my critique of single mamis…and encuentros…

i am having a lot of issues around access, communication,
expectations, and trans national community building.  so i want to
bring those to the table.

i have been really dealing with this for the past couple of months.
but honestly felt insecure about bringing these to the table.

ok so a few weeks ago i was in this conversation by email.  and i was kind of taken a back by the responses in this email.  mainly because i was speaking about issues i was having accessing communication technology and folks in the us.  you know how so much of our media work is us centered, hell us exclusive, and that marginalizes and excludes me.  since i dont live in the us.  pretty simple right.

the responses were… um… special.  one, silence.  two, hesitation.  three, defensiveness.

then i kind of just dropped the convo because the convo itself was marginalizing and excluding me.  and it was getting pretty exhausting. or more accurately i was having a hard time convincing myself to take the whole convo seriously.  i think it just came to a point.  the point when i was told that i was critical of single mamis.  that i just laughed.  and laughed.  and was like ok.  and trying to think of what to say that wasnt snarky, lol lol, or otherwise pushing up the dada absurdity of the conversation.  like.  yeah, i hate single mamis.  i hate my mother.  i hate all mothers.  whatever.

but the thing about this convo.  is that it was such a classic well intentioned pile on.  like there was one of me.  and then other folks responding to me.  supporting each others vision of what i had said.  misquoting me and then repeating the misquotation.  and me responding to the folk in increasingly long emails- because increasingly more people are coming into the convo each their slightly dift perspective on what is ‘going on’.  and me, trying to explain, why, and how, they have misconstrued my vision through their own lenses.

and in the moment in that convo. it all seems so logical.  that this is the way the convo happens.  no matter how absurd it gets.

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

for little light

i think.  i think we are building a philosophy of radical love.  it is here. it is there. it is in and out.

we are writing a new bible of love and war.

how could i have forgotten this for a second.  of course of course i have read this.

it is this:

Here’s what they’re on about: they live in a world where we are monsters. They live in a world that trembles daily, because we snake our faultlines through its foundations and each time we move more crumbles and falls over the yawning edge of the flattened sea. In their world, once near us, their children can be lost to them, and just seeing us represented fills them with the rage of people struck in the face and deprived of their birthrights.
That world needs to end, and we know it. That world will end, and they know it.

There’s a war on. Either we succeed, and their world ends; or they succeed, and ours does. Does it matter that we want them to go on living in our world, that our world has room for them to build cities and parks and futures? Not really. The very act of not getting to define everything for the rest of us is the end, for them. The fact that none of them would actually die, that their children would be fine and their blood unshed, is irrelevant. We can abhor and condemn violence and torture, and this too is an act of war. We can love them depthlessly as people and wish them no harm, but we cannot avoid the implications. If we are considered equals, their world is over. Our lives are the explosives that end it.

that’s it isnt it little light?  it is not just our lives but it is that we refuse to let them define us.  that is an act of war.  that is the rhetoric that matters to them.  and if they can’t define us they cant own us.  if they cant own us they cant control us.  and if they cant control us then they cant make us monstrous slaves in their system.  and if they dont have slaves to work for their benefit, then the whole system collapses.

What’s (radical) love got to do with it? Everything.

1.i am a mother. and when i first read jess’s piece that was what came to me: my motherhood. and how central my love with my daughter is in my organizing.
and i have followed the ensuing conversation fascinated. wow. there are all these permutations and experiences i hadnt perceived. so thanks to everyone for that. i will be thinking about this conversation for a long time.

when i say ‘radical love’ what i mean is ‘radical caretaking’. caretaking for me is concrete action. taking care of myself. taking care of others. on multiple levels physical, mental, emotional, spiritual.  it is providing space where others can take care of themselves.  where they feel empowered to ask for what they need.  it is  not because i like them (often i dont, hell, there are enough times in the day i dont like my daughter, but i take care of her…does that make sense?) but because they are another human being and they deserve to be whole too.

when i think of radical love. i think of being a birth assistant for working poor african immigrant teenage moms. and loving them. even though i may not particularly like them. not the kind of folks i want hang out with on a saturday aft. but loving them tenderly through an incredibly vulnerable moment of their lives. and that creates a bond between us. and yes they yelled not nice things to me in their final moments of labor. and they resent me because i am a stranger, not their boyfriend, not their mom. but because we have been really vulnerable with each other…the quality of the relationship is…more human(?)

