Don't You Ever Stop Talking

It is not me

2010-08-19T12:55:00.000-07:00

I have just received a call from a friend that my e-mail has been broken into and a message is going around that I need money to be sent immediately to Nigeria. Please ignore all messages. I cannot get into my e-mail to change things yet but I am trying. If you read this and know any of my friends, please help spread the word of this. thank, Joan

Old Friends on Bondi Beach, July 2010, But First, Uluru

2010-08-03T23:22:00.000-07:00

First let me explain the first image in my last post as one of my readers has requested. That is Uluru at sunset. Uluru is the world's largest free standing monolith and a sacred site of the Anangu people of the central Australian desert. Here in la mia nuovia lingua is a welcome by Nellie Paterson, a leader of the Anangu. "Questa 'e terra degli Aborigini e voi siete i benvenuti. Guardatevi intorno ed imparate, in modo da capire gli Aborigeni e che la cultura aborigena 'e forte e viva." This is the land of the Aborigines and you are welcome. Look around and learn so that you will understand the Aborigines and that Aboriginal culture is strong and alive."

Uluru rises from the flatness of the vast desert, 400 K from Alice Springs. Our friends, Dawn and Linda and La Professoressa walked around its base, the respectful way to take in this monumental being, a procession of 8 miles. I could only do four but I was grateful to be at its base looking up at its caves and the dream-time stories imprinted on its rock face.

I have been trying to work on the long piece about Elliot, my brother. I am spending more time at home, and I have the feeling that I must do some things. As I worked over the first draft, two insights came to me about what I had learned from my life, two failings that at least I can now claim as wrested knowledge. First, is that I have been careless in my life, careless of others and the second closely connected insight is that I indulged my over whelming need to protect myself as soon as I was old enough to be able to do that. I thought I could escape the rawness of my childhood by putting my emotional safety before all other things. You know, I do not know who is reading this, a strange way to break open one's 70 year old heart, but the pressure of life's changes compels me to make this offering.

New York Buddies Below the Equator, July 2010

2010-07-29T03:32:00.000-07:00

Dawn and Linda, whom I have known for over 35 years, carrying our New York history, walking down the main street of Alice Springs, in the red center, il centro rosso, of this land. From Columbus Avenue in Manhattan to the Todd River bed, usually the dry avenue of aboriginal families making their way of out their desert communities into the bustle of Alice, but now running with renewed waters--a rare sight. but even rarer for me was the wonder of my two old friends, comrades for so long, within arm's reach. I have accepted, I think, that I may never see old friends again, that the distance is too great, the travel too demanding, too expensive, that even in this modern world, the change of continents, of generations, of physical health, makes a difference. To stand with Dawn and Linda along the flanks of Uluru, the sacred monolith of ancient and present peoples, on a rainy evening, just the four of us alone with the curves, the valleys, the hidden routes of this breathing being of red stone, was wonder entire. For many years, we had walked under the glowing skyscrapers, the neon monoliths of Times Square, together, and now, in my 70th year, our women's friendship encircled the world.

La Professoressa With Her Rooster

2010-07-01T01:45:00.000-07:00

First may I send my love to Stephanie and Lepa for their constant friendship that knows no barriers, except at times my own laziness. And to the seven other followers, thank you.

Now while I moan about my aching bones, La Professoressa goes about touching up our home, here seen putting up three wild duck sculptures that I bought for her almost ten years ago. And she is wearing her carpenter's belt, known fondly here as "The Rooster." I get a special thrill when I see her wearing leather, as some of you might know, and so once a year, she girds her loins. La Professoressa is 12 years younger then me and is often the day to my nights. Amidst all the sad certainties of so many national policies, amidst my anger and sorrow and restless knowing that the power to inflict and control and decide for others must be interrupted, moments of desire seize me, moments of life that lie in the bend of a neck or the curve of an arm, in the wonder of La Professoressa saying, I love you, darling and then turning back to her 80 students' essay waiting to be read.

In two days time, our friends from New York will walk into our arms. Dawn and Linda, my upper West Side buddies. This will keep me going.

La Mia Amica, Patrizia con Eleanor Roosevelt

2010-06-23T04:07:00.000-07:00

Every week for almost a year, my dear friend Patrizia and I have been attending Italian classes at the Center for Italian Studies here in Carlton. She now far surpasses me in her mastery of the language but I am so grateful for this opportunity to parlare, leggere e ascoltare to this lingua bella. At this time in my life, when my body is so uncomfortable, I stand on new strade, ascolto nouve canziones--the songs of Gino Pauli, full of the sea and the salt of you as he sang so many years ago. And always the voice of that soon to be human wooden thing, "un semplice pezzo di legno" that would turn into the voice of possibility--"Non farmi male!" if only loved. Do not hurt me, the voice of the people of so many nations, the voice of so many whose bodies long for the cessation of pain, for the fullness of the belly, for the bounty of water. Le ossa mi fanno male, my bones hurt, my friends. Non farmi male for us all. No more hurt.

Their Deaths, Our Lives

2010-06-17T02:44:00.000-07:00

Furkan Dogan, 19, in his senior year at Kayseri High School; he hoped to become a doctor.

Cengiz Akyuz, 41, married, three children aged 14, 12 and 9.

Cengiz Songur, 47, six daughters, one son

Fahri Yaldiz, 43, firefighter, married with four sons

Cetin Topcuoglu, 54, former amateur soccer player and Taekwondo champion, married, one son. His wife, Cigden Topcuoglu, was also on board. She survived.

Cevdet Kiliclar, 38, reporter, webmaster for Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH). Married, one daughter, one son

Ali Haydar Bengi, 39, ran a telephone repair shop, degree Arabic Literature, married, four children, ages 15, 10, twins, 5.

Ibrahim Bilgen, 61, electrical engineer, member of the Chamber of Electrical Engineers of Turkey, political candidate. Married, 6 children.

Necedet Yildirim, 32, an IHH aid, married, one daughter, aged 3, photo to follow.

On June 3, 2010, I received these images and information about the men killed on the Mavi Marmara. Occupations depend on creating a faceless opposition. In that night, these are the ones who lost all, in an attempt to change a brutal national policy. 30 children had their worlds shattered in international waters by the children of a people who know what it means to come home to empty homes, to have only photographs to look at of those murdered because a Sate decreed they were no longer worthy of living. Was this what it took for Israel to relent on its blockade of Gaza, to finally understand that not all the public relations campaigns, all the scripted responses, the memorized falsities, the declarations that this is what good Jews should say when confronted with bad press, will make these faces and all the rest of the Palestinian disappeared, go away. Their stories will be told, in the novels pouring out of the Palestinian imagination, by exiled poets and on the stages of the world. Like the tellings of another time--in the saddest of historical ironies, in the saddest loss, or refusal, of historical knowledge. How many more times will our human hearts fail each other.

Words from Daniel for my 70th birthday

2010-06-10T04:18:00.000-07:00

It is three weeks ago now that we celebrated my 70th birthday. I want to share with you what my friend Daniel wrote for the occasion--my 31 year old friend. Many years ago now, I co-edited a book with John Preston called "Sister and Brother: Lesbians and Gay Men Talk about Their Lives Together." John died from AIDS before he saw the finished book which was not a success then back in 1995. Neither many lesbians or gay men bought the book, each I imagine thinking the other was other. I dedicate these words, Daniel's words about our life together, to the memory of John.

Joan

This is your birthday, so this is my love letter for you.

I first met Joan when I was writing my PhD at the University of Melbourne.
She had come from New York, a stranger to the city.
I too had come from far away and our connection was instant: two strange shapes that felt out of place but drawn together through our queer sense of the world.

Of course, I had first met Joan through her writing. Eve Sedgwick introduced me to Joan through the pages of "Epistemology of the Closet."
In this book, Sedgwick calls out Joan's name and the other courageous pro-sex survivors of the sex wars as pioneers. These writers, say Sedgwick, challenged feminist orthodoxies of the time which pitted lesbians and gay men against one another. For Sedgwick writing in 1990, these challenges themselves "led to a refreshed sense that lesbians and gay men share important though contested aspects of one another's histories, cultures, identities, politics and destinies." (37)

Although it may sound too grand to say in this public place, in the privacy of our relationship I know that I have been privileged to experience that sharing, that intersection and that mutual implication with Joan in a profound and personal way.

That sharing, that intersection, that mutual implication. When Joan would read my dissertation drafts she would always say, "why do you always write in threes?" From the start Joan could always read my rhythm. I want to say that it's kind of like that old Bette Midler song from "Beaches," I know you by heart, because our friendship is just about as camp and as dorky as that.

Ever since our first meeting at the restaurant when I went fumbling through your clothes looking for you lost ear-ring while the English Department sat around us lunching to our endless obsession with pyjama parties--we have fun. She makes me feel young again.

In our current writing project, we have been reflecting on intergenerational perspective on queer archiving. And perhaps it wasn't until I had been to New York to visit the ephemera files, the books, banners, posters, badges and spunky dyke volunteers who worked at the Herstory Archives that I really understood Joan's Australia. For Joan, those archives were her compass--here Joan has had a chance to look at life from different eyes, out of space, out of time. And at times this reorientation has been scary but it has let Joan see life from a wholly different side. Joan is often wont to say that I introduced her to the language of post-structuralism, to queer theory and Foucalt--but it has been an honour of my life to constantly bring Joan back to the fact that her work, as Sedgwick makes clear, has helped lay the foundations of queer studies today. As her friends we have all helped her reorient herself to her histories, to herself, in this new land. And I have seen how Joan's relationship with Di here in this beautiful home they have created has inspired Joan to paint life across a new canvas and to find new languages for her life in this vivid, different world.

And we are all here today because Joan has captured our hearts. The way her eyes glisten when she smiles, so full of such a celebration of life and its pleasures. The way her jaw changes position beneath her soft cheeks as she rails against war, oppression and violence. Joan is like a power source. Knowing her, we know how she organized all those lesbians across New York City to get the Archives happening. She can hustle and she can schmooze and she can carouse. And she can certainly make me swoon.

During my PhD years, Joan and Di did the bureaucratic dance of visas and immigration and when the bureaucrats weren't smiling on Joan's application to remain here I remember doing the gentlemanly thing and offering my hand. As it turns out, she turned me down, but she did it so tenderly.

In a world of managerial universities, Joan has been a true academic mentor. She has nurtured me and kept believing in me and it is only now that I have an academic job that I can look back on all those years of uncertainty with a real and deep appreciation for her love and encouragement. People all over the world can tell stories about how you have inspired and driven them and on behalf of all those people who can't be here today, I want to say thank you.

Joan is a friend in both the summer and the winter, embracing the pleasure and facing life's hardness. Through our more recent times in hospitals you have been a rock. Who knew that sudoku and the letters of Rosa Luxemburg could get you through the eye of the storm? Thank you Joan--you have a gift for making a path out of the debris.

When Joan prepares for a public speaking engagement, she will spend weeks collecting clippings and fragments from here and there to rustle through and read from. A narrative emerges from the constituent parts, so, to close, I have two:

from Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"
"What it it then between us?
What is the count of scores or hundreds of years between us?
Whatever it is, it avails not--distance avails not, and place avails not,
I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine
I too walked the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it,
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me..."

Second, this is from a 1995 song by Chris Knox:

Seems like you and me are stuck together
Feels like we've never been apart
Seems like you are my skin of supple leather
Feels like your blood pumps through my heart

Seems like you and me are one another
Feels like we couldn't be un-joined
Seems like I am your sister, you're my brother
Feels like a phrase yet to be coined

Seems like I am to you a vital organ
Feels like you are to me the air
Seems like without your night I'd have no morning
Feels like you'll always want me there

It we should ever be untethered
If somehow we should end
If we could not go on together
Apart you'd be my good and trusting friend.

Happy Birthday, Joanie

Our June Vigil--We are All Gazans Now

2010-06-06T22:01:00.000-07:00

Emily Henochowicz, 21, art student from New York was hit directly in the face with a tear gas cannister at the Qalandiyah checkpoint. Here a Palestinian woman calls for help.

Standing in the rain and tumult of Israel's national failure

Hargit, Geraldine, Hinde, Jean, Sivan, Esme, Alex, Sandra, Hellen, Joan, Di

From Haifa to Melbourne,

Statement of Isha L'Isha

We the women of Isha L'Isha-Haifa Feminist Center express deep shock at the continuing and deteriorating consequences of the siege of Gaza. We express solidarity with women peace activists who acted to break the inhuman siege on women, children and men; a siege that has been preventing basic human freedoms, health services and essential materials.

We extend our support to our sisters in the feminist movement, especially those who went out to exercise their right to protest against an outrageous injustice and found themselves facing a military attack that was a result of a violent state policy.

We call on women and men in Israeli society to resist the attack on the most basic human values, and to join our call--the attack on the peace flotilla is an attack on me. The siege on Gaza endangers us all. Isha L'Isha--Haifa Feminist Center is a multi-cultural feminist collective established in 1983. Our aim is to bring about social change by promoting values of equal rights and equal opportunities for all women; bring about social change by promoting values of equal rights and equal opportunities for all women; eradicating discrimination, violence and oppression of women; and fostering solidarity among women.

http://www.isha.org/

From Melbourne to Haifa, to Gaza

On Tuesday night, Students for Palestine called for a mass rally against the Israeli commando raid on the flotilla of aid ships that killed, we think, there may be more, 9 men and wounded many more. I received a call that afternoon asking if I would be willing to speak on behalf of Women in Black, but there was a deeper reason. I would be the only Jewish voice and this is why I said yes, half hoping they would not need me. Daniel was waiting for me on the corner of Elizabeth and Bourke Streets, the closed-to- traffic- main street, where only trams are allowed, bringing their passengers to the two largest department stores of Melbourne, Meyers, and David Jones. Leaning on his arm, I walked past the sight of our monthly vigil, the night sky heavy with clouds towards the already large crowd spilling over into the roadway. I had folded in my pocket a copy of my blog writing prior to this one and a letter I had sent that morning to The Age, Melbourne's largest newspaper. Somehow I knew I would not read from a page if I was to speak. The moment, the pain, the anger was too large for premeditated words. Kim, one of the the organizers, quickly found me and said, yes, I would be speaking and I should stay near the sound truck. Hellen and Sandra, Women in Black friends, joined me and I saw Sivan further back in the crowd and Sol as well from the Australian Jewish Democratic Society. I listened to all those who came before, to the young Palestinian woman just returned from visiting her family on the West Bank, her pain and rage at what she had witnessed filling the night air,to leaders of the Palestinian and Turkish communities in Melbourne to a Green politician to a Maritime Union official to an elderly Imam, and I thought, how can I do this, how can I put my Jewish self with my American voice in this justified mix of rage and hurt. How would I not be the enemy. And then I was the next speaker, and I moved close to the center where I could see the faces all around me and I thought how did I get here, I am 70 years old, recovering from cancer surgery, standing yet again in another street with banners and chants, standing like I stood on broad Washington D.C. avenues;on Park Avenue in New York in front of embassies; in front of swanky East Side hotels hosting Nixon or Reagan or Bush; squeezed into Dag Hammarskjold plaza across from the U.N.; standing in Brown's Chapel in Selma, Alabama getting ready to march to Montgomery, how did I get here in such a far away place in such a time of life--and then I saw the dead men and thousands of Palestinian people whose lives have disappeared, names never printed in our newspapers--just the words, "Four Palestinians shot dead by Israeli Defence forces." I thought of all the Jewish people of conscience I know here, in Israel, in New York, all over the world, who stood beside me. I have never felt so naked, so small as in the moment the microphone was put into my hand. All around me were young Palestinian women and men and in the distance I could see families and older people. I cannot tell you exactly what I said, I know the first words that came out were, "I am just a body.." and "tonight we know the failure of history, that what had happened on that boat and every day at check points and house evictions was not what the Holocaust had taught my Jewish heart." I threw into the night air the Yiddish word shanda, I know I spoke as a Jewish woman, for all the women in the international movement known as women in black, I know I said we have to question the certainties of all nationalisms, I know I spoke of my, our, Jewish solidarity with the suffering of the Palestinians. All the time the faces looking back at me, lips forming the word shanda. And then it was over, for me. As I made my way back to Daniel, the young Palestinian woman who had spoken earlier came over and said she remembered me from another demonstration and it was good to see me again. Several older women wearing head scarves came to me. "Are you the woman who just spoke? Yes. One of the women hugged me and said thank you, it means so much that you took the risk to speak. Our heads rested together for a few seconds, my bare gray curls against the black fabric of her head cover.

Daniel, my dear young friend, again offered me his arm so I could begin my journey back to West Brunswick. I was the smallest moment in this evening I have described, but for me once again I encountered that huge moment of human generosity--the refusal of easy hatreds.

New Book: "Shifting Sands: Jewish Women Confront the Israeli Occupation," edited by Osie Adelfang, an anthology of women writing about the Middle East, with a preface by Amira Hass and a forward by Cindy Sheehan including writing by Starhawk, Anna Baltzer, Alice Rothchild, Sandra Butler and Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein. Can be found at Amazon.com

"Urgent, we have threat from Israel"

2010-05-31T02:58:00.000-07:00

In the darkness of night, seventy miles out to sea, in the international waters beyond Israel, 19 people were shot to death by elegantly armed Israeli soldiers. Perhaps Israel hoped the night would shroud the horror of their young people's actions--give them guns, give them nationalistic fervor, give them heavy doses of Israel's exceptionalism and turn them loose on the "enemy." I am writing words in shock, in despair, in rage--I am taking in the shouts of pain and disbelief from my peace activist comrades around the world, including Israel. We can reach each other, but we cannot stop a nation gone mad and all the others who empower the killers--the American government who pours money into the military coffers of Israel--paying for those helicopters from which the young people lowered them selves onto the boats, paying for those state of the art commando uniforms, the guns which they turned on those marked only as the enemies of the Jewish state. I want to say I love you, all who tonight sit at their screens, as I do, reaching out, so we are not alone with the horror of witness only, we recommit to honoring human life, to honoring each one who died in the darkness of the night, amidst a cargo of hope. We do not know the names or countries of those who have died--that will come in the morning light. We do not know if Hedy survived or did Israeli bullets do what the concentration camps could not. Again, as I have always written, I write from a Jewish heart, Israel is my concern, my burden, my shame--and activism in the face of the brutalities of a mad State is my Jewish heritage.

From on the boats in the flotilla:

Lubna: Greta urgent we have threat from Israel
Greta: Lubna. What is happening?
Lubna: two Israeli ships coming toward us
Greta: Please try to stay on this so I can tweet it
Lubna: they contact the ship asked who we are and dissappeared now they getting close to the ship we can see them stay here 3 boats coming not two 3Israeli boats we are 78 mile from Israel
Greta: I'll keep writing
Lubna: people here their life jackets every body peppering here
Greta: ok. You are the lifeline to our Twitter account.
Lubna: we may loose the wireless, we didn't expect them now, we thought they will arrive at the morning. Please stay in touch with the other boats.
Sent at 10:50 PM on Sunday
Greta : We can't reach anyone
Sent at 10:52 PM on Sunday

Today, I just received word that Hedy Epstein was not on any of the flotilla boats; she is in Cyprus, waiting for another flotilla.
Greta: Where are you? Are you there?

2010-05-13T03:16:00.000-07:00

This old fellow, blind, now sleeps in his front yard, wrapped against the early winter chill. Cello and I walk pass him quite regularly these days and he raises his head to greet what he cannot see. "A good old dog," his owner told me one day. "A wonderful friend to our family." Now he rests where he can do no damage. I have grown more and more aware of how badly animals have fared in our human world--dragged, prodded, pulled, against their will, our constant battering at their dignity. It is all connected, isn't it--arrogant States and arrogant corporations and blinded armies, assumed gender and racial superiorities, all tied to our certainty of the power and right of our will. I wish this old fellow a good journey, he is loved and safe and one day he will be gone from his patch. I honor him.

A Body in Time

2010-05-11T04:59:00.001-07:00

Cello and the doorbell all going off at once. I open the door and there is a carefully wrapped package from Florida, USA, left on the veranda by the postman whose orange- clad back I can just barely see as his motorbike scoots onto Dawson Street. A gift for me on the eve of my 70th birthday from an old friend, an old lover. I sit, my back aching from my recent surgery, unwrap Skeezy's gift: an old boxed set of Replique, the perfume I wore as a young femme on the lower East Side of New York.

Dear Joan 4-29-10

So many years, so many accomplishments, so many memories. Yet we are still here, still talking, and still caring. You are as young to me on your 70th as you were on your 20th.

Enjoy this piece of your past that my senses will never forget and--have a very Happy Birthday.

As ever, Skeezy

Skeezy--now a grandmother several times over, and I learn over and over that the body leaves its touchings long into the time of our lives; thank you, old friend, for carrying that young woman and her perfume back to me.

Morning Light

2010-05-08T16:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, after a night of rare rain, the garden was touched by the magnificence of early morning light. That path of old stones is the work of La Professoressa, who between reading student papers, writing her essays and looking after Cello and me, shapes her native garden. Yesterday, I received word of the death of Rhonda Copelon, a feminist teacher and activist long associated with the Queens College Law School, the pioneering law center that I watched grow into being as I taught all those years. I have no easy words for these deaths, of comrades, of colleagues, sometimes even of adversaries. It is the human way, but oh so hard. And so the light, a needed simple splendor.

Archives Never Leave Me

2010-05-05T22:26:00.000-07:00

As many of you know, I have lived with archives most of my life. Now in my Australian home,

I once again put up the shelves to give a home to the writers, thinkers, who give me life. This rich vision of history,

touch, story telling never sits quietly. An archives never does, always making present something we name the past. Here, also, I am using my archival passions to preserve the history of Melbourne's Women in Black Community that has been standing vigil for peace in the Middle East since 1988 and so I present you these images of two documents--a poster announcing the 1989 vigil and an 1991 issue of the Australian Jewish Democrat newsletter with an article by Marg Jacobs about why she rises early on Saturday mornings to get to downtown to join the vigil. Many histories cross in these documents--women's Australian history, Lesbian history since several of the women in Women in Black in the past and now are gay women, the history of resistance, Jewish and otherwise, the history of the Australian Jewish left. Documents irrepressible in their aging declarations, documents that now move into a digital age but carry with them an old tenacity, the struggle to do better.

Our May Vigil and a New York Comrade, Harry Weider

2010-05-03T02:03:00.001-07:00

Harry Wieder, always concerned with making power do more for those whose dignity was under daily assault

Our Women in Black May Vigil in the streets of Melbourne

Here we are, Sivan, Hellen, Hinde, Sandra, Sue, Esme, myself, and once again, Hagrid from Hebron, in her red jumper, intensely engaging in discussion with a young Palestinian-Australian man. After, we always have coffee and talk, plan more actions, find out what other struggles we are involved in. At the table you see us all reading a petition against the Northern Territory Intervention Act and its racist implications. All of this, this swirl of street life, of passionate engagements, of my comrades' beautiful faces, of Hagrid looking up at me, saying she is in exile from her own tribe because of her peace work in Israel, standing vigil at check points to try to limit the soldiers' arrogance--I am in exile she says and I hold her and say that no, we will make another country of the heart, for all the Jews who are painted as the enemy by our own people, for all the Jews on hate lists and black listed from jobs and podiums, another country of the heart and conscience. With rising European anti-Semitism and rising Israeli right wing nationalism, we will hold each other close and never fall silent in the face of another people's tragedies.

