conflict and love

here’s the problem.  in a lot of chosen families/liberatory communities. we dont have a way of dealing with conflict.  we just have to assume that we all agree.  and we dont.  i dont.  i wont.  i am standing at a slightly different angle.  i have a different perspective.  especially when we come from different cultures and communicating styles.

but.  communities go in flames often after the honey moon period.  because any conflict doesn’t feel safe.  we haven’t agreed on ways to disagree.

so people shut the fuck up.

i was talking to a friend and she reminded me that there are communities that have been doing what we dream of doing.  supporting each other.  re creating the world.  loving each other.  for centuries.   those communities dont outlive their purpose.

maybe it is so easy for us to leave a community that there is little will to stay and struggle.

maybe the staying and struggling seem so impossible because we havent agreed upon how we will talk to each other.  how we will argue.  how we will make decisions.

i am thinking about bfp’s new commenting policy. what i love about it is that it exists.  it tells us how we are to argue with one another.  hash things out.  critique another’s words.  with respect and love.

i still believe in radical love.  probably more now than ever.  this summer i focused on loving myself, my body, my past, my future.  and i realized to love myself means that i must be vulnerable to myself.  that if i am to be whole.  i must first gather the discarded and forgotten parts of myself.  my stories.  my visions.  my people.

we need to assume that we are going to disagree.  passionately.  and we must decide what is a good way to do so.  that i what i learned.  that all the parts of myself dont agree with each other.  i live with contradictory visions and conflicting folks.

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.

shackling of women during birth in prisons

h/t radical doula

from rh reality check

check out this article on giving birth in shackles.

Last month, a former Washington inmate sued the state for shackling during her birthing process and high-risk pregnancy, treatment that included a leg iron and a metal chain across her stomach.

Also last month, former inmates of Cook County jail filed a federal lawsuit in Illinois challenging the facility’s shackling practice. Illinois was the first state to have legislation that prohibited shackling; it remains one of four states that make shackling explicitly illegal.

“I had no idea women were treated like that anywhere,” said Tina Reynolds, who was shackled during labor and the birth of her son fifteen years ago.

“Shackling is a brutal and inherently unjust practice, so blatantly draconian,” said Malika Saada Saar, executive director of The Rebecca Project (and contributor to RH Reality Check).

“The problem is that policies for incarcerated men are extended to women without adapting to distinct circumstances,” Saada Saar added.

i am really glad to hear that the activists around this issue are framing it as a human rights violation.  that this is cruel and unusual punishment.  and that it is torture.

because that is what it is.  it is a practices that causes physical and psychological trauma to the mother as well as child.  someone in the article described it as ‘draconian’ and i kept imagining these medieval torture chambers.

what i have a hard time imagining is the justification for this practice.  really?  so that the woman doesnt escape incarceration.  something tells me that this was said by someone who has not gotten to experience the glorious miracle of labor.  ummm….in the middle of labor is the woman really going to have the energy to break out of prison?

Leaders in the anti-shackling movement credit the campaign’s momentum to centering the experiences of women who were shackled. Their stories are featured at press conferences, in letters, in briefs, and other campaign vehicles. Many are collected through Women on the Rise Telling HerStory (WORTH), an association of formerly incarcerated women founded by Reynolds.

“It may be possible to resist changes (to the practice of shackling), but when you’re confronted with the reality of women who’ve had to endure this, that’s a hard position to maintain,” said Rhoad.

i was thinking earlier that we dont center the voices and experiences of the marginalized simply because it makes us look good.  no, we (as community builders) do so not only because it is ethical but also because it is effective.

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.

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.

accountability and war

Do you know the PROBLEMS you raise with that baby girl.

When you say that their is no concept BIG ENOUGH,no institution GREAT ENOUGH to sacrifice the well being of one person. That if it hurts ANYONE in anyway that it can not be accountable for . It should be STOPPED.

DO you know what people think of you when you say you are worthy of being that person.

