Showing posts with label women. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Revolution at Point Zero: Montreal Book Launch and Discussion with Silvia Federici (April 4th)



[please post and forward widely] [svp diffusez largement] [français ci-dessous]
[facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/123882664466638/]

Revolution at Point Zero: A Book Launch and Discussion with Silvia Federici

Thursday April 4 at 6:30pm
1610 Ste-Catherine West (Faubourg Building), Room B-060
(métro Guy-Concordia)

- This event is free.
- For free on-site childcare, please call 24 hours in advance: 514-848-7585.
- Wheelchair accessible.
- Il y aura une service de traduction chuchotée vers le français.

Join us for a discussion with feminist and anti-capitalist activist Silvia Federici, a veteran of the Wages for Housework campaign and author of Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.

Federici will discuss her most recent book Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (PM Press 2012), a collection of texts written between 1975 and 2010. In this talk she will specifically address social reproduction in an era of  globalized capitalism providing a feminist and autonomous Marxist analysis of the ongoing recolonization and decimation of much of the planet. As outlined in Revolution at Point Zero, this process fosters a permanent crisis of reproduction and survival. As women continue to bear the brunt of this onslaught, Federici puts forth a vision of the commons as a site of resistance.

Copies of Caliban and the Witch and Revolution at Point Zero will be on sale along with other feminist and anti-capitalist literature.

This event is co-sponsored by QPIRG Concordia, QPIRG McGill and Kersplebedeb Publishing.

(Note that Silvia will also be giving a workshop on "Reproductive Work and the Construction of the Commons in an Era of Primitive Accumulation" at the Anti-Capitalist Teach In on April 7th. For more information, visit: http://www.qpirgconcordia.org/?p=4319)

info: 514-848-7585 – info@qpirgconcordia.org
www.qpirgconcordia.org - www.qpirgmcgill.org - www.kersplebedeb.com - www.pmpress.org


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La Révolution au Point Zéro:
Discussion et lancement du livre de Silvia Federici

Jeudi le 4 avril à 18h30
1610 Ste-Catherine Ouest (Bâtiment Faubourg), local B-060
(métro Guy-Concordia)

- Cet événement est gratuit.
- Pour le service de garde, veuillez téléphoner le numéro suivant (24 heures en avance s.v.p.): 514-848-7585.
- Accessible aux personnes en fauteuil roulant.
- Il y aura la traduction chuchotée vers le français.

Venez rencontrer Silvia Federici, militante féministe et anticapitaliste de longue date, membre du mouvement «salaire contre travail ménager» et auteure du livre Caliban and the Witch : Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation («Caliban et la sorcière: Femmes, corps et accumulation primitive»), dont la traduction française sera publiée sous peu.

Federici discutera de son dernier livre, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (PM Press 2012), un recueil de textes écrits entre 1975 et 2010. Plus précisément, elle apportera une analyse marxiste féministe et autonome pour adresser la question de la reproduction sociale dans un contexte de capitalisme devenu global, de la recolonisation et de la décimation de la presque totalité de la planète. Comme le souligne Revolution at Point Zero, ce processus crée une crise permanente de reproduction et de survie. Alors que les femmes se retrouvent aux premières lignes de  cet assaut, Federici nous offre une vision du bien commun en tant que site de résistance.

Des copies de Caliban and the Witch et de Revolution at Point Zero seront disponibles aux côtés d'une sélection de publications féministes et anticapitalistes.

Cet événement est une collaboration entre GRIP-Q Concordia, GRIP-Q McGill et la maison d'édition Kersplebedeb.

(À noter que Silvia offrira un atelier sur "Le travail de reproduction et la construction de biens communs à l'ère de l'accumulation primitive" au teach-in anticapitaliste qui aura lieu le 7 avril. Pour plus d'info: http://www.qpirgconcordia.org/?p=4319&lang=fr)

info: 514-848-7585 – info@qpirgconcordia.org
www.qpirgconcordia.org - www.qpirgmcgill.org - www.kersplebedeb.com - www.pmpress.org




Friday, March 08, 2013

IWD Message from Political Prisoner Lynne Stewart


Radical human rights attorney Lynne Stewart has been falsely accused of helping terrorists. On Tuesday, April 9, 2002, she was arrested and agents searched her Manhattan office for documents. She was arraigned before Manhattan federal Judge John Koeltl. This is an obvious attempt by the U.S. government to silence dissent, curtail vigorous defense lawyers, and install fear in those who would fight against the U.S. government’s racism, seek to help Arabs and Muslims being prosecuted for free speech and defend the rights of all oppressed people.

Lynne Stewart, who was at the time 66 years old (she is now 73), received a 28-month sentence in October 2006. The government appealed the sentence, and in 2009 Lynne was sentence to 10 years in federal prison. While in prison, Lynne became ill; at this point she has stage 4 cancer, which has spread from the breast to the lungs and bones. She is now in a federal medical facility for women in Texas, thousands of miles away from her home, family and community.

The following is a message Lynne called in a few days ago, intended for International Women's Day:

This is a cry from deep in my soul on behalf of my sisters--abused, forgotten, made marginal.  We are always aware of our place on the rungs of the ladder of oppression based on race and class and  sex.

Since this needs be brief I want to first talk about sisters Indian--Asian and Native American.  It is the most difficult concept to conceive of the evil predatory communities these women on different sides of the world live in.  Rape is VIOLENCE not sex. It has been routine for men to absolutely do as they will without any fear of retribution legally.  There have been no courts to Prosecute, to PUNISH.  My first rejoinder is always to urge self-defense--that will always get a woman to Court.  But she may be the victim again.  Right now, the Congress has passed a "law" that we hope will protect Native Indian women here.  But there have been many "Laws".  There is greater hope in India where there has been a righteous female uprising that cannot,  will not be ignored.

Briefly I just want to mention -- women who are not in the cruel world but suffer behind bars -- cages, if you will.  Some of us are political --here because the Government has criminalized our actions or framed us -- I call out to you to Remember and  Cherish  Marie Mason, a "green warrior", Afiia Siddique " a heroine in her own Pakistan for her brave resistance", and also Me -- Still fighting, Still Struggling.  Still loving you all.

Love Struggle,
Lynne
3/4/13;  9:40  am



Thursday, March 11, 2010

OUT OF OUR SHELTERS! OUT OF OUR LIVES!

An important public service announcement regarding police invasions of women's shelters in canada, from the fine folks at No One Is Illegal Toronto:

OUT OF OUR SHELTERS! OUT OF OUR LIVES! was the message delivered
to the Canada Border Services Agency on March 8th, International Women's
Day, by the 120 plus women and trans-folks who poured into the Toronto
Rape Crisis Centre for an Emergency Assembly.

The Assembly was called after it came to the attention of the Shelter |
Sanctuary | Status campaign that in Feb. 2010 an Immigration Enforcement
officer went into a women's shelter, looking to deport a non-status migrant
woman, and survivor of violence. Since this information has been made public,
more and more women have started to break the silence.

The Assembly agreed to begin a large-scale campaign insisting that
Immigration Canada make women's spaces and services OFF-LIMITS to
Immigration Enforcement. We are writing today to ask for your support. Please
read below, forward and act! Our actions can make immediate change.

(Details of the assembly can be found at http://toronto.nooneisillegal.org/node/435
Here is what the Toronto Star had to say: http://bit.ly/dAeIlT )

The gathering of over a hundred women, with support from hundreds of others calls for:

1) IMMEDIATE ACTION
This FRIDAY, March 12:
Phone or Email Reg Williams, Director of Immigration Enforcement in Toronto
Phone: 905.612.6070
Email: reg.williams@cbsa-asfc.gc.ca, cc shelter.sanctuary.status@gmail.com

Insist that CBSA has no place in anti-violence against women organizations.
A sample of what you can say or write can be found at:
http://toronto.nooneisillegal.org/node/436

Forward this call to your friends, family and networks. The more
people/organizations that they hear from, the stronger our message will be!

2) If you are part of an organization that serves or supports migrant women,
transpeople and children, or work in a shelter or anti-violence against women
organization, invite a member of the SSS campaign to talk to you about
Access Without Fear. We can work with you to ensure that your centre is safe
and accessible for all people, regardless of immigration status.

3) Shelters and anti-VAW organizations across the city and across the country
are signing on to a declaration demanding:
-a moratorium on all deportations for women surviving violence
-Immigration Enforcement stay out of shelters and anti-VAW spaces
-women fighting back against violence be given immediate status

The full declaration is available here: http://toronto.nooneisillegal.org/node/432
If you are working in the anti-VAW sector, work with residents and
participants to get your organization to sign on to the declaration.

