How2
Postcard is an edited and continuously up-dated section of brief comment received on work in recent issues of HOW2, as well as excerpts from letters circulating privately among writers/readers and with HOW2 editors/writers. Your postcards and excerpted letter exchanges on literary questions appropriate to this journal's focus are welcomed. Please send to Kathleen Fraser <kfraser@sfsu.edu>
from Sawako Nakayasu
PLAY A JOURNAL OF PLAYS
seeks submissions for its inaugural issue.
PLAY will publish work that radically rethinks the life
of plays on the page. While plays and performance texts of all lengths
are welcome, short pieces in particular are encouraged. Conventional
play formatting is not.
Please send work, accompanied by a letter of introduction, to:
PLAY
Sally Oswald, Editor
8116 Brookside Road
Elkins Park, PA 19027
Deadline: August 1, 2002
___________________
Perdita Among Us
May/ 2002
from Barbara Guest
...about Perdita
I admired Perdita and she was my friend. Our relationship in New York
where we shared an apartment was harmonious. We were at times oddly
alike, having the same likes and dislikes, although she did prefer second-rate
novels. I believe it was a way of relaxing. Her children are consistent
readers. One could say it was a literary family.
I shall continue to miss her. She possessed a sudden humor, unlike anyone
else I knew. She lived in a literary, sophisticated household in her
youth, and I benefited from being near her humor and her style. She
was a child of H.D. the poet and that says much. I read a book on the
history of music by her real father, Cecil Gray, and it is brilliant
and subtle. One always wonders how her life might have changed, had
her real father once appeared in her adulthood. She told me she “once
saw her father walking on the beach on Capri, with a famous opera star,
pearls floating on his back."
Barbara Guest’s HERSELF DEFINED. The Poet H.D. and her World—originally
published in 1984 by Doubleday—will be reissued by the Schaffner
Press (Tucson), in July, 2002. Guest is the auther of the novel Seeking
Air and numerous poetry collections, including the forthcoming Miniatures
and Other Poems (University Press of New England, Hanover). Guest’s
essays on art, Durer in the Window, American Art of the1950s and
60s will be published by Roof Books in 2003. Wounded by Joy,
Selected Literary Essays, will be out soon from Kelsey St. Press,
Berkeley.
May/2002
from Susan Friedman
Memories of Perdita
Reflections on Perdita Schaffner [Excerpted from a letter written for
her surviving children, Val, Elizabeth, and Tim.]
March 22, 2002
...Your mother's picture hangs on the bulletin board above my computer....
She is standing in a turquoise smock, her gentle eyes wrinkled in shy
smiles.... Her kindness shines out of that photograph. Somehow I believed
that she would be there forever, bemused and tolerant guardian of all
of us many people who poured over her mother's life and work, inspired
and curious and moved and forever fascinated.
...I thought I’d share my memory of my first meeting with your
mother in 1978, around the time of the first screening of Borderline
in New York City, an event held in conjunction with the celebration
of Paul Robeson’s life. I met her first at the reception and then
later in more relaxed surroundings in the old brownstone. It was not
too long after the death of Norman Pearson and her decision to take
on the heavy and all so very public responsibilities of being her mother’s
literary executor. At the reception, she looked somehow ravaged, as
if the public assumption of the role of being “H.D.’s daughter”
was more than she wanted to bear. She was stiff and quiet and almost
speechless standing next to your father and maybe even some of you children....
People milled and streamed about and there she was in the middle of
it all, so very publicly “the daughter” alongside Robeson’s
“son”.... I was enthralled and even more shy than she to meet
her. She kindly told me to come by to see her the next day for an “interview.”
THAT was surely intimidating, though she herself didn’t intimidate.
She looked too unhappy and uncertain to terrify even a young uncertain
scholar like me.
The next day I dutifully appeared on the doorstep, where she set me
at ease immediately in a comfy, homey environment, where the somewhat
worn furniture and informal signs of family life everywhere told a story
of resistance to upper crust displays of status and connection. She
eyed me curiously, taking her new responsibility seriously. Suddenly,
I realized I was to be evaluated, looked over, sized-up—perhaps
dumped or denied access to H.D.’s “shelf” at the Beinecke.
Would I know enough? Would I say something stupid about H.D. and not
pass muster? Would I offend with my questions? Would she want to shape
what I wrote? Give me some kind of litmus test before giving permission?
Suddenly, she was a very new factor in the just emerging world of H.D.
studies. And I was very afraid—terrified.
Your mother’s first questions were about my children, then 4 and
7 years of age. “What are their names?” she asked. I said,
Ruth and Joanna. She sighed and said, “How nice. How ordinary.
What nice ordinary names.” She told me your names—Valentine,
Nicholas, Elizabeth, and Timothy. And she said that it was very important
that I understand that her mother had never stood at the kitchen counter
making peanut butter sandwiches for her daughter. That she, Perdita,
never had other companions to play with; that she, Perdita, was forbidden
school and schoolmates. She said to never forget that H.D. loved the
idea of motherhood more than she could bear the messiness of it all.
I could sense her quiet defiance, her determination to create a home
for her four children that would be more ordinary, more filled with
friends and peanut butter sandwiches and station wagons and stories
about school. I imagine now that she would have been—or at least
wanted to be—the perfect “soccer mom,” driving you kids
here and there to this lesson and that lesson, this friend and that
friend.
As we settled into the warm sofa with the fading brown cover—I seem to see in my mind’s eye shades of brown and tan and fading green or blue—with tea in hand, she brought to life for me a childhood filled with melodrama, with talented, driven, somewhat crazy artistes flying in and out of rooms, slamming doors, staring moodily, fiercely private or intrusively bossy—all at Kenwin, the villa above the lake, a modern Bauhaus where art was made. She—the child—never quite sure who would be in her life or out of it at the next moment, didn’t know what the storms were all about, just that the storms blew her one way, then the other. The alternative? Stuck at Audley House, stuck in white gloves and rules rules rules. Shuttled from Kenwin to London, opposite lives. And her two mothers—the one, distant, adored, with not enough but very precious moments shared with special intensity and privacy; the other, fierce and domineering, the Steam Roller. She said “My Two Mothers.” She said “They were Platonic lesbians.” It took me many years to understand the wisdom of her seemingly casual remarks.
With her talk, Perdita brought a world to life for me, perched me on the windowsill of a world I could scarcely imagine by myself, no matter how much I read in the still uncatalogued papers stored in the bowels of Beinecke, waiting for the meticulous and inspired and tender curation of Louis Silverstein. What a gift—her gift! One of her many gifts.
I flew out of that
brownstone sensing that Perdita would be behind me, standing in the
wings of what I wrote and trying to understand, never a censoring spirit,
but a bemused one nonetheless. As time passed, she assumed the public
mantle of H.D.’s daughter with great dignity and generosity, growing
into it, having the wisdom to let a hundred flowers bloom, let anyone
have access, let anyone say what they would say or write what they would
write. Wrongheaded? So what. Stupid? So what. Off on cloud nine? So
what. Incomprehensible? So what. Involved in its own world? So what.
But always, she gave permission. So often, she wrote kind notes, patient
with the excesses and enthusiasms of others.
Her answers, criticisms, disagreements—all came in the form of
the stunning essays. Her gift to bring us all through her words to that
time, that place, those people, herself in the center, never lost in
the shuffle. Her writing has the detail, the rootedness of Bryher; the
grace, rhythm, and insight of H.D.—her two mothers braided into
a style uniquely her own. We all begged her to write more, and more.
Anything. She too is a writer among writers. She hinted she would, she
might, she was—writing: then out would come into print another
gem, another pearl. Are there, were there, more?
I feel bereft, as you all must, at her passing. I feel inconsolably
sad that when I’d finally managed to finish the edition of H.D.’s
and Bryher’s letters about psychoanalysis...that she would not
see it...and daydream bemusedly and curiously about those lost times
and the people today who would read of them....
Susan Friedman’s edited volume, Analyzing Freud:
Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle, will be published by
New Directions in the fall of 2002. She is currently the Virginia Woolf
Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The full text of the above letter first appeared on the HD Society website.
To find the HD Society website, go to: http://www.imagists.org/hd/index.html;
to send a query to the H.D. listserv, go to
HDSOC-L@uconnvm.uconn.
___________________
May / 2002
from Edward Butscher
PERDITA SCHAFFNER
(Eulogy delivered at the Bay Street Theater, March 31, 2002)
My wife Paula and I first met Perdita and John Schaffner back in 1977
and were immediately charmed and intrigued by them, by Perdita's aura
of constant British amusement over and bemusement at a terminally insane
world and by John's more serious, somewhat regal sense of self and function.
Both were generous hosts in their different ways and gracious dinner
guests. At home, amid a pleasant shuffle of tall children grown up and
often going or coming, as amiable as their parents, Perdita was the
Lady of the Perpetual Meat Loaf, which she claimed to have shaped into
a delicious centerpiece from odds and ends found loitering in the fridge
or larder, even table scrapings, and John, encased in his loud All-American
chef’s apron, presided over a metal basin of steaming clam shells
and other seashore salvage.
I still treasure the visual impact of Perdita, the Dutch cap of black
hair, the quick, wise, almost childlike smile, the sudden wave of a
dismissive hand when a disdained name or subject (usually political)
came up in conversation, the general impression she gave of a convivial
benevolence—fused with a deep-rooted shyness, arm frozen at the
ready to ward off surprise attacks, however clearly pleased to have
people enjoying her cat-patrolled house and grounds. It was easy to
see how her tall, self-assured husband must have given her a necessary
sense of safety—she told me on more than one occasion that she
liked the "big bear" aspect of my bulky presence (much bulkier
then, than now) when I showed up to take her back to our house for lunch
or dinner or when she joined us going to one of the inevitable and endless
Hampton lawn parties, poetry readings, gallery openings.
Of course, I had known of Perdita before we met her, having done research
in areas of literary history that intersected with the career of her
mother, the poet H.D., who had given birth to her while in the throes
of double pneumonia. I was aware of the hectic household she grew up
in, dubbed "the lump" in her infancy by its melange of egocentric,
variously talented artist types as contemptuous of gender roles as of
bourgeois conformity, a household strange enough to make my own dysfunctional
nest appear semi-normal. And I marveled at her serene survival and major
achievements in subsequent life tasks, mastering three languages, serving
at Bletchley during the war, emigrating alone to America afterwards
to acquire a new citizenship, a literary agent husband, and four bright,
highly individual children. Fascinated from a biographer's perch, urging
her, like many others, to write an autobiography, I was curious about
the flesh and blood specifics of her rich past, which included a cast
of extraordinary characters that ranged from D. H. Lawrence (once suspected,
like Ezra Pound, of being her father) and Aldous Huxley to the outrageous
Sitwell clan.
She did indeed try to preserve her past with the pen throughout the
1980's, taking workshops and turning out prefaces and brief memoirs
for reprints of her mother's books. It was in one such, a contribution
to Michael King's 1986 anthology, H.D.: Woman and Poet, that Perdita
confirmed the difficulty she faced as an author, recalling that her
two mothers (H.D. and her partner, Winifred Bryher) "were writers,
which indeed I knew all along. . . . Maybe I'd become a writer too.
No. I couldn't compete." What she did write, however, was inevitably
deft and perceptive, if reticent in a shrewd minimalist fashion that
painted much more than was on the page, self-deprecatingly honest and
capable of a sly wit but forever tolerant of the foibles of her family
and other strangers.
In her 1983 introduction to H.D.'s novel, Bid Me To Live, Perdita is
quite candid about her biological father, the composer Cecil Gray. Noting
that she had been legally adopted by the Macphersons in 1927 (Bryher
had wed Kenneth Macpherson after divorcing Robert McAlmon), she recounted
the sole meeting she had with Gray twenty years later, which passed
pleasantly without a single mention of their relationship. "Let
sleeping dogs lie," was Perdita' s prescription for healing peace,
here and elsewhere. "Don't disturb the profound animal."
Such a prescription, which comes at a high cost, to be sure, had its
origins in an ambivalence-shaken childhood, cradled in great wealth
but wracked by fierce contrary emotional winds. Perdita's "Sketch
of H.D.: The Egyptian Cat," done in 1980 for the reissue of another
H.D. novel, Hedylus, gave the first of several capsule views of her
lonely early years: "We lived in Switzerland . . . isolated from
the world. Visitors came by from time to time; mostly writers, adults
only. I never consorted with other children, other families, other mothers."
In the same memoir, H.D. is limned as "a tall figure of striking
beauty ...and frequently overwrought, off in the clouds, or sequestered
in a room, not to be disturbed on any account." Later, happily,
according to Perdita's account, once free of "the pressures and
conflicts of motherhood," H.D. "became a much better mother.
. . . We were adults together, and friends. "
Yet the dolorous refrain haunting the prefaces and introductions Perdita
produced for her mother's reissued books was a dirge of sorts for a
childhood denied, as in the 1986 preamble to H.D.'s Nights that summons
up the imposing Bauhaus on Lake Geneva where she entered her painful
teens: "We were terribly ingrown, a volatile microcosm in the vastness.
I was caught up in it, and trapped, yet an outsider, a gawky adolescent
without a clue as to what was going on. I missed a lot, but I will never
forget the tensions." Without a father, or too many of them, Perdita'
s core self split and reforged itself in the crucible of two contending,
if not antithetical, female forces: the adored rejecting poet goddess
and her earthbound opposite, the plain, blunt, kindly Bryher, rebelling
against her own distancing parents, avant-garde in her artistic sympathies
but common-sense firm in her nurturing practicality. Perdita's "Pandora's
Box," written in 1981 to provenance her mother's HERmione—Hermione
was, of course, mother to the charming Perdita in Shakespeare's Winter’s
Tale— Perdita articulates the anguish and outrage of every artist's
offspring ever forced to sit outside a closed door while her or his
parent is obsessively pursuing the Muse: "Hush, Hush, whisper who
dares. 'Your mother is working.' In her room, behind a locked door.
. . . I wanted to be in that room. I resented being hauled away."
It is here that Perdita dramatizes the pull of the female spirits that
would shape her into the human paradox she became: "'Hippo, hippo,'
[Bryher] would yell, pursuing me with a hippo hide whip. And I was stood
in comers, and deprived of dessert, like any bad Victorian child. Well
warranted, I have no doubt. . . . In their different ways, both mothers
gave me a lot of affection. . . . I just never knew what was going to
happen next. " The Perdita whom Paula and I met and came to cherish
seemed very much an amalgam of her two mothers, a lover of books and
literature, a fond mother and grandmother, a graceful survivor of the
natural disasters inflicted by irrational fate, including the death
of John in 1983 and her son Nicholas in 1991.
The latter blow sought minor relief in yet another verbal cameo, this
one, "His Mother's Tribute," appearing in Out of Season (1993),
Paula's anthology of pieces by and for people who died before their
time, and following several of Nicholas's own poems and Timothy's adroit
elegy for his brother. Again, brevity and the fertile unspoken prevail.
"'Love you,' one of us would say, countered by 'I love you too'
by the other," is how she begins, going on to isolate his specialness:
“not the oldest, not the youngest, not the girl"—and
to salute his dedication when critically ill at winter's start, keeping
"hard at work with final revisions, proof corrections, captions"
for his final book. The tribute ends as it begins, circling to the last
visit, "'Love you,' I said at the door of his hospital room. 'Love
you too,' he replied with that wonderful smile."
In retrospect, one can appreciate the heroic attempt to hang a full
portrait on a single peg, and the unbearable sadness of the tears that
always sear deepest and endure the longest, the unwept ones. Her consolation
in her last years, besides the evident joy in her grandchildren, Timothy's
sons, Wyatt and John, and Val's two girls, Kaya and Lia (Perdita died
before Pada's birth but knew he was on the way), was in accepting her
beacon-like place in her mother's lengthening public shadow: "Late
in life," she wrote, "I've come to a new career, or rather,
it has come to me: keeper of the flame, a daunting responsibility."
It was also a career she patently relished. I remember running across
her one winter in Houston, the odd venue for that year's annual MLA
Convention, and being warmed by the evident delight she took in the
session and panel devoted to her mother's work.
One of Perdita' s finest literary miniatures is "A Day at the St.
Regis with Dame Edith," which was published in the American Scholar
(1992) and recently reprinted in The Pushcart Book of Essays (2002).
It cleverly and with gentle humor depicts the extravagant behavior and
dress of Edith Sitwell on one of her rare visits to New York but pauses
amid the fun to observe with typical acuity: "I realized how intensely
vulnerable she was, underneath the flamboyance, beyond her spectacular
facâde." Like Perdita herself, no doubt, a vulnerability
I witnessed during my last glimpse of her on Main Street in East Hampton,
when I met her as she emerged from one of that avenue' s notoriously
overpriced boutiques. Some doubtless flippant remark of mine elicited
that trademark "Oh, yes," that Cheshire smile and dismissive
wave of a hand as she waited to be helped into a car by the solicitous
Catherine, obviously enfeebled but still refusing to accept the brutally
unacceptable.
Perhaps the best manner in which to say goodbye to Perdita is to remember
the brilliant wood violets that spangle the Schaffner fields each year
and share the opening poem of H.D.'s 1921 collection, Hymen, which was
dedicated to Bryher and Perdita:
They said:
she is high and far and blind
in her high pride,
but now that my head is bowed in sorrow, I find
she is most kind.
We have taken life, they said,
blithely, not groped in a mist
for things that are not—
are, if you will, but bloodless—
why ask happiness of the dead?
and my heart bled.
