so i finally crossed the 50,000 word mark on the novel for national novel writing month.  exciting.  aza is still cheering for me.  although i dont think that she knows what she is cheering for.  she has though, told me several times this morning that i am awesome and beautiful.

so happy to have finished this on the morning of eid.

the novel isnt finished.  i mean the story isnt over.  i just finally reached 50,000 words.  fucking awesome. but i have more to do to actually have a completed rough draft.

it is a fascinating to write a novel so quickly.  i gave up on all pretenses to grammer, spelling, constructions, etc.

i fell in love with write or die.  it pushed me to write off the top of my brain and trust the movie that was running across my head and just write down what i saw.

Abortion is illegal in Egypt unless the woman’s life is in imminent danger. Damage to the fetus is not accepted as a reason for abortion, a legal position emphasised by a recent fatwa that says that “it is impermissible for the mother to induce abortion [even] if it is proven that the fetus is deformed or suffers from mental retardation … It is not a justifiable excuse”. Nevertheless, women regularly find ways to end unwanted pregnancies. A 1996 study among 1,300 Egyptian women by the Cairo Demographic Centre found that one-third had attempted to terminate a pregnancy. Other studies suggest that about one-third of abortions are carried out without medical supervision, with women trying traditional remedies or overdoses of aspirin or quinine, at a risk to their own lives. Many foreign-trained Egyptian gynaecologists now offer abortions in private clinics, although these relatively safe procedures, costing as high as US$460, are not affordable for most women. Although a physician who performs an abortion could face three years in prison, the financial gains often outweigh the risks. For US$150 many doctors or midwives will perform abortions but sometimes in far less sanitary conditions or with outdated methods.

1.hey just a reminder about the call for submissions for the quirky black girls zine! deadline december 15th.

To love a black girl is a radical act. In a society that says black girls are ugly, useless, laughable, difficult and expendable loving ourselves and loving each other is revolutionary, dangerous, a delicious risk. On the heels of yet another study about how black girls are ohso hopelessly lonely and unwanted we want to think about how we as black girls can critique the images, the stereotypes, the one dimensional representation of black women in the mainstream media. How do we create a vibrant black girl loving culture in the face of that mis- representation? As black girls who love black girls and the brilliant universe transforming potential that we represent we are creating an online zine that we really see as a big ‘ol collaborative love letter to black girls from black girls. We are seeking collages, poems, letters, comix, images, short essays, games, worksheets, puzzles, playlists and shout outs that respond to the following questions:

What do you want to say to black girls? What do you wish someone said to you when you were younger?

see the entire call for submissions here

hi there!

this is my call for submissions to the second volume of revolutionary motherhood: outlaw midwives zine.  i am really excited about this project.  and i hope that all of you are able to participate.  i am envisioning this as a guide for birth workers and mothers, especially working class and mothers of color, on conception, pregnancy, birth, and the baby year.  for us by us.
i am looking for everything from a couple of practical tips in a couple of sentences, to stories, to drawings and photos, lists, and more…

outlaw midwives zine

focusing on pregnancy, birth, and the baby year

for and by: mothers, friends and allies of mothers, doulas, midwives, birthworkers, childbirth educators, childbirth advocates,

intention: to create a practical zine guide for pregnancy, birth, and the first year of motherhood centering the lives of working class, marginalized mothers and birthworkers.

check out the outlaw midwives manifesta and website: http://outlawmidwife.wordpress.com/

outlaw midwives: creating revolutionary communities of love

some suggestions for topics on which you can submit…but these are just suggestions…

conception. suggestions for those trying to conceive.  and for not conceiving.

pregnancy. tips for the first, second, third trimester.  relationship with doctors, clinic, midwives, family, friends, etc. what advice would you give a woman who is having an unassisted pregnancy (a pregancy that does not involve professional medical folk or midwives…)   what should a woman be looking out for to know if something is ‘wrong’ during her pregnancy?
birth. stories and advice for unassisted birth (birth without medical folk or midwives). homebirth, hospital births.  what are the social, economic, legal consequences and limitations for marginalized mothers to make choices about how, when and where they will give birth.    what to do with the placenta?

