Our March Author: Marisa Silver

kMary Coin: A Novel 

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits

Marisa Silver: Interviews
Marisa Silver

Rights Reel: Young Lakota on Independent Lens

I've just started reading Louise Erdrich's The Round House (a Cleveland Rights Readers selection). This fictional narrative draws on realities like those described in the Amnesty International report, Maze of Injustice, about sexual violence against indigenous women, and institutional barriers to redress. Now I'm really looking forward to another look at gender issues and Native Americans in the up-coming PBS Independent Lens presentation of Young Lakota, 

South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation is no stranger to strife and heartbreak, stark realities, and inspired idealism. In Young Lakota, we are brought directly into the emotional and often uncertain journey of Sunny Clifford, her twin sister Serena, and their politically ambitious friend Brandon Ferguson, who all share the desire to make a difference for themselves and their community. 

Their political awakening begins when Cecelia Fire Thunder — the first female president of the Oglala Lakota — defies a South Dakota law that makes abortion a crime, even in cases of rape or incest. Fire Thunder takes a stand by proposing a women's health clinic providing abortions on the reservation but open to all local women. While Serena is unwed and with a toddler, and Brandon is raising two little boys, Sunny is just back on the reservation after two years in college. All three find themselves immersed in this political battle as they struggle between opportunity and principle.

The film comes from the team that made the excellent documentary, The Education of Shelby Knox.  Young Lakota premieres on November 25th.

While I'm at it, another Frontline/Independent Lens offering on these themes is last spring's Kind Hearted Woman, the film follows Robin Charboneau, a 32-year-old divorced single mother and Oglala Sioux woman living on North Dakota’s Spirit Lake Reservation.

Robin’s battles in tribal court with her ex-husband for custody of the children, even after he is convicted of abusive sexual contact with his daughter, illuminate how serious this problem is on the reservation. Her quest to heal her family, find a man worthy of her love, build a career, and fulfill her goal of returning to her reservation to help prevent the abuse of women and children, takes her on an intimate and inspiring journey full of heartbreak, discovery, and redemption.

The film is available to watch online at the PBS site, or you can download the audio on iTunes (a good way to work through it's full five hours). Both films are great companions to Erdrich's award-winning novel.

Our March Author: Mara Hvistendahl

This month we are reading Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. The author has a personal website where you can learn more about this informative book and also check out some the other writing she has done, much of it for Science. She also lists many of the interviews she's given about the book. Here's one from Shanghaiist and another from Salon for starters. Our Loyal Readers will certainly appreciate this question and response from the Minneapolis Star Tribune,

Q Your subject is so upsetting -- and yet "Unnatural Selection" is surprisingly addictive with its rich characters and scenes. Did any writers inspire your style? 

A I admire the way Philip Gourevitch writes about Rwanda -- you know, the book with the really long title, "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families."

For a nickel summary of the book you could go with this NPR piece, but if you have more time, the video above or the audio (also available via iTunes) on this page, New Books in Gender Studies,  will give you a more thorough overview of the book. Much of the controversy surrounding sex selection centers on abortion. In this Salon article, Hvistendahl focuses on how antiabortion advocates (like NYT columnist Ross Douthat) read her wrong.

A step removed but not completely unrelated, Hvistendahl writes for the Atlantic about the consequences of having a child, including her own, in the Year of the Dragon. Or try this Science podcast about predicting unrest and conflict in countries with a demographic "youth bulge", another interesting convergence of science and human rights. Finally, of concern to our work on behalf of Chinese dissidents, see this article, The Great Forgetting, which mentions another Rights Readers author, Ma Jian.

For March: Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl

We are looking forward to reading Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men by Mara Hvistendahl in March,

In 2007, the booming port city of Lianyungang achieved the dubious distinction of having the most extreme gender ratio for children under five in China: 163 boys for every 100 girls. The numbers may not matter much to the preschool set. But in twenty years the skewed sex ratio will pose a colossal challenge. When Lianyungang's children reach adulthood, their generation will have twenty-four million more men than women. 