You know I am far from the streets of New York but from time to time the New York Times brings me news that takes me back to the gay activist days of the 70s and 80s and the dear people who struggled in the streets and in the city council hearing rooms to gain civic respect for gay people and others. Sadly, because it marked his death, I once again saw the face of Harry Weider, a small man with a large forehead, a fierce heart and an irrepressible commitment to justice in life or as the Times said, "a gay, Jewish, nearly deaf and otherwise disabled dwarf from Queens." Harry and I often ran into each other at demonstrations or at planning meetings. I remember him sitting at the archives table one afternoon as we talked about the state of gay social struggle. He often offered me a drive home from actions. "The only child of Holocaust survivors," Harry pushed and pulled others to pay attention. He was coming from a community meeting, the Times went on to tell me, when he was hit by a taxi in mid street. Charlotte Weider, his 86-year-old mother, said "In spite of my very strong feeling to protect him,I could not hold back his good." Hold back his good. Dear dear Harry. You gave New York your life.

A Week Before

2010-04-29T21:33:00.000-07:00

Here we are Cello and I and our friend Jaquie getting us in her sights, in front of the Port Phillip Bay down St. Kilda way. What I wish for all, the sun, the sea, no hunger, a warm presence pressed against my side, his life touching mine. A week later, I was back having cancer surgery far from the sun and the sea. Thank you all who have written and those who have reached me in so many ways. I am mending now--should be able to do our monthly Women in Black vigil on Saturday. I will go to rest now. Kisses for those who would want them.

No Words for a While

2010-04-21T18:37:00.000-07:00

Our international Women in Black community was saddened to hear of the death of Biljana Kovacevic-Vuco on April 20 in Belgrade. "During her long career as a peace movement and human rights activist, Biljana was the founder of the Human Rights Council of the Center for Antiwar Action in Belgrade and the head of the SOS helpline for the victims of political,ethnic and workplace discrimination." I think of Lepa and of all the women of the Belgrade community and know they have lost a dear dear comrade. We all have.

I will be quiet for a while. As soon as I finish this post, we are off the the Royal Women's Hospital for my surgery. I want to leave you with a place to go for the finest writing I have read growing out of the what is happening in Palestine Israel now--it is the journal writing of Jane Toby, an American woman from the Hudson Valley Women in Black community. Find her at http:://hudsontowestbank.blogspot.com/ You will not let her go.

Also look to our womeninblack.org.au website

Thank you for your words, your thinking, your caring
Joan

Again But I am One of the Lucky Ones

2010-04-18T22:33:00.001-07:00

Dear Friends, and even those who think I am an enemy of the State of Israel, I just received the news that I have uterine cancer. Once again an embarrassed doctor who was convinced all was alright until the cellular drama was caught on that other small screen, the pathology slide. I almost laughed, how many more cancers can a girl have--colon,breast and now my underused uterus. We are in the midst of planning my 70th year celebration, my poor Professeressa, she too must enter into the fray once again. This is the glory of life, celebration and wearing down. Cello could not be denied his afternoon walk, not on this walk pictured here--this is my New York walk in Riverside Drive where I and my dog friends, first Denver and then Perry, walked every day of every season, amidst the autumnal oaks, and Spring cherry blossoms and sometimes my old pal, Liz Kennedy, walked with me as she took in the antics of every creature. Cello and I walked in a different terrain and as we did, I thought I am one of the lucky ones. Already my doctor has made an appointment for me with the "specialist" at the Royal Women's Hospital. I thought again of all the cancer patients that get stopped at the borders, that can't reach help, those whose countries have never been able to find a way to get care to all who need it and I thought, we need Cancer without Borders, we need every cancer patient who has been lucky enough to get treatment to march on the governments of the world--starting first with those who purposely make the road to treatment almost impossible--in the name of State restrictions. Open the check points for people needing treatment. Israel with some of the finest hospitals in the world, with doctors who, as David Brooks and Thomas Friedman love to tell us, are the great entrepreneurs of the medical world, just on the other side of the militarized check point, open the check points and let the cancer patients through. A beginning. Cancer without Borders, care without borders. I am one of the lucky ones.

2010-04-15T02:13:00.000-07:00

Here, our April Women in Black vigil: Sue, Hellen, Geraldine, La Professoressa, a visitor from Haifa and myself. Judith Butler, an old friend, speaks to the University of Berkeley Student Senate about divestment:

The first thing I want to say is that there is hardly a Jewish dinner table left in this country [USA]--or indeed in Europe and much of Israel--in which there is not enormous disagreement about the status of occupation, Israeli military aggression and the future of Zionism, binationalism and citizenship in the lands called Israel and Palestine. There is no one Jewish voice, and in recent years, there are increasing differences among us, as is evident by the multiplication of Jewish groups that oppose the occupation and which actively criticize and oppose Israeli military policy and aggression. ..

Of course, we could argue on what political forms Israel and Palestine must take in order for international law to be honored. But that is not the question that is before you this evening. We have lots of time to consider that question, and I invite you to join me to do that in a clear-minded way in the future. But consider this closely: the bill you have before you does not ask that you take a view on Israel. I know that it certainly seems like it does, since the discussion has been all about that. But it actually makes two points that are crucial to consider. The first is simply this: there are two companies that not only are invested in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and peoples, but who profit from that occupation, and which are sustained in part by funds invested by the University of California. They are General Electric and United Technologies. They produce aircraft designed to bomb and kill, and they have bombed and killed civilians, as has been amply demonstrated by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. You are being asked to divest funds from these two companies. You are NOT being asked to divest funds from every company that does business with Israel. And you are not being asked to resolve to divest funds from Israeli business or citizens on the basis of their citizenship or national belonging. You are being asked only to call for divestment from specific companies that make military weapons that kill civilians. That is the bottom line....

Lastly, let me say this. You may feel fear in voting for this resolution. I was frightened coming here this evening. You may fear that you will seem anti-Semitic....To struggle against fear in the name of social justice is part of a long and venerable Jewish tradition;it is non-nationalist, that is true, and it is committed not just to my freedom, but to all of our freedoms, So let us remember that there is no one Jew, not even one Israel, and that those who say that there are seek to intimidate or contain your powers of criticism. By voting for this resolution, you are entering a debate that is already underway, that is crucial for the materialization of justice, one which involves having the courage to speak out against injustice, something I learned as a young person, but something we each have to learn time and again. I understand that it is not easy to speak out in this way. But if you struggle against voicelessness to speak for what is right, then you are in the middle of that struggle against oppression and for freedom, a struggle that knows that there is no freedom for one until there is freedom for all. There are those who will surely accuse you of hatred, but perhaps those accusations are the enactment of hatred. The point is not to enter that cycle of threat and fear and hatred--that is the hellish cycle of war itself. The point is to leave the discourse of war and to affirm what is right. You will not be alone. You will be speaking in unison with others, and you will, actually, be making a step toward the realization of peace--the principles of non-violence and co-habitation that alone can serve as the foundation of peace. You will have the support of a growing and dynamic movement, intergenerational and global, by speaking against the military destruction of innocent lives and against the corporate profit that depends on that destruction. you will stand with us, and we will most surely stand with you. (printed in The Nation, April 13, 2010)

And from South Africa:

Judge Goldstone has been banned by the South African Zionist Federation from attending is grandson's bar mitzvah--this as an act of retribution for Goldstone's report to the United Nations. As one Jewish blogger said, "What has happened to our people?"

What has happened to our people?

Your words as always give me more then I deserve

2010-03-30T05:08:00.000-07:00

know I have worried some; I have lived in this body so long, struggled with its own struggles, trying to hold it dear, to recognize the dailiness of its own stumbles--the cellular dramas that from a distance form me. The ct scan showed no cancer--but why then, I said between sighs of relief, do I feel so ill. The next day I bled and more will be done. I am of the lucky ones, those who are not stopped at check points, those who are not turned away from help for so many reasons, those for whom flood waters or famine have not swept away the paths to aid. For the first time on these pages, I felt embarrassed by my words, by my posturing, talking about the stars when I felt like I was dying. No more of this.

I want to share with you the words of two women, one is my friend, the other I have met for the first time through her blog, "Hudson to West Bank," which follows Jane Toby through the streets of the West Bank and the beaches of Tel Aviv. First, the words of Alex Nissen, my friend here in Melbourne who has been in Haifa for the last four months.

Tear Gas Brings Memories:Jewish Home, Fascist State?

As an Ashkenazi (a Jew from European descent) Israeli who was born in Australia to refugee parents, I have the luxury of living in Israel whenever I choose to, with full rights. Like other Jewish citizens, I have the freedom to move, access to hospitals, universities and water. What a luxury. So how can I call this place home and fascist at the same time?

Last Friday I went to a Palestinian village called Bil'in which is near Ramallah and about a two hour drive south of Haifa, my town, along Road Six, a highway built alongside the Apartheid Wall that surrounds the Palestinian towns of Qalqilya and Tul Karm, two towns that are completely surrounded and isolated by the Wall. of course, there are no acknowledging their existence; after all they are not in Israel, they are Palestinian towns, a way of thinking that is difficult to comprehend when you first arrive in this place.

Last Friday was a special day because it marked five years of struggle against the Apartheid Wall that is being built on Palestinian lands near the village of Bil'in. It has also been five years of popular demonstrations, suppressed by force. And nearly two and a half years since the Israeli High Court ordered a change to the route of the Apartheid Wall. Demonstrators came from all over Israel and Palestine to show support for the village's struggles for freedom of movement, of provisions for the basic needs of daily life, things that I, as an Israeli and Australian, have always taken for granted.

The last time I went to Bil'in was many years ago. I have been going to the Palestinian Occupied Territories to document and bear witness to human rights abuses. I was raised to respect human rights and freedom especially since my own Jewish culture suffered as a result of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. I went to this demonstration because of those values of respect for human rights. What I witnessed was an assault on freedom and humanity by the Israeli army.

There were over a thousand people of all ages, mothers, fathers, children, grandparents marching to express, not only their solidarity with the desire for freedom, but also in solidarity for the right to live in dignity, to farm one's own land and to live one's own life without oppression.

Some of the Palestinian men managed to move the temporary wire fence and put Palestinian flags on the other side. At this stage, I did not see the Israeli army and thought it was strange. But then the Israeli army came. The sprayed stink liquid that made people sick, used sound grenades, and shot dozens of tear gas canisters; there was nowhere to hide. As we, the elderly and the young, ran to escape the tear gas behind and beside us, I stopped and looked up to see it raining tear gas ahead of us. The soldiers shot numerous tear gas rounds at the front of the demonstration, at the side and then ahead of us so that we would be trapped by the thick white smoke. There was no point in running. No space was safe from the possibility of being hit by tear gas. The air was thick with gas, people couldn't breathe. An elderly woman collapsed, people helped carry her out. Many people fell, they couldn't breathe and they couldn't move. I felt that there was nothing I could do to escape, I couldn't breathe, my skin was on fire and my lungs were struggling for air like every one else. I had no forgotten my history or why I was here. How sad it is and ironic, I thought, that the Israeli Army threw so many gas canisters at civilians demonstrating for human rights, and here I am, a Jew, I am gassed by a Jewish army.

I managed to get some distance away to turn around, only to see the Israeli Army continuing to shoot dozens of tear gas canisters everywhere, and in disbelief, I witnesses the Israeli Army shooting at the ambulance which was soon surrounded by thick gas. I have only these words to describe the injustice I witnessed. I can escape. I can go home, where I have running water to take a shower and wash off the day's poison and trauma. But what of the others, how long would the gas cling to their clothes, their skin?

How many Palestinians need to suffer before we all take a stand to stop the violence? Israeli human rights' organizations along with the Israeli peace movement and Palestinians are calling for you to help by supporting peace and democracy in a country that's spiralling out of control.

In this country, democracy only belongs to the privileged like me, and not to my Palestinian sisters and brothers.

Alex Nissem

Women in Black

Coalition of Women for Peace

Film of demonstration and march, Friday the 19th, February 2010:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quSVqqEao4c

I still feel the pull of the vast possiblities of the dark skies, but Alex and others draw me back to these our human streets, our imagined nationalities where armies clad in steel break the dreams of mere citizens. How naked this makes us all.

In the photograph, Alex, her blue scarf streaming free, stands next to La Professora, here in St Kilda with the bay behind them. Before she left for Israel/Palestine.

Questions, Always Questions

2010-03-25T18:33:00.000-07:00

Today I will find out if my cancers have returned--perhaps. I am not afraid, I am curious and I am aware of the flow of life around me, the hot sun and gentle wind, Cello curled up in the shade on the corner of the veranda, workmen building steps in the back, books around me--Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl," futuristic visions that question and yet carry within their shattered cities, the possibilities of care and concern, of hope unknown, stuttering like the steps of Emiko, or the endlessly twisting the challenges of survival that speed Hock Seng through the back allies of the Kingdom, the rumblings of the massive Megodonts who turn the wheels of the factories, the ancient made new, of new organic and inert combinations that produce their own forms of urgent "new people" questions, of courage, of nourishment, of cooperation while the old uglinesses of greed and domination bite at the heels. Thailand in the future, not New York, not London, and that alone is a light into the future. Our "topography of failure," environmentally, economically, socially, swims with life. I want to look to the stars now, to the vast regions of unknowns where what ever is human or life-filled will shape hope out of first appearing darkness. Here in Australia, we almost touched the future--when norrie mAy welby became for just a day the world's first person to be issued sex-not- specified documentation by the Australian authorities, a person without a state approved sex and still a person; however, daunted by their own courage, the same authorities rescinded their declaration, 24 hours later. So one way I face my own mortality is expanding the circle of my questions, throwing off the ballasts of "this- is- how- it- has- to- be."

Olivera has just called from Brisbane, she knows of topographies of failure as she knows of flight and the push of self re-invention.

I read also "The Classroom," by Simon Mawer, a story of modernity and hell, of bodies and glass houses, of Fascism and touch and always "The Journal of Helene Berr,"--

When I write the word Jew, I am not saying exactly what I mean, because for me that distinction does not exist; I do not feel different from other people, I will never think of myself as a member of a separate human group, and perhaps that is why I suffer so much, because I do not understand it at all. I suffer from the spectacle of human beastliness. I suffer from the sight of evil falling on humanity; but as I do not feel I belong to any particular racial, religious or human group (because such feelings always implies pride), all I have to keep me going are my inner debates and reactions, my conscience. I remember a remark Lefshetz made when we were at rue Claude-Bernard and his speeches in support of Zionism disgusted me: 'You have forgotten why you are being persecuted.' That's true.

But the Zionist ideal seems to narrow. Any exclusive grouping, whether Zionism or the hideous fanatical Germanism we are witnessing, or even chauvinism, always contains an excess of pride. I can't help it; I shall never be at ease in any such group." (December 1943)

There Are New Voices in Town

2010-03-14T17:29:00.000-07:00

From The Age, a leading Melbourne newspaper:

"Jerusalem: Israel's military and one of its soldiers are no longer 'friends' after the gunner posted details of an impending raid in the occupied West Bank on his Facebook page, leading to the mission being aborted.

The soldier from an artillery unit updated his page on the social networking site, saying 'on Wednesday we are cleaning Qatanna, [a village near Jerusalem] and on Thursday, God willing, going home,' the army radio reported."

No more lying about what is happening in Palestinian villages, this poor young soldier who has the ability to hold his gun to the heads of any Palestinian who gets in his way, who only wants to go home to his God and family, says too clearly for his bosses, we cleanse people away, we sweep them from their homes as if they are stains on the land.

While Israel launches its public relations campaign, the last resort of morally bankrupt nations, new settlers' homes spring into being in East Jerusalem; the sea, air, land embargo of Gaza continues; the disenfranchising of Palestinian Israelis continues; the silencing and exiling of "foreign activists" as members of peace and anti-occupation NGO contingents are called, continues; plans go ahead to build a "Museum of Tolerance" over the Mamila Muslim cemetery; non-violent Palestinian demonstrators and organizers are rounded up in night raids and at a New York love fest for the Israeli Defense Forces, over 20 million dollars are raised. Pamphlets in Hebrew are passed out on planes calling on people to join in the struggle against this new attempt to delegitimize the state of Israel. Craziness, public relations campaigns as a way to turn eyes away from every day brutalities. Museums of Tolerance built in a country where nearly half of Israel's high school youth "do not believe that Israeli-Arabs are entitled to the same rights as Jews in Israel and would deny Arabs the right to be elected to the Knesset." (Ha'aretz, 12 March 2010) This is the future of Israel--growing religious fundamentalism, growing xenophobia, growing racism, growing armies. Already we read public statements about the "third world" workers who threaten the purity of the Israeli state. The words of a Jerusalem Post Editorial, 07/03/2010:

Tel Aviv, rejuvenated and energized as perhaps never before in its 100 years of existence, is the trendiest magnet for Israel's young, most vial and upwardly mobile set.

But Tel Aviv also pulls to it others, equally attracted by its bright lights and opportunities. There are third world economic migrants, the vast majority of them illegal....Anyone who indeed wanders into Neveh Sha'anan...would be hard put to identify the cityscape as even remotely Israeli, Squalid and foul, it's home to an exotic collection of denizens who have found their way to the country and most of whom originally hail from the southern hemisphere."

Israel is building walls of all kinds, and as others have said, it is building its own prison of intolerance, not only on its own shifting borders but within its own neighborhoods. All the banning of outside observers, all of the marshalling of required Jewish Diaspora unquestioning support will never disguise the tragedy of what Israel is becoming.

Yesterday the news article read "Israel Seals Off West Bank to Prevent Unrest," and continues to say that Israeli police will allow only men over 50 and women to pray at the Noble Sanctuary. This corrosive power to decide who will pray and who will not, who will live in their homes and who will not, who will be able to work, who will be able to receive medical care, to go to university, to drive down a highway, to make a plan for the future, this corrosive power over other human lives as Israel should know, etches a national ugliness that will haunt this nation.

From "Only Gall and Nothing More" by Gideon Levy, 08/10/2010:

Is the discourse we are conducting--if indeed we are conducting any discourse among ourselves and with our interlocutor--legitimate at all?Ever since the territories were occupied a public debate has been going on here [Israel] about their future and what is being done there...the settlements--yes or no; the roadblocks--yes or no; the assassinations, the arrests, the starving, the closure, the encirclement, the curfew, the exposure, the torture, the freedom of movement, the choice of the ritual,--yes or no.

Where does this right come from? [the right to say yes or no to prayer] Just as a rapist does not have the right to discuss carrying out his nefarious scheme, and the robber cannot haggle over the conditions under which he will return his loot, the occupier, the taskmaster, the jack-booted soldier and the exploiter cannot discuss the conditions under which they will carry out their deeds. This is a blatantly immoral discussion. The discussion by free people of the fate of other people under their rule is just as legitimate as the discussion by slave-runners or human traffickers. The only legitimate discussion is one that intends to end the situation, immediately and unconditionally.

I say thank you to all within Israel and without, who tirelessly struggle to raise dissenting Jewish voices, who take to the streets like the demonstrators in front of that icon of power, the Waldorf Astoria, the legacy of the robber barons; to all, who stand vigil, who enter the forbidden zones of Palestinian suffering, who sit at their computers late into the night sending out the news both of despair and of hope, of organizing and petitions, to all who brave the tear gas bombs and rubber bullets, to all my Jewish family who risk exiles from friends and family, from communities and some from jobs, who like me, know we are all part of this history, who know there is no other way to live in these times other then to say over and over no, no, no, not in our Jewish, human names.

As you might have heard, I wrote these words in some despair, not only with the state of Israel, but with the resurgence of the Christian right in America to almost crazy national attention, the Texas school board decisions over text book contents, the Tea parties and draped American flags over the shoulders of scoundrels, the attacks on lawyers doing their job of defending unpopular clients, and on and on, and then in the Australian Jewish Democratic Society Newsletter, March 2010 (www.ajds.org.au), edited by my dear friend Israeli-Australian Sol Solbe, I find the words of Sarah Beninga, spoken at the Sheikh Jarrah rally. Beninga is one of the Israeli activists who organized the rally on March 6:

There Is a New Left in Town

There is a New Left, and it is not a left that is content with peace talks; it is a left of struggle. There is a New Left that knows that there are things you have to fight against even when they are identified with the state and even when they are sanctioned by law. There's a New Left that knows that this struggle will not be decided on paper, but on the ground, in the hills, in the vineyards, in the olive groves. There's a New Left that is not afraid of settlers--even when they come down on us from the hills, masked and armed. This left does not succumb to political oppression by the police, nor does it care what Ma'ariv writes about it.

There is a New Left in town. This left does not want to be loved, does not dream of filling town squares and does not bask in the memories of 400,000 demonstrators. This left is a partnership of Palestinians who understand that the occupation will not be stopped by missiles and bombs, and of Israelis who understand that the Palestinian struggle is their own.

The New Left links arms with Palestinians is a cloud of tear-gas in Bili'in, and with them, bears the brunt of settler violence in the South Hebron Hills. This left stands by refugees and work immigrants in Tel-Aviv and fights the Wisconsin Project [privatised 'welfare-to-work' program]. This New Left is us, all of us.

All those who came here tonight; all those who dared to cross the imaginary line separating West and East Jerusalem despite the threats and intimidation--we are all the New Left that is rising in Israel and Palestine. We are not fighting for a peace agreement; we are fighting for justice. But we believe that injustice is the main obstacle to peace. Until the Ghawis, the Hanouns and the El-Kurds return to their homes, there will be no peace because peace will not take root where discrimination, oppression, plunder exist. There is a New Left in town and this left stands with the residents of Sheikh Jarrah tonight, and it will continue standing with them until justice overcomes fanaticism.

But there is also a New Right in town. A Right filled with envy and racism that seduces the masses with its jingoistic rhetoric. The New Right has no interest in the well-being and the welfare of human beings. The New Right is only interested in a narrow ethnic and tribal loyalty a la Avigdor Lieberman. For the New Right, only the Jewish poor deserve attention. And what makes someone Jewish is that they are not Arabs. The New Right has nothing to offer but never-ending war. The New Right has nothing to offer but hate for the other: Arabs, refugees and leftists.

This New Right creates the fanatic settlers against whom we are demonstrating tonight. These settlers hate Jerusalem. They have no love for Israel and no love for humankind--they love only themselves. There are many amongst the settlers with whom we can and should carry out a dialogue. But the settlers in Sheikh Jarrah who sing songs of praise to Baruch Goldstein--must be defeated.

The New Right created the mayor of Jerusalem Nir Barkat. He is a technocrat who doesn't understand or care about Jerusalem. He is a mayor who uses administrative terror against the residents of East Jerusalem and neglects the residents of West Jerusalem, while mouthing empty cliches. If Jerusalem is a powder keg, then Nir Barkat is the one who is striking the match. But Barkat doesn't scare us and neither of the settlers or Lieberman.

We will continue coming to Sheikh Jarrah and everywhere that justice is crushed by the forces of occupation and oppression. Take a look around you; we are not as few as we thought we were! And we will prevail!

Take a look around--away from the love fest for more killing at the Waldorf Astoria where so many parents poured their money into making sure their children will live in a more unsafe world--and let us find each other and take up the struggle.

Molti Cose--Many Things of the Heart and Body

2010-03-09T15:34:00.000-08:00

How do I sort out all I want to say--thank you for still being there if you are--it has been over a month. I do not know anymore how to use writing to mark the days, the whirlings of this world, the adventures of the body and the mind. Let me begin by grounding us in the weather of Melbourne, a torrential spilling of the clouds, sheets of rain, like a waterfall crashing to earth, hailstones throwing themselves at windows, heads, frightened dogs. Flooding in the North--slowly now the dry river beds of the flat middle are filling up, slowly the overflows make their way down into dry basins and people rush out to welcome the returning water, wading in the gift, with pants rolled up and big grins on their faces. The lives of whole river systems depend on this return of fresh water--the Murray-Darling river basin, desperately trying to survive the rising tide of sea water at its Southern end, waiting, waiting for its rescue. Once I knew the Hudson, walked along its tamed shores in Manhattan, always aware of the power of its floes, never doubting its hold on its own way of being--the cliffs of the Palisades reminders of earlier days when other peoples looked down upon its currents, searching for food, for dangers. Now I have in my mind's eye, the red river gums, standing dry footed in their river places, holding on, holding on, until once again water flows. This is a land of extremities and it is my home.

