WAITING IN THE PAST FOR THE FUTURE TO COME

WAITING IN THE PAST FOR THE FUTURE TO COME

Dulles Airport. Waiting. For once I’m early for my flight. I am not good with waiting. Or being told to wait. I came to D.C. to attend the first ever State of Women Summit, and had to wait about an hour and a half to register, because there were so many women, from all over the country who showed up for this. Standing in that endless line, and later for the “gender-neutral” bathrooms, I was strangely patient. I felt as if something was shifting inside me. Maybe it was for many of us, as we came together to listen to powerful speeches from the President, First Lady, V.P Biden and a parade of amazing women leaders, inventors, educators, entrepreneurs, all ages, races, religions, regions. Maybe I was O.K with waiting because for the first time, I was feeling like, well: WE HAD ARRIVED!

At the State of Women's Summit, all the female U.S. Congress and Senate members

 The Summit felt like part-sporting event, part-political rally. Being lifted by all those super-achiever XX Chromosomes concentrated under one roof made me giddy. Collectively, it’s so much easier to feel empowered. And my big take away from this awesome gathering was to reach out more, create community more, lean across the aisles, tables, chasms and differences and really listen. If the answer isn’t forthcoming, I think I am also learning how to wait for it. 

See, for a long while I have resisted the story of women being told from a place of lack. We’re not this, we’re not that, we're just not enough.  Even Oprah, as she was interviewing Michelle Obama during the closing session (and my table-mates were having mild seizures of ecstasy), brought this up… how every woman she has ever interviewed spoke of suffering at some time  from debilitating low self-esteem. As a young feminist, I countered this with outer defiance, recalcitrance, rage. Over the years, I strengthened my armor with stories of pioneering women, explorers, artists, first-timers, and would devour their biographies. Amelia Earhardt was a childhood heroine, then Beryl Markham, Isabelle Eberhardt, Alice Guy Blaché, Rosa Luxemborg, Margaret Bourke-White, Martha Gellhorn.  Receptivity, passivity, nurturing, these so-called Jungian feminine traits were to be avoided at all costs.

I wanted nothing to do with feminine weakness. My best friend even nicknamed me “bobcat” for the little bulldozer you see on construction sites. My favorite Sylvia Plath line, from the poem “Lady Lazarus,” was always, “I rise with my red hair, and I eat men like air.”  But in the last few years, building GlobalGirl Media around the world with so many different young women, from such a wide array of family, cultural and personal backgrounds, watching them navigate their teens and twenties, I started to notice something. Unlike me, many of these younger women were not afraid of revealing their vulnerability. Schooled in posting sexy selfies and snapchat, maybe it was part of their overall subtext.  Much more nimble with the “emoji” than me, could they also be embracing a femininity I was afraid of? Without being reductionist here, and I know I am venturing into thorny territory even just broaching the subject, but I really am talking about a new prism for feminism. The one that allows for fluidity, for contradictions, for fierceness and grace. 

Or as Moxie filmmaker Tiffany Schlain once said in an interview: “ Feminism is the thing that declares without apology and with absolute logic that the things I know to be true in my heart are true indeed.”  That is a beautiful way of saying, what you are feeling inside, is just as important as what you present on the outside.

Contrast this with Luis Vuitton appropriating “Lightning” the heroine from the hugely popular video game Final Fantasy. For their latest ad campaigns, they proclaimed her the perfect avatar for the “globalized, modern woman.” In a world where social media and all its endless iterations are so integral to our lives, this digitized fembot doesn’t necessarily spell strength. You could also see Lightning as The metallic tin-woman (man) without a heart.

Lightning, from FINAL FANTASY

I recently attended the Geena Davis Institute’s See Jane Salon, “Keeping Up With Generation Z,” where I learned from Annie Leal, the vibrant, young Social Media Manager of We are Mitu. She spoke of how youth are actually becoming less public on social media, more discerning of what they post than my generation, shunning facebook and even instagram for platforms like snapchat, where their presences instantly become absences. Like self-curators in a sense, they are O.K. with both objectifying and then silencing themselves.

