Poetry for Brigid

It's that time again! Here's my entry for the Fourth Annual Brigad in the Blogosphere Poetry Slam. Happy Imbolc!

*****

Beatrice Cenci was a young Italian noblewoman executed in 1599 (with her stepmother and elder brother) by the Pope because she was involved in the murder of her father, who had imprisoned and abused them.

Alimitra David wrote a poem, Beatrice of the Cenci, that takes place on the eve of the execution. In it, Beatrice calls out to her mother (who died shortly after her birth). As it is a long poem, I am only sharing the first and last stanzas. The entire poem can be found in Impulse to Fly (1998).

*

I don't ask
that you
come to me here
to hold me and
cry as Lucretia and I
have done for
years I
don't ask you to
come and be as
we are a

voice against his
will like my
smallest finger
against the
stone gate of
the courtyard

Mother I don't
pray you back to
this place only
sing to me
strong
from wherever you are

oh sing to me Mother
I will climb your voice
hand over hand
high over these
robed men who
curse me

sing tonight
for tomorrow they
will cut me loose
at last to fly from this
motherless place
this place of
fathers and
fathers and
more fathers

*

Mother do you
love me do
you love me
broken as I am
do you love my
feet my hands
my face do you
love me when I
hear you and

do you love me
when I can't
listen when I
float
blind and deaf
in water with
no current was

it your voice in
my dream was it
mine calling names I
don't remember when
awake

this night will
become morning
I have heard
rumors of
morning of
sunrise and
figs ripening

Mother I call
to you not to
come to me here
only sing for me
strong
from
wherever you are

Visioning and Re-Visioning

Ms. Magazine has a list of quotes from prominent women, Vision for Change, about what they would like to see happen under an Obama administration. My favourite?

LET THE SURVIVORS LEAD. The violence-against women movement has to, once again, become a movement and not just a network of social-service providers. Violence will only end when survivors are seen as potential organizers on their own behalf, rather than simply clients of social workers, lawyers, judges or medical personnel. —ANDREA SMITH, PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN CULTURE AND WOMEN’S STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN; COFOUNDER, INCITE! WOMEN OF COLOR AGAINST VIOLENCE

There is so much change that needs to happen within the VAW movement. We need to reclaim the feminist analysis and address the root causes and systems that create, sustain and encourage violence against women!

...then Work for Change

The University of Calgary announced the creation today of the Brenda Strafford Chair in the Prevention of Domestic Violence in the Faculty of Social Work. It is only the second such chair in Canada.

First Mourn...

Quick News Post

Malalai Joya Visits Canada

Read the Hansard excerpt to get the full irony of the moment.

Funding Feminism

The National Association of Women and the Law (NAWL) announced yesterday that it was "...being forced to close its office, lay off its staff, and cease major consultations and advocacy on women's legal issues as an outcome of the Harper government's devastating changes to the mandate of Status of Women Canada." NAWL is encouraging people to write letters and are fundraising to re-open in 2008.

The cuts to Status of Women Canada have prevented women's organizations from accessing funds for advocacy or research. Effectively, we're to continue helping "deserving, victimized women" (i.e. serve the patriarchy) and not change the system to make it equal for all (i.e smash the patriarchy).

Funding feminism is such a complex web. Many people say that the government should not be funding those who work against it, yet the government has abandoned all pretense of working for women. By taking up the banner, we are at risk of allowing the government to continue to ignore us, but we can do nothing less than fight for change. By asking for money to do that work, we get caught up in a system that is designed to keep us from making change. And some organizations do remove themselves from the system, trying to exist through funding directly from women, which leads to instability and burnout and all the problems that any one of us who has ever wondering where the rent is going to come from can relate to - because the women who need change most are the women who have the least.

Now we have lost another voice for change, another ally in the struggle. And I would shout "No More!" but I know that this is not the reality. The dark night is long and hard and painful, and it's not going to end tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that. But it is going to end. It has to end. Wil sha.