 

The prognosis for China's neighbors is no less bleak: rampant sex selective abortion has left over 160 million females "missing" from Asia's population. And gender imbalance reaches far beyond South and East Asia, affecting the Caucasus countries, Eastern Europe, and even some groups in the United States --a rate of diffusion so rapid that the leading expert on the topic compares it to an epidemic. As economic development spurs parents in developing countries to have fewer children and brings them access to sex determination technology, couples are making sure at least one of their children is a son. So many parents now select for boys that they have skewed the sex ratio at birth of the entire world. 

 

Sex selection did not arise on its own. Largely unknown until now is that the sex ratio imbalance is partly the work of a group of 1960s American activists and scientist who zealously backed the use of prenatal technologies in their haste to solve an earlier global problem. 

 

What does this mean for our future? The sex ratio imbalance has already led to a spike in sex trafficking and bride buying across Asia, and it may be linked to a recent rise in crime there as well. More far-reaching problems could be on the horizon: From ancient Rome to the American Wild West, historical excesses of men have yielded periods of violence and instability. Traveling to nine countries, Mara Hvistendahl has produced a stunning, impeccably researched book that examines not only the consequences of the misbegotten policies underlying sex selection but also the West's role in creating them.

The Malala-Malalai Connection

It's heartening to hear that the young Pakistani child, Malala Yousafzai, nearly killed by the Taliban for her advocacy of education for girls, is recovering and that arrests have been made in the case. Don't forget to send her a solidarity message here. The story of Malala Yousafzai wasn't new to me as I had been impressed by the New York Times video above around the time we were reading Stones into Schools. But the first book I thought of when I heard about this attack was one we read last spring, Malalai Joya's A Woman Among Warlords because of the obvious similarity between the these two activists courageous struggle for gender equality in the face of Taliban death threats. It turns out the two are linked by the a common namesake and that the younger girl holds Joya in high esteem. A reporter for the Christian Science Monitor reports,

The first time I met Malala, a couple of years ago, I asked her what her name signified. She answered: "Probably, a hero like the Afghan heroine Malalai [of Maiwand] or Malalai Joya. I want to be a social activist and an honest politician like her," she said, smiling. Ms. Joya, a 30-something activist, politician, and writer who was bitterly critical of both the Taliban and the Karzai regime, was at one point dubbed the bravest woman of Afghanistan.

Read Joya's response to the attack on Malala here. (Also, there's a documentary film version of A Woman Among Warlords in the works. You can support it here.) Finally, I've read through Malala's BBC diary excerpts which help us see this wartorn region with the moral clarity of childhood. I hope there's more writing where that came from, and that she will recover sufficiently to continue documenting and sharing her life, bringing inspiration to all of us.

Louise Erdrich, The Round House and the Violence Against Women Act

A few years back we enjoyed reading and discussing Louise Erdrich's Tracks. Her latest book The Round House, which has already been nominated for a National Book Award, looks like a book we may want to be talking about in the future,

One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe. In one day, Joe's life is irrevocably transformed. He tries to heal his mother, but she will not leave her bed and slips into an abyss of solitude. Increasingly alone, Joe finds himself thrust prematurely into an adult world for which he is ill prepared. 

While his father, who is a tribal judge, endeavors to wrest justice from a situation that defies his efforts, Joe becomes frustrated with the official investigation and sets out with his trusted friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, to get some answers of his own. Their quest takes them first to the Round House, a sacred space and place of worship for the Ojibwe. And this is only the beginning.

In this Chicago Tribune interview, Erdrich explains:

This is the first time I've written a book that was at once about human relationships, and yet very political, so I would encourage readers to look at the end. (An afterword discusses the 2010 Tribal Law and Order Act, which aims to reduce violence in tribal communities, and includes references to organizations working to advocate for Native American women.) When I started the book, I had the knowledge of this tremendously agonizing situation that is a truth on reservations, but as I wrote the book, it became an interior, psychological drama as I lived this boy's life. He was with me all the time.

When I heard about the book, I immediately thought of Amnesty International's 2007 report Maze of Injustice: Sexual Violence Against Indigenous Women in the USA and our work to pass the Tribal Law and Order Act. Untangling the jurisdictional 'maze' is an on-going process and will be helped by reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. Voice your support for VAWA here.  Read the whole Trib interview for more and Minnesota Public Radio and NPR also have great audio interviews with the author. I especially like this quote via NPR: "Revenge is a sorrow for the person who has to take it on. And the person who is rash enough to think it's going to help a situation is always wrong." I am really looking forward to reading this book for a deeper understanding of these issues.

