Women of the Akemba Tribe in Kenya Face Pressure to Change

A report by founder and curator Munuve Mutisya, published by the International Network of Museums for Peace – May 2012

Same-sex marriages have existed for many years among the Akamba. Recently this tradition has become controversial in the Machakos County of Kenya. These marriages are non-sexual, perma­nent unions between two women, which exist so that the women can rear children and pass on fam­ily property. In the Akamba community, in Macha­kos, one may be brought in to share motherhood with another woman already in a marriage, but who is unable to bear children, in order to create a family. Maweto is the name given to the women in these relationships. In the past, the Maweto moth­ers were highly respected in their communities and families.

The Maweto mothers had the freedom to choose men to father their children and sometimes they chose to have a man anointed by the commu­nity for this purpose. This man was not the hus­band in the household that they joined. The family formed by the union of these two women provided security for the children and partnership and the status of the two women. Maweto women were expected to look after their parents and inherited land and property just like other Akamba children. More recently, Maweto mothers and their children have been rejected by society.

Modern religions and western influence have changed the ideas that people use to define their families. Partly because of this, communities are turning away from Mawe­to families even though these families are able to support their children and offer a creative way for women to maintain their land and standing.

The Akamba Peace Museum decided to find cul­turally-appropriate ways to promote a positive im­age of Maweto families, while also advocating for their fundamental rights within society. The mu­seum now serves as a networking center for the Maweto Mothers of Ukambani. For the last twelve years, they have been engaging the marginalized Maweto women in its activities. The museum is currently providing the local community at Kyan­zasu village, in Machakos County, access to infor­mation about Maweto advocacy through ongoing discussion meetings and exchange visits among the Maweto Mothers of Ukambani.

The participa­tion of the Maweto Mothers in community affairs and their interaction with friends and visitors has empowered them. They do not consider them­selves as outcastes. This is a significant step in out­reach, which the Akamba Peace Museum is doing by bringing Kenyans to bear the testimony of once ostracized women in their rural setup participating in full community life. The Maweto Mothers are able to raise their voices and share their concerns to the wider community without fear of exclusion. This has created space for public debate, dialogue and action as visitors interact with the Maweto Mothers, read the newspaper stories, view photo­graphs, and watch video clips about the Maweto Mothers at the Peace Museum. This initiative was developed to address the gaps and enhance the participation of the marginalized in the community development process by keeping its non-partisan stand or position.

The Akamba Peace Museum has been promot­ing advocacy in addressing critical social issues at community level, such as poverty, social exclusion, empowerment of marginalized rural groups such as Maweto, and catalyze a democratic process in decision-making. The museum is also a source of empowerment that directs education among the youth and schools in Machakos connecting devel­opment with traditional knowledge. A group of 50 elders are currently working together with the youth to document local histories, material cul­ture, ceremonies, and songs through a continuous one-on-one education with the elders so as to pre­pare the youth to honor their heritage of social values while engaging in dialogue with modernity and christianity.

To order copies: http://www.lulu.com/shop/clive-barrett-and-joyce-apsel/museums-for-peace-transforming-cultures/paperback/product-20077305.html

Ted Nugent calling for "chopping off the heads" of Democrats in the next National Election

On April 20, 2012, Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Brevik gave his account of how he executed 77 people at a summer camp in Norway in July 2011.

“It was extremely hard to shoot that first shot. It is contrary to human nature. But after that…it became easier,” he testified. “To take a human life is the most extreme thing you can do, but you weigh that against superior motives. I’ve had a dehumanization strategy towards those I considered valid targets so I could come to the point of killing them.”

Brevik describes a process that is at the center of every genocide. That process is one of dehumanization. When clearly stated, as in Brevik’s account, we immediately condemn its insidious nature. However, we often fail to acknowledge the steps that lead to this process unfolding, and the role we play herein on a daily basis. Every time we as individuals or with affiliates (peers, religious bodies, political parties,) identify groups of people as “other” “unworthy” “beyond the sphere of deserved rights,” etc., we in fact have participated in the dehumanization of those persons. There is no separating our verbal disenfranchisement of others, from the physical harm committed against members of targeted groups.

Inflammatory rhetoric fueled Brevik’s anger over immigration policy and immigrants. In the USA today, talk show hosts and politicians have taken up the same mantle of creating celebrity for themselves by outdoing each other with polarizing and incendiary statements. The latest case of this is Ted Nugent’s public speech comparing Democrats to a coyote that must be shot. Here he referred to the current administration as “evil, America-hating” and stated that people needed to “ride into the battlefield and chop their heads off in November.”