Ah, could they know
how violets throw strange fire,
red and purple and gold,
how they glow
gold and purple and red
where her feet tread.
from Tatiana Petrovich Njegosh (U. of Macerata)
Networking Women : Reti di Donne
New bi-lingual ResearchWebsite for Modernist Studies
URL: http://reti.unimc.it
The project
Networking Women focuses on a number of women writers, intellectuals,
artists, and art patrons (among them Dora Marsden, Harriet Shaw Weaver,
Bryher, H. D., Edith Craig, Nancy Cunard, Margaret Anderson, Muriel
Rukeyser, Susan Glaspell, Katherine Mansfield, Una Marson, Tillie Olsen,
Meridel LeSueur, Elody Oblath Stuparich, Carlotta Kaderl Beck, Wanda
Wultz, Anita Pittoni) who have, through their different initiatives:
a) proposed, built, asserted an autonomous female subjectivity; b) radically
redefined male and female sexualities, the social roles of men and women,
and the changes in sexual relationships as a starting point for a modern
history and a new culture; c) worked for the emergence of a cross-ethnic,
international and supranational culture.
Far from being considered as new pawns on the modernist checkerboard
or as exceptional personalities waiting to be canonized, they have been
studied in their roles as founders of magazines and journals, creators
of salons or theater groups, or as social and political activists. From
this perspective, they are links connecting and promoting a vast array
of human, political, cultural and literary relations. Their first rate
intellectual production, moreover, has constantly been related to the
sociopolitical movements that characterize the time from the last decade
of the nineteenth century to World War II.
The research project has been conceived as an intervention in the ongoing
international debate on the culture that produced modernist and avant-garde
practices. Through a re-reading of the rich intersections of art, life
and history, and of diverse positions and practices, the project intends
to re-construct and recover for present investigation the multiple directions
that were open in actual history but were either abandoned or reduced
and flattened out by subsequent critical and historical narratives and
theories. A key thematic and theoretical aspect of the project is the
reconstruction of the maps of real and lived spaces as well as of the
new maps of experience and cognition generated by interpersonal and
intercultural exchanges.
The web site. Database, metadata element set, thesaurus, search engine
and forum
The Networking Women database, metadata element set and search engine
have been designed and programmed as an hypertext to archive and retrieve
data. The Networking Women metadata element set is based on the Dublin
Core metadata. For further information on our version of the Dublin
Core metadata, see the GUIDELINES in the WORK AREA.
The Networking Women web site features:
- the database;
- metadata records;
- documents (the button ìdocument attachedî on the upper
left side of each metadata record indicates that a document is attached
to that record);
- the thesaurus, based on an enlarged version of the European Womenís
Thesaurus, International Information Centre and Archives for the Women’s
Movement (IIAV), Amsterdam, 1998;
- the search engine;
- the forum.
The documents are archived through a hypertextual indexing. The subject
element of the metadata element set features15 subjects. Each subject
can be associated with any keyword of the thesaurus. The semantic area
of each metadata record can feature up to 100 hot words (subjects and
keywords) linking metadata records with identical subject or keyword.
The Networking Women’s thesaurus includes all the terms of the
IIAV thesaurus and a list of terms selected from the project’s
documents— names and relevant terms such as “modernism,”
“modern,” “contemporary,” “new,” etc.
Reti di donne/Networking Women Subjects
WO/MEN
GENDER/SEXUALITY
RACE/ETHNICITY
CLASS
PEACE
WAR
PLACES
DISPLACEMENT
INTERNATIONALISM/TRANSNATIONALISM
INTERNATIONALISM/REGIONALISM
EXCHANGES
IDENTITY
CULTURAL PRACTICES
ARTI/FACTS
DEFINITIONS OF CULTURE
Wo/men are Networking Women women and men. By Places we intend a broad
range of spaces where cultural events took place and where contacts
were made such as clubs, salons, estates, prisons, pacifistic associations,
political parties, theaters, publishing houses, journals, persons, etc.
The Networking Women project uses the Modern Language Association (MLA)
documentation style. Software requirements: the site is designed to
work with Internet Explorer 5 and Flash 4.
Copyright information
All the materials contained in the Networking Women web site and database
and the application itself are subject to the rules and regulations
of the owners of the material and intellectual rights.
The Networking Women application and all the materials in the Networking
Women web site and database, when not otherwise stated, are material
property of the University of Macerata (Università degli Studi
di Macerata, Italy). All the materials are provided for scholarly, didactic
and public use. Any commercial use or publication without authorization
is prohibited.
All the documents reproduced as attachments to the metadata records
are citation copies, complete or partial, of the original documents.
They are used by permission of the material and intellectual right owners
and they are provided for the personal use of students, scholars, and
the public. Any commercial use or publication without authorization
is prohibited. For more information on the owners of the material and
intellectual rights of the documents reproduced as attachments, please
see the element ìrightsî in their metadata records.
As for “The Freewoman. A Weekly Feminist Review,” “The
Freewoman. A Weekly Humanist Review,” “The New Freewoman.
An Individualist Review” and “The Egoist. An Individualist
Review,” we fully acknowledge the British Library as copyright
holder of the microfilm images. The images reproduced from the above
mentioned publications are copyright of the British Library Board.
The Networking Women project makes every effort to comply with applicable
copyright and other intellectual property rights laws. Any actual or
suspected violation of the legal rights of any person or entity should
be reported to Marina Camboni, the coordinator of the project
at camboni@unimc.it
The Networking Women web site is maintained by the Department of Modern
Languages and Literatures (University of Macerata, Italy). The Networking
Women web site, first initiated in October/2000, was last updated March
2002 by Oscar Peli. For any further information contact Tatiana Petrovich
Njegosh at t.petrovich@unimc.it
2/17/02
from Sawako Nakayasu
NEEDED: Writings on “collaboration”
Dear Kathleen and Ann,
As I approach the final stages of collecting work for the first issue
of !Factorial, I could still use some more writings about or on collaboration,
if anyone is interested in writing about it. OR even better: I would
love if people might submit *ideas*, realized or not, on collaborative
procedures. Please send by enclosing the writing inside the text of
an email, to Sawako_Nakayasu@brown.edu.
(And if anyone is interested, I have more info on the press & some
discussion ideas for this section)
best,
Sawako
___________________
1/22/02
from Fanny Howe
AFGHAN WOMEN’S SUPPORT: Immediate Aid Needed
for the Mother and Child Health Clinic in Peshawar
Afghan Women’s Support is a group of concerned women in Boston
who have come together to bring immediate aid to Afghan women and children
in a specific refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan. Here the Afghan Women’s
Council, founded in 1986 by Mrs. Fatana Gailani, runs the Ariana School
and the Mother and Child Health clinic, which provide education and
medical care to refugee families; it also publishes the monthly Zan-e-Afghan
(Afghan Women) in order to mobilize Afghan women and to bring peace
and stability to the children of their country.
A lack of access to education has been one of the most far-reaching
problems for Afghan children. The Ariana School, with a current enrollment
of 2000 boys and girls (grades 1-12) and a professional faculty of 65
teaching in two shifts, was founded by the AWC in 1986.
In the current crisis, the Ariana School continues to provide education
to the refugee children. Afghan girls can take up their long-interrupted
studies. Graduates of the school are given training in teaching and
journalism in order to continue widening the access to quality education
for Afghan children everywhere, and to promote communication among the
refugees.
Since its inception, the Mother and Child Health Clinic has focused
on these services: obstetrics/gynecology; pediatrics; vaccination; laboratory
testing; and pharmaceutical distribution. A mobile clinic serves those
whose injuries or disabilities are too severe to allow them to make
clinic visits. An education program includes instruction on family planning
and pregnancy management, first aid, oral rehydration therapy, nutrition
and hygiene. A 20-bed hospital has been established in Kabul City.
Faced with an immense influx of new patients since October, 2001, the
Mother and Child Health Clinic is in desperate need of medical supplies
and blankets, sweaters, socks, mittens, and any warm clothing in any
size. All these can be purchased in Pakistan, but funding is needed
at once.
We are asking for immediate financial aid as Central Asia’s cold
winter is worsening. The Peshawar camps in Northeastern Pakistan are
radically vulnerable. You can make a huge difference to the women and
children who are there. Financial aid will go directly to them over
this winter. It will provide hope and energy to the courageous Afghan
women and their children, and help in the rejuvenation of post-war post-Taliban
Afghanistan. Above all, it will save lives.
TO NOTE: Your contribution will go directly to a bank account
in Peshawar set up for this purpose alone.
Please send (tax-deductible) checks to:
The Philanthropic Collaborative
[On the check, write that the money is to go to The Fund for the Afghanistan
Women Council]
Send the check to:
Philanthropic Services, Rockefeller Financial Services,
30 Rockefeller Plaza, Room 5600, New York, NY 10112
Check our website: http://www.afghanwomenssupport.org
___________________
1/6/02
from Cynthia Hogue
Ldov
The University of Alabama Press presents We Who Love to Be Astonished:
Experimental Women's Writing and Performance Poetics, ed. by Laura Hinton
and Cynthia Hogue, now available. Susan Schultz writes: "This is
an important collection, especially in its emphasis on multicultural
experimental writing, and on differences between modes of experimental
writing." We Who Love to Be Astonished collects a powerful group
of previously unpublished essays to fill a gap in the critical evaluation
of women's contributions to postmodern experimental writing. Contributors
include Alan Golding, Lynn Keller, Carla Harryman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis;
discussions include analyses of the work of Kathleen Fraser, Harryette
Mullen, and Kathy Acker, among others.
11/20/01
from Sue Landers/ Brooklyn
New (old?) male-female ratio
Editors:
I have just started publishing a magazine* that tries to print an equal
number of men and women, and have found the blind submission ratio
beetween men and women to be about 75/25. When discussing this problem
with my fellow editors we used both How2 and Elizabeth Treadwell's publishing
ventures as examples to follow when it comes to seeking out and supporting
women's writing.
Which gives you some context for the following question/observation:
I am curious--this is not a criticism--it seems as if there are more
male
contributors in the current issue than in the past. As I am just beginning
to look at this new issue (n.6) of the magazine, I can't fully speak
to the caliber
of the articles, but still the increase in male contributors caught
my eye.
If you have any thoughts on the matter, I'd love to hear them.
I think How2 is still a necessity, and I read it because it is unique.
Thanks,
SLanders@collegeboard.com
============================================
*editor's note: the magazine referred to is PomPom, a poetry journal
based on the idea of a polylogue -- each issue prints responses to
work published in previous issues.
11/3/01
excerpts from Frances Presley
London observations
....I'm trying to formulate my thoughts, both in prose and poetry
from London.... It's a way to reexplore London, and its
fissures and scars....Here are also some reflections from a Laurie
Anderson concert I went to shortly after NYC/9.11 events.
•
Went to the Laurie Anderson concert on Friday night, and she said some
words at the beginning about the attack on New York. She spoke in very
general terms about 'positions' and did not really define what hers
is.
The concert itself was quite a mix of old and new, not the total concept
of
new work I have come to expect, and there was no visual accompaniment.
The Royal Festival Hall was full, and I was miles from the stage. A
man in
the row behind me, obviously a devotee, was describing how he had just
cashed in his BT shares for some others in an American plane manufacturer:
"they're American planes, made in America," he quipped.
I was enjoying the concert in parts when Anderson started 'O Superman',
and
then I was suddenly attentive. It seemed to take on a new meaning: "here
come
the planes", "they're American planes, made in America",
"come as you are, pay as
you go". She also draws on biblical language in a machine world
to make it seem like
the only language possible. It is a language of prophecy, and it is
also the language we
turn to after bereavement when nothing else will do. But as Anderson
demonstrates, we must know how it intersects with every other language
that we use.
"O Superman" also contains, as you will remember, the messages
on the
answer phone from mom: "Is anybody there? Are you coming home?"
I too
saw the news reports of people playing back the last answer phone messages.
And
then I was in tears: "And when justice has gone there's always
mom". I was in tears
also because my own mother had died since I first heard "O Superman",
and she used
to leave messages on my answer phone, which sometimes ended with "love
mum".
Now I know there's another level of unthinking emotionalism in all this,
of "momism",
as I've heard it described recently. What we're reaching for is a thinking
emotion.
FPresley@compuserve.com
___________________
"Peace" vs. "Global Responsibility"
(a discussion between Cynthia Hogue and Jeanne Heuving)
11/8/01 : from C.H.
Dear Jeanne,
I was struck by your comment that you saw little use in commentary on
How2's Forum calling for peace (primarily my piece, although you don't
mention me specifically), and that you rather thought it a time to call
for Global Responsibility. I wouldn't have thought that the two are
mutually exclusive. I would be interested in hearing more of your thoughts
and distinctions. Mine have been evolving in the weeks since the bombing
started, as I have heard Afghan women activists interviewed on Democracy
Now--who are in favor of the bombing, and as more civilians have been
killed. I wonder if your views have been gelling as well as we try to
figure out what is happening through some serious censorship and quelling
of dissenting voices. Although it seemed clear to me that you disagreed
with me, I am not sure that I disagree with you--but I was also not
sure what you meant.
Kathleen would be open to our exchanging on the Forum, and while I do
not wish to get into a long exchange, I would be interested in your
clarification and amplification of your views.
Hope your book is coming along well--I missed seeing you at MSA. I am
on my very first sabbatical and pretty much in heaven at the Wurlitzer
in Taos, which I strongly recommend you apply to for a residency. It
is low key, in the mts. very beautiful.
Best regards,
Cynthia
peacewoman@earthlink.net
11/14/01
Dear Cynthia,
In tracking down my rather quickly thrown off comment about "peace,"
I find I said this: "I can't find much meaning in this crisis in
the call for 'peace' exactly--I find 'gobal responsibility' much more
resonant."--and then I equivocated about the word "responsibility."
(email, 10/19). In this email I was searching, really, for a slogan
or a banner which would address my desire for political action at this
time. If I could take these words back into my mouth, or rather eat
them up through backspace, I would rather say, "I find 'global
justice' much more resonant." Justice is a trendy word in academia
right now, but I like it because it suggests that as global citizens
our responsibility may well exist through an ultimately highly responsive
and imaginative set of actions that produce "justice."
I applaud your understanding of the spiralling effects of violence (postcard
10/9), and indeed, I think non-violence is often the best strategy.
But "peace," ah it seems far too peaceful for this world--not
as you intend it--but as I read it quickly and callously--as a banner
for the movement I would join. When we first started bombing Afghanistan,
I was dismayed that the most visible political movements in Seattle
were "Peace" movements. I was not for the bombing in Afghanistan,
exactly, anymore than I am for any of a number of "police"
actions, but then I do depend on the safety net they provide me. I remain
unsure how to respond to this crisis, since it seems to tap into all
of the most unsolveable dilemmas: global capitalism reproducing itself
through amazingly powerful media. How to listen differently even if
one has the space and time to search out alternative messages? How to
communicate outside of the propaganda machine?
You want to redefine "honor" as "being able to hear both
sides, both perspectives." Yes, but are there really only two sides
here, two perspectives? The word justice implies for me a transformative
multiplicity--where the listening changes with the doing. Yet, I am
not sure what to do? I know that in Seattle there are many groups actively
involved in the politics of different parts of the world, yet I am already
more than busy with the things that I do. So, I wonder how might I redirect
these responsibilities--to do what?
Say, for instance, how can HOW2 listen for women's voices that are trying
to "say" their experiences and lives differently? If words
matter, and we are wordsmiths, what words to use? And how will we know
whether by our words we are producing "global justice"?
Love,
Jeanne
jheuving@u.washington.edu
___________________
11/14/01
from Kerri Sonnenberg
ConundruM
Conundrum, a new print journal of poetry showcasing the work of emerging
and established writers, invites submissions for its first issue.
Conundrum seeks a range of poetry that flusters the language of its
making,
experiments along/extends/questions the boundaries of genre, tickles
the
distance between word and reference, &/or recasts the interfaces
of sound,
visuals, narrative.
Visit www.conundrumpoetry.com
for more info
deadline : January 1, 2002
ConundruM
Kerri Sonnenberg, editor
P.O. Box 1838
Evanston, IL 60204-1838
liberation are being cynically used by the U.S. government to gather
support
or the current war--a war that, I believe, is being waged by the U.S.
for unjust
geopolitical and economic gain. I hope that, after reading the following,
you will give support to any statement or action about women's lives
in
Afghanistan _only if_ that statement/action _also_ demands "Stop
the
War!U.S. Out of Afghanistan!"
please, read the following to see why I feel so strongly about this.
I am writing to you after reading an article in Sunday's NY Times
(November 11, 2001, p. B6) with the headline "Adept in Politics
and Advertising, 4
Women Shape a Campaign." The women, who included chief Pentagon
spokeswoman Victoria Clarke, are described there as "among the
Bush administration's
seeking to convey to a global audience."
to Vice Presiden Dick Cheney. She says of her committment to advocating
for the war: "I think we [the 4 women] probably bring--and I don't
mean this to
sound sexist--but we probably have more of a subconscious outrage at
these issues...This is something that crosses my mind every day: a third
of
these women in pre-Taliban days were doctors, lawyers and teachers.
You can't
help but be outraged."
historical context for Matalin's remarks (sources at end if not cited
in
text):
government immediately moved to improve the terrible feudal conditions
of women.
It set up literacy programs especially for women, whose illiteracy rate
was 96%. It trained more teachers and published textbooks in local languages.