I am too dramatic, I know that. I will work on it. I have said that when I do not write for a while, it is because my body is having another conversation and such is the case this month. I have a growth in my uterus that needs to come out--this feels almost too personal to write--but on the day of the surgery, I woke up shaking all over. At the hospital, the admitting nurse discovered I had a high fever and matching blood pressure so all decided something was going on and no surgery--now I start the consulting with oncologist and others to find out. But something else--yesterday I went out to take a look at the construction work that is being done in our backyard and tripped over a piece of wood, falling heavily on my good knee. It is this falling, the third fall I have had in the last year, that most tumbles me, into the shock of the unexpected, the ground coming up so fast, into the moment of wonder when the fall is over, what is still working and finally the refuge of the bed, where all is still. Cosa ci posso fare? I am living in deep appreciation of daily life now, my books, my darling, my Cello,my friends, a roof over our heads that holds off the torrents, hard and soft and for me, the delight of the little television at the end of my bed that brings me the wonders of the Olympics, the lunging broad shoulders of the cross country skiers; the bent over, noses to the ice, gentle touching of the buttocks in front of the short track speed skaters; the swelling thighs, the swinging arms and arrow like heads of the long distant skaters--always carrying Hans Christian Anderson with them, I think--the quirky slides and shouts of the curlers and the youth, flying into the night air, flipping turning and landing on their feet. I who fear the ground beneath me at times, almost 70, lie still and glory in these athletes. Through that little window at the end of my bed, I peer into snow covered hill trails, I see into the heaving lungs of bodies throwing themselves into exertion, into exultation, their breaths puffs of ongoing glorious life.

Questi giorni, studio Italiano con tutto il mio cuore. Ogni giovedi, vaddo con mia amica, Patrizia, a Centro Studi Italiani a Carlton. These days, I study Italian with all my heart. Every Thursday, I go with my friend Pattie to the Center for Italian Studies in Carlton. Studiamo con la Professoressa Nancy, una brava insegnante, `e bellissima! How I love this language, its heart, its fullness of vowels, its world view--di bella. I turn to its folklore, Collodi's Le avventure di Pinocchio nel livello B for beginning readers and it is all here.

C'era una volta...

--Un re!--direte subito. No, ragazzi. C'era una volta un pezzo di legno. Un semplice pezzo di legno di quelli che d'inverno si usano per accendere il fuoco.

Once upon a time--"A story about a king!, the children shout. No, children. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood, a simple piece of wood like the kind we use to feed our fires that keep us warm in winter.

A simple piece of wood, un semplice pezzo di legno, we are all--until touched by the imagination, said Professoressa Nancy--with all the ugliness of the world, with all the assumptions of who should die and who is enemy, with war like eating, every day, war as a way of life, a simple piece of wood says in una voce piccoloa piccoloa, 'Non farmi male!'--a little, little voice says, 'do not harm me." And Maestro Ciliega heard and stopped. A child was born. (Please feel free to correct my Italian. That is how I will learn.)

Books, always books, my food of life. I have decided that I must know more about the Jewish diaspora, Jewish resistance in other forms besides Zionism, besides exclusive nationalisms. In an issue of The New York Times Book Review that I tracked down in the Carlton bookshop here, Readings, I was caught by a review of four books growing out of the French resistance movement and one Jewish French woman's experience of occupation--the Journal of Helene Berr, newly translated into English in 2009.... I have been turning her pages over and over, looking at her face again, into her eyes, looking at her words that I underlined, the connections I made--her love of books, amidst it all, the words of Keats or Shelley, her love of love. At times, in the beginning, one cannot tell which dread is haunting her, the loss of a young boy who feels like the center of her life, or the narrowing world around her, tight with hatred. In the two years Helene Berr gives us, 1942-44, romance, fraught with longing and loss, slowly fades from view and a dread entire, the Nazi plan for the French Jews, changes the pastel colors into horrors of inhumanity, but always at the center is a young yearning woman whose circle of love grows larger as her world shrinks. Some call Berr's diary a Holocaust book--and of course it is, the story of a young woman who loved life so much, who adored her Paris, her studies, her Mozart, her laughing university friends, her father, the first of the family to be interned in a Nazi holding camp in the center of Paris, her adoration for the beauty of the night sky, for a rain freshened garden, for her own possibilities of the imagination--"I'm not afraid for myself but for something beautiful that might have been"--the gift each of us can be to the human world, a human world still able to respect the possibilities of each individual life. But I am afraid that genre labeling makes the reader think they know what they will find--In these pages that stand for a life, Berr gives us her thoughts about resistance, about shame, about the nature of the past and the present,about normality, a word that appears on almost every page as the normal changes its meaning before our eyes, day by day, about the ethics of conscience, about what being Jewish means to her, about her place in the diaspora, about the nature of human evil--her thoughts which a whole army tried to erase. "The destruction of personal thought and of the response of individual consciences is Nazism's first step (February 14, 1944)...how quickly morality and the respect for humanity disappear once a certain boundary has been breached! (Friday, December 31, 1943) In these pages, she asks us to see, to be responsible for knowing, what is happening in the name of nation states, to see the connection between art and politics, to always be aware of what is causing pain, "if only people knew what ruins are in my heart."( November 1943)

Tomorrow I shall have to get off the metro at Pere-Lachaise [one of the first edicts passed against the Jews of Paris was forbidding them to ride in all carriages or lines of the Metro] That was where I first had a proper conversation with Mme Schwartz, about a year ago, around 5:00 p.m., with trains passing by all the time; we sat on the platform bench and talked. I told her about Jean, because I could not hide it from people to whom I had given my heart. Now I don't have to make that effort or that confession, since all the people I loved have vanished. I can still hear her, her eyes shining with affection (her eyes were always so bright with love):

'A girl like you is such a lovely thing!'

A scheine madel

Everything I write about Palestine/Israel, about the diaspora and its possibilities of hope, will be touched by this woman and what she asks us to do from the depths of her extremity.

"Masters of the Dew"--For My Haitian Students and All Whom They Love

2010-01-14T19:14:00.000-08:00

The news from Haiti pours out upon the world; it took so long and so much death for this country, so marked by colonial history and resistance to its grip, to be seen again. Pushed to the edges of world concern, of American concern, by matters of race and class, by its lack of wanted resources--even its people mostly have a hard time gaining refuge in the countries that have caused so many of its losses--Haiti, as close to America as Cuba, the dismissed country, the invisible people, to those in power. Haiti, who sang of a people's collective urge for freedom, while Napoleon still rode on the back of his armies, Haiti whose writers dreamed of unending collectives, workers united to turn drudgery into national wealth, Haiti where painters and poets found languages of color and shape to bring to the world their unique vision of Africa in the Caribbean, Haiti whose people make an art form of inventing living languages and religions that wear the vestments of the past but invoke new songs of the magic of the spirit. In patois and in French, using all they have to create, always create. I am thinking of my Haitian students, of Firenz, of Yvonn, of Isabella, of Darby Bruno with whom I read Jaques Roumain's "Masters of the Dew," over 30 years ago, of the great contemporary Haitian writer, Edwidge Danticat, who in the 1990s came and spent a day reading her texts with our students, how they poured over her words, and held them up for her to see in their word-worn hands. Of Darby, stocky and tough, taking the small role of the prison van driver when we were performing Bessie Head's "Collector of Lost Treasures." How he created a whole life lived transporting the hopeless to their final home in his portrayal, Darby who struggled every day to make it to the unwelcoming Queens College campus. Of sitting across from a two of my Haitian women students on the Flushing line subway and how they covered their mouths with their hands when they turned to speak to each other--we are sometimes ashamed of speaking Creole, here at the College, they had told me. Patois under the stern gaze of French, still finding hidden places to keep a people alive. And the last day of classes one term now lost in all the years, when a group of my students presented me with two Haitian wooden mortar and pestles, the fine grinding tools of bush survival, of savory creation. When I had to chose among my possessions for the final move of my life, for my own dispersal, I carefully wrapped them so they would arrived unharmed from their 23,000 mile flight across the Pacific seas.

It is you I think of now, my Haitian students, with all your cultural riches, with all the strengths of your spirit and intelligences, with all your determination, with your knowledge of political struggles and the cost of national courage in the face of the killing thuggery of Poppa Doc and his American supporters. Know that you have never left me, that the time I spent learning from you, embodied all the wonders of my life as a teacher. As I write these words, I see the face of the old man, who still remembers Africa, in the film of "Black Shack Alley," set in the sugar cane fields of Martinique, I see the face of the pipe- smoking grandmother who did all she could to keep Joseph out of the killing fields; you sat and watched that film with me, in a dark room on a cold winter morning far out in Flushing, Queens, in a temporary Quonset hut that was our SEEK classroom, and told me, life was hard but a people's desire to live and create, to refuse divisions of class and race, was greater still. Breath, eyes, memory now more then ever, dear Haiti.

La Professoressa in Paris, 2009 and in my Life, 1998

2010-01-03T19:46:00.000-08:00

I write of misused powers, of the hardening of the heart under the shadow of nationalisms, under walls of exclusion, but I also carry the voice of my lesbian body, of my lesbian histories, into all these stony places. On my desk amidst all the commuinques from Cairo, I found this poem, written by one woman to another.

Saftey

We have already travelled worlds together

in each other's curves and words

and hollows

although we only just met

We have already opened doorways

to knowledge and loneliness

and love

although we thought they had been closed with finality

We have already changed shape

to embrace unfamiliar waves and symbols

of desire

although we thought we knew who we were

two women together

have created the fragile shifting fragments of a refuge

in the midst of life's great dangers.

For Joan, 8 March 1998

Our January Vigil, a New Year, To The Streets Again

2010-01-03T04:00:00.000-08:00

Here is our flyer for our January Women in Black vigil:

Make 2010 The Year We End Israel's Blockade of Gaza

Since just days before Christmas, 2009, over 1300 citizens from 42 different countries have travelled to Cairo as a transit point to Gaza where they would join over 50,000 Palestinians on December 31 in a Gaza Freedom March to protest the continuing siege of Gaza. Conceived during Code Pink's delegation to the Gaza Strip after the Israeli Cast Lead incursion, the organizers envisioned a massive, peaceful nonviolent show of international solidarity with the Palestinian people. The had envisioned several days of commemoration of those who died during the winter attack, several days of bearing witness to the rubble, the unreconstructed homes, and the widespread destruction of the possibility of healthy daily life.

Women in Black, Melbourne, dedicates this vigil to the international Gaza Freedom Marchers, young and old, including 85-year old Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein, who have been stranded in Cairo, after the Egyptian government decided to block their transport. Like freedom marchers from other times and other struggles, they are helping each other to survive on the streets, in blockaded hotels, in the face of massive police presence. All we ask of you is to be aware that thousands of miles from here, ordinary people are risking their lives to end the suffering of the people of Gaza. Several days ago, thousands marched in Gaza and in Israel to the Israel-Gaza border, asking for an end to the blockade and renewed dedication to peace efforts. For first hand accounts of what is happening to the freedom marchers and their supporters, please go to Gazafreedommarch.org or to our website, Women in Black.org.au.

These people, ordinary citizens of Gaza, of Israel, of 40 other countries, want another kind of world where children do not play amidst the ruins of their homes, where young people have hopes for the future, where national hatreds to not reign supreme over international negotiations for peace. A new year, let us make it one that honors human life and all its joyous and complex possibilities.

We, the members of Women in Black, wish a happy and peaceful New Year for all.

I Thought I Was Saying Good-bye, but...

2009-12-30T04:56:00.000-08:00

Sometimes my body fails me and I think it is time to fall quiet, and then people take to the streets, travel thousands of miles, to remind the world that a year ago, a terrible thing happened to an already imprisoned people, the people of Gaza, a year of days has turned and still there is no let up to their suffering, their deprivations--America looks on and moves not, Egypt looks on and moves not, Israel cuts into the freedoms of its own people more and more to insure the punishment, the humiliation, the exhaustion of the Palestinians both in its borders and beyond. But around the world, women and men who cannot live with the never ending roll call of injustices, are moving--now on the streets of Cairo, 1400 people are pushing against the wall, struggling to break the siege, to enter the walled in towns of Gaza. Like freedom marchers before them, they have met phalanxes of police, of refusals, of entries denied and like the Freedom Marchers before them, they gain strength from each other and build the alliances that are needed for the duration of the struggle.

From Dorothy, "Critical Situation in Cairo with Gaza Freedom Marchers," December 28, 2009, 5:07 PM:

We are writing to call your to your attention a critical situation that has developed in Cairo, Egypt over the past week. Since just before Christmas over 1300 citizens from 42 different countries have travelled to Cairo as a transit point enroute to Gaza where they would join over 50,000 Palestinians on Dec. 31 in a Gaza Freedom March to protest the continuing siege on Gaza...after months of preparation and consultations with the Egyptian Government, Egypt abruptly announced that these peace marchers would be denied entry into Gaza, could not display any posters or banners, and could not organize or participate in any peaceful symbolic commemorations of all the civilian deaths in Gaza a year ago and the continuing suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza today..."

From 59 year-old Starhawk's e-mail out of Cairo, Dec 29, 2009:

"But finally I escaped and went off to the French Embassy, with Elizabeth, the young anthropologist I met on the plane, and Max, a cheerful young man with a giant Palestinian flag which he has managed to unveil on the pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, other key monuments. They were talking about Jewish organizing and friend who had burned out and Elizabeth said, "You just have to understand that your whole life is going to be about resistance......[I think of Lepa's words a decade ago, her fist banging on the archives' table in my old apartment, "who said we would win in our lifetime, fighting fascism, we must do what we can in our own time, the struggle will continue."] ...We went back to the center of town, to the steps of the Journalists' Syndicate where our hunger strikers were holding a vigil. Twenty-two people are on a hunger strike...the steps of the Journalists' Syndicate are like a stage and it was filled with people, the hunger strikers in the center, flags and banners all around them."

From Cheryl in Cairo, December 29, 2009, 4:03 PM:

"I am having much trouble with my blackberry and anything to connect me to the outside world, nonetheless, my spirits are good. Indeed they are blocking us from entering Gaza. Yesterday we were at the World Trade Center/UN building [in Cairo] and the police surrounded us for hours--I stood eye to eye with young soldiers--most of them so very young (some no older then 16 or 17)--we taught each other how to say peace in our respective languages, we laughed, one guy even cried a little when I told him he ein halwah/beautiful eyes--but don't get me wrong--I am not naive about how dangerous this could get at any moment. It is just that, once again, I ma reminded that when given the opportunity to see each other's humanity, really look at each other and try to see each other, walls can come down.

The same walls that seem so impenetrable to get from Cairo to Gaza on this march.

When I think of the 1400 people who have come to participate in this effort from all over the world, I truly feel in my heart that one day this blockade will be lifted.

We will find a way to get the aid and the school supplies including the 12 laptops purchased by our group. I am also bringing something precious from my friend, Noura. The day before we left, she gave me her beautiful floor-length engagement dress, saying 'Some young girl will want this for herself--to celebrate her own engagement." So I have brought the dress to Cairo and am determined that it will get to Gaza...because it signifies that that young woman is creating a future for herself, that she expects to have a future. One of the most devastating affects of violence and the long lasting aftershocks of trauma is the loss of a sense of future.I stay on course to give that young woman a dress and to say to her and to you that I believe in a better future for Palestine.

Many of us are joining Hedy Epstein, an 85 year-old survivor of the holocaust, in a hunger strike--hard for me to pass by the shwarma, balawa and figs I see on the streets, but I am hungrier for this blockade of our march to get the attention of the world and I am hungrier yet for peace and justice. [Hudson Valley Residents on the Gaza Freedom March, http://hudsontogaza.blogspot.com]

Dresses, school supplies, bandages--an elderly Jewish woman sitting on a Cairo street, refusing to eat in the name of histories of injustices, young and old people brought to these streets like in other times we were brought to the streets of Selma or Sharpesville or Washington, D.C., trying to break through the killing walls of national agendas with only civilian bodies, an unarmed people, demanding that the rest of us who live our lives as if the Wall, and all that goes on in its shadow, was not our concern. I have not read one word of what is happening in Cairo in an Australian newspaper or seen one moment of coverage on the news stations. In my daily NY Times summaries, I have not see one mention of the freedom march. But in this other world, where words can soar over national boundaries and agreed on silences, words and images are pouring out. Do what you can to honor the best of the human spirit. For images, go to

http://www.flickr.com/groups/gazafreedommarch/pool/show/with/4222620991/

One Year Ends

2009-12-22T17:39:00.000-08:00

Yes, Khulud, you are right. It is the resistors who make new roads possible, who push back the confinements, who broach the walls. It is the resistors on both sides of entrenched nationalisms, of territory and of gender, who make possible the breath of joy between the stones. No matter what the governments do, you and all the others who take on the edicts and the closings and the rulings and the documents of erasure, will change the face of human history.

I want to take this time, the end of one reckoning of the change of years, to thank every one who read my words, who wrote to me, who challenged me, who questioned me, who gave me heart. I have one more thought to share--and I have been 70 years slow on this one. Last week, I saw, had to see, the frenzied fear of a pig waiting for its death. The animal tried to chew through the metal bar of his last cage to escape his slaughter. I looked into his living eye, and never will I forget it. I think of walls that block out the human faces of those called our enemy, I think of the drone planes that now kill at will, machines trained to erase human lives, I think of all the animals that had a life and whose flesh I ate to feed my human life, not so special as to demand so many eyes to go blank. Anonymous deaths from which we benefit. And I think of the people who work in abattoirs, who hear the final screams of living beings all the hours of the day, who need their jobs, who grow used to their jobs, it is just a job. How did we come to this? Yesterday, Di was pulling out of a parking spot, and I looked into the yellow eye of large dog in the back seat of the car next to us. His eye followed mine, his head turning, as our car slowly pulled out and I saw in that yellow look nothing I knew for sure except life, a watching of the moment, silent and steady, each of us tied to our form of deciphering, a quiet agreement to honor the differing rights of observation, the differing workings of the heart and head.

To all my friends, old and new, to all my lovers, old and new, to all who showed me what I needed to see and to all who waited with me while I failed and tried again, who sat by my bed or listened late into the night to the same old fears, to all who helped build with me the archives of the forgotten and the judged, I touch with a life time's gratitude.

2009-12-22T01:06:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking this so-called holiday season of the children of Gaza. How do they look upon the world who seems so to have forgotten what makes a child take joy in life, even a child of Gaza. The children of Gaza stumbling over the stones of homes that offer no shelter, not from nations casting lead or from history. They look out at us, framed by loss, by roads that go no where, they stand in their own ruins, too young to have known freedom of movement, to have run down roads that lead to larger freedoms in their own land. Like other children who posed too difficult a question to their times, they seem to fade from view even as they look at us. The children of Gaza.

Heat

2009-12-14T23:22:00.000-08:00

It is

6:30 in the evening here, an early summer day, and the heat is pulling out all the moisture we harbor within. I sit at the bus stop, we have no subways here, but trams and buses and trains that run on the surface with people waiting at gaited fences to continue crossing the street, like one sees often on the news back in America,the awful sight of a car crushed on the railroad tracks, the wooden railing not doing its job of holding back the drunken driver or the daring teenager racing against the metal monster. Tomorrow, we are told on all the news outlets, will be one of the danger days, in the low hundreds, and country towns all over Victoria and New South Wales are on the alert for bush fires. Those of us in the city will hunker down in our houses, flats, take refuge in the movies; here the heat is like nowhere else because Australia sits right under the void in the ozone layer, and your skin knows it. Last year, Daniel, Joel, Di, Cello and I spent the day behind shuttered windows, drinking smoothies and playing cards. Every once in a while we would step out onto the deck to test the severity of the day and quickly we withdrew, it was like walking into fire. While we hid, hundreds in country towns around Melbourne where dying, caught trying to save their homes, or in their cars or in the middle of a field. The last time we stepped out on the deck, we smelled the burning dust, the fire- strength carried on the winds. For a moment I thought of another time of destruction and mortality carried on the wind, that day in September when on my upper West Side window ledge, there was a chalky tragic dust. I live in a new geography, and I have come to know and share the fearful look upward at a pitiless sky, so blue you would think it is an ocean but in it lie all the deserts of the world.

Our Love, 2007, New Jersey, photo by Morgan Gwenwald

2009-12-14T19:41:00.000-08:00

I came across this shining image when I was going through my 2007 correspondence, but that is another story. La Professeressa and myself have aged in the past three years, the glow of good health is not as strong as it was here, but what sang out to me about this image of two women was the joy of being in each other's arms--and I thought about the gay marriage struggle, and why I do not want the State to have control over the context of this joy, the legitimizing of this joy, over making sure our human rights are sharable yes, that these smiles do not need the blessing of a god or a law I rejoice in. Here we hold in our mutual grasp the possibilities of intimate bodies, beyond the judgement of the small minded or the frightened, the devotedly convinced or the whims of pragmatic politicians, beyond the kindnesses of well meaning others who grow larger in their own eyes by letting us in to the magic circle of law blessed unions. I have many dear friends who want to marry, have married in the few states that permit it, who will fight with all their breath for the time when gay people can walk down any aisle they want and end up at the alter of blessings of their love. I will stand beside them as the voices of hate pour over their dreams, I will fight homophobia in all its forms, but somewhere under the wounds of deprivation that it engenders--so many clamor for what is denied, let us fight in the military, let us be priests and rabbis, let us be married--I embrace this un-Stated joy; we are frailer women now, but once we stood in the sunlight, attending the gay marriage of two women friends in a Temple in a small town in New Jersey--dressed for fun in our red lipstick, power to power. Let me be a 70 year old for a moment--or perhaps I am always an "alta cocker," and say to younger gay people--do not let not being allowed to do something the State needs you to do, like serving in the military, seduce you into not thinking about what kind of State you want to a part of, after gratitude, think about what it means that the State can give and with hold the legitimizing of love, about what it means to serve religious institutions that often restrict the definitions of who is fully human. What I mean to say is, in honor of the young people sitting handcuffed in the streets of Copenhagen or marching in the streets of Tehran, let us find new ways of creating a more joyous human world.

In the Loop Bar, Melbourne, Australia on the 40th Anniversary of Stonewall, USA

2009-12-08T19:42:00.000-08:00

(I am posting a speech I gave here in June as part of a Stonewall celebration night here in Melbourne.) Joan Nestle, June, 2009
As many of you know, I started my public queer life in the butch-fem bars of New York’s Greenwich Village in the late 1950s; in the intervening years, I have traveled through many cultural and political terrains, one of the culminating moments being riding up Fifth Avenue with Jonathan Katz and our lovers as grand marshals of New York City’s Gay Pride March on a hot day in July in 1999. Oh but how the wheel turns, and now on a cool winter July afternoon La Professora and I and our friend Pattie, a long time member of the lesbian community here, make our way out of Pellegrini’s, -- a Melbourne icon of a place where good coffee and quick dishes of home cooked pasta make their way over the counter to be eaten standing in most instances-- cross Bourke Street—we are “at the Parliament end of town,” my letter of invite reads, to join a growing crowd of gay people outside the Loop Bar for an afternoon of talks about the lesbian and gay rights movement in Australia and the USA. Once again, I cross the threshold of a dark bar—rows of worn couches, a small stage, a bar running alongside one wall—the room continues into more sitting space behind the stage. On a different continent, almost a life time later, I find myself at home. New friends, and old, like Pattie whom I have known for over ten years now, the young queer people of the Victorian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby (VGLRL) who have organized this event—I have had to learn a new atlas of Australian acronyms-- and around forty other people have made their way down the cobblestoned laneway into this den of history—where under the careful directions of Sally Goldner, whom I have also known for a few years now, a wonderful standup comic and long time transgendered activist, Graham Willett, one of the anchors of the Australian Gay and lesbian archives, Jean Taylor, long time lesbian feminist activist with tales to tell and myself will talk of Stonewall echoing through the years. Then in a fitting finale, we give the stage over to the younger generation: Hayley Conway and Stephen Jones, VGLRL coordinators, and Alyena Mohummadally, President of the Australian Gay Multicultural Council. This, I believe, is the rhythm of history forming history—we tell our stories, the happenings and our understanding of them, bring up the voices, span the decades and then, fully expecting displacements of certainties, take our seats, often in the honorable front rows, and lift our gaze to the speakers on and of the new stage of things—listening always to the voices of the present struggle who imagine the future we will never see, but who have seen our past. Let us hope our lives and our reflections about them can be of some help.