what was your personal experience/story of birth? pregnancy, the baby year?
what did you learn/are you learning from the baby year?

what would you want to tell a soon to be mother about pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood?  or write a letter to your pre-mother or pre-pregnant self about what you should expect.   what didnt you expect to happen/learn/experience in pregnancy, birth, the baby year?  write a letter to you daughter and/or son about what you learned/want to pass on about pregnancy, birth, baby year.

what do you wish someone had told you about early motherhood and/or being a birth worker?
what do you wish you could have said to someone, but didnt?
what is your vision/ideal of how pregnancy, birth, baby year could be?
what has been most difficult for you?

how have you navigated through the systems of welfare, prrotective child services, hospitals, etc?

what family/traditional wisdom did you receive about pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding?

breastfeeding vs. bottle.  what are the social and economic influences and consequences of the choice to breastfeed or bottle feed?

why did you become a birth worker?  what has been the highlights of the experience? what have been the difficulties?
practical tips for a birth worker, doula, midwife, and birth partners.
herbs, physical exercises, nutrition, rest, employment, healing, reading suggestions, breathing, difficult conversations,
photos, drawings, visual art
poems, essays, fiction and non-fiction
tips, suggestions, lists of resources

keep it simple

deadline february 14, 2010

send submissions to primitivedragonfly@yahoo.com
or leave it in the comment box below
please this pass this on to whomever you think would be interested…

peace and love
mai’a

when i was a kid i loved the great brain books. so when the great brain was the reference that this blogger used to make her point, i was so happy.

The excerpt I’m providing is after Abie Hoffman has died, and Tom’s family are coming to terms with the gruesome fact that Abie starved to death–that he died among, yet tragically apart from, those who called him friend:

“What has that got to do with letting Abie starve to death because he was a Jew?” Uncle Mark demanded. “Abie was my friend and your friend and had all kinds of friends. He knew all he had to do was to ask and we would have given him anything he wanted.”

“But he would have had to ask,” Papa said.

“I just don’t get what you’re driving at,” Uncle Mark said, shaking his head.

“Let me put it this way,” Papa said. “It isn’t that we dislike the Jews or mean to be unkind to them. It is just that we don’t worry about them the way we worry about other people. I talked to Mr. Thompson at the meat market. He knew Abie had stopped buying meat from him weeks ago, but he didn’t worry about it. I talked to Mr. Harmon at the Z.C.M.I. store. He knew Abie had stopped buying groceries from him, but he didn’t worry about it. Oh, they had their excuses, saying they had thought Abie had stopped batching and was eating in cafes. But the fact remains we let a man starve to death because nobody worried about a Jew.”

“I don’t buy that,” Uncle Mark said.

“Let us assume,” Papa said patiently, “that Dave Teller, who is a bachelor and cooks his own meals, suddenly stopped buying meat from Mr. Thompson. You can bet Mr. Thompson would have made it his business to find out why. And let us assume that Dave Teller suddenly stopped buying groceries from the Z.C.M.I. store. You can bet Mr. Harmon would have worried enough about it to find out why. And let us assume they found out Dave Teller was broke. You can bet they wouldn’t have let Dave Teller starve to death. And if Dave Teller had fainted three times, you can bet the people in this town would have insisted on taking Dave to a doctor whether he wanted to go or not. But Abie was a Jew and so nobody worried about him. May God forgive us all.”

“I see what you’re getting at now,” Uncle Mark said. “We are all guilty.”

it has me thinking a lot about what community is.  and what it isnt.  i mean who was abie in that community?  he was a part of the community.  and yet not really. not enough.

i have been on both sides of this equation.  i have been abie, the one that no one worried about, checked up on.  and i have been the butcher. seeing all the signs but not caring enough to check up on someone.