Your Life for a Love Poem

Learn about landai, a two line poetic form (perfect for Twitter!) practiced by the women of Afghanistan and about the risks they take for the right to self-expression. Eliza Griswold (The Tenth Parallel, Wideawake Field) has a great piece about Afghan women's poetry in The New York Times Magazine, Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry,

Like most folk literature, landai can be sorrowful or bawdy. Imagine the Wife of Bath riding through the Himalayan foothills and uttering landai so ribald that they curled the toes of her fellow travelers. She might tease her rival: “Say hello to my sweetheart/If you are a farter [tizan, one who farts a lot], then I can fart louder than you.” She might make a cutting political joke: “Your black eyelashes are Israel/and my heart is Palestine under your attack.” She might utter an elegiac couplet: “My beloved gave his head for our country/I will sew his shroud with my hair.”

“A poem is a sword,” Saheera Sharif, Mirman Baheer’s founder, said. Sharif is not a poet but a member of Parliament from the province of Khost. Literature, she says, is a more effective battle for women’s rights than shouting at political rallies. “This is a different kind of struggle.”

There's more, including a slideshow, at the Pulitzer Center website. More in this form can be found collected in Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women's Poetry. Samples from the book here. Also of interest, there is a new collection of poetry by Taliban authors, Poetry of the Taliban. The editors were interviewed in The Atlantic recently, 

The average reader in the West probably regards the Taliban as being profoundly hostile to culture. How do we reconcile incidents like the destruction of the Buddha statues at Bamiyan with the outpouring of poetic sentiment documented in your book?

There is a difference between the formal pronouncements or edicts of the Taliban's leadership and the fighters on the ground. That is as true for the Taliban as it is true for the British Army. In our introduction we also note the contradiction between the formal edicts issued by Mullah  Mohammad Omar (banning most kinds of music) and his private consumption of those same songs that he had banned. This is to be expected. The Taliban are not a monolithic movement, with fixed and unchanging attitudes. In many ways, our difficulties understanding the movement say more about us than it does about the Taliban.

Sounds like what we need is an Afghan poetry slam.

For March: A Woman Among Warlords by Malalai Joya

For March, we have chosen A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice by Malalai Joya. Mark your calendars (March 18, 6:30 PM at Vroman's in Pasadena) for discussion of this inspiring young woman's life and Afghanistan's future,

Malalai Joya was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2010. An extraordinary young woman raised in the refugee camps of Iran and Pakistan, Joya became a teacher in secret girls’ schools, hiding her books under her burqa so the Taliban couldn’t find them; she helped establish a free medical clinic and orphanage in her impoverished home province of Farah; and at a constitutional assembly in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2003, she stood up and denounced her country’s powerful NATO-backed warlords. She was twenty-five years old. Two years later, she became the youngest person elected to Afghanistan’s new Parliament. In 2007, she was suspended from Parliament for her persistent criticism of the warlords and drug barons and their cronies. She has survived four assassination attempts to date, is accompanied at all times by armed guards, and sleeps only in safe houses. 

Joya takes us inside this massively important and insufficiently understood country, shows us the desperate day-to-day situations its remarkable people face at every turn, and recounts some of the many acts of rebellion that are helping to change it. A controversial political figure in one of the most dangerous places on earth, Malalai Joya is a hero for our times.

More on Honor Killing

As a supplement to our book this month, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen by Kwame Anthony Appiah, we have a few bonus links on 'honor killing' and the courageous women who campaign to end the practice:

The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting has a fresh collection of articles on Pakistani women who have received death threats from family members and who seek protection in shelters while they struggle to obtain justice through the legal system.

PBS Wide Angle has a documentary available, Contestant No. 2, for viewing on line about an Arab Israeli teenager whose life is threatened after she enters a beauty contest.

Hina Jilani and her sister Asma Jahangir, whose work on behalf of Pakistani women was described in the book, were recognized by the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights Speak Truth to Power Series. Another human rights defender honored by the RFK center is the very impressive Jordanian journalist/advocate, Rana Husseini.  She speaks about 'honor killing' in the Al Jazeera video below, along with Turkish sociologist, Yakin Erturk.



