the privilege of traveling

i have been thinking  about writing this post for a while.  in part i have not done so because i do have lots of privilege and have been able to travel.  and i felt awkward, felt like i was making myself vulnerable to criticism if i wrote this.  but then i figured, fuck it.

i had one of those conversations that i seem to have every few months with someone new about how i do not take into account how privileged i am to be able to travel and live abroad.  and how privileged i was to be partnered. when i talk about my experience of being a mother.

privilege.  privilege. privilege.

1. i do take how much privileged i am into account.  actually in some ways i am more aware of certain types of privilege because i travel.  for instance, the power of my US citizenship comes into stark relief when i am abroad.

2. and i know that it is a privilege to be in a happy partnership, both of us dedicated to loving aza and each other.

3. but i also know that traveling and being partnered is not in and of itself simply privileged.

MOTHERS TRAVELING

let me see if i can put it this way:

through out history.  as long as there have been wars.  mothers have traveled with their children.  they have to survive.  they become refugees.  they become slaves.  they travel to find a safe place to live and create a life with their families.  they leave home to flee abusive husbands, or advancing troops, to find doctors, to find lost family, to take care of sick family, to find work, to find food, to find peace.

yes it can be a privilege to travel.

but it can also be a privilege to stay home.

balcony culture and community art

i invite all of you who read this blog to particiate in this lil piece of community art.  by sending me pics and photos.  and words.  and whatever you want to digitally.  and i will print them out and incorporate them into this balconey art.

so i have been thinking a lot about community, art, and borders for the past few months.

one of the things that i have realized is that making art seems to stress me the fuck out.  i get knotted up about the art piece being good enough.  or whatever.  so i started sketching in an art journal.  just trying to loosen up.  and searching for my vision of the world.  i started taking photographs of the world around me.  loving the digital camera that lets me just snap. snap. snap. and then run home and see what i saw.

and these practices definitely helped.  to open myself to my own vision.  but the notebook started to feel too small and confining.  and i love taking pictures.  but i still wasnt feeling myself as free.  i was still caught up on perfectionism and meaning.

so habibi bought this 6 foot piece of canvass and i have been painting for the past couple of days.

at the same time in talking to lex about porch culture in the south and stoop culture in the north and i was saying: man, i miss having a porch.  and then i said.  oh but we have balconeys here in cairo.  and realizing that there is a very definite balconey culture here because everyone lives in an apt.  and even cheap apts have at least one balconey.  and that i want to make our balconeys a site for urban street art and contributing to a culture of balconeys in abdeen, cairo, egypt. i also wanted to do an art project with aza.  and so she will be painting and drawing

so i am painting this latest piece and i when it is completed.  i will hang it on our balconey.

and i want to invite all of you who read this blog to particiate in this lil piece of community art.  by sending me pics and photos.  and words.  and whatever you want to digitally.  and i will print them out and incorporate them into this balconey art.

send it to me at primitivedragonfly at yahoo dot com or leave a link in the comment section…

as to the type of art i am looking for.  i am pretty open about it.  take a walk through your neighborhood and take pictures or sketches.  a poem.  questions.  a story that you want to share.  photos of you or your family friends community.  art.  posters.  your ordinary heroes/heroines.  a piece of art/painting/writing created by someone else that you want to bring forth.  the possibilities are endless.

i am really excited that this piece will:

1. contribute to the visual community of the neighborhood

2. mean that aza gets to paint

3. will act as a bridge between my online communities and my offline communities

4. will bring forth a more complex picture of middle east africa for those who do not live here and a more complex picture of europe and the americas for those who do not live there. and show the interconnections between these multiple sites of expression and communication

5. find another way to break through the censorship, imprisonment, and torture of bloggers in egypt

simple health care

as many of you may know i have a healthy distrust of the medical establishment.  and by that i mean that i have stayed away from doctors as much as i could for my teenage and adult life.  now part of this is just economic.  for most of my adult life i havent had health care insurance so i couldnt afford to go see a doctor.  even if i wanted to.  when walking into the doctors office is 70 dollars and that doesnt include tests or fillling prescriptions…i had to find more economic ways to keep myself healthy.

so at first i started with herbs and vitamins.  echinacea, kava kava, st johns wort, vitamin c, etc.

and food.  raw fruits and veggies, cutting out animal products, drinking more water, etc.