–community is about survival.

–saying: all you have to do is ask.  is often not enough.

in almost every community i have ever been in.  i have been on the margins.  i remember when i was a trainer we had this exercise to explain that in every group there is–the center–and –the margins–

i hated this exercise.  because the organizations take on the group dynamics. is that the center and the margin each play an essential role in the group.  and so we should be appreciative of each others roles.

what was not emphasized, or mentioned, was that the center had much more influence and power to make decisions than the margins.  and that in our organizations and in most org’s you dont get to choose if you are in the center and the margins.  the organization presented these concepts as if it was a difference in personalities.  between being rebellious and being stable and preservation-oriented.  and while this seemed pretty true with the white, male, middle class, traditionally christian, etc folks.  the further that your identity was marginalized in the greater society, the more likely that one was going to find oneself on the margins in this progressive social justice organization.

and then of course one was labeled with being ‘rebellious’.

folks think that i must love being on the margin.  i must love being stigmatized and diminished with terms like ‘rebellious’ and ‘different perspective/vision’ and ‘creative’ all the other euphemisms.

sometimes i just make it all into a joke. laugh it off. this is easiest when it doesnt effect something fundamental about my life.

sometimes i just bite my lip.  and feel the water in my eyes stinging.  and keep walking forward.  cause i cant let them see how much they are breaking me.

i think a lot about colorism.  but i dont write about it much.  it is a tense topic among people of color.  not that ive seen it cause a lot of arguments among poc.  but a lot of silence.  and a lot of diminishment of the power of colorism.  its a bit silencing.

i have never been to a majority brown and black folk country, aka third world, in which there were not major social issues around colorism.  especially for women.  since women’s social power is so tied to their physical attractiveness.

i would love to have conversations about colorism/hueism among woc-light and dark.  i would love to hear woc who are light say that light skin is a privilege. a complicated privilege, yes.  but a privilege all the same.  that has economic, social, and political consequences on an everyday level.

Testing Perceptions

He and his colleagues took different photos of then-candidate Obama and digitally manipulated them to alter just the areas of exposed skin. “So we sort of isolated the head and the hands of Obama and altered the skin tone to make it relatively lighter in tone or relatively darker in tone,” Caruso says.

The research team then showed the altered photos, plus the unaltered ones, one at a time to undergraduate students and asked them to rate the photos in terms of how representative they thought each photo was of the candidate. They researchers also questioned the students about their political views.

Liberal participants were most likely to rate a lightened photo of Obama as being most representative of him, while conservatives were most likely to say that about a photo that had been darkened, according to their findings published in a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Perceived Lightness Tied To Votes

What’s more, the researchers found that the degree to which someone saw a lightened photo as being representative of Obama was related to whether he voted for him a week later.

That was true even after the researchers controlled for political views and measures of bias against blacks, says Caruso. “Assuming that people had equal levels of political conservativism,” he says, “the extent to which  you rated the lightened photos as more representative was, over and above your ideology, also predictive of your voting intentions and your voting behavior.”

The researchers also showed students digitally lightened and darkened photos of John McCain but did not find that political affiliation affected people’s ratings of the photos.

because lets be honest.  at a really  basic level. like employment opportunities, housing accessibility, and other basic day to day issues.  being a dark skinned woman is something i am not allowed to forget for too long. i cant diminish my own darkness.  and the associations that people bring to my darkness.

Caruso also says he recently has been looking to see if skin tone can affect people’s level of support for a novel biracial candidate when people’s political affiliation with that candidate is ambiguous.

In one new study, his team used altered photos of a person described in the experiment as a candidate for a position with the Department of Education. People were shown either a darkened, lightened or unaltered photo of the fake candidate and then asked a few questions about their views on various issues facing the department.