It trainedbrigades of women to go into countryside to provide medical
services
and by 1985 increased hospital beds by 80%. It prohibited the brideprice
and
gave women freedom to choose their marriages. It prohibited punishment
of
women for losing their virginity before marriage, It made it possible
for women
to train and then work as doctors, teachers, and lawyers. The government
also cancelled mortgage debts of laborers and tenants; these debts had
been
inherited over generations so that feudal warlords held landworkers
as
virtual serfs.
overthrow by beginning to send money and equipment to fundamentalist
opposition groups in 1979. This inital effort grew into even more extensive
U.S. backing of the Taliban, the Northern Alliance and other factions,
all of
which drew their power from the feudal landlord class.
women was a young socialist movement, the Progressive Democratic Party
of Afghanistan (PDPA). "The CIA actually created Osama bin Laden's
organization back in the 1980s to attack...the progressive government
in Afghanistan. As vice president, George Bush Sr. oversaw the operation.
In
the Agency's employ, bin Laden's troops murdered teachers, doctors and
nurses, disfigured women who took off the veil, and shot down civilian
airliners with U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles.
U.S.-financed and trained fundamentalist groups--and the U.S.
government did not care. Instead, U.S. government policy has been to
support
the interest of U.S. oil in the Central Asia region. These oil corporations
have
been trying to get a pipeline through Afghanistan for about 10 years.
From a May 26, 1997, New York Times article by John F. Burns: "While
deploring the Taliban's policies on women and the adoption of a penal
code that provides for the amputation of thieves' hands and the stoning
to
death of adulterers, the United States has sometimes acted as though
a
Taliban government might serve its interests. The Clinton Administration
has taken the view that a Taliban victory would end a war that has killed
1.5
million Afghans; would act as a counterweight to Iran, whose Shiite
Muslim
leadership is fiercely opposed to the Sunni Muslims of the Taliban,
and
would offer the possibility of new trade routes that could weaken Russian
and Iranian influence in the region. For example, a proposal by the
Unocal
Corporation of California for a $2.5 billion pipeline that would link
the gas
fields of Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan has attracted
strong
support in Washington, though human rights groups are likely to object
to
the plan....
concept under which the vast mineral resources of the former Soviet
republics
would be moved to markets along routes that would offer these countries
a
new autonomy from Moscow."
task force to monitor the region's politics and gauge its wealth. Covert
CIA
officers, some well-trained petroleum engineers, had traveled through
southern Russia and the Caspian region to sniff out potential oil reserves.
When the policymakers heard the agency's report, [Secretary of State
Madeline] Albright concluded that 'working to mold the area's future
was
one of the most exciting things we can do.'"
as an intelligence service for the oil industry) wrote in January 2001:
"With
the coming of a Sino-Russian pact of mutual assistance and an Iranian
acceptance
of the Russian proposal to carve up the Caspian Sea, any chance the
U.S. had of
cementing alliances in the region seemed doomed. The incoming American
administration, heavy in oil and related interests, will likely try
to reverse
this trend. How effective they will be is open to question."
future in the region to: "the success of the Central Asian counterstrike."
That
article was posted on April 24, 2001.
teachers" when they were flourishing under a secular government--nor
did it care for the Afghan women of the countryside living under feudal
conditions.
hoped the return of the feudal warlords to power would give the U.S.
oil
companies a chance at that pipeline--a chance that a secular socialist
government would not give them. (A historical note here: The U.S. began
its war against the secular government six months before the U.S.S.R.
intervened with troops. [p.146, "From the Shadows," an autobiography
by
Robert M. Gates, former Director of the CIA, Simon & Schuster, 1996])
Now the U.S. government is trying to use the very women whose lives
were _crushed and ended_ by U.S. interference and power politics! The
U.S. is dishonoring women twice.
secular government attempting to liberate women, and that resulted in
the
terrible abuse and deaths of women under fundamentalist forces.
Now the U.S. is trying to use the very deaths of women that _it caused_
to
consolidate U.S. power in Central Asia.
manipulated. We know that the full liberation of women can not be
accomplished within a framework of injustice, inequity, and imperialist
violence.
U.S. War! U.S. Out of Afghanistan!"
Minnie Bruce Pratt
Pentagon publication by the U.S. Department of the Army, "Afghanistan--a
Country Study for 1986"
Workers World newspaper, reprinted article of Oct. 10, 1996
<
<http://www.internationalANSWER.org>
___________________
11/8/01
email exchange: Cynthia Hogue and Salima Hashmi
Dear KF and How2
readers,
We have now heard from all three of the women that my friend Shehla
suggested, and there will be more, as Salima mentions our interest to
Afghani and other Pakistani women. I hope that as these are posted,
there will be a good response from Western women. We in the States must
project ourselves mightily into their shoes to imagine their experience--affected
so deeply by Sept. 11; we still view it as an isolated incident. We
have no sense of how it feels to live near a frontline, to be truly
oppressed and endangered. Every day these days I feel so thankful, even
as I feel it so urgent to speak out, even as I am savoring this writing
time....
It has so much to do with the fear to speak, which goes way back for
most of us.
Cynthia
<peacewoman@earthlink.net>
Dear Cynthia,
Thanks for your e-mail..Am just off to a South Asian human rights moot
in Delhi, and you would be intersted in talking to many of the delegates,
including Kishwar Naheed, Asma Jehangir and others. Will pass on the
message and you will hear from some of them... As we are leaving early,
this is just to acknowledge your message and to tell you that much is
going on in response to recent events and those that led up to them.
We are of course deeply worried about the continual bombing and the
terrifying human suffering that is already unfolding...this HAS to stop
immediately...it in no way combats terrorism...only reinforces it.
regards,
Salima Hashmi
___________________
11/6/01
from Elizabeth Treadwell Jackson
Women of the think tank:
"I cut out tiny cardboard Christians and threw them to my collection
of stuffed lions." -- Perdita Schaffner
Last August I spent a camping trip reading *Women of the Left Bank* (which I would highly recommend to anyone interested in same, tho you may want to skip some parts, as when plots of books you haven't read are given away, in my case H.D.'s *Hermione*). Toward the end, it's all about everyone's reaction (practical & literary) to the beginning of WWII and I remember lazily thinking under some big tree in Washington state, it's so strange to imagine being that truly *caught* in history. And now, here we are (tho of course I am not nearly as *caught* as a no doubt wide variety of folks in NYC, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, & Afghanistan).
beer like the ocean
spitting emails back at you
my Jean Rhys moments at the corner store
I like a slogan
Rachel Levitsky sent me: "a life is not abstract just because it's
far away" -- she may have phrased it better.
Paula Gunn Allen came and spoke at Small Press Traffic on Oct. 19. She
talked about lots of things, including Indigenous nations' reactions
to current events. She talked about how the earth is going through some
kind of menopause which sounds ludicrous coming from me but you should
read her essay "Growing Up Sacred" which she wrote for a book
of photographs of sacred places in the US just published (she couldn't
remember the title of the book, a coffee table sort I imagine, which
charmed me being deeply marked by her work as a critic and as a teacher
of mine at UCB). She was lucky enough to grow up with a Scots-Irish
Laguna Pueblo mother who read the kids Gertrude Stein aloud and told
them to look at the mountain. Also a Lebanese father, which gives some
twists to her take on the events. She read some updated transliterations
of Rumi poems which pleased the crowd. MP3s of her talk and also some
other great recent SPT readings by Stephanie Williams and Lily James
should be up at our website (http://www.sptraffic.org) fairly soon.
Right now there is a lovely poem by Mei Mei Berssenbrugge you can listen
to there if you have the right equipment.
any less deafening cry
(for Carol Mirakove)
the last glass ceiling, broken leap
fanny alright, these tidy ladies
that won't keep, the commercial,
not the military, side
antelope prescription supplier,
that makes it hard to figure,
miles of back-country connoisseur
lodgings vary
from spartan to less spartan,
slaved queensrust way
tarried nightly
wishingpot
into the policy bingo
How lucky am I to be writing anything at all and to have an evening in which to read poems sent to me by Sarah Anne Cox and Carol Mirakove.Love and hope.
___________________
11/5/01
circulated by Beryl Nicholson, via Susan Gevirtz
New list: Balkan
Women and Friends
A new discussion list, Balkan Women and Friends has been launched. A
lot of people
are doing research on women in the Balkans. The list aims to be a resource
for them
and for anyone interested in women’s issues that will enable them
to make contact
with one another and with people elsewhere who have the same interests.
Consult the website at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BalkanWomen
Join by sending an e-mail to:
BalkanWomen-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
then send a message to introduce yourself to the other members, and
of course
any information, in any language, you would like to contribute to:
BalkanWomen@yahoogroups.com
Please pass on this message to anyone you know who might be interested
in
joining the list.
<beryl1@research32.freeserve.co.uk>
____________________
11/4/01
from Sawako Nakayasu
“Radical text collaborations” needed by Women
I posted the following to the poetics list, but really I think I want
to
target more female writers--
do you think you might be able to pass this around to people you think
might be interested? (of both genders--I'm not being gender-exclusive
with
this, but so far I've heard from more men than women, and want to publish
more women than men...)
thanks so much--
sawako
**************************
factorial !press
is dedicated to publishing radical text-collaborations, and welcomes
submissions of work for its inaugural issue. (Poster and book submissions
will also be considered, on an on-going basis.)
Emphasis is on exploratory, genreless, and/or multicultural writing.
Possibilities include radical articulations of plays, performance text,
transcriptions, instructions, narrative, conversations, essays, poems,
definitions, manifestoes, incidental text.
Collaborations between unlikely pairings of writers are especially encouraged.
[for the journal]
--please send up to 15 pages hard copy.
--or send descriptions, ideas, processes, proposals, possible &
impossible
imaginings of collaborative projects to be compiled in a "process"
section.
---> deadline: january 15, 2001---->
[for posters]
--please send photographs or prints of text/visual art collaborations.
[for books]
--please query by letter first before sending a manuscript.
(please include contact information or SASE for reply)
--> send all work to-->
factorial !press
Sawako Nakayasu
5869 Dry Oak Drive
San Jose, CA 95120
____________________
10/29/01
from
the editors/Kelsey St. Press
Open
Submissions Announced for younger/less-established writers
The
Kelsey Street Press announces a two-month period of open submissions--from
November 1 to December 31, 2001. We are looking for unpublished book-length
collections of poems or poetically-informed prose. We are especially
interested in receiving submissions from younger or less established
writers. Manuscripts will be selected in early 2002 and published in
2003.
We
are interested in books with some cohesion in their overall composition
and style whether it is a sense of narrative or consists of a set of
interrelated series or parts. We appreciate writing that tells a story
but not in the usual way, which subverts a particular kind of genre,
has a sense of wit or irony, is honest but not naïve, but is also
direct, surprising, vital and graceful. The press is especially interested
in work in which the writing, the page and the form of the book are
in dynamic relation.
Kelsey
Street Press was founded in 1974 to publish experimental writing by
women and has a history of publishing poets' collaborations with visual
artists. Recent publications include Juice by Renee Gladman, Symbiosis
by Barbara Guest and Laurie Reid, and Tales of Horror by Laura Mullen.
Collaborations will not be accepted in this call for manuscripts.
For
more information on the press, please view our website at:
http://www.kelseyst.com
Letters of submission & manuscripts should be sent to:
Kelsey St. Press
attn: Tanya Erzen/ Karla Nielsen
50 Northgate Ave
Berkeley, CA 94705
____________________
CONTINUING
RESPONSE TO "FOR THE RESURRECTION OF WORDS"
10/28/01
from Toni Maraini/Rome
Sites for Afghan poetry and art
If
you look at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7261/
you will
find a list of poets (but you cannot read them as they are not in English);
go to the bottom of the page and click 'related links', and you will
find
two serious cultural magazines “Ariana” and “Lemar”.
In 1999, the Afghan Students Association at George Mason University,
Fairfax, Va., presented an art show of works by thirty Afghanistan artists.
From this show, an on-line exhibit was assembled with a selection of
works by 14 of these artists--one woman, Asma Zaka--called “Cross
Roads of Asia/ The Afghan Art Exhibition.” See Lemar-Aftaab / April-Sept.
1999 /Vol 1- Issues 8 & 9 . To find this work, go to www.asaweb.org
Be careful in making a distinction between independent sites and propaganda
ones.
I have seen that the ones that are honorable and serious all start by stating clearly that they condemn terrorism and participate to the sorrow of American people; you can go ahead in that case.
Buon lavoro
10/25/01
from
Anne Dewey/ Madrid
Empathic
Angles vary from Students Abroad
Dear
How2 editors,
10/25/01
by Robin Andersen/Fordham, NYC
Finding
Empathy in the TV Coverage of the World Trade Center Attack
The
TV images of the World Trade Center burning were horribly familiar yet
they stood without parallel. Black smoke billowed from both buildings
and I thought I saw a free-falling body twist its way past the gaping
hole in Tower One. Yet the studio voices that accompanied the images
did not mention it. Had they not seen him or her?
TV anchors, some calm, some excited, repeated that a plane had
crashed into the North Tower, then hit the second one. It was live footage
of real buildings burning in real time, but they stood silent, with
no natural sound, at the surreal distance evoked by long camera shots.
As I watched, another explosion tore through the second tower and flames
silently consumed a lower portion of the building. The only frame or
reference for such images is the fictional narratives of computer-generated
action films in which cities are mutilated and destroyed. Independence
Day, one such cartoon-like adventure, demolished New York and Washington,
the very cities I now watched burning.
Our
perceptions have been permanently framed by the sensibilities of those
commanding fictions, and TV practitioners are certainly under the sway
of the techno-hyper-real. It seemed as if we were living through Life
the Movie. These events had already happened and this was some sort
of spectacular sequel. Openly awed by the visual spectacle, “it
was quite a sight,” one intoned. Some awareness, just below the
level of waking, continued to nag at my reception of the pictures, aren’t
there people in the buildings? The TV voices were not helping even as
they recounted, over and over, the actual events. A pilot on a remote
phone connection with Channel 4 had seen, “the plane screaming
by at full power.” By the time he looked out his apartment window,
about 4 or 5 seconds later, it had hit Tower One. As he spoke the buildings
burned benignly against the sky of the clear September day. Though there
was emotion in his voice, it was hard to bring actual human beings into
this zone that was essentially fictional, uniquely visual, and usually
without real consequences. After all, we didn’t mourn for the
thousands who died in Independence Day. But didn’t I just see
someone, an actual person’s body falling to the ground?
The
people we did hear from were the ones already out of harm's way Eyewitnesses
told how they had fled the building. A misguided sense of responsibility
might have prevented reporters from attending to those still inside.
Was it some desire to prevent mass hysteria? Later that night, when
I finally got through to my friends in SoHo, I heard their sorrow at
seeing dozens of people crowded at the windows on the floors with no
exit routes. A man very near the top had waved a white cloth through
a broken window for at least 45 minutes. He never got out. After 7 hours
of watching television, I had not heard any such stories. Whatever the
reasons, television did not see fit to allow us to grieve for the people
left trapped in the building at the time it went down. We will never
be able to have that collectively summoned moment of silence they all
deserved.
There
was much concern for the NewYork skyline. At Newark airport one journalist
pointed a camera over the tails of a fleet of United jets to find empty
sky, where this morning he told us, we would have seen the World Trade
Center. Throughout the day TV openly lamented the loss of the buildings,
yet the fact that people lay buried under the rubble was almost never
mentioned. One police officer requesting anonymity estimated losses
in the thousands. Whether the media decided for themselves, or simply
followed official admonitions, the effect was the same. One journalist
actually used the term “collateral damage” for those killed,
diminishing the humanity of those lost.
A
New Yorker covered in soot ran down the street. He came in and out of
the frame, and as he did I could see his lips move but the sound was
off. The studio voices were always laid over the images, they interpreted,
explained, but never let me hear the people on the street. Some considered
media worthy were brought into the studio or moved out of the direct
action and interviewed, but only short snippets of what they said were
aired. We were told that a storeowner was giving out water, but I did
not see such meaningful moments. I wanted to be with my fellow New Yorkers, sharing their struggles
for survival, and grieving for the ones lost. Instead, there was the
endless repetition of the most dramatic images. In addition to The Towers
Burning were images reminiscent of other movies including, Armageddon;
clouds of dust and rubble billowing from between the buildings, pursuing
people running away in the street. Repeating the picture over and over
with no sound removed it from real experience and turned it into a fascination.
By days end one of the newsmagazines had produced a slick sequence molded
into familiar entertainments, “doctors and interns lined up like
on a set of a disaster movie.
I
didn’t want to be a detached observer, awed by the spectacle,
entertained by cleaver references, calmed by the stories deemed appropriate
by gatekeepers. I wanted to be a thinking, feeling citizen, part of
a human community pulling together in a crisis. I wanted local reporters
in the streets getting the story on the ground. By the next day, local
news was doing just that, giving out help-line numbers, reporting on
family members searching for loved-ones, and in general being good citizens.
This
disaster has no frame of reference adequate for its expression and able
to grasp its meanings. The fictional frames are just that, entertainments.
We grasp for a way to express human dignity in the face of terrible
loss. We do have storylines and image conventions for death, ones applied
to people outside of our own communities. When the media air grizzly
pictures of famine, disasters, death and war elsewhere, they are usually
presented with little context, from a detached perspective: people crowded
together, under attack, starving, suffering horrible indignities. These
people are presented as the Other, through narratives of exclusion,
as little more than sights for our fascination. Ethical battles have
been fought, some won, some lost, about airing graphic depictions of
human horror. Many have been deemed too ratings worthy to be shelved.
We have no words, no media frames that can recognize the sadness of
death as it happens, while preserving the dignity of those it is happening
to. Media sensationalism often overcomes our feelings of empathy and
compassion. Are these the reasons we could not acknowledge that the
buildings were full of people?
The
city is beginning to come to terms with the loss of life, as family
members search for those still missing and unaccounted for. No doubt
there are pictures and footage that we have not yet seen, of the horrible
events that occurred on Tuesday. More footage of the people who jumped
out of the buildings is starting to be aired. The audio track of screams
and chaos are beginning to accompany the repeated disaster footage.
