OnLine With Zoe

Where were you born?

A week ago I attended a NOW event, the Women of Color and Allies Summit.  It was interesting though I was mostly focused on membership and facilitating a World Café Conversation.  The next day at lunch, a woman told me she had learned something interesting at the WOCA Summit ~ that asking someone where they are from ~ is racist.  Surviving my torrent of questions, she went on to explain that the question comes from a place of privilege.  No matter how I asked, she was unrelenting.

It has been a week and I am still turning it over in my head.  I have no idea who told her that idea, but I believe it is representative of the very root of racism ~ making curiosity, questions, difference, inquiry ~ taboo or even insulting.  How will I ever bridge the separation if I cannot ask how we are both different and alike?  How will we all get along if we cannot say – Wow, that is new to me, that is different than me, tell me all about it. 

We are all Harijan, as Gandhi named the “untouchables,” we are all children of god.  Laura Nyro said that she was a child of the universe.  I want to say – yes you have an accent, you look different and would you tell me about it.  The second note, in that symphony of humanity, is for the question to be returned and then I get to say where I am from.  I believe it is only racist if there is an implication that I may ask and you may not.  My particular etiquette believes that if I ask, I am simultaneously offering and expecting to be asked and to answer.  Is it not the conversation that we might have in common?  Is it not the curiosity we might have in common.  To me, it seems arrogant to say asking is rude. 

In the World Café I posed this set of questions to begin a positive conversation ~
CAN I BE YOUR SISTER?
     I am a different color than you.
     I am a different religion than you.
     I am not your age or your size.
     I was born in a different country.
     My orientation and gender identity is different than yours.
     Can I be your sister – your family?
     Can we put it all aside and be sisters?

I believe we cannot just put it aside.  We have to ask and our question has to be received.  Years ago, at a family style restaurant, a mother and son sat across from me, the boy asked his mother, while pointing at me, “Why does she have such a big head?”  The mother was so upset, instantly teaching her son that innocent inquiry is wrong. 

I disagree and I want to know all about you.
     Why do you wear a headscarf?
     What holidays do you celebrate?
     Why do you go to prayers on Saturday?
     Do you believe in god?
     Why are you in a wheelchair?
     When do you believe life begins?
     Hey, where were you born?

If the conversation partner feels they can ask right back – the real listening begins.  Racism and elitism asks while making it crystal clear – don’t ask back – I am too privileged to be asked.  Asking from true inquiry as an invitation to meet, as Buber speaks of, is an innocent and kind beginning.

The best humanity has to offer

So long ago, 1982, I just joined a few women to fast.  Dick Gregory flew to town, sat with us, fasted on air and told us that he made a primary commitment to fasters around the world.  He explained that only the side of right, the side of light and truth could fast.  Hey, lets be honest, I was thinking what is this grandstanding anti-gay black man doing here sitting with us?

Oh do I get it now.  Fasting is simply irresistible.  Once you have put the body at rest (not processing food) and listened to the interior whispers of your own spirit, you know.  You know where you have been.  You know where other fasters are.  Maybe it is like that surfer who found that perfect wave and its memory is a polished jewel of a thought in a perfect storm of thoughts. 

For the last nine days, there are fasters on campus at Columbia University.  It is occurring because of many grievances against the administration and the blatant racism practiced on campus.  I would not presume to know the nuance of the protest.  I do feel confident in saying that Dick Gregory was right ~ in all the fasts I have known of ~ they are always shining light on the advancement of humanity.  They are always asking the observer to liberate themselves from the darkness of oppression.  They are the best humanity has to offer. That is why I want to thank these fasters.  Because of them, I ask more of me.

If you want to read about the fast at Columbia, leave a comment of support and track their process, visit their blog. 

Guerrilla Girls rock my world

In 1977 I fell in love with an artist.  Can you imagine?  It sounds like a lyric and it was a very emotional, romantic and complex song.  The little apartment over the bookstore was filled with acrylics and oils and canvases and books and posters.  Her favorite painting, in all the world, was Vermeer's Girl in the Red Hat.  There were reproductions of it in every room, even the laundry room.

When we visited the National Gallery and she saw it in person for the first time, she fell to her knees and wept.  The guard stepped back to stand with me and quietly asked, "Is she an artist?"  I could only nod.  The guard held everyone away for many, many minutes while Maria took it all in.  I suppose at that moment, I fell in love with the power of art.  As I have written about several times, I wander museums looking for art by women.  It is the opening of my lectures on women's rights.  It is the question on my mind in the Louvre, the National Gallery, the Getty, every museum. 

