We are, each of us, functions of how we imagine ourselves and of how others imagine us, and, looking back, there are these discrete tracks of memory: the times when our lives are most sharply defined in relation to others’ ideas of us, and the more private times when we are freer to imagine ourselves. [...] it occurred to me that if others have so often made your life their business — made your life into a question, really, and made that question their business — then perhaps you will want to guard the memory of those times when you were freer to imagine yourself as the only times that are truly and inviolably your own.
— We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch

The passage above from Philip Gourevitch’s gorgeously written book about the 1994 Rwandan genocide, struck me as a particularly true framing of the story of the woman who was stripped and assaulted in Tahrir Square over a month ago. She has chosen to remain private about her identity even as images of her trauma has become a global icon — adding to a dramatically changing iconography of what it means to be a Muslim woman fighting and resisting.

2006 story on Dutch legislation banning full-length veils in public places

In 2006, Dutch legislators introduced new laws banning full-length veils in public spaces. The image to the right shows a Muslim woman protesting the ban.

Ayhan Tonca of CMO (the main Dutch Muslim organization) condemned the ban and further claimed that  ”hardly any Dutch women wear burqas anyway”.  So most Muslim women in the Netherlands do not wear burqas and an actual Muslim woman’s opinion is part of the story. Despite this, the image chosen for the news piece shows a nameless, voiceless figure.

The message is clear. This story is not about clearly discriminatory legislation, but about Muslim women’s unique wish to be oppressed by the veil.

The veil is powerful — a piece of cloth that has been entrusted to define women’s movements across the Muslim world.

It becomes the only thing worth noting about a Muslim woman — fetish-ized in a countless number of ways.

And it’s not simply the veil that is fetishized — but the human body and the human experience that goes along with it.

New Yorker mimicking 'Tahrir Woman' whose assault included revealing her blue bra

The image to the right shows a New Yorker utilizing the trauma of a real woman as part of her own political statement-making activities [Source Link].

The matter of violence or brutality is secondary. Never-mind what the woman whose experience is being performed was fighting against. All that matters is that she was wearing blue underwear and a veil.

Even as Muslim feminists and activists challenge existing narratives (and have for a long time); the Muslim woman is singularly defined by how much or how little she reveals of her body.

It follows, then that a Muslim woman’s eyes — the one part of her body available for consumption is routinely sexualized.  The trope of the “mysterious and beautiful eyes” of a veiled Muslim woman is so common that it is an inescapable and widely- recognized part of Islamic female iconography.

Stop the Oppression of Women in the Islamic World (ISHR)

Which is perhaps why the artwork shown below is so powerfully subversive. In the mural, a Muslim woman’s eyes is the central piece of the art, however they are politicized and rejects notions of an exotified enigma. [In other words, it kicks ass.]

In the revolution, eye-patches have become a symbol of solidarity for the hundreds of protesters who have lost their eyes during the Jan. 25th march. It is believed that the army specifically target eyes and head when attacking civilian protesters.

Activist Ahmed Harara famously lost one eye during the protest that ousted Hosni Mubarak and then his second eye during the ongoing struggle against the military.

A woman walks past a mural depicting a woman with eye patches near Tahrir Square in Cairo

In this way, the revolution is radically disrupting long-held patriarchies in the politics of gender and sexuality. Last year, Egyptian blogger Aliaa Magda Elmahdy posted photos of herself nude on Twitter — igniting a storm of dialogue, dissent and solidarity.

Art Inspired by Aliaa Magda Elmahdy

Like the  strategy to target protesters’ eyes, terrorizing women through sexual violence is a key part of how SCAF has tried to silence the women of Egypt.  In a world where women’s bodies are a battleground, Aliaa Magda Elmahdy’s nudity  is a breathtakingly courageous act of defiance —  inspiring many.

What is further remarkable about the art and images surrounding Aliaa is the stark absence of the veil (or “mystery eyes”) in defining a Muslim woman’s struggles. And when it does become the thesis of a project — it has meaning beyond its symbolic, fetishistic weight. A few weeks ago, Elmahdy send out a call for women to send in photographs of themselves with and without the veil. The photographs are fascinating.

In so many ways, the “Muslim woman” is no longer the interchangeable, voiceless, and faceless figure we are so used to.

She has a story.

Via 

A Graffiti Campaign to Denounce SCAF

A story that is inspiring a radical re-imagining of resistance to oppression and what that fight might look like.

Via

Carlos Latuff Artwork

This radical re-imagining is further giving space  for countless other silent struggles to be echoed.

Also, meet Asmaa Mahfouz.

Some of the most powerful words I have ever heard spoken. I will let her have the last word. It is little surprise that she has been said to have sparked the revolution.

What’s on your mind? What did you write about?

Links welcome.

Republic Day gallantry award to alleged torturer of Soni Sori!

