Gladly Beyond Any Distance

So Black Mamba tagged me the other day:

Post 5 links to 5 of your previously written posts. The posts have to relate to the 5 key words given (family, friend, yourself, your love, anything you like). Tag 5 other friends to do this meme. Try to tag at least 2 new acquaintances (if not, your current blog buddies will do) so that you get to know them each a little bit better.

I was determined to do this, not only because I like Black Mamba (and I do), but because I had to prove Tabula Rasa wrong; he said BM wouldn’t get a cheep out of me (this childish tit-a-tat has, in fact, gone on since we were about ten. I love it.).

Result: near failure. Not because of my lack of output - though it certainly could be a lot more consistent than it is now - but because I rarely seem to write about anything other than politics and the big bad world outside. Of course, there’s a lot of me in there - the personal is political and vice-versa - but not in ways that are necessarily familiar or familial. sigh. Looking back, I think it was because I was determined, when I started out, not to make this a blog of the kind that led the blog-o-boom: the vicarious exploration of other people’s private lives and lesions. Frankly, I found that sort of blogging both terrifying and self-indulgent. I also felt I had nothing to offer of value online, that could remotely interest a set of unknown readers. Ashwin persuaded me otherwise; a lot of his argument had to do with the description of the blogging community he comes from: the techies. Clearly there was a space for blogging about one’s interests, one’s passions, rather than about oneself.

I realise now that I have - somewhere along the way - gone to the other extreme of the pendulum and am dangling hopelessly from an oblique position of self-denial. I find that many of the blogsters I read, write about themselves and theirs with humour and insight. I kid you not: I *like* reading them! If I don’t see these blogs as self-indulgent, is there possibly space for me to sneak back in a bit of me and mine into this blog? Black Mamba, you didn’t think you’d lead to an orgy of reflexivity now, did ya??

With this long preamble, here’s my meagre offering for the tag.

Family: A bit of a stretch, but to my extended family in Raichur. Also a cheeky aside to my pun-tashtic family (not really a post at all, but wothehell, I love xkcd).

Friend: about a friend in Gujarat, and her struggles with fundamentalisms.

Yourself: a post about ‘being an action hero‘. Also my previous stab at being tagged.

Your love: music and poetry. Unsurprisingly, a post about Gangubai Hangal that conveys both my awe-struck admiration and her comments on caste. And a tribute to Kaifi Azmi.

Anything you like: a whimsical post on Durga Puja and JK Rowling. And a diatribe against the news in India today.

…and I tag those I haven’t tagged before: Anindita (in the spirit of disclosure and familial-ity, my gorgeous sis-in-law who normally tags _me_), Mangs, Lalit and (relatively new) blog buddies: Pranav and Suzanna (whose blog I promised some time ago I would explore, and this is a great way to begin!).

Farida Shaheed, one of the founders of Shirkat Gah (a women’s resource centre in Pakistan) and WLUML (the network for women living under Muslim laws), wrote in from Pakistan. With her consent, I share this. It seems clear that despite her shortcomings, Benazir represented a hope for Pakistan that has been horrifically snuffed out.

Dear friends thank you for all your notes of concern,

As a new year starts, I sit here still numbed by the events, paralysed by the events that seem to have shut down our ability to think and act, unable to concentrate (like many others).

Only after her assassination have we come to realize just how many of our hopes were pinned on Benazir, her presence and leadership of the only mainstream party that consistently speaks of the federation, of the poor, the peasants, the workers; spoke of equality for all, especially the minorities and women. The one party with supporters until now across a deeply divided and troubled country, who gave us hope that, maybe – just maybe we could turn this nightmare around, if elections were held and if they were not entirely rigged, and if we received some breathing space…so many if’s and still we dared to hope.

I met Asma [Jahangir] on the 29th and thanked her for having inviting Benazir that night last month as soon as they lifted the house arrest on Asma and Benazir both. Asma said ‘but no, I didn’t call the meeting. Perhaps she was meant to meet us all that last time because it was she who phoned and asked for a meeting with civil society’…A meeting we were pleasantly surprised at, that left us commenting on how much she had matured. She listened to all of us with great patience and grace, answered with patience and good cheer, even some of the sillier points made/questions asked. She reserved her fire for a short passionate intervention on how the fight with the extremists was our own fight not someone else’s agenda and on how precarious Pakistan’s situation was, and how it was time to act.

