Interview by Alyssa Algu
From the beginning of your professional life, you have worked on human rights, gender justice, journalism and activism. Since 2022, you have taken up a position with Reporters without Borders. How do you understand your work at Reporters Without Borders, an international NGO that defends press freedom and activism, especially with respect to women's rights?
To answer that question means telling you about myself and where I come from. I was born and brought up in India. I had a very different kind of an upbringing, because my mother is a single parent and she was negatively judged for bringing me up alone. So I grew up with seeing inequalities in society already. It made me angry, because as a child, growing up you can't do anything about it.
That's why I took up social work, completing a MA, because I wanted to do something to change the injustices that I experienced as a child. My first position was in Jharkhand, in India, a rural area. I worked with tribal women for about two and a half years. The concept with which I worked was on how to collectivise women to fight to have their own voice for social justice.
This was not something I had learned studying social work. In social work, too often, you are trained as a person who's a saviour – you go to the field and you are the one saving everyone. But when I was in the field, I quickly realised that's not true. That's far from the truth! It's the people that you work with who must have the power. You are just a facilitator in a way, so they are the ones actually fighting for their justice or rights – and that's how it should be. For me, that was a very important lesson that I learned in that first job, when I was working in India.
"In social work, too often, you are trained as a person who's a saviour – you go to the field and you are the one saving everyone. But when I was in the field, I quickly realised that's not true. That's far from the truth! It's the people that you work with who must have the power."
Shataakshi Verma
Since then, I started working with different communities, different groups, mostly women. When I began working in cities, I worked with trans women, intersex people – so marginalized genders. Being in such communities, the ways that women and people of marginalized genders are affected by conflict automatically became a focus of mine. How are gender relationships impacted by conflict?
Because I was concerned about this question, I went to Afghanistan, where I lived for more than three years. There, I worked with women in the context of conflict. That's where Reporters Without Borders (or Reports Sans Frontières, RSF) came in. Despite its name, RSF is not a journalistic enterprise; it's actually a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) that does capacity building for journalists in conflict affected places and for those working in authoritarian regimes. For me, this was the kind of work that I wanted to do, because you are giving tools and resources to the people who are doing the work in the community.
In my case, coming from a South Asian country, working in an international organisation is also a step up. It’s a way to see the world and financially it is important, as a woman, to be in a place where you can make a decent amount of money for the work you are doing. What I realised in India is that social work jobs don't pay you that much and if you don't come from a well-to-do family or a well-to-do-setup, earning a decent living is critical, because you want to do work that matters, for society, but, at the same time, you need money back home.
Practical considerations like that were also a crucial part of my decision to move to a bigger organisation. After Afghanistan, I then began to work in Taiwan. I've been living in Taiwan for a year and, like Afghanistan, Taiwan has been affected by conflict for some time. It's not the same kind of conflict as it was in Afghanistan, but is rather different. I am able to explore that as well – and I am able to work in the whole Asia Pacific region. I am the programme manager of the RSF Bureau, so I manage all their projects here and it's bigger scope.
And then, at the same time, I started my organisation Art of Freedom. My role in RSF is helping me to learn and answer the question: How do you run a bigger organisation? So I feel like I can take lessons learned and go back to my community and maybe do something for them, as well.
She is also the founder of Art of Freedom Project, a women's collective based in Kabul that advocates for rights for women from ethnic and religious minorities in conflict affected communities around the world through art based mediums. In 2022, she directed a documentary film, named The Lost Fish, mapping the struggles of the fisherwomen community in India’s coastal city Mumbai, on their struggles with displacement and their fight for livelihood. She has also contributed her writings from her human rights work in several journals, with her latest work published in the Journal of Youth, Peace and Security. In 2023, she attended the Harvard Kennedy School's executive program on using public narrative as a tool for storytelling, action and community mobilisation
Verma is currently working with Reporters without Borders as their Asia Pacific Bureau Program Manager and is based in Taiwan..
You have an interest in the role of film and the arts as a way of demanding rights for women. Your own film work, "The Lost Fish" is a documentary about fisher women in Mumbai and their struggles for livelihood. With the Art of Freedom project, you have tried to support women in conflict zones, especially young women in Afghanistan, in making their voices heard, in a context where that is now difficult and even dangerous. Why do the arts matter in struggles for women's rights?
Art is important to me. At one point in my life, I was very much into photography. But I gave it up because I began having ethical concerns. I was working in the community and I felt I was taking away their stories when I went there, simply as a photographer. I've had my tryst with art, both believing and not believing in art.
But in the conflict affected communities that I have worked in, many people, and women in particular, have less access to many resources. They do not have access to education, for instance, or they do not have access to reliable information. In these contexts, art can be a less intimidating tool for them to communicate. When we were in Afghanistan, if we were showing art – a film or anything else – the women would become much more excited to talk about it. They didn't feel like we'd put them at the centre where you're telling them, “Speak now!” This is part of the story: women and other people who are marginalised should fight for themselves. But how should they fight? What is the process? Sometimes, those of us who were working on the ground forget to ask these questions. We say: “They have to fight for themselves!” But did we give them the right tools to fight?
We didn't. Education was not accessible to them. A lot of tools were not accessible to them. So then how will they ever raise their voice? Of course, anyone can talk. But that can be especially intimidating for women who've come from marginalized backgrounds. Having witnessed those difficulties, I saw art being a very important tool for helping women, in particular, to communicate – and I wanted to develop this idea further.