When confronted by Secret Service agents for his comments, Nugent resorted to hiding behind his freedom of speech and the use of metaphor. However, as proven in Norway, for 77 victims of dehumanization, there was no hiding from the bullet of one who decided to act on the hate that empowered him to commit murder.

An unarmed Trayvon Martin died from a gunshot wound that has brought national attention to Stand Your Ground laws.

On April 1, a New York City newspaper reported that parents in Park Slope Brooklyn had declared war on ice cream carts in the park. “Along with the first truly beautiful day of the year, my son and I had our first ruined day at the playground,” a parent states online. “Two different people came into the actual playground with ice cream…I left with a crying 4-year old.” Another parent was quoted saying, “I should not have to fight with my children…just so someone can make a living.”

Undoubtedly, these parents saw themselves as well within their rights. They expect a world where they are not be inconvenienced with having to say “No” to their children. For the rest of us, we are left wondering how we got to the point where such a petty annoyance should be hailed as reason for civic intervention.

In the last two decades, society has gone through a two-pronged movement focused on issues of tolerance. On one hand, we have seen a relaxing of stances on morality-steep issues such as gay rights, out of wedlock births, and cohabitation without benefit of marriage. On the other hand, we have become more empowered to challenge those who in any way interfere with our personal space. Examples include a NYC mass transit rider who is routinely hailed in the media for shushing passengers who make noise in his train car, or personally, a recent incident where a woman walking a dog chastised me as I threw some crumbs onto the curb for a pigeon. How did this recent theme of self-righteous indignation take hold?

A clue might be found in the successful campaign against smoking. Watching the popular television series “Mad Men,” one is treated to scenes we now view with caustic humor, i.e. the gynecologist exam featuring a cigarette-puffing doctor. Yet, thinking about it: cigarette smoke wasn’t any less annoying in those days than now. People simply accepted that certain pleasures of others should be tolerated as a courtesy. Undoubtedly, one expected there would be reciprocity when one’s own idiosyncratic pleasures might have been distasteful to others. Such was society—a give and take—with an appreciation that one should be allowed those legal pleasures that got them through their day.

In time, we would be taught to accept the harmful nature of cigarettes. Likewise, the sight of a pregnant woman imbibing would also fall into folklore as the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome permeated the media. However, along with the passing of our naïveté about the dangers, we also seemed to feel empowered as vigilantes wherever the behavior of others was not to our liking. As our “desire” to have everything to our personal liking turns into our perceived “right” for such, we move ever more toward individuals less tolerant of those around us.

One has to wonder what role this growing intolerance has had in the proliferation of now popular “Stand Your Ground” laws. Florida reports that the incidence of self-defense homicides has doubled since the law went into effect. Rather than retreat, or mollify, this law has been translated by many as justification for shooting another at the first sign of jeopardy. Left with a societal shift of being more tolerant of other groups, we seem to have rechanneled energy into being less tolerant of the individuals around us. Perhaps every once in a while, we need to sit next to a smoker and let go of our mandate to police the activity. The benefit of an act of tolerance toward another is that it leads to peaceful effect on both parties.

Burmese opposition politician Aung San Suu Kyi elected to Parliament

Cut off from most of the world for decades by an oppressive military rule, Burma (Myanmar) has recently made momentous strides toward a more open society. Perhaps the most dramatic event in this political shift is the April 1 announcement that opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was elected to the lower house of the Burmese parliament. Under house arrest for almost 15 years since 1989, she was finally released in 2010. During the intervening years her efforts to secure a peaceful democratization of Burma had her awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought and Rafto Prize. In 2011, she was awarded the Wallenberg Medal.

With the junta ceding power in 2011 and rebels signing cease-fire agreements, US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has been calling for a reevaluation of our relationship with that country. As with former prisoner turned South African president, Nelson Mandela, Suu Kyi’s reward for perseverance is a remarkable testament to the power an individual to forge societies steeped in positive peace.

Ibrahim El-Husseini Photos courtesy artist

Free Theatre Event! Monday, April 2, 2012 at 6:30 p.m at the Martin E. Segal Theatre, 365 Fifth Avenue, NYC (at 38th Street)

Award-winning Egyptian playwright Ibrahim El-Husseini visits the Segal Center to present a reading of his Commedia Al-Ahzaan (Comedy of Sorrows) in its English translation by Mohammed Albakry and Rebekah Maggor. Comedy of Sorrows was one of the first theatrical responses to Egypt’s January revolution. Its heroine, a young, college-educated Cairene woman, travels through her city, gradually growing aware of the misery that surrounds her. First performed at Cairo’s Al-Ghad Theatre, it was lauded as an “emotionally poignant and aesthetically cathartic theatrical experience.” Join us for this look at excellence in the Egyptian theatre and for a discussion about how art informs a society convulsed by change. With Professor Marvin Carlson (CUNY Graduate Center), Rebekah Maggor (Vanderbilt University), and playwright and actress Najla Said.

