Gladly Beyond Any Distance

From my inbox this morning…

National Call-In Day for Gaza!
January 16, 2009

We designate Friday, January 16th as National Call-In Day for Gaza. Calling is quick, easy, and effective, and will take about 5-10 minutes. We need to keep the phones ringing non-stop for the duration of the day so that our message CAN NO LONGER BE IGNORED.

Contact in order of importance:

1) Call President-Elect Obama’s Transition Team at 202-540-3000.
Ask that President-Elect Obama and his team call for:
1) An immediate cease-fire.
2) An end to the blockade and siege of Gaza.
3) An immediate withdrawal from Gaza.

Be firm and polite and stress the fact that over a thousand people have died and thousands have been injured in Gaza, mainly civilians. This follows months of suffering under a severe blockade that has resulted in shortages of food, fuel and basic medical supplies. When calling, mention (UN Security Council Resolution 1860 that was adopted last week which calls for an immediate ceasefire and unimpeded humanitarian access.

2) Call your Representative at 202-224-3121. Ask how they voted on House Resolution 34 which passed overwhelmingly in the House last Friday, with 390 Representatives voting yes, 5 no, and 22 present. The resolution “recognizes Israel’s right to defend itself” and “reaffirms the United States’ strong support for Israel.”

If your Representative voted “no” or “present” on H.Res. 34, thank them and ask that they cosponsor Rep. Kucinich’s upcoming resolution.
(See: http://endtheoccupation.org/downloads/KUCINI_001_xml.pdf)

If your representative voted “yes” on H.Res. 34 state your disagreement with their vote and ask them to co-sponsor the Kucinich resolution.

3) Call your Senators at 202-224-3121 and assert your disagreement with their unanimous vote on Senate Resolution 10 and ask that they introduce a resolution in the Senate that is similar to Rep. Kucinich’s resolution in the House.

Please forward this to all your lists and personally contact 10 friends and urge them to make these calls to save lives in Gaza.

Change happens with numbers. That is how Obama became president and that is how we can bring a lasting peace and justice to the Palestinians. As people living in America, we control the discourse and the funding that has resulted in the present massacre in Gaza. Considering the fundamental role that we play in this political situation, our participation is the least we can do.

“The death of children is the death of innocence, and the death of innocence is the downfall of humanity.”
– Emine Erdogan, wife of Turkey’s Prime Minister, 1/10/09

At around six in the morning on the 1st of May 1997, I was on Magdalen Bridge in Oxford, listening as the Magdalen choir sang in the summer, while the sun came up from behind and shone brighter with each clear note. I then walked slowly to the polling station near home, gathering friends along the way, and cast my vote in a historic election: a landslide victory for Labour, a resounding defeat for the Conservatives after eighteen years of Tory rule. I could vote in the national polls because I was a member of the Commonwealth, and in the local elections because I had been resident in Britain for over six months by then. It was a deeply satisfying, if quirky, event for an Indian to participate in: an acknowledgment, if you like, of the crooked and sometimes unexpected pathways of colonisation, the bound histories of coloniser and colonised.

I’ve thought about those elections a great deal in the past few months, and particularly yesterday. Not in the least because much of that process was about the overwhelming support for Tony Blair, amidst Labour slogans of ‘Enough is Enough’ and ‘Britain Deserves Better’. Personality is key to political victories of this kind, and I can only hope that Obama’s course in history will not end up feeling like betrayal, the broken promise of Blair.

There is much to be critiqued, and even more to be analysed, about these American elections. Including the irritating - and dubious - notion of US exceptionalism when it comes to electing a black man as President. As some of us felt last night while watching the results come in, it wasn’t only ‘Yes, We Can’, and ‘Yes, We Did’, though these were powerful thoughts. For the rest of the world, it was also a sense of ‘Yes, About Time You Did’.

But let those analyses be for tomorrow. For today, I was privileged to be part of an extraordinary moment in a nation’s history, even if as visitor not citizen. The weight of that history came home to me not while listening to the somewhat fatuous commentaries of the news anchors, but through the tears of Congressman John Lewis -  a man who was left beaten and bloody on an Alabama bridge forty years ago, as he marched for the right of African Americans to vote. He called it “a wonderful night… a night of thanksgiving,” and I thought to myself about another elections in 1994, when apartheid was dismantled in South Africa, not blow by blow, but vote by vote.

