Evelyn, one of the funniest and funkiest people I work with, walked past my desk yesterday. She stopped, thought for a second, turned around with a playful grin on her face, and said: “I am looking for someone who can talk on my panel tomorrow [on African feminism]. I wish I could paint you Black.” Everyone in the office laughed out loud.
Might just have been the strangest and best compliment I’ve gotten this year (or at least tied with the dude who wanted to give my dad the airplane as bride price).
So, I couldn’t be on the panel she moderated today, but they invited me to sit there and soak it up.
It was electric. It wasn’t a panel so much as it was a circle of African women of all ages, talking.
They talked about patriarchy (the idea that power is a finite thing we each have to grab or someone else will) vs. feminism (at its most basic, the idea that power is an infinite thing that we can nurture in ourselves and others, so we each have enough). They talked about mentoring younger women, about struggling with their husbands, about being supportive instead of critical of prominent female politicians, about learning to be proud of who we are.
Hope (one of my co-workers, who I lived with last time I was here) spoke on the panel about her own life. Her last name, in local language, means “unable to be uprooted”. She talked about how she loves her mother for naming her “Hope Unable-To-Be-Uprooted”. She talked about how she loves herself, because she knows she is phenomenal. She said each young woman should decide for herself whether she ever wanted to get married or have children. If so, we should go for it, and not allow ourselves to be bought (bride price is common here) or convinced of who we should marry because it is expected of us, but rather do what makes us happy. If we don’t want marriage or children, we shouldn’t be ashamed not to want it, and we should go for what we want instead.
(How many young women in the U.S. really believe that, I wonder? How many of us still think we’re incomplete somehow if we’re not in a relationship? How many people think “how sad” when they see a woman who never had kids—even if she didn’t want them?)
Another panelist, Dr. Gloria, talked about our power as mothers and aunties to socialize our kids differently—how she raised a feminist son. She said, “It is the same patriarchal system that imprisons men and victimizes us as women. We are clear that we are not at war with men, but with patriarchy. Many men would choose something different if there were another, viable role presented to them.” She then talked about how the mothers in the room could socialize their sons differently, and socialize our daughters to love and stand up for themselves.
I could go on and on and on.
In other words, they SO didn’t need me on that panel. I haven’t felt that kind of honest, self-reflective energy in awhile—the kind that allows us to remember that we can celebrate our accomplishments and still realize there is so much we still internalize that keeps us boxed in.
I started to think about how much I apologize for myself, how I still struggle not to think of my self-worth only in relation to how helpful I’m being, how my strategy in my last relationship was to avoid talking about my work (which is a HUGE part of my life) because I know it freaks most guys out. This group of women had so much in common with my own struggles—trying to do it differently in our own lives. The energy in the room was much like how I imagine it felt to be in the women’s movement in the U.S. in the 70’s, where ideas were sparking and no one quite knew yet the immensity or even the direction of change that they were setting in motion, and so much was yet to be determined.
In short, these women rock. It’s so contrary, isn’t it, to the depictions we often see of African women in the Western media?—the victimized recipients of aid after tragic famine and warfare, the overly-heroic mother figures that share some ancient wisdom that we hold on a pedestal and at the same time ignore, the National Geographic exotic beauties or scary witches, etc.
One of the things I love about my organization is how all of our work, including writing, graphics and photographs, flies in the face of all those myths. We publish things showing people as they are everywhere—laughing, struggling, working, playing, and searching for themselves somehow. And, like the women in that room, a force to be reckoned with, equally, on their own terms.
www.raisingvoices.org
www.preventgbvafrica.org
May 12, 2009
April 17, 2009 Jordan- Moses’ mountaintop
It’s a clear, windy spring afternoon full of daffodils and green grass. I went up the mountain from which Moses saw the promised land (from where you can now see the West Bank and Gaza) and it was more emotional somehow than I expected.
Moses has long been my favorite persona in the Bible. My admiration is not so much about the miracles or the commandments or the parting of the Red Sea, but the courage it must have taken to have been raised in subjugation and to see something different so clearly, to believe in it so strongly, and to convince an entire people into action.