Presented in collaboration with the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Vanderbilt University, and AO International

ABDELLAH TAÏA (photo credit: Chema Moya/European Pressphoto Agency)

(Paris) In the Morocco of the 1980s, where homosexuality did not, of course, exist, I was an effeminate little boy, a boy to be sacrificed, a humiliated body who bore upon himself every hypocrisy, everything left unsaid. By the time I was 10, though no one spoke of it, I knew what happened to boys like me in our impoverished society; they were designated victims, to be used, with everyone’s blessing, as easy sexual objects by frustrated men. And I knew that no one would save me — not even my parents, who surely loved me. For them too, I was shame, filth. A “zamel.”

Like everyone else, they urged me into a terrible, definitive silence, there to die a little more each day.

How is a child who loves his parents, his many siblings, his working-class culture, his religion — Islam — how is he to survive this trauma? To be hurt and harassed because of something others saw in me — something in the way I moved my hands, my inflections. A way of walking, my carriage. An easy intimacy with women, my mother and my many sisters. To be categorized for victimhood like those “emo” boys with long hair and skinny jeans who have recently been turning up dead in the streets of Iraq, their skulls crushed in.

The truth is, I don’t know how I survived. All I have left is a taste for silence. And the dream, never to be realized, that someone would save me. Now I am 38 years old, and I can state without fanfare: no one saved me.

I no longer remember the child, the teenager, I was. I know I was effeminate and aware that being so obviously “like that” was wrong. God did not love me. I had strayed from the path. Or so I was made to understand. Not only by my family, but also by the entire neighborhood. And I learned my lesson perfectly. So deep down, I tell myself they won. This is what happened.

I was barely 12, and in my neighborhood they called me “the little girl.” Even those I persisted in playing soccer with used that nickname, that insult. Even the teenagers who’d once taken part with me in the same sexual games. I was no kid anymore. My body was changing, stretching out, becoming a man’s. But others did not see me as a man. The image of myself they reflected back at me was strange and incomprehensible. Attempts at rape and abuse multiplied.

I knew it wasn’t good to be as I was. But what was I going to do? Change? Speak to my mother, my big brother? And tell them what, exactly?

It all came to a head one summer night in 1985. It was too hot. Everyone was trying in vain to fall asleep. I, too, lay awake, on the floor beside my sisters, my mother close by. Suddenly, the familiar voices of drunken men reached us. We all heard them. The whole family. The whole neighborhood. The whole world. These men, whom we all knew quite well, cried out: “Abdellah, little girl, come down. Come down. Wake up and come down. We all want you. Come down, Abdellah. Don’t be afraid. We won’t hurt you. We just want to have sex with you.”

They kept yelling for a long time. My nickname. Their desire. Their crime. They said everything that went unsaid in the too-silent, too-respectful world where I lived. But I was far, then, from any such analysis, from understanding that the problem wasn’t me. I was simply afraid. Very afraid. And I hoped my big brother, my hero, would rise and answer them. That he would protect me, at least with words. I didn’t want him to fight them — no. All I wanted him to say were these few little words: “Go away! Leave my little brother alone.”

But my brother, the absolute monarch of our family, did nothing. Everyone turned their back on me. Everyone killed me that night. I don’t know where I found the strength, but I didn’t cry. I just squeezed my eyes shut a bit more tightly. And shut, with the same motion, everything else in me. Everything. I was never the same Abdellah Taïa after that night. To save my skin, I killed myself. And that was how I did it.

I began by keeping my head low all the time. I cut all ties with the children in the neighborhood. I altered my behavior. I kept myself in check: no more feminine gestures, no more honeyed voice, no more hanging around women. No more anything. I had to invent a whole new Abdellah. I bent myself to the task with great determination, and with the realization that this world was no longer my world. Sooner or later, I would leave it behind. I would grow up and find freedom somewhere else. But in the meantime I would become hard. Very hard.

TODAY I grow nostalgic for little effeminate Abdellah. He and I share a body, but I no longer remember him. He was innocence. Now I am only intellect. He was naïve. I am clever. He was spontaneous. I am locked in a constant struggle with myself.

