The Political Science Departmental Undergraduate Group and Sarah Doyle Women's Center held a screening and discussion of the documentary "Pray the Devil Back to Hell" Wednesday night.
The film details a nonviolent movement by Liberian women who sought peace during the country's civil war in 2003. The subsequent discussion was moderated by Molly Wallace MA'06, PhD'10, a visiting lecturer in political science who taught the film earlier this semester in POLS 1360: "Gender and Global Politics."
The event was organized by Amanda Kozar '12, the co-leader of the DUG and a student programmer for the Women's Center. Kozar said she contacted Wallace for the event since Wallace is "one of the only people" in the department who focuses on gender.
Wallace wrote in an e-mail to The Herald that she suggested the film because of the "important questions about women's particular strengths in peacemaking and peacebuilding processes" that it raises. Kozar added that the film was also relevant because of the strong Liberian community in Rhode Island.
The early scenes of the film focus on one of the driving forces that led the Liberian women to organize — the war's effect on children, some of whom are shown holding skeletons and shooting guns, others of whom are emaciated and asking only for a bite of doughnut. The documentary also highlights the fact that the movement united both Christian and Muslim women.
Mixing historical footage and interviews with the women, "Pray the Devil Back to Hell" quickly moves from the women's initial demonstrations to the international peace talks that occurred in Ghana. It also shows some of the strategies that the peace-seekers were able to use, many of which involved their position as women. Several of them withheld sex from their husbands to pressure them into action. During the peace talks, one threatened to strip in an attempt to expedite proceedings. The film explains that in Liberia, seeing a naked mother is considered a curse.
The film also chronicles the events that follow the exiling of Liberian president Charles Taylor and continues until the democratic election of Liberia's first woman president, Ellen Sirleaf Johnson. The women stay involved throughout these later events because, as Leymah Gbowee — one of the leaders of the movement — says in the film, "Peace is a process, not an event."
The film itself examines the civil war through a relatively tight lens. As a result, some of the background history of the Liberian civil war is explained in the film, but a lot of the subtleties are glossed over. Firestone's involvement in Liberia is alluded to in a blink-and-a-miss moment when the film mentions Liberia's natural resources. The presence of domestic violence in Liberia is revealed through a background image of a billboard depicting rape. Those who do not have an understanding of Liberia's history and demographics might also miss some of the other complexities involved in the war.
But the issues that were merely touched upon in the film were discussed more fully in the seminar-style discussion that Wallace facilitated following the film. A group of about 10 members of the Brown community — roughly half men and half women — discussed the women's strategies and tried to determine reasons for the movement's effectiveness and how one might inspire similar activism in the United States.