Let us hope that these horrible sights don’t become the source
of revenue, or ratings boosters when commercials make their way back
on to our television screens. Hopefully we will now be more aware of
the need for empathy and compassion when we tell stories of death, loss
and destruction, not only for ourselves, but also for those who find
themselves in front of our cameras in other parts of the world.
[Note:
Robin Andersen teaches media studies at Fordham University and is the
Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Program]
10/22/01
Sent in by Megan Adams, from <salon.com>
The Taliban's bravest opponents
An underground resistance
of Afghan women risks torture and execution
to alert the world to the regime's atrocities. One freedom fighter tells
Salon her story. (originally posted 10/2/01)
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Janelle Brown
The film footage is wobbly and blurry but stunning: A soccer stadium in
Afghanistan is packed with people, but there is no match today. Instead,
a pickup truck drives into the stadium with three women, shrouded in
burqas, cowering in the back.
Armed men in turbans
force a woman from the truck, and make her kneel at the penalty line on
the field. Confused and unable to see, the woman tries to look behind
just as a rifle is pointed against the back of her
head. With no fanfare whatsoever, she is shot dead. The shaky video
camera captures the cheering crowd as people rise to their feet, hoping
to get a better view of the corpse on the ground. The blue folds of the
burqa begin to stain red with blood.
This public execution
is some of the most shocking film ever seen on
television; it is perhaps the best document that the West has of
atrocities committed by the Taliban. It is just one part of an
astonishing hour-long documentary called "Beneath the Veil,"
currently
in heavy rotation on CNN. Filmed by the half-Afghan British reporter
Saira Shah, who traveled undercover to Afghanistan last year, "Beneath
the Veil" neatly captures the horror of life under the Taliban--the
public executions for infractions as minor as prostitution or adultery,
the brutality of fundamentalist police, the slaughter of civilians
unlucky enough to live on the front line of the civil war with the
Northern Alliance.
In documenting life
under the Taliban, Shah went into the homes of the
Afghan people and onto the battlefields, cleverly evading the
Department of Vice and Virtue, which would have thrown her in jail for
filming illegally (all unsanctioned filming is forbidden). She visited
territory occupied by the Northern Alliance, and visited a village where
the Taliban had brutally murdered dozens of civilians just weeks
earlier-- a local wedding photographer had filmed the scene as
villagers buried rotting bodies that had been scalped and mutilated.
There, Shah also interviewed three teenage girls whose mother had been
shot dead by the Taliban. They were so traumatized by the atrocities
that the Taliban subsequently inflicted upon them that two of them
would no longer speak.
But some of the most
heartstopping footage in "Beneath the Veil,"
including film of the execution of the women in the soccer stadium, was
captured not by Shah but by an Afghan underground organization which
assisted her in her work. Indeed, Shah's documentary would not have
been possible were it not for the Revolutionary Association of the
Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), an underground organization whose members
risk their lives every day in attempts to undermine the Taliban and publicize
its brutality.
RAWA was originally
founded in 1977 as an Afghan feminist group
focused on women's rights, but its mandate broadened when
fundamentalists rose to power. Determined to expose the frightening
abuses of the Taliban, women in the group began to hide video cameras
under their burqa and document the executions and public floggings
which take place every day under the Taliban. They also smuggle female
journalists like Shaila Shah and Eve Ensler, writer/director of "The
Vagina Monologues," into the country, in hopes of bringing attention
to their cause. In defiance of the Taliban's law forbidding education
for women, RAWA also runs clandestine home-based schools for girls; for
women, who are forbidden to work, RAWA teaches handicrafts and sells
them online. In the refugee camps in Pakistan, RAWA also provides
medical assistance, housing and education for impoverished and
terrified fugitives of Taliban rule.
RAWA, the most prominent
Afghan-run organization to oppose the
Taliban, has become one of the fundamentalists' greatest enemies.
Perhaps the aspect of the group most infuriating to its opponents-- and
a surprising key to its effectiveness -- is that it consists entirely
of women, nearly 2,000 in Afghanistan and Pakistan, who use the cover
of their burqas and the seeming powerlessness of their status to
strategic advantage.
By traveling with
RAWA, Shah got a first-hand view of what it's like
to be a woman living under the Taliban, and she was invited into RAWA's
secret schools and illegal meetings. She also got access to its library
of video footage -- which includes not just the film of the execution
of the women, but footage of the public hanging of three men in the same
soccer stadium. (The soccer stadium was funded by international aid
groups who wanted to raise the spirits of the Afghan people; instead,
the Taliban is using it only for executions. One Taliban official told
Shah that if the aid groups felt that the stadium should be used for
soccer, they should build the Taliban an extra stadium for
executions.) "Beneath the Veil" was filmed long before the attacks
of
Sept. 11, and, according to RAWA members, the situation in Afghanistan
has since become more dire. Because the borders between Pakistan and
Afghanistan have closed, the Afghan people are now trapped in their own
country-- enduring the oppressive rule of the Taliban while waiting
for U.S. bombs to drop from the sky. RAWA, meanwhile, says it is running
out of money and can't afford to educate, feed and treat the millions
of refugees massed along the border. The Pakistani police, which are
sympathetic to the Taliban, regularly target RAWA members; and since
communication with Afghanistan has been cut off, the RAWA members in
Pakistan know little about what is happening to their members across the
border.
In a telephone interview from Islamabad, a 26-year-old member of RAWA,
identified only as "Fatima," spoke about RAWA's work in Pakistan
and Afghanistan, its position on war and the Northern Alliance, and its
"uncompromising attitude" toward fundamentalism. A seven-year
veteran
of the group's dangerous brand of activism, Fatima is a member of the
RAWA political committee that has been trying to rally both Afghan women
and the international media to its agenda.
Q. What is your life
story, and what do you do for RAWA?
A. I'm from Kabul.
I started to work with RAWA when I was 19 years old. There has been war
in our country for more than 23 years; my generationwas born with war,
we've experienced just crimes, just blackness, just sorrow in our country.
We never saw happiness or democracy. I lived in shock, because every day
there were tragic stories in my neighborhood around me.
When I was young
I decided to do something about this. A lot of young
girls commit suicide because they are helpless and hopeless. But some,
like me, choose the way of struggle. We accept that we want to serve
our people -- that this is the best way to bring justice to our country.
When I was 20 years old, I left Afghanistan; my job for RAWA was to
come here to Pakistan and work in the refugee camps. I had to cross the
border often and go back into Afghanistan to organize women for
demonstrations; and to bring RAWA's publications into Afghanistan. We
would go secretly and without documents -- no one asks you for them
because you are a woman. I wear the burqa then, because this is the
only visa required for women to enter Afghanistan. When I
cross the border, no one can know that I am in RAWA.
Q. Why do you use
the pseudonym "Fatima"?
A.We all use different
names all the time, because we have a lot of
security problems. Our leader Meena and her bodyguards were
assassinated in Pakistan in 987 by the Islamic fundamentalists and the
KGB. Our members are always attacked and injured -- we receive death
threats by e-mail and letters and telephone, telling us to stop what we
are doing or they will kill us. So we are working clandestinely in
Afghanistan, and in Pakistan we are half-secret.
Q. Have you ever
been personally attacked by the Taliban?
A. I was flogged
three times in the streets, for stupid reasons. They
will flog women that don't have the veil on, or aren't with their male
relative, or are talking to a male shopkeeper, or are out on the
streets during the evening. There are always people sobbing in the
streets because they are being beaten. This is normal.
In Pakistan in1999,
I was injured at a RAWA demonstration. Pakistan
is one of the countries that officially recognizes the Taliban
government; so when we take our anti-Taliban slogans into the streets,
they try to stop us. During the demonstration, we were fighting -- we
wanted to go in front of the United Nations building; but the Pakistani
police wanted to stop us. During the fighting, they beat me and broke
my hand.
Q. What has been
RAWA's most crucial activity in Afghanistan?
A. We teach hundreds
of women and children in the underground schools in Afghanistan. For children,
we teach mathematics, physics, chemistry, Persian, science, social studies
and the history of Afghanistan; also, the geography of the world. For
women, we just teach them two main subjects -- mathematics and Persian.
When our women go to the shops, they don't know how to pay the shopkeeper
and get change, because they haven't had an education.
We also bring in
video cameras to expose the crimes of the Taliban.
It's risky work. We filmed the execution of the women that you saw in
"Beneath the Veil." Also, we've filmed hangings in Kabul and
several
other cities, taken pictures of Afghans who have had their hands cut
off for stealing, or their necks cut. There are photos on our Web site.
We make a hole in
the burqa and film through it. That's why the
quality of our films is very bad; it's very difficult. No one has ever
been caught doing it; but execution is the only punishment if you get
caught, especially if the Taliban knew we were RAWA.
Q. What are you doing
in the refugee camps in Pakistan?
A. We have schools
for girls in the fugitive camps; but in some we have
problems because of the influence of the fundamentalists. We have
handicraft projects for women; we run chicken farms, a jam-making
business and carpet weaving projects. We also have mobile medical teams
that go in to the camps one or two days a week to give free medicine.
We had a hospital called Malalai, but it closed because of our financial
problems; one of our very urgent projects is to reopen it.
Q. What are your
feelings about the attack on America?
A. We are so sorry
for the victims of this terrorist attack. We want to
shower them with deep solidarity. We can understand their sorrow because
we also suffered this terrorism for more than 23 years. We were already
victims of this tragedy.
On the other hand,
unfortunately, we warned the United States
government about this many, many times; as well as the other countries
that are supporting and creating the fundamentalist parties. They helped
create these terrorists during the Cold War; they supported Osama bin
Laden [during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan]. Fundamentalism is
equal to terrorism; it's equal to crime. We said, this germ won't just
be in Afghanistan, it will spread out all over the world.
Today we can see
this with our own eyes. We warned them but they never listened to our
cry, to our voice.
Q. How is the crisis
in America affecting your work at RAWA?
A. Thousands of families
are escaping from Afghanistan, leaving everything behind because they
are afraid of war. Thousands of others that are living in Afghanistan
don't have the possibility to immigrate here; and now, even the borders
are closed. That means that our people have to burn in the flame of war
and all the doors are closed.
In fugitive camps
it's really hard to work, especially hard because
millions of fugitives have just arrived. They are in shock, and have
nothing but themselves and the clothes on their back. I met a family
yesterday that wanted help from RAWA, they cried and said they walked
through the mountains because the border was closed. Their child fell
down the mountain and died, but they couldn't stop because they had to
escape.
Our people escape
from Afghanistan because of the fear of killing and
rape and torture, but they will die in the refugee camps because of lack
of food, jobs and healthcare. Even here the situation is not good. We
are in a crisis in the camps; thousands have contacted us for help and
we don't know how to help them. At every moment they want their children
to be in our orphanages or our schools; they want a house, medicine --they
need everything, and we have no money.
Also we are so worried
about our members inside Afghanistan, about
their lives.
Q. Are you concerned
about a war with the United States?
A. We are condemning
an attack of the U.S. on Afghanistan, because it
won't be the Taliban but our people who will be the victims. The United
States should decry these terrorist groups in Afghanistan; but not
through an attack. Maybe through commando attacks, though. We do want
the United Nations to be more active -- their rule is very important in
this moment.
We also want to convey
a message to the American people that there's a difference between the
people of Afghanistan and the criminal government of Afghanistan. There
is a river of blood between them.
Q. Do you support
the Northern Alliance?
A. We condemn the
cooperation of the United States with the Northern
Alliance. This is another nightmare for our people -- the Northern
Alliance are the second Taliban.
The Northern Alliance
are hypocrites: They say they are for democracy
and human rights, but we can't forget the black experience we had with
them. Seventy-year-old grandmothers were raped during their rule,
thousands of girls were raped, thousands were killed and tortured. They
are the first government that started this tragedy in Afghanistan.
Q. What government
do you support, then?
A. We are ready to
support the former king. It doesn't mean that the king is a very ideal
person for us. But in comparison to the fundamentalist parties, we prefer
him. The only condition we have for the king is that he must not cooperate
with the Northern Alliance.
Q. What does RAWA
need right now?
A. We are in a very
bad financial condition. We need anything we can get -- for our mobile
team, for medicine, for our schools. Maybe $1 is
nothing for them, but for us it means a lot. To run our struggle with
empty hands is impossible for us.
(To donate to RAWA,
visit the RAWA's Web site, <www:Rawa.com> The Afghan Women's Mission,
or The Feminist Majority.)
Do you want to go
back to Afghanistan?
I miss Afghanistan
very much, it's my country. I love my city and my
country a lot. I am a fugitive here. Whenever there is peace in Afghanistan
we will never go to another country -- we will go back to rebuild Afghanistan
and experience good days, I hope.
9/19/01
[Sent
in by Susan Gevirtz 10/25/01, via
<faces-l@yahoogroups.com>]
A
statement of Medica Mondiale Kosova Women's Center:
Call
for a non-violent response in the aftermath of the attacks on the World
Trade Center, USA.
We
wish to express our shock and extend our deep sympathy to the relatives
and friends of the victims of the brutal attacks in the United States.
It is hard for us to see the suffering, even from across the seas, even
as trauma counselors ourselves. And we cry for the people of many nations,
ethnicities, and religions who died. The people of Kosova have put up
posters of sympathy with the people of the United States, and we have
held vigils of solidarity with the victims from around the world.
We
have lived through war. We have been greatly helped in our recovery, by
the United States representatives, who talked against revenge and promoted
reconciliation as essential to achieve a future with true peace and democracy.
We
know what it is like to be attacked, to grieve and to feel anger. Every
day we attend to the physical and emotional pains of the women in our
communities who continue to suffer from the violence of war. We listen
to the stories and work together with women to find ways to productively
channel negative emotions. Women in Kosova, still suffering from the symptoms
of severe trauma, know what military responses do to innocent people and
how long-lasting the consequences are.
Therefore
we understand the urge for revenge is strong. And we know that it must
not be given in to. We know that a violent response can only bring more
violence. It does not bring justice. Instead it kills more innocent victims
and gives birth to new holy avengers. It begins a new cycle and
perpetuates more hate, more insecurity, more fear and ultimately
more death amongst civilians.
We
urge in the strongest possible terms for the United States and its allies,
to temper their anger and to refrain from the folly of a sweeping military
solution‚. Terrorists are not nations. And nations must not act
like terrorists.
We
do not wish to have you see your young men go to war and lose their lives,
like thousands of our sons, fathers, and husbands did. We are horrified
that there is talk of attacking and putting at risk millions of people’s
lives because of the acts of a few. We do not wish to have war on a country
or countries full of innocent adults and children, who already suffer
at the hands of their leaders and whom themselves have committed no crimes.
We know that bombs are not smart, we know they kill women, children, and
old people and we know only too well, that it is mainly the women who
bear the task of rebuilding societies torn apart by war. This is our work
at present and it is very hard work. We do not wish to see countries'
economies devastated, and its people made poorer for generations to come.
We do not wish to see Americans attacked, killed or made afraid in the
United States because of their religious or ethnic identities. We wish
for all nations to be proud and to build a society and a politics that
respects individuals and groups, and promotes diversity.
American politicians and decision makers, grieve for your dead, and find ways to protect the living! But we ask you not to put us and your citizens at more risk. What you are threatening to unleash is making us afraid for the world. Do not endanger the people of Asia, the Middle East, and northern Africa. War will surely imperil us all and future generations also. Please remember your past and learn from ours, and work to leave a legacy of justice and peaceful construction, not of revenge, destruction and war.
___________________
RESPONSES TO "FOR
THE RESURRECTION OF WORDS"
[Posted between 9/20 and 10/1]
10/9/01
from Cynthia Hogue
In a Battle of Wills There Are No Winners
It is four weeks since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Like most of us since these attacks, I have been more aware of being alive as a gift. I have reached out to loved ones to tell them I love them. And like most of us, I am scared and wish I didn’t feel so helpless. Because as I write, the U.S. has started bombing Afghanistan. The bombing does not make me feel safe. It makes me feel unsafe.
One of the radio commentators remarked on the day the bombing started, apropos of the origins of war, that the Vikings didn’t have a word for the meaningless escalation of violence that comprises the plot of the greatest Icelandic saga, Brennu Njalsaga. Njal’s Saga is the story of a wise man with an unwise family. What starts out as a small retaliatory exchange between two households escalates, despite Njal’s best peacekeeping efforts, until two whole clans are involved in the rivalry. At last Njal and all his household are burned alive by their enemies. When the plot is reduced to its broad outlines, the horror of the violence of killing so many people is writ large (one of the themes of this saga). When we reduce the September 11th attacks to the nineteen young Muslim fundamentalists--the sect is so sexist we need not denote their sex--who highjacked four passenger airline jets and killed over 6000 people in one hour, these terrorist acts seem to us clearly mad. Crazy mad. The actions of lunatics. From our perspective.
Angry mad, from their perspective. Why do they hate us? Americans asked after the attack. “How do people reach this level of anger, hatred and frustration?” asks Professor of Conflict Studies John Paul Lederach. To call them lunatics misses a crucial point: By my experience, explanations that they are brainwashed by a perverted leader who holds some kind of magical power over them is an escapist simplification and will inevitably lead us to very wrong-headed responses. Anger of this sort, what we could call generational, identity-based anger, is constructed over time through a combination of historical events, a deep sense of threat to identity, and direct experience of sustained exclusion.
From the terrorists’ perspective, they are a David heroically fighting the bully-giant Goliath, who is spreading Western imperialism. If we do as they expect, which is to use our power against a weak people or nation, we can expect without a doubt that they will engage in the future in ever-escalating cycles of revenge and violence.
