I’m not waiting for the sky to open

All this talk of business and no talk of blessings. I wish different words had been spun from my mouth this past month. But sometimes holidays are hurricanes -and then, I didn’t come here for a holiday, either.

Some days I walk these streets and my body can’t take it -all the smells and colors and hot winds, meat on sticks and bowls of raw fish. Some days the purple of Kente makes me nauseous. But this comes from a bruise that formed upon arrival. I find myself walking through Kaneshie motor park silently scolding myself for not opening up my arms and hugging every person trying to sell me biscuits.

It’s not that I am waiting for the sky to open; it’s that some days it does.

On those days the morning light is like silk, and I wake soft with possibility. In such such open skies I brown with out burning, taste water like sweet milk, and inevitably find myself at the Arts centre pounding a djembe or learning Ga dances on the Accra shore line. There is beauty in this city. Buckets full of it. So much that sometimes I feel like drowning and can’t catch breath. I think this excess, this harlem of color and taste, may be the root of my anxiety. My eyes don’t know how to filter. My tongue doesn’t know how to breathe. Thankfully, I seem to still know something about learning…

~

In Hotel Ado-do, ABANTU brings fourty women of the District Assemblies and they speak of how they fought for election, how their relationships with men have changed, how they managed all this while running farms, shops, families. And I realize how much we need these strategies. How far we are from representation and meaningful change in our country. Feminism may no longer be a dirty word, but it seems to have lost much of it’s popular meaning. I’ve been told we don’t need it anymore by many a man and many a woman. Where feminism is the recognition that we live under a global system of patriarchy, I’m not sure what these individuals are referencing. Can we be represented without representation? How engaged are we if Status of Women Canada been shut down as silently as it recently was?

What I’m saying: We need more women in politics. ABANTU’s strategies are not complicated. They are not expensive to implement. They offer direct training, education and support to women who want to run for local government. They bring these women together and form networks, women’s caucuses, mobilized groups that can respond to policy threats and continue to support new women who want to move into the political arena. I’m not saying the identical strategy would work in Canada. The success of this project is dependant on two factors present in Ghanaian politics that are absent in Canada -a system of local government (district assemblies) that allows for greater participation and representation, and (my own conjecture) the presence of visible, recognized threats to the status of women.

By this, I am not insinuating that we are without threats in Canada. Our country is a landmark in the UN sanctioned “16 days of action against Gender Violence”. It is hard to pretend we have moved far from the Montreal Massacre when we remember the devastation at Dawson College last fall, or when we look at our rates of domestic violence. Despite the reality that many women in our country face, these threats remain largely unrecognized, both popularly and politically. Our crown speeches don’t reference the gendered nature of issues. And our country doesn’t shout loudly about their absence. There are many groups that are trying, but until it’s naturally amplified in our own minds, these voices will grow sore screaming solo.

Are we less mobilized because we are closer to equality ? Or are our experiences fragmented enough that we no longer realize we all need to fight for equal access to resources, representation and respect? Change can happen through collective action, persistence and raised voices. In fact, it’s the only way it does. The newly passed Domestic Violence Act is proof of this in Ghana. There is still a lot of work to be done, but there seem to be open channels for moving forward. Reflecting on the locked doors and shut windows Harper has held up to half our country, I’m feeling less optimistic about Canada.

So where do we start? At the risk of repeating myself, my only answer is this: If silence is the problem, that voice may be the answer. We need to move past our complacency in order to become mobilized. And first, we need to know what we’re facing.
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Final words of gratitude to every last one of you who sent out some love when my words were waxing into darkness. I’m in a new home, nee north kaneshie, nee hotel diamond palace; here I walk into the pantry freely and like the smell of the bed sheets. And I have a wondrous invention called a key, that will ensure I’m not stranded on the street for a second time. I hope y’all have an adventurous holiday, with more mashed potatoes than turkey, and more love than stockings.

~ by winterharvest on December 13, 2007.