4) Get involved with the SSS campaign. On March 19, come out to the
SSS: Access Without Fear Forum for front-line workers and service providers
to develop strategies aimed at ensuring access to essential services for people
without full status. Register here: http://bit.ly/9y1Pvo

The Shelter|Sanctuary|Status Coalition is a growing movement of over 120
anti-Violence Against Women organizations that are working to create safe
spaces for all women, regardless of immigration status.

http://toronto.nooneisillegal.org/sss
shelter.sanctuary.status@gmail.com



Monday, September 28, 2009

Women Fighters of the LTTE

You can read the entire book online: Women Fighters of Liberation Tigers - Adele Ann Balasingham

Shared via AddThis



Friday, March 13, 2009

Wednesday in Montreal: P4W: Prison for Women Film Screening w/ Ann Hansen



KEEPING IT REEL!
QPIRG-Concordia's Subversive Cinema Series
next feature film: P4W: Prison for Women
National Film Board (NFB) Classic Film

Followed by a special lecture by ANN HANSEN,
author of "Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerilla".

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18, 7pm
1455 de Maisonneuve West, H-110
(metro Guy-Concordia)
Welcome to all. FREE. Wheelchair accessible.

P4W: Prison for Women is an NFB classic film that takes shattering look at love and isolation in the most desperate of places. The film centres on five women inmates - their stores, their relationships and their lives - inside Canada's only Prison for Women in Kingston, Ontario. The complex fabric of this invisible community is revealed through the use of interviews, monologues and powerful verité sequences. (Canada, 1980, 90 minutes)

The film is followed by a special lecture by ANN HANSEN. Ann is a former inmate at Kingston’s Prison for Women; and author of “Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla.” Ann was part of the underground anti-war guerilla movement of the 1980s in Canada.

Info: 514-848-7585
info@qpirgconcordia.org - www.qpirgconcordia.org



Friday, March 21, 2008

Interview with Comrade Parvati of the CPN(M)

i am happy to be able to pass on this brief interview with Hisila Yami, nom de guerre Comrade Parvati, of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). While i am wary of some features of the revolutionary movement in Nepal (see here or here for instance), i am also inspired by aspects of the struggle there, and especially by the theoretical contributions Parvati has made in her essays Women's Leadership and the Revolution in Nepal and her Interview with People's March (both published along with a commentary by Butch Lee in the Kersplebedeb pamphlet People's War Women's War).

i am reposting this from the blog Fire on the Mountain.


Interview with Hisila Yami

Conducted by Jorun Gulbrandsen and Johan Petter Andresen



Hisila Yami is a central committee member of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). Yami was a minister in the interim government until the Maoists withdrew in August 2007. She has written many articles about women’s liberation. The most important are collected in the book “People’s War and Women’s Liberation in Nepal”, ISBN 81-904039-0-7. Published by Purvaia Prakashan, India.


Red!
: Is it possible for the working women in the third world to achieve liberation without people’s war?

Hisila: Never before in the history of Asia has the number of women joining the people’s war been so huge. At the same time, we must keep in mind that there is a strong left movement in Nepal. The background for this is that the position of women is very bad. More than 80% live in the countryside. Because of lack of income, the men go to find cash jobs in urban areas or in foreign countries. The women stay behind and take care of the farm and the children. The feudal system does not give the woman the right to own land. There are no openings for her. Her life is between the house and the water source. She is married away to the in-law family at an early age. Normally, she cannot visit her own family more than once a year. By the time she is 35 she is a grandmother and her life is finished. If she tries to go to the city she ends up sexually exploited. So the people’s war gave openings for women.

Politically we made this a point. During the war against the colonisers in 1816 the women fought bravely. The party used this as an example that women can fight. In 1944 there was a united woman’s effort to fight against the Rana system. The party was formed in 1948 and all the fronts were formed. Through these examples from history we showed that women have played, and must play, a central role.

Already in 1995, one year before we started the people’s war, we made a rule that there must be minimum two women in each unit. A unit had between 5 and 11 members.

In the period of the first people’s uprising in 1990 it was normal among communists that the husband worked as a full time party worker while the wife worked as a teacher and took care of the family. But we broke that rule in 1993-4.

There are many concrete reasons for the women to join the PLA. The were oppressed by the police, or the families sent the women to avoid them from getting raped by the enemy. Many women also saw PLA as a possibility for another type of life, a better life.

You should know that also before the people’s war, the left was strong in Nepal. The 8th of March has always been celebrated. There was of course a gender ground for that. The left started working with women’s liberation at an early stage. It was the women’s mass organisation that first made an independent program for women’s liberation.

The women’s fronts were very active in 1996. The attacked the men who wasted time playing cards and drinking liquor. They also attacked men that bashed women. Another example is the protests against beauty contests in the urban areas.

Right now the front is organising a wide women’s front for a federal republic. We always look for a united front in our political work.

Red!: What do you think are the main achievements during the people’s war in Nepal pertaining to women’s liberation?

Hisila: Because of our intervention the government was forced to amend many feudal laws. Many NGO’s were also forced to do work directed at women. And the state started employing women.

In the liberated areas the women are now given the right to property. Even now, in other areas, the women have to return their parent’s property when they get married.

We have introduced the right for women to get married again when the husband is martyred, and we have introduced the right to divorce and remarry.

The women in the liberated areas are getting justice through the people’s courts. The formal state organs are expensive and take a lot of time.

We have also politicised women. We have taught them that they have to fight against the state, the police and the military. When you fight, you learn about state oppression in practice. When the enemy rapes women, it teaches them about the gender character of the state.

The party was generous to promote women's leadership fast. In connection with the reorganisation of the party in August, the central committee was downsized to 35 members, and there are now only two women in the central committee. But the reorganisation upgraded women’s representation and positions in the lower levels of the party.

Our demand is that 40 % of those employed by the state must be women.

Red!: What did you find were the main methods that you applied to achieve your goals?

Hisila: In the autonomous regions we made sure that many members are from the local areas. We needed to develop their social skills. They were often more interested in PLA, and the possibility of a lot of mobility. And their uniform gave them a good feeling. PLA was more technical work and made it easier for them to partake. Another positive factor was the collectivity in the PLA. Collectivity is a very important part of their culture.

We also used the method of positive discrimination of dalits and women. In running of the autonomous regions we had the rule of minimum 20 % dalits and 40 % women in leading organs.

Red!: How do you combat males oppressing females in the party and the PLA?

Hisila: The women are more vocal now at every level. One of the reasons for the promotions is exactly that the women are more vocal. But still it is a problem at every level for women to get heard.

We have also had deviations because of our cultural heritage. One example is when a politbureau member had an extramarital relation with a central committee member. The man was given more punishment than the woman.

In two line struggle: there is a tendency to pit women against women. But there is also a tendency to treat women differently than men, something I have experienced personally. When my husband Baburam Bhattarai was taken action against in 2005, this was given a political motivation, but when I was taken action against, the reasons given were my negative influence on him.

Red!: How do the women organise within the party and in the party leadership?

Hisila: When the women are in the women’s front they all work together. But in the party the women do not get together.

Red!: What are your immediate goals in the struggle for women’s struggle in today’s context?

Hisila: We should do away with the feudal system. The feudal system gives nourishment to the mini-kings in the households, and it reinforces the idea of the son as more worth in the family.
To attain this goal we are developing a united republic front of women’s organisations.
We are working for the implementation of the positive steps that were made with the interim constitution.

We are also working for the government to put priority on employment, education and health. This is especially important for women as they have a higher percentage of illiterates and are more exposed to illness, for example reproductive diseases.

We are also working for proportional elections instead of first past the post in connection with the elections to the constituent assembly. In this connection our demand is that 50% of the representatives shall be women, and that dalits, ethnic and national minorities also shall be proportionally represented. [Since this interview the Maoists have made a compromise with Nepali Congress where the elections to the constituent assembly shall be 60 % proportional and 40 % first past the post. The constituent assembly will decide the form of the state and the election procedures for the federal republic.--Red!]

Women communists can be a good rallying point to develop unity. When you see sectarian violence, you see that the women get be attacked because they bear the babies. The women can be invoked to be a uniting force in developing the new federal system.

We are encouraging a new generation of leaders, and here we must have continuous leadership development of new women leaders.

Red!: What do you think are the main achievements for women after the peace agreement in November 2006?

Hisila: The question of citizenship right. Before there was male linearship. Now the child gets citizenship if the mother has no husband. Another positive step is that when women and dalits buy land they don’t have to pay normal taxes.

Red!: What role do the various family structures among the different ethnic groups play in oppressing women in Nepal?

Hisila: In the Hindu family the concept of purity is very important. The parents want their children to get married very early to avoid her having sexual relations before she is married.

Red!: Nepal is entering the first phase of a national democratic revolution. What are the main aims for women in this phase?

Hisila: Women should be brought into the productive force. Today they are still the ones that stay behind. The right to parental property is also a central question. And they should have access to health services. Today a lot of time is spent doing household work. A lot of infrastructural work needs to be done to reduce the time used on household work. A lot of energy is waisted because of the lack of infrastructure. There must be put much more effort into education. There are less than 10 % girl pupils in the schools.

Now, in the autumn of 2007 the peace process is getting stretched out. This has led to some negative tendencies that have been detrimental to women. There is a tendency to reverse the achievements from the people’s war. There is a tendency that men dare to oppress women more openly. That’s one reason why we want to achieve elections to the constituent assembly as soon as possible.

Another example of the tendency to reversal is that some places they are reintroducing dowry again. And lastly I could mention that reactionaries that fled during the people’s war are returning and that we have witnessed an increase in wife bashing.

