Helen Benedict, the author of a novel, nonfiction book and play about women serving in the war in Iraq, met with students, faculty, staff and the greater community through luncheons and dinners on Monday and Tuesday as the Center for Women and Gender's annual visionary-in-residence. Through her consortium "Giving Voice: Women, War and Silence," Benedict aimed to provide fresh insight into how the treatment of women in the military reflects on how women are treated in society, including at Dartmouth, she said.
The visionary-in-residence program brings scholars who are investigating new topics or revisiting research from a different perspective to share their work with the Dartmouth community, according to Center for Women and Gender Director Jessica Jennrich.
In her keynote address, Benedict read an excerpt from and answered questions about her book "Sand Queen," a fictional narrative of the intersecting stories of 19-year-old Kate Brady, who guards Camp Bucca, a detention facility in Iraq, and Naema Jassim, an Iraqi medical student whose father and younger brother were detained in the camp. The story is set during the beginning of the Iraq War.
Benedict said she became interested in the Iraq War after interviewing women soldiers who had fought in Iraq.
"I wanted to listen to what the soldiers themselves were saying about the war because nobody was listening to them," she said.
Benedict said she then realized that women are dealing with "enormously high" rates of sexual assault and harassment in the military.
"I was shocked that we were sending women to war with all the same dangers as men and also treating them as sexual prey," Benedict said.
Rape in the military is a problem relevant to both men and women, according to Benedict, noting that 20 percent of women in the military are sexually assaulted.
"It's a rot at the core of the military that concerns us all," she said.
Benedict said that "Sand Queen" evolved out of her interviews with female veterans for her nonfiction book "The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq."
"As women were telling me their stories of combat and sexual trauma, they would often hit a wall where they couldn't talk anymore," she said. "It was in those silences that the true experience of war lay."
Benedict said that "Sand Queen" allowed her to reach a deeper truth that journalism could only suggest.
"I felt that with fiction I could dig deep into those sore parts without harming any particular person," she said.
In compiling research for her fiction and nonfiction books as well as her play "The Lonely Soldier Monologues," which all relate to the topic of women in the military, Benedict interviewed more than 40 female veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and several Iraqi refugees, she said. Jassim's character, for example, was based on a 23-year-old Iraqi refugee that Benedict interviewed extensively. The refugee was raped while detained in Abu Ghraib and later kidnapped and shot by an unknown group as the translator for an American journalist, according to Benedict.
"As [Benedict] told the remarkable story of bravery and overcoming trauma and the dignity of that woman, I understood why she was inspired to write the fictional character," English professor Alexis Jetter said.
Caroline Marani '12, who attended the lecture, said she was intrigued by how Benedict combined American and Iraqi women's narratives in "Sand Queen."
"It seemed very raw and honest, and I've never heard anything about the war that was that candid," Marani said.
Georgia Travers '13 said she was impressed by the tangible emotions in each separate account of the Iraq War.
"It's terrifically interesting to have someone who can convincingly depict that bias that each of those views have," Travers said.
Marani said that she did not realize how pervasive sexual assault is in the military.
"I wish that more Dartmouth women were aware of this and that sexual assault doesn't only take place on college campuses," she said.
Philosophy professor Susan Brison said that Benedict's book "Recovery: How to Survive Sexual Assault for Women, Men, Teenagers, Their Friends and Families" helped her recover from her own rape and near murder. She said she hopes Benedict's work on sexual assault in the military will allow Dartmouth students to think more critically about campus culture.
"I think it's not easy for us to see the harmful effect of sexual assault elsewhere when it's not talking place at home," she said.
Benedict also served as part of a panel with Paula Schnurr, co-founder and deputy executive director of the National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Christina Fanitzi Tu '13, an army captain still on active duty, and Anna Huh, a student at the Geisel School of Medicine who served as a linguist in the Air Force for four years, according to Brison, who moderated the panel.
Each of the events planned during her visit highlighted a different strength of Benedict's, Jennrich said.
"[Benedict] works in so many different media, so I wanted to explore her performance piece, to talk specifically about her work as a journalist and then to talk about her work as a fiction writer," she said.
Jetter said she found Benedict's multiple representations of the same research interesting.
"What her presentation made clear are the possibilities and limitations of each of these forms of writing and how important it is to break down each of those forms of writing and borrow from each, and that's rare," she said.
The consortium was part of the ongoing Dartmouth Centers Forum program Words and Their Consequences, according to Brison.
