Women Investigators Uncovering Transgression in Unity Dow’s Fiction

Summary

Unity Dow's fiction is set within a human rights discourse, specifically in relation to the lives of women and children in Botswana. She has been quoted as saying that in speaking out on human rights issues, she is ‘reclaiming the voice’, particularly the voice of women (Dow in Daymond and Lenta ‘“It was like singing in the wilderness”: An Interview with Unity Dow’: 47). Dow already had a successful legal career before becoming a writer. In 1988, while a partner in a legal practice, she co-founded the Women in Law in Southern Africa Research Project (WLSA) and later became fully involved in research and advocacy work on women's and children's rights. In 1998, she was appointed a high court judge, a position she held until her resignation in 2009. Her four novels Far and Beyon’, The Screaming of the Innocent, Juggling Truths and The Heavens May Fall were published during this period. Advocacy and activism are so central in Dow's writing that her fiction could be seen as a continuation of her career as a rights activist, providing a way for her to continue her grassroots advocacy work while sitting as a judge. In an interview, Dow suggested that writing fiction allowed her to draw on her experience as a human rights lawyer without the constraints of having to keep to the facts. In fiction she could tell the women's stories she was unable to tell when writing legal reports:

I worked for many years with women, abused women, women who had offended against the law, and I always found that they all had stories but no report could capture them. No report that was, for example, trying to get the Minister to change the legislation could attend to the finer details of their stories. I felt I could never really capture what they had said, but writing fiction allows you to take all this material and write in a way that will reach a wider audience. (Dow in Daymond and Lenta: 56)

In this article, I consider two aspects of Dow's work, firstly, the ways in which her representation of an informal network of human rights workers moves towards a grassroots politics of identity based primarily, but not exclusively, on gender; secondly, following on from Dow's statement, I am interested in the way she converts case histories into fiction to create another wider network of women.