and yoga.  and learning to breathe deeply.

and energy/body work. focusing.

and chiropracter after the birth to get my back and especially my spine stronger.

and homeopathy.  which i didnt have a lick of faith in. until i was so desperately in pain with a sinus/tooth infection and i had tried everything and been to two dentists and finally went to the homeopath in san cristobal and a day later i was so much better i couldnt believe it.

and i have plenty of reasons to distrust doctors.  i have my lil set of horror stories.  especially in dealing with /nurses/hospital staff while i am admitted through the er with no insurance…which is why i was at the er in the first place because i couldnt afford to go see a private doctor.

and there are definitely times when i think that doctors are really helpful.  for instance surgery when it is necessary.  and broken bones and xrays.  when i need a knife to cut into my flesh to extract something or set something right … yep a doctor is useful then…

family christmas

1. i come from a traditional black southern christian family.  well really its more like a clan.  from northern south carolina.

its important to know where one comes from.  in order to know where one is going.

and after christmas 2006 i realized that where i came from was seriously messed up.  and where i was going was away.  far away.

2. i was 7 months pregnant.  visiting my family for the holidays.  habibi had stayed in minneapolis to work.

if we build it, we will come

some days i am so grateful to my writer/activist sisters. all over the world. like i have been feeling all over the map lately. a piece of my brain living in the past. a piece in the future. trying to stay here in the present.

and then i realized that i wasnt all over the map, i was here.  it was just that i didnt have a framework for all of these disparate thoughts and so they felt like they were floating in the ether.  when they are actually quite grounded to the earth.

in other words i read this by bfp who was interviewed by womanist musings.  and i so loved her response.  and then i read fabi’s post.  and i went back and read nadia’s latest work.  and i said: okay, we are okay.  here. and now.

my mural of a diamond

from nadia.

1.here, we live on the fifth floor of an apartment building in downtown cairo.  the closest we get to dirt and leaves are the potted plants on the balcony.  so i am end up sinking into blogs lately (do you ever do that just sink into a blog and read it for hours?) that celebrate the earth, green growing things, leaves, trees, etc.  like this blog called: diy winterdreams.

2. recently she had a post on atc’s artist trading cards.  which is a movement/style that i learned about back in 2004 from my friend cami.  and i always meant to join.  somehow.  but i end up getting distracted by life.  so now four and a half years later…i am thinking about trying to take my lil art journal pages and moving them towards atc’s.

even though this one is traded: i love it.  sew.

but this one is available.  somedays it is how i feel. blue tree

and these trees as well: spiral garden

3. this morning i had a dream that i was painting this gorgeous mural on a wall of our apartment.

isolation, communities, and international womens day

1.  i am really excited about the fact that folks are interested in this lil blog dream.  i had kinda thought that no one be interested.  and people would be annoyed that i asked them in the first place.  and i put it out there because i had this dream and then another one and another one and it became obvious that the universe was not going  to let me get a good night sleep until i did.

2. i am hoping to have it up and basically running for international women’s day: march 8th.  but i may not reach that deadline.  there is alot going on in my world right now and i dont want to half-ass any of the projects i am working on.  including the whole being a mother-thing that i do.

3.  this morning i woke up with mary j blige’s version of ‘im going down’ running through my head…

it all started with survival

it kind of all started when the progressive organization i was working with, christian peacemaker teams told me that i could no longer work with them full time because i was going to be a mother.  that if i did work with them part time my healthcare and other benefits would be dropped.

i started to miscarry a couple of days later.

a couple of weeks after that i put in my resignation.

i realized that the reason that i was not of high value as a global activist worker when i chose to become a mother was because in the communities in which we worked, the mothers, especially the mothers of young children were not considered to be very important by global activists.

even though  in that organization, we had claimed to solidarity organizing, stand with the oppressed, and accompaniment of communities under the threat of violence, we focused primarily on the work and leadership of men in the community.  now, most of the local men with whom we worked were fathers of multiple children, often young children.  we barely looked at the leadership of women in the community, not to mention mothers, not to mention mothers of young children.  the assumption was that those mothers would be too busy to deal with issues ‘outside of the home’.  as if the war zone was in the streets, didnt cross the threshold, as if ‘womens work’, the work of caretaking, sustaining lives and community, were less threatened by violence and war than ‘mens work’ and mens lives.