The Vikings in fact did have a word for the senseless feuding that drives the plot of Njal’s Saga, which is the word used to rationalize the violence by the characters. It is the same word as motivated the terrorists on September 11th, the same word as is motivating U.S. and British retaliation. It is a word for an heroic concept, a warrior’s code. That word is honor, along with the component parts of the ancient heroic code: pride and shame, loyalty and betrayal. One of the men interviewed on the radio the day we started the bombing was a veteran of the Gulf War. When asked if he’d go back to war if drafted, he said, “Of course. It’s the warrior’s code, to rip the living heart out of the enemy’s chest. I’m a warrior.”
Honor requires us to retaliate, or the enemy will think he can get away with murder. But honor, too, will require the other side to avenge such retaliation because we “deserved” the punishing “justice”they dealt us. At the dawning of the twenty-first century, we discover that we understand the saga‘s world of the blood feud and violent retaliation because, to our shock and horror, we are suddenly living it. However much we refuse to hear them, from the Muslim extremist perspective, the U.S. has been made “to pay” for past grievances to the Muslim world, for which we had never shown remorse. Now, we are making Afghanistan “pay” for harboring terrorists. But Afghanistan did not attack the U.S. So, the U.S. will eventually be made to “pay” for its harming Afghanistan. How far and how long will this exchange of violence go?
We desperately need another model for what is deemed an honorable response. That model also lies in Njal’s Saga as well, in Njal himself. The saga was written after Iceland had converted in 1000 A.D. to Christianity. Thus, although its action takes place before the conversion, its theme is influenced by gentler Christian tenets. Njal is a pagan precursor of what I will call “radical Christianity” (to distinguish it from the bigotry of most versions of fundamentalist Christianity, much like the terrorists’ Islamic fundamentalism must be distinguished from the gentler Muslim faith). Njal counsels tolerance and negotiates nonviolent alternative responses to violence. He wheels and deals for peace. Although the violence of his pagan family eventually takes him down with them, he represents an alternative that redefines the heroic code of honor. We need that alternative now. What are the possibilities?
For a start, we could redefine “honor” as being able to hear both sides, both perspectives, not just our own. We could view violence itself as dishonorable, and every “holy war”--both sides have bandied this phrase about--as sacrilege. Certainly when we are the target, we call violence “barbaric”and “heinous.” Why is it justified when we perpetrate it ourselves? We could consider our own possible responses in terms other than violence. And to those who say we will look weak to the world if we negotiate, we could answer: We need another definition of strength. Strength is the courage to wait and to make a considered response. Strength is not throwing our military weight around. Strength is seeking insistently--and, why not? aggressively--negotiated, diplomatic solutions.
We need to honor the memories of our own victims by listening to their families. Many of the families of the September 11th dead are not calling for retaliation, but for peacemaking. Touched so deeply and irrevocably by this tragedy, these families understood more immediately than any of us that no violence will return their loved ones to life, no retaliatory strike could suffice to comfort them in their grief. They say again and again that their dead would not wish other innocent people to die for their deaths. In escalating the violence, we risk making the deaths of over 6000 civilians truly meaningless, for we will have failed to understand the lesson in their deaths: that how we feel now is how civilians in Baghdad felt when we bombed them, how civilians in Serbia felt, how civilians in Japan felt.
Is it not dishonorable
that we were indifferent to the pain we caused? We need to redefine honor
as caring about the consequences of our actions in the world, and as not
hypocritically mouthing the rhetoric of democracy when we take geopolitical
action. Not only should we care, because we can identify with grief felt
around the world. We must care--not as a rule of law, but as Barbara Kingsolver
puts it, as one of “a hundred ways to be a good citizen, . . . to
look finally at the things we don’t want to see.”
On September 11th our world changed. We Americans learned that we weren’t
safe in our own country--whether we are warriors or peacemakers, whites
or people of color, men or women, gays or straights, legal or illegal
residents. All of us will suffer for the policies of the few in power.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. This tragedy has produced a huge
awakening. We as a people have the opportunity now to change as well.
Instead of confirming the terrorists’ portrait of the U.S. as a bullying
superpower, we might still yet react unexpectedly, for example by beginning
to address real grievances in the region.
We might yet throw ourselves into supporting sustainable peace between Israel and Palestine, and stop now the bombing of Afghanistan, thereby being as good as our word and proving to the Afghan people in our actions that we are not making war against them. In this way, we might begin to defuse the reason that young Arab men give their own lives to kill American civilians. Lederach writes “I believe that monumental times like these create conditions for monumental change. . . . Let us choose democracy and reconciliation over revenge and destruction.” If we have not ruined already this monumental chance for change by meeting violence with violence, that old model of honorable blood vengeance, the terrible deaths we have suffered will not have been in vain.
As Ghandi said, “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.” Mary Oliver’s question in her poem “The Summer Day”never seemed so urgently timely: “Tell me, what do you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?”
peacewoman@earthlink.net
Taos, New Mexico
10/4/01
[as sent in from
Elizabeth Treadwell Jackson, via Susan Landers, from original posting
on the EPC list]
SISTERS ARISE & VOCALIZE!
by Anne Waldman
Language has been
on the feminist political agenda for years. It can't
just go away meekly now. It is agonizingly evident as of September 11
that there has been a paucity of women's voices from the political arena
(the world over) as well as in the arena of high public culture and discourse.
Something is missing. Hello?
One observes the endless parade of Presidents, Mullahs, generals, prime ministers, Cabinet members, diplomats, politicians of all kinds, pundits, experts, etcetera flash across the screen and surface in the daily massive missives of newsprint. But so few women. The talking head female folk on TV are a relief. Susan Sontag and Maureen Dowd are a relief but there has got to be more female leadership and articulation and input into the public discourse and decision-making apparatus. More mainstream illumination from the hidden dakinis and durgas! & more Amy Goodmans! Some alternative/corrective resource to power of VOICE. How things are expressed, stated, conveyed whether it be condolence, dissent, opinion--whatever the form or genre--needs attention. US nation-wide surveys showed a marked difference of opinion when it comes to issues of "war" "education" "literacy" (& we are, I hope, grateful that Laura Bush cares about books). We need more THINKING by women aired and expressed on urgent issues. It is not good for the psyche that we are so deprived.
SISTERS - SPEAK OUT YOURSELVES & DEMAND MORE DISCUSSION OF THE CURRENT STATE OF THE WORLD AND THE WAR ON TERRORISM NOW. INSIST THAT YOUR FEMALE ELECTED LEADERS GET MORE VOICE & INK!
A feminist critique of language calls into question our assumptions about who is speaking. And for whom? And to what purpose? Who is the language representing and what kind of ideology? Whose interest? How does language attempt to manipulate us? We've had in the not so distant past genteel tyrannies of custom and practice. It was a crime under slavery for African Americans to read and write. Remember when a woman couldn't vote? When saying a liturgy or public oratory by women was forbidden? A certain ilk of males have had a monopoly on NAMING WHAT COUNTS AS REALITY. This seems more and more insane in a universe with infinite possibilities. It doesn't need to be this way. Of course we understand that gender is a social construct and that the possibilities of "difference" are endless and all beings who are not just representing the dominant male constructs are also welcome here!
RECLAIM NAMING. CHECK OUT WHAT LEADERS ARE SAYING AS WE ENTER INTO ANOTHER WARRING PATRIARCHAL GOD MENTALITY. DECONSTRUCT OLD GRAMMARS, METAPHORS, IMPERIALIST IMPERATIVES! POETS: STAY ON THE CASE!
We know that the
privileged and powerful have had a vested interest in
shaping the world through language. Tailoring the world to suit their
ends, constructing a world in which they are the central "players".
Structures, categories, meanings have been shaped by the dominant white
man.
Capitalism thrives
on a political discourse that marginalizes alternative thinking and people
who can be exploited without "voice". Our modern state emerged
from the ashes of the feudal state and was built on a class and patriarchal
model, Political representation began as the right of property-owning
MEN. Now the capitalist state addresses itself to a generalized citizen/consumer--presumably
classless, sexless, a hip citizen of the increasingly troubling world.
It's not working! Look at the mess we are in. Also to protect this "version"
of reality the
capital-driven state constructs its weapons of mass destruction with impunity
and threatens the very planet we dwell on by its greed for wealth and
power. We also see so many women suffering (unable to drive, get an education,
bare their faces in public, etc.) under other (in some cases less subtle)
regimes that are also constructing their weaponry and so on...The victims
of strife and war are also women.
IS ANYONE UNDER THAT CHADOR?
Anne Waldman
Full Moon over Umbria & Afghanistan
Oct 2, 2001
crcfellow@netemedia.net
10/10/01
[Sent in
by Cynthia Hogue]
The Challenge of Terror: A Traveling Essay
by John Paul Lederach
So here I am, a week late arriving home, stuck between Colombia,
Guatemala and Harrisonburg when our world changed. The images flash even
in my sleep. The heart of America ripped. Though natural, the cry for
revenge and the call for the unleashing of the first war of this century,
prolonged or not, seems more connected to social and psychological processes
of finding a way to release deep emotional anguish, a sense of powerlessness,
and our collective loss than it does as a plan of action seeking to redress
the injustice, promote change and prevent it from ever happening again.
I am stuck from airport to airport as I write this, the reality of a
global system that has suspended even the most basic trust. My Duracell
batteries and finger nail clippers were taken from me today and it gave
me pause for thought. I had a lot of pauses in the last few days. Life
has not been the same. I share these thoughts as an initial reaction recognizing
that it is always easy to take pot-shots at our leaders from the sidelines,
and to have the insights they are missing when we are not in the middle
of very difficult decisions. On the other hand, having worked for nearly
20 years as a mediator and proponent of nonviolent change in situations
around the globe where cycles of deep violence seem hell-bent on perpetuating
themselves, and having interacted with people and movements who at the
core of their identity find ways of justifying their part in the cycle,
I feel responsible to try to bring ideas to the search for solutions.
With this in mind I should like to pen several observations about what
I have learned from my experiences and what they might suggest about the
current situation. I believe this starts by naming several key challenges
and then asking what is the nature of a creative response that takes these
seriously in the pursuit of genuine, durable, and peaceful change.
SOME LESSONS ABOUT THE NATURE OF OUR CHALLENGE
1. Always seek to understand the root of the anger - The first and
most important question to pose ourselves is relatively simple though
not easy to answer: How do people reach this level of anger, hatred and
frustration? By my experience explanations that they are brainwashed by
a perverted leader who holds some kind of magical power over them is an
escapist simplification and will inevitably lead us to very wrong-headed
responses. Anger of this sort, what we could call generational,
identity-based anger, is constructed over time through a combination of
historical events, a deep sense of threat to identify, and direct
experiences of sustained exclusion.
This is very important
to understand, because, as I will say again and again, our response to
the immediate events have everything to do with whether we reinforce and
provide the soil, seeds, and nutrients for future cycles of revenge and
violence. Or whether it changes. We should be careful to pursue one and
only one thing as the strategic guidepost of our response: Avoid doing
what they expect. What they expect from us is the lashing out of the giant
against the weak, the many against the few. This will reinforce their
capacity to perpetrate the myth they carefully seek to sustain: That they
are under threat, fighting an irrational and mad system that has never
taken them seriously and wishes to destroy them and their people. What
we need to destroy is their myth not their people.
2. Always seek to understand the nature of the organization - Over
the years of working to promote durable peace in situations of deep,
sustained violence I have discovered one consistent purpose about the
nature of movements and organizations who use violence: Sustain thyself.
This is done through a number of approaches, but generally it is through
decentralization of power and structure, secrecy, autonomy of action through
units, and refusal to pursue the conflict on the terms of the strength
and capacities of the enemy.
One of the most
intriguing metaphors I have heard used in the
last few days is that this enemy of the United States will be found in
their holes, smoked out, and when they run and are visible, destroyed.
This may well work for groundhogs, trench and maybe even guerilla
warfare, but it is not a useful metaphor for this situation. And neither
is the image that we will need to destroy the village to save it, by
which the population that gives refuge to our enemies is guilty by
association and therefore a legitimate target. In both instances the
metaphor that guides our action misleads us because it is not connected
to the reality. In more specific terms, this is not a struggle to be
conceived of in geographic terms, in terms of physical spaces and
places, that if located can be destroyed, thereby ridding us of the
problem. Quite frankly our biggest and most visible weapon
systems are mostly useless.
We need a new metaphor,
and though I generally do not like
medical metaphors to describe conflict, the image of a virus comes to
mind because of its ability to enter unperceived, flow with a system,
and harm it from within. This is the genius of people like Osama Ben
Laden. He understood the power of a free and open system, and has used
it to his benefit. The enemy is not located in a territory. It has
entered our system. And you do not fight this kind of enemy by shooting
at it. You respond by strengthening the capacity of the system to prevent
the virus and strengthen its immunity. It is an ironic fact that our greatest
threat is not in Afghanistan, but in our own backyard. We surely are not
going to bomb Travelocity, Hertz Rental Car, or an
Airline training school in Florida. We must change metaphors and move
beyond the reaction that we can duke it out with the bad guy, or we run
the very serious risk of creating the environment that sustains and
reproduces the virus we >wish to prevent.
3. Always remember that realities are constructed -
Conflict is, among other things, the process of building and sustaining
very different perceptions and interpretations of reality. This means
that we have at the same time multiple realities defined as such by
those in conflict. In the aftermath of such horrific and unmerited
violence that we have just experienced this may sound esoteric. But we
must remember that this fundamental process is how we end up referring
to people as fanatics, madmen, and irrational. In the process of name-calling
we lose the critical capacity to understand that from
within the ways they construct their views, it is not mad lunacy or
fanaticism. All things fall together and make sense. When this is
connected to a long string of actual experiences wherein their views of
the facts are reinforced (for example, years of superpower struggle that
used or excluded them, encroaching Western values of what is considered
immoral by their religious interpretation, or the construction of an enemy-image
who is overwhelmingly powerful and uses that power in bombing campaigns
and always appears to win) then it is not a difficult process to construct
a rational world view of heroic struggle against evil. Just as we do it,
so do they. Listen to the words we use to justify our actions and responses.
And then listen to
words they use. The way to break such a
process is not through a frame of reference of who will win or who is
stronger. In fact the inverse is true. Whoever loses, whether tactical
battles or the "war" itself, finds intrinsic in the loss the
seeds that
give birth to the justification for renewed battle. The way to break
such a cycle of justified violence is to step outside of it. This starts
with understanding that TV sound bites about madmen and evil are not
good sources of policy. The most significant impact that we could make
on their ability to sustain their view of us as evil is to change their
perception of who we are by choosing to strategically respond in
unexpected ways. This will take enormous courage and courageous
leadership capable of envisioning a horizon of change.
4. Always understand the capacity for recruitment-The
greatest power that terror has is the ability to regenerate itself. What
we most need to understand about the nature of this conflict and the
change process toward a more peaceful world is how recruitment into
these activities happens. In all my experiences in deep-rooted conflict
what stands out most are the ways in which political leaders wishing to
end the violence believed they could achieve it by overpowering and
getting rid of the perpetrator of the violence. That may have been the
lesson of multiple centuries that preceded us. But it is not the lesson
from that past 30 years. The lesson is simple. When people feel a deep
sense of threat, exclusion and generational experiences of direct
violence, their greatest effort is placed on survival. Time and again
in
these movements, there has been an extraordinary capacity for the
regeneration of chosen myths and renewed struggle.
One aspect of current
U.S. leadership that coherently matches
with the lessons of the past 30 years of protracted conflict settings
is
the statement that this will be a long struggle. What is missed is that
the emphasis should be placed on removing the channels, justifications,
and sources that attract and sustain recruitment into the activities.
What I find extraordinary about the recent events is that none of the
perpetrators was much older than 40 and many were half that age.
This is the reality
we face: Recruitment happens on a sustained
basis. It will not stop with the use of military force, in fact, open
warfare will create the soils in which it is fed and grows. Military
action to destroy terror, particularly as it affects significant and
already vulnerable civilian populations will be like hitting a fully
mature dandelion with a golf club. We will participate in making sure
the myth of why we are evil is sustained and we will assure yet another
generation of recruits.
5. Recognize complexity, but always understand the power of
simplicity - Finally, we must understand the principle of simplicity.
I
talk a lot with my students about the need to look carefully at
complexity, which is equally true (and which in the earlier points I
start to explore). However, the key in our current situation that we
have failed to fully comprehend is simplicity. From the standpoint of
the perpetrators, the effectiveness of their actions was in finding
simple ways to use the system to undo it. I believe our greatest task
is
to find equally creative and simple tools on the other side.
Suggestions
In keeping with the
last point, let me try to be simple. I
believe three things are possible to do and will have a much greater
impact on these challenges than seeking accountability through revenge.
1. Energetically pursue a sustainable peace process to the
Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Do it now. The United States has much it
can do to support and make this process work. It can bring the weight
of
persuasion, the weight of nudging people on all sides to move toward
mutual recognition and stopping the recent and devastating pattern of
violent escalation, and the weight of including and balancing the
process to address historic fears and basic needs of those involved. If
we would bring the same energy to building an international coalition
for peace in this conflict that we have pursued in building
international coalitions for war, particularly in the Middle East, if
we
lent significant financial, moral, and balanced support to all sides
that we gave to the Irish conflict in earlier years, I believe the
moment is right and the stage is set to take a new and qualitative step
forward.
Sound like an odd
diversion to our current situation of terror?
