Dan Moshenberg

Dan Moshenberg is an organizer educator who has worked with various social movements in the United States and South Africa.

Israel’s `emergency’ stalks Ethiopian women’s bodies

March 1, 2013 by Leave a Comment

According to a recent report, Israel has been administering Depo-Provera to Ethiopian women without any informed consent. At present, it’s estimated that thousands of Ethiopian women are receiving regular shots. The women never consented to receiving this highly controversial treatment. Many were never told that the shots are contraceptive, and questionable contraceptives at that.

The Ethiopian women started receiving `the treatment’ in the so-called transit camps in Ethiopia. Exactly who originated the program and who runs it now, from the camps in Ethiopia to the clinics in Israel, is under investigation.

Some women say they were told, in the camps, “No shot, no Israel.” Others say they were told it’s a flu shot.

At one level, this news is not new. In 2008, a day care center director noticed a sharp decline in the numbers of Ethiopian children. She went to the nearby clinic and was informed the clinic had been “had been instructed to administer Depo Provera injections to the women of child-bearing age.” They were merely following instructions.

In 2010, the Women and Medical Technologies Project of Isha L’Isha, or Woman to Woman, released a study, “Depo Provera: A contraceptive method given via injection: A report on its prescription policy among women of the Ethiopian community in Israel.” They noted that while Ethiopian women made up 2% of the female population in Israel, of “the mentioned 4833 cases, 2759 (57%) were women of Ethiopian origin.”

The most recent `discovery’ occurred in December of last year, thanks to a documentary made by Sava Reuben, a woman of Ethiopian origin. Reuben has been in Israel since 1984. The `nation’ was shocked. Outcry ensued.

How is one to read this tale of racial, xenophobic, sexist violence against women … all under the sheltering sky of State health policy? In Namibia, South Africa and elsewhere, women have been forcibly sterilized because they were HIV-positive. In Namibia, the women took the State to court … and won: “Non negotiable: my body, my womb, my rights”. In India, Indira Gandhi’s government, in the mid-1970’s, launched a campaign of forced sterilization. It was `the Emergency.’

It’s always `the Emergency.’ From Namibia and South Africa to India to Israel and beyond, it’s always `the Emergency’ and women always pay. Emergency is the state of the modern State. This too is not new. In 1940, Walter Benjamin wrote: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.” Almost sixty years later, Giorgio Agamben commented on Benjamin’s insight: “Walter Benjamin’s diagnosis … has lost none of its relevance. And that is so not really or not only because power no longer has today any form of legitimization other than emergency, and because power everywhere and continuously refers and appeals to emergency as well as laboring secretly to produce it. (How could we not think that a system that can no longer function at all except on the basis of emergency would not also be interested in preserving such an emergency at any price?)”

None of this is new.

What is the price of a permanent State of emergency? Ask the Ethiopian women in Israel. They’ll tell you.

 

(Photo Credit: Care2.com)

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The women of Namibia say, “Rape is not NAMIBIAN”

February 26, 2013 by 3 Comments

“We mean business, and we really are serious. We are just tired of being disempowered, being talked to like little children.”

In Namibia last week, Police Inspector General Sebastian Ndeitunga issued a ban on miniskirts. He warned women that too short and revealing clothes are not African. He acknowledged that in Namibia there’s something called a Constitution, but then went on to explain that “culture” trumps constitutional rights. He then warned that wearing clothes that are too revealing would lead to arrest.

The Namibia Press Agency reports that 40 women were arrested, over the festive season, for wearing “hot-pants.” The women were held in custody overnight and then released to their parents, with lectures on public indecency. As the Police Inspector explained, “I don’t want to prescribe how people should wear, even if it’s new fashion style, it should be within our tradition.”

While women have been threatened with arrest for wearing miniskirts, it has been noted that no men have been threatened with arrest for wearing sagging pants. Apparently `culture’ and `tradition’ only `protect’ women.