During the people’s war the PLA were active all over the rural areas. Now the situation is more evolutionary. Now there is a certain disillusionment. The PLA is now stationed in the cantonments. People are missing the collective life where the PLA played a central role. People are returning home and the situation is not as positive in the field. Some are a bit disappointed.
This is also a reason why we want to go forward as fast as possible--so that we get more results to show. It’s a very painful process right now.

Red!: How large is the women’s front that supports you?

Hisila: All Nepalese Women’s Association (Revolutionary) has approximately 10 000 paying members.

Red!
: Which texts do you use for developing the general theory of women’s liberation in Nepal?

Hisila: We use among others F. Engels book on The Family, The State and Private Property, Women and Socialism written by Bebel, a collection of writings by Marx, Engels and Mao. We also use collections of articles written by our own comrades.

Red!: How will you avoid the valiant female liberation soldiers sacrificing their lives as cannon fodder for a male dominated party leadership and a male dominated state that ends up oppressing women as in Russia, China, a.s.o?

Hisila: It’s very much connected with political deviation. Political deviation will also affect the situation for dalits and women. The main line is the central issue, and this is the only way to avoid counter revolution.

Red!: What is your view on the relationship between class struggle and women’s liberation?

Hisila: They are very close. Women were the first to be oppressed, and will be the last to be liberated when class oppression ceases. So the test of whether class oppression still exists is if women’s oppression still exists or not.

Red!: Can the working class get liberated without the women in the working class taking the lead in the liberation of the working class as a whole? What would this mean concretely in Nepal?

Hisila: The litmus paper is whether the women get the leadership or not. In Nepal we say that the mass organisations should have 50% women in the leadership. But the party is an ideological organisation and this rule should not apply.



Monday, September 10, 2007

Calle Santa Fe: Remembering Those Who Fought



Calle Santa Fe 2007 / 35 mm / Colour / 163 min, Dir. Carmen Castillo, Chile - France.

On October 5th 1974 the Chilean military and political police (DINA) raided a safehouse in a working class neighbourhood in Santiago. Miguel Enriquez, a leader of the underground resistance to Pinochet and a hero of the revolutionary left, was killed and his fellow combatant Carmen Castillo was seriously wounded in a two hour long shoot out.

Castillo, who was six months pregnant at the time, was then dragged into Santa Fe street ("calle Santa Fe") and left there bleeding as soldiers argued about what to do with her; she would likely have died were it not for a neighbour who called an ambulance and insisted that it drive through the military lines to rescue her. Amazingly, the driver agreed and the soldiers did nothing to stop them.

Even once at the hospital, Castillo was not out of danger. Soldiers arrived, and what might have happened next - torture, detention, execution - was all too clear. Yet a nurse got to a phone and made a call to Castillo's uncle, and then the word was out: the junta was trying to kill a wounded woman, a pregnant woman at that. It struck a chord, and there was international outrage, and the junta - eager to be rid of this problem - had Castillo and her children exiled to France within a month. And so in this way we will be told that "the dictatorship could not overcome the acts of anonymous people."



In the years following memories of the shootout on calle Santa Fe would haunt Castillo, and would eventually push her to write and make several films trying to come to grips with what had happened. As if the superficially simple events of the day - "police killing guerilla resisting dictatorship" - were like one little loose thread, as she would tug on the story, Castillo would come up against questions - how did the police find the safehouse? who talked and why? - which would eventually see her re-examining the mythology of the resistance, and for a time have her excluded from it.

Castillo's latest film, Calle Santa Fe, recaps the events of that day, introducing us (briefly) to the radical left and the resistance to Pinochet she was a part of; but mainly this is a film about about how repression and exile, political errors and defeat have played themselves out in the film maker's life, the lives of her children and those of her comrades. Through her eyes we see what society looks like after fascism, after the butchers have safely retired and everyone else tries to pretend life is normal. We see this is as Castillo travels back to Santiago, to the house on Calle Santa Fe where Enriquez was killed and she was wounded, to the city where she meets family members - who have quite different feelings about her political activities - and also former comrades and neighbours.

*************

The Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, or Movement of the Revolutionary Left, was founded in Chile in 1965 during the conservative pro-American presidency of Eduardo Frei. It brought together students, trade unionists, anarchists, Trotskyists and radical Christians, and was heavily influenced by the example of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara who had led a revolution in Cuba just six years earlier.

While it has been claimed that it was primarily a student group with little base among Chilean workers, according to the former members interviewed by Castillo the MIR found its strongest support amongst the poorest sections of society, presumably the unemployed, landless peasants and Indigenous people. According to one source, by the early seventies the MIR had only 2,000 members, as compared to the Socialist Party's 80,000 and the Communist Party's 100,000 within the Chilean working class. (In the Chilean context at that time the Communist Party was far more conservative and timid than the left-wing of the Socialists, being the strongest advocate of a peaceful strategy class collaboration, and a vicious critic of the "extremist" MIR.)

For the entire Chilean left this time was of course marked in every way by the election of Salvador Allende as president in 1970. The socialist Allende was the candidate of Unidad Popular ("Popular Unity") a coalition of left-wing parties which included the Socialist Party, Communist Party, Radical Party, Social Democratic Party and MAPU. Under his leadership the Popular Unity government would follow a cautious strategy, nationalizing key industries while also reaching out to the middle classes and right-wing military officers.

Calle Santa Fe does not tell us how Castillo ended up on the revolutionary left, and then in the MIR, but she has written about this elsewhere. As Mary Jane Treacy has summarized in Carmen Castillo and the Politics of Forgiveness :
...Carmen Castillo, daughter of the former rector of the Universidad Catolica, lived at the heart of the MIR throughout much of her young adulthood, an involvement that embraced not only her political affiliation, but also her social group of friends, lovers, and family. She reveals that her entry into revolutionary life at seventeen was primarily an infatuation with "la belleza del compromiso," the beauty of political commitment and obedience to those who embodied it. Thus she first turned to Beatriz Allende, daughter of the future president, and was fascinated by the young woman's refusal to conform to the norms of seductive femininity, insisting instead upon maintaining a serious mien that befitted her role as member of a guerrilla organization. Castillo's response to this example was to obey "la Tati:" "[m]e fascinaba su saber y su rigor, gustaba de obedecerle sin cuestionar, me plegaba a sus ordenes, buena alumna"/ I was fascinated by her knowledge and inner strength; I enjoyed obeying her without question; I followed her orders like a good student (vuelo 115). Castillo joined Allende's revolutionary group, serving as go-between ("buzon") with militants in Bolivia, and repeating that she must fight unto death ("luchar hasta morir").

As Castillo fell in love with Beatriz's cousin, Andres Pascual, who gave her a theory of revolution to interpret her practice, she entered into the leadership circle of MIR, married this Allende and had a daughter, Camila. When soon after she fell in love with Miguel Enriquez, she abandoned her flamboyant style ("good-bye to mini-skirts," she announces) to embody the simplicity of a serious revolutionary, following the wishes of her new com-panero: "me sentia alegre, descubria el gozo de obedecer a las exigencias del hombre amado"/ I was happy; I found the joy of obeying the demands of the man I loved (vuelo 120).

[quotes from El vuelo de la memoria, by Carmen Castillo and Monica Echeverria. Santiago-Paris. Santiago: LOM, 2002]

While the MIR - which officially rejected electoralism - was well to the left of the Popular Unity government, it was not opposed to it, but rather maintained a position of critical support. For example, one of the former MIRistas interviewed by Castillo recounts how in 1970 the group temporarily called off all its actions in order to not hurt the Allende's chances at the polls. During the election campaign the Popular Unity candidate's own security corps was provided by the MIR, as the police could not be trusted and the groups own intelligence operatives inside the military and the right had warned them of plots against Allende's life. In fact Castillo tells us how some of Allende's MIRista bodyguards were being sought by police at the same time as they guarded him. Little surprise that following his victory the new socialist president would pass an amnesty for all members of the organization.

The MIR's chief criticism of Allende was that in opting for a "constitutional", legal and peaceful road to socialism, the new government was too intent in currying favour with the middle class, which meant sabotaging the radical workers' and peasants' movements and relying on the army to remain neutral and play its "traditional" role as protector of the State. The MIR, the only left-wing party to not officially participate in the Popular Unity government, advocated the creation of dual power structures as a step towards setting up a workers State. Rodriguez and other MIR leaders argued that that instead of relying on the army to protect it the government's only chance lay in arming and empowering the grassroots organizations of the working class while democratizing the armed forces, removing power from the anti-communist officer corps.

As an example of how far Allende was willing to go to placate his ruling class enemies, in 1971 when the MIR published its programme regarding the army and police forces in its newspaper El Rebelde, the Popular Unity government had all copies of the paper seized and laid charges against the programme's author. A sad sign of where things were at, all the more so as the last two point in the MIR's "scandalous" programme were that soldiers and police should "disobey officers calling for a coup" and "join with the people in their struggle against the capitalist class." (see Chile the State and Revolution, pages 193-4)

The MIR's criticisms were proven right on September 11th 1973, when the armed forces rebelled against the left-wing government, murdering Allende and bringing to power a military junta under the leadership of Augusto Pinochet - ironically, a man Allende had trusted to be his eyes and ears within the armed forces.