I believe the opposite is true. This type of action is precisely
the kind of thing needed to create whole new views of who we are and
what we stand for as a nation. Rather than fighting terror with force,
we enter their system and take away one of their most coveted elements:
The soils of generational conflict perceived as injustice used to
perpetrate hatred and recruitment. I believe that monumental times like
these create conditions for monumental change. This approach would
solidify our relationships with a broad array of Middle Easterners and
Central Asians, allies and enemies alike, and would be a blow to the
rank and file of terror. The biggest blow we can serve terror is to make
it irrelevant. The worst thing we could do is to feed it
unintentionally by making it and its leaders the center stage of what
we
do. Let's choose democracy and reconciliation over revenge and
destruction. Let's do exactly what they do not expect, and show them it
can work.
2. Invest financially in development, education, and a broad
social agenda in the countries surrounding Afghanistan rather than
attempting to destroy the Taliban in a search for Ben Laden. The single
greatest pressure that could ever be put on Ben Laden is to remove the
source of his justifications and alliances. Countries like Pakistan,
Tajikistan, and yes, Iran and Syria should be put on the radar of the
West and the United States with a question of strategic importance: How
can we help you meet the fundamental needs of your people? The strategic
approach to changing the nature of how terror of the kind we have witnessed
this week reproduces itself lies in the quality of
relationships we develop with whole regions, peoples, and worldviews.
If we strengthen the web of those relationships, we weaken and eventually
eliminate the soil where terror is born. A vigorous investment, taking
advantage of the current opening given the horror of this week shared
by even those who we traditionally claimed as state enemies, is immediately
available, possible and pregnant with historic possibilities. Let's do
the unexpected. Let's create a new set of strategic alliances never before
thought possible.
3. Pursue a quiet diplomatic but dynamic and vital support of
he Arab League to begin an internal exploration of how to address the
root causes of discontent in numerous regions. This should be coupled
with energetic ecumenical engagement, not just of key symbolic leaders,
but of a practical and direct exploration of how to create a web of ethics
for a new millennium that builds from the heart and soul of all
traditions but that creates a capacity for each to engage the roots of
violence that are found within their own traditions. Our challenge, as
I
see it, is not that of convincing others that our way of life, our
religion, or our structure of governance is better or closer to Truth
and human dignity. It is to be honest about the sources of violence in
our own house and invite others to do the same. Our global challenge is
how to generate and sustain genuine engagement that encourages people
from within their traditions to seek that, which assures the
preciousness and respect for life that every religion sees as an
inherent right and gift from the Divine, and how to build organized
political and social life that is responsive to fundamental human needs.
Such a web cannot be created except through genuine and sustained
dialogue and the building of authentic relationships, at religious and
political spheres of interaction, and at all levels of society. Why not
do the unexpected and show that life-giving ethics are rooted in the
core of all peoples by engaging a strategy of genuine dialogue and
relationship? Such a web of ethics, political and religious, will have
an impact on the roots of terror far greater in the generation of our
children's children than any amount of military action can possibly
muster. The current situation poses an unprecedented opportunity for
this to happen, more so than we have seen at any time before in our
global community.
A Call for the Unexpected
Let me conclude with simple ideas. To face the reality of well
organized, decentralized, self-perpetuating sources of terror, we need
to think differently about the challenges. If indeed this is a new war
it will not be won with a traditional military plan. The key does not
lie in finding and destroying territories, camps, and certainly not the
civilian populations that supposedly house them. Paradoxically that will
only feed the phenomenon and assure that it lives into a new generation.
The key is to think about how a small virus in a system affects the
whole and how to improve the immunity of the system. We should take
extreme care not to provide the movements we deplore with gratuitous
fuel for self-regeneration. Let us not fulfill their prophecy by
providing them with martyrs and justifications. The power of their
action is the simplicity with which they pursue the fight with global
power. They have understood the power of the powerless. They have
understood that melding and meshing with the enemy creates a base from
within. They have not faced down the enemy with a bigger stick. They did
the more powerful thing: They changed the game. They entered our lives,
our homes and turned our own tools into our demise.
We will not win this struggle for justice, peace and human dignity
with the traditional weapons of war. We need to change the game again.
Let us take up the practical challenges of this reality perhaps
best described in the Cure of Troy, an epic poem by Seamus
Heaney, to loosen the grip of the cycles of terror. Let us give birth
to the
unexpected.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a farther shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
John Paul Lederach
September 16, 2001
JPBus@aol.com
BIO: John Paul Lederach is Professor of Conflict Studies and Founding
Director of the Conflict Transformation Program and the Institute for
Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Widely known for his pioneering work on conflict transformation, Lederach
is involved in conciliation work in Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Somalia,
the Philippines, Northern Ireland, and the Basque Country, among others.
He has helped design and conduct training programs in 25 countries across
five continents. His most recent books are: Reconciliation (Herald Press,
1999), Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies
(USIP, 1997), and Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation Across
Cultures (Syracuse University Press 1995).
__________________
FOR THE RESURRECTION
OF WORDS
an on-going conversation emerging from the events of September 11, 2001
Note: The email exchange, below, came out of an immediate and urgent need to respond to recent terrorist events in the U.S. As members of the How2 Editorial Advisory Board began, spontaneously, to share their thoughts with each other, it seemed clear that this sudden blow to our human psyche had swiftly become the CENTRAL condition around which all thought/feeling was flowing in us--privately and communally--and that in order to make the How2 "postcard" email exchange relevant to our readers--to even imagine anyone wishing to use it, at this moment--we would need to keep it deeply connected to issues we are all worried about & thinking over within "the continuous present" of writing. This may include the location of suppressed questions that are not necessarily coming up in pre-defined and socially-pressured public discourses (classrooms, bars, dinner tables, TV or radio shows--to/in which we are witness &/or participant).
Excerpts from these initial communiques have been put together, below, as both witness and invitation to our readers to participate in this exchange of questions and perspectives. One can imagine, for example, postcards from readers who are teaching, describing useful written projects (with sharing of selected results)-- ways of finding & making of written language acts for overwhelming states of fear, grief, confusion or political scepticism.
KF
________________________________________________________
9/20/01
excerpt from Elizabeth Frost / NYC
.... I am terrified, numb, & aghast at my lack of language at this time. I want to explore that feeling of lack. I feel deep rage about the discourse that is bombarding us -- the military machine of cowboy rhetoric, the "dead or alive" bravado, the ubiquitous image of the flag -- despair that I have no discourse to oppose to it. No symbol to wear or hang from the windows, one that would express grief & solidarity w/o yoking those to a jingoistic & hysterical patriotism. I am enraged that an Islamic friend has stopped wearing her head scarf for fear of her safety. That a colleague tells me that all his dark-skinned, dark-haired students have shaved their beards & cut their hair -- for safety. That the Morrocan family that runs 2 restaurants in our neighborhood has the biggest & most plenteous flags at their establishments -- for safety. I am enraged at the absence of a counter-symbol.
I am grief-stricken to hear the stories of a student who was trampled by the fleeing crowds, who walked in bare feet all the way home to Queens, volunteered to take blood donations for several days with no sleep or respite, & was then yelled at in the subway for being "middle-eastern looking." Of another who works fielding phone calls from the families of those missing & could not control her sobbing. In a classroom. In that place. In that place of words. I am appalled by their tears, I am exhausted, I am appalled by my presence before them, I am speechless.
I am stricken anew this morning with the news that one of my students died in the attack. She worked at a financial firm. I am appalled that she was at work while I was at home. That for the last four years she was slowly earning her BA in one evening course at a time. That this evening I must tell her classmates
I have no language for this.
9/20/01
excerpt from Jo Ann Wasserman / NYC
I am in NYC too. The city where I was born. I was on 7th Ave. and Greenwich Street when one of the buildings collapsed and there was only the sound of thousands of us in the street gasping as it tumbled. Our own human sound louder than the structure's rumble.
....On Thursday night, I went to the opening of a friend's art show. It was the opening of her first major solo show and had been in the works for over a year. Many of us attended just to see each other. I arrived at the space in far west Chelsea (which can look like a war zone on the best of days) to see my friends wearing surgical masks in the absolutely toxic smoke.
But it was important to see my friend's paintings. To see the attempt. Something good and full of intention. Later in the week I was talking to this same painter friend and she expressed disappointment that her show had gone ahead as very few people have attended since that night and it is her first big show. Then she began crying, saying, "why should I worry about something so stupid?"
That is what it has been like for me here. Feeling the fear (evacuated twice from locations which were threatened after Tuesday), feeling shocked, ashamed, exhausted, heartsick (walking past thousands of flyers with pictures of the "lost" lining 11th Street all the way to St. Vincent's hospital) and then ricocheting to concerns about the trivial and banal. Why can't I get below 14th Street to the apartment where I am staying and get clean underwear? Why is this bank line taking so long? Why did the woman put so much milk in my coffee when I asked for "just a little?"
....My friend David just phoned to see if I was going to a peace march tomorrow in Union Square. I said, "Yes." He asked if I was bringing a sign but I have no sign to bring. Nothing clever to say. Not one thing. I am so sad. People in the street are sad and quiet here. No music blaring out of bodegas, no excited conversation, not even many children yelling and playing.
....I feel really sad. And to offer my deepest condolences to any of you who have been touched personally in this tragedy.
9/22-25/01
excerpts from Renata Morresi / Univ. of Marcerata, Italy
.... I was struck by the fact that both Elizabeth Frost and Jo Ann Wasserman wrote about their difficulty to define, to express, to find adequate words and symbols, which now lie broken and useless.
I think we should try to find those words and symbols again (where? in the past? in ourselves? in other cultures? should we create brand new ones?). Not logos, trademarks, labels, slogans, badges, banners, allegories of death...
...but, rather, metaphors, words to cope with reality, attempts to understand and resist interpretations--EVEN theories ("theory" being the 'bad' word few want to hear in times of crises). But lack of theory is bad theory, and we--the world--can't afford such a lack now.
...IÕm trying to express how these recent disasters have changed our relation to language. Think of definitions given in the past few days: terrorist attack, permanent global war, Holy War... (none of them seems proper)... and how everyone is trying to cope with this void of language, working out responses that generate from internal (psychological, but also physiological), external, socio-cultural variations. Now those responses are floating and opaque; sometime later they'll harden into definitions (the making of History). I think that's a good reason for us to be watchful and keep on writing.
And 'as life goes on' I can't avoid thinking about the dozens of petitions I have signed for years in defense of Afghan women, to expose their inhuman condition: I wonder where those petitions landed, what we are to do for the forgotten words.
....Let's keep on writing about what is going on (inside, outside: is there a difference?)...striving to find words to express it, to give a shape to these fragmentations.
9/22/01
second excerpt from Jo Ann Wasserman / NYC In response to Renata Morresi
In response to Renata Morresi, I agree that theory must move forward and is critical to our sorting out process as we receive so much incorrect and non critical information from the agents of mass media in the States. We certainly need sensitive and revolutionary thinking right now. One thing that I was struck with while attending the peace march last night was the insistent use (on the part of the demonstrators) of dualistic languageÑ"Bush wants war, New York wants peace!" or "justice: yes, war: no!"
My friend and I tried to start a round of "we feel scared" and "dignity for humanity" (doesn't scan well, I know) to no avail. If theory and critical discourse could help us to move outside of binary thinking (or defining) as that which we are against, rather than for, it would be transformative. What I want is to be defined as FOR something, not always against. Even in listening to the chant, "Peace not war," I wondered, "what does peace mean right now?" The way things were on September 10th in New York City as thousands of people woke up living on the street? The way things were in Macedonia last year? On the Gaza Strip today? In the Sudan? In Pakistan?
Last Tuesday night I felt like there was no place to go and feel "safe" for the night. It is a strange feeling for me but I know many around the world and in the States experience that all the time. A thought flashed through my mindÑI wished it was New Year's Day so that I could attend the big, 24 hour marathon poetry reading which takes place at The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York City every year. I wanted to be there partly to be around friends but also to be in a space of hearing poems, nonstop. I have been thinking about the place poetry has in a situation like this one. How the mysterious nature of that language might also be part of a response.
Yesterday I heard that On October 3rd there will be a group reading by about 50 poets (many of whom are also critical writers) at St. Mark's. The idea is to respond to recent events here. I don't know what people will read or say but I am eager to find out. If anyone will be in NYC and wants specific info., I would be happy to e-mail it out.
9/25/01
from Ann Vickery / Sydney, AU & Pennsylvania
....I have been thinking about the strength of words and the strength of a symbol like the flag--there may be little or no appropriate words at this time but there have been plenty of flags. Flags have long been a potent symbol of solidarity and mourning. I think back to how Cathy Freeman carried the Aboriginal flag in both Olympic games, symbolically reminding all in Australia and the rest of the world of her history and Aboriginal Australians' continuing presence. Her gesture was far more effective than any sentence she might have spoken. And it seems to me, that for many Americans, the American flag has had a similar function at this point of time. I'm not suggesting here that a minority Australian proudly showing her 'colour/s' to the world (while her country's government still fails to acknowledge or say 'sorry' for past injustices) is the same as an average American showing the flag in his/her own yard. But that the flag is an outward sign or gesture of solidary, gesturing in the American case a sympathy towards those most affected by the events of 9/11.
At the same time, I also find it dissettling. I am now constantly reminded that I am an "alien" in the United States, that as a sign of solidarity, it excludes me. I've noticed too that many have begun wearing ribbons in the colours of the flag in the same way as there were AIDS ribbons, and apparently, Gulf war ribbons. As a symbol, I think the ribbon, like the flag, focuses on it being an "American" tragedy, that it elides the many non-Americans who died in the World Trade Center collapses and the suffering of their families. I realize that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were targets precisely because they were American icons, but in reinforcing it as simply an American tragedy, the use of the flag or its colours as a symbol merely encourages the objectives of such terrorism--to heighten national and cultural divisions.
I think new approaches to combatting terrorism must go beyond, as Jo Ann suggests, a simple dialectic of peace vs. war, to some global coalition of the "civilized" against an unknown other. More importantly, to actually rethink what the very basis of being civilized might mean or perhaps even more, what it might mean to be human today.
How to relate this to writing, I'm less sure.
Lastly, I just wanted to say how much I appreciated Renata's timely email about modernist writers working through issues of politics and aesthetics in the face of fascism. A different, though related set of issues, certainly arises in relation to terrorism. Both, I think, are different again than the questions arising in the face of a slow, sanctioned genocide such as occurred with the Holocaust, arguably also happening in other parts of the world today.
9/25/01
from Kornelia Frietag / Potsdam, Germany
I am still confused, and yet feel that I should finally somehow contribute to our exchange about the terrible events of 2 weeks ago, even if I am relatively far away in Germany, and have no one close in New York. Although my original speechlessness has given way (had to give way) to efforts to talk with my kids, my family, my friends, and colleagues, I am feeling a complete inability to balance and to connect emotional and rational responses in an acceptable way. I cannot manage this balancing act between (the expression of) complete devastation, sadness, compassion, and helplessness on the one hand, and an analysis of the political, historical, social, and religious context on the other. But I am sure that it is this balancing act that is most urgently needed.
It is needed because the one without the other does not hold, or rather is extremely one-sided if not dangerous. In Germany, at present, next to the hands on anti-terrorist, measure-taking approach (be assured of U.S.anti-terrorist military support + more police: cameras, security checks, screening etc.), the emotional discourse (in words, gestures, actions, and symbols--all very material), is the officially sanctioned one...as long as it is "for the U.S. not against them." Hence my daughter and her classmates talked for hours in class about the events per se, without any background information on Afghanistan, Bin Laden, and/or the Middle East, but when a fellow student raised one question about U.S. policy in the region, he was reprimanded and, for the rest of the lesson, overlooked by the teacher who threatened to bring him before the headmaster.
That two-thirds of the former East German citizens--who have experienced their share of offical binary interpretations of history and current events--are strongly opposed to a war (on Afghanistan or any other "villain state") is mostly interpreted as the expression of an insufficiantly developed sense of democracy and/or latent anti-Americanism.
Yesterday the culture section of my local newspaper opened with a one page article on "The Cowardly Thinking," claiming that German "artists and intellectuals flee into anti-American prejudices." What the diverse intellectuals quoted there (in bits and pieces, completely out of context) have done is: to put the events--in Washington, New York and the Pittsburgh area--into a wider context of US policy plus voicing the same fears of race hatred, vicious patriotism, and militant jingoism that have been expressed in our e-mail discussion.
The erronous logics of a terrorism which takes the symbols of US global power (the World Trade Center, the Pentagon) as material representation of the "evil" ("US imperialism") and hence aggressively destroys them, is cynically repeated in a counter-attack scenario (prescribed by the Bush government and followed by its allies, Germany among them) which takes the very same symbols as material representation of the "good" ("democracy", "civilization") as those to be aggressively defended. It seems to me that the arbitrariness of symbols, the contextual differences of meaning, the contingency of positions--historical, political, social, gendered, ethnic, class-related--and the ambivalence of emotions needs urgently to be thought about, talked about, written about before and while re/acting to what undoubtedly was an onslaught on humanity, a terrible, inhuman act.
It is especially hard to make (perceive and create an awareness of) a difference, or rather to make differences in writing (the use of words and symbols) that subvert the simplifying dominant discourse, when this very discourse is so emotionally charged. And yet these differences need to be made, thought, spoken, and written--risking the judgement of "cowardly thinking," rather than not thinking at all.
Greetings and thanks to all of you who are struggling to find (the) words,
9/25/01
excerpt from Linda V. Russo / Buffalo
.... What makes sense is to continue to assemble a life in the aftermath. The writing is such an assembly, though it is never "after" but current, and a current we ride to--where? Directions don't make sense now. Every direction is suspect.