What I will do, through the use of my notes and news flashes that I carried with me on that afternoon in addition to Lee Hudson’s and Steve Hogan’s wonderful reference work, "Completely Queer: the Gay and Lesbian Encyclopedia" (1998) that I carefully put on the stage in front of me, as if this history was a friendly weight, is reconstruct my talk in that most grassroots of places, a gay bar.

The Voice of Sally Goldner: First I want to respectfully acknowledge the Wurundjeri people as the traditional owners of the land we are meeting on today.

Thank you, Sally, and to the organizers of this event for inviting me with my American voice to be part of your celebration. By doing this, you have allowed me in a metaphorical way, to step off into the line of march, New York’s Gay Pride March, that just happened in the early hours of your morning in my city so far away. First, hot off the press, sent out by my dear friend Jonathan Katz, the newly released Stonewall Riot Police Reports, June 28, 1969 in which for the first time we learn the name of the much rumored butch lesbian woman who was among the first arrested on that summer night. [Here I am waving above my head the printout of the arrest record from OutHistory.] Her name is Marilyn Fowler, Marilyn Fowler, now is put back into our history. Then I want to put in the air the names of comrades, of pioneers in the American movement—Harry Hayes, Del Martin, Barbara Gitttings—who sadly have died and one other group of people, the students of SNCC (the Students’ Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) who in their civil rights marches through violent southern towns, sit ins at soda fountain counters and long days of voter registration in the back country of the American South, made the history I am speaking of today possible.

How grateful I feel to stand here with you today—you have given me a chance to revisit the existential energies of the most politically and culturally important decades of my life—the American 50s, 60s, and 70s. These were the decades of a people’s self creation, where the private became more and more, for African-Americans, for women, for queer people, actions in the street [here I paused and spoke of the images from Iran, indeed the images that seem to be propagating at such an alarming rate—columns of national militaries, like a devastating crop of malevolence, advancing on unarmed citizens the streets.] where national agendas of hatred and discrimination were challenged by people with the smallest amount of social power.

Now I know I was supposed to talk about the gay 70s in America but one of the other stories I would like to tell is what came before, to challenge in my own way, the idea that 1969, the Stonewall Rebellion, was the starting point of our emancipatory journey. Another point I want to make is that our journey, our queer journey—my own personal one and our larger international movements are deeply embedded in the histories of nations, of technologies, conflicts and social justice movements. Desire, shame, anger and ultimately rebellion—sometimes all at once—make this three decade period history so compelling, so rich. Throughout this talk I will be blending the personal with the political, a phrase born in the women’s movement in the 1970s, to give this history a body, a body alive with want. I am juggling so many worlds here—the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, the gay rights movement—and they must be kept in the air together because they all created each other and sometimes, challenged the visions and strategies of each other.

Twenty years before the decade we are looking at today, queer peoples were reeling with oppressive legal, political and psychological restrictions, yes, but in the true dialectical way, many were creating ways to resist, to form communities of desire and protest, like so many marginalized people do when the world is closing down around them. I was 10 when I entered this most restrictive American time; Joseph McCarthy, the anti-communist campaigner and the subsequent House Un-American Activities Committee, were nourishing a culture of fear and intolerance of difference throughout the land—the killing air as I have called it. Growing up in a working class neighborhood in the Bronx in the 1940s, I heard the whispers and saw the shunning. On December 15, 1950, McCarthy expanded his public list of subversives to include sexual deviants. That morning Americans, queer and straight, found on the front page of their New York Times the report of the Senate Investigative Committee entitled, “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government,” followed by “Federal Vigilance on Perverts Asked: Senate Group Says They Must be Kept Out of Government because of Security Risk.” The first paragraph developed the theme: “The lack of emotional stability which is found in most sex perverts and the weakness of their moral fiber, make them susceptible to the blandishments of foreign espionage agents.” (Katz, 99)

Thus a decade of what has been called the witch hunting years began—with all the ironies history keeps in wait—think of Roy Cohn and FBI Chief J.Edgar Hoover, both of whom have been outed in the subsequent decades, leading the persecution of other homosexuals. Hoover announces in 1951 that his agency has identified and driven out over 400 sexual deviants in government service. Queers like other ideological enemies were a fifth column in their nation; note the language of security, deviance, threat, subversion, that chillingly connects to our world today, However, I, like so many others, was learning other histories as well. My working class Jewish mother, a bookkeeper in New York’s garment industry all her life, told me of the heroism of Paul Robeson, the African American internationalist exiled from America, taught me of the Triangle Shirt Waist Fire and the creation of the textile unions early in the 20th century, while her own working life taught me the power of bosses, and in these years, my body was on its own journey of subversion and by the end of this decade, the 1950s, I would be a weekend regular in the working class butch-fem bars of Greenwich Village, taking on, along with my bar comrades, Vice Squad raids and police harassment. Constantly bombarded with messages of why we should hate ourselves, our collective resistance was already well under way.

In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, gay people were organizing in groups to form the Homophile Movement for Equal Rights, men like Harry Hay (1912--) who, along with others, brought the Mattachine Society into being in 1950 and Del Martin, who sadly died last year, along with her partner Phyllis Lyon was creating the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian civil rights group, coded names yes, but listen to their voices as they create the possibilities of Stonewall, of a counter discourse in their conventions, publications, social gatherings--under FBI surveillance the whole time, we later discovered.
May 15, 1955: Resolution of the Mattachine Society: Be it resolved that the Mattachine Society does hereby appeal to parents, ministers, doctors and all those who come in contact with and have a lasting impression on the youth of this nation, to become aware of the sexual problems of all youths, to understand it and deal with it intelligently and with charity so this nation may have a coming generation of adults able to accept themselves and their place in the community and be prepared to deal with our problems as a nation with responsibility, strength and intelligence for the benefit for all mankind. (Ridinger, 44)

We were subverting the national discussion of that thing called the sexual deviant—our desires, our angers at social injustices, our belief in our own human dignity grew as the American 50s became more restrictive.

In the same year, 1955, Rosa Parks coming home from a long day’s work, refuses to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus.

The Voice of Del Martin, October 1956, speaking as the founder of DOB at a national meeting of Homophile Groups, which she describes as mostly for men with some involved hard working women: “The Daughters of Bilitis is a women’s organization resolved to add the feminine voice nd viewpoint to a mutual problem. While women may not have so much difficulty with law enforcement, their problems are none the less real—family, sometimes children, employment, social acceptance—the groundwork has been well laid in the five and a half years—Homosexuality is not the dirty word it used to be. It has only been in this 20th century through the courageous crusade of the Suffragettes and the influx of women into business that women have become independent entities, an individual with the right to vote and the right to a job and economic security. But it took women with foresight and determination to attain this heritage which is now ours. AND WHAT WILL BE THE LOT OF THE FUTURE LESBIAN? FEAR? SCORN? THIS NEED NOT BE IF LETHARGY IS SUPPLANTED BY AN ENERGIZED CONSTRUCTIVE PROGRAM, IF COWARDICE GIVES WAY TO THE SOLIDARITY OF A COOPERATIVE FRONT—If the let Georgia-do-it- attitude is replaced by the realization of individual responsibility in thwarting the evils of ignorance, superstition, prejudice and bigotry.” (Ridinger, 52)
And this is the struggle to which Del devoted her entire life.

By the end of the 50s, I had found my way to the public lesbian bar community, to the sex workers, passing women, my fem-butch comrades who schooled me in the my erotic and cultural rites of passage. As you may know if you have read my other writings, I carry their touch and their lives with me always.

I entered the next decade, 1960s—and I know the prefix American goes before all I am saying here this afternoon—leading two lives, social activist and teacher by day—and sexual deviant by night, a young fem dancing late into the evening to the velvet songs of Johnny Matthias and the wails of Teresa Brewer, drinking her 7 and 7s in the back room of the Sea Colony, prepared for police intrusions and wanting intrusions of another kind, hating the strictures of State surveillance which marked our lives particularly in these public private moments. Remember at this time the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was still defining homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance.”

In the 1980s, during the Reagan years, I wrote, “Today the 1960s is a favorite target of those who take delight in the failure of dreams. For those who dabbled in social change or who stayed aloof from the passions of the times, the sixties has become a playground for nostalgia, a pot-filled room of counterculture adolescents playing with anger. But it is a sad cynicism that jeers at the defeat of courage and commitment and a selfish one too. [And simply wrong, I added on this afternoon, forty years later.] There is one group of Americans that cannot play with the 1960s, cannot give these years to mockery and disdain. In Alabama and Mississippi and Arkansas, in Watts and Harlem and Philadelphia, in luncheonettes and in movie theaters, on beaches, on school steps, and on buses, black Americans took their history into their own work-worn hands, carried it on their tired feet, until it became a different thing.” And now I add for gay people as well, who start the decade as sexual deviants and end it as gay liberationists. This decade, the 1960s was the most important ten years of my life—the sexual energies of it, the grassroots thrust of its social energies, the opportunity it gave me to seize history and mark it with collective actions. A decade of great struggles and great sadnesses: in 1963 Dr Martin Luther King delivers his “I Have a Dream Speech” in front of thousands in Washington, D.C., JFK is assassinated and Betty Friedan publishes The Feminine Mystique.”

From A Restricted Country (1987): I wore a double mask in those early sixty’s years, in those estaurants [here I explained how we conducted the sit ins in Baltimore’s segregated restaurants, with our black comrades picketing outside, while we, the white members of CORE infiltrated the restaurant.] My first deception was to the enemy; the pose of a nice white person who could be let in and would sit down and eat in quiet tones, pretending to ignore the battle for human dignity that was happening outside the windows.[Once again I was part of a fifth column.] The second was to my friends, my comrades, black and white, the pose of straightness, the invisibility of my queerness. They did not know that when the police entered, with their sneers and itchy fingers, I was meeting an old antagonist. Perhaps their uniforms were a different color, but in the lesbian bars of my other world I had met these forces of the state. I never told my comrades that I was different because a secret seemed a little thing in such a time of history.
The time for secrets, however, was coming to an end. Feminist and gay manifestoes were in the air.

The Voice of William Beardempl, 1966, in DOB’s publication, The Ladder: “You the respectable members of society have created these distortions in the lives of individuals, and then you disparage the results of what you have done. You turn with evil indifference on those you have maimed and sadistically hurt—and hurt again—and take advantage of the helpless fellow human being because they happen to be homosexuals? What are you going to do now? We will not accept compromise or tolerate injustice any longer. The way ahead for us has been plainly determined by the history of our country—We hear the drums of equality from the American Revolution. We hear the cannons of unity from our great civil war. Our banners shall read the same as for all men—Equality, Unity, Peace, Freedom. In our day to day existence, we still hear the catcalls of fruit, fairy, queer, faggot—all the reactions of subjective inequality still practiced by our neighbors and that continue to dwell in men’s civilized hearts. We demand our rights. If the police to not protect homosexuals as they have not done so in the past, then I can see in the near future a separate police force paid for and operated by the homophile community. Unless restrictive laws are changed, unless the courts uphold the rights of homosexuals, we shall have no alternative but to go to the Supreme Court and overturn those laws that all men are treated equally except for homosexuals. We ask no special favor. We want the ordinary rights like every other citizen of the United States—jobs, homes, friends, social lives, safety and security. Here is our challenge to San Francisco: Face Reality—Face Homosexuality! (Ridinger, 124)

I want to be linear in this telling but I can’t, too much was all going on at the same time, but let us know stop at that late warm night in June, 1969 in the Village right across from the 7th Avenue Subway stop, when a group of young gay people, some queens, some young cross dressers, one butch woman whose name we now know—Marilyn Fowler—and old bar regulars, touched by all I have mentioned—the growing strength of people’s movements demanding dignity and their own class evictions from the “good” life, decided this intrusion by the State was one too many. [I interrupt the telling here to say that this is only version of the story, that we are learning nuances all the time and that stories of mythic origins are ironically shifting things.] The police entered the Stonewall Inn, a rather dank place, thinking it would be a raid like all the others, hustling cringing queers onto the streets to await the police cars, to please the Mayor’s clean- up- the- city call, perhaps to punish an uncooperative Mafia connection. The story goes, “While the police waited for patrol cars to cart away the arrested suspects and the seized alcohol, the bar’s patrons began to resist. They refused to follow police orders. Men refused to show their IDs and men dressed as women refused to accompany female officers to the bathroom to have their gender confirmed. Those who weren’t arrested exited through the front door, but they didn’t get go far. Within a short time, the crowd swelled to an estimated 2,000. As police put the arrested into the wagons, the crowd threw what they had—pennies, beer bottles, trash cans—at the police and shouted ‘Gay Power!’” 13 people were arrested, four police officers were injured. The rebellion continued for six nights—on one of them I stood in the middle of the cordoned off road, the wet streets shining in the night, interrupted in my journey to the bar by the milling crowds. It is estimated that there 1,000 gay rights organizations formed within a year after Stonewall, and by 1972, over 3000. (Carter)

Gay liberation was one part of the journey I had to take, but as a woman, I am also forever grateful to the Women’s Liberation Movement—and to the world of lesbian feminism—even though I struggled with its rigidity from time to time—these collective voices of new imaginings and fierce actions allowed me, forced me, to confront the history of the normalized concept of "woman" and how this system of power relations fit into all the others--class,race, colonization and the other manipulated markers of human complexity. What heady days there were, not because my new comrades were better than my bar days community, but because together these discourses, these struggles for full human expression and for sexual freedom gave me the insights I needed to have a life, a life, now of almost 70 years, that has brought me to these shores where my history cpeaks to yours.

Something had happened from the mid 1960s on—women, straight and gay, educated by their work in the new left and the civil rights struggles but disappointed in their demeaning treatment by the men in the movements, broke away from what they called the “sexism” of their male comrades and through grassroots organizing and consciousness raising groups (I was in three, a Marxist feminist reading group, a lesbian feminist group and a Gay Academic Union’s women’s group out of which in 1974 would come the Lesbian Herstory Archives) put the slogan the personal is political into action. The development of feminist theory and actions transformed the 1970s—women’s shelters, Take Back the Night Marches, Anti-Violence Against Women Campaigns, reproductive rights marches, the equal pay for equal work campaign with the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) finally being passed in 1970, the birth of a feminist theater project starting with It’s Alright to Be A Woman Theater Group—simple, profound stories from the lives of women we recognized; then as the decade progressed, feminists like Betty Friedan grew frightened of the growing lesbian “menace” as she called it in the national women’s movement, which in turn inspired activist lesbians to stand up at a national women's conference and proudly reveal their self-identifying t-shirts announcing they were this terror, the Lavender Menace. (Note again how the use of the word "menace" is a holdover from the McCarthy 50s, and how subversive the fifthe column idea can be.) The next few years revealed the cracks within our own discourse: issues of separatism within the lesbian feminist communities, the conflicting visions of radical feminists and cultural feminists, of sex radical lesbian feminists and anti-pornography lesbian feminists—all these conversations going on as we created alternate women’s cultural, political and social communities.

All social change movements have their documents of principle, their manifestos and position papers, their chants and anthems and so did American lesbian feminism. In 1970, a group calling themselves the Radical Lesbians printed, at a community press, a small four page declaration that reverberated throughout the decade—“The Woman Identified Woman,” whose first lines were, “What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.” I want to put this document, this ideological championing of the lesbian as the answer to centuries old domination and control of women next to that physical explosion in the streets of the Village six months earlier—both announced that another national social conversation about our queer and women’s bodies was about to begin. In my own bar fem way, I also knew I had a different kind of struggle within the movement ahead of me—desire had been my exploding force, portraying its richness my political and cultural motivation—my work, and the work of many other women, for many years was to enrich the anger with an honoring of pleasure, to keep queering my woman’s body without betraying it. I wonder at these words, still so alive with meaning for me when I am almost 70.

In December 1969, I joined the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA) and entered the formal world of gay liberation in the old firehouse on Wooster Street with its treacherous metal twisting spiral staircase—ok for firemen but not for high heels of any gender. In April of the new year, the first all women’s public dance was held and standing here in the darkness of your bar, I can still hear the throbbing music, the shirts torn of sweating women’s bodies and breasts bouncing free as hundreds of lesbian feminists celebrated their new freedoms. Soon after, tired of what we felt was gay male trivializing of lesbian concerns, we formed the Lesbian Liberation Committee that organized Sunday afternoon cultural and political events for lesbians—this group would later by the next year turn itself into Lesbian Feminist Liberation, one of the longest lasting lesbian social and political groups in America. In May of 1970 the Second Congress to Unite Women is held in NYC and at the opening gathering a group of women stand up wearing their Lavender Menace t-shirts and protest the growing homophobia of the National Organization of Women.

In May of 1970, four students are shot to death by police on the Kent State Campus protesting the war. That image of the young man lying dead on his stomach on the campus walk, his face not seen, his rigid legs turned inward, a young woman kneeling by his side, her hands up to her face in disbelief, has stayed with me all these years. No place was safe from the anger of the State, a State that was turning on its own young.

In 1970, American soldiers are accused of murdering entire town of Vietnamese civilians.

The1970s in my country was a decade of firsts for us; we get a taste of power and a growing sense of ourselves as a national community; the decade will end with tragedy and our largest gay pride demonstration ever. In 1974, we are taken off the list of mental illnesses. Elaine Noble becomes the gay politician elected to office. I begin my participation in the yearly pride marches, lesbians, gays, march together out of the Village up Sixth Avenue to the strawberry fields of Central Park, until in the mid 1980s, business interests in the Village turned up in the opposite direction so the hundreds of thousands potential customers would spend their money downtown. In 1973, I helped form the Gay Academic Union to represent gay teachers, students and workers in the colleges and universities of New York City; our first conference is broken up by a bomb threat. Then in 1974, out of a GAU women’s consciousness raising group that included Julia Penelope Stanley and Deborah Edel, the Lesbian Herstory Archives is born—to honor the histories I have been talking about today and so many more. LHA is still going strong in its own home in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. The collection would live and grow for two decades in my upper West Side apartment, right down the street from Womenbooks, the first women’s bookstore in New York.

History is not a tale of continuous progression or disappointment; it is about engagements, broken promises, refusals and breakthroughs, power shifts and access to technologies and offered moments of change if we take them up. The 1970s were no different. One of the most vivid memories I have is the hundreds of us that stood in all weathers throughout the decade in front of the New York City Council Chambers meeting hall as the elected officials voted on the city’s gay rights bill—from 1972 on for fourteen years we stood, protested, testified, and each year this city of my birth and so many years of my life turned its back on us until 1986, when we were finally recognized as full citizens of New York. The decade that opens with the gay power shout and lesbian creative rage also features Anita Bryant and her antigay Save the Children national campaign in 1977 and towards the end of this year of great national coming out, in 1978 on November 27, Harvey Milk, a favorite gay son of San Francisco and his friend Mayor Mascone are shot to death by a Dan White whose lawyers argue the Twinky defense, sugar made him do it, for a lighter sentence. I know many of you have seen the recent film documenting these events—our history becoming national history.

Finally in the closing months of 1979, the archives collective, holding high its banner proclaiming “In the Memory of the Voices We have Lost,” joins over a hundred thousand people from every state and ten foreign countries to march on Washington, D.C. demanding respect be paid to lesbian and gay rights and in this last year of the decade I was told to bring to you today, the National Gay Task Force adds Lesbian to its title. From the small meetings of friends of Harry Hay and the women who walked up the long flight of stairs to the San Francisco offices of the Daughters of Bilitis, from the bar people who had risked their lives on dark streets to touch and love, from the women’s collectives and the endless meetings about how to change what gender dictates in this world and so much more—it now comes to you, you the younger ones, this long twisting skein of our queer human dreaming.

Thank you for listening to this American voice telling an American story.

Sources
Carter, David. "Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution." New York: St Martins
Griffin, 2004.
Hogan, Steve and Hudson, Lee. "Completely Queer: The Gay and Lesbian Encyclopedia." New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998.
Katz, Jonathan. "Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A." New York: Thomas Crowell Company, 1976.
Nestle, Joan. "A Restricted Country." San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1987,2003.
Ridinger, Robert B., ed. "Speaking for Our Lives: Historic Speeches and the Rhetoric for Gay and Lesbian Rights (1892-2000)." New York: the Haworth Press, 2004.

Words for Palestine

2009-12-06T17:37:00.000-08:00

Words for Palestine, December 6, 2009, Melbourne, Australia

Students for Palestine asked me to speak at a rally held in front of the Park Hyatt Hotel here in Melbourne where the Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard was hosting Israel's Deputy Prime Minister, Slivan Shalom. They were discussing, the paper said, Israel's request for help from Australia to help it rehabilitate the Jordan River. This was Shalom's second official dinner--the first in Sydney where the Prime Minister of Australia also welcomed the Israeli government official in glowing terms and never once mentioned the crises that is facing the Palestinians under the present Israeli regime. I was asked to speak as a representative of Women in Black and thus Hellen, Marg, Sue, Geraldine--my Women in Black comrades stood with our banners behind me as I spoke. We clearly were the oldest in presence. Without their support, I could not have accomplished what I had to do. I quote the words of two poets in the talk--I wanted something different, more complex then a typical rally speech--the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and the American writer, always prophetic in terms of what racial failures would bring to States, James Baldwin. Thank you, Daniel, for the image.

Words for Palestine

Salam Alekhim/ Shalom

I want to thank Students for Palestine for inviting the Melbourne Women in Black group to be part of this demonstration against the uncritical welcoming of Silvan Shalom to this country. I speak with two voices today—as a member of Women in Black, and as a 70 year old American Jewish woman who lost one third of her family in the Belzec Concentration camp. Two voices but one heart—the brutalizing of populations by the use of overwhelming military force, by governmental policies of ethnic cleansing and forced expulsion from family homes, by the unquestioned belief in the right of one people to live a full life while another is condemned to hopelessness , to endless humiliations, to erased pasts, to an impossible present and a murdered future—I cannot, will not, not turn my head or heart away from the connections between my Jewish history and Palestinian history of the last 60 years.

In Haifa, after the first Intifada, in 1987, 5 Israeli women stood in silent vigil dressed in black to protest the Israelis occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. the next week Palestinian women joined the protest and a few months later, 5000 marched through the streets of Tel Aviv asking for peace. Now Women in Black stand in over 30 countries demanding an end to the brutalization of civilian populations and the planet, an end to what seems like a time of endless wars. Here in Melbourne Women in Black have been organizing for an end to the occupation since 1988 (Here I referred to Alix Nissen, a founding member of Women in Black both here and in Haifa and Marg Jacobs who has been involved with Melbourne Women in Black since 1988).