There’s a great book Zora Neale Hurston wrote in the 1930’s that I read when I was in college—called Moses, Man of the Mountain. It is the story of the Exodus, set in the American south during slavery, told in contemporary Black dialect. Also, the Nora Ephron essay about how much self-criticism women internalize, and how Moses was wise to let a civilization who had been enslaved wander around in the desert for a generation before taking the new generation to the promised land to start a new society—it takes time to root out the mentality of being less than others. Anyway-- Moses, man. What an amazing person.
Moses has long been my favorite persona in the Bible. My admiration is not so much about the miracles or the commandments or the parting of the Red Sea, but the courage it must have taken to have been raised in subjugation and to see something different so clearly, to believe in it so strongly, and to convince an entire people into action.
There’s a great book Zora Neale Hurston wrote in the 1930’s that I read when I was in college—called Moses, Man of the Mountain. It is the story of the Exodus, set in the American south during slavery, told in contemporary Black dialect. Also, the Nora Ephron essay about how much self-criticism women internalize, and how Moses was wise to let a civilization who had been enslaved wander around in the desert for a generation before taking the new generation to the promised land to start a new society—it takes time to root out the mentality of being less than others. Anyway-- Moses, man. What an amazing person.
April 11, 2009 Jordan- the Red Sea
Middle east resort.
Women with hair and bodies covered giggle by the Red Sea, which is actually quite blue—and windy.
The women in bikinis stroll by, pretending to be more empowered, as we worry about our thighs and the size of our breasts, and whether we are still pleasing to men.
But it all disappears the moment we all hit the water—skin prickles and all is awake and here.
The whole world stops, and is cold, but new and fresh and blue and a whole other way of being underneath. Coral and fish and white, white sand going deeper.
On the shore, a middle-aged couple with sandy shoes and backpacks eat yummy-looking ice cream and don’t smile—not even a little.
And another couple reads to each other and smiles for no reason.
The sea smell and strong tea start to heal my runny nose. My mind stops for a moment and is present, like when I hit the cold water. Arabic music—the slow, haunting kind, begins at the restaurant. The wind stills. A fly alights.
Women with hair and bodies covered giggle by the Red Sea, which is actually quite blue—and windy.
The women in bikinis stroll by, pretending to be more empowered, as we worry about our thighs and the size of our breasts, and whether we are still pleasing to men.
But it all disappears the moment we all hit the water—skin prickles and all is awake and here.
The whole world stops, and is cold, but new and fresh and blue and a whole other way of being underneath. Coral and fish and white, white sand going deeper.
On the shore, a middle-aged couple with sandy shoes and backpacks eat yummy-looking ice cream and don’t smile—not even a little.
And another couple reads to each other and smiles for no reason.
The sea smell and strong tea start to heal my runny nose. My mind stops for a moment and is present, like when I hit the cold water. Arabic music—the slow, haunting kind, begins at the restaurant. The wind stills. A fly alights.
April 10, 2009 Jordan- Petra
Petra is incredible. It’s one of the 7 wonders of the world (the ancient city carved into the red rock cliffs about 6,000 years ago). The immense sculptures carved into swirling stone of mauve and red and rose and black. But the life that interacts with it, I think, is what makes its wonder. The small 8 year old Bedoin girl, hair fully covered, who skips toward my friend Najwa and I, and asks us the time in 5 languages, hoping to hit the right one and get us to answer so she can start the conversation and sell us one of the necklaces dangling from her outstretched forearm. She swears to Najwa in Arabic that she only does this on her time off from school. She grins and skips away.
Further up, the small boys sell the donkey rides to those of us with sore feet. The camels laze and munch beneath the ancient rock columns. The young men with playful eyes and long hair race their horses up the track, slow down and sell rides and flirt with the young women trudging past. I hear the legends of western women lured by Bedoin culture and married to Bedoin men, agreeing to live as nomads or near-it.
It’s clear why.
Aside from the fact that a couple of these guys look like Johnny Depp with the hair and eyeliner of Pirates of the Caribbean--it’s the idea of freedom. Home for many of us has come to be a place of things designed for comfort and luxury—a world of things which become a greater need to our minds than Spirit, than culture, than freedom. We bend to them. For young people with a strong sense of passion and spirit, the suburbs are like the 7th level of hell. We dream of being cowboys/girls and hobos, long past when those cultures were truly alive back home. Bedoin culture, in a lot of ways is that—the mystery, the rejection of creature comfort in favor of culture and nights full of desert stars.