Technology for Good

So, a couple in the UK were so concerned that social service officials would try to take her baby away (even though the officials themselves admit there is no threat to the child) that they secretly audio taped a conversation and posted it on YouTube (who have since taken it down because of legal procedures being taken against them, I suspect). One official is quoted as saying he'd like to have a conversation with the couple "to understand how this information came into the public domain." (Like he doesn't know, right?)

Even thought it was "illegal" to tape the officials, I think that the couple made the right move. A few more cases like this and I'll start to believe in the power of the internet for good again! (There's that glass-half-full part of me again.)

"Witches" tortured over AIDS deaths in Papua New Guinea

"People believe a witch would behave in a certain way, would walk in a certain way." Not only are women more vulnerable to HIV/AIDS because of sexual assault and poor sex education, but they are now being targeted as the reason for the infections. The estimate is that 500 attacks (torture and murder) have occurred in the past year, especially as the HIV infection rates continues to increase.

The Politics of Poverty

I'm not planning to blog much this summer; I'm spending most of my days hanging with The Kid and/or working on a project for RESOLVE Alberta. But I'm going to post a couple of the reviews/etc. that I've got hanging around my desktop. These will eventually be posted on the main site, once I finish the CSS changes.... which, at this rate, should happen sometime this fall.

Poor-Bashing: The Politics of Exclusion. Jean Swanson, 2001. Review originally published in the viec review 4(2), July-August 2003.

Jean Swanson, formerly of End Legislated Poverty (publisher of The Long Haul newspaper), writes from a place of experience, empathy, and activism. Her words are clear, as are her expectations: she wrote this book to challenge the notion of poverty in Canada.

Swanson’s analysis is detailed, especially when it looks at how the understanding of poverty has changed in the past decades. In one chapter, she contrasts “Income Security for Canadians”, a 1970 document which cited the importance of all persons having “an adequate income on which to live” and the role of the economy in supporting social objectives, with “Improving Social Security in Canada”, a 1994 document which abandons these ideas and instead extols the virtues of independence and initiative by individuals in their quest to rid themselves of poverty. In two short decades, she concludes, the blame for poverty has moved from the economy to the individual. This is consistent with the continual privatization and deregulation agendas of the provincial governments; there has been a complete shift in awareness, understanding, and expectation. It is in this type of climate that poor-bashing flourishes.

The simplicity of focusing on individuals in poverty prevents an analysis to develop around the conditions that keep people from employment, education and other dignities. Swanson cites Jo Grey, an activist with a Toronto anti-poverty group, in relation to this issue; instead of the continual “putting a face on the problem [of poverty]” sentiment that people have come to expect in media stories about poverty, Grey advocates for an analysis of the problem in the first place. Grey even coined a new word, poornography, to describe the “poor as victim” stories that dominate Canadian media; these stories re-victimize people in poverty as they reduce them to the category of “deserving” poor.

Swanson certainly does not shy away from the systemic issues: chapters include a look at the role of charities in poor-bashing, how people in poverty can self-bash, and what tools we can use to challenge poor-bashing as we encounter it. She is straightforward and does not hesitate in naming poor-bashing behaviour where she sees it. In the end, the reader is left not only with an enhanced awareness of poor-bashing behaviours, but also a variety of tools to use in challenging poor-bashing in its countless forms.

Challenging/Changing

Beliefnet.com has an interview with three Muslim women sparked by a new translation of the Quran by Laleh Bakhtiar (one of the women interviewed). Bakhtiar has caused discussion amongst Muslim and feminist scholars over her translation of the verb daraba from "beat them lightly" to "go away from them" (among other changes). Bakhtiar can be seen as building on a long tradition of women who have refused to accept that religion should be the root of women's subjugation.

Of course, there's a backlash, as it is challenging "the way things have always been done". But let's face it; male-dominated religion is designed to keep women "in their place". Remember Paul's letter to the Ephesians? (And I'm going to take this moment to formally complain that I didn't learn about the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus - one of the seven wonders of the ancient world - until I started questioning the patriarchal bias of the faith I grew up in. That information certainly changes the meaning of the text. But I digress.)