All participants were told that the candidate agreed with them on half of the issues. But when asked if that candidate would get their support, says Caruso, “lo and behold, those who saw a photo with darkened skin accompanying the candidate’s biography just a few minutes earlier reported that they were less likely to vote for this candidate.”

what i find interesting about this article from the new york times is that the expulsion of jews from jerusalem acts as a central origin myth not only in popular jewish culture, but also in the founding documents of the state israel. how in this contemporary age one of the most entrenched and politically significant conflicts/occupations is in part based upon an inaccurate myth.  the power of the ‘origin myth’.

what are the origin myths that i tell myself?  origins of africa, middle passage, slavery, underground railroad, redemption songs.  how accurate or comprehensive is that myth?

who doesnt it include?  my native ancestry?  my white ancestry?  why not?

and why do i tell my story this way?  is it not just as accurate to say that i come from the stars?  i come from a womb?  i come from lucy?

The Israeli Declaration of Independence states: “After being forcibly exiled from their Land, the People kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it.”

………………………….

also how conversion actually played a huge role in the maintaining and re creating the jewish culture/folk.  have been thinking a lot about marge piercey’s book that i read this summer.  woman out of time.  and how in the future, one’s culture was not based on genetics, but on the culture that you felt called to participate/be a member of.  so then culture identification was not linked with skin color, hair texture, and other physical characteristics.  it seems to me that this has been the way of maintaining cultures throughout histories much more than i have thought.  what does it mean to be trans-cultural?  can we convert/revert from one culture to another? and what is the difference between a respectful conversion and the many oppressive forms of cultural appropriation?

Despite the fragmented and incomplete historical record, experts pretty much agree that some popular beliefs about Jewish history simply don’t hold up: there was no sudden expulsion of all Jews from Jerusalem in A.D. 70, for instance. What’s more, modern Jews owe their ancestry as much to converts from the first millennium and early Middle Ages as to the Jews of antiquity.

Other theories, like the notion that many of today’s Palestinians can legitimately claim to be descended from the ancient Jews, are familiar and serious subjects of study, even if no definitive answer yet exists.

………….

and how political power is highly invested in what origin myths we believe about ourselves…

Consider, for instance, Professor Sand’s assertion that Palestinian Arab villagers are descended from the original Jewish farmers. Nearly a century ago, early Zionists and Arab nationalists touted the blood relationship as the basis of a potential alliance in their respective struggles for independence. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Israel’s longest-serving president, made this very argument in a book they wrote together in 1918. The next year, Emir Feisal, who organized the Arab revolt against the Ottoman empire and tried to create a united Arab nation, signed a cooperation agreement with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann that declared the two were “mindful of the racial kinship and ancient bonds existing between the Arabs and the Jewish people.”

what is the political power of my origin myth?  and in whose interests is my origin myth?

this is such a strong poem by kameelah…

part III–statue of limitation (november 22, 2009)

if you are raped on monday
best to heal on tuesday
suture the wounds on wednesday
you best be better by thursday
tell the authorities before friday
because on saturday, it never happened

 

# aza has developed an interesting syncretic language of egyptian arabic, english, and french.  she says things like: come henna! (come here)  i want di.  (i want this)  you button you.  (button your shirt).

# i am reading the journals of sylvia plath.  i love her poems.  and reading her journals. her language is so interior and rich.  reading sylvia always brings me to reminding me that writing poetry is about being able to share what is most intimate to you in language.

poppies in october

“A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky”

# which makes me think that in an increasingly post literate, poetry is becoming more and not less relevant.  it seems to me that as the written word becomes less necessary as a means to conveying information.  poetry, which does not covey information primarily, but experience of intimacy.  poetry that is a form created to be spoken and then those folk poems – such as the odyssey- were transcribed.  poetry that focuses on saying the unsayable.  naming the unnameable.  on truth.  poetry that focuses on language as launguage and also on something beyond or before language.

poetry that attempts to say what it says with no clutter.

poetry is what i read when i am in a hurry.