A South African poet, Adam Schwartzman, wrote this poem at that time, and it rings true for first time voters across the world, and for those, like me, who invest in the notion of participation, who spend years, months, days, working and waiting for that opportunity. Lucky to be born as a voting citizen in a complex country, I try not to take that destiny for granted; in my first elections in India, I went to nearly 20 polling stations before I found my name on the rolls (and Yes, It Wasn’t Easy).

However flawed our democracies, however complicated our experiences of citizenship, casting our vote is a moment of arrival, as well as of continued journey: as voters, as citizens, we bear witness to both.

Vote

I could hear our air over the radio, being everywhere
differently, belonging to no man. I cried for you

—you dumb girl—standing in line with the naughty, safe emigrés,
too far from my home and thinking how you might be now—

water in Retief’s Kloof, night on the Malutis,
silence in the suburbs. When I was a boy I

had you. We were growing ready, learning to be blessed
and slightly forgetful for the time we’d grow away.

I’ve waited to do this with you. I saw the very last day
out with one soft cross. It was my first time too.

Adam Schwartzman (from The Good Life. The Dirty Life. and other stories, Carcanet 1995)
London, 26 April 1994

In the present climate of economic uncertainty meltdown, political hypocrisy and understandable social anger, I thought I needed to cheer myself up - and perhaps you, NotSoGentle Reader. The AWID Forum is a platform for feminists - of all shapes, sizes, sexualities, genders and agendas (!) - that is convened every three years. This time it’s mid-November in Cape Town, one of the beautifulest places in the world, inhabited by some of my bestest friends. However, I am not going for the Forum this year; the first time since the 1999 Forum. One reason is that I need to write this doctoral thesis that I have been promising myself - and others - to finish for the last ten years (aaargh). The other is that I do feel, increasingly, that every now and then, one should drop off the conference junket route (not that I’m on a plane every month, but certainly, every year so far in the last ten) to allow younger and newer - one doesn’t preclude the other - people to experience the energies of solidarity. And the AWID Forum is certainly a space for that energy.

I do feel like I’m missing out on something, though - particularly since this year’s Forum is on the power of movements. But then I think to myself that the struggle is fought every day, in the little moments, all over the world. And that power is shared, as I already know, with countless friends across the world. So perhaps then, just an opportunity to muse on the last Forum and a session we conducted there, based on the book - Defending our Dreams: global feminist voices for a new generation - that we launched at the Forum. Defending our Dreams is arguably the first international anthology of young feminist analyses ever; I’m proud of it, but I’m also proud of this session we did, with a bunch of contributors to the volume. And perhaps my reflections on the session go beyond the moment:

Do we really dream differently? It was easy enough to choose the title of our book – Defending our Dreams – once we had found Gabrielle Hosein’s quirky and questioning poem on feminism, but it was very difficult to judge whether a session at the AWID Forum on our dreams would be interesting at all. We shouldn’t have worried. Putting together a panel of extraordinary young women – articulate and honest – is all the recipe we needed. Five of our contributors, Alejandra Scampini (Uruguay), Indigo Williams-Willing (Vietnam/Australia), Salma Maoulidi (Tanzania), Jennifer Plyler (Canada) and Paromita Vohra (India), sat together to discuss what I, as moderator, had thought were banal, obvious questions: What are the dreams we dream – and how are they different, or not, from those dreamt (by feminists) before? What are the strategies we use that might be different? And where to, from here?

The questions may have sounded banal, but the session felt like magic. Like the others, I too struggle to understand why – how the last session of the day, with people coming in tired and overwhelmed, sitting at the edge of their chairs and at the back of the room (so they could exit quietly and quickly if needed), could have created a little oasis of joy, of reflection, of separately articulated dreams that somehow, wonderfully, fused together to be shared by others in the room, listening to them. Perhaps one reason for the magic was the simple truth we had overlooked in our grand theorising – that ‘dreaming’ is a very powerful word. That we so rarely use its power, both for ourselves and for others. That we are so caught up in the banality of the every day, that we forget we begin with a dream, and that somehow, somewhere along the way, that dream changes in shape and form and colour. Sometimes we even forget – in the cynicism of complexity and the routine efforts of struggle – that we had a dream at all, and that it whispers to us every now and then in quiet, unsuspecting moments.

