To women with love

FOR INTERNATIONAL Women’s Day, commemorated for more than 100 years on March 8, this column is a roar of solidarity from Trinidad and Tobago to women everywhere.

It is written in the black and white of a keffiyeh and joins the world’s majority in demanding an immediate ceasefire and an end to the dispossession and decimation of Palestinians. It grieves that most Israeli victims are women and children, and that whole generations and families have been taken. It affirms that the Nakba is not a historical event, but an ongoing ethnic-cleansing project of colonisation.

It stands shoulder to shoulder with ordinary women at the forefront of peace and anti-weapons movements who are fearlessly and unapologetically impolite about geopolitical hypocrisy. It rallies them to protest everywhere and in every way. For, in this time when nation-states’ conscience has been abandoned, what act to decry genocide can possibly be too radical?

This column refuses to forget the women of Iran who cut their hair, threw their head coverings into fire, and marched for freedom from violent religious fundamentalism. The hundreds of teenage girls beaten, disappeared, tortured, or killed. It sings to them as they imagine their fists in the air in the streets, as they shout "azadi!" (freedom!), as they continue to confront compulsory veiling laws; risking punishments that include expulsion from university and imprisonment. Though the world has let you down, these words are ever on your side.

To schoolgirls in Afghanistan, with a persistent hunger for reading, for music and arts, for science degrees. May you create a land of hope as you grow. May your secretly taught knowledge strengthen you as you dismantle walls of repression. May you blaze a trail over thorns and turn stones into stars. As you chorus, you are not a puppet of others, but in charge of your own fate and capable of blossoming on your own. From the other side of the global south, from where I sit – Muslim-descended and in a university – this column accepts nothing less for you, certainly not in the name of piety.

Far from headlines, women and girls of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Yemen and Sudan are surviving conflict, destroyed infrastructure, starvation and terror by the tens of millions while men spend on military arms, territory and power. We know that armies are built to capture fossil fuels, minerals, metals and mining interests; Mother Nature’s gifts seen through the eyes of vulgar greed. Hold on, one day your hands will again be scented with sandalwood and decorated with henna. Although this column cries with you, don’t give in to sorrow. Your babies will be well-nourished, your children’s schools will return, your fields will flourish, and your families’ dreams will rise from war’s rubble and ruins.

This column is a poem whose stanzas cross borders without permission as do women migrants from Venezuela to Cuba. It observes how capital can move, but labour is immobilised, leaving poor workers with little chance to compete with Wall Street. It watches women holding separated families together. It hears girls detail the gendered risks of being on the move on a starless night with dark coves or barbed wire or locked rooms ahead. It carries a placard that reminds that no human being is illegal.

¡Ningún ser humano es ilegal!

This column speaks softly and lovingly to the women and girls of Haiti; plundered by France, denied sovereignty by the military boot of American imperialism, and violated by peacekeepers. It affirms their right to lead in ending man-made violence and fear. It recognises that to be female and to be LBGTQI increases vulnerability to sexual violence in contexts without justice. It sings praise to grassroots women’s organisations providing healthcare, food, family, empowerment and healing.

Medam, nou salye nou. Women, we salute you!

As we march on Friday at noon from Woodford Square to a global theme that emphasises counting women in and greater inclusion of women to accelerate progress, we must remember women at the edges of the dew. We must question what is meant by progress. We must transform power as it is organised today, as it devastates girls and women’s lives, as it disconnects us from our sisters because they are different, more marginalised, or far away.

This column is graffiti chalked anywhere women please. It says we are here, as we have always been, to champion care, defend peace, stop war, broker reparation and reconciliation, challenge politicians, grow gardens, and to write letters of love and solidarity.

Diary of a mothering worker

Entry 527

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