Not surprisingly, the women rejected the ban, and even more its political context, vociferously and boisterously. Women’s organizations filed protests. Women, and men, wrote in opposition. Women and men organized public demonstrations. Finally, the Inspector General claimed, predictably, that he had been misquoted. The actual arrests of women in hot pants can’t be brushed away quite so conveniently.

Namibian women understand “culture” and “tradition” and know that assaults on their clothing are never what they seem. Banning the miniskirt, of course, is itself a long and often violent tradition. Edith Head banned the miniskirt from the Academy Awards. (Somewhere Seth MacFarlane is singing, “We saw your knees”, and it’s still not funny.) At various times, the governments of Swaziland, Russia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo have outlawed or come close to outlawing miniskirts. In recent years, women wearing miniskirts have been attacked because of their attire in Zimbabwe, Malawi, and South Africa.

In each case, the women rose, organized, and attacked, because in each case, the women understood that the attack on their clothes was an attack on their bodies and themselves.

In the recent past, Namibian women have been organizing, working at the unfinished business of creating national and local democracy. Herero and Nama women have been organizing for the rights and realities of indigenous populations as they have organized to increase the presence and power and expand the rights of Herero and Nama women. Namibian women farmers have been organizing and developing sustainable agriculture political economies. And Namibian women, who were forcibly sterilized, without their consent, have been organizing, organizing, organizing, and gaining ground.

When Namibian women heard of the Inspector General’s remarks, they understood the context immediately: sexual violence. Namibian women know about the sexual harassment, violence and threats they often face, for example at taxi ranks, and they know it has nothing to do with their clothing. Namibian women know about rape and other forms of sexual assault, including what gets called “corrective punishment”. They know about the everydayness of date rape. They know about the often-limited access to sexual and reproductive health services, and the severe restrictions concerning abortion, and they know that lack of access and prohibition is part of a structure of violence against women. HIV-positive women know about the reproductive and sexual rights violations they suffer repeatedly, and in particular in doctors’ offices, clinics and hospitals. Women know they are tired partly because all matters of contraception and family planning are left to them. They take the burden and the blame.

They know all that. They know the miniskirt is a diversion, on one hand, and serious, on the other.

And they said as much at the protest rally in Windhoek:

“There is no excuse to rape a woman, no excuse, no matter what she wears.”

The women of Namibia refused to be limited to a discussion of clothing, of mini this and hot that. Instead, they put the issue forward directly and squarely. As one placard said, “Rape is not NAMIBIAN.”

 

(Video Credit: OATV News / YouTube)

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America’s seclusion rooms form a landscape of atrocity

February 25, 2013 by 7 Comments

Recently, legislators in Oregon, Arizona, and Indiana began to address so-called seclusion rooms. Seclusion rooms are solitary confinement cells in schools. They’re also called `isolation booths’, `isolation boxes’, and `behavior support’. George Orwell is alive and well, and apparently in charge in the schoolhouses of the United States.

Jared Harrison is now 12 years old. He went to primary school in Eugene, Oregon. According to his testimony, for four years, starting in first grade, he was forced into a seclusion room pretty much every day, often for hours. Further, his parents were never informed. Ever. As his mother, Jennifer Harrison, explained, “”I was never notified. I didn’t know it was happening until I walked in and found him screaming facedown on the ground with two adults sitting on top of him.”

Parents have notified the State that they’re considering a lawsuit.

Parents in Arizona are also suing the State for having put their child in seclusion for hours on end. When the child asked, begged, to go to the bathroom, he was refused. And so finally, he urinated in the cell. The boy’s mother, Leslie Noyes is quite clear on at least one point: ““It’s like five by six, padded walls, no windows.  It is definitely like a cell.” Don’t call those rooms `seclusion rooms’, don’t call them `cool-down’ spaces, and certainly don’t call them `open air rooms’. Call them prison cells.

In Indiana, parents and advocates are also saying those prison cells are not “quiet rooms” or “safe rooms.” They’re specifically not safe because no one monitors the child while she or he is in the cell. They’re simply left there, absolutely alone. That’s not quiet, that’s not safe, and that’s not education. That’s violence.

