In My Life
July 7 – 31, 2011
Mariam X is the pseudonym of a former child soldier from Sierra Leone who was abducted by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) at the age of eleven. Before escaping the RUF nearly a decade later, Mariam had been made the “wife” of a rebel commander, bore him a child, and was forced to commit random executions or risk losing her own life at the hands of her enslaver.
In My Life is a collaboration between mariam X and the documentarian Sara Terry, born out of Mariam’s struggle with forgiving herself for the atrocities she committed as a younger person. The series includes vivid color images made by both women, each presented with a simple caption. Essayist Sue Brisk characterizes their dynamic this way: “the bond between Sara Terry and her subject is symbiotic. In Sara Terry’s photographs Mariam can see herself and find the safety to rediscover her past. The Images taken by Mariam herself look innocent, as though she is playing with a small camera on a class trip or snapping Polaroids for the family album. The simplicity of her imagery, however, is in stark contrast to the handwritten text describing Mariam’s nightmare. Viewers quickly absorb her experience, through the simple imagery and the simple comments, because Mariam speaks a simple truth.”
In My Life: the story of an ex-girl soldier
I met Mariam (not her real name) in Sierra Leone in June 2007. Because her privacy needed to be protected for legal reasons (she was scheduled to testify against Charles Taylor at the International Criminal Court at The Hague), I needed to find a way to tell her story without showing her face. She had asked me to teach her how to use a camera – and I realized this was a perfect solution, one that would allow us to see Mariam’s world, through her eyes, without seeing her face. What I didn’t expect was that Mariam would choose to use the camera as a metaphorical tool, a way of telling the story of her life in the bush through photos taken in the village where she now lives. She took photos of her life, and I took photos of her. The words that accompany the photos are her own, written in my hand. I’ve taken them from my interviews with her, and also from the comments that she made as we looked at the photos she took and chose for this essay. I was able to stay in touch with Mariam for a year or two, mostly through others (she didn’t have internet access), and I was able to raise some money for her to buy a sewing machine and material, which I gave her – but unfortunately we lost contact some time ago. I continue to be grateful to her for her willingness to collaborate in telling the difficult story of her life as an ex-soldier, and for doing it so fearlessly.
Los Angeles, February 2016
Mariam’s story is included as a chapter in my larger project, Forgiveness and Conflict: Lessons from Africa for which I won a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography.
Sara Terry is an award-winning documentary photographer and filmmaker, and a member of VII Photo, who is best known for her work as a post-conflict and social justice storyteller. She won a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship for her long-term project, “Forgiveness and Conflict: Lessons from Africa.” She is also the founder and director of The Aftermath Project, which supports photographers working on post-conflict stories and which celebrated its tenth anniversary with a book published by Dewi Lewis. Her most recent award-winning, feature-length documentary, A Decent Home, about mobile home parks and the wealth gap, aired on PBS in 2023 and is still screening across the country in communities and universities. Terry was named to Forbes Women’s “50over50” list in 2024.