I'm in Buffalo, on the US/Canadian border. The day after 9/11 I tried to take a walk along the Niagara River (our border) to find the otherwise well-trafficked area all but empty except for scattered Vet-types with binoculars trained north.... My co-ambulator and I were advised against walking on the pier, which had been my desire, because of a bomb threat to the Peace Bridge that runs above it on over to Canada. It was eerie, we felt unsafe, and we left.
We felt unsafe for the next three days and never parted company, except to go to classes, to teach, which was almost fruitless--on Thursday I cried, looking out onto the tiny sea of my students to take attendance, just glad that they were there. They were sobered, and we went on--I teach composition--and learn we did.
.... Basically, I've been thinking, how would How2, if she could talk, want the Forum to function? This is where we interpret her "constitution." While on the one hand I value hearing intelligent women-poetry-thinkers critically address all manner of issues--I love especially the way this forum, email, lets those issues evolve, accelerate--I wonder how can this be brought forward in a way that's true to How2's urgencies--to poetry and women? And yet, oddly, Ann's suggestion that we need to "actually rethink what the very basis of being civilized might mean or perhaps even more, what it might mean to be human today" really urges me.
Perhaps that's not so odd, though, when one considers how poetry is being cast about amidst all the rhetoric of memorial and war in the U.S.. According to National Public Radio, to be human and male is to write Poetry; to be female is to talk and to grieve. Our only nationwide forum for news and culture, NPR has brought poetry to the foreground, in the voices of Billy Collins, Robert Pinsky, and, today, W.S. Merwin, offering profound reflection and dour sentiments.
Women, when they form audible words, sound in untrained yet eloquent prose. These are the wives left behind. What NPR forms is an apparently unbridgeable sexually-differentiated cultural divide. At what point do contemporary women enter to define a national/poetic response? We stand, like Greek women outside the gates of the polis, mourning. Olson said to Carolee Schneeman when she went out to Gloucester with her then partner in the late 60s, that it was when the cunts began to speak that Greek tragedy began its decline.
Anne Carson's fascinating essay "The Gender of Sound" illuminates: "Greek women of the archaic and classical periods were not encouraged to pour forth unregulated cries of any kind within the civic space of the polis or within earshot of men. Indeed, masculinity in such a culture defines itself by its different use of sound." I've often wondered what stake male poets have/had in "masculinizing" their practice, keeping it pure of certain (read "feminizing") emotions. I'm not essentializing here (women write "emotional" poetry), but just noticing how the burden of emotion is often pushed onto women while at the same time this burden is used as an excuse to prohibit women's cultural production, where culture is seen to proceed in a rational, or in some sense formalized, manner.
9/26/01
from Frances Presley
Dear all,
I too have hesitated
to speak about the terrible events in New York, and I
still do. I am grateful to those on the H2 EA Board who have spoken to
us. I
was fortunate to meet Elisabeth Frost when she came to England earlier
this
year, and I know I share much of her sorrow and anger at what has taken
place, and what is taking place.
I would also like
to add my immediate experience and thoughts, and perhaps
there will be opportunities later to come back to the wider questions.
It was a day when I was at home, fretting about the government's abolition
of the organisation I work for, and finishing an essay about performance
in
poetic collaboration. I was balanced between despair at national politics
and the pleasure of remembering a creative act with someone I felt very
close to. I think I had retreated from any wider community.
The only other person
in my flat was the man decorating my hallway, and
he was the first to tell me about the attack, as he had his radio on.
It was a
radiostation which seemed to play non stop 60s pop music, so I wasn't
quite sure
how to believe him. Later I went to the shop and people were talking about
it in
that excited unsure way of first hearing. I switched on the tv at lunchtime
and
the two of us watched the pictures and heard the commentary. For a while
it was
just stunning images on our tv sets: the collapse of the tower like an
imploding rocket, reminding me of the space ship that failed. I think
I said that it would solve nothing, and only harden attitudes.
He expressed various
standard prejudices about immigrants, culminating in
nostalgia for the loss of the empire. It was all so familiar and I just
refused to confirm his opinions. A friend rang to say that he wasn't sure
if he'd be able to get back to London, as he'd heard that they'd cordoned
London off. For a moment I worried if the decorator would be able to get
home. This turned out to be as much of a fiction as Americans believing
that the whole of Britain was cordoned off by foot and mouth. Nevertheless
it suddenly did seem much closer to home, and with threats of possible
attacks here, and for a while I scanned the news for statements about
London.
The City was evacuated. The City in London means above all the stock
exchange, and a totally undemocratically governed area of London (although
it has jurisdiction and powers extending far beyond that), which has its
own cordon of security, and it is very hard for me to feel any connection
with it. The connection comes later, as it did with New York, when you
hear about the personal losses and tragedies. We have a history of bombing
in London in recent years, though nothing to compare with what has happened
in New York. We have hated institutions like the City, especially during
the Thatcher years. I live in an area where the bomb-making factories
were
concealed.
On the night when
the City was bombed, an Irish friend had
joined us for dinner and we were talking about the history of Ireland.
We
heard the explosion, but only later found out what it was. Although the
bomb was planted at night, there were victims, including local people
who
had nothing to do with the financial centres. We have become used to
living with possible terrorist attack, with frequent bomb scares before
the
Good Friday agreement, which now seems on the verge of collapse.
Like many others I fear for our civil liberties. The government is talking
about measures that were not even introduced during the IRA bombing
campaigns, and probably would have been ineffective anyway.
I also fear for our Asian population and for asylum seekers, who are
already treated inhumanely.
There are many causes
of fear on the streets in London, but many of us
believe that we fight against these things by not resorting to a police
state, but by strengthening our communities. On the Tuesday evening I
went
to our housing coop meeting - an ill attended event usually these days.
I
wanted to escape from the endless replay of television. There were more
people than I'd expected, and some that had returned to the meeting after
a
long absence. Next year we celebrate 25 years of the coop's existence.
Today I saw the headline, "Bush sends plan of military action",
and for a
moment I read it as "Bush ends plan of military action".
Love and peace
FPresley@compuserve.com
9/28/01
excerpt from Arielle Greenberg / Boston
Two issues I face here and now:
1) Spinning off of Linda Kinnahan's remarks about what it means to be an innovative writer who is also political: How to be a non-narrative poet in the face of such REAL, linear surreality, you know? I don't even WANT to write about it all, but it's the only thing I AM writing about, in one way or another, and I feel slightly irresponsible for going sideways/non-linear rather than being directly story-telling about it all. To this end, I am planning to read Celan, whom I think of as a brilliant avant-garde reporter of very direct and personal tragedy. Can anyone suggest other poets who have done this, especially women poets?
2) I am also thinking a lot about what it means to be a global citizen. I am not so naive as to think that America can or should pull out of all foreign policy...at this point that's simply not realistic, nor is it generous. So how can a country like the USA use its power for good instead of evil? How can I be a part of urging it to do so?
I want to also note, in regard to Linda K's comment about Pinsky (whom I almost always find self-righteous), that I did hear a pretty good alternative to the voice of HIStory when Boston's NPR call-in show, "The Connection," had a day dedicated to the uses of poetry at times like these, and guests were Marie Howe and Naomi Shahib Nye.... One of my favorite moments on that show was when the (male) host brought Nye on the line, and instead of either Howe or Nye addressing the questions at hand-- or the host--Nye said, "Hello, Marie, I have been thinking of you in New York" and Howe said, "Hello, Naomi darling, I have been thinking of you." Such a human--and, dare I say, female--moment.
10/1/01
from Hilda Bronstein
Dear all
I have been reading your thoughtful messages with gratitude, and with
admiration for such articulate reflections. Many of the sentiments expressed
echo my own--in particular my feelings of frustration and powerlessness--but
I am made hopeful by the determination of everyone involved in this correspondence
to make sense of their lives, and to plan for future action--be it the
re-reading of Celan, the writing of new poetry, the raising of issues
in HOW2, or meeting up at the Modernism conference. (I wish I could be
there). Ann's suggestion for the rethinking of 'what the very basis of
being civilized might mean...what it might mean to be human today' ties
in with my own concern regarding our (my) lack of understanding of how
such inhumane acts come to be perpetrated.
I was in China on the 11th, in an area where we unable to receive CNN News, or indeed any other English-speaking channel. Rumours abounded, and to see the TV images with no commentary or explanation was terrifying. I rang my daughter in London, and she told me what she knew of events. As we spoke, news reports were coming in on her TV from the USA. She told me that a White House spokesman was about to appear, and asked--did I want to hear what he was saying? Hungry for any information, I replied in the affirmative and she held the telephone receiver close to the TV. It was not what he said that made me weep, but just that I suddenly became aware--in that moment--of the distance that separated me from those I loved, of the enormity of the atrocities that had been committed in New York and Washington, and that what I was hearing formed just one small part of a historic unfolding which could lead to more violence and unimaginable suffering throughout the world. That feeling has not abated.
my best to everyone
and thank you,
Hilda
hildabronstein@workandaweigh.co.uk
postcard email may be sent to kfraser@sfsu.edu. Selections will be made with a view to range and diversity.
___________________
10/1/ 01
From: megan minka lola camille roy
LUST FOR LIFE
Dear How2 writers-readers,
if kathy acker lives on in your heart (as she does in mine)... you may
want to write something on her writing for this conference...or attend
it, if you are in NYC. Note that performance work is included.
camille roy
minka@grin.net
Call for Paper
Proposals
Conference on the Writings of Kathy Acker
November 7-8, 2002
We invite you to
submit paper proposals for a conference on the writings
of Kathy Acker, one of the most erudite, provocative, fearless, and
influential writers of our time.The conference will include scholars from
various disciplines, including Catherine Stimpson, Eve Sedgwick, Gayatri
Spivak, Andrew Ross, and Avital Ronell. Panels will address these and
other issues: the politics of appropriation, gender drifting and geo-eroticism,
the intersection of
literature and philosophy, violence and desire, queerness and feminism,
language and representation, visual art and performance, and the role
of
pornography.
LUST FOR LIFE is
planned in conjunction with the publication of
ESSENTIAL ACKER: The Kathy Acker Reader, edited by Amy Scholder and
Dennis Cooper, forthcoming from Grove Press; and an exhibition of
Acker's manuscripts and drawings from the Sallie Bingham Center for
Women's History and Culture in Duke University's Rare Book, Manuscript,
and Special Collections Library and the Fales Library at NYU.
The LUST FOR LIFE
committee-Amy Scholder, Carla Harryman, Avital Ronell,
Marvin Taylor, Eric Zinner, Matias Viegener, Cristina Favretto-is
working in conjunction with the Fales Library and New York University,
where the conference will take place. There will be a plenary session
and panels, followed by a public reading from Kathy Acker's writing.
Papers should be 15-20 minutes in length. Please email your proposals
to
Marvin Taylor at marvin.taylor@nyu.edu
or send to:
Marvin J. Taylor
Director, Fales Library and Special Collections
New York University
70 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012
___________________
9/24-25/01
from Mendi Lewis Obadike
feminist Net Art project: keeping up appearances
I have been reading your journal for a few months. Harryette Mullen recommended that I check out the site. Thanks for all the work you do. I really like the idea of the postcards. The dialogue we have because of email is its own thing, isn't it? I like the way the public nature of that section makes those exchanges a model of community-building. I am writing to let you know about a new project I have online, "keeping up appearances, a hypertextimonial". The press release is below.
For Immediate Release For more information contact mendi@blacknetart.com http://Obadike.tripod.com
Mendi Obadike Textifies
Online Intermedia artist Mendi Lewis Obadike presents "keeping up appearances",
a hypertextimonial. In the tradition of black feminist artists Faith Ringgold
and Audre Lorde, Obadike makes art out of what is said and not said. Her
past projects have examined intersections of sound, propriety, and enactments
of a black female aesthetic. This project is part of her "Black.net.art"
actions. See "keeping up appearances" at: http://blacknetart.com/keepingupappearances.html
This piece is viewed best through Internet Explorer. ### Peace for everyone.
____________________
7/3/01
from Marieke Gaboury
Susan Glaspell Estate
I am seeking contact information for whomever handles the estate of Susan Glaspell. Any information you could provide would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Marieke Gaboury MandarinR@aol.com
____________________
3/15/01
from Elizabeth Robinson
A response to "erotics" [featured in reading/s How2/5] Against/Grain
All poetry is an erotics insofar as it is about tension and texture. Intimacy implies a thorough knowledge of a limited body while that body continually renews itself. The tension of the known occurs while stumbling upon unexpected comminglings: collage: one atop another. Eros invites us to enter the dim mystery of a pattern. It is a pattern, however, that is animate. The known defies the familiar, so fluid. These contradictions of lived experience arouse. Tension doesn't so much release as give, against itself, permissions. Contra-Dictions. The body sometimes needs to go against the grain in order to perceive the grain. So there's a gorgeous, voluptuous obstinacy in pronouncing the unsayable. What is more palpable--breath, saliva, &c--than the blurring of boundaries. These many forms, 'figurative' and literal, make up the pattern of some shifting whole. So a body of work resounds and resides with a body of desire. As desire beckons with its ultimately tantalizing textures. The very pleasure of the word, the words, are their life as a body and how they rub me the wrong way.
____________________
THE PERILS OF
GOING PUBLIC:
A 4-way conversation, collaged from emails between "postcard" editor,
Kathleen Fraser, and three readers
between KF and Kelly Everding, Art Director Rain Taxi
KF's question/ 1/18/01:
You write: "I am an MFA grad from ten years ago (a survivor of sorts) who has forsaken the academic life for something less volatile. I am a woman poet who is primarily influenced by male poets--particularly surrealist poets--and it's hard to shake that."
These two sentences are the basis of a book! But meanwhile, why don't you read the "forum" in H2/n4, currently on-line through February, and see if you have any response to any of it from your position of having chosen to give up the academy. If anything burbles up, just write it into an email and maybe we can get some discussion going among other readers. It seems that many women remain quite timid around entering the public arena... and must be lured in, i.e. given very particular invitations.
I wonder what this is about....I'm puzzled why more women don't respond to the "bait" of having a place to write responsively from any perspective or style they choose. I've really wanted the unspoken questions of "taste-making," selection of what gets into print, and the on-going questions of power relations to have a place to be sorted-out in this journal....
I'm curious where you did your MFA work? In the early '70s, I taught for two years at the Iowa Writers Workshop--as well as a year at Reed College--before landing at SF State University...and find myself very interested in how you've described your academic experience as "volatile"--sufficiently so, to lead you to give it up... .
Everding's response/ 1/22/01
I will definitely look deeper into the layers of the H2 site and maybe get up the courage to contribute. I was struck by what you said in your last email about women needing to be lured in--I think I follow that behavior. I am timid and every piece of writing needs to be almost beaten out of me. I resist the work of writing, but once I am in it, I love it. I don't know if it's a self-esteem thing or what--probably. Being outside academia, I sometimes don't feel qualified to make any statements or judgements. I have definitely left that high-critical language behind. Would I sound dumb? Not in the know? These are the personal demons I struggle with and sometimes overcome by writing ... Every new review is a new accomplishment, something new to learn.
I received my MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.... It was harrowing at times, but the best thing about it was meeting close friends whose relationships really helped to shape my writing life more than the classes or teachers. Some of these same friends are here in Minneapolis, so we continue the discussion and mutual celebration of poetry and writing.
Please check out Rain Taxi's new online edition, recently posted (www.raintaxi.com). I have a review there of a book on Jean Painleve, a science filmmaker who was a friend to the surrealists and really pioneered science films, shooting underwater footage and such.
By the way, our RT website has had a link to How2 since our inception. Eric Lorberer (the editor) knew about H2 and has great respect for it....so many avenues of information. The great thing about web sites are their non-linear structure, a sort of Big Bang theory of expansion as one link takes you to another, one interest sparks another. H2 definitely shows the care and time you've spent on it--I really like the old B&W pictures of modernist women writers as well as the minimalist and clean white look of it. .
KF to KE/ 1/22 /01:
Dear Kelly, You'd be surprised at how your feelings and situation speak for so many!!! The push/pull around going public that you describe is an all-pervasive problem many are up against. Recently, several H2 readers' private emails spoke of the anxiety of writing beyond a small circle of friends and also of the various traumas of grad school--who/what is voiced vs. what remains unvoiced...both in grad school and after, feeling a bit anxious to have one's actual experience or thinking revealed.
By the way, if you are into film, you might enjoy writing about some female-directed (or authored) surrealist or modernist film/s??? Did you see the interviews we did of filmmakers Pelle Lowe (H2/3) and Yvonne Rainer (H2/4)? I see film and its construction as very interrelated to the project of constucting the modernist and contemporary inventions of/interventions into that thing called "poem". Why don't you work on a visual/word piece for the mixed media section for issue 6 (since n5 is just about to go on-line, end of Feb., under the new Editorship of Ann Vickery. (I'll still be doing the "postcard" selection.) Think about it...you could use photos, art work, written responses both longer and shorter...It could be fun!
[Note: for direct link to Rain Taxi website, click on LINKS at bottom of H2 home page.]
*
between KF and Mary Berger, editor Narrativity
KF's question/ 1 /10 /01
...if I hadn't thought to invite you (as now clarified) to write a response to an "under-appreciated" book (or books) you are currently fascinated by, would you have thought to ever send in something to How2 on your own?? Would it have felt risky in any way? Would you have felt prohibited? Unconsciously waiting for a personal and specific invitation? I ask because I've been struck by the fact that in over 2 years of editing H2, the only persons initiating "reviews" have been male, even though I thought H2 was proferring an open invitation... Clearly we've not yet adequately understood a missing piece of the puzzle.