Repeatedly, the story of violence is at least twofold, and each fold intensifies the other. First, there is the forced seizure and abandonment of a child into a cell for an extended period of time. Second, there is the discovery by the parents of what has been going on. The parents and the children share in the tragedy. When the children testify, the mothers, such as Jennifer Harrison, listen by their side and weep. The violence doesn’t stop once the door to the `seclusion room’ has been opened.

This is a tale of atrocity: “[M]ore often than not, [contemporary psychiatric]’medicine’ is a complete atrocity-comparable only to the history out of which it grew: is four-point restraint-being tied down at the wrists and ankles-an improvement over being bound with chains? Is the cage inhumane whereas the seclusion room is not?”

Speak the truth fearlessly. Solitary confinement in our prisons is torture. Seclusion rooms in our schools are an atrocity. The solitary confinement of seclusion rooms comprises the social human landscape of the United States today. Close the seclusion rooms. Do it now.

 

(Video Credit: Dan Habib / Vimeo)

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Canada’s Highway, Prisons, Foster Homes, and Schools of Tears

February 19, 2013 by 7 Comments

The Ashley Smith inquest continues. Ashley Smith was a 19-year-old woman prisoner who troubled the government of Canada too much with her constant acting out and suicide attempts, and so, finally, was allowed to commit suicide while seven guards stood and watched.

The guards, four women and three men, have now testified. They all say their hands were tied; they were only following orders. They’re very sorry, even anguished, for how Ashley Smith died. They know they failed her, they know the State failed her. They were misinformed. They were told Ashley’s problems were “behavioral not mental.” Behavioral not mental is code for in control of one’s actions. When the madwoman in the attic is a 19-year-old in solitary confinement, somehow she becomes `sane.’ The guards say they knew something was wrong, but the doctors had told them otherwise. It was a victory of military discipline over human and common sense.

Some ask, “How does an 18-year-old end up doing serious time in a federal prison for throwing crab apples at a postman?” Others wonder if Ashley Smith’s death was suicide or murder. Did Ashley Smith die or was she killed?

The Ashley Smith inquest continues, and Ashley Smith is still dead.

Here’s another question. Is Ashley Smith’s experience an isolated one? How does Canada treat its troublesome children? Three current reports suggest that the treatment of Ashley Smith is more common public policy than exceptional horror.

One study documents “ongoing police failures to protect indigenous women and girls” in Northern British Columbia. This “failure to protect” includes gang rape, torture, abduction, and a whole menu of violence. This “failure to protect” has contributed to the construction of what many call the Highway of Tears, as has the national government’s `failure’ to care about the lives of indigenous women and girls. That’s not failure. That’s refusal, and it’s an aggressive public policy, not an omission or lack of action.

A second study follows a 13-year-old Aboriginal child from cradle to cage. Taken from his parents at an early age, he was tossed from one foster home to another. Most of them were abusive environments. The one foster parent who actually cared and tried to take care of the boy couldn’t get help from the State, and so had to give the child up. When the boy turned eight, and was in a residential facility, the staff started disciplining him by calling in the police. And so began his life of being Tasered, followed by time in prison.

His story is a common one. In British Columbia, of children and youth `in care’ more enter into the juvenile criminal justice system than graduate from high school. One in six youth in care have been in youth custody. Close to one-third of the youth in the juvenile justice system is Aboriginal, which pretty much accords with the adult prisons. As above, so below. That’s equality in a prison State; that’s public policy.

An unpublished study reports that more than 3000 Aboriginal children died in Indian residential schools. Children died of disease, malnutrition, and accidents. Children froze to death. From the 1870s to the 1990s, 150,000 First Nations children were forced through the meat grinder of “civilizing” instruction, and at least 2% of them died in house. The names of 500 of the 3000 dead are still unknown. What is known is that in 1917, the Department of Indian Affairs stopped reporting the deaths and death rates of Aboriginal students in residential `care’: “It was obviously a policy not to report them.”