What were the dreams that were shared? That not just ideology, or strategy, is about the personal being political; that our lives begin and end with the struggles of this truth and its reverse – the political is invariably, always, personal. Whether it was about a feminist daring to say that her dream is to be happily married to a wonderful man and have healthy babies, or about another feminist daring to say that perhaps body shape contributes to feminism (are ‘fat’ women more ‘feminist’???). That the struggles have changed in context over the years, but that our feminist histories have never been intimate enough for us to learn enough from them, or to acknowledge them in ways beyond the academic. We asked our older sisters in the audience: why is that we don’t have histories of the movement that tell us about the little struggles? About the jokes at the end of the day, the exhausted camaraderie at the end of a battle, the imperfections and human-ness of the process? Why is it that we feel we look at history as a series of perfect, coordinated responses to situations – when we know that the truth is sometimes painful, sometimes hysterically funny, always messy?

‘Intimacy’ was a word we used a lot. And ‘relationships’. And we came to the shared vision that grand political change is often about shared intimate processes of relational shifts. How we grow to live freely and well with our lovers, our families, our friends, our colleagues – and how they live with us – is often the longest, toughest journey. And that acknowledging that intimacy of change might make our future journeys easier. We ended with an acknowledgement to the wisdom of the past, while dreaming on. We quoted Gloria Steinem: ‘Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning’.

Strange how death gives life to memories. I hadn’t actively thought of Baba Amte for some time, but he died yesterday at the age of 94. Suddenly, a collage of images starts putting itself together. In 1985, Baba Amte got the Magsaysay award, particularly for his work on leprosy. I don’t remember it clearly, of course, but I do remember, three years later, finding that my Hindi teacher was a cousin of his. I think she was surprised that I knew who he was, though my sense is that it had more to do with the news junkie I had begun to be, and less with any self-proclaimed activist zeal at the age of fourteen.

However, some time while I was in college in Delhi (if I’m not wrong; memories are images without accurate recall dates), I remember Baba Amte fasting in one of the first rounds of protest against the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada. I remember going to sit on the margins of the crowd that had gathered outside Rajghat, watching this frail man (he was already into his eighties then) on a charpai, surrounded by those who admired him and who were inspired by him. Also surrounded - as usual - by the ubiquitous hangers-on who had come to see the tamasha, the incongruous sight of a brightly coloured pandal sheltering a sombre non-violent protest from the Delhi sun.

Why was I there? I suppose I was a hanger-on too, of a certain kind. Those years in college were signified by a painful, sometimes self-consciously intense need to find heroes for myself. I didn’t succeed; much. I think I came out of those years wiser, less pained, and able to make fun of myself, thankfully. And equally able to recognise that heroes are - in general - ephemeral souls, that inspiration is cut and paste: heroism and heroes are found in unexpected places. Yet there I was, watching Baba Amte, imagining Gandhi, juxtaposing one frail man against the other, one courage against another, one struggle for freedom against another. Somewhere, somehow, the cut and paste obviously turned into a collage. One that came back to me yesterday.

The Hindu’s obit quotes the Dalai Lama, calling him a man of ‘practical compassion’, but the description I like best is that by Baba Amte himself. In an interview to Graham Turner, he reportedly said:

I don’t want to be a great leader. I want to be a man who goes around with a little oil can and when he sees a breakdown offers his help. To me, the man who does that is greater than any holy man in saffron-colored robes.

The mechanic with the oilcan, that is my ideal in life.

Image from the Ramon Magsaysay Award website.

Monday (January 21st) was Martin Luther King’s birthday; it also happens to be the only public holiday commemorating and celebrating the life of an African American in the USA. It seemed appropriate for CommonDreams.org to publish his speech of ‘independence’ from the war in Vietnam, called ‘Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence’, delivered in April 1967. It speaks to all of us, across the world, as we watch this nation debate wars that affect us, an economy that affects us, and a future President who will affect us. Let’s hope they choose right.