Castillo gives us a glimpse of what it was like to be a revolutionary on that day: the MIR sent word to Allende in the Moneda (presidential palace) offering to rescue him, but the president - "mindful of the power of symbols" - refused, even though he knew it would mean his death. Instead, Allende sent word back to the MIR, telling his left-wing critics that it was up to them to "continue the fight".

At first, comrades helped mount barricades in the working class neighbourhoods of Santiago, despite the order to go underground. The initial feeling was that this was where the people were making their stand, and that this was the proper place for revolutionaries. But by the end of the day it seemed that the army had crushed this resistance, and as night fell the entire organization went underground.

i wish Castillo had spent more time on this period, the lead up to the coup and its immediate aftermath. After skimming the book Chile: State and Revolution (by Ian Roxborough, Philip O'Brien and Jackie Roddick, Holmes and Meier Publishers 1977) i feel that there are a few things which just aren't mentioned in Calle Santa Fe, and should be. Not that i am unsympathetic to the filmmakers position - this documentary is almost three hours long, and i know that if she had provided all the details i would want it would be at least twice that. Still, in the interests of filling some of these gaps, i'll take a moment and mention a few points here...

According to Roxborough, O'Brien and Roddick the MIR benefited from having the correct analysis of the possibility of "peaceful change", but suffered from a very limited influence amongst the working class and peasantry. They even claim that many of the land occupations which were attributed to the MIR at the time were in fact autonomous actions of peasants or Mapuche Indians, and that accusation that the MIR was involved were a political smear, nothing more. Although they were correct in predicting that the "constitutional road" would prove itself to be a mirage, along with most of the radical left they did expect the armed forces to split, with a section moving to defend the Popular Unity government. When this split failed to materialize, the MIR was as lost as everyone else.

Also, i wonder if the rosy picture of relations between Allende and the MIRistas is not a case of wishful thinking some thirty years after the fact. As a martyr Allende has become a powerful symbol of resistance to fascism and imperialism, his decision to face death in the Moneda rather than flee or negotiate with the coup leaders being one of the most evocative images of that day. Nevertheless, the historical record is clear: in the lead up to the coup Allende was part of the more conservative faction of the Socialist Party, which along with the Communists formed the "right-wing" of the Popular Unity government, and as such opposed those efforts which might have actually have helped prepare the working class to resist the impending massacre. Perhaps there was personal warmth, friendship even, between individual MIRistas and Allende (after all, the presidents own nephew was a leading member of the organization!), but this did not prevent the PU government from trying to reign in the radicals as part of its strategy to woo the middle classes and the officer corps. i am left with the impression that some of the nice things all those interviewed by Castillo had to say about the martyred president might be just a bit exaggerated...

One more point worth clarifying: in terms of actual resistance to the coup, it is true that the MIR like others on the left called for a strategic retreat on the 11th, telling members to go underground. In retrospect, this was clearly the correct decision, the only one which did not lead directly to torture - often followed by death - at the hands of the military. At the time it seems that the MIRistas believed that everyone else was doing the same thing, and that the army had smashed the workers' resistance by the late afternoon. Yet in terms of honouring the dead, we should note that on this point the MIR were wrong: workers continued to fight for days after the Allende was killed, often led by radical members of the Socialist Party, and snipers continued to pick off soldiers for a week in the popular neighbourhoods of Santiago. Finally the military resorted to aerial bombardment and random massacres, the hallmarks of fascism in power, to terrorize the neighbourhoods and put and end to this popular, though disorganized, resistance.

Despite these minor holes, i found what Castillo and her old comrades had to say about this time to be of great interest, all the memories fascinating because they were so real. People told how they had read books about how to operate in clandestinity, about how to live a guerilla existence, but that when the time came they were completely unprepared, out of their depth. They threw on clothes that had been in style in their grandparents' day, men shaved their beards (and all stood out because their chins were whiter than the rest of their face!) and put on ties, and to the best of their ability they disappeared to organize the next stage of the resistance.

Those interviewed by Castillo are not so much typical of the MIR's fighters, but rather of those who survived, for by 1974 the junta had managed to hunt down and kill some 80% of the leadership, by 1978 some 800 MIRistas had fallen. This was a time of hardship and bitter losses. While the MIR managed to publish El Rebelde from the underground ("we often preferred to go without food in order to publish," one woman remembered), and carried out acts of "armed propaganda", defending the people as best it could and assassinating army torturers, even those survivors we meet in the film were almost all captured within the first year or two of the dictatorship, held in the junta's infamous prisons, tortured, and then expelled from the country in 1975.

Although the MIR had criticized Allende for relying on the army to protect him, its own preparations for armed resistance seem to have been far too tentative for the level of violence the Pinochet regime was willing to inflict. Which is really understandable if you think about it: how many of us have talked about catastrophe around the corner, criticized our less radical comrades for their naive faith in the system's stability, and yet made no real preparations of our own?

Beyond these initial weaknesses and reversals, these former militants explained that going underground itself had major negative repercussions. As one man explained, being a revolutionary means working with other people, making personal connections with the oppressed; clandestinity stops you from doing that, instead you must concentrate on survival, and as a result you risk becoming invisible to those you would prefer to be working with.

Although Castillo herself had lived underground alongside MIR leader Miguel Enriquez, she shares little of her own experiences of this period. So far as this film is concerned, her own story really begins with her capture in 1974. Expelled from the country, she became active with the international movement to expose the crimes of the Pinochet regime, all the while remaining a member of the MIR. Indeed, as a result of all the arrests and expulsions during these first years of struggle against the junta, many, perhaps even most, of the MIR's active members ended up in a similar position, living outside of Chile.

While Calle Santa Fe does not touch upon what life was like for Castillo in those years, she has written about it elsewhere, and according to Treacy's overview of her works this was clearly a time of great pain:
The MIR leadership, a hierarchical circle that kept its members under party discipline, still had an important interest in Castillo's life as "the Widow" and therefore carrier of Miguel's political essence. It sent her regularly on tour to build solidarity among radicals throughout Europe, even as she was barely coping with her many personal losses (vuelo 185-86). Her attempted suicide, or breakdown, inattention to her dying infant, and inability to care for the daughter entrusted to her care bear witness to Castillo's deep emotional distress at the same time that Cuba was demanding debriefings on Miguel's death, the MIR insisting that she remain in Latin America to play out her role as revolutionary icon, and former non-militant friends rejecting her as a troublemaker.

*************

If many of the surviving MIRistas had been forced outside of Chile by the mid-1970s, many of their lives were now to take a particularly hard turn. In 1978, with the declaration that "The MIR Does Not Seek Asylum!", the organization initiated Operation Return ("Plan Retorno"), by which militants were to be smuggled back into the country to carry out armed struggle against the military regime.

What gets explained here is so valuable precisely because it is what one can imagine getting left out of some left histories.

Operation Return was not something you volunteered for, nor was it just a matter of a few cadre sneaking back temporarily to carry off an attack. For a resistance movement which had been largely driven out of the country, Retorno represented a major offensive, a gamble of sorts, a plan to smuggle large numbers of militants into a country ruled by a brutal dictatorship in order to re-establish an underground revolutionary movement.

Most painfully, as many of the MIRistas had kids, the Operation had a second dimension - "Operation Shelter" - whereby the revolutionaries' children would be sent to Cuba, to be raised collectively while their parents lived or died far away.

This was obviously a difficult, excruciating, process, and one which was made all the more so as it had been decided by the leadership and imposed on the cadre. And although Castillo herself did not return to Chile at this time - as a high-profile MIR spokesperson she would have been a liability to the new underground - she too sent her children to Havana, "in order to devote my entire life to supporting the resistance" she says.

Castillo interviews her own daughter, and also the daughter of a fellow MIRista, the one being remarkably understanding and sympathetic to the whole process, the other summing up her feelings as "Mom, you left me for shit!" In a discussion with many of these mothers, one woman explained that there were no separate women's structures or spaces in the MIR in which to discuss Operation Return or Operation Shelter, and figure out what was really the best thing to do - "not even a place to cry together" over the loss of their kids, as one woman remembered. "We could have never imagined how much pain we were causing," explains another.

i found this section to be of such importance because it dealt with a real problem that confronts people carrying out illegal resistance, and which - because of the sexist division of labour - is particularly heavy for women. All over the world people have sent their kids to be raised by others as they have entered situations of particularly heavy confrontation, but this is obviously a very difficult choice, and one which most people will not make if there are other options. This dilemma may be avoided by small groups in situations where one can "volunteer", where one is not forced underground; but in terms of mass movements, simply mooting the point and saying "that's what needs to be done", is going to mean developing a movement which most people will not want to join, and one which will hampered by the predominance of mainly young men.

i'm not offering any solutions, and what criticisms come to mind are accompanied by the respect i have for what one woman explained, that she "wanted to build a better world for our children - and left them to build this world"... nevertheless, Operation Shelter appears deeply flawed, which is what makes it useful to think about. One obvious point to make is that what it means to be deprived of one's parents really depends on the way in which one had been raised up until that point. Children who are raised collectively, either by comrades or by extended family networks or some combination of the two, will fare better than those whose mother and father were the central caregivers. But there are limits to this logic, as children who are exiled along with their parents, or children who survive along with a few key caregivers, are likely to enjoy a particularly close bond and dependency with those particular adults. & even if children are raised collectively by many adults, what happens when suddenly most or even all are instructed to leave? no obvious answers...

i am particularly curious about the gender balance within the MIR at this time - while i imagine that like the rest of the Chilean left it had had more male than female members prior to the coup, was this still the case in 1977-8? War often changes gender balances, especially as the enemy may find it easier to identify and kill male combatants than women (i.e. just look at the fact that Enriquez was killed, but Castillo was sent abroad after a quick campaign which made much of the fact that "the military was persecuting a pregnant woman"). How many of the combattants who were to go underground in Chile in Operation Return were women? and how was this decision made? Is this what one male MIRista meant when he criticized himself and the party for having been too rigid, for having excluded cadre who were not willing to abide by decisions? And what part does this question play in Castillo's question as to whether or not Operation Return was really worth it, sending so many back to be killed?

questions questions questions...