Further up, the small boys sell the donkey rides to those of us with sore feet. The camels laze and munch beneath the ancient rock columns. The young men with playful eyes and long hair race their horses up the track, slow down and sell rides and flirt with the young women trudging past. I hear the legends of western women lured by Bedoin culture and married to Bedoin men, agreeing to live as nomads or near-it.
It’s clear why.
Aside from the fact that a couple of these guys look like Johnny Depp with the hair and eyeliner of Pirates of the Caribbean--it’s the idea of freedom. Home for many of us has come to be a place of things designed for comfort and luxury—a world of things which become a greater need to our minds than Spirit, than culture, than freedom. We bend to them. For young people with a strong sense of passion and spirit, the suburbs are like the 7th level of hell. We dream of being cowboys/girls and hobos, long past when those cultures were truly alive back home. Bedoin culture, in a lot of ways is that—the mystery, the rejection of creature comfort in favor of culture and nights full of desert stars.
April 9, 2009 - Uganda to Jordan, via Khartoum and Cairo
The plane from Uganda stopped in Khartoum, Sudan to offload some passengers and let others on board, before we moved on to Cairo and Jordan. Maybe that’s the source of it; I can’t seem to shake the weirdness of that. . .
Khartoum, Sudan: the home of the Government of Sudan, designers of a current genocide which we’re doing next-to-nothing about. I read something once about the Holocaust that pondered about the ethics of proximity—about how somehow it’s easy for us to dismiss horrible things if they’re not happening in our back yard, in front of our eyes, much less to our kids—but rather in some distant place.
But I was, for an hour, in the same city as the creators and perpetuators of a genocide. In reality, I live only a 2 hour flight away from them, and a 4 hour flight away from the genocide itself. So even if ethics were related to proximity, my lack of action makes me somehow guilty. I sat on the plane and chatted with the Palestinian man beside me about what I should see in beautiful Jordan. People got off the plane and walked out into Khartoum.
And then more people got on—a woman in a gorgeous turquoise headscarf, silver jewelry and henna on her fingers, an elderly man with a white traditional robe and a turban and a cane, a wealthy woman dripping with diamonds, a small child. I have had Sudanese co workers and friends, I have read books, I have heard the stories of friends and colleagues who have worked in Darfur for years, prior to the time most aid workers were expelled—but somehow I’d never felt it like this. This is happening NOW, on our planet. And our lives go on as if it were nothing. I remember that from Victor Frankl’s book about the Holocaust—or at least I think it was him. He sat in the concentration camp and realized, stunned: “life goes on outside.”
But we can do something, surely. Am trying to figure out what and how like the rest of us.
http://www.savedarfur.org/
http://notonourwatchproject.org/
Khartoum, Sudan: the home of the Government of Sudan, designers of a current genocide which we’re doing next-to-nothing about. I read something once about the Holocaust that pondered about the ethics of proximity—about how somehow it’s easy for us to dismiss horrible things if they’re not happening in our back yard, in front of our eyes, much less to our kids—but rather in some distant place.
But I was, for an hour, in the same city as the creators and perpetuators of a genocide. In reality, I live only a 2 hour flight away from them, and a 4 hour flight away from the genocide itself. So even if ethics were related to proximity, my lack of action makes me somehow guilty. I sat on the plane and chatted with the Palestinian man beside me about what I should see in beautiful Jordan. People got off the plane and walked out into Khartoum.
And then more people got on—a woman in a gorgeous turquoise headscarf, silver jewelry and henna on her fingers, an elderly man with a white traditional robe and a turban and a cane, a wealthy woman dripping with diamonds, a small child. I have had Sudanese co workers and friends, I have read books, I have heard the stories of friends and colleagues who have worked in Darfur for years, prior to the time most aid workers were expelled—but somehow I’d never felt it like this. This is happening NOW, on our planet. And our lives go on as if it were nothing. I remember that from Victor Frankl’s book about the Holocaust—or at least I think it was him. He sat in the concentration camp and realized, stunned: “life goes on outside.”
But we can do something, surely. Am trying to figure out what and how like the rest of us.
http://www.savedarfur.org/
http://notonourwatchproject.org/
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