And yes, it was important that she was a woman, a woman of great courage of defiance and of passion who led from the front foot (as they say in cricket). I am old enough to remember the day she became Prime Minister in 1988 and how immediately – and I do mean immediately – after eleven years of brutal and increasing oppression of women (and others) under Zia, the atmosphere shifted the sense of oppression in the streets lifted and women felt the burden lighten. And if she didn’t always deliver (and often she didn’t), as peasants said of her father, at least she made us the promises, and gave us hope.

Right now, it is difficult to foresee the future, whether and when elections will take place – what will happen during Muharram and ashura, around the corner, when nerves are ragged anyway and the menace of potential violence lurks.

We can only hope that some sense prevails somewhere, that elections are held as quickly as possible and that we find a way out of this spiral descending to madness…

Farida

Image from the Wikipedia entry on Benazir Bhutto.

Last month, I sent this piece around by email, by facebook, by almost every method of communication, but not by blog post, strangely enough. However, it is well worth having up for transient posterity on these pages; to those who might be interested, this is an extraordinary and powerful challenge to the editors of the recently published Norton Reader on Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism, an ambitious work seeking to ‘trace the historical evolution of feminist writing about literature in English from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century’.

Pius Adesanmi asks the editors why - in an edited volume spanning over 100 contributors - they did not see fit to include an article by an African feminist theorist:

It is your awareness of these things that makes your excision of African feminist theories and theorists from your volume all the more alarming. Could it be that you imagined that the voices of the African American women you selected adequately speak for those of their continental sisters? Possibly. If this is the case, I must tell you that African American women cannot be made to stand in and speak for continental African women. According to an African proverb, the monkey and the gorilla may claim oneness, monkey is monkey and gorilla gorilla. Perhaps you imagined that African women would be better served to find some space inside the Third World/postcolonial/transnational feminist umbrella you represented with the voices of Gayatri Spivak and Chandra Mohanty? Possibly. Could it be that you are simply unaware of the considerable body of African feminist intellection, right there in your back of the wood in the US academy? Possibly. Could it be that you just simply elected to disappear them like you disappeared me? Possibly.

I think his challenge goes beyond that of acknowledging the critical presence of African feminist thought - though that is clearly the immediate provocation - and pushes us all to think about issues of inclusion, exclusion and legitimacy in academic circles. Important indeed.

Dumbledore is gay.

Coincidentally, this post is about the not-so-noble laureate James Watson, widely known, along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, for the double-helix model of DNA, for which they won the Nobel in 1962.

The Indian Express runs an article saying that Dr Watson has been suspended from his New York based scientific laboratory for allegedly saying, in a Sunday Times interview on October 14, that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.” Reuters also reported that he has cut short his book tour - for Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science (how apt) - and returned home to the United States.

While there has been understandable furore over his remarks, his own apology in a statement he issued at the Royal Society on Thursday, adds to the utter ridiculousness of his previous comment, though he does say it has no scientific basis: “To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly [...] That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief.”

His scientific peers are horrified. The trustees of his lab have said they “vehemently disagree with these statements and are bewildered and saddened if he indeed made such comments” while Robert Sternberg, a prominent researcher on race and IQ at Tufts University, called Watson’s statement “racist and most regrettable.”

In the Chicago Tribune, Sternberg, a critic of traditional intelligence testing, comments that intelligence can mean something different for different cultures. In parts of Africa, a good gauge of intelligence might be how well someone avoids infection with malaria — a test of cleverness that most Americans likely would flunk. In the same way, for many Africans who take Western IQ tests, “our problems aren’t relevant to them,” Sternberg said.

Watson has made other extraordinary comments in the past, as this article in the Independent reports.

In 1997, he told a British newspaper that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual. He later insisted he was talking about a “hypothetical” choice which could never be applied. He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, positing the theory that black people have higher libidos, and argued in favour of genetic screening and engineering on the basis that ” stupidity” could one day be cured. He has claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured, saying: “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would great.”

