear from refugees, disability activists and all those who are often silenced, particularly within the mainstream media. This focus on individual stories with an international scope, where we hear directly from the people involved, is similar to The Sex Lives of African Women (another Qissa favourite book review!) and really helps to give a full overview of a broad topic.

'this privacy and intimacy of storytelling in a domestic and female-led space, is something that reverberates through the book.'

The importance of storytelling for raising awareness or kickstarting action is particularly highlighted in the story of Waad al-Kateab, a Syrian journalist who charts five years of her own life in a documentary called ‘For Sama’. Sama is al-Kateab’s daughter and, by using a personal narrative and a real relationship at the heart of the documentary, she was able to raise awareness of Assad’s regime in Syria and to campaign for him to be held accountable for his war crimes. ‘For Sama’ received more BAFTA nominations than any other documentary in the award’s history, showing the impact that personal stories can have.

Many of the women and non-binary people in the book, including Waad al-Kateab mentioned above, are refugees. Naturally, refugees experience borders at many points in their lives, so it makes sense that they’d be included in high numbers in this book. But what was particularly interesting was the full range of barriers they must overcome. First there is the border of the country they are looking to leave, which can include financial barriers to pay for passage, physical barriers such as safe paths to asylum, emotional barriers such as assimilating into a new culture, language barriers. The list goes on. But let us focus on barriers put in place by Governments for just a moment. Wander Women is quite UK-centric in its focus on the asylum process, but it still provides many good examples of the difficulties of finding a safe space to call your own:

‘Asylum can only be claimed by people once they reach the UK and yet, other than various nationality-specific resettlement schemes such as those for Ukrainians and Afghans, there are no visas for coming to the UK to claim asylum. It is a catch-22 that only harms the people it professes to protect. A report from the Refugee Council 'predicts more than 19,000 people a year fleeing war, conflict, and bloodshed could face years in UK prisons for attempting to find safety'.’ 

These shocking statistics may come as no surprise to those involved in the asylum process both in the UK and in other countries in the Global North. Countries typically try to make the process as difficult as possible and exclude many people through the sheer amount of hoop-jumping and logistics needed for an application. I attended a talk by Shabnam Nasimi, the Former Policy Advisor to the Minister for Afghan Resettlement & Minister for Refugees, who was very explicit on the fact that these resettlement schemes are not working. By not providing safe passages out of Afghanistan and into the UK, there is not much point offering a resettlement scheme for those who make it here legally, because barely any do! 

Let’s look at another example from the book. A particularly interesting chapter was ‘Matriarchs in the Desert’ about Aminatou Haidar from Western Sahara. For those of you unfamiliar with this conflict, as I was, it centres around the Moroccan invasion of the Western Sahara in 1975, forcing thousands of indigenous Saharawi people to flee the area and set up refugee camps in Algeria. The book perfectly highlights the Global North’s ignorance of this conflict (whether that be intentional or otherwise) by juxtaposing the violence of the invasion with mention of the nearby Canary Islands, which were solidifying their reputation as party islands at the same time as their neighbours were having to flee torture and rape. As Mohamed Laabeid says in this same chapter, this ignorance is due in part to the Western media not covering the conflict in much detail. As we have seen many times before (and we are sadly seeing played out on screens even now), the media is just less concerned by the death of Arab people. 

Not all of the narratives are sad or disheartening. A lot of the time we hear from the women fighting for change. We hear from Patrice, a woman from St Lucia and part of the Windrush generation, who speaks about the power of establishing community in a new place. For her, it’s the church she now attends in the UK:

‘Like Guli and Najat finding female solidarity and community, both in the refugee camp and after arriving in Britain, the women in Patrice’s church came together to help each other with the challenges of motherhood’

This idea of female solidarity is something that comes up often in the book and shows itself to be incredibly important when it comes to overcoming borders. 

Censorship, both by governments and individuals, is another topic that comes up across the narratives. One particularly pertinent story, given the current genocide in Palestine, is from Iara Lee, an activist filmmaker. In 2010, Iara was on a peaceful mission bringing humanitarian aid to people in Gaza via boat. The harrowing tale she goes on to tell about nine of her colleagues being killed by the Israeli military is disturbing. Equally disturbing is the way her voice is silenced when she wants to speak about her experiences. She was prevented by ‘an internationally renowned online conference talks platform’ from mentioning Israel-Palestine for fear that the video would be banned from YouTube. We also hear from Ari, a refugee from Russia (Georgian-born) who was silenced by her husband and who dealt with terrible domestic abuse due to the systems in place that make women who are dependent on a man’s visa exceptionally vulnerable to risk. As it says in the book: 

‘how can a woman be free from an abuser if her country doesn’t want her to be?’

The personal narratives and emotional stories of the individuals in Wander Women are bookended by really interesting observations and horrifying statistics. Take for example the fact that in the UK, 'deaths by suicide rose from 0.01% in the general population to 36% in [asylum seeker] detention.' Or the fact that a system like passports, something you may think is the key to freedom of movement, is actually something that can be ‘served to control the movement of groups of people’. You may have seen in the news recently about people buying ‘golden passports’ in order to move more freely (though this seems more for people with shady business/personal histories) or, indeed, the annual lists published of the world’s most useful passports. If you hold a passport from one of these countries, it’s probably not something you think about. But if you have a passport from a country deemed ‘undesirable’ to those in power, then the passport itself might become a burden. It is universal truths like these, laid out among the personal truths, that help to cement Wander Women as a rigorously researched and illuminating book. 

The grouping of the stories in each chapter is quite interesting. In one chapter we hear from Jessi, a non-binary actor and writer in London who has cerebral palsy. Their story is well-told; we get 16 pages of Jessi’s experiences and the ways in which they have faced discrimination and various physical and societal borders. In the same chapter, we then hear from Sonia Ng, a Hong Kong student who faced sexual violence at the hands of the police during the civil rights protests in 2019. While these two stories and experiences (and the others that follow in this chapter) might not seem necessarily linked at first glance, when we look at the borders they face, we see that we are looking at ways in which the physical body is particularly vulnerable to restriction and violence. I did find some of the grouping a little tenuous, but this was mainly due to the fact that individuals live a multi-faceted existence and thus their experiences of movement, or lack thereof, are going to be intersectional.

There were definitely moments in Wander Women that could do with a tighter edit. The introduction was a little too meandering in its scope and led to me getting lost about whose story we were discussing. However, overall the range of stories and experiences in the book make it really worth reading. Each chapter opens with a beautiful illustration by Emmy Lupin which adds a lovely personal touch to the book. This book is the start of a very necessary conversation on the borders that women and non binary individuals face.