My heart exploded when I first discovered the Guerrilla Girls; their books, their masks, their mission.  Seeing them at the National Museum of Women in the Arts last week was an unexpected bonanza of feminism, human rights and the arts.  Their presentation included slides, facts, figures, and conversation.  Frida is in a wheelchair and Kathe is having fun with a cigar. 

During the Q&A, a person asked how they felt about "being here."  Kathe was very insightful to immediately understand that the question was about the nature of a women's museum.  Most likely being asked many times over the years, they both knew the facets of the question.  And, to their great credit, they answered in depth while pointing out that they do not agree.  Frida believes that it is important to have a museum of women's art.  It is a undeniable testament to women in the arts.  Kathe said that she did not see it that way.  Why should women's art be segregated and, thus, the museum offer a conciliatory gesture that women have their own museum?  While women may be 16% of Congress, women's art in museums is just a sliver of that percentage. 

The entire conversation reminded me of a terrible choice Maria and I tackled in our bookstore thirty years ago ~ do we integrate all of the literature (Virginia and Thomas side by side) or do we make one of the two rooms of the store - Women's Work.  Upstairs, with rare exception (Vermeer and Dali) it was all and only women's work.  It was how I met Kahlo, Fini, Chicago, Flack, Krasner, Gentileschi.  We listened to Nyro, MacCrae, Morgana King, Anita O'Day, Alice Coltrane, Holiday.  But what would the fallout be in this ultra conservative neighborhood of Newport Beach, California? 

Maria was a Gemini and my moon is in Gemini, and finally we made the decision to segregate the work but could argue each side with equal commitment.  And so Kathe and Frida, my Guerrilla Girl friends, I get. I really get it. 

Guerrilla Girls inside my little pink camera

Sunday, October 29, the Guerrilla Girls, Kathe Kollwitz and Frida Kahlo spent the afternoon at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C.  I was in the second row, mesmerized and in love.  These amateur videos are from the Q&A.  The only fissure in this event is that I must work on my camera skills. 

Frida Kahlo, seated in a wheelchair with a temporary injury, is answering a question about others joining in the masked movement.  I was thrilled to hear that the Girls encourage all masked avengers to take on injustice.  Cat woman, anyone?

Kathe Kollwitz was asked about the separation of women's issues from human rights.  She talks about spending time with women Nobels and discussing that there is a "big fight taking place on the world stage to make women's issues, human rights issues."  (you can hear me mumble ~ "Oh Jesus." 

 

Alice Paul's Bedroom

I suppose some people want to video Elvis's bedroom.  I have seen the homes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson.  This is more moving to me than I can even say - so I will leave it to you.  Here is the bedroom of Alice Paul, taken by me with my little pink camera which I am not used to at all - as you can tell by the fact that it never occurred to me to narrate. 

I must be Dreaming

Some days are just better than others.  Some days hold the unexpected and this was such a day.  I knew it was going to be special, to see the Sewall-Belmont House, but nothing like it actually was. 

Doris Stevens, Alice Paul and others, whose names I don't know, climbed these stairs after standing at the White house so that we could vote.  They fasted and waited and dreamed that we would all vote, if given the right.  They held banners which I had seen in photographs and now live under glass.  Fortunately when I realized what I was looking at and gasped, no one was within ear shot. 

I was fortunate to visit with a new friend, Anne Grant, who had slept in the Sewall-Belmont House after having lemonade with Alice Paul and Wilma Scott Heide.  Anne took this picture of me at the front door.   It seemed impossible to explain to Anne what it all meant to me and then something happened that made it clear.

While wandering around the house, I found the library.  Rows and rows of books, boxes of documents, long shiny tables and chairs.  Hard to believe but there among all of the leather bound books, I saw mine, The Hungry Heart ~ now that was an audible gasp.  It seemed to just manifest before my very eyes, as if I had wished it.  The Sewall-Belmont House had not ordered it; rather a woman who worked there had ~ so I never guessed where it had landed. 

Beyond anything imaginable, she asked me to sign it.  Crazy.  I sat and signed my book to the Sewall-Belmont House.  Why I did not burst into flames and vaporize, I cannot explain.