Chechnia's shahidki, women who commit acts of terrorism against the Russian state and the Russian population, have become notorious. Used to justify draconian retribution against the peoples of the North Caucasus, these female suicide bombers sacrifice their lives despite knowing that their acts are unlikely to bring down the Russian state. Why then, do these women blow themselves up? In Writers and Rebels, Rebecca Gould uses close textual analyses of Chechen, Daghestani, Georgian, Ossetian, and Russian literature to link the figure of the abrek, the infamous bandit of the Caucasus, to the shahidka. In doing so, she explains the logic of what she calls “transgressive sanctity,” a postcolonial formation in which violating the law of the colonizer becomes a sacred form of action. Working through three languages and six cultures, Gould has produced a linguistic and theoretical tour de force whose argument transcends the post-Soviet sphere to address the form of violence characteristic of the contemporary moment.
In an innovative move, Gould uses literature and ethnography, rather than the historical record, to interrogate culture and ethics. She begins by examining the figure of the abrek, particularly in the person of Imam Shamil, the legendary Caucasian guerrilla fighter who led the resistance against Russian occupation between 1832 and 1859. She argues that once the abrek transgressed the law to oppose a sovereign power seen as illegitimate, he became more than just a bandit, but someone who made violence a sacred act. Gould labels this valorized illegality “transgressive sanctity,” showing how anticolonial violence became culturally meaningful in the Caucasus.
Gould could have let the abrek stand in for all the peoples of the Caucasus. But she goes even further, showing how the Chechen logic of opposition was muted and transformed in Daghestan. Unlike the Chechens, Daghestani writers did not rely on adat, or customary law, to oppose zakon, or the laws of the colonial state. Rather, they became textualists, drawing on Islamic shari'a law to struggle against colonial law. As Gould points out, when Daghestani scholars rebelled, as they did in the late 19th century, they justified their actions in terms of Islamic legal tradition, and thus claimed fidelity to a higher legal and moral order. Gould illustrates this difference brilliantly, drawing on a deep, detailed reading of debates between Daghestani scholars and their Chechen counterparts.
Gould then looks at a third difference: the approach of the Georgians, who, rather than openly opposing Russian domination, largely accommodated it. Looking carefully at the life and texts of Tsitsian Tabidze, a sharp critic of his contemporary writers, Gould shows that rather than struggling violently, as the Chechens did, or engaging in legal debate, as the Daghestanis mostly did, the Georgians aestheticized violence and collaborated with the Russian conquest of the Caucasus. Tsitsian Tabidze's sharp critique of this collaboration led him to oppose the Soviet state—a political stance for which he was executed in 1937.
In Gould's fourth chapter, she breaks dramatically with her first three chapters to use her own ethnography rather than texts to take up the question of post-Soviet resistance. She looks at Aizan Gazueva, a Chechen woman who blew herself up along with the Daghestani general responsible for the death of her husband and brothers. Gould shows how the logic of this suicide bombing stemmed from a similar concept of transgressive sanctity to those held by the Imam Shamil and Tsitsian Tabidze. What had appeared as a senseless act of violence becomes, as Gould places it in historical and cultural context, the only meaningful act that a person subjected to arbitrary state-sponsored brutality can carry out. Gould does not lionize the shahidka’s radical violence. But she explains why this transgression is sanctified by the community it comes from, and in doing so, tells us much about Chechnia's contemporary anti-colonial struggle.
Gould claims that the shahidka’s actions are a degraded form of transgressive sanctity, and that once Chechen national independence was off the table, these radical acts of violence became mere aesthetic acts rather than serving a higher strategy. One might argue instead that once resistance was placed in the frame of Islamic jihad, acts of terrorism became even more sanctified and hence even more meaningful. The marriage of Chechen violence and Daghestani attention to shari'a here seems to uphold Gould's point about transgressive sanctity, rather than showing that violence had become unsanctified. But this argument merely shows the power of Gould's analysis. By giving us a unified analysis of the anti-colonial politics of the Caucasus, Gould has helped to spell out the logic of contemporary terrorism.