This sort of prejudice is not new, but when it is demonstrated by someone of Watson’s stature, it gains currency in exceedingly dangerous ways, not least by the way it is portrayed in the media. Cameron Duodo comments in the Guardian about the front page headline in the Independent of October 17, ‘Africans are less intelligent than Westerners, says DNA pioneer’:

[I]n emphasising Professor James Watson’s proficiency with regard to DNA research, without making it sufficiently clear that his work on DNA does not necessarily make him an expert in the determination of human intelligence, Milmo elevated Watson’s racist rant into the semblance of authoritative scientific opinion.

My surprise is at those commentators who see Watson as being ‘an obsolete product of a bygone time’ (Laura Blue in Time.com) and others in the blogosphere who are dismissing his remarks as being ‘senile‘. Watson’s prejudices are not new, and certainly, they can’t be excused as the possible ramblings of old age.

For me, the story that has always been told far too little is that of Rosalind Franklin, the woman who, if she had been alive in 1962, should have also won the Nobel for her work on DNA. One account tells of how the race was on between the teams of Wilkins and Franklin, working at King’s College, London and Crick and Watson, at Cambridge. Watson attended a lecture of Franklin’s and based on a rather unclear recollection of the facts she presented - while ‘critical of her lecture style and personal appearance’ - created a failed model. Franklin worked mostly alone (another story talks of how even when there was conversation amongst them, it was so patronising that she didn’t take it further), and didn’t want to publish her findings until more confident about her theory that DNA was helical. Wilkins grew frustrated and in January 1953, showed her results to Watson, without apparently her knowledge or consent. This account also quotes Wilkins as admitting, “I’m afraid we always used to adopt - let’s say, a patronizing attitude towards her.”

When Watson and Crick published their paper on DNA in Nature in 1953, they made no acknowledgment beyond the statement: “We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished results and ideas of Dr. M.H.F. Wilkins, Dr. R.E. Franklin, and their co-workers at King’s College London.”

In 1962 Watson, Crick and Wilkins together received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In their Nobel lectures they cite 98 references, none are Franklin’s. Only Wilkins included her in his acknowledgments. Franklin died in 1958 at the age of 37 of cancer. The Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously, only to living persons.

Much after her death (and presumably, the Nobel), Watson and Crick made it abundantly clear in public lectures that they could not have discovered the structure of DNA without her work. But how much of this was too little, too late, and carefully so? Franklin’s name is hardly associated with work on the DNA model, certainly not in the way Watson’s and Crick’s are, to any school child in most parts of the world. What is even more upsetting is the counter-factual possibilities of her having been acknowledged for her work; would the resulting fame (and some fortune) have helped her in her battle against cancer? Worse still, she never knew that Watson and Crick had accessed her results; she communicated with them till she died.

Even those at Stockholm wonder. Since all archives related to nominees are closed for fifty years after it is awarded, we will know in 2008 - next year - whether Rosalind Franklin was even a nominee for the Nobel prize that her three colleagues - without her knowledge - won based upon her work.

Dr James Watson may still be in our textbooks, but he has been a scientist and a human being of bias and prejudice, and certainly, in Rosalind Franklin’s case, all these and more: a man with tragic, unethical, lack of generosity towards a fellow scientist.

The image of the DNA helix is of a sculpture at the Lawrence Hall of Science, UC Berkeley, taken by Hsien-Hsien Lei. The image of Rosalind Franklin is from the article by David Ardell.

A bit late in the week, but I do feel good - overall - about this year’s bunch of Nobel prizes. Particularly those to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore for Peace, in ‘informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change’, and to Doris Lessing, ‘whose prolific writing extends from the realistic to the fabulous’ and who is only the eleventh woman to win it for Literature (and in this case, feminist science fiction; yay!).

34 women have won Nobels across the disciplines since their inception in 1901; out of a total of 777 individuals and 20 organisations. However much people can mutter on about politics (and political correctness), all awards are inherently political and subjective (especially on artistic merit), and I’m glad when that politics and subjectivity coincide with mine. :)

Now my heart will be full when Ursula Le Guin wins it.