In each instance, from the 3000 Aboriginal children to the one Aboriginal child to hundreds of missing Aboriginal women and girls to Ashley Smith, the State responded with silence, followed by denial.

The Highway of Tears is not a road to nowhere. It leads to the Prisons of Tears, to the Foster Homes of Tears, to the Schools of Tears. Ashley Smith’s suffering is part of the brutal disposal of children in a world in which care is forced to surrender to the business of security as usual.

 

(Photo Credit: cbc.ca/highwayoftears.ca)

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Virginia’s war on women of color

February 13, 2013 by 4 Comments

Earlier this week the Virginia House of Delegates refused to restore the rights of nonviolent felons who have paid their debt to society … again. Governor Robert F. McDonnell had made re-enfranchisement a priority of his final year in office. The Governor spoke compellingly of “a nation that believes in redemption and second chances.” His Republican confreres in Richmond were not impressed.

Virginia is one of four states that permanently bars felony offenders from voting or running for office. At present, only the Governor can restore those rights, and that takes a long time, a great deal of work, and, not insignificantly, the commitment of a Governor who thinks it’s worth the time and effort. Most don’t.

In Virginia, as elsewhere, the disenfranchisement of former felons stems from, and adds to, centuries-old histories of racial and ethnic exclusion, oppression, and State violence. Approximately 378,000 Virginians, or 6.8 percent of the Commonwealth, fall under the `felony’ ban. This lifelong ban affects one of every five African Americans in Virginia. That’s no accident. That’s public policy.

These numbers are particularly noxious when one recalls that sixty percent of Virginia felony convictions do not merit jail time, and many are for nonviolent offences.

The lifelong voting ban in Virginia has always been an assault on African Americans immediately, and on communities of color, more generally. In recent years, however, it has also been a weapon in a war against women of color.

The so-called war on drugs has targeted women of color, in particular through conspiracy laws. These laws basically catch women for the crime of intimate relationships with someone involved in the drug trade. The women often, perhaps usually, receive extraordinarily harsh sentences. In Virginia, the case of Santra Lavonne Rucker is illustrative. Her boyfriend was thought to be a major dealer, in Virginia and New York. Rucker was charged with him, as an accomplice, and convicted, despite what many think was flimsy evidence of her actual involvement. But here’s the kicker. Rucker was sentenced to life, lives actually, in prison. Despite overwhelming evidence that, at most, she was a bystander, she was sentenced as a major kingpin in a statewide conspiracy. Santra Lavonne Rucker is still waiting to see the light of day.

Malinda Jenkins, of Lynchburg, Virginia, discovered that, thanks to drug conspiracy laws, absolutely ordinary everyday interactions between intimate partners can result in a narcotics prosecution. Jenkins was brought in with her boyfriend and others. Despite the agents’ testimony that they had never witnessed her or knew of her having any relationship to any drug deals, Jenkins was convicted with the whole crew. On appeal, her conviction was reversed because there was no evidence. It wasn’t insufficient evidence. It was nonexistent evidence.

These are just two cases, but they speak to the last thirty years of the war on drugs and its impact, nationally and in Virginia. In Virginia, being convicted of a drug offense can mean a lifelong ban on welfare benefits as well as a lifelong ban on voting. For women and their children, the ban on welfare has meant an impossible life. This has particularly affected Virginian women of color. That’s no accident. That’s public policy.

Since 1990, Virginia has had one of the highest increases in time served by prisoners and keeps people in prison for longer than most states. This is true for those convicted of nonviolent as well as violent offenses. Only recently has the State, with the establishment of the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission, begun to address the possibility of diversion and alternative sentencing. As is so often the case, the Commission was a result of prison overcrowding in the Commonwealth. Nationally, prison overcrowding has often resulted in men being released much earlier than women for exactly the same offense. The State simply needed the men’s beds more than the women’s.

The Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission applies a point system to each prisoner to establish `risk’ of recidivism. For drug and fraud offenses, women are deemed a much, much better `risk’ than men, nine times better. For larceny, men are a somewhat better risk, about 1.5 times better. In December 2012, these numbers translated as follows: 635 drug cases for review; 951 fraud cases; 185 larceny cases. In the overwhelming number of cases, then, women are a much better prospect for anywhere but behind bars. That’s according to the Commonwealth of Virginia.

It’s time to return the right to vote to those who have paid their debt, especially when much of that debt is the result of legerdemain. It’s time to stop the war on communities of color. It’s time to stop the war on women of color. Do it now, Virginia.

 

(Photo Credit: Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos/Slate)

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In the camps, the women sigh, “O brave new world”

February 11, 2013 by 7 Comments

A key plank of Australia’s asylum policy is deterrence. What happened to asylum being the key plank of asylum policy? Deterrence in this instance means “offshore camps”, particularly on the islands of Manus and Nauru Islands. Manus Island is part of Papua New Guinea, where a trial opened today to challenge the legality of the “processing camps”. The charge is that the Papua New Guinean law does not allow for detention without any charge. Detention camps. Processing camps. Or, as Marianne Evers said of the camp on Nauru, “I actually liken it to a concentration camp.” Not surprisingly, the Australian government takes offense at the likening, “I think invoking concentration camp is a disgrace.” Calling the camps on Manus Island and Nauru Island “concentration camps” is a disgrace, but the camps themselves … are fine?

No.

Last week, New Matilda published three sets of letters by women asylum seekers currently imprisoned on Manus Island. The women are from Iran, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan. They describe terrible hardships in their homelands, terrific struggles to get to Australia, and then debilitating, crushing conditions on Christmas Island and then on Manus Island. They describe the dire mental health crisis that sweeps through the camps, especially among the younger men who are increasingly suicidal. They write about their struggle for safety for themselves and their children. They write a great deal about their children. They describe the life draining out of their children within the universe of trauma that constitutes the detention camp. They describe the cultures and public policies of violence against women in their homelands that compelled them to leave, to seek personal safety and dignity.

The United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR, issued a report last week on Manus Island, based on a January visit. The agency confirms the reports of the women asylum seekers. The physical conditions are “harsh”. The living quarters have no privacy, which is a particular concern to parents of girls; are unbearably hot; and have grossly inadequate sanitary facilities. And that’s the family compound. The conditions in the compound for single male adults are worse.

The conditions are generally and specifically traumatic. They breed mental health crises on an individual, collective and structural basis. For the adults, it’s terrible. For the children, it’s crushing.

The UN list of dehumanizing conditions goes on, but here’s the point. This is what happens when deterrence is a key plank in asylum policy. Since Australia began “offshore processing” its asylum seekers, have the numbers gone down? Absolutely not. They’ve risen, incrementally. Does that mean the policy hasn’t worked? According to the State, it means the State hasn’t arrived at the proper balance of harsh and brutal. When the Australian government can match the brutality the women, children and men have fled, then it will have arrived at what it considers to be an appropriate asylum program.

Australia has invested political capital, national identity, and hard cold cash in brutalizing asylum seekers. They have sought partners. First they turned to Papua New Guinea, and this week, they turned to New Zealand. Australia sees asylum seekers as another `opportunity’ for regional free trade agreements. This time trade is in battered bodies and dreams.

Why can’t asylum, rather than deterrence, by the key plank of the asylum policy? What would it take to move the concept of the right to asylum to the center of all asylum policy? Ask the women asylum seekers on Manus Island. Repeatedly, they say they fled violence but they sought peace. Peace, rather than `security’, must govern asylum policy.

Meanwhile, the women who sought peace sit in the harsh camps on the remote islands, look at their children, look at themselves, look at the guards, look at where they’ve come to and where they’re probably going, if the State has its way, and they sigh, “O brave new world, that has such people in’t.”