An excerpt:

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. When machines and computers, profit and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look easily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: ” This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from re-ordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are the days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take: offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wombs of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to ad just to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.

We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us re-dedicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

Image from CommonDreams.org

A poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (translated by Agha Shahid Ali), from the site Indian Muslims, via Shivam Vij.

du’aa

aaiye haath uThaayeN ham bhii
ham jinheN rasm-e-du’aa yaad nahiiN
ham jinheN soz-e-muhabbat ke sivaa
ko’ii but, ko’ii Khudaa yaad nahiiN

aaiye arz guzaareN ke nigaar-e-hastii
zehr-e-imroz meN shiiriini-e-fardaa bhar de
voh jinheN taab-garaaN-baarii-e-ayyaam nahiiN
un ki palkoN pe shab-o-roz ko halkaa kar de

jin kii aaNkhoN ko rukh-e-subh ka yaaraa bhii nahiiN
un kii raatoN meN ko’ii shamaa munavvar kar de
jin ke qadmoN ko kisii rah ka sahaara bhii nahiiN
un kii nazroN pe ko’ii raah ujaagar kar de

jinkaa diiN pairavi-e-kazbo-riyaa hai un ko
himmat-e-kufr mile, jurrat-e-tehqiiq mile
jin ke sar muntazir-e-tegh-e-jafaa haiN un ko
dast-e-qaatil ko jhaTak dene ki taufiiq mile

ishq ka sarr-e-nihaaN jaan tapaaN hai jis se
aaj iqraar kareN aur tapish miT jaaye
harf-e-haq dil meiN khaTakta hai jo kaNTe kii tarah
aaj izhaar kareN or khalish miT jaaye

Prayer

Come, let us join our hands in prayer.
We, who can not remember the exact ritual
We, who, except the passion and fire of Love,
do not recall any god, remember no idol.

Let us beseech, that may the Divine Sketcher
mix a sweet future in the present’s poison
For those who can’t bear the burden of time,
the rolling of days on their souls, may He lighten

Those, whose eyes don’t have in their fate, the rosy cheek of dawn
may He set for them some flame alight.
For those, whose steps know no path
may He show their eyes some way in the night.

May those whose faith is following falsehood and pomp
have the courage to deny, the boldness to discover.
May those whose heads wait for the oppressors sword
have the ability to push off the hand of the executioner.

This secret of Love, which has put the soul on fire,
may we express it today and the burning be gone.
This word of Truth that pricks in the core of the heart,
may we say it today and the itching be gone.

Faiz, 14th August 1967

Lisa Rundle wrote a brilliant column recently, reproduced in rabble.ca, called ‘The Feminots‘. She often writes stuff that I wish I’d had the gumption (or the grace) to do myself, and she clearly does it better than I ever could have.

Unashamedly, I quote:

A few weeks ago I was in the middle of a number of unfortunate situations with women, in these cases women older than I am, who identify as feminists but seemed to blithely treat other women like poop. I thought to myself: Ageism! I thought: Sexism! I thought: I’m going to write about these… these, these… feminots!

That was a few weeks ago. I tried the idea on a number of other women, older and younger, and everyone got pretty charged by it. “Yes, yes!” they’d say. “I’ve experienced that. The hypocrisy is infuriating!”

I found myself jotting notes and examples from my own life with fervour. I left myself voicemails while I was out so I wouldn’t forget. I began day-dreaming, tangentially I admit, about the sound-alike feminauts* — flying through space, boldly charting fabulous new feminist territory and wearing lots of shiny things, zapping feminots and hypocrites of all kinds with the light of truth and justice… Sigh.

But mostly I thought about the stark division between the women I know who live their politics, who inspire me and make the world better in so many quiet and unseen, super-local ways simply by the way they treat others, and those whose regular treatment of the women around them fails to live up to feminism’s most basic tenet—that all women deserve fair and respectful treatment. (And would a little appreciation every once in a while be so bad? But I digress again.)