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.

post-revolutionary motherhood

a comment yesterday to my post about ‘the definition of motherhood’ got me thinking about how we define family and love…

Why does motherhood have to be centered when we talk about primary care-taking? I’m an adopted person. I think of the people who raised me as my parents. But why do I have to? Would I love these folks any less, would our relationship be any different, would they love me any less, if we didn’t all play the charade of trying to approximate a biological family? It’s kinda silly really (and not just because I’m black and my a-family is white). I think of my biological mother and father as my parents as well, even though I’ve never met them. They just are. And while I see the good in expanding our definitions of motherhood/parenthood, I also wonder why these are the only terms we get to use when we speak about primary caretakers.

this got me thinking about my resistance to prop 8.  my resistance to the fight for gay marriage, as in marriage that is legally recognized by the state, is that i dont think that any marriage should be acknowledged by the state.  marriage for the most part and by origin is a religious sacrament.  and having the state certify a religious sacrament seems a blending of state and religion that makes me uncomfortable.  why can’t all people simply apply to the state for a civil union (for the legal recognition) and not have ‘marriage’ be under the control of the state?  there are plenty of churches that perform marriages for all types of unions, so every state in the union already has ‘gay marriage’.  so honestly i have never understood the fight.  back when i first came out, it wasnt about marriage, it was about love and sex and attraction and the responsibility we have to be honest about who we are and the responsibility we have to be honest about who we are with.  so rather than fight to make the term ‘marriage’ more inclusive i kinda want to fight to abolish state-sponsored marriage.

i know that the term ‘motherhood’ (like marriage) still brings out some archaic romantic notions that are smell sweet and salty and soft and rugged, bitter and beloved for me.  but when i first got pregnant with aza, i remember thinking: i dont think i am a mother, i will be more like a big sister.  at the age of 27 i still felt weird to be a mother.

but i like the idea of dropping the term ‘mother’.  and rather than expanding our vision of who ‘revolutionary motherhood’ includes, simply embracing ‘revolutionary caretaking’.  perhaps sooner or later we are going to have admit that the institution of motherhood cannot simply be reformed but must be deconstructed and probably discarded.

because caretaking is revolutionary.  actually, i think that caretaking must be apart of our post-revolutionary vision.  as in ok, after the political revolution is over and we have achieved political freedom…then what?  the skills and art of being able to take care of each other, of the earth, of ourselves is primary throughout the process of creating community

it seems to me that de-centering motherhood (especially the ways it centers women’s biological connections or centers the attempts to re-create women’s biological connections to their offspring and partners) is a communal liberation.  honestly, i see that all members of the community need to be able to be and engage in being caretakers.  i see that this is essential to creating community, to care for the members of that community, to be responsible for them, to deconstruct the nuclear family unit…

my mother says that when she was growing up it wasnt just her mother that she was responsible but everyone in the community.  everyone was ‘family’ whether they were genetically connected or not.  she could be praised or punished by any of them.  there were dozens of eyes and ears watching her. which sounds a bit creepy to me (having grown up in suburbia) but also allowed for my grandparents to know their children were safe and loved outside of their purview.

so i am trying to think of more words to describe this vision.  revolutionary caretakers? revolutionary family?   i am not sure yet about the nomenclature.  but lets keep the conversation going…

the definition of motherhood

what does it mean to be a mother?  i am not trying to wax poetic.  i am trying to get a handle on what does ‘mother’ mean as a social category.  i think that we deny the existence of a lot of mothers when we speak and write as if the central determination of who or better yet what is a mother is that she does the primary care for her biological offspring with whom she carried in her womb for 9 months.

i do this too easily.  speak and act as if becoming a mother is about uterus, ovaries, menses, pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, etc.  as if these biological processes define motherhood.  they dont.

at the incite! conference in denver there was a workshop called revolutionary motherhood.  and in it were women who were adoptive parents, godmothers, aunts, folks taking the primary care for their parents, and more.  and i felt this internal twinge, this resistance to calling these women…mothers.

and then i remembered at this conference how it had seemed so clear to me that even though ‘woman’ in comparison to ‘man’ was an oppressed social category, if incite! centered the experiences of women of color  in relation to ‘trans of color’ and marginalized the experiences of transfolk then incite! was being transphobic and oppressive as an organization.

and so if i centered the biologically/primary caregiving-identified mothers as the primary experience of motherhood, then i was marginalizing alot of mothers.  saying that their experiences were not ‘complete’ somehow.  they were ‘kinda like mothers’ but not ‘real mothers’.  and since i was considering some mothers to not be ‘complete’ i considered their lives, their experiences, and their knowledge to be incomplete as well and thus not as important for me to pay attention to.