# am thinking a lot about radical women of color and spirtuality and art.  how does our spiritual beliefs/practices influence our actions and our creative expressions?  what is the relationship between our words, our poetry, our politics, and our spirituality?

great article on rastafari and third world feminism.  the incredible historical connections between the nyabingi movement in uganda, the mau mau, ethiopia, caribean rastafari, and the greenbelt movement.  a history of the power of african women fighting for personal, communal, and national liberations.

 

Rastafari is not being treated here as a millenarian or religion phenomenon [Bakan 1990:16, Campbell 1987] but rather as wayof life which emerged when peasants were faced with land seizures and forced into cities, especially in Jamaica in the period since 1930, but also in Africa since the turn of the century. Today rasta is the expression of indigenous people fighting for their rights. It is a global cultural practice, an expression in particular of black people and especially of black women…

New Rastafari came from the old male-identified Rastafari and its antecedents in the jubilee of emancipation from slavery. It came from radical religious movements in Jamaica in the 1800s, from Ethiopianism, Garveyism, pan-Africanism, struggles of ‘the sufferers,’ and from nationalist insurgency in Africa and Caribbean. It has emerged both from and against these antecedents. The new Rastafari has come from a global fightback against IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs (SAP) especially by women because SAP hits women so hard [Antrobus 1989:26]. It has come from media globalism and the music so purveyed, from international feminisms, including the excavation of the history of women’s militancy and centrality to each phase of capitalist expansion and the struggles characteristic of that phase [Mohanty et al 1991]. In sum, new forces have adapted and transformed Rastafari into a still more potent world movement.

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The Nyabingi movement, influential in southwestern Uganda from 1850 to 1950, was centred around a woman healer, Muhumusa, who was possessed by the spirit of Nyabingi, a legendary “Amazon Queen.” Muhumusa organized armed resistance against German colonialists and subsequently detained by the British in Kampala, Uganda from 1913 to her death in 1945. The spirit of Nyabingi possessed mostly women, but also men, who led uprisings against the British in 1916, 1919 and 1928 among the Kiga in Kigezi, along Uganda’s borders with Congo and Ruanda. British occupation involved imposing foreign
African Ganda intermediaries on the egalitarian, patrilocal Kiga agriculturalists. The Ganda’s exactions of land, labour, food and money for poll tax galvanized the Nyabingi movement to rebel both against European and Ganda men and win major concessions. Nyabingi was a woman-led movement against oppression of all the community but  specifically of women who did the farming and food preparation and hence were directly affected by colonial demands.

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Jamaica’s leftist paper Plain Talk, in February 1937, printed an article which claimed that “the blacks are flocking to the standard of an organisation which dwarfs all similar federations.” The organization was ‘Nya-Binghi,’led by Emperor Haile Selassi [Post 1978: 173].” Thereafter some Rasta began to call themselves Nyabingi or ‘Nya-men,’ while Rasta forums of solidarity and the drums played at them were also called Nyabingi [Campbell 1987:160].  Jamaican rasta may have believed that the spirit of Nyabingi possessed Selassi and strengthened his fight against the Babylon of Mussolini’s fascism. But the women-centred character of Nyabingi in East Africa was lost in the transfer.

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There was a resurgence of rastafari in the 1950s with the bauxite enclosures. After the war US and Canadian capital eclipsed British capital. Alcan, Reynolds, Kaiser Bauxite, Alpart, Revere and Alcoa made Jamaica the world’s largest producer of bauxite. The bauxite industry displaced thousands from rural areas and intensified unemployment. “Most of the land was purchased from small farmers, to the point where the activities of the transnationals displaced 560,000 rural Jamaicans from the countryside between 1943 and 1970 [NACLA Jan-Feb. 1981:2-8 cited in Campbell 1987:86]. Some 163,000 Jamaicans
migrated to the UK and an equal number to the US and Canada between 1950 and 1968. While men went from the Caribbean abroad, women went from the countryside to the city. Jamaican rural women brought the core ideas of Rastafari with them to the urban slums. The rasta upsurge, in addition to being a grassroots male class expression, was a women’s rural survival network built on the organizations of Ethiopianism, Bedward and Garvey. The beginnings of the new Rastafari was a woman-identified, revolutionary peasant ideology shaped to serve new urban demands.

