This issue of the 蘑菇视频 Repro Project Newsletter marks the beginning of March, during which we observe , , (March 8), and (March 10). Throughout this month, we lift up, honor, and celebrate women, girls, and femme folk who throughout all of human history and in every human society have held up half the sky.
As I sit down to write this intro, I’m mindful of how hollow, and even cruel, it may sound to wish everyone a happy Women’s History Month, when all around the world the grotesque and monstrous actions of men – with their/our weapons of mass destruction, their/our anger and rage, their/our sociopathic abuses of power – murder, kill, abuse and terrorize women and children, and destroy their present lives and their futures. In just this past week alone, 165 people, mostly girls between the ages of seven and 12, were killed by a bomb strike that hit a school in Minab, Iran, on Saturday, February 28. This was one of the opening acts in the war that the US and Israel launched against Iran that day. The bombing of the school appears to have been a so-called “double-tap” strike, in which a second bomb is dropped on the same location once emergency rescue, medical care, and civilian responders arrive at the scene. Double-tap strikes are war crimes. Unsurprisingly, state officials from both the US and Israel deny responsibility for the strike, implying instead that the bombing was actually a failed launch of Iranian weaponry, which of course, Iranian officials deny as well. The thing is, regardless of whichever patriarchal regime dropped the bomb(s), dozens upon dozens of girls are dead because of it.
When men drop bombs, women and children suffer and die the most.
When men wage war, Earth bleeds from a thousand cuts, and sacred Life force spills out and drains away.
There is a bell hooks quote that I’ve committed to memory. For me, as a cis white Euro-American man, her written and spoken words (and not just this particular quotation) have become, in so many ways, my North Star – the point of reference upon which I fix my gaze, in order to know when I am following the right and good path, and when I am veering off course:
“We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.”
The one word I want to highlight here, in this quote, is “constantly.” She said we need to constantly critique the dominant system, because it is constantly normalized by those who benefit from it. The work to problematize that which has been made to seem unproblematic is ever on-going. The hard but honest truth is that liberation from systemic oppression(s) is never a one-and-done, once-and-forever event. Freedom, liberation, and justice are processes, not discrete events, or permanent states of being. We can observe and learn from human history that liberation and freedom processes are not linear, but in fact are non-linear, non-returning returns, like so many intertwining spirals that connect past, present, and future. Each successive generation of artists, freedom-fighters, and movement-builders takes up the work not just from the immediately preceding generation, but from all of the preceding generations of artists, freedom-fighters, and movement-builders. Civilizations rise and fall and are replaced; rights are fought for, won, lost, and fought for again; human dignity is honored, then degraded, and then defended and elevated again; Life is held as sacred, then desecrated, then there is remembrance and recovery of wonder, awe, and magic in living. Paulo Freire, Brazilian liberatory educator and theorist, once wrote that humanization and dehumanization are both historical processes, but humanization (becoming more fully human) is humanity’s only true vocation.
Relatedly, James Baldwin once said, in an interview:聽“There may not be as much humanity in the world as one would like to see. But there is some. There’s more than one would think. In any case, if you break faith with what you know, that’s a betrayal of many, many, many, many people. I may know six people, but that’s enough. Love has never been a popular movement and no one’s ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of very few people.”
When Baldwin refers to the love and passion of a very few people, he is stating yet another hard but honest truth: there could be so many more people tending to the care of the world, but there have always been just enough people who love and care enough to keep the flames of justice, freedom, and liberation alive.
So, in the face of the horrifying violence of patriarchy, and white supremacy, and colonialism, and capitalism – the problems of our present moment – let us rise resolutely to continue the work of every generation of artists, freedom-fighters, and movement-builders who have come before us. Now it is our time to fight for what is right; to do what we can to hold the world together; to pick up where others have left off. That’s our job now, our only true vocation as Freire put it: to love the world and ourselves into greater, fuller freedom, justice, and humanity. We will not complete the work, for it is not work that can ever actually be completed. Among the generations that come after us, we must trust that there will be, as there always has been, enough people willing to love the world enough to hold it together.聽
Mao Zedong said repeatedly during the cultural revolution in China in the 1960s-70s, “Women hold up half the sky.”
As we enter into Women’s History Month, we honor the matrilinear legacy of every woman, every girl, every femme person – whose names we may or may not know, or may have forgotten – who have held the world together by their love and passion translated into action, and who, in doing so, have made the world and us better. Upon their shoulders, we stand high; and upon our shoulders, the next generations will stand even higher.
