The Writivism Short Story Prize is an annual award for emerging African writers administered by the Center for African Cultural Excellence (CACE). Now in its fifth year, the prize has supported literary careers for hundreds of emerging African writers.
Entrants must be unpublished writers, resident in an African country. One is deemed published if they have a book of their own. Any questions of eligibility shall be resolved by the CACE administration and their decision is final.
Entries must be submitted online, by emailing them to info@writivism.comas attachments (not in the body email), clearly labeled in the subject: 2017 Writivism Short Story Prize Submission. The writer must include in the body of the email, other information about him/her, as country of residence, age, legal name and pen name (where applicable) and telephone contact.
All entries must be in English or French, and 2,500 – 3,500 words long. Entries should be attached in Microsoft Word or Rich Text formats, with the title of the story as the file name. The first page of the story should include the name of the story and the number of words. The entry must be typed in Times New Roman 12 point font and 1.5 line spacing. No mention should be made on the identity of the writer in the entry.
The deadline for receiving entries is March 31, 2017 at midnight GMT. Each entry shall be acknowledged independently by email. Acknowledgement mail shall be sent after the deadline.
All entrants undertake that their stories are original and authentic. Entries will be checked automatically for plagiarism using electronic software. Entries found to be plagiarized will be disqualified without notification to the writer.
Only one entry per writer may be submitted for the Writivism Short Story Prize. The story must be original and previously unpublished in any form including on the writer’s personal blog.
Entrants agree as a condition of entry that CACE may publicize the fact that a story has been entered, longlisted or shortlisted for the Prize. The shortlisted writers and winners of the competition will be expected to participate in readings, The Writivism Festival and events at selected schools.
Worldwide copyright of each story remains with the writer. CACE will have the unrestricted right to publish and translate the short-listed stories in an anthology and elsewhere. The writer shall not publish the short listed story elsewhere, until ten years from the first date of the original publication by CACE.
Shortlisted writers will edit their stories with a commissioned editor prior to publication in the annual anthology. Failure to cooperate with the editorial team will lead to exclusion of the story from the anthology.
Short listed writers may be invited to attend the annual Writivism Festival in Kampala, Uganda, from August 24 – 27, 2017 and will each be awarded $100 (USD) cash. The winner of the prize will be awarded $400 (USD) cash and may be considered for a one month writing residency at a university in an African country.
The winner will be required to produce a complete first draft of a publishable fiction manuscript before the residency. The winner, on taking up the residency commits to publishing the manuscript edited through the residency, under the Writivism Series with a CACE partner publisher.
Discovered 70 years after it was written,
Claude McKay’s Amiable With Big Teeth
depicts an overlooked time
in African American history when
communism and black nationalism
found themselves entangled.
A vendor shows his wares at a bookstall on 125th Street in Harlem, New York, in June 1943.Corbis / Getty Images
In 1922, the Jamaican-born writer Claude McKay published Harlem Shadows, a landmark book of poetry that helped usher
in the Harlem Renaissance. Though McKay was a literary celebrity
in the New York neighborhood, his life and art were in many ways
defined by a kind of nomadism. His interest in both black
diasporas and communism led him to the waterfronts of Marseille
and Morocco, and to Moscow. It’s this experience that eventually
led McKay to write his newly discovered novel Amiable With Big
Teeth, which takes on the tensions between black nationalism and
more globally minded approaches to solidarity that reached a
fever pitch in the 1930s.Written over 70 years ago but published just last month, the novel
revolves around the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, in which Benito
Mussolini’s troops invaded, and went on to occupy, Ethiopia in
the mid-1930s. Watching from across the Atlantic, many African
Americans saw Italy’s military campaign as a direct attack on black
sovereignty by a white imperial power. But some communist
sympathizers in the U.S., most of whom were white, tried to
reframe the conflict as not being about race at all. They believed
it was instead about the rising threat of global fascism and urged
black Americans to align themselves with left-wing movements
abroad and with the Soviet Union.
This debate about the value of communist internationalism over black nationalism is at the core of Amiable With Big Teeth. Written at a time when most scholars thought that black cultural production had come to a grinding halt as a result of the Great Depression (and the consequent dip in arts patronage), Amiable With Big Teeth provides unparalleled insight into this relatively understudied moment in black American history. But the novel, and the picture of Harlem political culture it offers, came dangerously close to being lost to history altogether. Written in 1941, it was only unearthed in 2009 when a graduate student named Jean-Christophe Cloutier came across the manuscript by accident while doing research at Columbia University. Now an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, Cloutier told me that he could assure readers “it was worth the wait.”
What excites Cloutier about Amiable With Big Teeth is that, despite its focus on global political intrigue, the story operates at a surprisingly compact and hyper-local scale. At its core, McKay’s text is essentially about fundraising: The novel revolves around a fictional black-led charity called Hands to Ethiopia that’s looking to raise money to supply Ethiopian soldiers with more weapons to defend themselves against Mussolini’s troops. Some of the familiar haunts of Harlem Renaissance literature are present—nightclubs, brownstones, and black society parties. But most of the drama of Amiable With Big Teeth unfolds in settings more evocative of community organizing than of the lives of uptown literati—in places like church basements, living rooms, and the cramped and chaotic offices of a non-profit.