*************

For all this, the 1980s were a decade of open resistance to the dictatorship. Reinforced by the returned members, the MIR carried out a variety of armed actions. We are shown video footage of truckloads of stolen food being redistributed in working class neighbourhoods. This also seems to be a time of inventive tactics, developed in relation with the communities of people the dictatorship oppressed. One woman recounts turning a neighbourhood into a no-go zone for the army simply by distributing loads of soccer balls to local kids who played with them in the streets and thus just happened to block the army's vehicles.

It would have been good to see more on this resistance to the junta in this period, either by the MIR or by other groups. As it is, we are given these examples, and some footage of demonstrations, and then... we are suddenly told that the MIR leadership decided to liquidate the organization in 1989, just before the dictatorship was to allow the first presidential elections in almost twenty years!

The announcement comes as a shock even to us just watching the film; it is clear how much more horrible and confusing it must have been to those who had survived and resisted underground. The decision was not explained, and even today it seems some former members do not understand why it was taken. Militants were simply told to get married, have kids, go to school, and forget about their life underground.

In the words of one former MIRista, she now felt like an orphan.

*************

Watching Calle Santa Fe i could only think that history can be like a gun, and some unlucky people are fired out of it like bullets. They may not "win", or even strike their targets, and yet they themselves are ripped apart, paying a great price for even having dared to try.

Re-reading this review, i see with some dismay that i have not been able to do this film justice. Or even given a fair impression of what it's about. Most scenes are not historical footage, but are of Castillo as she wanders through the downtown Santiago, or through poblaciones, or around the old calle Santa Fe, looking at post-fascist Chile and asking herself, torturing herself, with the question "was it all worth it?" So much sacrifice, so much pain, and here the murderers were allowed to write their own ending, to retire in peace, while men and women like herself and her comrades are the odd ones out, reminders of possibilities that were closed off, battles that were lost and are now eagerly forgotten.

If Calle Santa Fe left me with so many unanswered questions about the MIR, it is probably because this film is not simply about the resistance, but about what a post-fascist society like Chile today means to those who resisted with such uneven results.

In this sense i am reminded of another excellent film, The Dark Side of the White Lady, which tells how the Chilean Navy's flagship Esmerelda was turned into a torture-ship during the first days after the coup. The Esmerelda is a national symbol in post-fascist Chile, something like Canada's Bluenose, and is still used with pride by the navy for ceremonies and tours abroad. The film opens with a small demonstration outside some military ceremony on the ship, calling for truth and memory and honouring the people who were tortured and killed on board... while passersby look at the protesters as if they were freaks, one woman explaining that if Chile is so "prosperous" today it is only because Pinochet saved it from the communists.

The day after Castillo was captured and Miguel Enriquez was killed his brother Edgardo issued a statement that "The fight will not be over until we have hung Pinochet by his balls at the Santiago Place d’Armes." But Edgardo was himself killed in 1976, while Pinochet got to die a natural death in 2006 at the ripe old age of 91. There was no anti-fascist victory, and today those who fought and managed to survive appear as embarrassments or anachronisms.

Nor does it seem like yesterday's guerilla has an obvious place in today's left. One of the hardest moments in Calle Santa Fe is where Castillo meets a younger activist in a bar, ostensibly to talk to him about her hopes to buy the house where Enriquez was killed and turn it into some kind of left-wing community centre. The young man she is meeting with - perhaps in a staged conversation, but certainly one which represents something real - tells her that such a plan does not really interest him or other younger activists, that they've almost had enough with hearing of those who fought and died, and that instead of commemorating what the older generation did (or failed to do), they prefer to act as they believe their elders would have. Which may be fair but is also unclear, and leads to more questions than answers.

One of Castillo's former comrades tries to convince her that the MIR had an effect, that it has a legacy, and that this can be seen in the new "horizontalist" left of today. Not party-based, but more "social" he says, as the camera zooms in on some hip hop street musicians rapping about poverty and capitalism, as if to say "This is what it was all for, this is our legacy." But for me at least the scene is unconvincing, this kind of nostalgic cozy sentimentalism, whereby whatever "they" did was worth it as it gave rise to whatever "we" are up to today.

To leave aside questions of cause and effect, success or failure, does not seem an adequate way to honour the past or really even see the present.

& for what it's worth, Castillo herself does not seem entirely trusting of such a tale.

If for nothing else, Calle Santa Fe is worth watching for this sadness and this honesty. Carmen Castillo shares with us herself, and her doubts, and her feelings of defeat, her questions of whether all sacrifices were necessary, or even useful. These are hard questions, and there are no answers, certainly not at this stage in the game.

*************

Calle Santa Fe is by no means a complete story. As i mentioned, Castillo has been driven to examine her past in the revolutionary left, and what happened to it. She has written several books, and in 1993 made her first film, a painfully honest, and surprisingly sympathetic, portrait of the woman who broke under torture and gave her and Enriquez up to the police (La Flaca Alejandra: vidas y muertes de una mujer chilena released in english in 1994 as In a Time of Betrayal).

Castillo first learned that the DINA had managed to "break" many captured MIRistas, and use them as double-agents to draw out and capture guerilla fighters, in the late seventies. Revealing the extent of this in a memoir she wrote at the time shattered the organization's mythology regarding its political prisoners, and led directly to her being expelled from the MIR, which accused her of doing "moral damage to the Revolution, MIR and the memory of Miguel."

Given this, one might expect Castillo to be one of those "ex-leftists" who feel a need to reveal all about the "bad revolutionaries" they once hung out with. i have not read her books, but judging from what i have found online, and from watching Calle Santa Fe, nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, while certainly not uncritical, Castillo is so clear in her sympathies and her unflinching solidarity with her own past and truth, that when she mentions in passing that she had "become distant" from the MIR in the 1980s i thought i had heard wrong, and it was only in reading about her on the internet that i learned of her expulsion and realized that this was in fact what she had said.

i went into Calle Santa Fe not knowing much about the MIR or the resistance to Pinochet, and had never heard of Carmen Castillo. While the film was almost three hours long i left the cinema with so many more questions than i had had before. The lead up to the coup, life underground, Operation Shelter, resistance in the eighties, life in exile for those who did not return - there is so much that is touched on, but only just touched on.

This is a compliment, not a criticism. i fully intend to check out what else i can find by Castillo, and will keep an eye open to what she does in the future. If the workers' movement in Chile was defeated by extreme violence, experiences around the world have shown how the left can also be suffocated by its own pablum and easy distortions. By showing us her own life and that of her former comrades, by not retreating from solidarity but also not giving in to self-serving "fibs", Castillo shows us what it means to treasure the truth, all truths, including the difficult ones.



Thursday, March 08, 2007

Monday, March 05, 2007

[Montreal] Women of Diverse Origins -- Reclaiming the Roots of Feminist Resistance



Public Forum
Saturday March 10th 9am - 6pm, lunch provided
University of Montréal,
3200 Jean Brillant, 2nd floor
(Metro Côte-des-Neiges / U de Montréal)


Suggested contribution: $5 (no-one turned away) Childcare available

On March 10th 2007, for the sixth year in a row, the March 8th Coordination and Action Committee of Women of Diverse Origins will be hosting a public forum to celebrate International Women's Day. Our theme, "Reclaiming the Roots of Feminist Resistance: remembering the past, looking to the future" addresses the rising tide of anti-feminist sentiment, here and around the world. There is an assumption that gender equality has been achieved. The lives of First Nations, refugees and immigrants, workers squeezed by globalizing economies, victims of police brutality, human rights violations and of violence against women and children, reveal a different picture. We urgently need to remember and draw lessons from feminist struggles, past and present, which have demonstrated the interconnectedness between gender, social and economic inequalities.

The assumption that gender equality has been achieved in the West, that it is women from 'other' cultures or countries, who need protection, (as with the recent declaration of Herouxville), is false, racist and patronizing.These presumptions obscure the reality that patriarchy is alive and well here; that imperialist violence by our governments, coupled with economic globalization, destroys the lives of women and their families in many other parts of the world. In Canada, the federal government's cutbacks to the Status of Women, the Court Challenges Program, and the Québec government's proposed policy changes requiring organizations that work with immigrants violate confidentiality, will prevent the most vulnerable, often women, from accessing rights.