As the media world shifts from consumption to creation, and as more and more women challenge the barriers to their entry into this world, so long dominated by the male narrative, is it enough to encourage young women to merely tell or even yell her own story?   Or do we need to make space to really consciously listen, and wait?  

A quick  google search of the word “quiet,” brings up a reference to one of my favorite books of late, Susan Cain’s “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in A World That Can’t Stop Talking.”  Cain reminds us that it was introverts—Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, Steve Wozniak—that we owe many of the great contributions to society. But right beneath this is an Op-Ed in the Washigton Post on the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen: Troubled. Quiet.

Not being heard can be tragic, deadly. And it’s exactly the media’s dominant drilling of Mateen’s outer-allegiance to extremism that misses the inner, awful truth: since a child, he was bullied. He was brutalized by a society that demonized his difference: chubby, of Afghan descent. We may never really know what would drive this very troubled young man to such savagery, but that’s just it: we shouldn’t pretend we do. If the stories we tell around such tragedies beget more hatred, othering and intolerance, then how are we ever to stop the insanity?

In wandering around the photography exhibit at the Women in Arts Museum in D.C., called “She Who Tells A Story,” I was struck by the series, “Girl In Her Room,” by Lebanese photographer Rania Matar. By photographing young women in Beirut and Palestine in their bedrooms, she was able to capture a remarkable vulnerability, an interiority that is rarely showcased in teen-age girl’s lives. Roland Barthes said about privacy:  “the absolutely precious, inalienable place where my image is free…”  These photos were both intimate and liberating. As viewers, we are asked to see these young women as individual, authentic, complex, real.

From "She Who Tells A Story" Exhibit, Photo credit: Rania Matar

Photo credit: Rania Matar

 If stories are to heal us, become creative interventions to the staggering violence and inequity in this world, we need to allow them the space to flow, like social currency, in between those sticky spaces we are so quick to either define or dismiss.  Like just what is a terrorist, or for that matter, a feminist?  Without a doubt, women and girls’ voices have been so often ignored and their stories rendered so invisible in the information spaces we all use to navigate our lives we do need to turn up the volume, over and over.

Yet,  as I wait for my plane back to California, I’m thinking more about how to live from our insides, how to speak from the silences, the softness, how to be better protagonists of our own stories. And if that means getting better at waiting, for the bathroom, the bus, the answer, well, what’s the rush?

LEARNING A NEW LANGUAGE FOR THE NEW YEAR

"I believe that deep within our being as a nation there is a longing for a moral movement that plows deep into our souls..." Rev. Dr. William Barbar,  NAACP

A few days after the New Year, I write this as I think of what I have witnessed and withstood this past year, both as the Executive Director of GlobalGirl Media, and as an individual woman, mother, lover, friend, filmmaker and activist. There is a deep aching in my heart these days, opened by wounds both personal and global…from Ferguson to NYC to Syria, Gaza and beyond.

I find myself at a loss for words, and wanting to go deep within, to find a place of quiet and stillness….a place where the protest, the choking and even the chanting stops. Is this defeat?  

Then I read this: “If one woman told the truth about her life, the world would split open…” (Terry Tempest Williams, “When Women Were Birds…”).  Well it seems truth is what is finally being told and revealed, about police violence, about racial divide, gender violence, about anger born of enormous economic and cultural rifts, about how lost most of us feel when WE ARE NOT BEING HEARD.

I march in Oakland for the #BlackLivesMatter movement and see a young girl with a megaphone. I can't get this image out of my mind for days.  I’ve been thinking about this idea of VOICE. I was always a vocal child. In fact, people still accuse me of interrupting them all the time. I was always so eager to share my opinion and passion with others. I was always a woman with many words. Yet lately I have grown quiet. The gruesome parade of events this year that have quite literally silenced individual voices from the Boko Haram kidnappings to the NFL batterers to Eric Garner’s haunting last words, “I can’t breathe…”  have led to a darkness and hush over our collective outcries. In refusing to speak, are we complicit? Maybe we need to find a new language.