In 2006, seven years after I moved to France, and after my second book, “Le rouge du tarbouche” (the red of the fez), came out in Morocco, I, too, came out to the Moroccan press, in Arabic and French. Scandal, and support. Then, faced with my brother’s silence and my mother’s tears on the telephone, I published in TelQuel, the very brave Moroccan magazine, an open letter called “Homosexuality Explained to My Mother.” My mother died the next year.

I don’t know where I found the courage to become a writer and use my books to impose my homosexuality on the world of my youth. To do justice to little Abdellah. To never forget the trauma he and every Arab homosexual like him suffered.

Now, over a year after the Arab Spring began, we must again remember homosexuals. Arabs have finally become aware that they have to invent a new, free Arab individual, without the support of their megalomaniacal leaders. Arab homosexuals are also taking part in this revolution, whether they live in Egypt, Iraq or Morocco. They, too, are part of this desperately needed process of political and individual liberation. And the world must support and protect them.

Caridad Svich

(Generation Without Borders is an essay series created by TCG for the 50th Anniversary of World Theatre Day. )

How does one write a life? Where does the will to intervene socially and politically in culture begin? Certainly, not every playwright’s path is marked by an activist intent. Some writers choose what may be deemed a “more quiet, interior” position in the field. Others may choose to use the work itself as a vehicle to exhort and proclaim their beliefs. Others still may simply choose to amuse, to create divertissements to comfort and/or soothe their public. There are many roads, in other words, to a writer’s life. The first job of a writer, however, is to notice, to observe the world, to train the eye to really see and record, and sometimes to see what isn’t there but could be. As a playwright, my path so far has been marked by a daily practice of seeing that has expanded in its global outlook over the years.

At first, writing was enchantment, a spell of words to fall into and in which to seek refuge. Writing, thus, was initially for me a retreat from the world. Part of the retreat had to do as much with being a child of immigrants as it did with wanting to create an alternative universe where ready-made constructions of identity and language were much more fluid and open. As I’ve kept writing and training as an artist, the enchantment has remained central to my relationship to words and signs on the page. The drunken ecstatic transformational materiality and beauty of languages verbal, visual and aural restlessly plays with my imagination and stretches the limits of the world that I see. But what is it that one sees as writer in the theatre? How does one face the world?

Theatre is a public forum. Writing for the theatre and live performance, thus, demands engagement with the world. To write a play is a civic act, or at very least the articulation of a desire to take part in a civic dialogue with society. Broad questions of identity and human rights enter very much into the frame of a play’s vision. What stories do you choose to tell when you face the page? And how indeed will you tell them? Content and form are inextricably linked, as they are in the “real” world outside the site of action of a theatre piece. When I write, the question nearly always has become over the years, “Why this story now? And how can I shift the world a little bit by re-framing the ways in which we are conditioned to seeing the human figure, the post-post colonial erotic, political and spiritual body, in space and time?” As a bilingual child of immigrants from Cuba and Argentina, respectively, the question inevitably also includes “And how does this story or stories engage with and of the Americas and the larger world?”

I’ve spent most of my writing life challenging and resisting labels and categories. Perhaps some of my colleagues would attest that the fact that I trained with master playwright and teacher Maria Irene Fornes right after receiving my undergraduate and graduate school degrees in theatre has something to do with my wariness of labels. After all, Fornes’ example was one of sublime resistance. She wrote all different kinds of plays over a forty-year period and defied expectations of what a female dramatist could do in the United States if she simply set about pursuing her vision relatively unconditionally. Her body of work is uncompromising, consistently surprising, unequivocally female in its concerns, and relentlessly ambiguous in its approach to the delineation of character. Her protagonists are deeply flawed, ornery, not particularly noble most of the time, and often blind-sided by their own complex natures and/or their socioeconomic positions in society. The intensive four-year training with Fornes at the INTAR Hispanic Playwrights Laboratory certainly had a profound influence on me as a young artist, but I recall resisting categories even before I worked with Fornes.

Back in graduate school at UCSD, I wanted to write outside any box, pursue interdisciplinary collaborations, and make all kinds of plays. If I think a bit harder on this, I would say, well, that’s just part of being an artist. One needs to start busting outta the box right from the get-go in order to get heard or want to get heard. But actually I think that for me writing for live performance always meant writing for this moment in time, however the moment manifested itself. Margaret Atwood talks about ‘negotiating with the dead’ when she writes, and for me, that negotiation has as much to do with listening to the ancestors as much as it has to do with the spectral beings that haunt theatre itself and its history. What is it that often we recall with fondness when we think about the acts of performance that inspired us at an early age? The sense of community, the ability to dress up and lose oneself in a role, the wonder that simple stagecraft can elicit, and the ability to re-awaken the senses and sharpen the mind to new ideas, forms, and stories.