From our flyer: "We stand in recognition of peace activists all over the world, to embrace our common humanity, as a bridge to mutual respect, to remind our selves that seemingly small actions can lead both to change and hope. We make the following promises for the new year—we promise to expose the lies that demonize those who discuss nonviolent ways to end the Israeli occupation. We promise to uphold the judgements of the UN’s Goldstone Report and Breaking the Silence. We promise to stand in solidarity with Israeli and Palestinian activists who face jail for their anti occupation work— with the Shminstim, a group of Israeli teenagers declaring their refusal to serve the occupation,with Mohammad Othman, a Palestinian human rights activist,with Kobi Snitz, with Ezra Nawi ,"

with the women who monitor the checkpoints hoping to reduce the daily abuses of Palestinians simply trying to get to work, with the citizens of Bi’lin who take on the Israeli Defense Force every night, with the members of New Profile, an Israeli anti- militarism group, with the Palestinian and Israeli academics who think and teach critically about the occupation and as a result appear on a hate list of those who must be purged from the academy in the so-called democratic state of Israel,with Gideon Levy of the Haaretz newspaper, with Dr Saida Atrash, the Director of the Mehwa Center, the women’s shelter on the West Bank where every day she and others try to comfort Palestinian women who have lost their homes, and with it any sense of security for their families.

We hear the voices of power easily enough, but the voices of alternate visions, of the questioners of certainties, these we must amplify and honor, these are our deepest hope—As Mahmoud Darwish wrote in his homage to Edward Said: "Then you are prone to the affliction of longing? My dream leads my steps. And my vision seats my dream on my knees like a cat. My dream is the realistic imaginary and the son of will: We are able to alter the inevitability of the abyss!"

The voice of conscientious objector Or Ben-David, a 19 year old Israeli young woman from Jerusalem: "To refuse means to say no! No to the military rule in the West Bank, no to the use of violence as a means of defence, no to patriarchy, no to violence against innocent people, no to war and no to a society that claims to be democratic but forces youth to carry weapons, to kill or be killed. I refuse because I want to make a difference. I want all those Palestinian youths who have lost hope to see that there are Israelis who care and who make a different choice. I want all my friends who became soldiers or who are about to become soldiers to see that things do not have to be the way they are, and that doing these immoral things is not something to be taken for granted, that another way is possible." The author of these words is now serving 20 days in an Israeli military prison.

Know that our numbers, the numbers of dissenters, are growing , that cracks are running down that monstrous barbed- wire topped gray wall that tonight’s honored guest calls a fence, know that more and more of us are not afraid of what they call us—traitors, self- hating Jews, antisemitic Jews, renegade Jews. What we are afraid of is what comes on the horizon when a people’s daily dignity is so insulted, when others so absolutely and brutally control the possibilities of one’s life—James Baldwin, an African- American writer who knew in his bones of daily dehumanization, warned of the the "Fire Next Time." What hope will there be for reconciliation if the settlers keep dancing on the hearts of the dispossessed, if leaders like Rudd and Obama and so many others sit down to feast with representative bullies of the Israeli state, pretending that Palestinian agony does not exist. We have seen in the past the results of this calculated refusal to challenge national cruelties. Read the Palestinian poet, read Darwish—"Do I ask permission, from strangers who sleep/in my own bed, to visit myself for five minutes? Do I bow respectfully to those who reside in my childhood dream?"

Mr Silvan Shalom is the minister for regional development and control of the flow of water--one of the regions he is in charge of is the upper Galilee, the one- time site of al-Birwah, a village razed to the ground in 1948, its people forced to flee and among them the poet I now always carry in my heart, Mahmoud Darwish, and his family—his birth place made invisible except in the words of his poems and on old maps, his very presence made absence, a poet in exile for much of his life, but against the roaring ugliness of Israel's dedication to the eradication of a people, I put the poet’s yearning lovely humanity, “The poem is what lies between a between. It is able to illuminate the night with the breasts of a young woman/it is able to illuminate, with an apple, two bodies/it is able to restore/ with the cry of a gardenia, a homeland!" The poet brings us back to the occupied body, the place of devastation, into the night of war he brings the perfume of longing, our rights of desire.

Long after the world forgets the name of the vice Prime Minister of Israel, it will remember the words of Mahmoud Darwish, the poet, for he honors the wonders of life.

**********

It had been a long day and I had been up all night writing the talk, I was emotionally exhausted from the whole event, my anger, my sadness, my speaking as a Jew and so Marg kindly led me to her car. It was only after I had arrived home, that I received the call from Daniel saying that shortly after I had left, the demonstators had attempted to enter the hotel and were beaten and sprayed with capiscum. A young woman friend of his whom I had met was punched in the face by a member of the police. This morning, our daily newspaper, "The Age," carried a picture of the confrontation and the following caption: "Capiscum Spray used to Quell Anti-Israeli Protestors." I want no more violence. Civil disobediance, yes, in the hundreds of thousands, yes, but no more aggressions provoking more aggressions. Enough of this--we will struggle against the Israeli state as we did against the apartheid South African state but in our own way, with an imagined difference. Blood against blood makes reconciliation impossible. Only the fire's devastation comes this way. We "must alter the inevitablity of the abyss." But I am 70.

Oh Such a Week We Had...

2009-12-04T03:25:00.001-08:00

Oh such a hard week we have had, but this afternoon La Professoressa went into that familiar mode--preparing for one of her international trips--rushes to the bank, to her office for needed papers, to La Mananas for two weeks worth of fruit for me, and most importantly of all, off to Richard, her beloved chiropractor who knows all the wayward bones in her back and can charm them back into place. Back home, I iron her just -decided- on- must- have shirts as she packs for her transition from Australian summer to English winter. Cello and I sit on the edge of the bed watching the process, an experienced packer is this woman, so quick, so wisely considered, one medium sized suitcase, one carry on bag with wheels into which go her computer, papers, books. In a few minutes all is ready. She gives me that dreaded nod and I call the taxi, always sad at her going--as the Italians say, partire e morire--taking leave is a little death.

The taxi pulls up, I stand at the gate, with Cello at my feet, his tail hanging low, we hug, kiss good-bye, whisper, "thank you for all you have given me" and so the hard week comes to an end with La Professoressa doing what she loves so dearly, doing what brought us together in the first place, flying off into the night, back towards Europe, her head packed with ideas on women and human rights, her itinerary one of visits with old friends, and classes to be taught, conferences to be attended, London and Paris her destinations. Nothing annoys her now, not the long wait in Bahrain or Singapore, not the dashes to her connections--buses, trains from airports to hotels and back again--not the prospect of sleeping upright for 20 some hours, her back already dreaming of Richard's restorative touch. Ten years ago this delight in leaving her home behind brought her to me in New York, with Cuba's sun still strong on her face, on her arms.

And how we travelled together--to London, to Dorset and the English coast, to Athens and Mykonos, Santorini and Crete, to Paris and Copenhagen, to Palestine/Israel and always to New York. But now Cello and I stand at our front gate and wave good-bye to the Red Head as she pulls away from our weatherboard house on Fitzgibbon Avenue; she is already talking with the Lebanese driver who has posted moments from his lost geographies on his dashboard, and then she turns for a last wave. The taxi disappears down Dawson Street. Cello looks up at me, his dark eyes even darker. Just you and me now, he seems to say. We make a promise to care for each other as best we can in the long weeks ahead until our exuberant traveller returns.

Lesbian Herstory Archives Art Benefit!

2009-12-01T17:25:00.000-08:00

You don't have to be in New York to help support the Lesbian Herstory Archives and get a wonderful work of art by a New York lesbian artist:

Join Us at the first ever Lesbian Herstory Archives Art Benefit!

Raffle of original artworks by more that 80 artists

Raffle tickets are $100 and can be purchased at http://www.lesbianherstoryarchives.org/

or by calling the archives--718-768-3953 to use a check, money order, Visa, Mastercard

Every raffle ticket holder goes home with an original art work and ensures the survival

of the Lesbian Herstory Archives

For a listing of the partcipating artists, to find out more go to the website!

Date of raffle: December 19, 2009

Alexander Gray Associates--526 West 26th Street, Suite 1019

If you buy a raffle, as I did, from a long way away, an archives volunteer will pick out a painting for you and mail it to you--and what good and bad in a good way taste the archives women have.

Joan's Delight

2009-12-01T01:52:00.000-08:00

Thank you, Lepa and Stephanie and all who have commented on my words. Thank you so much.

Daniel is a young man who has been my friend and comrade ever since I arrived in this city. I first met him when he was finishing up his Doctorate thesis and I was on my first Honorary Fellowship tour in the English Department of the University of Melbourne. Oh the ways of the world, that I should come all this way to find my Daniel, a working class lad from Mount Gambia in South Australia who burns with ideas and projects, who is a dedicated volunteer at the Australian Gay and Lesbian Archives and who knows how to schmooze on the phone, not a flourishing art here. Young gay man and old lesbian, how we laugh together.

A Night in Caulfield--Written for the Newsletter of the Australian Jewish Democratic Society, November, 2009

2009-11-11T02:37:00.000-08:00

Under the gaze of the brave founders of the Bund, captured in charcoal drawings and turn of the century photographs, 60 or so contemporary Bund members living in Melbourne and their supporters gathered in the SKIF Center to honor Chaver Doctor Marek Edelman (1919-1009), the last surviving commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This is the second Bund event I have attended here and once again I found the gathering touched by a sense of historical dignity, by a living dedication to the Bund vision of social justice, political freedoms and comradeship.
Under the red Bund banner, sat a portrait of Dr. Edelman and close by was a vase of yellow flowers, symbolizing the yellow tulips Dr Edelman placed for many years at the foot of the Polish monument to the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto.

We watched news coverage of the funeral procession, thousands it seemed walking quietly down a broad Warsaw boulevard after his casket, Polish soldiers forming an honor guard. The ironies of history. Arnold Zable spoke about his meeting with Edelman last year, after a lifetime of admiration and how direct, clear- headed and pragmatic the freedom fighter was about the hard choices that they had to make in their armed struggle, but Zable emphasized, Edelman did not glorify the use of arms. “He told me,” Zable said, “that he admired those who decided to die with dignity in the camps as profoundly as he did those who died with guns in their hands. He detested the phrase, ‘they went to their deaths like lambs to slaughter.’”

A short except from a two hour filmed interview with Edelman about daily life and resistance in the ghetto highlighted the complexity of Edelman’s humanism. In stark black white, with deep shadows etched on his face, Edelman spoke of the day by day maneuvers, of the decisions of who would live that day and who would die. At times, we heard only his voice while we watched haggard people trying to find a place to hide. This man with an aching heart said if the choice was to save a 15 year old daughter or a 20 year old man, we had to choose the one who could best fight. Shadows and clarity, a terrible kind of clarity.

A three page English translation of a biography of Edelman was waiting on every seat so those of us who did not speak Yiddish could follow along as Bobbi Zylberman spoke in elegant Yiddish. One of the reasons I go to the Bund events is because of the opportunity to hear Yiddish in a living progressive political setting. Dr. Edelman who escaped the ghetto through the sewers of Warsaw chose to stay in Poland where he continued his lifelong support of liberation struggles including the struggle for a Palestinian homeland, a struggle though, he advised Palestinian leaders, that should not use civilians as military pawns. For his willingness to engage the Palestinians, Edelman has become a hero in exile in Israel.

Throughout the evening, people greeted each other, held each other and what impressed me greatly was the large number of teenagers present, all participating in some way in the night’s events. Unlike other Jewish progressive political gatherings I have attended, here there is a true intergenerationalism, meaning that there was another kind of energy in the room along with the historical sadness. Teenagers, speaking Yiddish, flirted and made sure the technology worked. They sang with hopeful voices the old songs.The evening closed with the wonderful singing of The Mir Kumen On Choir, featuring the strong young voices of three singers from SKIF. Once again the proud Bund anthems rang out and all around me, women and men late in their lives, stood as one and sang in Yiddish the Bund words of hope and resistance. In a small hall, with a gray carpet stained from much communal traffic, transpired something humanely wondrous, touched by shadows and song, by lives of courage and principle, by journeys of displacement and fraternity.

Our Time by the Beach on the Mornington Peninsula

2009-11-09T21:04:00.000-08:00

Last week, La Professeressa took Cello and me to a new part of our world here, the Mornington Peninsula, green and rolling hills down to the sea, in places reminding me of the Irish coast I saw so many years ago, in the early 60s. Here my breasts hang low and my darling fronts the breeze while Cello cools his nose in the sand. Life is like this, layers of worry, of concern for the dis-ease of others, done in our name, or because we live far enough away to think it is not of our concern, and then the longing just to be in the open air with those we love, to feel the wind and see the sweep of the sea, here so vast, long arcing white foamed waves rolling into the beach, the running steps behind us as we struggled up the sandy path to the ocean of a young woman surfer, her board already strapped around her ankle, her feet flying over the sands to join her comrades already black spots resting on the never still swelling flowers of the sea, no fear in her, no trepidation it seemed--the sea and youth and strength of body were all there for her to pleasure. I thought of the freedom of her movement, the delight of her delights, and wished for all the young of the world to know her joy, the sure steady swiftness of her approach to that which she most wanted.

Sometimes It is Hard...

2009-11-09T20:40:00.000-08:00

The more I read, the more YouTube footage I see of home evictions in East Jerusalem, Israeli police and settlers mugging for the camera, smiles, self congratulations in the face of exiled Palestinian families, the cries of women, the confused and frightened looks of the children, the peace observers, mostly women, shoved aside by the young men who are cloaked in national power, guns slung over their shoulders, men too young to have seen the Polish families moving into the homes of Jewish families carted away by the Nazis, the sense of righteous reclamation as Jews were cleared from neighborhoods of Europe, their property, their dignity, their claim to a family history denied--but I will say the words we are not supposed to say. That these soldiers, that these settlers with their bully boy struts, remind me of those Nazi soldiers, those gentile victors who trampled over the evidence of other lives, I as a Jew say Israel, the nation state, has granted unquestioned power to bullies to destroy Palestinian lives, daring the world to stop them. And like once before, so many turn their heads and hearts away, this time not in deference to a mad man but to a nation state that hides behind our history of suffering to mask its own growing fascism.

The image I share with you is of a paperbark tree on my street here, filled with the late afternoon sun of early summer. The bark of this tree hangs in shaggy wide strips that are soft white inside, like leaves of a manuscript. I sometimes collect the shed pages and pile them up on our veranda, the pages of a ancient book or one to be written. This light so filled with the dailiness of natural beauty that has been occurring on this continent for thousands of years is the counter moment to the brutalities I saw in those YouTube eviction films. Palestine/Israel too has a lovely ancient light that is now a silent witness to how terribly we fail our humane hearts.

Lisa Nestle, 1967-2009, and for Robin

2009-10-11T23:52:00.000-07:00

Robin and Lisa, c. 1975

Joan and Lisa, 1969

Elliot and Robin, c.1971

My niece Lisa, always the taller one, died last month, a short time after her father, my brother, and her tormentor took his last difficult breath. I asked Robin, the surviving sister, daughter, niece if I could write about Lisa and her--here I cannot find the words--her journey, no, too soon she lost the freedom, the ability to choose her steps, struggles, yes but how little I really know and that is my shame, her life--so short, so at the mercy of neglect and a father's rage--"of course," Robin said, in one of our weekly now, sometimes daily telephone calls, "you can't say anything I don't already know." And her laugh, Robin's brave laugh, saying I have seen it all, felt the exile of it all, the hurt of it all, and here I am. Witness what happened, these lives --what some call affairs of the family. The Nestle family, or at least this shuddering branch of it.

Regina, Lisa, Carol, Robin, c. 1972

Lisa, a three year old little girl, called frizzy head by her mother, a rare visit from her queer aunt and her aunt's then lover, 1971, a bleak landscape in a New Jersey suburb, Carol, the mother who was soon to leave. We go down to the basement to play with Lisa, the girl with the unwanted curls, the Jewish curls, I can't help thinking--all I remember is this little girl putting her dress over her head and running head first into the brick of the basement wall, over and over. We took turns holding onto her, trying to talk her out of her need to run blindly into pain. And through it all, I thought how can I leave her here, how can such damage be already done? I thought--this is what I remember from all those years ago--my brother had made it clear he did not want me near his children-- this society won't let me take her and how would I support her and me. My brother had told me in the past that I had no right to criticize how he raised his child--I was a queer, what did I know?

Regina and Robin and Lisa, New Jersey, 1969

You know, I can't continue here laying out the sadness of these lives; I will leave in my papers the full story as I remember it, the Nestle saga--Regina, Elliot, Joan and now Robin. Know that once there was a young girl named Lisa who loved to draw and put ketchup on her food, who back in the late 70s traveled with Robin and Deborah and me to our yearly two week rental cottage in Truro on the Cape, whose laughter Deborah and I could hear coming over the wood partitions, the girls taking in the sights of Washington D.C. as Deb and I tried to beef up their knowledge of American history, visiting with our friend Judith, the girls swimming in the New Hampshire lake, the photo of Lisa with her head leaning on Deb's shoulder in the small Croydon kitchen, Lisa sleeping under our bed in my New York apartment, not wanting to be in another room. Robin curled up at the end of our bed-- we knew then how badly they had been damaged. Lisa, tall and with a husky voice who tried to make sense of what life had given her, a father who beat her and her sister so badly, they would flee into those same suburban New Jersey streets and hide under the parked cars of their neighbors, the two little girls who told us on that trip, Deborah and I, of how they build a nest for themselves in the garage and invented their own language that only they could understand, the language of the wounded, a created privacy when nothing else was off limits, not their bodies, not the crushing of their joy.

Robin and Lisa and friend, dancing, California, c.1977

Lisa escaping into drugs, from time to time calling me from the West Coast, then silence, then another Lisa voice, a smaller voice saying simple sentences, Lisa, whose brain was damaged from being brought out of a drug induced coma too quickly, now in her 20s but walking her streets as ten year old, yet still taking delight in her job as a returner to the shelves of unwanted supermarket items, the last time I heard her voice, my heart froze, froze with enormity of what had been lost, of what had never been for this young woman named Lisa. She gave birth to a daughter, who someday I hope I will meet, she wants to be an artist and I remember again, her mother, Lisa, the lanky young girl, sitting on the floor of the flight departure lounge, drawing images from the young person's encyclopedia Deb and I had given her, her curly dark hair, her off center careful smile. The plane came and carried both Robin and Lisa back to their lives. I know if somehow Deb and I had managed to keep those children, their lives would have been different and so would we.

Where It All Began, Regina and Jonas on their Wedding Day, The Bronx, NY., 1928

I have been carrying around with me from country to country, from home to home, a small old fashioned cassette tape. On it are the voices of my mother, Regina, and the giggling sounds of Robin and Lisa. My mother, so long gone now, had never been able to mother me--always working, always loosing--money, apartments, lovers--but with these children, and at the mercy of my brother who kept her locked in her bedroom at night so, he said, she would not go out and gamble, in another suburb in Silicon Valley, she was radiant and funny and creative--let's tell a story, she says, let's sing a song, she encourages them, in her own not adult, not child voice, and the love of they for her and she for them raises off the shiny thin magnetic strip. How rare this preserved bit of human voices is--happiness, protected childhood, my mother embracing these young lives, for the short while my brother endured her. Robin tells me she still remembers how happy they were with Regina, how much she loved them. Now Regina is gone, Elliot, the deliverer of the blows, is gone, Lisa, the child woman, is gone. Robin and I are talking, Robin will come here soon and I will hold her. Once after she had heard I had cancer, Lisa sent me a beautiful white basket of flowers all the way from San Francisco--someone had helped her do it. I am the teller of stories, I am the holder of the thread that binds these lives together--how do I explain that the glimmers of love, that even my brother, sad and distraught man that he was, catch my heart, working class we were, Regina, Elliot and Joan, Regina the embezzler, whore, owner of Jonas' Dress Shop in a small town outside of New York in the 1940s for one year before it went bust, the shop named after my father who had died in 1939--perhaps the missing beginning for me is the beginning of the whole story, Jonas Nestle, whose body I have never seen, whose voice I have never heard, but who did hold Regina and Elliot for a short while in his furrier's arms--you see, these stories never end--as yours do not either, some thread will be caught up in another's heart. These sad three and what I made of it all. Dear, dear Robin, you will be the collector of our threads. You who have shown me the grace of your spirit as you nursed your dying father, your dying sister--with all the hardness and lost there but you try so hard to forgive. I, we, await your visit.

Readings--1--Darwish, Luxemburg,Colette--Desire for the Lost, Just and the Flesh of the Word

2009-09-16T02:20:00.001-07:00

I want to give you the choice of what you want to read in these postings and so I am creating headings for my passions--the head and heart--trying to keep track. Authors are my fellow sojourners here--I am free to follow my impulses and bring together voices as if they are around me--and I have the time to read which is a gift. My author friends for the next few months will be Mahmoud Darwish, an old friend whose lines carry the breath of loss and the perfume of loves--for his occupied land, for his Arabic language, for the motifs of resistance, for the horse and the well and the star and the beautiful woman; Rosa Luxemburg, her dedication to change, her courage to endure the loss of freedom for a vision of another way to organize human society, every time some one now disparages The Left, I think of these women and men who took rifle butts to the face and bullets to the heart, who refused the unreal comforts of nationalisms; Colette, with the heat of summer in her words, the coolness of her view of family and mothers and fathers, her naked body in all her ages, her mistakes in Vichy France, her questionable wisdoms and her desperate practicalities, her frizzled red hair resting on a pillow as she gathers strength to write once again from her bed, her words rising from the stiffness of her body, the Proustian woman--these three, the exiled Palestinian poet, the closest to me in time, the closest to me in the temper of his songs; the murdered Jewish revolutionary, with her limp and little hat on the European balcony with the male thinkers lined up around her, so sturdy and urgent in her view of what must be done, her letters to her lover whom she cannot quite organize but for whom she longs as she crosses the borders into Poland, into Germany always one step ahead of the national police, so Jewish she is to me, the angel of secularism but with a twist; the French writer with a taste for business and for the flesh, her queer body half naked in the dance halls of France with Missy standing guard for close to ten years, a realist, a sensualist, an explorer of the underworld of touch, sensualists all I see them, here in my study in West Brunswick I dream you all and listen and yearn and wish you the longest of lives in each others dreams. Yesterday, the postman threw a little cardboard box over the gate and Cello called my attention to its arrival--your last to be translated book, Mahmoud, "A River Dies of Thirst," always the beauty so tight in your hand, the color of your taken land, and always the rain of life washes you back into history, back into the every day wonder of courage and light.

Our Monthly Vigil, September 2009

2009-09-07T02:50:00.001-07:00

What a vigil it was, our largest yet and with wonderful musical accompaniment, Bonjah. A human rights activist from New Zealand came up to join us and an old friend, Penny, stood with us the steps to join as well. We all missed Alex who is in Israel doing her activist work, but she will see these images and be with us. Hellen, Marg, Geraldine, Sandra, Sivan, Esme, Sue, myself, Penny, just some of the women in the vigil. Remember the first Saturday of every month in front of the old GPO, 12-1.

2009-09-02T04:57:00.000-07:00

I thank Mark Levy for sending out these images from the May 2009 commemoration of the Queens College students of the 1960s who were active in the Civil Rights Movement. see the following entry for more about this time. from "Queens College and The 1960s Civil Rights Movement Project"

Archival Posting 2: Old Comrades Reunited

2009-09-02T04:05:00.000-07:00

When I was in New York last year, Mark Levy, a civil rights veteran of the 1960s, was launching a history project to commemorate the Queens College students who had participated in the Civil Rights movement. Two of these students, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered because of their civil rights activism, along with a young African-American civil rights worker from Mississippi, James Chaney. In May of 2009, these aging comrades marched in the graduation ceremony. Carl Hirsch and I could not be there but Mark sent us our sashes and these images resulted. We all have many love stories in our lives and this is one of mine:

From the Introduction to Sister and Brother: Lesbians and Gay Men Write about Their Lives Together, edited with John Preston. The book is now out of print.