Three quotes from Doris to leave you with:

“The Golden Notebook for some reason surprised people but it was no more than you would hear women say in their kitchens every day in any country.”

“You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself - educating your own judgment. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this society.”

“I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I’m delighted to win them all, the whole lot, OK? It’s a royal flush… I’m sure you’d like some uplifting remarks.” (on winning the Nobel)

Today, 17 October, is World Poverty Day, and the Global Campaign Against Poverty (GCAP) is marking it with ‘Stand Up and Speak Out’ events all across the world. More information on these events are at the StandAgainstPoverty site.

However, what really struck me amongst the various mailers I got for the event was the UNIFEM poster which calls for increased investment in women in order to eradicate poverty.

Hey, so I’m back from a really interesting Multi-Generational Feminist Dialogue, held by CWGL, CREA and Youth Coalition at Rutgers University. Followed by a hysterical performance of Fat, Feminist and Free by Pramada Menon (of CREA) in Noo Yaark.

I certainly will blog about the dialogue over the next few days, but in the meantime, I found that Anindita had ‘awarded’ me with the ‘rockin girl blogger’ title… hmm… what it means to be appreciated by your peers (especially your gorgeous sis-in-law). sniff. :)

So I am proudly - and puckishly - passing it on to:

Bint Battuta (who writes a fascinating blog based in Bahrain, but she’s originally from Bengaluru)

Black Mamba (who’s already had things to say about pink, and this will clearly add to her collection)

DYSfunctional Wisdom (my crazy cousin Divya)

Kauntext {}  (a complex look into identity politics in Gujarat and what that means for Raahi herself; again another Bangalorean friend) and

Refraction (Mangs; co-founder of Blank Noise [update: lowly coordinator, says she!] always with a unique perspective on liff, the universe and everything)

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.

Open Democracy has set up a blog for women’s voices to be represented at the G8 summit, called ‘Open Summit: Women talk to the G8‘. They invited contributions (and are continuing to do so, for those who want to share); this was mine, cross-posted here.

Image courtesy Screen Sifar.

My day (and sometimes night) job is working with police officers in India on issues of violence against women and children; I coordinate a UNICEF partnership with the Karnataka State Police. One of the most critical aspects of this work is, as Anindita so succinctly described elsewhere on this blog, analysing the impact of our socially entrenched gender-based norms. The lack of value for our girl children - and if they’re lucky, for the women they grow up to be - has meant that we have lost, in our female population, the size of a small to middling European country.

But this post is not about genderocide. It is about that and more. It is about asking our governments - particularly the all powerful G8 - that in this context of ‘terrorism’, of an almost universal culture of production and consumption around ‘fear’ and ‘mistrust’, they analyse honestly and courageously their own contributions to a growing set of fundamentalisms: economic, religious, cultural, social and sexual. Women (and children) are often hit hardest by these fundamentalisms.

Identities are complex; we acknowledge that readily but seem willing to sacrifice that complexity for simplified categorisations and easy classification. More than ever, our language of ‘us’ and ‘them’ divides us over and over again, in the conversations we have, the advertisements we watch, the TV series we devour. And our politicians, our priests, our ulemas, our leaders - those who claim to represent us in all our complexity - speak the language of divisions, of fissures, best of all.

A young Muslim friend of mine lives in Gujarat, India. She explores, every day, what it means to be a woman, a Muslim, a young person, an artist, in the maelstrom of fundamentalism that is the Gujarat of today. She struggles with what it means to be a citizen: either of this country or of the globalised world. What does citizenship mean if you live constantly in the shadow of fear? Not just the fear of physical abuse, but worse still, the violence attached to labels? For her, wearing the hijaab is both an act of courage and an unintended performance: she is just never quite sure of her audience or its response.

There is complexity in hate-mongering too. In India, as possibly elsewhere, it seems as though the language of ‘empowerment’ for women has been claimed and reconstructed to mean ‘power’ rather than ‘dignity’ or ‘equality’ or ‘pluralism’. Not all our women politicians are feminist, and not all our fundamentalists are male.

These are not only issues of government. But they are issues for governments; our states are contributing, in no small measure, to these voices of fundamentalisms, of alienation. And worse still: sometimes it is they who create the vocabulary.