The fundraising efforts of Hands to Ethiopia quickly become
complicated when a mysterious Russian interlocutor named
Maxim Tasan enters the picture. A black member of the charity
essentially becomes Tasan’s mole and encourages the organization
to open itself to white members and to expel Trotskyites. At the
time, the Russian Communist Leon Trotsky was living in Mexico
City to avoid political payback from Stalin; after challenging
Stalin’s rise to head of the Bolshevik Party, Trotsky was perceived
by many Communist stalwarts to be a traitor who had made the
party vulnerable to fractious dissent. But to the humble leader of
Hands to Ethiopia, a fascinating character by the name of Pablo
Peixota (an Afro-Brazilian turned Harlem numbers-runner), this
anti-Trotskyite campaign is an over-complication of what is
essentially a matter of race. For Peixota, the so-called “Italo-
Abyssinian crisis” is about “one little black nation, single-handed,
almost unarmed, fighting against a mighty white nation.”
Brent Hayes Edwards, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, who co-edited the manuscript with Cloutier, told me the global dimensions of Amiable With Big Teeth are in many ways a response to how World War I shaped black American consciousness. African American servicemen returned from abroad with a newfound “international viewpoint,” Edwards said. That global outlook motivated black Americans to become increasingly involved in the issues facing people of African descent worldwide. Of particular focus for black Americans was defending independent black nation-states—countries like Haiti, Liberia, and Ethiopia—from white Euro-American occupation. As Edwards explained, black sovereignty, or “the idea of black people defining their own destinies,” was “a big deal” at the time McKay was writing Amiable With Big Teeth.
Claude McKay
In the introduction to the novel, Cloutier and Edwards quote McKay’s 1940 anthropological work, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, in which McKay explains the anxieties that animate much of the story: “Harlem [in the late 1930s] was overrun with white communists who promoted themselves as the only leader of the Negroes. They were converting a few Negroes into Bolshevik propagandists, but they were actually doing nothing to help alleviate the social misery of the Negroes.” McKay is referring to Soviet Russia’s propaganda campaign against the United States, which, during the Cold War, was partially directed toward exposing the nature of race relations in America. For instance, the Soviet press extensively covered the case of the Scottsboro Boys, and the Bolsheviks even sent money to aid in their legal defense.
Still, many African Americans, even those who believed in the economic principles of communism, were suspicious of whether the Soviets fully grasped the intricacies of race in the United States. As the author Zora Neale Hurston once put it, “What the hen-fire could Russia do for us?” This skepticism manifests in Amiable With Big Teeth when Maxim Tasan tries to convert Pablo Peixota’s daughter, Seraphine, to his cause by telling her that Russians don’t believe in race. He cites the fame of Alexander Pushkin, often called the father of Russian literature, whose maternal great-grandfather was from Eritrea (though Tasan says Ethiopia and indeed, this fact is disputed between the two countries) as proof of Soviet Russia’s legacy of color-blindness. When Tasan proudly tells Seraphine that Pushkin’s descendants were known as “Russians, not Russafricans,” she can’t help but interpret what they’re doing as “passing”—pretending not to be black and thus shamefully denying their heritage. The scene speaks to the friction and misunderstandings that McKay and Hurston believed plagued Soviet messaging on race relations.
McKay’s critique of Russian communism was especially noteworthy given his earlier commitment to the Soviet cause. In 1922, McKay spoke as an unofficial representative of the “American Negro” at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in Moscow, which also coincided with the fifth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. He wrote about his experiences in a 1923 issue of the NAACP magazine The Crisis, in an essay titled “Soviet Russia and the Negro.” In Moscow, he spoke with hopefulness about the Soviet Union’s potential to serve as a global beacon for racial equality, citing Russia’s own racial makeup as a country whose geopolitical position created a nation “where all the races of Europe and Asia meet and mix.” McKay’s eventual disillusionment with the Soviet Union is well documented in his personal correspondence, but Amiable With Big Teeth represents a thorough artistic rendering of black disappointment with Soviet communism.
For a work so rooted in international politics and full of non-American characters, Amiable With Big Teeth has the surprising distinction of being the only novel McKay ever wrote on American soil. (He toiled away on it while holed up in a cabin in Maine, “up here where it is cold and bracing,” he told a friend.) Despite his centrality to the Harlem Renaissance, McKay spent much of the period when that movement flourished abroad, in Western Europe, Morocco, and, of course, in Moscow. McKay’s contribution to the Harlem Renaissance was his decidedly global pan-African outlook.