My own relationship with gay men began in 1959 when I found myself on the campus of Queens College, part of the City University of New York. Here in this working-class "Berkeley of the East," I met Carl, the son of a trade unionist who had been purged from the union he had helped to organize in the first wave of red bashing in the 1940s. Tall, broad, with a permanent cowlick over his forehead, Carl was part of a whole family of red diaper babies who still believed in the vision of the International. The group of committed activists gave my own class anger a historical setting; my first date with Carl was to see Lotte Lenya portray Jennie in Brecht and Weill's "Threepenny Opera" in a small Village theater. Afterward we sat in a huge and sparsely populated automate where he explained Brecht's vision of the theater to me, the coffee cups piling up and the ashtray spilling over.

That night we attempted to make love as my mother slept in the next room. I was naked, and Carl was stroking me, when my mother sleepwalked into the room. Carl threw his body over mine, and I said in a stern voice, "Mother, go back to sleep." Obediently, she turned herself around and marched out the way she had come in.

"What will I tell her in the morning?" I wondered out loud to Carl.
"Tell her," he said quietly, "we were trying to find each other."

All night we talked until the Queens sky turned orange with the new day; I still wanted Carl to make love to me, but I already knew that my womanness was not a softness that he sought.

We kept our erotic searchings to ourselves while Carl and the others continued my cultural and political education; songs and voices filled my heart--Martha Schlamme, her voice heavy with European history, singing "Peat Bog Soldiers"; Pete Seeger, his head held high, singing "The Banks are Made of Marble"; Odetta, like a reincarnation of Paul Robeson, making us believe in an international community of peace. We organized, petitioned, rode buses to Washington, picketed the Flushing, Queens Woolworth for its discriminatory racial policies, rode Freedom buses to Baltimore and attempted to integrate restaurants and luncheonettes. We refused to take shelter during air-raid drills and had our college IDs confiscated by the campus police; we shut down the school to protest the Vietnam War.

I am still inspired and haunted by the memories of that time; by the maliciousness of the McCarthy era; by the courage of the then young people like Paul Robeson Jr. and Jo-Anne Grant, who were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee because of their unauthorized travel to China; by our insistence to support them, to be present in that hearing room that really was a courtroom, a conviction chamber. And while Carl and I did these actions together, while he taught me about the long tradition of radical protest in this country, we both went our separate ways in the night, to differently fleshed worlds.

In 1963, I left this country to travel in Europe with my woman lover. When I returned, things had changed. My friends interpreted my going as a betrayal of Carl; male homosexuality was easier for them to understand than my lesbianism, I suspect. I became more and more involved in Greenwich Village bar life, while continuing my own involvement in the Civil Rights movement. Carl want away to graduate school; we wrote each other long letters giving each the courage to explore our queerness. Carl was looking for a home with an older man. I wanted sex, street wanderings. I found the Gay Liberation movement. This past year [1994] once again I was in Washington, along with thousands of other gay and lesbian people, demonstrating for a more compassionate, inclusive American society. As I marched in the Lesbian Herstory Archives contingent down a long wide avenue, Carl jumped out of the crowd and ran over to me. Still large, still in his suspenders and a white shirt, he hugged me and I thumped his chest. Through all the emotional commotion of our reunion, we never missed a step as a whole nation of lesbian and gay people walked into history.

And here we are again, old friends, bodies marked by the passing of the years, but know that the songs once sung in the name of another social vision many years ago still sing within us.

Palestine/Israel: The Village of Bi'lin

2009-09-01T23:29:00.000-07:00

<http://bit.ly/XMuEI>. <http://bit.ly/HGJWx>. The first is a link to a blog kept going by the people of Bil'in, a Palestinian village that faces the Israeli Defense Force over a barbed wire barrier to keep Palestinian farmers from their lands, their olive groves and farmland. The second is a you tube link to a non-violent protest by the children of Bi'lin, chanting, "We Want to Sleep," as they march towards the barrier. These strange mix of letters, making no traditional sense, now carry us into the daily lives of those who others want to suffer in silence. Look and you will see soldiers with heavy guns and full military gear gather to ponder how to silence the children--then these young men--it seems like young men--pull together to move the barbed wire fence so they can arrest and carry over to the Israeli side, a 14 year old resident of Bi'lin.

In recent months, the IDF has been using night raids into the village to punish the non-violent citizens by arresting village leaders and activists. In the cover of night they come to break a people's spirit and no one sees other then the soldier and his targets. We must see, my Jewish eyes must see beyond the night, beyond the barrier, beyond the settlers' rage at the sheer survival of the hated--how did we come to this? I know as more and more push through the silences, Israel will have to rethink its human face--but how much more will be asked of the people of Bi'lin, of the Bedouins of the Negev, of Gaza, of the West Bank, of East Jerusalem? While the cafes flourish, the universities preach excellence, tourists come from all over, while the economy keeps many pleased, while Israelis can go and come as they please, bath in the seas, walk in the desert, stand on mountain tops, take pride in their children's futures, those behind the wall pull life from the hardest places. What kind of Jew am I? Like so many others, one that cannot live in silence at such inhumanity.

I know I had said I would put my writings on the Womeninblack.org.au site, but I have decided that there is no separation between this struggle and all of my life.

Thank You

2009-09-01T04:12:00.000-07:00

It is late here, the first day of spring with the warmest August since weather has been recorded on this continent--remember for those of you from my New York days, this is the end of our winter. More about geography later but now I only want to thank those of you who have responded to my words--Stephanie, Judith, Lee, Esther, Pattie and Shebar. Simply, you give me life, both as a writer and as the holder of other lives. I think this journal is my book, unfolding like a scroll, the present and the past, fading photographs of what has been my life, trying desperately to hold on, to honor, the tints of life before the shadows come. You give me joy, and I am so grateful.

Archival Posting 1--The Letter

2009-08-27T02:44:00.000-07:00

I will use this sight to form my own archives, to preserve moments of my past--as I think I have been doing all along. In the old days, I would have given these documents to the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and eventually, all will end there, but for now, I will gather them here as I find them--in what remains of my New York life here in Melbourne.

What prompted me to do this in this clearly stated way is the discovery of a letter from the first woman I loved, Carol Betty Lipman who died in 1965, tucked away in a slim, black hardcover book, Six Nonlectures, by e.e.cummins. Carol and I had met in Queens College in 1960. We were both English majors, she struggling, I devouring all I could. An unlikely couple, we shared a mutual love for literature and I, being slightly older and more widely read, became her prompter as we both prepared for the culminating comprehensive examination that all English majors had to pass to get their degree. I was already living alone on the lower East Side, Carol still lived at home with her family in Jamaica Estates, Queens. I was the hippy commie, she was engaged to a medical student and had a diamond engagement ring to prove it. Both our lives changed when we became lovers, deliriously so in some ways, very difficult in others. The letter is after we had separated, when Carol had fallen in love with another woman.

From the inside front cover:
"...and will somebody tell
me why people let go...

"(we're everything greater
then books might mean)...

and

"true lovers in each happening of their hearts
live longer than all which and every who..."

Dear Joan,
Now it's true I didn't write any of this and I ought to be original but you introduced me to it and I want you to know I appreciate it, and we read it all together so why not repeat it? So--

expand y o u i
into we
and in
vest i
gate the
uni
verse as us.

Love, Carol

The Letter-- all this written in Carol's small neat handwriting, blue ball point ink on a page torn from lined small pad--

Dear Joan,
Every day I think to myself--how is Joan--what is she thinking? I wonder if I can ever really be happy, Joan. There are always so many problems. I would have called you tonight but every night I say to myself--she will ask you why do you call and whatever I answer means nothing to her anyway. If I say, I was worried about you, you would say you don't have to worry about me, Carol. And if I said I was thinking of you, you would remain silent. And whatever else I might say would certainly upset you--so you see, I do not call you. I try not to be selfish although I would like to hear your voice. I miss you.

I wish our lives could meet sometimes but when they do, it is then that we are most apart. I think we are together in our separateness. It is quite sad to think that but I know it is true. I feel so much a part of you at times, Joan.

Please stay well Joan. In spite of what you may think, I still love you in my own way and I think you know that.
Carol

Why am I doing this, writing these words tonight onto this screen, a screen Carol never lived to see, to whom am I sending these words from a young lesbian woman to another, this tender page of loss and connection just newly brought to light so many years later? I know all that Carol said is true, I know that I have never forgotten her in any day of my subsequent life, I know I have often asked myself, have I used the years I had and Carol didn't in a way that brought meaning to life, I know that her death so young, so fearful, so shining in her countenance, was the first huge obscenity life made me witness. You too must have letters like this, from a time so long ago, but living anthems to lives and touch, to joy, and regret for broken things. Remember, Carol, how we curled around each other in the late afternoon violet waves of Riis Park, free to kiss and taste the salt on our bodies, on this patch of Brooklyn gay beach, our legs intertwined below the water, so young and free, delighting in what our courage had brought us--sunlight and glowing touch--and we were young, so young, riding home in your red convertible to my East 6th street crumbling apartment where your red car was the banner of another world. I stood at the window, watching you drive away, back to your family in the rich part of Queens, my body still trembling at your kiss. Always, Carol, Always--as long as I have words, you will live. With the top down, your arm around me, and the future always a promise.

Bits and Pieces 1

2009-08-23T20:39:00.000-07:00

I will use "Bits and Pieces" for short moments of information, reflections, tendernesses.

We believed that the election last year was the most important, and now I think the next election will be the most important for the kind of future America will have. Will the courage of the dream last? Will the haters, the ranters, the birthers, the fearful twist America into their image?

I just wanted you to know that I have started to post some of my more recent writings and talks on this part of the website. If you go to the posting "Books, Birds and Rosa," you will find the article I wrote for the Australian Jewish Democratic Society's Newsletter in May. I will add the speech I gave as part of an event commemorating Stonewall here in Melbourne very soon.

I have added images of my brother to the posting of his loss. I had never seen these images before and they are the only ones I have. My niece, Robin, so kindly sent them to me.

I am putting more and more of my writing about Palestine/Israel on the website Womeninblack.org.au including images and words about our monthly demonstrations.

My darling, La Professora, works in the garden every Saturday, her one break from ceaseless work at the University, while Cello and I stay close, catching the fallen branches, wondering at how she knows just what a tree or the soil or the brick path needs.

2009-08-23T19:42:00.000-07:00

I am using this place, undefined and yet in my hands, to archives these precious images that my niece, Robin, so kindly sent me after my brother's death. I will add images of him to the moment when I wrote of his death. These moments here had been lost to me, particularly the images of Regina, my mother, the woman in blue and green shift, the woman with a Chesterfield cigarette always in her hand, the woman who became a grandmother for Robin and Lisa, the first conventional domestic role I have ever seen her in. These images were taken in New Jersey home of my brother and his first wife, Carol, where Lisa was born. Lisa, who know is so ill and who still has hope in her eyes in the first picture with dear Robin, my final connection to family memory. The year is perhaps 1964--Robin will have to help me here--I am in my work clothes, the brown suit, my fem self so clear, a young woman I never had seen myself to be, always believing I was graceless. But it is the red, white lined swim suit that brings back the taste of a kiss, of a young fem's desire in the sun. That is the exact bathing suit I was wearing in the black and white photograph that is in the archives in Brooklyn, taken on the gay working class beach of Riis Park in circa 1960 where Carol Lipman and I kissed in the Brooklyn sun, held each other in the gentle surf along with all the other gay women and men occupying their known and harassed part of the Brooklyn shore, police and bashers in the waiting. That red two piece suit cheap and long lasting so simple a flag of pleasure, of desire, unafraid but knowing and my mother's legs and feet, her bunyioned toes reaching towards my so then unmarked body, my mother's body that I always remember clothed for work, for her battle in the man's world of the garment industry, her too tight shoes, her small body armored in girdle and full line bra, her body, all prepared to "earn a living" as she said so many times between puffs of smoke and bouts of Scotch. Here I see her reclining, her dress hitched up so air and light can touch her, her daughter at her feet, her daughter who so often and for so many years fled her body, her chaos, her loneliness. Now my niece, Robin, the survivor of so much, puts us back in the same frame. I think of Colette whom I am rereading and these images as working class Jewish fractured family sensuality, Colette's so loved Riviera mountains and sea replaced by a grubby New Jersey back yard, the sea by a child's cheap wading tube, but the bodies of mother and daughter, and the writing that would come from the opening up of want in dangerous places. Regina, her hair carefully done, her one extravagance, given back to me, so small, so real, so worn, now so dear as I almost 70 try to understand where bodies go.

"Palestinian Gays under the Hijab" by Nisreen and Dayna

2009-08-19T21:36:00.000-07:00

I am posting here Nisreen Mazzawi's outrage at the refusal to allow gay Palestinian leaders speak at the recent rally in Tel-Aviv.

August 16, 2009

"While we all are shocked by the shooting attack at the gay youth center in Tel-Aviv last week, that as result of it 2 young people lost their lives, Palestinian lesbians ans gays need to face both the homophobic street and the racist leaders of the Israeli gay community who refuse to give the stage for Palestinian speakers, neither for the former member of the Knesset, Issam Machool, nor for representatives of Aswat--Palestinian gay women's group based in Haifa. For the organizers and by their words, "they can't go as far as this."!!!

What do they mean, by going "going as far as this?"!!!

While in the world the legend of the democratic country of the middle east keeps announcing its jingles regarding the tolerant city Tel Aviv that provides a shelter for the Palestinian gays running from their society and families,the Palestinian gay community and supporters are excluded on purpose from public events specifically from the solidarity anti-homophobic demonstration held yesterday in Rabin Square.

Although the stage was full of politicians, a few of them known as homophobic ones, the majority of the gay community in Israel believed their struggle has nothing to with "politics;" this is what explains the instant need for 'social peace,' that a gay activist and victim of the attack talked about, to distinguish it from the other peace, supposedly the 'bad' one, the forbidden peace.

Living in a conflict zone where people die and kill every day and violence is everywhere makes people less sensitive to violence surrounding them, less sensitive to gender violence, killing of women, to xenophobia, to racisms and to other's lives. This is how a thousand people and more can be killed in less than one month in Gaza and all keep silent.

While the Israeli society, including the Israeli gay community, choose to ignore the increased level of internal hate and violence affected by the level of the occupation and its violence, this violence keeps increasing and infecting others. Instead of facing this problematic and complicated situation, the leaders of the gay community chose to exclude Palestinian gays and their supporters and to push them back into the closet. This is easier and goes hand in hand with the legend the government creates and promotes.

The highlight of the event was the presence of the Israeli President Shiman Perez showing public solidarity to the gay community. Despite his former homophobic record, by his sentence 'we are the do-not-kill,' he re enforces the public blindness to the mass killing of Palestinians that occur often and frequently by the government of this country...

For the Palestinian gays who live and struggle for their lives under the occupation, Tel -Aviv is not an alternative or a safe shelter. The few who succeed in making their way to Tel-Aviv end up living and working in the streets...

In fact, for the Israeli gay community and its leaders, the Palestinian gays including those who are citizens of Israel are excluded and not welcome. The leaders prefer to keep them in the closet, to push them back there and this way they can keep telling their legend the way they like. If it was up to them, they would put them under the Hijab...This way they can be the only ones who can tell how Palestinian gays and lesbians look and they will have a good excuse to attack and occupy their countries and societies as they believe they are the protectors of freedom.

While we believe homophobia is equal to racism and hate is equal to murder and murder is equal to murder, the majority of the Israeli gay community choose not to see the link and to ignore other kinds of violence abundant in the Israeli society.

The killings broke the image of the paradise for gays in the Middle East, and as a result it created a wave of worldwide international solidarity. Seeing all these people going out in solidarity make us wonder regarding the message of this unity. Is it mourning the loss of the non realistic image of the gay paradise in the Middle East or is it a call for raising voices against homophobia infecting all the societies around the world?'

copyrighted by Nisreen Mazzawi, feminist activist for peace and environmental-social justice, August 16, 2009

The Voice of ASWAT, the Voice of Palestinian Gay Women

2009-08-19T20:31:00.000-07:00

August 2, 2009

A Horrendous Crime of Hatred Against Gay and Lesbians in Israel

Aswat- Palestinian Gay Women laments the tragic death of the two youngsters at the Tel-Aviv gay center Saturday evening.

Aswat harshly condemns the horrendous attack on the center of LGBT community in Tel-Aviv, resulting in the killing of gay and lesbian activists and severly wounding several others. We call upon our partners and supporters to fight all forms of crimes of hatred, specially, ones directed the LGBT community.

We are utterly appalled by this crime of hatred that marks an extreme escalation of homophobia in our community, particularly, that it occurred in Tel-Aviv, supposedly a symbol of pluralism and diversity.

The horrific crime followed a wave of massive incitement of hatred against the LGBT community in Israel, and it is unfortunate that the Israeli government condemns these crimes but frequently tolerates verbal attacks directed from seniour government officials against the gay community in the country.

Aswat stands in solidarity with all LGBT organizations and activists in the country, Palestinians and Israelis alike, against the atrocious killings of innocents. We will march together, hand in hand, in Haifa, in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem against hatred and discrimination and raise our voices, the voices of justice and freedom.

In solidarity with all victims of the Crimes of Hate

Aswat-Palestinian Gay Women

e-mail:rdcoordinator@aswatgroup.org

website: www. aswatgroup.org

Aswat Believes in the Power of the Movement

My communications, print outs pile up beside the computer and so does my anger, sadness, determination. What does all else matter if in our own times, knowingly, we allow the suffering of a people in our name. Hatred, streets, doorways guarded by guns, walls shutting away a people's pain so normality can flourish on the other, freedom of movement, of expansion, of dreaming, of consuming, but this is not a normal society--evicted Palestinians sleeping in the street across from their ages old home, now newly occupied by a settler family whose teen age children come to the gates of their new home to sneer at the now homeless family--they should go away, all of this is ours. These children will be the future of this "normal" country."

I grew up in the Bronx in the 1940s where many of our neighbors had the blue numbers of their deadly dispossession on their lower arms--reaching for pickles or bread revealed the grocer's miraculous history of survival--and the word that reaches out from that time now is "rokmunis," the feeling of another's pain, much of the Bronx ran on rokmunis. Occupation is built on the absence of this word. Articles after articles, those articles I read through every night, depict its loss in this "normal" land. Palestinian workers rising before dawn to wait hours in steel chutes before they will be allowed into Israel, workers told they are not allowed to bring food or beverages in with them, no home cooked meals to make their day of labor easier; the face of a young Palestinian-Israeli child whose family has been told she can no longer attend a day care center because her kind are not wanted--what is normalized in Israel is hatred, fear and exclusion of difference. And yet so many other Palestinians/Israelis struggle to make the unseen seen, to monitor the acts of cruelty, to intercede, to keep alive another kind of national vision, another kind of human heart.

"Homophobia is Racism--Racism is Homophobia"

2009-08-11T01:02:00.000-07:00

Vigil in Tel Aviv

I want to include here a talk, given by Tamara, a queer activist from Tel Aviv, at a demonstration held in Berlin on August 7th and distributed by Rela Mazali and Jewish Peace News.

"Last Saturday a nightmare came true: we were hunted down.

A faceless man went into a room full of youngsters and opened fire.

Now 2 of them are dead, many wounded. Some teenagers outed on a hospital bed.

When the news of the murder came, it was all too easy for me to picture the scene--I used to spend most of my waking hours in this secluded basement flat in central Tel Aviv, the offices of the Israeli GLBT association, Haaguda, working on Pride and AIDS awareness events.

We felt very safe there. Confident. We had the City of Tel Aviv on our side, hanging rainbow flags on demand. We had the police doing our bidding instead of detaining and forbidding.

Ok, we had to swallow a few LGBT-phobic jokes from officers, bureaucrats and commercial sponsors. But we thought it was a small price to pay for tens of thousands marching in the streets of Tel Aviv, safe and proud, giving courage to countless kids across the country.

The price we paid now isn't small. It is immeasurable. The life of 2. the health of 15, a collective trauma.

I do not feel safe now in Tel Aviv. Our strong hold. Our ghetto. I feel grief stricken and furious and betrayed.

I want to know who was this man in a ski mask dealing death, in whose name? Was it a homophobic zealot? a Fascist? A crazed family member or even a lover? How can I spot this kind and seek shelter when I recognize danger?

Maybe I should simply watch out for men with machine guns.

But this is far from simple in Israel, where most young men are drafted at 18, many issued a gun. Reserve soldiers--the entire able-bodied male population--often take their gun home, too. There are guns on the bus, guns in cafes, guns in restaurants, guns on the trains and the beach. Security guards and police have pistols. Settlers carry fire arms where ever they go.

In fact, there are probably only 3 segments of the population in Israel that are less likely to have access to guns: work migrants, Palestinians and ultra religious Jews.

Yesterday, the Israeli police accused the LGBTQ communities of prematurely calling the murders a hate crime. Of inciting hate against other minority populations.

I agree with the police--it is too easy to point the finger at the extreme religious parties. Or at immigrants. Better look for the real villains: better accuse the policemen who on Sunday called the supporters of the evacuated families in East Jerusalem, "filthy faggots," when many of them had arrived directly from from a memorial demo protesting the murders in Tel Aviv/ Better investigate law enforcers calling conscientious objectors "stupid dykes" while smashing their heads on the pavement. Better beware of the police arresting and bashing queer activists in central Tel Aviv on the very same day as the murders, after they tried to protect refugees and their children from being deported.

Better point the finger at the soldiers who kill peace loving men and youth in non violent demos in Palestine and round up others in the dead of night.

I accuse them of creating a society of hatred and brute force where no minority is safe.

But it is also too easy to blame the police. The police are only a symptom, a tool of the government and the state. The same government who did nothing when calls for our blood were heard from its benches. The same state whose president, Shimeon Peres, objected in 2007 to the Pride Parade in Jerusalem--where 3 people had been stabbed only 2 years earlier.

Many of us in the Jewish LGBTQ community in Israel believed we would be safe if we would "be like everyone else," be mothers, soldiers, consumers. Be poster girls and boys for "the only democracy in the Middle East." Be a tourist attraction.

We were told that we could be safe if we distance ourselves from an hint of otherness. Because "the other draws fire."

We are not safe. we are being murdered. And in order to protect our self we should be nothing like every one else. We should demand they put away the guns they use to shoot us. We should denounce violence and repression of other minorities. We should honor the murdered by remembering--Homophobia is Racism. Racism is Homophobia."

"I Cannot Go Back to the Old Reality"

2009-08-04T21:43:00.000-07:00

To honor our young queer people, I will bring you words of the Tel Aviv community as they come to me--I will try not to tell you what connections to make. I thank Il-il for her permission to share this letter with you.

Dear Joan,

The last days have been so exhausting. I've not left the LGTB center in Tel Aviv for 3 days so far, only to go home, change and sleep for a while. There is so much to do, so many teenagers overflowing the center, crying, aching for friends, talking, sharing and just trying to hang out in a safe place. So many radical queer people trying to find their space, to speak, to ache without forgetting our unique identities. "Forget that you are women, trans, butch, femme, religious, secular, Palestinian, Feminist," some rich gay men told us who decided they should lead the way. "This is the time to forget your voice, let us speak," they told us. But we are not quiet, we are raging, more then ever. We have so many demonstrations, so many activities, meetings and actions.

I do not know how tomorrow will look. I cannot go back to the "old reality," the feeling that we are safe in Tel Aviv. I've read "Stone Butch Blues," I've read your "Bathroom Line," and I thought it's history, it's far away. But no. Now it is here. Now in 2009, in Tel Aviv, LGTB youth is being murdered. Kids I've worked with are hospitalized, or having to visit their friends in hospitals only because they were at an LGTB youth activity. Most of them had to come out of the closet on Saturday night, after they were shot and their parents found out they were not where they though they were, in all meanings.

