Makini Boothe,
"A Reunion of "Sisters": Personal Reflections on Diaspora and Women in Activist Discourse"
(page 5 of 6)
Attempting to Make Sense of It All: Liminality
One of the best things that happened at the institute was the chance
to interrogate, on a personal level, the validity of using "diaspora"
and "women" as categories of analysis. I decided to explore the diverse
experiences of African-American woman. I did this by designing a tableau
about African-Americans in a magazine produced by the participants.
Everyone else contributed written stories that related experiences in
their home country to a topic discussed during the training institute,
but I chose collage as a creative alternative.
At first glance, the collage is a tableau at the center of which is a
quote from African-American artist Kara Walker: "MANY BLACK WOMEN LIVE
IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. THEY LIVE THERE NOW STILL. MANY BLACK
WOMEN VISIT OTHER COUNTRIES TO SHOW PEOPLE IN THOSE OTHER COUNTRIES HOW
BLACK WOMEN SURVIVE."[3]
Close inspection of the collage reveals a border
composed of statistics about black women in America, including the
finding that thirty-five percent of African-American women between ages
eighteen and twenty-four go to college and that African-American women
make up sixty-six percent of all AIDS diagnoses in 2006.[4]
My goal here
was to highlight the inequalities—and diversity—of African-American
women, with the statistics revealing the range of experiences inherent
in this single group of people. I also wanted to use Walker's quote and
the statistics to hint at the overall history and experiences of
African-American women.
Along with these goals, I wanted to discuss the relationship between
African-American women and Africa. Beneath Walker's powerful quote is a
watermark of a slave ship. The barely detectable slave ship symbolizes
the ever-present impact of history on our current reality. Although
slavery has ended, many of the social-economic injustices in existence
today have roots in slavery. Toward the bottom of the collage, I
included the definitions for "diaspora" and "liminality," the latter of
which references the dual spaces occupied by U.S. women of African
descent as both "African" and "American." My goal with all of this was
to initiate a discussion about the diversity among African-American
women. Although African-American women belong to both categories
("diaspora" and "women"), some have access to higher education, and some
do not; some receive adequate medical treatment, and some do not. In
many ways, Walker's quote about survival subverts the disempowered
notions communicated by some of the statistics.
Sauti Yetu: Our Voices
I was not the only participant who recognized the limitations of the
institute—and, by extension, many institutional activist endeavors. A
group of us felt the need to exploit the opportunity of having been
brought together to mobilize other activists. Informal discussions held
during social time revealed that some fellow participants and I wanted
to capitalize on our experience by arming ourselves with greater
awareness and critiques of our experiences. Some of us decided to form
an activist exchange network that focuses on connecting young women
activists of African descent from around the world. We are committed to
recognizing the diversities inherent in the experience of women within
both Africa and the diaspora. Our aim is to sponsor an activist from the
continent and another from somewhere in the diaspora on a six-month
exchange program, during which they participate in activist efforts on
the ground. We have tentatively chosen the name Sauti Yetu, meaning "Our
Voice" in Swahili, to represent both the group itself and the individual
communities comprising that group.[5]
Our aim is to "engage young activists of African origin through an
exchange program to increase their understanding of Africa and the
diaspora and to stimulate them to find intercultural responses to the
cultural, social, economic, and political challenges of Africa and the
African diaspora." Inherent in our mission statement is the recognition
of the multiple diversities that exist both on the continent and within
the diaspora. By capitalizing on this diversity, we hope to ensure that
participants are continually critiquing constructions, such as diaspora.
This exchange network relies on the idea that we must learn from each
other.
Our intention is to subvert the disempowered assumptions often
affixed to communities of African descent on the continent and
throughout the diaspora. Kim Butler speaks about this very effort:
"Traditionally, diasporas have been viewed as disempowered because they
typically lack the resources (particularly economic and military) of
formal states. It has therefore been easy to establish their
disempowerment as normative. Nonetheless, transnational formulations are
clearly capable of overpowering the national insofar as they are able to
mobilize necessary resources . . ." (213). The disempowered narrative that
Butler references is based on assumptions that the diaspora is connected
through experiences of shared oppression. However, the entire aim of
Sauti Yetu is to recognize that, despite global economic disparities and
diverse experiences, we can all contribute to the amelioration of global
society if we free ourselves from making false assumptions and commit to
the process of learning and investigation.
To address issues of the homogenization of women, we hope to connect
the participants with various community-based women's rights
organizations. They will meet empowered women contributing to the
betterment of their own lives and to the health of their communities.
The focus is on learning from rather than on saving the "disempowered."
It is worth mentioning that the concept of empowerment did not figure
into our discussions because this term connotes a particular power
dynamic, rather than a relationship based upon collaboration.
The Sauti Yetu board communicates via e-mail and arranges Skype
conference calls to discuss the development of the initiative to date.
These virtual conferences have to contend with the challenges of
Internet access, time zone, and language differences—among us, we claim
English, French, Portuguese, and Swahili as mother tongues, and we
represent varying degrees of English proficiency. Our initiative
represents an emerging movement of the twenty-first century described as
"technology-enabled activism," which, as the name suggests, uses
technology as a tool for generating social justice.
A substantial amount of research has gone into documenting the
development of technology, particularly that of mobile phones, for
activist purposes on the African continent. Herman Wasserman of the
Department of Journalism at South Africa's University of Stellenbosch
has argued that the Internet can establish links between similar groups
around the world in an effort to build networks of solidarity: "Not only
do these new media technologies facilitate formal political
participation (so-called "e-governance"), but they also provide the
means for social movements, activists groups, or minority groups to
engage with these processes on a global level . . ." (4). Technology-based
activism, as demonstrated by Sauti Yetu, continues to effectively
connect people in a manner unimaginable even a decade ago. Still, large
segments of the global population remain marginalized by lack of access
to technology. Though this does not totally exclude them from working to
improve the conditions of their communities, the further development of
and accessibility to technology will extend a role to groups otherwise
disconnected from each other. In the interim, it is the role of
organizations like Sauti Yetu to be conscious of its relative privilege
and to work toward giving marginalized groups a voice at the global
level.
Perhaps the greatest testament to our aim to subvert the narrative of
disempowerment is an examination of the people who make up the exchange
network. Our members are often grouped in the category of "disempowered"
by virtue of both our African origins and our gender. The very fact that
we have put this organization in motion, however, disrupts any
presumptions of our powerlessness and positions us as agents of
change.
Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Next page
|