My Body Is Not Your Battleground

My Body is not your battleground
My breasts are neither wells nor mountians,
neither Badr nor Uhud

My breasts do not want to lead revolutions
nor to become prisoners of war
My breasts seek amnesty: release them
so I can glory in their milktipped fullness,
so I can offer them to my sweet love
without your flags and banners on them

My body is not your battleground
My hair is neither sacred nor cheap,
neither the cause of your disarray
nor the path to your liberation
My hair will not bring progress and clean water
if it flies unbraided in the breeze
It will not save us from our attackers
if it is wrapped and shielded from the sun
Untangle your hands from my hair
so I can comb and delight in it,
so I can honor and annoint it,
so I can spill it over the chest of my sweet love

My body is not your battleground
My private garden is not your tillage
My thighs are not highway lanes to your Golden City
My belly is not the store of your bushels of wheat
My womb is not the cradle of your soldiers,
not the ship of your journey to the homeland
Leave me to discover the lakes
that glisten in my green forests
and to understand the power of their waters
Leave me to fill or not fill my chalice
with the wine or honey of my sweet love

Is it your skin that will tear when the head of the new world emerges?

My body is not your battleground
How dare you put your hand
where I have not given permission
Has God, then, given you permission
to put your hand there?

My body is not your battle ground
Withdraw from the eastern fronts and the western
Withdraw these armaments and this siege
so that I may prepare the earth
for the new age of lilac and clover,
so that I may celebrate this spring
the pageant of beauty with my sweet love.

- Mohja Kahf, 1998

A Bedouin Woman From Syria

                                          (taken at the World's Columbian Exposition, 1893)

Isn't It Ironic?

This morning while driving to work I was fortunate enough to hear the President of the world throw his pearls of  wisdom at North and South Sudan. Needless to say I was glad I had missed breakfast in my rush because I would have probably thrown up. 


If conflict is not the way then surely Obama should take his own advice or at least attempt to give these warm and fuzzy lectures to his military central command. 


If it wasn't for the created wars and interventions of the US empire in the past decades there would be fewer refugees, drone attack victims, Abu Ghraib like prison torture photos and Afghanistan like massacres of civilians by American military personnel on the rampage. 


So if Obama is not going to put US tax payer money where is mouth is then he should just shut up!

For Old Times...

Abuse Amuse

The gang rape dominating the headlines this week should make every South African feel very uncomfortable. Despite statistics which show that the accused in gang rape cases are less likely to be found guilty or that 1 in 9 South African women are raped, it appears that the nation needed graphic videos of a mentally challenged, teenage girl being raped by 7 men to go viral, before they were moved to action.

In a country where rape is seen as everything from a right of passage and a cure for lesbians and AIDS to entertainment on a dull Saturday night, can we really afford to be silent even for a second?

In somewhat related news the Alpha Boyfriend, an Internet meme has been successfully doing the rounds. It involves a girl telling her boyfriend something in a sweet way and him responding by punching her brutally. Apparently it’s ‘only a cartoon’ and those calling it offensive have been accused of creating a furor over nothing.

The ability to see domestic violence as humorous requires a society that has normalised violence against women to such an extent that it no longer seems wrong.

Racist, sexist and xenophobic jokes have always been the fire starter to the brutal main act. A way of desensitising the masses into believing that the plight of the perceived 'other' is trivial and 'deserved'.

Makes me think about the 1956 protest against pass laws, when 20000 women staged a march on the Union Buildings. A song of strength and courage that was composed for the event: Wathint'Abafazi Wathint'imbokodo! (You strike a woman, you have struck a rock). Now decades later like every other old song it seems to have been remixed. Something along the lines of…

You strike a woman and the nation will remain as unmoved as a rock.

The Moment After The Bomb...

The Pulitzer Prize in the breaking news photography category was awarded to the Afghan photographer Massoud Hossaini of Agence France-Presse (AFP) this week. He took the above photo of a girl crying in fear after a suicide bomber's attack in Kabul.

For the whole article:http://mg.co.za/article/2012-04-18-hossainis-heartbreak-wins-2012-pulitzer. 

An Interesting Take On Banning Hijab...

A Woman From Tharparkar Near The Indo-Pak Border

 (The Movie Poster, Ramchand Pakistani)

Supremacism

What is it about the ideology of religious fundamentalism that allows it to travel so indifferently among such disparate political groups? I believe that it is an incarnation of a demon that has stalked liberal democracy everywhere throughout this century: an ideology that, for want of a better word, I shall call supremacism. It consists essentially in the belief that a group cannot ensure its continuity except by exerting absolute cultural and demographic control over a particular stretch of geography. The fascist antecedents of this ideology are clear and obvious. Some would go further and argue that nationalism of every kind must be regarded as a variant of supremacism. This is often but not necessarily true. The non-sectarian, anti- imperialist nationalism of a Ghandi or a Saad Zaghloul was founded on a belief in the possibility of relative autonomy for heterogeneous populations and had nothing to do with asserting supremacy.

- An except from ‘the fundamentalist challenge’ in The Imam and the Indian by Amitav Ghosh