Every kind word I read makes me feel so empowered and excited. I feel excited that newspapers, hegemonic newspapers in Israel and internationally will not stop writing about it. I feel excited to see the list of volunteers that I helped organize today, getting longer and longer....

Il-il K.

However this story unfolds, whomever the shooter is, and why the bullets flew, there is no going back--little by little, the Queer body is emerging as part of a national discourse on the possibility of difference within in Palestine/Israel and beyond.

United Voices

2009-08-04T05:50:00.000-07:00

Horrendous Crime of Hatred Against Gays and Lesbians in Israel

Aswat- Palestinian Gay Women- laments the tragic death of the two youngsters at the Tel-Aviv gay center Saturday evening.

Aswat harshly condemns the horrendous attack on the center of LGBT community in Tel-Aviv, resulting in the killing of gay and lesbian activists and severely wounding several others. We call upon our partners and supporters to fight all forms of crimes of hatred, specially, ones directed against the LGBT community.

We are utterly appalled by this crime of hatred that marks an extreme escalation of homophobia in our community, particularly, that it occurred in Tel-Aviv, supposedly, a symbol of pluralism and diversity.

The horrific crime followed a wave of massive incitement of hatred against the LGBT community in Israel, and it is unfortunate that the Israeli government condemns these crimes but frequently tolerates verbal attacks directed from senior government officials against the gay community in the country.

Aswat stands in solidarity with all LGBT organizations and activist in the country; Palestinians and Israelis alike, against the atrocious killings of innocents. We will march together, hand in hand, in Haifa, Tel-Aviv, and Jerusalem against hatred and discrimination, and raise our voices, the voices of justice and freedom.

In Solidarity with all victims of the Crimes of Hate

Aswat- Palestinian Gay Women

The Tragedy of Israel, of All Our National Violences

2009-08-03T20:47:00.000-07:00

A letter received, August 3, 2009, after the attack on a gay youth center in Tel Aviv:

I just wanted to share with you that my boyzfriend and I are taking this especially hard because we were physically attacked ourselves a month ago when we went to support the pride parade in Jerusalem. A group of young boys were actually sitting in the streets waiting for the queers to pass by after the parade. My boyfriend, me and 2 other friends (a dyke and a transsexual woman) were attacked for passing by in the "Holy streets" and looking nothing like the normal passers. It was not serious physically, but emotionally it was shocking and horrible.

We have been through a really hard time after that and had trouble going out without being afraid, but we got an amazing support from our community (at least from most of it) and we just stated feeling better, but now with the shooting I am back to being afraid to leave my house.

Usually, I am going to demonstrations and very active in the community, but until recently I was fighting for "others," less fortunate, and couldn't imagine something like this happening. It is the worst feeling--not fighting back for myself, but I just ran out of strength. If you consider in the past few months, we heard about more and more violent attacks that didn't register anywhere because it was only beatings which on one reported, it's not a total surprise. I am sorry for not having more comforting news. Love, Y.

So much I wanted to tell you of, it has been a long while, but first today, my words of solidarity with the Queer community of Tel Aviv, of Israel, with the queer community of the world--we know in our hearts daily violences contort our lives in every corner of this world, and that violence, the armed expression of hatred, flourishes as both a national policy and a private hell for those deemed not fully human. My friends in Palestine/Israel, my peace activist friends, have known for a long time that the violence of the occupation, its checkpoints and house demolitions, its forced evictions and impenetrable walls, its injustices piled on injustices, like crumbling homes, cannot be contained. Like soldiers returning home from war who turn their killing ways on their wives and friends, violence as national policy opens the home streets to blood letting of all sorts-if you hate, if you see an unrighteous enemy, blow them away.

To the Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer community of Tel Aviv and Israel: We are standing with you in solidarity in this time of great sadness and mourning. We joins thousands of Queer people and others around the world who refuse to let hatred destroy the beauty of human love. From Alex Nissen and Joan Nestle, Women in Black, Melbourne, Australia

I want to say that I carry always in my heart the young gay people I met in Israel in 2008. I saw your beauty of body and heart, and to think that such courage and hope should be so endangered deeply saddens me but I know our collective strength.

I think of the recent propaganda campaign by the Israeli government to paint Israel as the gay loving country of the Middle East, I think of the furor in the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade when dissenting queer Jews refused to wave the distributed blue and white Israeli flags as they marched in the Jewish contingent and instead held signs questioning the morality of the occupation. The internal conflicts within Israel about what is a human life reveal what seeps through armed walls and the guns of soldiers, always powerful, focusing on the nationally hated other, the Palestinian. Dissent, queerness, the naked body--now more then ever.

Women in Black Vigil, Melbourne, Australia, July

2009-07-04T05:21:00.000-07:00

Our July Women in Black vigil in a city street teeming with life and social concerns; speaking next to us, sharing the old Post Office's steps, was a rally by Honduras Australians against the military coup and as always we share the space with a Palestinian group staffing a literature table. Our names--Alex, Geraldine, Karen, Marg, Denise, Sandra, Hellen, Joan and we welcomed back an original Women in Black participant from the vigils in the late 1980s, Diane.

The cracks in the wall are getting bigger every day--but not quick enough to relieve the day to day suffering of the people of Gaza. In their name, we stand as Jewish women to say we see, we hear, we know.

Our Road Trip to Adelaide, June 2009

2009-06-30T22:45:00.001-07:00

Spirit of Humanity Imprisoned, Stonewall Memories, Israeli Peace Activist Arrested--and Geographies

2009-06-30T22:12:00.000-07:00

Dear Dear Lepa--your words find me as always, in these new ways, as they did in the old ways. Yes, in the middle of the night after I wrote that entry I thought of Olivera and you and that other forest, another geography of killing, where Muslim boys and men were disappeared. You see, they cannot blind us, not one from the other, not from each other's histories, not from saying in our women's voices, we know the cruelties in our bones, we know the excesses of power, we know in our queer bodies that we can so easily loose our human face in the vision of the state, we know how a rifle slung over a young shoulder and an anthem of supremacy humming in the soldier's head can lead to never ending silences, to life butted into despair because I am young and the state tells me that my glory lies in my brutality. But the years will come and soldiers and haters will grow old and pray in their deepest parts that the new soldier takes no notice of them.

So much is broiling in my head--Rosa Luxemburg's small figure, with her hat adding an inch or two to her tilting body surrounded by all those men at the early international conferences in the first years of the 20th century, her struggle to work to have a home with her lover Jogiches, to run her home in between running the party and away from the police, how she calls him by a woman's name when she writes to him from prison so her letters will not end up confiscated by the state who will take her life, the news of the seizure of The Spirit of Humanity, a boat filled with international peace activists trying to bring hope to the people of Gaza only to be attacked and confiscated by the Israeli Occupation Forces--they embargo the sea, the land and the air above--this is called withdrawal from occupied lands--see our Women in Black site, womeninblack.org.au--the news section for ways to help and more information. And then the pending imprisonment of Ezra Nowri, a gay Israeli peace activist who tries to intercede for Palestinians living outside of Hebron whose homes are bulldozed--all the smashing, the planned cruelty, all to make life harsh and unwanted, while like here, so many Israelis live their full lives, allowed to have their natural growth as the government calls it when defending the settlements, turning their heads away from the loss of life just beyond the wall that allows them to see nothing. Such a life cannot stand, there is too much pain under it and around it--the pain of Jewish suffering in the face of state certainties that we were not human, not seeable except to eradicate and now the new history of pain created by this Israeli state that will not relent in its right to punish an occupied people. All that will be left as Nawi says, will be hate.

And yet, La Professor, Cello and I saw a baby lamb drop from its mother's withers on our way to Adelaide, the grass newly green, the lamb all wet with life blood. We saw the wide sky, always the possibilities of another way where tenderness has its own power and the body of a lover reminds one of our divine fragilities.

The State and Memory

2009-06-16T19:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday early in the gray Winter morning here, I sat in the smallest theater in the Nova, the movie house in Carlton that shows international films, along with 8 other gray haired people to see the Polish film, Katyn. As the curtain lifted, history descended on us and I have been in its grip ever since. History and how the state fears memory, how it struggles to own memory, how unreconciled shame is most deadly when joined to the power of an unchallenged State. The opening image: two sets of civilians running towards each other, battered suitcases in hand, over an old wooden bridge, one panicked crowd warning the others of the terrors behind them--the Russians are coming, scream the frightened masses trying to escape out of Poland, the Germans are coming, warn the approaching others, trying to flee into Poland, and in the middle of it all is a family dog tied to a bridge railing, unable to move in any direction and crying for release as the humans run by him.

Since writing these few words, I have availed myself of this immediate source of knowledge that lies under my fingertips--Andrzej Wajda, in his 80s now, the famous Polish director, walks into the Katyn forest of history, the site of the 1940 mass murder of of thousands of Polish military officers, intellectuals and civilian prisoners by Stalin's occupying forces. Occupation, state control over the stories that can be told of disowned brutalities, the refusal of some to sign on to the lies at the cost of their lives--a patriotic myth perhaps--but as I sat there all I could see were haunted, hunted civilians running through the map of the world, some waving shopping bags at tanks, some trying to quickly tap into their cell phones what the state police were doing to their friends as election despair fell into the streets, some marshaling their strength for one more uprising, against impossible odds, the general images of my time and the specific voice of one young man standing in the streets of Tehran, an actor by trade, saying "No not revolution, we want reforms, we want kindness, we want friendship with the world." Perhaps a blog is not the place to write at length about memory, about the decrees of the state demanding no coffins of fallen soldiers be shown, that allows no reporters or cameras into war zones, that wants to make mourning a historical catastrophe a crime against the state, all the disowned genocides that rend the past of its grief, in the name of national vanities. But the artists will tell the stories, the cultural workers who seize back from the denied past the trampled forest floor, the empty ghetto lane ways, the blood stained cell.

I live my every day now here--often a wanderer in strange streets--but more and more, as my body aches, and I read, read, I am many places at once--the images come to me--from friends like Dorothy forwarding a video of what the Palestinian workers, or people trying to be workers, have to go through every morning to get through the cages of control--and I stood at that checkpoint, I know the sound of the gates and locks and chains, I saw the old people waiting, waiting as young men with machine guns, checked and rechecked their papers, talking to each other, not even seeing the tired woman in front of them. Dr Ruchama Marton, the Founder of Physicians for Human Rights--Israel, has made us all part of the workers' endless mornings--"Palestinian workers at the privatized IRTACH gate"--embedded in YouTube --http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=914x3Z_7gvY htttp://www.leftinhebrew.org./LIH/video.asp?p=86&L=english, filmed and edited by Eran Torbiner --privatized dehumanization--and the company gets paid for it!

A little kindness the young man asks for, the valuing of life for life. Let me work, let me live, let me feed my children. All our children.

I want to add something here--I know some of my old friends are up set with me for my constant writing about the injustices, the racism that is at the heart of the Israeli occupation and its treatment of its own non-Jewish citizens. I have explained elsewhere that never do I feel more Jewish then when I am challenging the silence in the forest about what goes on every day in the occupied territories and in Gaza, but I know the other side as well. Because I stand in the streets once a month with Women in Black in Melbourne, I also hear the antisemitism, the denials that the Holocaust ever happened from regular people. All of us who do this work never for one moment forget those who did not live to see the sun again, the ships turned away, the easy hatred of Jews that floats to the surface when economic hard times strike--again and again I hear in the streets--it is the Rothchilds and the IMF who are responsible for all the bad things, the Rothchilds--that collective surname for all our imagined wealth and power--never do I forget and always I answer--and so we walk this narrow strip of land between my lancemen who call us traitors and the antisemites who call us the spoilers of the world--I have left the safe confines of New York City--but I have found wonderful new comrades, Jewish and not, who walk that path with me. And in the past and out there where these words go.

Books, Birds and the Heart

2009-06-11T21:34:00.000-07:00

I want to thank Lepa, Stephanie, Lee for your answering words. I can see that my blog is not a free flowing conversation so it is wonderful when I can read your responses. Yesterday I received my own version of a care package, a large gray plastic bag containing the books I had been waiting for. The delivery man throws them over our front gate to Cello's accompanying din, and I run out as if I am meeting the clipper ship, long over due, only it is not a husband I am welcoming home but words, faces, lives, histories. This joy at the arrival of books started many years ago when I was in the lower grades of PS 94 in the Bronx--mid 1940s--and amidst the 2 penny pretzel and the free carton of milk my greatest joy was being the class secretary to check in the box of Scholastic books we each had been able to order--I can still feel the pure joy of pulling back the cardboard flaps and there, nestled against each other, were slim cheap paperback versions of the classics and some recent favorites like the Nancy Drew

series. Here I found my Albert Payson Terhune and his Scottish collies cavorting on the moors, the black stallions of Walter Farley, the hanging head of Black Beauty--I can still hear the clip clop of the tired wagon horses as if they were coming up Gun Hill Road that I thought I could hear back then.

Forgive me if my dates are wrong--perhaps these wondrous boxes appeared later in my life, when I was living in Bayside, Queens in the early 50s--time flashes in strange ways now but the river that it is still washes up the bits of gold that form a shining center of remembered life.

No longer do I scoop up from the long traveled box the adventure stories of families lost on deserted islands or young girls on mountain tops with goats and old wise uncles. Now I await the writers, the thinkers , the brave, who have made a claim on my interest, on my passions. Rosa Luxemburg came to me because I was asked to review an article about the new release of her Letters from Prison in Tel Aviv and Ramallah for the Australian Jewish Democratic Society's Newsletter. My friend Daniel andI read her letters out loud around a small cafe table outside the Melbourne hospital where his mother was fighting for her life. I thought these pages, downloaded from the free Rosa Luxembourg Archives on the web, would be a good distraction--but letters from prison are never just distractions and this woman who looked into the soul of an exhausted beast of burden through her prison window and saw the bent backs of the working classes, this woman difficult and dedicated now sits on my desk, sits my bed, and always behind her polemics or letters of demanding desire, I see the rifle butt that will smash into her oh so Jewish face, the bullet that will crush her heart, fired by her own party comrades because she would not, could not, under her doctrine, support the first World War, I see her marble bust rising from the German canal so many years later, the narrow body of urban water where the lackey soldier dumped her small Polish body with its richness of up swept hair and its pockmarked hip. Over the seas have come her words, small things but oh how they travel--not in their "truth" but in the song they seen of a life straining with every step to rethink the world. I better stop now, but now my other comrades, the word givers whose gift I await, hanging onto the swinging gate: May Out West, poems and Dear Elisabeth: Five Poems and Three Letters to Elizabeth Bishop, both by May Swenson (thank you, Lee); China Mielville's The City and The City, my dear Meilville who rethinks and subverts and interchanges shadows and facts on the ground, species and cities and wounds; Pen America: A Journal for Writers and Readers--10 Fear Itself, with Edwidge Danticat's profound meditation on the danger of not fearing--Dear Edwidge, who came so many years ago now it feels like, to speak with our special seminar students in SEEK at Queens College, The Literature of Caribbean Women Writers, Dr Bobb and myself welcoming this young beautiful Haitian author, now a mother of two daughters, and how at that long table we all poured over the underlined passages of her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, our students forgetting their awe at meeting a real author and diving into her text so to pull up their own discovered treasures--that was teaching and learning and reading at its best and all because a writer did not think herself above the journeys of those around her, but understood with all her generosity, the gift they had brought from their struggling lives to her words.

And finally, the books that do take me back to the those old Scholastic specials--the 7 volumes of Kevin J. Anderson's The Saga of Seven Suns; how I love rolling around the star clusters in the warm embrace of his green priests and the outlaw Roamers, gazing with amazement at the planet sized tree ships and peering into the depths of gas giants to see what will come zooming up into darker space. Transport gates all, I swing upon. And still I stand with Women in Black, the suffering of those imprisoned by national meannesses, always in my mind.

It is now August 11, 2009: I am adding here the article I wrote for the Australian Jewish Democratic Society Newsletter, May 2009.

Rosa Luxemburg Speaks to Us

Back in February, two things happened in Palestine/Israel, one huge, the other almost overlooked: a national election culminating in a right wing government, stiff with reactionary posturing, and the opening of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation's offices in Tel Aviv and Ramallah, the occasion marked by the re-issuing of a small book that influenced many of Israel's pioneering Left thinkers like Shulamit Aloni--Luxemburg's oddly idyllic and thus chillingly heartbreaking, Letters from Prison.

"Sonyusha, you are feeling embittered because of my long imprisonment. You ask: "How can human beings dare to decide the fate of their fellows? What is the meaning of it all...my dear little bird, the whole history of civilization...is grounded upon 'human beings deciding the fate of their fellows,' the practice is deeply rooted in the material conditions of existence. Nothing but a further evolution, and a painful one, can change such things. At this hour we are living in the very chapter of transition..." (Letter to Sophie Liebknecht from Wronke Prison, May 23, 1917)

That the strong visage of this controversial political thinker, brutally murdered in Berlin in 1919 along with her comrade, Karl Liebknecht, should be seen once again, peering into the national debates about inequalities and the futility of war and nationalism to create either stability or social justice at a time when the Israeli Left seems an almost futile gesture, is a testament to the hopeful ironies of history. And to the courage and insight of the Israeli Sifriat Hapoalim publishing house which is responsible for the book's reemergence. To commemorate the opening of its Israeli office, the Foundation sponsored a free conference to discuss Luxemburg's heritage and her relevance to the Israeli and German Left, the home base of the Foundation. In Haaretz, Avner Shapira wrote that Dr Angelika Timm, Director of the Israeli Office, explained that the Foundation's activity in the region "reflects German left-wing recognition that it, like all of Germany, bears a historical responsibility for Israel. The Foundation supports civic projects such as educational initiatives or peace and humanism, the empowerment of women and assistance to weakened populations, and tires to promote mutual understanding between Israeli and German society."

Polish-born Luxemburg (1871-1919), founder of the Spartacus League and the German Communist Party, lived much of her life under the threat of political assassination. Undaunted by enemies, on the Right and the Left, she and many others endured periodic imprisonments, long separations from what most of us would just call the daily joys of life. A firm believer in her own ideological visions, she also cherished the social value of dissent. "Freedom," she wrote, "only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of the party--however numerous they may be--is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter." These words are now engraved over the entrance to the Foundation's headquarters in Tel Aviv, translated into Hebrew, Arabic and German. I cannot help but think of these words when faced with the closing down of discussion in the American Jewish community (from which I hail) and here (where I now live) when it comes to critiquing Israel's version of nationalism--or the connections between a vital democracy and social inequities. Luxemburg, while passionately dedicated to her world view, rejected violence as a useful tool of social change, favoring general strikes and cultural interventions.

Rosa Luxemburg, seen as a traitor to a nation state intent on war, spent her last two years watching for the smallest signs of life in the restricted world of her jail cell and its little yard. Used to the larger stage of international Left politics, she now focuses on the vitality of birds and butterflies, trees blooming on a horizon never to be reached by her again. "On the paper as I write, the faint shadows of the leaves are at play with the interspersed patches of sunlight; the foliage is still damp from a recent shower, and now and again drops fall on my face and hands...At six o'clock, as usual, I was locked up." (Wronke, end of May, 1917).

I know Sol had asked me to only give an overview of Shapira's article , but thanks to the Rosa Luxemburg Internet Archive, I was able to hear her voice again, in her last days writing to Sophie Liebknecht, the wife of her imprisoned comrade, Karl. "How strange it is that I am always in a sort of joyous intoxication, though without sufficient cause. Here I am lying in a dark cell upon a mattress as hard as stone; the building has its usual churchyard quiet, so that one might as well be already entombed; through the window there falls across the bed a glint of light from the lamp which burns all night in front of the prison...I lie here alone and in silence, enveloped in the manifold black wrappings of darkness, tedium, unfreedom and yet my heart beats with immeasurable and in comprehensible inn er joy...but when I search my mind for the cause of this joy, I find there is no cause and can only laugh at myself--I believe that the key to the riddle is simply life itself, this deep darkness of night is soft and beautiful as velvet, if one only looks at it in the right way...."

Hannah Arendt, who includes a chapter on Luxemburg in her haunting Men in Dark Times (1955) warns against over-sentimentalising this often hard-nosed theoretician; like many strong women who take unpopular public stances at the risk of their lives, she was called seemingly oppositional things--the bloodthirsty Rosa, the hopeless romantic. Her Letters from Prison reveal in a matter of 50 pages her toughness, her thirst for learning, for checking her texts--books are as important as birds in these letters--food, give it to the other prisoners, she writes, but for me, send the books!--and her desire to protect fragile lives while she glories in the complexity of the natural world and the challenges of the material one. I think of the Jewish women thinkers, Rosa, Emma Goldman, Hannah Arnedt herself, who dared to be pariahs in their own homelands and I think of the darkness we will forever know as the Siege of Gaza.

(Inspired by the article, "A Red Red Rosa (Not to Mention Green and Pink) by Avner Shapira in Haaretz.)

Elliot Nestle, My Brother, 1935-2009

2009-05-24T23:03:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, my brother of whom I have seldom written, died in a hospital between Los Angeles and San Francisco, with his daughter, Robin, by his side. The last time I had seen Elliot, perhaps 7 or 8 years ago, was at Artie's Delicatessen on the Upper West Side where I took him and Robin for lunch. When we said good-bye, both Elliott and Robin clung to me, as if I was the tall mast above very rough waters. I will write more but for now, on this strange page which sends my words out to everyone and no-one, I just in the silent darkness of the letters say my brother, my 74 old brother, tormented from childhood and a tormentor of others from time to time, is no longer living.

Our Home on Fitzgibbon Avenue, May, 2009

2009-05-20T22:25:00.001-07:00

My favorite sitting place, under the wisteria leaves in the shade

Fitzgibbon Avenue only runs three blocks far different from the river of Broadway along which I lived for so many years.

La Professora's Night, University of Melburne, May 20, 2009

2009-05-20T21:32:00.000-07:00

First, I want you to know that I and others have created a new website for Women in Black, Melbourne--womeninblack.org.au--and here much of my writing documenting our activities, concerns and first hand reports of our version of "the facts on the ground" in Palestine/Israel will be reported. Much is happening in Melbourne, many people from the Palestinian and Jewish communities are working together to stop the suffering of the people of Gaza, to push for sanity and relief from unfettered national and military power.

Last night, La Professora delivered her Inaugural Professorial Lecture, "Pushing Feminism off the Map? International Law in Times of Crises," to a packed house at Melbourne University where old friends from her youth community worker days, from her women's refuges' days, from her mid life law student days, and her contemporary colleague and friends gathered to listen and celebrate. I had had the privilege of caring for my Professora as she worked on her talk--seen here occupying my artist's shed for the polishing of her ms--with Cello under her chair picking up bits of thought that might have fallen off her pages.

What I saw last night besides a beautiful woman mapping her public thinking for forty minutes was a turning point in a journey; in 1991, Di had entered law school as a 38 year old community worker who had walked the streets with the homeless youth of St Kilda, sat with and calmed women escaping domestic violence into shelters she and other feminists had created in the 1970s, Di having grown tired of fighting the government for more permanent change turned to the law looking for another way to push power into caring. What I saw was the culmination of both a personal journey, my dear one's, and the history of an Australian feminist community--supporting, creating, struggling, growing older and still trying to find strategies for change. In the first photograph, Di stands with two other women who entered law school when she did; they studied together, they pushed each other to continue when it all looked too hard--Munya and Fahna. Both are now solicitors--that's trial lawyers in American English. Patricia, my Pattie, who helps us set up our social action websites sits with Marg, a woman who has devoted much of her life to social change movements--both dear friends to me now and Di's long time comrades, others here as well--Peter, Di's brother, Michelle, a trades union leader, Joel, our dear friend and partner of Daniel, and Maureen, a teaching colleague. And a group of Di's students, past and present--never never forget the students.