(Photo Credit: Al Jazeera)

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On outrage

February 8, 2013 by 6 Comments


I cannot write about Anene Booysen. Many others are, and are doing so eloquently. But I do wonder about outrage. The national response to the horrible violence against Anene Booysen has been described as outrage. When does outrage occur?

How many women and girls must suffer violence and abuse to cross the threshold of outrage? How many men must engage in violence and abuse before the horizon of outrage is breached?

I ask this because I don’t recall outrage being expressed when both the Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust and the Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women and Children faced imminent closure last year. Yes, there were individuals and groups who jumped and organized, but there was no great surge of outrage at what would surely follow the simultaneous closure of the two most successful and most important resources in the Western Cape for those seeking help, support, community in the midst of suffering violence.

Remember, Rape Crisis is the oldest center of its kind in South Africa. In a recent two-year period, it served over 5000 rape survivors. And when it served the survivors, it served their loved and loving ones, their friends, their communities, and their neighborhoods. It served the whole of South Africa, one healing empowering person at a time.

Likewise, Saartjie Baartman has been working out of Manenberg to change the world by changing the area. The Centre, open for ten years, is a one-stop service shop: 24-hour shelter, short and medium residential care, childcare, counseling, legal advice, education and mentoring, and more.

Both Rape Crisis and Saartjie Baartman have played lead roles in research, advocacy, and mobilizing around women’s rights generally. They offer a place for women to hear their own voices, to have their voices heard, to have their voices joined and amplified, to have their voices translated into action.

Both Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust and the Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women and Children are indispensable, and not only for the women and children, and men, who come in looking for help. For the entire country and beyond. Who leapt to organize when the two, in one fell swoop, faced closure? The usual suspects. Not `the nation,’ not the State, nor was Twitter alight with outrage.

Along with protests and uprisings and expressions of outrage, all of which are terrifically important, let there be outrage for the condition of those people and organizations that have worked and are working now to change the world, to transform society, to create a place in which women and children and men can live in peace and joy. Support Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust and the Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women and Children. It’s never too late. Do it now.

 

(Photo Credit: Local Media Unpacked)

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Welcome, asylum seeker, to the society of the queer spectacle

February 6, 2013 by 7 Comments

In the United Kingdom, gay asylum seekers increasingly feel pressured to prove they are gay. In the last three years, the United Kingdom Border Agency rules, and application of rules, for those seeking asylum based on persecution of sexual minorities in their home countries have changed.

Previously, the policy was one of `discretion’, in which gay asylum seekers’ applications were rejected because, it was felt, the asylum seeker merely needed to act with greater discretion. If she or he was tortured, it was her/his fault. If she or he was killed, again, her/his fault. If she or he was kicked out of family and community and left to suffer the ravages of the streets, she or he should have known better. It was a policy of shut up, go away.

In 2010, a Supreme Court decision changed that. In the case of HJ(Iran) and HT (Cameroon) vs. Secretary of State for the Home Department, an Iranian gay man feared imprisonment and lashing, while a Cameroonian gay man was terrorized by his neighbors. The Court rejected discretion: “An interpretation … which denies refugee status to gay men who can only avoid persecution in their home country by behaving discreetly (and who say that on return this is what they will do) would frustrate the humanitarian objective of the Convention and deny them the enjoyment of their fundamental rights and freedoms without discrimination. The right to dignity underpins the protections afforded by the Refugee Convention.”

Since then, with mounting austerity-led, privatization-pushed campaigns by the State to close the non-existent asylum pipeline so as to protect the country from the non-existent tsunami of asylum seeking detritus, that compassionate “opening” has been translated into a cross between a peep show for the State.

Gay? Lesbian? Transgender? From a dangerous, toxic place, which could be your household, could be your neighborhood or `community’, could be your country, because you’re gay or lesbian? Prove it. Hunted down by the State and/or Civil Society because of your sexual minority status? Prove it. If you don’t have the scars to prove it, well … show us some skin.