Kamayani Bali Mahabal says she is ashamed that the nation is giving gallantry award to a police officer Ankit Garg on the occassion of our Republic Day who is accussed of torturing a tribal woman and the case is ongoing in Supreme Court. She requests all of us to protest this award. For more Kamayani Ji can be reached at 09820749204

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Despite the continuing furore concerning Dow’s sponsorship of the Olympic games, Lord Sebastian Coe and the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) maintain that they are satisfied with Dow Chemical’s ethical performance and sustainability.

Almost three decades on from the infamous Bhopal gas leak of 1984 in Central India that killed an estimated 25,000 people, the death toll continues to rise.

Disgraceful

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INDIA: Don’t preach awareness without remedies. Asian Human Rights Commission responds to the Prime Minister’s attention to national child malnutrition.

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Totally drug-resistant TB emerges in India

Physicians in India have identified a form of incurable tuberculosis there, raising further concerns over increasing drug resistance to the disease1. Although reports call this latest form a “new entity”, researchers suggest that it is instead another development in a long-standing problem.

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Eh.

The Bombay High Court has reduced punishment for a man convicted of sodomising a 10-month-old girl child, accepting his contention that he lost control over himself as he was living away from his family.

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Did this happen? Apparently.

Anurup and Sagarika Bhattacharya – an Indian couple from Kolkata are living a nightmare in Norway. Their children – a three-year-old son and one-year-old daughter – were taken away from them by Norway’s child protective services and placed in foster care eight months ago.

The drastic measure was taken because [...] They fed the children with their hands and the infants slept in the same bed as the parents.

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Prernalal gives a good overview of all the ways one can be undocumented.

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A lovely project

On Jan. 21 and 22, those comedians (Jessica DeBruin, Corinne Fisher, Dawn J. Fraser, Chrissie Gruebel, Stephanie Masucci, Tracy Mull, Roopa Singh, and Katie Sullivan, seen rehearsing below)—plus Rachel Dratch of Saturday Night Live fame—will lend their unlikely voices to the women who wrote these poems in a fund-raiser titled “Comedians of New York for Afghan Women Writers.” The reading is to benefit the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, an organization that mentors Afghan women writers and distributes their work to a global audience.

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via the New Yorker

The Caging of America: Why do we lock up so many people?

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

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A heart-wrenching photo documentation project

This is how Project Unbreakable works: People write words they remember their abuser saying on a poster, and Brown photographs them holding the poster. Each chooses to reveal none, some or all of her or his face. Some add information about the abuse on the site. Others say the words are enough. Some know the exact words they want to write, do so quickly and are finished. Others struggle, cry and want to talk.

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The Invisible Mother. Another fascinating photography collection.

‘This was a practice where the mother, often disguised or hiding, often under a spread, holds her baby tightly for the photographer to insure a sharply focused image.’

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An excellent take down of NPR’s Planet Money piece on Wall Street.

For a while, I’ve been thinking about writing a piece on how NPR is more toxic than Fox News. Fox preaches to the choir. NPR, though, confuses and misinforms people who might otherwise know better. Its “liberal” reputation makes palatable a deeply orthodox message for a demographic that could be open to a more critical message.

The full critique will take some time. But a nice warm-up opportunity has just presented itself: a truly wretched piece of apologetic hackery by Adam Davidson, co-founder of NPR’s Planet Money economics reporting team, that appears in today’s New York Times magazine.

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Electronic Intifada on Israeli appropriation of Palestinian cuisine.

Zionism’s cultural appropriation of indigenous Palestinian folklore and cuisine – such as hummus, falafel and maftoul – as “Israeli” has long irked Palestinians, especially when these same cultural products are used in international propaganda and marketing efforts which deny Palestinians’ rights and history.

Now, Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank are attempting to steal perhaps the most important symbol and source of economic sustenance for rural Palestinians: olive oil and olive culture.

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Diet books dumped in U.K. protest at Parliament

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Callista Gingrich calls 911 on a woman for breastfeeding in public and has her arrested

Answering questions from reporters, Ms Gingrich said: “It’s inappropriate, really. People need to take care of these situations in private. Some secrets should remain behind closed doors.”

The unmitigated gall!

I don’t care that you head departments or projects or that reputed people know you and that you yourself are reputed. That phony gesture calculated to give me a sense of the health of your bank account is tripe. Believe me, owning privilege is far worthier than celebrating it.

How about this? Make me laugh. Or better yet — laugh at my jokes. Tell me your story — tell me who you first fell in love with. Or don’t. Ask me about the loves of my life. The transformative power of things are on my mind. Of love. Of art. Of the written word. Of passion. Of dissent. Tell me…what do you think will change the world?

What is not required is this pressing need to give yourself a corner of humanity and ask me for mine so that we can stay in our respective niches. I am not interested in giving you my categories. I didn’t ask for yours. I am not interested in being classified, if I can help it. And today I can.

Heart-bruised. I sweep up my cluttered thoughts, hide them in a corner. I silence the noise — hush now, enough! I un-see the reel. Mote-kissed. I turn off the lights, cut the static noise of the radio.

But no matter how hard I try, you remain still. Stubborn as always, refusing to un-clutch my heart.

The wind whistling outside has found its crack in the wall and seeps through the window.