More from Terry Tempest Williams’ gem of a book: “To find our sovereign voice often requires betrayal, we just have to make certain we do not betray ourselves.” 

To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did. So now I’m in search of a new narrative, perhaps one that is not even mine. And in order to do this, I must listen. Listen for the language of beauty hidden in the darkness, for words that cannot be spoken but are written with our eyes, our tears, the touch of a human hand.  One need not speak in order to have a voice.  Like, Williams reflects (I love that we share the same surname):

“I want to feel the beauty and the pain in the age we are living…I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape of where I dwell. “

There are so many ways to change the stories we have been given. Or as Rebecca Solnit writes in Men Explain Things to Me, “Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.”

So it’s really a process, of letting go, listening, forgiving and clearing the debris of your personal defeats so you can face the unfathomable public a little less mute, a little less dumbfounded.

 On Thursday, December 4, 2014, the United Nations Secretary-General released The Road to Dignity by 2030: Ending Poverty, Transforming All Lives and Protecting the Planet,  a report that highlighted the importance of including youth in the post-2015 international development process. We at GlobalGirl Media signed on to a growing cadre of women and girls’ rights organizations calling for more inclusion. If we are to truly achieve the stated goal of an ambitious, transformational and universal post-2015 agenda that ensures equality, nondiscrimination, equity and inclusion at all levels, adolescent girls’ rights and needs must be meaningfully included and reflected throughout the process.

One of our GlobalGirls from Morocco, now studying in China told me she was struggling with her past, her longing for home, her restlessness, and wrote to me on Facebook: “I know that I will have to go step by step so the transition will take time, but I am not willing to give up the hardship I have to go through, this is the great gate to my freedom…”

In these first few days of 2015, I ask you who are reading this, what is your gate, what are you willing to walk through, and where will you find your new voice for the new year? 

From the blogger eeshap on The Crunk Feminist Collective:  "When we locate our silence, confront it, hold it close, and wrestle it with compassion and ferocity. That is when the silence slinks. That is how we make space for our stories. One at a time, all at once, unapologetic, and true."

BESPOKE FREEDOM AND HASHTAG FEMINISM

BESPOKE FREEDOM AND HASHTAG FEMINISM

Sitting at London’ Borough’s Market, just near the London Bridge, thinking of today’s elections in South Africa.  May 7^th marks an historic occasion for the “freeborns,” those born after the end of apartheid in 1994, those who will be voting for the first time. I am recalling something one of them told me as I was working with our GlobalGirls in the streets, interviewing young people about the upcoming elections. “Not yet Uhuru…not yet free…” he said, “But I am free in the sense that I have my own mind, and can choose to vote or not to vote.” We called the campaign “FreeBornFreeMind,” gave it a hashtag, and started posting short burst “vox pops” every day leading to the election.

Interviewing FreeBorns in Soweto

So now here it is May 7^th, and I am waiting for a triple shot latte as I mull over the month’s events. I arrived in London in the middle of tube strikes, with international news and social media raising a global, vuvuzela outrage over the disappearance of hundreds of Nigerian girls, kidnapped by Muslim religious extremists. Grey suits and silence engulf me as I am rocked awake this morning on the tube, on my way to my meeting with Reuters Foundation.  London is so contained, polite and proper. After the chaos of township traffic and getting lost in the dizzying maze of Jozi neighborhoods, I am relieved as I walk through the impossible wealth of Knightsbridge, row upon row of brilliant white Georgian mansions, their white columns seem to be holding up a bygone era. The fact that on bank holidays, chaps in tennis whites still say things like “40- love” behind locked gates in private gardens in Belgravia while drugged-up warlords invoke Allah to justify selling young women into slavery requires deeper reading.

London Cityscape

I want to know more. I want to know what is in-between. I want to know why there are no more than these awful polarities…where is the grey? I hope it’s not just in the English gentleman tailor shop windows on Oxford Street, beckoning with the eponymous word,  “bespoke…”

I keep bumping up against this word here” “bespoke.”  When I first overheard it on the tube, I thought it meant spoken for. Then I saw it on the storefronts of bakeries, tailors, cleaners and even an eyeglass store… (!). It actually means “made to order…” or “made especially for,” as in, for those who order. Those who can…for an orderly society, one that knows what it wants and demands what it wants, ahead of time. The privileged, the few, the “spoken for.”