"We say: “They have to fight for themselves!” But
Shataakshi Verma
did we give them the right tools to fight? We
didn’t…So then how will they ever raise their
voice?"
When I was living in Afghanistan, I met a few, very lovely women. Together, we started the collective that we call Art of Freedom. In 2019, we did our first workshop in a café in Kabul. We started engaging with women in spaces where they could come together, and discuss and use arts to let us know how they've been feeling. It was just… simple. We didn't have any idea about the impact of the project, it was just a space for them to share.
At that time, it was important for us to have these dialogues, because there were peace talks in Afghanistan and we realized that in all of these policymaking talks, women's narratives were completely missing. And then the Taliban came back to power, neglecting everything that the women had built up for so many years.
"At that time, it was important for us to have these
Shataakshi Verma
dialogues, because there were peace talks in
Afghanistan and we realized that in all of these
policymaking talks, women's narratives were
completely missing."
Suddenly, our work became more urgent because women were losing their spaces. They couldn't go to school anymore. It's 2024 and it's now been two years since the Taliban put a ban on young girls going to school. There is no other country that doesn't allow women to go to school. These women not being able to access their education is a very basic human right that has been taken away from them.
Sometimes, what angers me and drives my work is that the world is not listening, and people don’t do what needs to be done. In today’s context, it is even more urgent for us to keep advocating, and the best tool for advocacy right now is to keep doing these workshops in Afghanistan. We either do them online or we train teachers and they do them on ground, in Afghanistan. Whatever comes out – the narratives – we put together and then we exhibit them and we put them in places of important advocacy: in symposiums and in United Nations conferences. We participate in recommending policies to the UN, where we bring these women to be part of these spaces.
We're trying… we're trying! We're such a small collective right now. But that's why we think art is important, it becomes like a tool, a way for sharing these women’s voices at a time when we urgently need to hear them.
You have worked in many difficult contexts, like rural India and in Afghanistan, where women face incredible hardships and, often, violence. What have you learned from these women?
One very important thing that I have learned is that women are full of resilience. This is something that we have been brought up with as women. We've always been told, for instance, to “Buck up and fight!” Of course, this affects our mental health and that is another important discussion we need to have. But all the women that I have worked with, I have seen them resisting – and resisting everything that's wrong in society.
It won't be a protest, standing out there in the road, but their own way of resisting. A very small example of this is one woman I was working with in Jharkhand. Her husband was physically abusive towards her and he would usually be violent late at night after coming home. Her response was that she would mix something in his food at times that would make him sleep faster. I'm not saying this is correct. I'm just saying I'm learning that women are fighting in small ways and they are protecting themselves however they can.
They're using what I call weapons of resistance, developing whatever solutions they have, in their own situation. Imagine if you give women the power to actually come together to find solutions to our problems: how amazing can that be? Because they're already inventing many solutions in their lives to fight these societal norms they must go through. We just don’t hear them or we never actually make use of all that knowledge that's already there with them – because apparently we have bigger, better people who will make decisions much better than us, as women. What I'm learning is that even in very difficult circumstances, women are finding solutions.
"And it is definitely very difficult to think of hope
Shataakshi Verma
in times like today. But when you meet people who
have fought all their lives, that somehow gives me
hope."
A lot of people ask me: “Where do you get your hope from, given everything that's happening in the world?” And it is definitely very difficult to think of hope in times like today. But when you meet people who have fought all their lives, that somehow gives me hope: How can we document those struggles? How can we bring those voices out? How can we let women know that there are women who have survived and changed the world for the better, and that they can too?
And what role is there for feminists in the global North who seek to act in solidarity with these women?
Recently, it was International Women's Day and something important I realized with a lot of the posts that were coming out is that the majority of feminist organisations I am seeing are in the global North. It is their responsibility to start thinking more intersectionally and from a more grounded perspective – and to drive resources towards where they are needed. For too long, even within feminism, some people have more power and others do not have much power. There needs to be intersectionality within policymaking and in international decision-making, where they’re considering people who might be living in Sri Lanka, women who are living in Bangladesh, women who are living in Afghanistan – and making space for them to come and speak, and then making it less intimidating for them to do so.
Is there anything else you think people should know that we have not yet spoken about?
One important thing is something that I'm learning right now: collaboration across people, across individuals, across organisations can go a long way. We're not competing with each other. We're working towards the same goal. You might be working towards mental health, I might be working towards a sense of agency for women, and somebody else might be working on climate change… But all of these struggles are connected.
"Collaboration across people, across individuals, across organisations
Shataakshi Verma
can go a long way. We're not competing with each other. We're working towards the same goal."
The Art of Freedom initiative is new – and we do have funding from a feminist collective – but we do not have too many resources available to us. And I’ve realised in the past year that collaboration can take you such a long way. We are working with organisations in Afghanistan but also in Sri Lanka and in Bangladesh, even though I never visited these countries or knew anybody in these countries. Collaboration allows the focus to be on the goal, as opposed to visibility. Instead of fighting to have our logos and names somewhere, when we collaborate together, we can raise everyone’s voices.
To learn more about Shataakshi Verma and her work, please visit her LinkedIn Page here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shataakshi-verma-79a1b1b3/; the Art of Freedom project here https://artoffreedomproject.org/; The Lost Fish Documentary here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uekhXOE3NU and her latest published work here https://unoy.org/downloads/journal-of-youth-peace-security-issue-2/.
Alyssa Algu is a student in the Concurrent Bachelor of Education program at York University’s Glendon Campus, double majoring in Sociology and French Studies.