Sunday, February 27, 2011

The Rally for Women's Health

    Prior to the sun slipping behind the nearest high-rise, the weather in fact bordered on pleasant, bus as soon as
     Prior to the sun slipping behind the nearest high-rise, the weather in fact bordered on pleasant, but as soon as the shade swept over us, the drop in temperature inevitably invited comments from the MC about how glad she was to see so many people standing vigilant in spite of the cold.
     It's difficult to attend a rally without hearing some permutation of that claim, but in this case, the statement was more than just, not only because of the chill of the air, but also the importance and immediacy of the cause. The House of Representatives has launched a brutal assault on Planned Parenthood and related entities, voting to defund organizations critical to the healthcare and well-being of women. In a bizarrely horrific parallel gesture, anti-choice billboards have appeared in New York City claiming that "the most dangerous place for an African-American is in the womb," a sickening appropriation of racist rhetoric to construe a women's right to choose as a genocidal act. Saturday's Rally for Women's Health, held in Manhattan's Foley Square, took a stand against these forces, aimed at both endorsing the right of choice and confronting the paradoxical right-wing logic that condemns abortion but undermines the accessibility of birth control and family planning.        
     I attended the rally in my capacity as a member of the Young Feminist Task Force of the National Organization for Women. The turnout was spectacular, as were its speakers, a diverse array featuring, among others, activist Shelby Knox, New York Senator Charles Schumer, Christine Quinn (Speaker of the New York City Council), U.S. Representative from Brooklyn Anthony Weiner (one of the rally's most inspiring orators) and an intended appearance by Gloria Steinem, who canceled due to illness but sent her impassioned support. 
     Though my emotions ran high throughout the rally, my somewhat notorious and frequently embarrassing propensity for tearing up in public didn't kick in until a local reverend from Judson Memorial Church articulated the degree to which Christianity, at its theological roots, landed on the side of women; that the religious groups colluding with the anti-choice right are in fact as un-Christian as they come. "Jesus Christ respected women," she proclaimed, with an intensity of spirit to which my blog-based quotation can't even begin to do justice.
     That so many religions arising from concepts of love and benevolence (Islam another outstanding example) have in the liberal eye become conjoined with violence and oppression is just one tragedy of many that the fanatics and fundamentalists have brought to bear. The pronouncement to a square full of feminists that God came down on the side of choice, liberty, and the rights of women was more than enough to choke me up. 
     Lucky for me, it was not yet cold enough to freeze the tears to my face.          

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Samina Ali's "How I Met God"

     Samina Ali is one of many brilliant women whose work inspired and assisted me while I was doing research for my novel.
     A Muslim-American author originally from India, Ali writes of a near-death experience that occurred while she was giving birth to her son. Starting with a massive seizure, the crisis led to a heart attack, liver and kidney failure, pulmonary and cerebral edema, and a brain hemorrhage, the latter a condition sufficiently serious to kill most patients. Her subsequent survival shook the medical community to its roots, a reality that would be compounded by her total absence of any kind of residual physical injury.
     In Ali’s telling, there is at the time of her pseudo-death no light at the end of the tunnel, no spontaneous flashing of her life’s history, but instead a sensation of total darkness, total emptiness, a sense of unadulterated being.   
     While such expressions might ring somewhat familiar to the average reader, her experience of God in the moment is beautifully rendered:
   
     “If the world can be described in positive qualities – attainment, attachment, gain, power – the world of God can be described in negation – undying, unchanging, unmanifest, unmoving, immeasurable, invisible, infinite. In God’s world, in His presence, I was nothing but pure awareness, pure consciousness, purity.”

     More beautiful yet, this absolute sense of divine connection doesn’t end with the ER, but follows her back into life again, allowing her to break free from the myriad ways in which her religious community imposed barriers between God and the Self. She describes the tendency in Indian-American populations for individuals to compete with one another to see who can be the better believer – who fasts the most, prays the most, and so forth.
     “People seem to be proclaiming, God is on my side,” she writes, “rather than humbly asking, am I on God’s side?”
     The cited essay “How I Met God” appears in the essay collection Living Islam Outloud:  American Muslim Women Speak.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Kabul's Female Arts Center

     While browsing Women's E-news, I came across a fascinating archived article from 2008 about a "Female Arts Center" in Kabul, Afghanistan. The Center was established with the specific purpose of allowing Afghani women the opportunity to express through visual arts what their vastly constraining society barred them from expressing elsewhere. I was unfortunately unable to locate any updated information about whether or not the center still exists, but in the context of a nation that could likely bar the right of women to vote without the express permission of their husbands, any kind of institutionalized conduit of expression, whether of passions, frustrations, or all of the above, would no doubt be a valuable asset to Afghanistan's female population.