While it's not a radical feminist interpretation of the text by any means, it is a move in a new direction. It will be interesting to see how/if it changes communities in the Western world, especially those that have already been moving toward integration of secularism into their traditions.

Sheep, in More Ways Than One

It turns out that you can “throw sheep” at as many people as you want, but sending a message to twenty or so of your friends about an organized effort by fundamentalists to promote controls on the majority of people in this country is not acceptable. Read More

I've been trying to stay away from commenting on The Great Canadian Wishlist experiment until it was over, but I've given up. It has been a frustrating mess, and it's not getting any better. There have been accounts disabled for weird reasons and others left alone after being reported; there have been fights back and forth with no end in sight; and, quite frankly, I have no interest in living in a Canada if the right-wing-nuts get their way.

I'm not pulling my support from the wishes (because I believe that the creators of said wishes made them honestly), but I am going back to using Facebook as it should be used.....

Update: Malalai Joya

News clip of protests from June 21, 2007.

There is also a new interview with Joya at The American Prospect:

"But this is the voice of the voiceless people of Afghanistan," she continues. "And they can't silence this voice and they can't hide the truth. And they understand that."

Update: Oumou Toure allowed to remain in Canada

Oumou Toure will be allowed to remain in Canada. She had been facing deportation and separation from her daughter, who would have been subjected to FGM if she had travelled with her mother to Guinea.

Women, United...

Video from the Women Against Poverty Action (May 31, 2007) in Toronto, ON. (More information on the action (and updates) can be found at the Women Against Poverty blog.)

Housing is a huge issue for women in Canada, especially for women who are leaving abusive partners. According to the Alberta Council of Women's Shelters, in 2006 15% of women, on leaving Alberta shelters, went back to their abusers; 72% cited lack of affordable housing as the reason why. That's approximately 1400 women and children who went back to an unsafe situation because they had no housing, over 50% more than in 2005.

Calgary currently has the lowest rental vacancy rate in Canada (0.5%, with Alberta at 0.9%), and the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $1037. (Toronto, where this action took place, has an average monthly rent of $1073.) As the rents continue to increase (because I really don't think the market is going to "crash" anytime soon), I can see more women returning to abusive partners because there really are no other options.

I read a story last night set in the midst of the anti-globalization movement, and one of the characters spoke of the anger and frustration at not being heard, that even the police-sanctioned and permit-approved marches were being co-opted and that if there was no violence there was no news. I'm reading several books that speak to similar themes, including one that talks about the de-radicalization of women's anti-violence work by the rise of ngo-politics and the corporate funding model. So, yes, I can understand the anger and frustration and sheer "why-ness" that would lead to actions such as this, and yes, I can support it, as women, united, will never be truly defeated.

Even better....

Yesterday night I posted about a new anti-domestic violence campaign and the trolls that were all over it.

Today, it's being reported the company behind the campaign isn't even aware of the campaign.

Geez, people, the moon isn't even full until tomorrow.

The bridges are lonely this evening

So far this evening, I've visited fan sites, the Great Canadian Wishlist site, pagan sites and the site for a new anti-domestic violence campaign, and they are EVERYWHERE! What's up with the proliferation of trolls today? Geez.

Canadian Child at Risk of Genital Mutilation

The United Church of Canada is calling on Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Diane Finley to intervene the case of Oumou Toure, who is facing deportation this week. Toure's daughter, who was born ten days after Toure's inital claim was rejected, is at risk of FGM if they are deported to Guinea. There has been no response to the letters from the minister's office as of yet. Toure may have to leave her children behind in Canada as wards of the state to keep them safe unless a Stay of Removal is granted.

Happy International Women's Day!

I'm invovlved in the My 365 Ways Street Action today, although I'm missing the IWD Celebration this evening. When you have a moment, stop by the site and add your ideas: the only way we're going to stop violence agianst women is if we work together.