It’s the society of the spectacle, in which gay and lesbian asylum seekers, who have not only suffered so much but have had to work strenuously to finally make it to “safe haven” are told they must labor some more … now to prove their sexual identity. In 1967, Guy Debord described a new society of the spectacle, in which labor and capital were shifted from production of goods to production of spectacle. He began writing and thinking of an “integrated spectacle (that) has transformed the world economically … using police methods to transform perception”. In 1992, Debord wrote: “The same formidable question that has been haunting the world for two centuries is about to be posed again everywhere: How can the poor be made to work once their illusions have been shattered, and once force has been defeated?”

How? Make them work to prove their claims to identity. Make them work to prove their claims to existence. This is where the spectacle of queer asylum seekers makes economic sense.

A lesbian woman from Uganda fled for her life to the UK. Upon arrival, “the UKBA officials wanted me to prove that I was lesbian but they wouldn’t tell me how I could.” Her application was denied. She spent months in Yarl’s Wood. She brought copies of Ugandan newspapers that called for her murder if she should be seen in Kampala. These were disregarded. Finally, she was given asylum. But first she had to do all the work. The State said no, sat back, and watched.

There all sorts of legal debates about the implications of the Supreme Court decision, touching on `queer cases’ and the law, the legal meaning of discretion, where lines should and shouldn’t be drawn, assessment protocols for LGBTQ asylum seekers, good sense and common sense, the centrality of LGBTQ rights on the map of human rights, the rights of gay men and lesbians to live freely, openly and on equal terms. The list goes on.

But there’s something else, something not of the courthouse but rather of the everyday world of work. Major investments are made in prisons and their outlying service networks for asylum seekers. It costs money to house a Ugandan lesbian asylum seeker for months. It costs money to threaten her with deportation, day in and day out. Major profits emerge from those investments. At the same time, there’s a newer form of extraction, that of making the asylum seeker work to prove identity claims. So … welcome gay man, lesbian woman. You have traveled so far and struggled so much. Welcome to your new workhouse, your new poorhouse … your body, your self, the new, and not so new, queer spectacle.

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Is Marie Therese Njila Nana a human being? Are you?

February 1, 2013 by 3 Comments

Subjected to the trials of Job, Marie Therese Njila Nana has survived with dignity, and is rewarded, by the United Kingdom, with prison and worse.

Nana is from Cameroon. In her area, her family was fairly prominent. When Marie Therese Nana converted to Pentecostalism, her family took, bound her, tortured and beat her. She fled to another part of the country, joined a local Pentecostal Church, and tried to begin a new life.

She lived in that town for ten years. Then the Church decided she must marry a Church elder. Nana refused, and was forced to move again, to avoid violence.

She met a man from another tribe, whom she married. Her family discovered this and sent nine masked family members to her house. They beat her.

Her husband left for Germany, for work. Threats, and worse, from Church and family escalated. Marie Therese Nana tried to reconcile with her family. She returned home to meet with her parents, or so she thought. Her family held her for days, beating her senseless and humiliating and degrading her, all in an attempt to `purify’ her. Then they took her to the police, where she was further beaten.

Marie Therese Njila Nana then fled, to England, where she applied for asylum. Which was denied. The Home Office claims that Marie Therese Njila Nana can return safely to Cameroon, because there are `support services’ available. Not the police, notoriously corrupt and violent and beyond reproach. Her family has proven its capacity to reach her anywhere in the country. The Pentecostal Church as well is all over the place. And her name is known. But somehow the United Kingdom Border Agency has decided that Marie Therese Njila Nana is not a true candidate for asylum.

And so they sent her to Yarl’s Wood, where she has been for the last nine months. Nana describes her experience in Yarl’s Wood as torture. According to doctors, she is clearly suffering from trauma, and has received no medical attention. To the contrary, guards have taunted and harassed her.