tracing out invisible maps

last night we hung out with my brother and his girlfriend and watched a stoner movie: pineapple express.  aza was asleep upstairs.  the movie was decent, a comedic noir.  in the middle of the movie we somehow got on the topic of my lil family’s impending trip to palestine.  and the fact that the border guards kinda dont trust me.  we ended up stopping the movie and i found myself drawing invisible maps of the middle east on my mother’s leather stool explaining the nakba, the 1967 war, the occupation.

it was post-midnight, we were a couple of drinks in, and his girlfriend keeps asking me questions.  so i keep tracing out a history of genocide and survival into the air.

when i would return from palestine on break, those of us in the organization with which i worked, were expected to to speak to groups of people, to share our experiences with folks in the states.  the organization encouraged us to speak infront of middle class liberal churches who saw us as a ‘voice for the voiceless’ and you know, we as americans have a ‘louder’ voice than the palestinians with whom we worked so we should use that voice to explain the situation in palestine.

i hated doing this.  resisted doing this.  the last thing i needed to do was use my privileged voice to be the palestine ‘expert’ simply because i had spent a smidgen of time in the region.

what i did was spent alot of time hanging out with my friends and my especially my brother’s friends who congregate at our house.  the boys and girls i had grown up with.  kids who had a high school education (if not the diploma), kids who worked shit jobs and hustled in rag tag cars.  i am like the big sister who made it out of our suburban neighborhood.

i really like talking to these kids.  they understand that the media doesnt tell the truth.  that you cant just stay neutral in a fight.  that the us government is shady.  i tell them: people think its muslims vs jews, but its not really, its just that palestinians have territory that israel wants.  so they are trying to get rid of the palestinian people.  and they nod their heads: yeah, thats real.

i tell them: its like living in the ghetto.  you hear someone got shot down the street.  you cant stay in your house all the time living in fear.  you got to get your kids ready for school.  you probably walk with them because you dont want them walking alone when the streets are hot.  so you keep living your life.  you got to go to work, buy groceries.  you probably dont have as much money as you need.  you probably have more family members living with you than you would like.  you dont think like, im living in the ghetto and its dangerous.  you think, what do i got to do today?  when the cops roll by you stay out of the way.  life is life is life.  thats what its like.

imagine me trying to explain this liberal church folks who think hip hop is too violent but really want to see peace in the middle east.

anyways, after his girlfriend exclaimed: hey i get why israel doesnt like you! and we all get another drink, we turn back on the movie and watch a couple of stoners kill a whole bunch of people.  we go to bed.  and i sleep better than i have in weeks.

daughter of a single mom: tough as shit

i have been following hermana, resist since i was preggers.  she has one of those blogs that i always want her to update more often.  like, every couple of weeks is just too long to wait. and i am not much of a commenter (i am getting better at it).

my younger brother and i were raised by a single working class/middle class mom.  she was and is amazing.  not only are we, her children, still alive, but she raised us to think for ourselves, to be politically conscious, to be artistic, creative and to speak up for ourselves.  the whole time we were growing up she always had her 40 plus hour a week job, plus the commute, plus a series of side projects/businesses.  my favorite was the afrocentric jewelry and accessories.  we spent our weekends looking at patterns, visiting african fabric shops, scouring magazines, sewing on a 1970-something blue singer machine, and learning about what it meant to be proud african-americans.

to this day my mom cheers for my creativity.   as long as i am writing, drawing, or creating something she is determined to support it.  she is the first one to remind me that i should be selling what i create.  that it is good.  hell, to quote jean grae, she is cataloguing my shit like she is afeni shakur.  she will read and edit anything i write.  and we still bond over walking through open-air markets, appraising the goods, and figuring out how *we* could do that.

and dont get me wrong, we bump heads often enough.  we are too much alike.  and i am the eldest daughter of a single mother, i grew up  a little too fast. know a little too much. i wont go into the details.  lets just say the details count.

single motherhood is tough as shit.  i am not a single mother.  i was just raised by one.  and if it wasnt for her i wouldnt have the visions that i have of what i want my daughter to learn from me.  what i admire most about my mother is that she insisted on putting energy behind that enormous amount of intelligence and creativity she has.  that she believed and still believes that her creativity is valuable and ought to be invested in.  but then she learned that from her mother, my grandmother, another incredibly intelligent and creative soul.