Did you EARN it ? Did you earn the right to believe you could live the way you wanted and SAY OUT LOUD

What do you do when you point out that we don’t earn it.

1. I have read this post several times.  i couldnt take it in.  i couldnt understand why i couldnt take it in.

cognitive dissonance.

this statement goes against everything that i have ever been told in my life.

also, this statement is true.

1. some really amazing beautiful things and people have come into my life recently. it is like once i lift the grey veil, i start to see things in a different light. i will write more about this later. but i just want to say: thank you. thank you. thank you.

2. yesterday we went to an artist workshop/gallery.  it is amazing (i know i use that word alot) to see the kind of creativity being expressed and encouraged.  i fell in love with that space.  and it so inspired me to think through art, writing, movement, and community.

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.

the hours

one of the churches of coptic cairo.  most of coptic cairo, the ancient christian churches of cairo, remind me of my favorite pages in a book called the grammer of the ornament that i carried around with me for a year.

luminescent inside of the church.

this is a lada.  i am in love with this car.  it looks badass and plush. perhaps from yugoslavia.  not that i would drive in this city.  today i was in a cab and had to hold my breath to not warn the cabdriver that he was about to run over someone.  not that he did.  of course not.

cute.  like a skittle.  that you find on the ground and look around to see if anyone is looking and then slip it into your mouth.  i could totally steal this car.

cairo is one of the purest experiences of post modernism and hybridity i have had.  and of serge la touche’s description of the economy of the shipwrecked.  pick up trucks as folk art in the third world.  the middle aged hijabi getting in the passenger door.  and the ancient coptic churches in the background. it is all a strange mismatched world.  nothing stays in its proper place.  i feel like at any moment the ground could shift and buildings could disappear or new ones could emerge.  and everyone would just deal with it.

like this afternoon i was walking down the stairs of the apt building and a worker had set up a large ladder and tools and cement on the fourth floor stairs.  so i had to slip between the ladder and the wall.  without slipping on the water or the cement.  and then a couple of hours later i returned and the ladder and cement had moved to another floor.  and he invited me to walk under the ladder.  and up the stairs.

and i said ‘excuse me’ to him.

baptism and funerals

lets jump in…

i guess i could feign surprise.  but i am not surprised.  this is what israel does.

i guess i could pretend to see both sides of the issue, and weigh them, but i dont see both sides.  i dont give a fuck about israeli justification for this shit. and fuck the arab governments as well.  you use palestine as an exclamation point in useless speeches and then sign off on palestinian genocide.

i am betting that the death toll will end up between 400-500 gazans.  they are still pulling bodies out of rubble.  and the hospitals are turning folks away because they are over run by the dead and the dying.

i dont want to look at it from the perspective of a mother today.  if you have a child you can understand why.  its easier to be a political scientist, a socio-economic analyst, a brain and not a soul.

the day after christmas we went to a sweet baptism of my nephew in a vintage americana barn.  the phrase that keeps reverberating in my head: we arent saved by what we do, we are saved because of what we do.  in other words: we are not saved by works alone, but we ask for gods salvation because of all of the things we have done in the past.

but i dont believe that one is saved by works or faith.  i dont believe that jesus has anything to do with this.  or this. or this.  if there is anything worth believing in it is the fact that gazans that palestinians that all those who have suffered still reach for life.

today anyone who believes in god has to admit that god is not as compassionate as many human beings.  if there is a god today we have to admit that he has become powerless and she has become barren.

what the fuck does it matter if when you die you will go to heaven or hell, when today is hell?  what the fuck will works or faith save you from?

one day i was watching a baptism, the next day funerals.

i am not a superhero.  it is difficult to be packing up my apartment to leave for palestine as i listen in the background to the news of israeli massacre of palestinians in gaza.  i have never been to gaza.  in the west bank, what happens in gaza i watch on al jazeera and the bbc just like everyone else.  it feels like another part of the world, even though it is less than a 100 miles away.

today i pray for the mothers in gaza.  and their children.