Stories of war — the ones we tell the loudest — are often about men. But for the true cost of war to be clear, we must do a better job of telling, and hearing, the stories of women — ordinarily civilians.
The stories of men — whether in movies, books or other media — are frequently stories of militarization. They present themselves with urgency, as breaking news. In my own research as a writer, the stories I regularly encounter about men are of moments: the moment a man left his family to fight, the moment he fired his first shot, the moment he was heroic or even the moment he committed a crime. The moment he died. Hearing such a tale may take only a moment too.
The stories of women, on the other hand, are often long. They require a more enduring attention from both tellers and listeners willing to comprehend the unspoken, the daily work of care and the long consequences of conflict. I learned this lesson as I shifted how I understood and wrote about the quarter-century-long civil war in Sri Lanka, where my parents grew up.