Part 2 of the interview here.

Shirt

How about starting off April's National Poetry Month with Robert Pinsky's homage to the seamstresses of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory (and garment workers everywhere), "Shirt."

Read the poem here.  More info and analysis here.  Another collection of Triangle Fire by poet Mary Fell here.

Audio of Pinksy reading the poem from the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition's Open Archive.

More on the Triangle Centennial

Time for a round-up of some of the coverage of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Centennial:

NPR's On the Media interviews David Von Drehle, author of Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, about the newspaper coverage of the fire and how he role of journalism in carrying forward the reforms the event spawned:



The New York Times has nice collection of stories related to the anniversary including a feature which will let you browse newspaper coverage from 1911.

You can watch last week's program from the New York Triangle Fire Centennial at the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition site.  The speakers start about 20 minutes in to Part 2.  They include Secretary of Labor (and my former Congresswoman) Hilda Solis, Senator Charles Schumer, Mayor Bloomberg, Danny Glover, assorted union leaders, a descendant of one of the victims of the fire and a firefighter salute.  As a fan of street theater, I loved the "shirtwaist" banners flying over the heads of the attendees.

WNYC also has a report on the memorial program and a number of other stories, many featuring descendants of those who were killed or survived the fire. My favorite is their audio archive collection which features sound clips of a survivor, a WPA dramatization of the fire from 1938, and excerpts from the 50th anniversary in 1961 where Eleanor Roosevelt and Secretary of Labor and fire eyewitness Frances Perkins spoke.

From the Fire

I can't resist sharing some more of the creative commemorations of Triangle Shirtwaist Fire centennial.  A choral piece called "From the Fire" has been commissioned and is premiering in New York this weekend. The New Yorker has the details and a little insight from the creators,

“In writing the music, I was thinking of crowd noises, the noise of family, the tenements, and the noise of the factory itself—everyone was packed so closely together—and then the sounds of the fire and the panic it caused.” [composter Elizabeth] Swados, who had worn a somewhat spacey expression while listening to her collaborators’ dialogue, became focused now that it was her turn to talk. “The pushing, crushing, and then the fire,” she went on. “How to do that, to convey that terrifying moment when the fire breaks out, vocally. There aren’t English words for it.

Promo video below. More music and photos at this tumblr: From the Fire
 

FROM THE FIRE - Promo from Jaime Lebrija on Vimeo.

The Chalk Project

Here at Rights Readers, home of Animals for the Ethical Treatment of People, we are always excited about good street theater. I'm sure a few of our Loyal Readers remember the Pasadena Posada tradition of chalking the names of loved ones who had died of AIDS on the steps of Pasadena City Hall.  Here's a similar commemoration of the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City which happened 100 years ago today. What a creative way to remind everyone about the real people behind this tragedy! More info here.  See my earlier post about the fire here.

March Centennials: Women's Day and the Triangle Fire

This March 8, we celebrate the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day.  For more on the history of this day honoring women see this timeline.  I've had labor unions on the brain, and was trying to think if we had read any books about unions and labor rights in the past and of course what immediately came to mind was David Von Drehle's Triangle: The Fire That Changed America which tells the story of the fire that took 146 lives, mostly of young immigrant women workers, and galvanized a movement for social justice.  As it happens, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire also happened in 1911, the same year, in fact just a week after, the first Women's Day. Learning more about the Triangle fire and the labor and women's rights movement associated with it, would be a great way to remember Women's Day this year.

As part of the commemoration of the Triangle tragedy, two documentaries about the fire are worth checking out.  The LAT recommends you watch both.  PBS American Experience offers Triangle Fire which has already aired and can be viewed online (or via Netflix streaming). Author David Von Drehle appears in the film. The PBS website features a map, photo gallery, biographies and other primary resources great for teachers and an excellent list of web resources for more information. (This Cornell site and Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition are especially worthy of exploration).  HBO's documentary is airing later this month. Here's the trailer:



Don't forget to check in with Amnesty's Human Rights Now blog this week for action suggestions to honor International Women's Day and visit the IWD website to learn more about other events celebrating the day.