currently diggin

blogs and websites i am currently diggin.  check them out.

quirky black girls: i am one of the contributers for this blog.  and i am proud of it.  it is part of the quirky black girl movement taking over the internet.

birthing project usa: the underground railroad for new life: a friend just hipped me to this organization/movement and i am amazed that i had never heard of it before.  its been around since 1988 and is focused on improving birth outcomes in african american communities by pairing an expecting mother with a sister who is the mother’s friend and advocate until at least the child’s one year birthday.  they also have a parallel program for expecting fathers.  incredible.

muslimnista: blogging on islamic feminism.  superb analysis.  if for a second you think that being muslim and being feminist cannot occur in the same body, on the same blog, think again.  what i love about this blog, honestly, is that it reminds me of the muslim women i have hung out with around the world.

radical doula: radical doula just sent me some real love in terms of a recent post of hers and i have got to send it back.  frankly, when i began this blog a year and a half ago she was the only other doula blogging about issues like race, sexuality, class, etc. and especially about reproductive justice.  the ways that the pro-life movements rhetoric disempowers women who choose to give birth as well as those who dont.  super-inspiring.

black girl get free: iresha also blogs for quirky black girls and i love her writing.  in her latest post she says:

Not only should Black Women be enlighten, but in order for the survival of their existence, they must embrace all things that the dominant culture sees as inferior and reject societies imposed racial and gender formation of them. The Blackness of Black Women’s beauty, and the culture that is seen as deviant by others, can also be seen as resistance from Black Women….Black is always seem as something “bad”, BUT White is not complex enough to use for Black Women, because Black Women’s beings are too complicated. Darkness is where things cannot be seen and creation has been bought forth. Also, bringing forth a creation is not an independent action but one that is created communally, by Black Women coming together. Its always good to create new things and embrace what our ancestors have left for us to discover their creations. So whomever said that darkness is dull and murky must have never seen the light that Blackness creates.

plus she is also from the va (what! what!) so represent.

mamita mala: mamita is real.  a real poet.  which you know the moment you read her work.  and a real person who blogs about her life as if she has no other choice but to be concrete, passionate, detailed, and self-aware.

revolutionary motherhood: i wrote for this blog as well.  (i did not list every blog i write for…so there…) and i love the women who post here.  the work is diverse, surprising, mama supportive, self-contradictory and authentic.

kameelah writes: she is a photographer.  she loves lists.  she is a public school teacher.  and a hijabi.

so as i was finishing up this post, i realized, hey, there are four sites that are authored by black women, two by latinas, one that is racially diverse, and two that focus on muslim women (which is not a race or ethnicity but is treated as both in the states), and thought…you know what this is what new media is about.

walking through fire

i first read nawal el-saadawi’s writing in hebron, palestine.  the book: the woman at point zero, is about a woman who is on death row for killing her pimp.  the writing is sparse, eerie, precise, breathless, moving, and quick.

and with that book alone she became one of my favorite authors.

i just finished one of her memoir, named: walking through fire.  it follows her through her young adult life and three marriages, her career as a medical doctor and writer, the development of her political engagement.  and her two children.

i am stunned by her life.  it reminds me that so much is possible in this world.  that there are incredible barriers to what we can do and yet, and yet, and yet, there is also a way.  here is a woman living in egypt in the 1950s and 60s (the time in which most of the memoir takes place) who had two divorces in her 20s, had a young daughter and worked as a doctor and writer on the frontlines of various wars in egypt and jordan.  her family was recently middle class and part of her salary went to supporting her parents and her brothers and sisters.

and we think of middle eastern women as being some how other, so much further behind that the west in terms of freedom or possibility.  how many women today in the west feel comfortable being twice divorced by their thirtieth birthday?  how many women would have felt confident doing so in the west in the 1960s?

how did she do all this with a child?

alot of her choices were enabled by the presence of om ibrahim.  when she firsts moves from cairo to a rural village to run the village medical facilities om ibrahim comes to her door and asks to be taken into her home as a servant.

I bestowed the name Dada Om Ibrahim on her and she took over everything, the keys of the house. The care of my baby daughter, the cleaning, washing, and cooking.  I even left my secret diary with her.  I taught her how to read and write, gave her a big wrist-watch and a small notebook in which she used to note down my appointments, and all the running expenses.