On Witnessing, Testing and Art: Want More

Tattoo of My Lover's Blood (M.A. Reilly, 2015)


“Every wall is a door."  - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I.

When I first read the headline in the Times Magazine, Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry, I was drawn in--moth to flame.  It's an older article, from 2012 written by Eliza Griswold and chronicles women poets who belong/ed to Mirman Baheer, a women’s literary society based in Kabul.  Many of the women belong in secret and others who cannot attend the meetings in person, phone in and sometimes read their poetry.  Griswold tells the story of one young woman, Zarmina, and it is this bearing witness that catches in my throat and I know I'll be putting paintbrush to paper if for no other reason than to try to honor this young woman in some modest way.

Griswold writes:

Rahila was the name used by a young poet, Zarmina, who committed suicide two years ago. Zarmina was reading her love poems over the phone when her sister-in-law caught her. “How many lovers do you have?” she teased. Zarmina’s family assumed there was a boy on the other end of the line. As a punishment, her brothers beat her and ripped up her notebooks, Amail said. Two weeks later, Zarmina set herself on fire.

We all create--some more dangerously than others.

II.

Take away one's art and what is left?
A hollow shell?
A remembrance?
Stop one from creating and not even the shell remains.

There's an urgency to the telling--an urgency to express and poetry so often is a means unlike any other. These Afghan women, these sisters, risk life to put words to the page.  They create folk art by making Pahstoun poems.

I had not read, nor heard Pashtun poetry before reading the article.  Griswold explained:

Pashtun poetry has long been a form of rebellion for Afghan women, belying the notion that they are submissive or defeated. Landai means “short, poisonous snake” in Pashto, a language spoken on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The word also refers to two-line folk poems that can be just as lethal. Funny, sexy, raging, tragic, landai are safe because they are collective. No single person writes a landai; a woman repeats one, shares one. It is hers and not hers.

Is not all art part artist part not?

Later I found this video also about the women poets and Griswold & Murphy's work. Take a listen.




III.
   
Such risk these women make in their desire to compose art--in their felt necessity. There's something so elemental for us to learn here. Something we need to privilege in our education of learners.

One only needs to think of Albert Camus (1957) or Edwidge Danticat (2011) to conjure an image of the artist creating dangerously.  Each wrote about such necessity and in our chase of cheap national literacy standards and higher PARCC and SBAC scores we have failed to privilege this, failed--perhaps to even understand the artist creating dangerously and how such acts are caught up alongside freedom and liberty. 

Sacrifice the artist creating dangerously, sacrifice the child learning the value of creating dangerously and we sacrifice our selves, our country, our freedoms.

Camus (1957) in writing about the artist said:

...If liberty has become dangerous, then it may cease to be prostituted. And I cannot agree, for example, with those who complain today of the decline of wisdom. Apparently they are right. Yet, to tell the truth, wisdom has never declined so much as when it involved no risks...

Standards are all about efficiency and teaching only what can be measured and scored easily. Standards and the tests that always accompany them are apt expressions of closed boxes that can be replicated over and over and over again.

We need to want more.

Danticat (2011) advised the writer to "[c]reate dangerously, for people who read dangerously." She tells us:

This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them. (Kindle Location, 181-182).

This is the gold these women in Afghan remind us is at stake.  Create something that someone would be willing to risk their life to read.

It's not the plethora of practice tests that the folks at Pearson and PARCC and Smarter Balance are hawking on their websites that are the apt measures of our creative selves. It's never been the single measure, corporate-produced, that tells such heart.

We need to want more.
We need to learn how to be hungry for the well said word and learn how to say no to the cheap fare we are offering to children daily.

#yesallwomen and "the task you cannot refuse"

Women Unmasked (M.A. Reilly. Collage. 2012)

I.

I appreciate Audrey Watters' (@audreywatters) post about women, ISTE & misogyny and although the context of the post is about misogynistic actions by ISTE male leaders, I am reminded that such behaviors are and have been present in the structures of hierarchies (contemporary and otherwise) for far longer than there's been ISTEs and the internet.  We need only consider Aristotle's belief that 'women were naturally deformed or imperfect males' (Flood, et als., 2007 from here) to grasp a sense of the long, long history of the hatred of women and girls.  This has never been limited to the 20th or 21st century for it is a learned expression of power and violence interwoven throughout our institutions and found lurking in the ways we value and fail to value.  It is an ideology, not bound by time or place--yet (in)formed by each.

How such ideology is communicated and reported does alter with time such as we see via the Internet. Moveable type allowed for the transfer of meaning beyond the intimate boundaries of touch and voice so long as one could author and/or have access to written texts and possess the ability to read them or listen to them be read. Such spaces of permission, of course, have often been controlled. Nonetheless, moveable type allowed for the possibility of the preservation of language, of one's story, of the voicing of other. It is in these stories that are not bound to us by geography and time that we learn how to bear witness.

A Room of One's Own (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

Today, the access to connect and reconnect with others across the earth via social media--along with the speed to do so--creates new conditions for stories to be told and heard. Our uses of social media allow for the possibility of voices that have been largely absent, silenced, missing, singular, misquoted, defamed, and quiet--to be heard as it enlarges the field of who hears--of who bears witness.  And it is in the co-specifying nature of telling and bearing, that a power to oppose misogyny is given voice--just as such power will invoke an increased desire on the part of some to limit possibility by regulating the Internet so that stories, such as those being told via #yesallwomen, can be silenced. And so the ways women and violence to women are situated and expressed also travel with force and speed--a force that Watters and others call to our notice.

II.

A Pocket Full of Stones (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

In thinking about #yesallwomen and the rise (and clash) of voices this hashtag has occasioned, I am reminded of Virginia Woolf who at the very end of  A Room of One's Own tells the story of the Shakespeare's sister and our responsibility to her:

I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young — alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to-night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so — I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals — and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would he impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.

The internet may well be a room of our own--giving rise to the courage to listen to other, to write,  to share, and to receive.  Hearing and telling have always been forms of bearing witness and in some ways reading the deluge of tweets via #yesallwomen allows us to bear the personal truths that may be difficult to voice and difficult to hear and yet we know bearing witness is an action we cannot refuse.

It's what we learn from the speaker in Adrienne Rich's An Atlas of the Difficult World who concludes:

I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn 

between bitterness and hope  

turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.  

I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else  

left to read  

there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

III.

And so to the women publishing via #yesallwomen,  to Audrey, and to the still silent women:


We are listening, too

           for something

(un)familiar

knowing you are

                    Shakespeare's sister

stripped from our very bones.



We are thirsty.