Do the youth of South Africa really know? Our girls are interviewed by Al Jazeera TheStream

and the CBC The Current Radio show of Canada, everyone is curious if they carry in them the weight of their country’s history. Will they go to the polls with this heavy burden? Do they feel “spoken for?”  The sad truth about the current political global space is that leaders have forgotten about accountability, competency, about being accountable to the younger generation, the new voters. And these voters are frustrated, isolated, they don’t want to be “spoken for,” as they certainly have something to say.

A recent Al Jazeera article by Rafia Zakaria over the online fervor of the Nigerian missing girls gets to the heart of the matter: we need to be careful about who we are speaking for. By cloaking the “saving” of these girls as a pretext for military intervention and an oversimplification or reduction of the very real danger women face globally.

How is it that most of the interviews of Nigerian experts on the news channels make them look like inept buffoons, reinforcing the dominant narrative of global inequality?  So it’s Michelle Obama and Ellen Degeneres that are the real saviours?

As Zakaria notes, “ The positioning of a grownup, liberated Western feminism against the simple, naive schoolgirl feminism of brown and black lands, where the girls are imagined as just beginning to scramble for an education and awaiting Western liberation” speaks to why GlobalGirl Media encourages girls to break down these hierarchical narratives and speak directly to each other.

Don’t get me wrong, the kidnapping, abuse and torture of these girls is inexcusable and needs world community support, but instgramming and hashtagging does little to help contextualize the larger American and European-owned multi-national oil interests in Nigeria that have created irreversible environmental damage and influenced a broken, corrupt leadership. The Nigerian’s state’s failure to bring Boko Haram to justice will not be solved by an outraged international drone-like intervention, ignoring sovereignty and local rule of law.

It will work only as we say in the media industry, as a “one-off,” trending for a few months, while the conditions through which women and girls are repeatedly violated, degraded and relegated second class citizenship will persist until the next “school-girl crisis.”

The world loves a rescue story.  It’s the stuff that sells. Perhaps the real hijackers are the media, and all of us tweeting and twittering along, like birds of a feather, unable or unwilling to address the broader, stickier narrative of Western do-gooders doing little more than driving our own personal narrative. How can we, the makers of story, and the pushers of culture make space for the silenced?  How can we help local stories find a global audience without our simplistic stereotyping of the “other?” Maybe we need a "bespoke” media, where we don’t so much allow the other to speak, we just listen.

Freedom...invisible or indivisible?

Today, I want to write about freedom. There's been so much talk of it lately, this being the final day that Nelson Mandela's body rests "in state" before being taken to his childhood village of Qunu. Listening to an NPR report this morning, the local Mayor, a woman, talks about how place shapes a person. The humble beginnings of this gentle giant of a global leader can be found here, but also in all the humble lives he touched, including mine. I opened his auto-biography, "The Long Walk to Freedom" a few days ago and fell on the chapter, The Black Pimpernel, where he recalls living as an invisible man in Johannesburg to escape the police state: 

... Living underground requires a seismic psychological shift. One has to plan every action, however small and seemingly insignificant. Nothing is innocent. Everything is questioned. You cannot be yourself; you must fully inhabit whatever role you have assumed. In some ways, this is not much of an adaptation for a black man in South Africa. Under apartheid, a black man lived a shadowy life between legality and illegality, between openness and concealment. To be a black man in South Africa meant not to trust anything, which was not unlike living underground for one's entire life....  The key to being underground is to be invisible. Just as there is a way to walk in a room in order to make yourself stand out, there is a way of walking and behaving that makes you inconspicuous. As a leader, one often seeks prominence; as an outlaw, the opposite is true. When underground I did not walk as tall or stand as straight. I spoke more softly, with less clarity and distinction. I was more passive, more unobtrusive; I did not ask for things, but instead let people tell me what to do. I did not shave or cut my hair. My most frequent disguise was as a chauffeur, a chef, or a "garden boy." I would wear the blue overalls of the fieldworker and often wore round, rimless glasses known as Mazzawati teaglasses. I had a car and I wore a chauffeur's cap with my overalls. The pose of chauffeur was convenient because I could travel under the pretext of driving my master's car.