On 10th March, Coni Ledesma of the Philippines, Hazel Hill of Six Nations, Shahrzad Mojab who works on gender and NGOs, Magali X Djehuty-Thot, Haitian Montrealer activist and Martin Dufresne of Montréal Men Against Sexism, along with many others, will address these issues and make the connections between Kathmandu, Kandahar, Caledonia,Haiti, Latin America and Montreal. Local organizations will present information and displays.

Saturday March 10th 9am - 6pm, lunch provided
University of Montréal,
3200 Jean Brillant, 2nd floor
(Metro Côte-des-Neiges / U de Montréal)


Suggested contribution: $5 (no-one turned away) Childcare available

Reclaim feminism, celebrate resistance on 10th March!

Additional info:

Tess Tesalona tess4a@yahoo.com



Sunday, February 11, 2007

Racist Reasonable Accommodation: Questions for a Revolutionary Quebec Left

In regards to the latest comments from my comrade Nicolas, regarding the racist “reasonable accommodation debate”...

There are two very important questions here. We have to deal with both of them, but in order to not get tripped up i think we need to separate them first.

The first question i see is “How do we relate to right-wing, sexist elements in the oppressed communities?”

The second is “How do those of us in the Quebecois or anglo communities maintain our base, when this same base is becoming increasingly hostile to immigrants?”

As to the first question, i think dealing with questions on a case by case basis, with a strong anti-patriarchal politic, is sufficient. Looking to solutions which come from and empower women – both in the dominant societies and in the oppressed communities – instead of using a cookie cutter model of what anti-sexism should look like.

What makes the Herouxville resolution so repugnant to me is the way in which the murder of women in Muslim theocracies is used to whiteout the murder of women here in Quebec – after all, this is the land of rapist cop Benoit Guay, land of the Polytechnique, and of the 777 women and children who have been murdered since... not one of whom would have been helped one bit by the men of Herouxville...

Framing the question as one of women’s subordination and super-exploitation lays the basis for a much more constructive and radical struggle, and one which is fundamentally more prone to anti-capitalism, than focusing on the ethnic identity of the different petitioners or religious content of their requests.

For instance, there is no religious, political or ethical connection between the “frosted windows” example at the Y in Mile End and the “non-kosher spaghetti” example at the Jewish General... other than the fact that both cases pitted some Jews against some non-Jews. But according to the terms of “reasonable accommodation” they are both not only connected, but are two examples of the same thing. So we end up in a crazy situation where depriving religious Jews of a cafeteria where they can eat (because once pig is allowed in, the whole area becomes non-kosher) is the same as supporting women’s freedom to exercise in a gym with clear windows!

Whether one feels that the imaginary “Jewish side” was right or wrong in either case, i find it difficult to see a non-racist basis for framing the two incidents as dealing with the same issues.

As to the question of male driving instructors, female driving instructors, etc. I really think that in such cases what has to be looked at is the consequences of each possible arrangement. I would oppose any position which would see men empowered to marginalize or exclude women, and that includes male driving students excluding women instructors. That said, rather than looking at this as a “clash of civilizations” where “we” must not cede an inch to “them,” i think the ideal would be to look for a solution in which everyone could be catered to as best as possible providing nobody is put at a disadvantage.

Worth noting: the complaints about immigrants asking too much in all these cases are not being made by women in the oppressed communities, but by people (generally men) in the oppressor societies.

But these questions are “case by case” – i see no evidence in Quebec at the moment that they are part of a concerted strategy from any particular group within the immigrant communities, including the right-wing religious element. Indeed, two of the most visible communities within this brouhaha – the already-established Jewish communities, and the more recent Muslim communities – are bitterly hostile to each other. So rather than some unified “immigrant agenda”, what we have are requests made by individuals or community forums within these marginalized communities.

The problem is that there is this overarching “reasonable accommodation” narrative in the white imagination, so that when members of the dominant societies encounter immigrants or people of colour making these requests they automatically associate it with all this other crap. Leading to a situation where if there is a letter from a Marie-Pierre Tremblay in the newspaper saying she would rather be seen by a female healthcare professional, or that she would prefer that her daughter attend a girls’ only school, one reacts very differently than if the letter-writers name looks Arabic or “foreign.”

On to the second question, regarding our base of support.

The following should be read over and digested:

This argument is having an echo, a huge echo and not only among the right wing masses. It does have an echo in the progressive camp. It does disarm us to a certain extent... Finaly, they are using our silence on this issue (and our anti-war activism wich is made in solidarity with middle-east communities) as a way to attack the left wich is more and more refered to as islamo-gauchiste...

i think what Nicolas writes here is certainly true. This “debate” is not something only happening “out there” – these are questions that have been discussed by all sorts of people for quite some time, and anxiety over how immigrant communities will transform Quebec exists throughout the political spectrum.

The question is not simply how to respond to this wave of white anxiety, but also who we are. Do we see our struggle as one for communism, or anarchism... or do we see our antecedents in the struggle for modernization and bourgeois democracy? Are we accountable to the working class as a whole, or to the white working class in particular? and for white organizers i realize this is not clearcut, and i offer no easy answers...

There is nothing wrong with trying to “cut the grass” out from under our opponents’ feet. If we can undercut their support, if we can reframe issues so that they are isolated and people are won over to a liberatory perspective, then that is something worth doing. As white radicals, we must always be open to this possibility, for when the opportunity presents itself, this is where our interventions can be most effective.

But we must not let the temptation to do so blur our vision or blunt our politics. As radicals within dominant societies, even if our work is done overwhelmingly amongst the most oppressed sections of the population, we should remember that there is always a place for us at the enemy’s table. We benefit from a kind of open invitation to join in, to constitute the “left wing” of our nations’ pro-capitalist politics. And to do so appears to us, as often as not, as a “realistic” or “pragmatic” or “clever” way to undercut the right-wing, when in fact we are “undercutting” them by extending their influence into the progressive camp.

We saw this in France in the 1980s and 1990s, as the Socialist and Communist parties tried to undercut the Front National by adopting bits of its anti-immigrant agenda (“le lepenisation des esprits”)... far from saving the electoral left, this delivered more and more support to the far right, as their ideas were legitimized. All the while remaining true to the PS and PCF’s base in the middle classes and least oppressed sections of the working class, and cementing their divorce from the immigrant proletariat of the banlieues...

The fact that the current wave of nativism has such a strong echo outside of the ranks of the traditional right-wing, “even” in the progressive camp, makes it all the more necessary for us to stake out a pole of radical and uncompromising opposition. This does not mean allying with right-wing elements within the immigrant communities (they are our enemies too), but it does mean grounding our politics in a class and gender analysis of how patriarchy and capitalism operate in our societies, and understanding what classes are represented in this “debate”.

As Quebecois and anglo-canadian societies are predominantly middle class, resting on shrinking traditional proletarian sections and a growing immigrant and racialized proletariat, maintaining our politics may require us to reappraise our base, to defend unpopular positions, to suffer the thinning of our ranks. We can’t expect to have a mass working class movement in a society where the working class is atomized, disorganized and infected with middle class ideologies... but we can’t solve this problem – indeed, we exacerbate it! – by jumping on the latest racist bandwagon.

We will not be alone if we articulate and maintain a militant anti-racist, anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist position. There are white people who don’t like where this “debate” is going. There are white people who feel uneasy about the strength of right-wing religious currents around the world, but who feel even more uncomfortable with the people of Herouxville. Even Quebec Solidaire seems to have staked out a liberal anti-racist and anti-sexist position on all this, insisting that the question should be deracialized and demanding that a woman from a “cultural community” be selected to head the government’s commission on the question; not revolutionary, but then again neither is QS...

By staking out a radical position far to the left of the likes of Françoise David, we will create the possibility for alliances with insurgent sections of the immigrant working class, sections whose opposition to right-wing patriarchal ideas is likely to be deeper and stronger than what we ourselves can manage on our own right now.

To articulate and maintain such a position requires confronting the current wave of nativism head-on, not diluting our opposition with demands for immigrant communities to adapt to the cultural norms of the majority. Not diluting our politics with support for practices that disempower or marginalize women, queers or the poor, but always taking our lead from the oppressed themselves, not from petit bourgeois politicians and journalists.




Thursday, February 08, 2007

No One Is Illegal (Montreal) on Racist "Reasonable Accomodation" Debate

The following is a February 5th statement from No One Is Illegal-Montreal on the racist debate currently occurring in Quebec about “reasonable accommodation”... i hope to write more about this tomorrow, providing some context for those of you from other parts of the world who have not been following this, but for now this is worth reading:

As racialized and migrant women, we are outraged by the slanderous, xenophobic and racist propaganda that is being expressed in the debate about "reasonable accommodation".

We assert our ability, as subjects not objects, to exercise our own capacity to self-determine our lives; we reject the repeatedly paternalistic, and fundamentally misogynist, discourse about the State that will supposedly save us from our own cultures.