     For a look the 2008 article, see below:

     http://womensenews.org/story/080817/afghan-women-blaze-path-in-contemporary-art

     If anyone has any information about the Female Arts Center, it would be greatly appreciated!

Monday, February 21, 2011

Featured Musician: Son House, Father of the Delta Blues

     Companions of the Garden is in part a rumination on what it means to be American. It takes acute fascination in American culture in general, and Southern culture in particular, of which music is an inextricable part.
     In this regard, I’m launching a weekly “featured musician” posting, where I explore an American artist whose work has in some way informed our national identity.
     Eddie J. House, Jr., known commonly as Son House, is the perfect place to start.  Heralded as the “Father of Delta Blues,” his music offers a stunning encapsulation of the magic of the Deep South, raising to its zenith what could well be my favorite musical genre, a sound inextricably linked with the culture of his native Mississippi.   
     House made his initial recordings in the 1930s and 40s, including for the Library of Congress in 1941. He then disappeared from the public eye for much of the two decades that followed, to be rediscovered by blues enthusiasts and coaxed from de facto retirement in the mid-1960s for a renewed series of recordings and performances.

     Blues critic Tony Russell, in connection with the Sony collection "Mojo Workin’: Blues for the Next Generation," writes that “many blues artists make music that is personal and individual, yet at the same time implies the history that lies behind and around it.  Listening to Son House is not simply listening to a man singing with a guitar, but hearing, through him and in the air about him, other voices and other guitars, so that we can reconstruct in our imagination the landscape of a vanished South, the world of the first blues singers.”
     I cite Son House directly in Companions of the Garden. He provides musical undertone to one of the novel’s occasional stream-of-consciousness passages, which takes place as the characters drive through the forests of western Mississippi: 

“Half-waltz, half-roll.  The skin of a dead monarchal gator animated with riverboat grease dancing on the surface of an ocean of sweat and blood and runoff and atop it the man and his slide guitar, the high notes tear inducing and saliva coaxing in the same amorous breath.  High chords on “Pearline” like a loving slap from the vengeful, interspersed with melody.  Blastchord-tune-blastchord-tune-blastchord-deltadawn wetness flooding runoff swamp dust cotton choke cotton choke. . . . A studio and a river inside it.  Oh, Pearline.”


     Long story short: the man is amazing.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

New Facebook page for Companions of the Garden

I've created a Facebook page in connection with the book. The page can be viewed via the following:

 http://www.facebook.com/pages/Companions-of-the-Garden/136162313117092

Cheers!

Interfaith dating in the Muslim community


Last night I had the privilege of attending a conversation on interfaith dating in the Muslim community, put on by The New York City Progressive Muslim Meetup Group, at John H. Holmes Community House near Grand Central Station.
It was a highly inspiring discussion, one in which participants were both passionate about the subject and open to sharing their own experiences. The majority opinion in fact seemed open to dating outside the faith, but with three major reservations, none of which managed to surprise me.
The first, of course, was family. The participants identified themselves, for the most part, as progressive Muslims, a label that proved somewhat less compatible with their parents. While they themselves might have succeeded at carving out a space in their faith in which the act of dating of non-Muslims did not feel sinful, it often complicated to the point of rupture their relationships with their families, both extended and immediate.
The second, no less shocking, was children. This became a major factor when the conversation shifted from interfaith dating to interfaith marriage, with story after story chronicling the sudden collapse of otherwise happy unions as the question arose of how childrearing might straddle the gap between, say, Islam and Judaism, or Islam and atheism. It was a question the night left precariously open.
Finally, and most morbidly predictable of all, the consensus seemed to indicate that it is significantly easier for Muslim men to date non-Muslim women than it is for Muslim women to date non-Muslim men. This is in part due to a section of the Qur’an that endorses the marriage of Muslim men to non-Muslim women and forbids the inverse, but also because of the overarching, religion-transcending reality than the stigma of sexual or romantic misconduct is much more hostile toward women than men.
One aspect of the conversation that intrigued me was its tendency to split between individuals who’d converted to Islam and those who were raised in the faith. Overall, interfaith dating proved less difficult for the former, insofar as any relationship decision they happened to make was less significant for their family than their actual choice to convert. 
I encourage anyone interested in finding out more about the faith to attend one of the group's regular gatherings. The atmosphere is welcoming, and the location convenient. (Not to say that such descriptions couldn't apply to a majority of locations in New York.)  