Theatre is poetry, and the poet’s song rides the chord of every emotional beat in the theatre.

For more of this essay visit: http://www.tcgcircle.org/2012/03/toward-a-visible-theatre/

John Malkovich (photo credit: ©Christian Colgny)

On March 22, 2012, John Malkovich will deliver his international message at UNESCO in Paris at a gala event that will include readings of play excerpts with Malkovich and other theatre artists.

I’m honored to have been asked by the International Theatre Institute ITI at UNESCO to give this greeting commemorating the 50th anniversary of World Theatre Day. I will address my brief remarks to my fellow theatre workers, peers and comrades.

May your work be compelling and original. May it be profound, touching, contemplative, and unique. May it help us to reflect on the question of what it means to be human, and may that reflection be blessed with heart, sincerity, candor, and grace. May you overcome adversity, censorship, poverty and nihilism, as many of you will most certainly be obliged to do. May you be blessed with the talent and rigor to teach us about the beating of the human heart in all its complexity, and the humility and curiosity to make it your life’s work. And may the best of you – for it will only be the best of you, and even then only in the rarest and briefest moments – succeed in framing that most basic of questions, “how do we live?” Godspeed.

- John Malkovich

For more information: http://www.tcg.org/international/events/wtd.cfm?type=4.

Members of the Seeds Theatre Group performing a drama to end violence against women in the Lae District, Papua New Guinea. (Photo: Pisai Gumar/Nationalpic)

Dramatizing violence! That’s the motto of the community-based Seeds Theatre Group to address violence against women and girls in the densely populated communities of the Lae District in the Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea.

The group consists primarily of unemployed youth and uses theatre as a powerful tool to raise awareness in urban communities with high risks of HIV/AIDS, crime and drugs. Funded through UN Women’s Pacific Fund to End Violence against Women, the Seeds Theatre Group held 42 performances in January in public areas, including markets, bus stops and public neighbourhoods.

How does the audience react to the performances? “Some feel guilty, others are concerned, and most women learn that there is help out there to protect their basics human rights,” said Willie Doaemo, Technical Director of the group. “Many men who didn’t realize violence against women was a crime punishable by law have spoken up and promised to stop beating their wives,” he added.

On the other hand, the artists themselves have gone through a learning process by reading the drama scripts and carrying out the performances. “Women are seen as inferior in our society, and this thinking has been passed on from generation to generation,” said Teddy Iwara, one of the actors. “Through the gender training, the rehearsals and the awareness performances, I am starting to respect and collaborate with my mother and sisters in our home, and will commit myself with the Seeds Theatre Group to end violence against women in the Lae District and Papua New Guinea,” he added.

With a population of 119,000, the Lae District has the largest population of the Morobe Province and is the industrial hub of Papua New Guinea, gateway to the Highlands provinces. High unemployment rates in urban communities increase the risks of crime and violence, which affects around 80 percent of the population in the district.

Mr. Doaemo expects to reach almost 70 percent of the population in the Lae District through a total of 168 performances over four months, although the group faces some challenging circumstances. The Lae District was declared a conflict zone in November 2011, when ten people were killed. Public gathering was restricted, and people were afraid to leave their homes. In addition, heavy rain made it difficult to carry out the performances. But the group improvises using innovative ways to get the public’s attention: “We played loud music to bring the crowd out anyway,” Mr. Doaemo laughed.

“We are funding this project because we believe that performing arts are an effective tool to reach out to communities around the country,” said Lena Lindberg, UN Women Regional Programme Director for the Pacific. “People learn about the legal consequences of domestic violence and the support that is available from authorities, such as the Police and Health Departments, women’s centres and NGOs,” she added.

The Seeds Theatre Group was established in 1997 by Sam Solomon Sommi, a theatre professional and trainer who saw the artistic talent of youth in the settlements of Lae City and started to provide training in drama, dance and music. By using traditional performing arts as a strategy for education, the Seeds Theatre Group utilizes the potential of young unemployed women and men, and at the same time raises awareness on the causes and consequences of domestic violence, sexual harassment in the workplace and bullying in schools.

The project works in collaboration with the Women and Children Support Centre, the Morobe Provincial AIDS Council, Save the Children, the Salvation Army, Ward Councilors of the district, as well as women and youth church groups.

The Seeds Theatre Group was featured in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation documentary film HIV/AIDS in PNG in 2000 and has also produced a radio drama with the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) Kundu FM 105 on HIV/AIDS and family planning.

http://www.unwomen.org/2012/02/using-performing-arts-to-end-violence-against-women-in-papua-new-guinea/