We assert that such a discourse is both racist and sexist. It is racist, because it perpetuates the idea that our cultures are fundamentally backwards and cruel, in contrast with white Western culture, which is seen as the ultimate achievement of civilization. It is sexist because it derives from ideas that render women childlike, or viewed as simple victims incapable of struggling for their own wellbeing.

This idea of "civilization" is intrinsically linked to the colonial mentality that led to the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. It is a genocide that persists when, by way of example, the disappearance of more than five-hundred indigenous women in Canada continues to be treated with contempt and indifference.

We reject the mass media's simplistic and reductive conception of women's "rights". While we actively assert our "right" to freedom, safety and dignity as articulated in the traditional paradigm of "human rights", we also assert our "right" to the expression of our cultural and religious identities.

We celebrate the diversity and dynamism of our cultures and our identities – including our different sexual orientations as queer, lesbian, trans, straight, or other forms of self-identification -- and refuse the simplistic caricatures that reduce our multiple communities to homogeneous and uncontested representations of a monolithic tradition.

In this respect, we reassert the dynamic nature of the various manifestations of our beliefs or cultural identities, which express themselves within a larger social and political context.

In particular, we observe that the analysis of the oppression of women and gender inequality, as expressed in the mass media, as strictly a phenomenon internal to religions, explicitly ignores the external, universal systems of patriarchy and sexism which all women face, while also definitively homogenizing religion.

We denounce the role of the State and its structures in the marginalization of racialized and migrant women, whether they are religious or not.

The actions of the State and the capitalism contribute to making the status of migrant women more precarious by increasing the barriers to obtaining legal status through various forms of systemic discrimination, and increasing the vulnerability of women by their criminalization.

We also denounce the complicity of the imperialist feminist discourse which, under the cover of supposed solidarity, imposes Eurocentric and assimilationist ideas gender equality. We are critical of the dominant feminist paradigm that privileges the choices of Western women as the sole path towards liberation, despite the overpowering reality of daily sexism that Western women face.

We are conscious of the way in which this discourse continues to be manipulated and used by pro-war, anti-immigrant proponents. We recognize the historical continuity of the appropriation and manipulation of feminist discourse by colonial and imperialist movements throughout the world.

However, we are not supporters of cultural relativism that tends to justify oppressive and unjust practices in the name of the "difference". We remain vigilant so that the freedom of religion does not prevent us from fighting actively against oppression.

To show true solidarity, we must listen to the women that we claim to support in their struggle, and we must understand that we occupy different positions of privilege and power.

To do this, we must actively fight against the dehumanization of racialized and faith communities, and against the victimization of women. We must support the women who are on the frontlines of their own struggles for liberation, and subjects, not objects, of their own transformation. We must engage in this process not motivated by pity or charity, but by a true sense of solidarity and respect.

-- No One Is Illegal-Montreal.
-----

--> If you wish to support this statement as a group or individual,
please get in touch. If you want to help plan actions against the
racism underlying this debate, please get in touch as well!

noii-montreal@resist.cahttp://nooneisillegal-montreal.blogspot.com514-848-7583

[Translated from the original French on the NOII blog]


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Sunday, December 03, 2006

[Movie Review] Songbirds, a Musical Documentary about Women in Prison



Songbirds, a film by Brian Hill
lyrics by Simon Armitage, music by Simon Boswell
UK / 2005 / Betacam / 62 min / english
Contact: Sue Collins, Century Films, Studio 32, Clink Street Studios, 1 Clink Street, Londres SE19DG Angleterre. T: +44-207-378-6106 F: +44-207-407-6711 | sue.collins@centuryfilmsltd.com | www.centuryfilmsltd.com


i saw Songbirds somewhat by accident. It was on a double-bill with Cottonland, a film about drug addiction in Cape Breton Island. Cottonland was so good that i would have left the theatre right away to gather my thoughts and write a review, but i had bumped into friends and so i stayed to hang out with them for the second feature – and i was glad i did.

Songbirds is a documentary about women who are in prison. Not about “women in prison” – with the exception of a few incongruous discussions of lesbianism and masturbation there is nothing about prison life here – but about the lives and experiences of the women who end up incarcerated.

So this is about what happened before getting locked up, and it’s pretty horrific. Almost all of the women featured in Songbirds are survivors of male violence, including rape at the hands of strangers, husbands and fathers. With the exception of Theresa – the only obviously middle class woman interviewed, and tellingly the only one who committed a serious violent crime (manslaughter) and who was nevertheless getting out soon – male violence forms a backdrop from which it is almost impossible to separate their current imprisonment.

There is Mary, who is 35 and has been in and out of prison since age 15, when her own mother turned her in for having drugs in the home. As she explains it, her mother wanted to scare her, but never imagined she’d actually get locked up. Today, she has been in and out of prison for all but one of the past twenty years. At one point she mentions that she has been raped five times, at another she talks about her child being placed in care. We see scars up and down her arms from slashing.

Another woman, Sam, had a father who beat and raped both her mother and herself. When as an adult she saw her child beaten by her partner she found herself unable to intervene, so she brought him to school, hoping that the teacher would see the bruises and notify children’s services. They did, but with unforeseen consequences: her kids were taken away from her. This led to her marriage to an abusive well-to-do man, in a desperate (and unsuccessful) ploy to win custody back by showing that she had “gotten her life together.” She ended up in prison after setting his house on fire after he tried to coerce her into having sex with him.

Most of this film introduces us to other women with similar stories. In and of itself, i think this makes Songbirds well worth watching, and these interviews remind us that traditionally prison is not the main institution of patriarchal control.

As former political prisoner Susan Saxe explained in Gay Community News back in 1987:

My own experience among women in prison tells me, as numerous studies and observations of others have shown, that an overwhelming majority of incarcerated women began as victims of child abuse. What differentiates them from all the rest of the abused women who do not go to jail? Not much, except that like the battered women who finally turn on their attackers, they sometimes fought back. They rebelled against their abusers, became throw-away or run-away children, were jailed, or were placed in institutions by parents who saw them as “crazy” or “delinquent.”

Again, the message is the same: submit to abuse in private by a parent, husband or boyfriend, or fall prey to abuse by strangers – the pimps and pushers on the street or the social workers, wardens, officers and attendants in the prisons, mental hospitals and detention centers. (Susan Saxe, Telling Someone reprinted in Cages of Steel: The Politics of Imprisonment in the United States, Maisonneuve Press, Washington DC 1992)

Historically, for more “privileged” women the father and then husband was supposed to be able to play the role of jailor; she was in his custody, and the State was simply a last line of patriarchal defense if these more personal and informal mechanisms of control were somehow breached. The situation was more complicated for working class and poor women, and women from oppressed nations, but informal mechanisms of control were still far more important here than they were for men.

Today still, this history of informal male control means that for many women there is little freedom to be found on either side of the prison walls. This is the jarring fact alluded to by one woman after another in Songbirds, who explain that life “on the outside” is in many ways worst than life behind bars. Mary explains quite matter-of-factly that she got herself caught on purpose last time, just so that she could go back to her “home” behind bars. Sam described prison as a time out from the hell her life had become with her “successful” abusive husband. In a statement that really spoke to the fact that as a survivor she is both stronger and more “free” than many, she explains that if she doesn’t like things when released, she’ll just come back. “You can do that? Just choose to come back here?” asks the director… “Sure, I’ll just get a gun and shoot a few perverts. I could do that no problem,” she answers. And i’m sure she was not kidding…

Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur noted this very same phenomenon when she was being held at Rikers’ Prison in 1978. As she wrote in her essay Women In Prison: How It Is With Us:

For many, prison is not that much different from the street. It is, for some, a place to rest and recuperate. For the prostitute prison is a vacation from turning tricks in the rain and snow. A vacation from brutal pimps. Prison for the addict is a place to get clean, get medical work done and gain weight. Often, when the habit becomes too expensive, the addict gets herself busted, (usually subconsciously) so she can get back in shape, leave with a clean system ready to start all over again. One woman claims that for a month or two every year she either goes jail or to the crazy house to get away from her husband.

For many the cells are not much different from the tenements, the shooting galleries and the welfare hotels they live in on the street. Sick call is no different from the clinic or the hospital emergency room. The fights are the same except they are less dangerous. The police are the same. The poverty is the same. The alienation is the same. The racism is the same. The sexism is the same. The drugs are the same and the system is the same.

i am also reminded of the words of former political prisoner Bo Brown, who in the movie 3 Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation explains that “Prisons are just a microcosm of this [the outside]. This is just minimum security and it’s prettier you know, it’s green and lovely and we have more choices about where we go and what we eat and who we do things with, but the same things operate.”

There is no illusion here about prison playing a positive or therapeutic role. Just some stone cold realism and honesty about the extent to which you don’t have to be in prison to be imprisoned.

A truth which of course has more or less reality depending  on your class, nation, race, age… and most definitely your gender.

