on women in the world

My friend requested that I post this excerpt from a letter I wrote to her. Since it relates to women and their increasingly recognized role in globalization, I agreed to do so.

I think another woman put this much more succintly and more beautifully than I could- a Palestinian spoken-word artist named Suheir Hammad: http://www.youtube.com/wat
ch?v=LFbE8RBhSDw

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Malcolm X was amazing. But he spoke and used and embraced a male aggression. He also spoke to that kind of aggression we as minorities adhere to, that double edged feeling towards any kind of restraint, limit, violence, and invasion. Women could hear him and believe that our day was coming to. We wanted our men to be empowered. What I like about King is that he kind of spoke to a different man, in a way, because of the peace-loving aspect of his philosophy in the first part of his life. Afterward, when he started being an uppity black, I’m not sure what type of aggression he was tapping into, or if he really did have an alternative model. I would like to find out.

Either way, the women behind did not always identify with aggression. Where are their stories, we are not living those stories right now, except as they are in the background. It’s time for the mythical male aggression to die, its time is over. It’s a dead religion.

The woman’s voice has never been so powerful in that it took a step back from the traditional male concept of power in war, conquest, domination, even manipulation, which ironically males pin on females all the time. But manipulation is only a mirror of what we had in our faces, our families, at our dinner tables, the whole time, a game wherein males were trapped like animals, embracing their animalhood, while we participated, feeling that our own humanity trapped us, the system using our humanity to trap us, our own men holding us down for it, resenting at times that our humanity should gain a voice or place in this world, in its raw and strong form. I know there were more women who imagined an entirely different game, a revolutoin poured from our minds and spirits.

The woman’s voice has never been so powerful as today, when we are in tune to each other all the time, growing as a stronger coalition, free to decide what model to choose, or to build our own, for we, like devleoping countries, like young men and women everywher,e like people of color, have the lessons of corruption to lean on. We have soul knowledge of fingers down our throats, of animals trapped in cages, of addiction and greed and hopelessness, of victimization upon victimization, of internalized hate, of self-hate and what it has done to our men, to our friends, to our leaders, to our mothers who have frantically tried to hold onto their sons, their husbands, and have been crippled by the tools handed to them. Who have been told that our place is our place, and we can never go too far, because the only reality in this world is animalhood. Our only hope for success is to marry the aggressor, or become him. Our only choices the ones handed to us, the only boxes to check those determined by another.

I grew up knowing there was something different, something newer, stronger, more aware. I grew up knowing a tangible difference between humanity and aggression, a difference in feeling whole when both are present in a rightful balance, in a temperance that brings all of human instinct and creative power to the world. I was raised up on this.

Then I lived to know these things shoved down my throat, I lived through the digestion and now I’m trying to get it out of me. I do not know how to absorb it and turn it into something new. I do not know beyond the choice I possess- to find a balance.

Now, for me is not a time of battle and aggression.
I am tired of seeing my brothers starving on their feet, driving themselves and me to a bitter end.