Are we looking at habit, here, or something more?? I assumed that if the place was created and the descriptions of/invitations to different sections clear enough, the space would be used very actively. Not true. It is in precisely this area that work still needs to be done to further open up the range of styles and voices --poets who might be interested in and willing to write about their own takes on what they are reading, instead of leaving it entirely up to the academic scholar/critics--many of whom are brilliant and inventive, others who read, rather exclusively, from the perspective of a very specific training & set of categories tending to leave out work that doesn't "fit".... Daunting. .
MB's response/ 1/12/01:
As for whether I would have sent work without prompting...I am no doubt too reticent for my own good in unleashing my work on the world, a result of my abiding ambivalence, whether learned or innate. I haven't yet managed to balance my particular needs for privacy, focus, and modesty, with the authoritativeness or exoticism that seem to be required for a public literary identity. But then again some of that comes from the indifference with which the work is often greeted. My ambitions are conflicted and not infrequently discouraged. I've invested too much in feminist/leftist critique to say that my reticence is just a function of my personality. On the other hand I've been slow to engage that critique in a way that would bring my work into a more public discourse. Yes, I've been afraid to be a more public writer; have maybe kept my work more subjective, private.... Which has left me with the dissatisfying feeling of being outside of any public dialogue.
But my version of what a public, political discourse might be may not be recognizable to some. I'm suspicious of much conspicuously "political" writing and its potential for dogmatism and reductiveness. I find politics in the subtle, solitary acts of perception and the formation of cognitive structures for apprehension and response. But the subtlety, the minutia, of such activities may result in work that seems inert rather than arresting. Or so I conclude, as I seem often to find myself mouthing inaudibly amidst a thunderous din.
Undeniably a "specific and personal invitation" is a motivation to enter the fray. It's exactly that kind of interest that brings a sense of the work being relevant to an audience, of its being a part of the larger writing/reading/ thinking world. I'm not one of those who's been able to convince myself of a work's relevance without some sign from the outside. To a certain degree, I think my writing project is about this very thing: the (often vexed) relationship between the very private subject and the seemingly remote power vectors that shape the social world. While the duality of private/ public is discredited these days, I need to retain some distinction like that to understand what's at stake in taking part in a public dialogue.
So---motivatedly, Mary
[Note: For direct link to Narrativity website, click on LINKS at bottom of H2 home page.]
*
Between Grad Student and KF, Oct. '00 through Feb. '01
KF to GS/ 10/14/00:
Do me a favor, and keep a list of questions that arise in your grad seminars or related conversations--particularly as regards the areas of tension you've written of, between theory and practice, as well as looming issues of power relations (even beginning at this grad school level)...the sort that might be interesting for other of our readers to discuss further in "postcard". .
GS to KF/ 10/14/00:
I've been thinking about what I might do for How2, and would like to suggest a book I've been fascinated with for a while...longing for a chance to engage with one particular piece. That piece seems to fit in with my on-going obsessions about landscape, space, and grids, dynamics, and connections . . . I'm very flattered to be asked to contribute to H2! I much enjoyed delving into the archives of HOW(ever) when I was researching Barbara Guest's work. It's so good to have all that material available on the web--I'd been wanting to see copies of the original journal for a long time--and have been following How2 ever since. .
GS to KF/ 2/2/00:
I don't know how to write about all this. Struggling with the gender issues has been very very painful for me here, and now that things seem to be improving somewhat, I'm a bit loathe to reopen old wounds!
There are some real practical issues for me that account for my not sending materials to How2 and not speaking up in on-line formats that I'd like to touch on. But most importantly, I have to find a way of writing about the politics of women's connections with each other that is truthful (but not over-revealing) of the particulars of my situation, yet at the same time avoids giving the impression that I think it's just "my problem" ...for the subject is extremely important.
Thank you for giving me the chance to see the other email contributions to this "postcard" correspondence. The questions raised make me think about all kinds of _practical_ reasons why someone like me doesn't make good use of forums that seem ready-made for speaking-out, even those as welcoming as How2. More on this later in this discussion.
I also need to find a way to write "in public" about the kinds of issues you and I have discussed in earlier emails. (Even revealing a previous one-on-one discussion feels problematic!) I can see _your_ frustration, coming across verbalized anxieties (issues) that often tangle us up in women's writing and scholarship --but not being able to persuade us to write about them in a form we'll allow to be made public.
The feeling that it's "just me" is part of ithe problem, of course. It's not so much that I always think my point-of-view isn't worth listening to, or that it doesn't deserve to be heard. (To my surprise, I often feel quite confident about my views, though of course that creates its own pressures.) The basic issue is that I am the only woman in my program to voice dissatisfaction--consistently and somewhat openly--about its gender politics. The program I am currently a part of is one that has constructed its identity on the basis of oppositionality, and requires that its students be loyal dissenters in supposedly hostile territory: "If you're not for us; you're against us." So the intellectual climate is very much"the fray" that Mary mentions, rather than any kind of open arena or protected zone!
A seemingly "open space" is created that is full of invisible barriers. The odd thing is that when someone bumps up against one of these, s/he becomes amazingly and embarrassingly visible, fully clothed in whatever kind of identitarian outfit suits the occasion. "Ah, we have a woman among us... (substitute whatever other label you like). How nice that you can speak up!"
In other classes that I attend, issues of race, class, gender, sexuality come and go as seems required by the subject under discussion and it isn't always left to the "other-identified" (as opposed to "self-identified") minority to speak up for themselves about whatever "their" issues are judged to be. While theory can certainly be misused as a debating tool--i.e., "I have a bigger, more famous, currently cooler theorist to apply to this issue than you do!"--it can also provide a framework that, because it is somewhat depersonalized, can allow push/pull and debate that goes beyond identitarian boxing-in. This is what I see happening in the best of the classes that I attend outside my own program. The risk, of course, with that kind of approach is that "speaking from experience" can get censored-out. In classrooms where I do feel comfortable enough to speak up, I try to take a pride in speaking from experience as well as theory.
Sitting in a room full of smart, interesting people who consistently ignore certain kinds of extremely important issues or assigned readings, and knowing that unless "my" kind of person raises them they won't be raised--whereas, if I do speak up, I'll be assumed to be speaking just because I am that kind of person--is not only appallingly silencing, but also excruciatingly frustrating. I leave the room and feel utterly drained with the effort of (not) speaking.
It also feels very lonely. The obvious answer to the situation I'm describing is for a group of the "whatever" kind to get together and speak up and support each other. But here I find myself in another kind of quandary that is particularly hard to talk about in this context. One of the very sad things about all this, especially for me, given the wonderfully supportive female community I had while getting my MFA, was to see how the women here get split apart and almost set against each other. For various personal (?) reasons, few have seemed prepared to rock the boat.
A difficulty for me in this situation is handling inter-generational feminist divides. From my experience here, the woman student who is "non-traditional" (in this context, older returning students) doesn't have much authority in the lit crit or poetry classroom, She is, I suspect, seen as boring, mumsy, and worst of all, "essentialist".
Most perplexing of all, if she also declares herself to be a feminist (how old-fashioned!), she obviously hasn't read (as indeed I haven't--I was hoping for a class here that would provide it!) the historical sequence of first-wave, second-wave, etc., feminisms. It is very clear to me that in my program, women (among other groups) are are not in a situation that encourages them to speak up about issues that aren't on the currently "mainstream" agenda." To say anything in the classroom--or to individuals, privately--that would even hint at this observation would be seen as patronizing. How dare I speak for someone else and make them look weak and naive? (As I write this, I notice--and resent--the twist I find myself putting on all this: not "this situation is bad," but "here's why this situation is so hard for me".)
I know that none of this will be news to many women. It's just been a big lesson to me--my hardest seminar last year was probably "gender politics". Having spent so much of my work life, and then in my MFA program among highly articulate and competent women scholars and professors, I came to realize that up to that time, I'd been very sheltered in professional situations. Even at work when, as happened not infrequently, I found myself "the only woman" (certainly often the only college-educated one, and hence an anomaly!), in business meetings, I never felt I was speaking "as a woman" (hence boxed-in)...as has happened to me here. I was an oddity, but there was respect for oddities, especially if they had some technical expertise.
Of course I have had some support, especially in private. But the worst hostility I encountered here came after a few of us dared--openly-- to put together a publicly identifiable united front. I now restrict myself to minimal appearances at poetry arenas (though that subject is what I came here to do!), and feel much more confident now that I'm not constantly exposing (or not exposing!) myself. There have been some changes in the last year, though, and more women have been entering this program, which has to be a good thing! I can see some differences happening, as a result of that--I notice that women's issues are discussed more...but still, from what I hear, this happens mainly at the instigation of the women in the room.
About my difficulty in expressing any of this in public (as opposed to privately): that awkward business of seeming to speak for other people. How dare I do that? I worry that perhaps I have got it all wrong, after all? What right _have_ I got to voice an opinion, especially a public one? I badly need to know that I've got it "right" . . . as if such a thing were entirely possible!
I actually feel deeply anguished at being told that I've "misunderstood" or that I just "don't get it". . . I can find a certain confidence (mentioned earlier), but I know it's a bit of an act. Because it's an act, it feels easily under-minable, and at the same time, I worry about its staginess and its (necessarily?) forceful rhetoric, and the effect that this has on the truthfulness of what I am saying?
I find that a good deal of my best thinking is done through poetry, and I believe that this is because there I am able to be truthful about the difficulties inherent in writing--anything at all. That feels much more honest!
Before signing-off, I wanted to say something very quickly about some of the practical things that stop me from taking part in this kind of public debate. First there must be time and effort! This is the third or fourth occasion in the last 8 months or so that I've done this kind of writing. In each case, I felt I just had to get something out, forcefully, and fast. Email is very pressurized--listserves particularly so, and particularly competitive, too. Get something out now! Jump in before the next person! A practical side of me says, yes, this is the only way to do this, while you're burning hot with the issue, while there's interest in it, an occasion for it. But this fights with the side of me that says, this is not how effective work is done. You have to be able to edit, to have time to write and come back fresh to revise.
The occasion was there, the issues demanded it, and I felt fired-up and desperate to make myself heard. But this is actually the hardest and most challenging kind of writing I ever do. Far harder than writing academic papers! It feels like running a race, or taking a very tightly timed exam. How best to do justice to the occasion (and the people involved), and my anger, and to be truthful to my insights and intuition, and at the same time be as persuasive and clear as I can? Even done all in one day (as this current piece is), it takes up huge amounts of time and emotional energy. Today, I've put aside some long-overdue grading, just to give this thing the time it needs, including going through its various layers: first emoting, then trying to get to some more rational-sounding structure, some attempt at balance (no one wants to sound shrill, or whiny), then editing for diplomacy's sake (after all, this thing is public!).
Re being invited--that certainly makes a big difference! But even then, and even given less emotionally fraught material, it's genuinely difficult to make the time. Even you had to ask me twice for a book review last year, and I was so thrilled to be asked!! As I'm sitting here typing I'm trying not to look at a second reminder to send some poems to a magazine. I guess, having the space to speak may not be enough. (After all, the frustrating classrooms I've described certainly looked open enough to begin with!) I need invitations, structure, something to bounce off, and the emotional resources that will help me key myself up to speaking-up and ignoring my other commitments! I don't think well on my feet; would much rather take things away and look at them quietly, digest them a bit, and then come back and say my piece. But frustratingly, my current lifestyle won't let me do that. Really a very basic aspect to being shut up!
I'm actually very very angry that graduate school (in its PhD form) shuts me away from all kinds of what I characterize as connecting, feminine parts of me --keeping up with and being supportive to friends and family, taking part in exchanges like this. I absolutely don't think the either/or sacrifice is a necessary part of the choice, and I think it's especially hard on women!! Sorry to go on and on about this--it's a very sore point right now. Add the fear that I have in this place, isolated as I am, of cutting myself off even more, and perhaps you have an answer to some of your questions?
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1/24/01
from Kristy Anderson
Zora Hurston
Film in the works I thought you and your readers would like to know about a documentary film on Zora Hurston for the Public Broadcasting System with major grants from PBS, the NEA and the NEH. This project has been a "work in progress" for ten years, which probably says more about me than it does about the project. But it's now in full-swing and I think it will be an exciting piece just because Hurston is such a fascinating character -- and we've filmed interviews with folks who have since passed on (Dorothy West for instance) who have inner perspectives. The script was co-written by Julie Dash and myself -- my co-producer is Sam Pollard, one of the "Eyes on the Prize" producers as well as a film editor for Spike Lee. We anticipate a PBS broadcast in late Spring 2002. The films focus will be Zora's anthropological work as a platform for her fiction, for her life and politics.
In addition to the film, Carla Kaplan is editing a collection of Zora's letters which was to have been published this year but isn't out yet -- Valerie Boyd is writing a biography which is to come out within the year -- and the Hurstons are due to release a book of their own about their family. I found some folktales at the Smithsonian that the Hurstons want to publish but I don't know when that might happen. So there are many of the written word types of publications going on with Hurston.
Your web site looks interesting. I'm going to tell a writerly friend about it because it looks so affirming for us fems. Keep up the great work!
kanders3@tampabay.rr.com
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6/2/00
from Shelley Jackson
"The Doll Games" project
I'd like to invite readers of How2 to contribute to a collaborative web project, the Doll Games. http://www.ineradicablestain.com/dollgames. My sister and I began this project to document the perverse and elaborate doll games we played as children, and that remains the core of the project. The Doll Games has several layers: we tell true stories, and include bonafide evidence that survives from those times (miniature books and letters "written by" our dolls), but we also footnote and theorize in a faux-academic manner, and address readers through a fictive and Kinbote-like editor. But this "scholarship" is slippery in tone: it's funny, but sometimes we mean it. The whole project sits uneasily between fiction and documentary, and that's the way we like it. (I am a writer, best known as the author of the acclaimed hypertext 'novel' Patchwork Girl; my sister is an independent scholar with a PhD in rhetoric from UC Berkeley, so this hybrid work is a kind of amalgam of our interests.)
This is an ongoing project, and it's still in an early stage. Right now it revolves around our own doll games, but over time, we hope the site will expand to include a vast section of contributions from other women (though we will we welcome men too) who have good stories to tell about their own childhood doll games. (Our note to contributors is located at http://www.ineradicablestain.com/dollgames/question.html) Because I suspect many of your readers are academics, however, I hope some of them will feel moved, as we were, to subtly spoof their own disciplines--under a pseudonym, if that seems liberating!
Contributors can email me directly.
Shelley Jackson,
shelley@drizzle.com
http://www.ineradicablestain.com
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11/20/00
from Jeff Hamilton
Riding Readers, RSVP!
Laura Riding's 1930 work Though Gently mixes prose, verse, and aphorism into a coherent analysis of the crisis of gender in the new humanism, American democracy's ascendant geo-political power, and English poetry's infatuation with the avant garde. Printed in a run of 200 copies, the text was slightly flawed, and the book never reprinted. In 2001, the Laura Riding centenary, Delmar magazine will reprint a correction of the original text, along with responses to it by poets and critics, Riding scholars and Delmar's past-contributors. The work received absolutely no attention in its initial commercial life. Delmar then invites the participation in this project of interested Riding readers. Responses of under 2500 words must be submitted by December 31, 2000. For more information, or for those interested who need a copy of the text, inquire to the editor: Jeff Hamilton/jbhamilt@artsci.wustl.edu.
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Difficulty reaching How2/n4 with search engines: A problem-solving session between Jeanne Heuving and Roberta Sims (HOW2 Webmaster)
10/13/00
I just tried to get current issue of HOW2 off of my computer at home using Microsoft search engine--and using the www address on its own--and each time I ended up with page showing #3 as current issue??? At the University using the same procedures, I get page showing #4 as current issue. I have no idea why this is happening? My computer at university is more powerful--but I have a fairly good computer at home, too--and in both cases am using UW internet services, so. . . --Jeanne Heuving, U. of Washington (Bothell/Seattle)
10/13/00
Jeanne, I've just tried searching for HOW2 through numerous search engines. One of them (Yahoo!) turned up an archived issue (on the Rutgers webserver). All the other searches turned up the correct one. When I searched through Lycos, I found the current issue when searching Lycos, Infoseek, Northern Light, Dogpile, Google, Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista, Direct Hit, HotBot, Go.com. In all cases How2 appeared within the first page of results, and often it was first or second. This looks pretty healthy to me, so I'm not sure I need to do anything to "fix" it. Jeanne, if there's something I'm overlooking, please let me know. --Roberta Sims
10/16/00
Jeanne, Could you
try emptying the cache on your browser? Every time you load a web page,
your computer stores a temporary version of that page so that if you call
it up again, it will load faster. Your webserver at work might be regularly
emptied, but you have to empty it manually at home. If you use Internet
Explorer, click on "TOOLS," then "INTERNET OPTIONS." In the middle it
says: Temporary Internet Files. Click on "Delete Files," then click the
"okay" at the bottom If you use Netscape, chose "EDIT" then "PREFERENCES."
On the left side, at the bottom, it will say "ADVANCED." Click on the
Plus sign beside advanced. Click on the word "CACHE." Click on the button
that says "CLEAR MEMORY CACHE," then click "OK". Now click on the button
that says "CLEAR DISK CACHE" and click "OK." Click "OK" one more time.
Now try typing in the exact URL http://www.departments/bucknell.edu/stadler_center/how2
and see if you get the currect issue (#4). If this doesn't work, please
let me know. --Roberta Sims
10/17/00
Dear Roberta, Kathleen and Ann, It did work. I am sure this has been a factor in my not accessing other current WEB sites, so am glad I know now. Thanks to Roberta and HOW2 for all manner of aid--and now technical service, to boot. --Jeanne Heuving