So why is it that so many feminists don’t seem to walk their talk? Heck, those patriarchs walk their talk all the time! I mean, they don’t just walk; they strut, they swagger, they swivel their talk. Sigh…

I’ve decided now to call this phenomenon - inspired by Lisa - the ‘feminitch’. That urge to scratch away at the scabs of un-feminism, to peel away the withered wide-eyed-ness of my youth, those unsuspecting moments of being a feminist groupie… till I discovered backstage.

A friend and I spent a couple of hours the other day, standing outside a women’s shelter, feminitching away till we were bathed in a glow of righteous wrath (and pain). To be fair - both to ourselves and to those feminists we love to hate - we were honest enough to express human frailty, and to acknowledge the ultimate coping mechanism: cut and paste. Take what you will from someone’s her/history and present, admire it, learn from it, and leave the rest be. If you can.

Lisa goes on to say:

Maybe I should retract my new term. Fun as I find it, it might not be as helpful as it could be. Goddess knows I’m sick of the good feminist/bad feminist shtick. (Maybe something a little more open-ended would do the trick? Femiwhaaaat? Feminish…) I don’t want to imply that the poopers who inspired this column are all-round horrible people. Each of us can react in ways we sometimes regret. The trick, I think, is to diligently try to take responsibility for that. To question why we make this or that decision. To find out where the knee-jerk responses come from and to do better next time. To apologize.

Because our politics mean something. And the way feminists behave, particularly toward other women, has a real impact — both on what feminism is perceived to be and how women feel about themselves, which goes on to have a huge impact on this gendered world. As feminists, we need to keep opening conversations and talking about the insidious ways oppressions operate in our workplaces, families and organizations, and that includes our feminist workplaces and organizations.

And they all ain’t feminots. The person who sent me Lisa’s column in the first place was an older feminist whom I admire, respect, and… like. Enormously. As with so many others in my life. Bless ‘em all. They make feminism worth living.

Lisa concludes by saying:

And, for something a little sweeter, let’s take a moment or two to really value all that unseen good work — the truly feminist workplace, the truly feminist counsellor, neighbour, friend, partner, sister. The ones who engage in those crazy ethical struggles, who own up to their mistakes, who are improving the world by the way they try every day. Here’s to you, you wonderful feminists you.

Here’s. To. You.

In my mailbox:

On Thursday March 15th, the environment ministers from the G8, the world’s biggest contributors to climate change, will be meeting in Germany. The outcome of this meeting will play a critical role in determining the world’s response to global warming–and the fate of the planet.

AVAAZ has been invited to attend this meeting to present our climate change petition. Help seize this opportunity to shape the G8’s agenda by signing the petition here:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/climate_action_germany

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Around the time Ashwin and I decided to set up this space (Ashwin with energy and enthusiasm, and I somewhat diffident and uncertain… I mean how self-indulgent can one get, I thought??!), I was sent the link to a raging debate around the (possible) racist implications of the cover to a book edited by Shamillah, Kristy and me: Defending our Dreams. Without going into too much detail about the book - of course you have to read it - it was a wonderful privilege putting together what is possibly the first anthology of its kind. A collection of young feminist writing from across the world, representing a range of issues, with contributors from eleven countries and all the populated continents, including a piece by male feminists (yes, they exist; if you don’t think so… you got it. Read the book.).

Coming back to the debate on rabble.ca, Defending our Cover turned out to be a strangely joyful task: infuriating and inspiring at the same time. Infuriating, because initially it seemed perverse that Southern (read: black, brown and white from South Africa and India) feminists should be defending the cover of their - international - book against a bunch of Northern (read: possibly white) feminists. Inspiring, for exactly the same reason. When I got past the upside-down-ness of it all, I was amazed by the range and depth of the debate around race, racism and its implications. A debate conducted on a bulletin board by a dozen women (of different ages, I suspect): serious, funny, passionate. And I could pop right in with my comments around our interpretations and intentions, including the fact that the cover was inspired by a great self-portrait by Jasmeen, a young woman from Bangalore whose art and activism are beyond doubt. A book that had been created almost entirely virtually (that’s another story) continues a life beyond its covers in exactly the same way: through virtual communities who share its convictions, debate its contents and hopefully, live its ideals in real, tough, worlds.

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