Songbirds would have been more on the mark had its director Brian Hill heard the words of these former political prisoners, who all analyze prison as an extension of other mechanisms of control. Unfortunately Hill seems to paint it as some kind of benevolent alternative. The words “country club” almost come to mind... so much so that i can’t help but see this as a bias, a desire to frame prisons (and, more broadly, the State) in a positive light. But then i also appreciate what he has said, that “it’s an awful indictment of any society that some people prefer to be in prison than out.”

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A film about women who have survived abuse is something of a long-shot in terms of the “public at large.” In real life women often have their very survival held against them; to have been a “victim” is to be dehumanized, and makes one less interesting than the “heroic” fantasy-figures Hollywood preps us to admire. Women who have survived male violence are often considered something of a social eyesore. The capitalist patriarchy trains us to mistake their battle-scars for weakness, their virtues for vices.

Much the same for prisoners – to be locked up is to be considered a “loser,” and the eyes glaze over as people tell their stories of how they ended up behind bars. Living in a capitalist society, infected with its shallow individualism, our minds acquire an orientation by which we focus on the trivial and ignore the very facts we should be paying most attention to. So the million and one details of how people end up faced with choosing between imperfect options, each of which brings them further from where they want to be, most often alienate the viewing public. While they should in fact be startling to us, angering us, waking us up to the fact that something is not right in this world.

Or at least that’s my experience of how many people (the kind of people who think of prison as a place they could never end up) react to this kind of story.

Which is where the music comes in.

After being interviewed by director Brian Hill, these women had their words taken to poet Simon Armitage, who composed songs based on their stories. The women were given singing lessons, and professional quality video editors, and we see them perform these songs throughout the movie. So you have women telling these gut-wrenching stories of their lives before prison – the lowest common denominator being rape and battery from men, and the use of drugs to dull the pain – interspersed with these moving songs they’re singing about the very stories they have just told.

To say that this format is effective would be a major understatement.

Music – which is really just poetry with a tune – is capable of communicating truths in a way that a simple account of the facts cannot. Perhaps in the same way that expressionism or surrealism provide more accurate representations of certain relationships and dynamics than realism does. Where people have internalized the system’s lies and acquired this capitalist knack of blaming the victim and celebrating the bully… music and poetry become ways to catch people off guard, to outflank our own subconscious complicity with repression.

Or as Songbirds director Brian Hill explained to CBC’s Rachel Giese:

if you’re dealing with people who are marginalized and people who have committed crimes, no matter how liberal you are and how sympathetic, i think there’s a tendency to define people by what they’ve done: she’s a crackhead, or she’s a prostitute. It stops us from seeing anything else about them. If you get people singing, they’re actually pretty vulnerable. It gives them another dimension: this is a person who has talent, creativity and is brave enough to stand up and do this.

[…] The women were much more involved in the process than in a traditional documentary. They okayed all the lyrics and had a sense of ownership over the project. i do think the women are magnified. The music does give them an extra dimension. Take Maggie, for instance, the Irish traveller in the film, who sings a country and western song and then a lullaby for her children who’ve been taken into care. Maggie is a crackhead. She is a bogus caller – i don’t know if you know that expression in Canada, but it’s a person who knocks on the doors of elderly people and then invites themselves in and robs them. It’s horrible what Maggie does. But she’s something else, too. She’s a mother who grieves for her children. And she’s someone with talent. She can really sing. And that’s the truth about Maggie. She’s all of those things.

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While Songbirds is a very moving and well done film, a thorough look at women in prison it is not.

As i already mentioned, there is no real discussion of life in prison. The violence and oppression that Hill shows us is purely intimate and interpersonal. The violence these women have endured is at the hands of “their men,” and hardly a word is said about other agents of oppression. If anything, the State appears as a benevolent actor.

i don’t want to exaggerate this criticism. These women are saying that in their lives it is their fathers and boyfriends and husbands who have been their oppressors, not the local cops or capitalists, and we should listen to this and mull it over and if this shocks you then you should rework your theories to take this into account. It doesn’t mean we should stop being anti-cop or anti-capitalist, just that we should not blinker ourselves to the fact that this may not be enough, may in fact cover up the “primary contradiction” in many women’s lives.

But we know that in real life many women are abused by an alliance of intimate and impersonal oppressors. This is the point so well made by the three women former political prisoners i quoted above. As Bo Brown, Susan Saxe and Assata Shakur each noted independently, the cops and courts and prisons are not an alternative to patriarchal oppression, just a different expression of it. An extension of oppression on “the outside.” When they do occur, collective responses to male violence are hindered if not simply repressed by the State. And finally, just as many men take advantage of the informal power they enjoy in intimate relationships to abuse and exploit women, so also do many men take advantage of the opportunity offered by their formal class position and relationship to the State – as bosses and managers and cops and social workers and prison guards too – to do the same.

Songbirds came out in 2005, the year that an increasing rate of suicides in women’s prisons in the UK finally crested. The preceding several years had seen a constant increase in the numbers of incarcerated women killing themselves – and for every woman who succeeded many many others would make the attempt. The widespread self-violence in women’s prisons in grim testimony to the fact that these are not “nice places” the State maintains – and the fact that the wave subsided when it did is proof of a direct correlation between repressive sentencing, overcrowding, and an unsafe environment. (2005, the first year the suicide rate decreased, was also the first year that the number of women in prison in the UK decreased.)

All of which is missing from Songbirds.

Viewers may also come away with a distorted idea of how much women in prison may or may not have in common. There is a national divide here which speaks volumes about capitalism and imperialism, but which is glossed over, its true import covered up.

Songbirds introduces several “traditional” white prisoners, four of whom are English and one Irish, each of whom has their own song and their own in-depth interview in which they discuss their life herstories. We are also introduced to many foreign women, some of whom are serving very long sentences, who were caught trying to smuggle drugs into the country. The interviews with these foreign women are much more superficial, and rather than each singing their own song, they all do one musical number together. What's more, unlike the citizen-women whose songs recount their lives and what led them to finally break the law, the foreign women's song only deals with the actual crime of drug smuggling itself. Hill gives a quick overview of how these women end up working as drug “mules” perhaps, but he chooses not to provide anywhere near the same degree of detail or focus as provided the other prisoners.

This emphasis on British citizens blurs several facts. To gloss over the “drug mules” is to gloss over one of the most important new elements in women’s imprisonment, for more than anything else it is the incarceration of female drug couriers which lies behind Britain’s skyrocketing women’s prison population. One in five woman prisoners in Britain today are foreign nationals, and half of these are from Jamaica. So that Afro-Caribbean women, only 1% of the general British population, account for 24% of women in prison in Britain today.

That these women’s predicament is also a result of men and male violence is documented in the film – but completely absent are the other (fairly obvious) factors that push Third World women to accept this dangerous work.

To flesh out this picture we can turn to feminist anti-prison activist and scholar Julia Sudbury, who has written about precisely this phenomenon:

Between 1980 and 1989, Edward Seaga’s conservative Jamaica Labour Party (JPL) pursued the ‘Washington Consensus’ model of neo-liberal economic reforms, privatizing state-owned companies and public utilities, scaling back local government services, introducing user fees for education and health care, and obliterating an already weak social safety net. Although People’s National Party candidate and former socialist Michael Manley was reelected in 1989, Manley and his successor J.P. Patterson have continued the economic path established by Seaga and his powerful international backers. These policies have led to layoffs of public service employees, many of them women, a reduction in social service provision, and dramatic increases in the cost of basic necessities. The impact on poor women has been particularly harsh because traditional gender roles burden women with the responsibility of caring for children and sick or elderly relatives. When the state sheds its role in providing social support and public infrastructure, poor women fill the vacuum. (Julia Sudbury, “Mules,” “Yardies,” and Other Folk Devils, in Global Lockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison-Industrial Complex, Routledge, New York, London 2005)

Sudbury notes that these women, pauperized by neo-liberalism, are the “exploited, poorly remunerated, and ultimately disposable workers of the global drug industry” – making the drug trade no different from other sectors of global capitalism, in which all manner of mechanisms both formal and informal concentrate the harshest levels of exploitation on to the female proletariat.

To say this, and to say that this is an important factor in women’s imprisonment even in countries like Britain, is not to deny the importance of “intimate” male violence, but simply to insist on telling the whole story, which is that there are different ways in which patriarchal oppression plays out for different women. Nation-class joins gender-class as a factor that can lead a woman through the prison gates.

An entire film could be devoted to the super-exploitation of women by the illegal drug sector, and their scapegoating by “tough on drugs” politicians, and i don’t want to fault Hill for not having chosen to make that documentary. But given the fact that the incarceration of foreign women for drug offenses is such an important factor in women’s prisons in Britain, and ever-increasingly so, it comes off as almost offensive that all of these women got such (comparatively) superficial treatment. (Not to mention the fact that their musical number was almost upbeat in a goofy kind of way.)

Despite these shortcomings, Songbirds remains a truly amazing movie, in both content and form. The “musical documentary” aspect, which had turned me off when i read the description (sounded awful corny, you know) makes this film a truly powerful experience, allowing the women to express far more than a dry interview format would. So much so that i left the cinema in a daze, blown away by what i had seen and heard, and it was only much later that i realized that fine as it was, it could have been even more.

Still, a real treat for a movie i initially had no plans on seeing…