In the 1953 Kenya’s Mau Mau revolt was covered in the world media with newsreels showing dreadlocked forest fighters. Jamaican rasta adopted dreadlocks.

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Mau Mau started in 1948 when women at Olenguruone agricultural settlement scheme went on strike. African women refused to participate in this terracing of the land to prevent erosion unless they first received title to the land. Their strike galvanized urban support from unions. Colonial reactions included repression which escalated until in 1952 the British imposed a state of emergency and launched the anti-Mau Mau war.

Women fought for land in many capacities within Mau Mau. Freedom fighters in the forests included women. Invariably a woman ‘Seer’ of the future worked directly with platoon commanders. Kimathi, the forest fighters’ general, recommended the admission of literate women into the forest fighting force. Other women joined Mau Mau fighters to avoid being sold off by their fathers as wives to pro-British ‘homeguards’ or ‘loyalists.’ Women in squatter villages on European estates provided intelligence, runners, food, refuge, medical supplies and care, and at crucial seasons, refused to pick tea and coffee. Similarly women on the ‘native reserves’ were an integral part of the Mau Mau military wing. In the cities prostitutes used their establishments as safe houses, and provided the Mau Mau Land and Freedom Army with money, intelligence and arms. Women traders used the railroad and markets as networks of communication. The British, recognizing that success in counterinsurgency depended on cutting the link between villages and forest fighters,
razed hundreds of communities and imprisoned women with their children in concentration camps. In Githunguri, the most repressive prison, women were divided into four categories depending on their degree of defiance. Most militant were the ‘hardcore’ women who were detailed to bury the bodies of freedom fighters hung by the British. Women in concentration camps were pressed into forced labour gangs.

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In the face of this tremendous defeat, Mau Mau women went underground. They kept alive their knowledge, networks and claim to the commons through indigenous women’s groups, story telling and songs [Macgoye 1986, 1987]. Women persisted throughout the 1960s in seizing land, especially from farms formerly owned by white settlers. As landlessness increased, poor women were unable to find husbands through whom they could get access to land, and they migrated to the cities to work as domestics and within the expanding ‘unrecorded economy.’ Through selling food, domestic services, sex, changa (alcohol) and
ganga the Mau Mau women bided their time and struggled to educate their children.

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The Greenbelt Movement is an internationalist, grassroots network of women which includes people described here as the new rastafari. It brings together women in several African countries not only to plant trees but to defend the land on which they grow. Led by Kenyan physicist and feminist, Wangari Mathai, the movement carries forward the ecology politics of Olengurone women who insisted on title to land before they would reclaim it. Direct action such as uprooting coffee trees, combines with a compelling spiritualist philosophy to make the Greenbelt Movement a vehicle for women’s defence of the environment and their rights to resources. As such it constitutes one of the more startling responses to the dislocations of SAP.

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The new rasta of East Africa consists of dozens of autonomous groups which above all provide for survival. They combine study, artistic creation, childcare, economic activities, community service and politics. These are part of a larger and older rasta network with links to London, Lagos, Caribbean and elsewhere. In Nairobi feminist rasta women work as maids, vegetable sellers, traders, seamstresses and prostitutes. They are influenced by Christianity, the indigenous Kikuyu religion and many strands of spiritualism. Political reggae is of central importance. Marley’s lyrics and those of other artists are studied carefully in Saturday afternoon ‘reasonings’ in slum yards. Marley’s teachings are virtual primers for those seeking to develop their capacity to speak English. While extreme repression prevents the display of any rasta symbolism or the Garveyite colours of red, gold and green; phrases such as “beat down babylon ghetto child,” may be seen traced in the dust on a city bus.

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the new rasta includes detailed philosophies and practices founded in the defense of land, markets and women’s autonomy.

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