Friday, February 18, 2011

Feminism and the Egyptian Revolution

Feminist author and activist Nawal El Saadawi relates to Women’s eNews the somewhat paradoxical character of Suzanne Mubarak, Egypt’s former First Lady.
Though Ms Mubarak is often lauded as a proponent of women’s rights, Ms. Saadawi argues that she instead endeavored to consolidate the Egyptian feminist organizations, and did so with the sole purpose of exerting control.
One of the more significant moves in this respect was Ms. Mubarak’s creation of the National Council for Women, an umbrella organization that oversaw approval of nearly ever women’s group in the nation.    
“Suzanne Mubarak killed the feminist movement so she could be the leader,” Saadawi said.
Just as the Egyptian Revolution had uniquely charged implications for its female participants, so, too, does the prospect of its failure.
Saadawi points to the well-known and near-universal fragility of the post-revolution state; one wherein an exhausted populace, having realized its initial goals, is all too prone to abandon its momentum and pave the way for a regime of equal or even greater autocracy then the one they removed. Time and time again, women are the first to suffer from this atrophying, most notably, in the Middle Eastern context, in Algeria and Iran.
Though quick to point out the distinctions between the Egyptian Revolution and those of the aforementioned nations, feminists worldwide put incredible stress on the importance of caution.
“I think about what happened in Algeria,” said Hoda Badran, chairperson for the Alliance of Arab Women. “To stop this, we have to demand our rights.”

Thursday, February 17, 2011

A Word on The Big Easy

Anyone closely acquainted with me is well aware of how much I love New Orleans. It plays a critical role in Companions of the Garden (the destination of the novel, no less) and is perhaps the only city in the world that offers New York any real rivalry for my affection.
As was the case with New York, my initial encounter with the Big Easy occurred in the aftermath of its national tragedy. I had no competing images and associations to offer against the storm-thrashed blocks of  Tremé, yet somehow or other the prevailing trend in the media and public discourse to portray the city as some kind of perpetually bleeding wound never quite caught on with me. On the contrary, my impressions of New Orleans hinged on things like strength, resurgence, vitality . . . the precise opposite of brokenness.
I'm therefore heartened every time the news offers me something to back my view.
A recent article in The New York Times reports on the surprising outcome of the Orleans Parish Sheriff to replace a massive jail complex destroyed by Katrina. Rather than endorse his efforts to build a new and equally massive facility, the city chose to instead reevaluate the parish’s superfluous penal system, one that sent directly to jail and detained on bond nearly every individual arrested of a crime, regardless of the seriousness of the offense, placing a massive burden on the execution of justice.
Hidden thinly between the lines is the implication that this much-needed revision to the nation's incarceration capital would not have been possible had Katrina not destroyed the original prison, forcibly creating a blank-slate environment where alternative modes of action could at last be considered.
To suggest that such an outcome justifies the tragedy is of course ludicrous. Instead, I'd argue that the unlikely fate of Orleans Parish Prison serves to challenge the tragedy's monolithic character. 
If a tragedy can be dynamic, then so can the city attached to it.
One reason of many for why I love New Orleans.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Islam, women, and misdirected blame


We’re fond of positing Islam as a religion hostile to women.
            Some of us take it a step or two further, pitching Islam and Muslim culture as an overarching  umbrella, under which crimes against women are uniquely suited to occur.
            I’m thankfully not the first to suggest that both points of view could benefit from a second  glance.
            I’m not the first to emphasize the stunning advances in women’s rights that the advent of Islam made possible, the right to own property, the right to divorce, and the banning of female infanticide notwithstanding.
            And I’m not, I hope, the last to argue that the misappropriation of Islam to legitimize misogynistic practices might have a thing or two in common with the perversion of secular entities that were intended to promote justice.
            I therefore have no qualms about mourning in the same breath the 14-year old Bengali rape-victim who was sentenced to death for adultery by a faux-Islamic court and the millions of American women who will suffer if the House of Representatives delivers on its promise to cut funding to Planned Parenthood and related health care centers, slamming everything from STI screenings to the treatment of breast cancer. 
         The majority of the world’s Muslims would no doubt agree with me in attesting that the abuse of women, whether by law or by so-called scripture, is disgustingly systemic.