“Rage is an appropriate response to oppression” — bell hooks

One way in which structural violence operates is by thrusting reductive narratives upon marginalized communities. Whether those narratives speak about inherent stupidity, uselessness, laziness or violence — they work to perpetuate an absence of humanity — a useful piece of imagination when we wish to do nothing about an unequal, unjust system that benefits the status quo, nonetheless.

In our world, we have developed a dauntingly effective way to silence someone — make them angry and use their rage to invalidate their voices.

There are at least two ways in which anger is used to dis-empower people and dim their stories.

1. De-legitimizing what someone is saying because they are, in fact angry.

A few months ago, INCITE wrote a detailed post about [their] friend’s personal experience that seems like a fairly complicated and specific incident of violence. Without going into the context (you can read it for yourself) — I wanted to pull out this quote which underscores an important point about violence, in general.

So the question for me here, and where I vehemently disagree with Bynes, is how one defines “provocation” and who judges what then is the socially acceptable response. I tend to agree with Brontez. Too often people who are targeted for violence have to have their motivations and their recollection of all the “facts” or chronology of all the events hyper-scrutinized beyond recognition if they at all do anything other than lay down and take the abuse (or in the case of sexual assault, you’re accused of lying if you don’t have any physical evidence that you fought back, or you choose to try to still (and steel) yourself to try to avoid further violence, or are simply in a state of shock). And what is more true than not, most of us, in some way, respond verbally or physically fight back.

I think Brontez was enraged by the situation and responded accordingly. But rage, as bell hooks once stated, is an appropriate response to oppression.

I think this is an important conversation to be having about communities and people who witness and endure violence routinely. We have a culturally sanctioned script that deserves to be trashed. Mainly, one that expects victims to survive by knowing the unknow-able and controlling what was never in their power.

2. De-legitimizing what someone is saying because they come from a group who are culturally coded as “angry” (ex.,feminists, black women, rap artists, lesbians).

I have not read Jodi Kantar’s book on the Obamas (The Obamas). There’s a lot of back and forth about how Michele Obama may or may not have been stereotyped as the “angry black lady”. I am sure it’s as basically tame as some say it is. But I did read this New York Times article about the book and this is how the article begins.

Michelle Obama was privately fuming, not only at the president’s team, but also at her husband.

And it ends with this:

She [Michele Obama] also thanked him [Barack Obama] for putting up with how hard she had been on him. At that line, a few of the advisers glanced at each other in recognition.

I don’t know Michele Obama — maybe she is a particularly tough political figure to handle. But I do know how she is described in an article that also describes the following incident.

“That’s not right, I’ve been killing myself on this, where’s this coming from?” Mr. Gibbs yelled, adding expletives. He interrogated Ms. Jarrett, whose calm only seemed to frustrate him more. The two went back and forth, Ms. Jarrett unruffled, Mr. Gibbs shaking with rage. Finally, several staff members said, Mr. Gibbs cursed the first lady — colleagues stared down at the table, shocked — and stormed out.

Mr. Gibbs later acknowledged the outburst but said he had misdirected his rage and accused Ms. Jarrett of making up the complaint.

In an article that is devoted almost entirely to the difficulty of working with Michele Obama (and her own misgivings about being the first lady) — it is striking that the one actual incident of inappropriate anger never comes from Michele Obama. Her characterization as someone who is suspicious and cunningly manipulative is sanitized, but the message is clear — she’s trouble.

Recently, Margaret Cho, the actress and comedian, got really angry and let out a primal scream because of some negative internet comments.

It was great.

[...] Some outside facebook observer said that my “language” was too much and told me that I had “lost a fan” because she couldn’t condone my “language”. I am sorry for that, as I love my fans, and it sucks to lose one, but obviously she doesn’t understand that when you grow up the way that I did, with kids at school throwing rocks at my face because they hated it because it was so ugly to them and they wanted the blood from my wounds to cover it so it wouldn’t have to be seen and at summer camps stuffed dog shit in my sleeping bag because I was told time and again that I looked like shit – and that I had to empty myself in the dark forest and still sleep in smelling that shit all that night and for weeks after because my family was too poor to afford a new one, my “language” is on the strong side. I apologize for offending the former fan, but I am only myself. That is all I can be, and if I must apologize for that, I don’t mind. All I am trying to say is that no young girl should be told she is ugly. If she is, you kill her spirit, and she may grow up like me, and lose a fan.

[...] Things I could say should be left unheard and unsaid because I am not willing to be the bigger person. I do not take the high road. I take the low road and blows below the belt are my absolute favorite. The best revenge is not living well. The best revenge is revenge. My mouth and mind and typing fingers are weapons of mass destruction and I pity those ignorant idiots who would leave insults about mine or any women’s bodies in comment boxes because there’s ways of hunting people down.

Go read the whole thing.

Get angry.

Don’t believe the lie that our emotions, our rage springs from our gender, race, class, or caste. It comes from our need to see the world change.

What’s on your mind?

Say. The cellar’s yours.