To walk "not as tall," or "stand not as straight," to not seek the limelight as a leader, to "speak softly,"  this I think is the Mandela example of freedom, a kind of invisible freedom. His 27 years in prison, his emergence into a world in tumult and transition, his absolute committment to reconciliation, these were beautiful lessons for me and my work as a young filmmaker and activist. 

Like many of my colleagues and friends, I can remember the exact place I was when he made that long walk to freedom, stepping out of a cell and onto the world stage. I was on a very tall ladder, painting the walls of a studio in the Brewery in downtown Los Angeles as partial, bartered payment for some work the owner of this studio had done on my film, UNCOMMON GROUND. I climbed down off the ladder, and sat alone in the vast emptiness of the studio, listening to Mandela's words and the chanting of the crowd. Tears flowed through this ridiculous smile I had, staring at my paint-stained hands, as I felt something enter that room...Hope? Reassurance? And I remembered all the beautiful moments we had, filming Uncommon Ground in Grahamstown, South Africa, where young people everywhere were flush with the fever of change. It was 1990, and black South Africans would still not have the right to vote for five more years, but the kids in Grahamstown, many of whom had fought in the underground Youth ANC league, well, they just knew it was coming. They had what Mandela had all those years in incarceration...a notion of freedom that is indivisible. They had faith.

Now, 24 years later, my mind is on Syria. Unlike South Africa's liberation struggle, when the world turned its attention towards the dismantling of apartheid with university campus sit-ins and corporate divestment campaigns, cultural boycotts, prayer vigils and diplomatic pressures, the world seems to be turning away from Syria. The mounting humanitarian crisis, with a documented 120,000 killed, 160,00 detained and over 2 million refugees outside the country and 6.5 million displaced within, it is arguably at neo-genocidal proportions, and still there is no sign of a solution...nor any sign of international outrage. Where are the mass protests and campus sit-ins for Syria? 

While Assad and his Iranian/Hezbollah/Russian supporters square off with the Jihadist hijackers of the Syrian uprising, the voice of the secularist Syrian people has been silenced. It seems U.S. foreign policy is more preoccupied with nuclear detente in Iran than massive human torture and death in Syria, what the brilliant Asli U Bali, an international human rights lawyer, refers to as "loss of a moral calculus." When it comes to Syria, it seems our world leaders have turned away from the legacy of Mandela and the lessons of South Africa. The quiescence of the international community on Syria is held at a terrible price: both sides are free to carry out more atrocities, the latest just three days ago in a Damascus suburb of Nabk, (reports of which I could only find in Arab news) when pro-government forces heavily shelled the area killing 40 civilians, mostly women and children. Further fragmentation of rebel factions and the increasing influence of outsider radical Islamists also targetting the Free Syrian Army only serve to strengthen Assad's position.

Qunu. Nabk. One village prepares to bury a beloved icon of peace while the world looks on, and another buries countless victims of an unending war, as the world looks away.

So while I am no longer painting studios to subsidize my life as a filmmaker, I need to go back to that empty space. I need to sit quietly and come to terms with this world out of balance, where the values of dignity, democracy, social justice and yes, freedom still matter. And as much as they may be invisible now, they are still indivisible. Like the eponymous Mandela, his absurdly tall bronze statue towering over Johannesburg's posh Standton shopping center, I have to remember where he came from. 

His humble beginnings in Qunu, coupled with so many tragedies like Nabk, really teach me the true meaning of Freedom. A long walk, a kind word, a quiet patience and steadfast belief. Yes, it's hard to find faith.

Until you read the story of Soundos, the 10-year old Syrian girl who was shot in the head by Assad's government snipers, and miraculously still lives, two years later, with the bullet still lodged in her brain. And guess what? Her father's name is Fatih... go ahead. Switch the letters around and what does it spell?