This is not surprising from an agency that commonly and blithely uses forces on pregnant prisoners. This is not surprising from an agency that, in report after report, is found to treat prisoners with abuse, violence, and viciousness. Prisoner after prisoner reports that the staff treats them “like dogs”, like animals. Marie Therese Nana puts it succinctly: “English people need to know that there are concentration camps in their country where aliens are tortured and oppressed.”

And now, the United Kingdom plans to send Marie Therese Njila Nana back to Cameroon. What’s the reward an African woman gets for having survived violence after violence after violence? More violence.

Marie Therese Njila Nana asks, “Am I a HUMAN BEING? I ran from my country to save my life and I just seek asylum. After destroying me mentally more than 8 months now they plot to send me back to my killers.” But the real question is this, “Are we human beings?” Only concerted and collective action to stop the flight, and all the flights, will do, if we want to answer, “Yes. Yes, we are human beings.”

(Photo Credit: Muse / bensmawfield)

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Tahrir meant liberation. It still does. Ask the women

January 25, 2013 by 3 Comments

In 2011, the women of Egypt pushed Hosni Mubarak out of power. One of those women was Sanaa El-Seif, who at the time was 17 years old. She moved to Tahrir Square, with friends. With a fellow classmate, Ziad Tareq, she created a space in which to produce a regular newspaper, for distribution in and beyond Tahrir Square. In so doing, Sanaa El-Seif pulled together and then retied all sorts of insurgent and revolutionary trains: feminist organizing cultures, women’s organizing cultures, youth organizing cultures. Centuries of revolutionary broadsheets, reading clubs, manifestoes, samizdat, night schools, you name it, came together in the work of Sanaa El-Seif.

Mubarak left office. The world media, by and large, left Tahrir Square, except for those regular moments of implosion, and Sanaa El-Seif stayed. She stayed as so many women have, to push the revolution forward, to materialize real transformation in Egypt now.

Sanaa El-Seif, now 19, says it simply and directly: Staying matters. This is not about disputes between exiles and those who stayed in whatever site. It is about staying with the energies of change, staying with the promises of building autonomous transformative spaces, communities, nation, and worlds.

Today is January 25, 2012, two years later. Two years is a short time and an impossibly long one as well. Many debate today the progress and the reversals of `Egypt’ since Tahrir Square became, for a short while, the center of a universe.

Two years ago, Tahrir meant liberation. It still does. Ask the women.

In the last year, women have assessed the situation on the ground and have organized, and continue to organize. A national women’s movement is slowly but decidedly taking place, at times quite publically, at other times in the shadows. But the point is that it’s a national women’s movement, one that was in many ways impossible prior to 2011 because of the State ideological and surveillance apparatuses.

Women whose names gained prominence in the 2011 Tahrir manifestations are still there, today, in the marches and protests. Women like Mona Seif, co-founder of the No To Military Trials For Civilians campaign. Seif has been challenging the military at every step, and, even more, has been challenging and attacking the militarization of civil society, of State, of intimate spaces, of everything. That challenge to militarization emerges from and returns to decades of Egyptian women and feminist thinkers and activists, such as Doria Shafik and, of course, Nawal el Saadawi.

Every day women including Nehad Abul Komsan, director of the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights; union activist organizer and leader Abir Ibrahim; Mozn Hassan, Director of Nazra Center for Feminist Studies; women’s rights activists Yara Sallam and Asmaa Gomaa; `revolutionary-turned-activist’ Nada Wahid; women graffiti artists Aya Tarek and Hend Kheera; and anti-violence organizer Eba’a El-Tamami work to create new spaces, new publics, for women, for autonomy, for freedom and power, for dreaming and doing.

Someone recently described the `Woman in the Blue Brassiere’ as “all too actual, real, and bodily, not just a symbol, but a flesh-and-blood human being who becomes virtual and goes viral, returning within a few days to haunt the real space of Tahrir Square as the banner of the Egyptian women’s movement.”

She does not haunt. She stays. The work of the revolution stays as it moves forward and expands, under the banner of the Egyptian women’s movement. Tahrir means liberation. Ask the women.

 

(Video Credit: YouTube.com)

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