My first thought is that I know what is happening to those girls. I, too, was taken from my school and raped by many men. But it wasn’t with guns and bombs, I wasn’t taken from my family, and I wasn’t sold into slavery in another country. It wasn’t in the name of religious law. The men who took me were in it for greed and power, and didn’t care if I studied. Still, my body aches with the physical memory. The second thought is how heavily imperialism grinds down onto the bodies of girls, how the news is written in layers, so that these teenagers being forced into the backs of trucks are superimposed onto a map of the partition of Africa into national portions of profit for gluttonous European elites, slashing national borders across, through, around the names people call themselves.
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Returning to the United States from Cuba always feels like time travel to me. I've been to a different century, and when I come back and try to explain my experiences to people, to tell them what I saw, how I interacted with the people of another time, no one understands or believes me. The fragments of the story may register: no ads on tv or on the streets, universal health care, free higher education, but what they mean in people's lives, what they add up to, what it feels like to take that for granted, doesn't. And without the visceral understanding of what Cubans have gained, there's no truthful context for the hardships, the mistakes, the struggles of daily life. One of the advantages of growing up in a multi-generation radical family is the way history inhabits our bones. During the last century, my family has openly defied the oppressive policies of the Russian Tsar, the Spanish crown, the U.S. government, the colonial government of Puerto Rico, the House Un-American Activities Committee, the FBI, and the Chicago police; resisted the US invasion of Puerto Rico, union busting, segregation, evictions, sexism, classism and racism in higher education, and police brutality; organized garment workers, unemployed women, rural coffee workers, hospital workers, women's consciousness raising groups, rebel radio shows, art collectives, radical theater groups, Jewish peace activists, tenant strikes and antiwar teach ins, for access to birth control and the right to unionize; agitated on behalf of the wrongly imprisoned, the exiled and the assassinated in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, from the Scottsboro Boys to Cece MacDonald, from Sacco and Vanzetti to Archbishop Romero, the Chicago Eight to the Cuban Five; supported people struggling to build just societies in Cuba, Viet Nam, Chile, Mozambique, Nicaragua, South Africa, and everywhere else, and opposed wars in Europe, Southeast Asia, Central America, the Persian Gulf, Southern Africa and the Middle East. We have inherited a broad, visceral experience of radicalism. One of the most devastating effects of ongoing trauma, especially the society-wide traumas of oppression and war, is that it becomes normalized to the point that it begins to seem inevitable, natural, and those who insist otherwise come to be seen as naive. Of course there are vested interests in making it appear that it's human nature to slaughter each other for control of land, water, oil, just as slaveholders made elaborate pseudoscientific arguments for enslavement as part of the natural order of things.
Becky, Debra Shultz and Me at gender seminar, c.1994
I first met Becky Logan in February, 1993, at a five day residential graduate school seminar in Washington, D.C., called The Worker and Her Writing. It was led by writer and activist Minnie Bruce Pratt and Pat Murphy, a vocational rehabilitation counselor with expertise on questions of women and money, work and violence. In my evaluation, I wrote "This seminar was probably the best formal learning experience I have ever had. It was purposefully and thoughtfully designed to create an atmosphere in which profoundly meaningful conversations could take place about our work as women... It was deeply empowering and I formed relationships I expect will last for many years." I am the descendant of Taíno people whose tropical ecosystem allowed them to put in minimal work and reap abundant crops of carbohydrates, who could spend a modest amount of hours fishing and gathering shellfish, and have plenty of time to develop sophisticated art forms and elaborate rituals. Their culture honored artists and trees, created breathtaking carvings in wood and shell, invented hammocks knotted from the fiber of maguey, polished rings of stone, ceramic pots and figures elaborately worked with earthen dyes, and days long festivals of poetry and song. I am also the descendant of the Spanish colonizers who came and slaughtered, tortured, raped and enslaved them; who came fresh from the famine-ridden lands of Europe, from rocky soil and harsh drought, and created a moral universe of harsh and virtuous labor to match. Before they kidnapped, tortured, raped and enslaved my African ancestors into the sugar fields of the Caribbean, they did their best to seize the labor of the indigenous people of the islands and turn it to generating profit, which they believed in with frenzied devotion. You can feel the hot outrage rising from page where a conquistador reported that "neither threat of punishment nor promise of reward" could induce my Taíno people to work more than they had to for their survival. As yet untrammeled by avarice and ambition, I imagine them looking at each other, and back at the red faced intruder with his odd ideas, and responding with one voice, "Duh!" The first thing I see is the headline. Three women missing for ten years are found. Three women have come back from the place of shadows. Is it Anna Mae Aquash? Is it the children of Plaza de Mayo? Is it the sisterhood of Juarez? Is it the five hundred and eighty stolen sisters of indigenous Canada? For anyone to come back is a miracle. Mothers of missing daughters everywhere twitch in their sleep, sit up, eyes staring, agonizing hope flaring along their nerves, what if..., what if...
René Gonzalez at home in Cuba.
In a beautifully crafted editorial in today's international edition of the Cuban newspaper Granma, Sergio Alejandro Gómez writes about the incomprehension of solidarity, by those who don't share it, as a mathematical disorder in which the release of Cuban Five anti-terrorist hero René Gonzalez somehow reduces the campaign for the freedom of all five men. But five, he points out, is a prime number, divisible only by itself and one. From René's home in Cuba, from their four cells scattered across the U.S., the Five affirm the political reality of their unity. Rene is home, but not fully free; Gerardo is in prison, but some part of him breathes more deeply. When the final version is ready for print, proceeds will benefit the campaign to free the Cuban Five.
Here in Boston, the news is full of genuinely moving stories about the courageous people who, when the bombs went off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, ran towards danger, into the chaos of injured and bleeding people and more potential explosions, in order to help the innocent bystanders overtaken by the agonies of a terrorist act. They were medical personnel already on site to tend to the runners, EMTs and police officers, runners and the people who came to watch them, who, when their community was threatened, stepped up to help in whatever way they could. |
About Aurora
Aurora Levins Morales is a disabled and chronically ill, community supported writer, historian, artist and activist. It takes a village to keep her blogs coming. To become part of the village it takes, donate here. Never miss a post!
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