Women Writing for Other Women in Colombia's Armed Conflict

In her article "Women Writing for Other Women in Colombia's Armed Conflict" Maria Mercedes Andrade compares Patricia Lara's Las mujeres en la guerra (2000) and Patricia Tovar's Las viudas del conflicto armado en Colombia: Memorias y relatos (2006). Andrade's objective is to compare how these texts of testimonios deal with the question of representing women's experience and of turning oral testimonies into writing. Lara, writing for a popular audience, edits her material in order to make it more literary and mixes fictional accounts with the testimonios she collects. In contrast, Tovar writes for an academic public and reflects about the implications of the editorial process in ways that signal the oral character of the original material. In spite of their differences, Andrade argues that both texts are valuable attempts to represent the experiences of Colombian women in wartime.