I have never seen La Professora so happy, so at peace and when we returned home to Cello and our garden, we sat and shared the one glorious apple our tree had produced. At one moment in the evening, when all had gathered for celebratory drinks, Di thanked old friends and new for all they had made possible and then, she turned in my direction, looking where she thought I might be--I was sitting in the back of the room, my leg having given out, not able to see her but enjoying just being there, and as if the sea was parting, the room broke into two halves so nothing was between my love and me; she raised her glass and said, and most of all, I thank my partner, Joan--doing the PH.D brought me to New York and her, and that was my greatest gift. We had gifted each other, but we had needed help along the way so thank you all who made the flourshing of this transcontinental love possible.

From the flyer: The lecture grew from discussions at an international workshop held in Onati, Spain in 2008. A larger version will be published in 2010 in a collection entitled Between Resistance and Compliance? Feminist Perspectives on International Law in an Era of Anxiety and Terror.

In Women's Hands

2009-05-07T21:49:00.000-07:00

After our Women in Black Vigil, Melbourne, Australia, April, 2009. Hellen holding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

We are All New Profile--2

2009-05-07T20:42:00.001-07:00

April 26, 2009. This morning the Israeli police descended upon the homes of political activists, members of the feminist movement New Profile, which acts for the civil-ization of society in Israel and against the undue influence of the military in the life of the country. (Jewish Peace News)

You see, there can be no linear line to these days, to the telling of these events, to the sadnesses, the wrong choices,--fire that Professor, banish that speaker, call them antiSemites, particularly the Jewish ones, put them on the S.H.I.T list so we can flush them and their ideas away, but little by little the wall is cracking, more and more are finding the strength to speak out, to find ways to travel to Gaza, to the West Bank, to see for themselves, to carry the images, the news out of the walled in places and many are women. And as the police rushed into the homes of the New Profile women in Israel, they were laying the basis for new coalitions, for others who had stayed on the sidelines to see how fragile a democracy can become right under your eyes, as you are looking the other way, as you are watching the parades and walking in the past, past familiar pains. Whatever it takes, you say, to keep Jews safe,but little by little more and more Jews will become endangered--first it is the peace activists, then the reporters who try to map the movements of the military, of the police, then the dissenters, then those who do not take oaths of allegiance and here I see Rosa, waiting through out this tumble of words, waiting her turn to tell how she is part of this all--her words--Freedom only for the supporters of government, only for the members of the party--however numerous these may be--is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter. Rosa writing from her prisons, from her "unfreedoms" as she calls them in a 1918 letter, her crime opposing the first world war, her disbelief in nationalisms--calling on German young men not to slaughter French young men, Rosa soon to be smashed in the face with the end of a rifle, and then shot in the heart, dumped in a canal, from which now her image emerges, dripping with urban waters, her little book, Letters from Prison, being republished in Tel Aviv and Ramallah, last month, two centers opening in her name in these cities, her Jewish voice once again in the air and all the histories looking on, at each other. "About six months after Israel's attorney general publicly announced an effort to criminalize dissent, state authorities have upped the ante in their "war"--as the daily Ha'aretz called it last September--against Israel's youth and against the broad grassroots movement of young Israelis who avoid serving their compulsory time in the military... On 26 April, a day before Israel's Memorial Day, Israeli police produced an absurd piece of political theatre...As if facing down dangerous organized criminals, they raided the homes of six activists in different parts of Israel, who were then detained for interrogation...computers confiscated, the arrested told they could not communicate with other members of the community for 30 days. Among those arrested: Analeen Kish, aged 70, ceramics artist, daughter of a family of the "Righteous Among Nations"; Miriam Hadar, age 51, editor and translator; Amir Givol, resident of Jerusalem; Sergei Sandler, resident of Beer Sheva and Roni Barkan, resident of Tel Aviv. The police edict, Do Not Speak of these events for 30 days, has been transformed into endless speaking about New Profile, about what these raids mean, about the police violence against subsequent protesters, (see youtube video, New Profile Demonstration in Israel, 30-4-09, 17:30, Tel Aviv, yisraelpnm), all over the Internet we are speaking, organizing, in Israel, in New York City, where ever peace activist feminists gather, Jewish and non-Jewish, the discussion will go on. In Rosa's month.

New Profile speaks: "The militarization of Israeli society harms the sacred principles of democracy, freedom of speech and political freedom. For people who thought that only Israeli-Arabs were being framed for criminal political activity, this morning was proof that none of us can be sure of the permission to express ourselves freely regarding the failings of Israel's society and regime." From Jewish Peace News, April 27, 2009, 4:55pm

(Read all of Rosa Luxemburg's "Letters from Prison" on the free Luxemburg Internet Archives)

Rosa and the Bund: We are All New Profile

2009-04-29T01:18:00.000-07:00

First I want to thank Pat for helping me set up a new website for Women in Black here in Melbourne, http://www.womeninblack.org.au/. I hope if any of you are members of Women in Black around the world, you will write and tell me the times of your vigils so we can post them on the site. You can contact me directly on the website. And in a way, this website and Pat sharing her expertise as a gift to us is connected to what I want to write about on this closing day of April.

How sane all these words sound now--how I was going to write about the connections between the April 19th commemoration for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that I attended at the Jewish Holocaust Center here in Melbourne, an annual gathering of the survivors and their children of the Polish Jewish community who were active in the Bund and still are. My friend, Michelle, sings in the Yiddish choir, Michelle, daughter of two parents who worked with JOINT (Joint Distribution Committee) first in the liberated camp of Belsen to care for the stateless Jewish survivors, and then in Africa, her father, a member of the French Resistance, Michelle born in Morocco, whose voice carries her diaspora wanderings, Vienna, Paris, Cambridge, Melbourne and now who sings and speaks in Yiddish. You see I cannot write in one line about all of this, about the crossings of our Jewish histories, about the Israeli raids on the home of New Profile feminists, about the prison letters of Rosa Luxemburg, about the lobby that is not a lobby, AIPAC, about the Partisans--"Fun grinem palmenland biz vaysn land fun shney/Mir kumen on mit undzer payn, mitundzer vey/Un vu gefaln s'iz a shrptis fun undzer blut/Shprotsn vet dort undzer gvure, undzer mut." (From the lands of green palm trees to lands all white with snow, We are coming with our pain and with our woe, And where'er a spurt of blood did drop, Our courage will again sprout from that spot.) from Zog Nit Keyn Mol!, The Hymn of the Partisans. You see I cannot speak of one without remembering all, I cannot escape the voices that soar over crumbling walls, Jewish or Palestinian, I cannot turn my eyes from the rough grabs of Israeli state police forcing protesters to the ground, dragging them hair first into the police stations, where they disappear behind a turn in the wall, or the young woman of Swat valley, held motionless by other women so she cannot deflect the public flogging deemed necessary by the Taliban code of morality, how to resist the flailing arms of hate, of women beaten to the ground, into silence, into desperation because they question. The Voice of Medea Benjamin, a member of America's Code Pink: "While I was being tackled by the security guards at Washington's Convention Center during the AIPAC conference for unfurling a banner that asked "What about Gaza," my heart was aching. I wasn't so bothered so much by the burly guards who were yanking my arms behind my back and dragging me along with 5 other CODEPINK members out of the hall. They were doing their job. What made my heart ache was the hatred I felt from the AIPAC staff who tore up the banner and slammed their hands across my mouth as I tried to yell out: "What about Gaza? What about the children?" "Shut the f---up. Shut the f---up," one staffer yelled, red-faced and sweating as he ran beside me. "This is not the place to be saying that shit. Get the f--- out of her."

If not there, where so many could change the course of events, then where? Where do we ask the questions, where will we not be called anti-Semitic, self hating Jews, duped leftists, effeminate Jews of the Diaspora who do not love our guns, where can we use words that describe reality like apartheid, racism, like Palestinian Bantustans that make a state a struggling impossibility, where can we in our imaginations say, the siege of Gaza reminds me of other sieges, against the Jewish people when they had no freedom of movement, no escape possible from state hatred, where can we say our memories, our histories are tormented by what is being done in small Palestinian villages in the way of the Settlements, the beatings, the terrors, use whatever it takes to make them give up their claim on that desert home or that one, no reporters, threatened activists, soldiers, always the soldiers, and the Settlers themselves, they will clean the land of these unwanted ones with cudgels and fists, no reporters, no police to protect, vigilante nationalism let loose on ancient hills but supported with modern money from modern companies like Leviev's Africa-Israel--once we know who is responsible we can take action and the people of the West Bank villages of Bil'in and Jayyous become part of our dreams of responsibility--the old, the young, real people kept in the shadows until another "fact on the ground" is accomplished, their eradication as a Palestinian village.

Beth by the Sea, March, 2009

2009-04-23T21:56:00.000-07:00

Here I have a new world of friends, friends who have been most generous in welcoming me into their life, into the history they shared with La Professora and the one we are making together. Both Beth and Pat, her partner, have shared their home by the sea with us, including Cello which is no mean feat. He is small but his hair goes everywhere--slivers of tough Schipperkee black hair. Walking with Beth along the Apollo Bay shoreline brings me close to the heart of this land, this continent island, where desert, bush, cliffs end at the immense expanse of the Northern and Southerns Seas at one end and the Indian Ocean at the other. In some odd way, geography here is everything even though it is so finite, so bounded; the Red Center with its holy rock, Uluru; the ancient Indigenous art galleries, protected by overhangs of old, old rock, once bottom of the sea rock, now hidden away in crevices known only to the elders, the white chalk drawings of sea serpents and hands, older gods and their retinue of symbols, cross hatched with ochre and umber and then all of this tumbling to the gleaming cities by the sea--Sydney, with its ferries hurrying workers home across the bay, the shining lights of the Harbour Bridge, the flying roofs of the Opera House, the hanging foxes so close to the engines of commerce, the rich rich living of the Bay Side dwellers. Fish and chips on Manley Beach, the shark nets along the beach seen so easily from the ferry fronting cafes--always a kind of danger lurking in the depths, in the interior vastness where tourists or the foolish can loose their lives so easily, can fall to the desert vastness or the churning turns of the craggy skinned crocs who have seen more then we will ever know. And here I am, trying to learn what I can, trying to edge open the strangeness, the unNew York Cityishness of this place, trying to find ledge of stone I can stand on--and it is my new friends, Alex and Michelle, Karen, Daniel and Joel, Mitch and Rose, Ann and Jane and Jane again, Beth and Pat and more who have propped me up and shown me the possibilities of comfort in this ancient sea made land made island.

My 1950s Self

2009-04-22T20:20:00.000-07:00

In the 1950s, my life was made possible by the kindness of one Roz J. and her mother and father whom welcomed me as Roz's best friend into their Bayside, Queens home. My mother at the time was under indictment for embezzlement and was entertaining a particularly invasive, to me, boyfriend. When home, I slept with a knife under my pillow in case he came near me again as well as to ward off the chilling chaos that was my mother. Roz befriended me at school and time and time again, I took refuge in her family's modest home, the first house I had ever entered, the first place I saw a husband and wife in the same bed, the first time I experienced what was a girl's room in the 1950s--Roz's pink flowered wallpapered bedroom. Her father, a large good humored man worked as a kosher butcher in upper Manhattan. I watched with wonder the rhythms of domesticity--the father still in his blood marked apron coming in the door, embracing his daughter and upon seeing me, calling out his little joke--Hi Hershey. Roz's mother, a beautiful and kind woman, always included me in their dinners; in this family setting, comfort food took on new meaning. I still remember the first time I ate at Roz's table macaroni and cheese. That is me, looking funny in what appears to be a kind of cowgirl outfit and a little later, perhaps in 1955, that is me wearing the bobby socs, hush puppies and wide skirt of high school dress. I had never seen these photos before and as far as I know they are the only ones that exist of me from this era and again I owe it all to Roz and her husband, whom I also knew way back then, for sharing them with me. How awkward I look, but how familiar that large body is still to me today, thighs too big, hair a little strange and then the phone call image, me feeling safe enough in Roz's kitchen to flirt with the camera, clad in flannel pajamas which I probably borrowed from Roz. Now a grandmother, Roz kindly had one of her children scan these images and send them to me. Not even the archives in Brooklyn--which has all my papers up until I came to live in Melbourne, Australia--1999 on-- has these images but now they will. Only deprivation can make such things seems so important. Who cares what Joan Nestle looked like in 1953 or who helped make her life possible? If my work has lived in the world in any meaningful way, it is only because people like Roz along the way gave me the comfort, the precious sense that not all was to be protected against, that I did not always have to be a sentinel on my own borders.

Alex and Hellen At Women in Black Vigil, April, 2009, Melbourne

2009-04-22T01:28:00.000-07:00

My Two Seasons--Snow in NYC, Sea in Apollo Bay

2009-04-22T01:22:00.000-07:00

What Will it Take?

2009-04-15T22:28:00.001-07:00

First I want to say thank you to all those who have held on in my absence. When I do not write it is because I am not feeling well, but, like so many of you, I am taking in, always taking in, the images of the last weeks, the young girl being publicly flogged by her Taliban elders in the Swat Valley, the murders of young gay men in Iraq, the results of the Israeli election that further empowered the haters, the growing vehemence of the American supporters of the Israeli Settlements, who are joining with frightened conservative voters, calling all their brethren to arms against Obama, the Bushes' tortures texts coming from the highest places of power in this land, (America, I mean for I write from another country) but I have also heard the chants of the feminists of Pakistan risking all in the streets, the men screaming, "Whores, whores" (the same word that is flung at the Israeli peace women who stand vigil in Jerusalem and Haifa week after week). My dear friend Alex shared the following video of Nurit Peled, an Israeli mother who has suffered the loss of her daughter in the madness that is the Palestinian/Israel conflict, calling for the end of the siege of Gaza. Whores, mothers, lesbians, women desiring the beauty of a free life--our right to be.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8n6w4_nurit-peled_news

An Israeli Voice for Reason

2009-04-15T22:28:00.000-07:00

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8n6w4_nurit-peled_news

A Night at Dante's

2009-03-15T05:21:00.000-07:00

After a day of wind and rain squalls, La Professora and I made our way to Dante's pub-cafe, a gathering place for an eccentric mix of devotees. On this night I was to be part of the Melbourne book launch for a collection of photographs--by Del LaGrace Volcano-- and text--by Ulrika Dahl-- about an international community of women who define as femme. I want to share with you my contribution to this moving and at times powerful event.

March 14, 2009

Thank you Liz and Ulrika for inviting me to be part of this evening.

My words tonight, this expression of my fem power, grew out of the courage of the young fem-butch, trans people, lesbian-feminist people, peace and gender queer activists, Palestinian and Israeli, with whom I spoke in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem two years ago. Out of the courage of Rauda Marcos, one of the founders of ASWAT, the Palestinian Lesbian Organization, who fights for the lives of all her peoples on so many fronts. Out of the words of Sonya of Australian Women for Palestine who lead me to the poetry and life of Mahmoud Darwish, the revered Palestinian poet who died at age 67 on August 11, 2008 in exile and who lived his life labeled "a present-absent alien" by the Israeli government. I will carry his words on this femme body for the rest of my life.

From my journal, June 22, 2007

Our friends in Haifa made us see with their eyes and so we saw through landscapes to deeper histories. When we first travelled the roads between Tel Aviv and Haifa, our eyes fell off the scrub hills, but Hannah asked us to look again. "See those prickly pear cactuses"--and she slowed the car down so we could focus our gaze--"Every time you see a cluster of them, you are looking at the ruins of a Palestinian home. The farmers used the plant to form natural corrals for their grazing animals and also ate the fruit born at the tip of the rounded leaf." We started to look deeper, longer, and soon we could see the tracings of another people, not a long gone people,but a recently displaced people. Stone foundations started to appear, buried in the surviving scrub. May you all have friends who make you look again. But when you see, there is no return to blankness, to cruel triumphalism.

The Poet: "Ah, the country where we see only what is not seen; our secret/We travel like other people but we return to nowhere...We have a country of words. Speak speak so I can put my road on the stone of a stone. We have a country of words. Speak speak so we may know the end of this travel.

Dear Poet, how did I find you, through dusty roads of unknown histories, you whose words live on so many tongues and yet I was so ignorant of the love you poured into your differently metered lines, of your swirling solid notes of exile, of the white mare that runs down into the valleys no longer safe, that drinks from your fathers' wells, now empty of their sense of self. I came as a stranger, a Jewish femme stranger into your cadences of loss and exultation, into your Andalusian sunsets and endless stony roads that lead to children carrying fathers on their backs, to endless journeys past familiar olive trees but with no rest allowed, no fruit given.

The Poet: " (to the killers) If you'd contemplate the victim's face/and thought, you would have remembered your mother in the gas chamber/ you would have liberated yourself from the rifle's wisdom/and changed your mind; this isn't how identity is reclaimed."

I stood in front of the gray looming wall that divided life from life, that marked the loss of history for one people and the loss of a soul for another. That impenetrable wall, with its razor wire far above us, froze my queer fem body. And that is why I am here tonight. For many years, I have written, mapped, tracked the power of my fem desire, the strength of my thighs to grip the wanted body and shake it loose of its hard places, to offer my fullness of desire and flesh as a way through, as a break in the wall, as a yearning that refuses solid borders and policed boundaries. I have reveled in the thrust of penetration, the opening in the wall; I have been a port of entry, a simple thing, a taking in, an offered warmth, a way in, a break in the wall. In other writings I have charted how desire for a certain kind of touch can push a woman off the map. And on that bare sandy road in East Jerusalem facing the wall's brutal solidity, I had the inkling of a fem politic, something beyond my earlier years' celebration of the fem-butch courage that walked the hate-filled streets of Joseph McCarthy's America. How does a fem face history, how does my body, always the speaker of my desires, confront the atrophies of national compassion that so mark our world. A port of entry, a simple thing, a taking in, an opening in the wall. Over ruins so huge they threaten to block out all hope, your words find me. I have tasted your heat, seen the olive trees in exile, decorative in the gardens of the usurpers. What a strange two the world would think us, a 50s fem from the Bronx, the dying poet who lives in every Palestinian heart--but the only way I can live in a world now where such a wall exists is to take your words into my mouth.

The Poet: "I am my language. I am what the words said: Be my body. Be the crossroads between my body and the eternal desert...there is no land to carry me above the earth so my speech carries me.

This is my language, collars of stars around the necks of lovers, my steps are of wind and sand/ my world is my body and what my hands possess/I am the traveller and the path.

The poem is what lies between a between. It is able to illuminate the night with the breasts of a young woman/it is able to illuminate, with an apple, two bodies/it is able to restore/ with the cry of a gardenia, A Homeland.

In Jerusalem and I mean within the ancient walls, I walk from one epoch to another without a memory to guide me...I was walking down a slope and thinking to myself: how do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone? Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up?... I think to myself, alone the prophet Mohamed spoke classical Arabic--'And then what? Then what?' a woman soldier shouted: Is that you again? Didn't I kill you?' I said: you killed me...and I forgot, like you, to die."

At the end of the two hour talk at the University of Tel Aviv, a group of fem women came up to talk with me about the difficulties they faced, the judgements from all sides that accompanied their lives. As they spoke and I comforted I saw their beauty. That night we spent in the Jerusalem home of one of the founders of Women in Black in Israel, the following day we stood vigil in the heart of the city--Gila took us through the streets, crossing over into East Jerusalem, traveling along the wall surrounding Bethlehem, stopping at the checkpoint controlling Palestinian entry and departures from their own land, and finally into the hectic histories of the old city. A long hard day. In the evening another communal sharing of food. Many of the young people who had been present at the Queer sexuality talk had made their way to Gila's house. Feeling a little tired, I sat in a chair in the backyard, taking in the scents of the warm night air, the sounds of Jerusalem, and one by one the students and their friends came to sit around me. They wanted stories of the body, these young queer peace makers, wanted tales of how we survived the bigotries of another time, how we found each other and tried to imagine another world. We leaned into each other and again I saw the beauty of the unarmed human body, their hopes for another kind of future held in their bare arms. "Come back to us," one of the young femme women said, "when the occupation is over."

Selected Books by Mahmoud Darwish

Why Did You Leave the Horses Alone? Trans. by Jeffrey Sacks, 2006.

Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. Trans. by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche, 2003.

Memory for Forgetfulness. August, Beirut, 1982. Trans. Ibrahim Muhawi, 1995.

The Butterfly's Burden. Trans. by Fady Joudah, 2007.

2009-02-19T02:19:00.000-08:00

Ice and Fire

2009-02-19T01:56:00.000-08:00

This afternoon my friend Pattie was on her hands and knees hooking up my new computer; thank you, my dear friend. We are back from the cold of New York, back in Victoria where the bush has exploded, where drought turns all to tinder and people die trying to save their homes, their children, their friends. So much has happened since last we spoke--the unspeakable war crimes committed against the people of Gaza, but speak we must and I will; Obama's inauguration and now the reality of his realpolitik; the archives' 35th birthday celebration at the Gay Center in Manhattan and the welcoming moments at the new Staten Island Gay Center--and friends, friends, dear New York friends--talking over bagels at Tal's, endless breakfasts at the City Dinner, my morning salon and the long talk with Nancy at the restaurant facing snow covered Central Park, walking the fashion district and so much more with Karin, in from Copenhagen, her new manuscript under her arm and then Liz and Bobbi, flying in from Tucson, dearest friends for so many years now and the gathering at Jonathan's on a snowy night in the Village so others could catch up with Liz and Bobbi--Allen's presence hovering us, this small reunion of the first generation of gay historians and archivists--when it was over, we poured out of Jonathan's brownstone like a bubbling mob of literary comrades--snow still falling, the street lamps throwing their yellow light on the snow covered sidewalks, helping each other down the slick street, into a new time and an old taxi.

Thank you all who have written comments in my absence--Paul and my old friend Roz and all the others and to Shebar who keeps this site going.

Two Months in New York

2009-01-14T10:25:00.000-08:00

We have been in New York since December 1 and will return to Melbourne on February 2, 2009. I write to you from a small mailing storefront on Broadway on the upper West side that is staffed by three young Egyptian men with whom I share my print outs calling us to demonstrate against the Israeli war on the trapped people of Gaza. My time at the computer is short--and I will write about the fullness of our time here when once again, the silences of Fitzgibbon Avenue replace the roar of life I have found once again on my old streets. To all who have found their way to my words in this world of so many words, thank you.

Old friend

2008-11-07T22:57:00.000-08:00

Thank you, Lee, dear old friend. I am sorry I do not know how to respond to comments in a more private way -so forgive this shared moment. You and I and so many others of the "old" times are the lucky ones--we have lived long enough to see great changes and to have a deep sense of what still must happen, not just for queer people but for all, on all the continents of our sad earth who cannot fully lift their heads.

Far from the streets of San Francisco, I saw a small Congolese boy, his eyes wide with terror, his small body trembling, eyes so wide with loss and fear, he could not blink, staring into the camera of the British news gatherer while another reporter, kneeling before the barefoot boy held the child's small hand in his own. So still his hand, his young young life almost at a standstill--he had lost his parents as they all fled for their lives from the approaching gun men. His eyes looking out at us, at me, sitting in my chair, safe. Oh dear child, oh dear boy, what have we done to you, to all the children who duck or swerve or huddle--their newly lived bodies shattered by our failures. I will not forget your eyes, the trembling of your limbs, the hand without will, lost lost in an exploding world. May you find your way home, dear boy. And we must never stop seeing all of you.