“(..) burn the books, they got too many names and psychosis, all this increminating evidence would surely hunt me if someone would break into my house…” Alanis lullabied my early 20s in New York City, what seems like ages ago… Then I dreamed of having the proverbial room of my own with books everywhere...
Post polluted Bangkok filled with soothing tenderness of Thais I burn the incense bought at the temple of Wat Pho in my own Roman apartment.
My incriminating evidence “Love, again” by Doris Lessing bought in the Border Bookstore outside of Liverpool the day before attending the wedding of boyfriend’s sister. It is laying next to my bed together with Anais Nin’s “Spy in the House of Love” and recently borrowed “The History of Love” by Nicole Krauss.
I attend some UN Consultation on Gender, Property Rights and HIV AIDS pandemic. One presenter steers away from illusive technical classifications of the pervasiveness of gender discrimination at all levels and he cites Lessing: “I write what women are saying, I hear what women are saying but they are not listening.” My sudden aversion to anyone, anywhere who says that “we want to give women a voice”.
The power of words. I listen to overly familiar “testimonies” of women from Uganda – stories of domestic violence, inheritance battles, pride and loss. We are one in our inability to intellectualise human suffering caused by simple and unaddressed injustice. I am intellectualising my refusal of the victimization tactics. Words can hurt too.
“Before he could speak and harm her with words while she lay naked and exposed, while he prepared a judgement, she was preparing her metamorphosis, so that whatever Sabina he struck down she could abandon like a disguise, shedding the self he had seized upon and say “that was not me.”. “Spy in the House of Love”
We have to keep gender relations in mind. Not just women. Someone says repeatedly in the forum. Then the whole talk of empowerment, humiliation and apparently empowerment in public acknowledgement of humiliations. I have never seen men come to international forums in order to feel empowered by sharing their stories of humiliation and violence incurred on behalf of women. I say then …no…this is about women’s rights. And one of the feminists has a son. I can just see how terrified she is when she finds out that if a woman is battered it is the fault of the mother of the batterer according to cultural understanding in one of the countries. Laws don't help. Too many women walk away from courts afraid of the power of hurtful words.
We are all fragile. Violence is an expression of our own inability to acknowledge our fragility.
“During the Age of Glass, everyone believed some part of him or her to be extremely fragile. For some it was hand, for others a femur, jet others believed it was their noses that were made of glass. The Age of Glass followed the Stone Age as an evolutionary corrective, introducing into human relations a new sense of fragility that fostered compassion.” “The History of Love”.
Would we all break if we couldn’t write? Is this why the web is also run on fiber optics?