From his first book of poems, 1912’s Songs to Jamaica (which was
written in Jamaican patois) to his 1929 novel Banjo, which chronicled
the lives of Senegalese dock workers in Marseille, McKay’s oeuvre
captured a multi-lingual black diaspora interested in forging a global
identity beyond the “Back to Africa” nationalist rhetoric of Marcus
Garvey (whose followers are satirized in Amiable With Big Teeth). In
that regard, Amiable With Big Teeth is typical of McKay’s writing
style, which was conversational in nature, and conveyed obsession
through dialogue and debate. According to Edwards, McKay’s novels
were “less about psychological interiority and more about … black
people from around the world arguing about what they have in
common.”As a creative work and a historical document, Amiable
With Big Teeth is nothing short of a master key into a world where
the intersection of race and global revolutionary politics plays out in
the lives of characters who are as dynamic and fully realized as the
novel itself. The story offers a front-row seat to the polemics that
drove (and stymied) black radical organizing in the 1930s. Given that
the novel lived on the dusty shelves of Columbia University’s library
for decades, we’ll never know how Amiable With Big Teeth would
have been received at the time it was written, and if its skepticism
regarding Russia would have complicated the reception of Richard
Wright’s pro-communist 1940 novel Native Son. But for today’s
audience, McKay’s last novel should make for fascinating and timely
reading as Americans enter an era in which solidarity-building
across racial identities and national borders feels more necessary,
and perhaps more difficult to achieve, than ever.
Born and raised in Toledo, Ohio, Black Arts poet, playwright, and children’s writer Mari Evans was educated at the University of Toledo, where she studied fashion design. She was influenced by Langston Hughes, who was an early supporter of her writing. In her short-lined poems, grounded in personal narratives, Evans explored the nature of community and the power of language to name and reframe. Her best-known poems include “Speak the Truth to the People,” “To Be Born Black,” and “I Am a Black Woman.”
Evans’s poetry collections include Continuum: New and Selected Poems (2007, revised and expanded in 2015); A Dark and Splendid Mass (1992); Nightstar: 1973–1978 (1981); I Am a Black Woman (1970), which won the Black Academy of Arts and Letters poetry award; and Where Is All the Music? (1968). Evans also published the essay collection Clarity as Concept: A Poet’s Perspective (2006).
In her essay “How We Speak,” published in Clarity as Concept, Evans wrote, “Listening is a special art. It is a fine art developed by practice. One hears the unexpressed as clearly as if it had been verbalized. One hears silence screaming in clarion tones. Ninety decibels. Hears tears, unshed, falling. Hears hunger gnawing at the back of spines; hears aching feet pushed past that one more step. Hears the repressed hurt of incest, hears the anguish of spousal abuse. Hears it all. Clearly, listening is a fine art. It can translate an obscure text into reality that walks, weeps and carries its own odor. Listening can decode a stranger’s eye and hear autobiography. Listening can watch a listless babe and understand the absence of future, the improbability, in fact, of possibility. Listening, more often than not, is a crushing experience.”
Evans’s books for younger audiences include I’m Late: The Story of LaNeese and Moonlight and Alisha Who Didn’t Have Anyone of Her Own (2006); Dear Corinne, Tell Somebody! Love, Annie: A Book About Secrets (1999); Singing Black: Alternative Nursery Rhymes for Children (1998, illustrated by Ramon Price); Jim Flying High(1979, illustrated by Ashley Bryan); and J.D. (1973, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney).
Evans’s plays include Boochie (1979), Portrait of a Man (1979), River of My Song (1977), and the musicals New World (1984) and Eye (1979, an adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God).
Evans’s critical works include Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation (1984) and Black Women Writers: Arguments and Interviews (1983). Her work featured in numerous anthologies, including Black Voices: An Anthology of Afro-American Literature (1968) and Black Out Loud: An Anthology of Modern Poems by Black Americans (1970).
The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the John Hay Whitney Foundation, Evans also received an honorary doctorate from Marian College and was featured on a Ugandan postage stamp. She taught at Spelman College, Purdue University, and Cornell University. Evans lived in Indianapolis for nearly 70 years, before her death in 2017.
I am a black woman the music of my song some sweet arpeggio of tears is written in a minor key and I can be heard humming in the night Can be heard humming in the night
I saw my mate leap screaming to the sea and I/with these hands/cupped the lifebreath from my issue in the canebrake I lost Nat’s swinging body in a rain of tears and heard my son scream all the way from Anzio for Peace he never knew….I learned Da Nang and Pork Chop Hill in anguish Now my nostrils know the gas and these trigger tire/d fingers seek the softness in my warrior’s beard
I am a black woman tall as a cypress strong beyond all definition still defying place and time and circumstance assailed impervious indestructible Look on me and be renewed
Hillary Clinton did not coin the phrase “women’s rights are human rights,” but that did not stop a controversy over the phrase from brewing on the internet just days before Saturday’s historic Women’s March on Washington and its sister marches nationwide. The hashtag #AddHerName began to trend on Twitter as Hillary Clinton supporters responded to what they believed was an intentional slight of the former Secretary of State by the organizers of the march. Clinton, who chose to attend Trump’s inauguration and not participate in the march, did not appear on the event program and was not listed among the women activists recognized in the event’s mission statement on “why [they] march.” Supporters argued that Clinton’s “commitment…to help women across the world is unparalleled.” Not citing her for the phrase “women’s rights are human rights,” which appears throughout the Women’s March on Washington program, added insult to injury. The Clinton supporters who took to the web to air their frustration held at the heart of their grievances the concern that not only was Clinton’s name being left out of this historically important moment, but her legacy as well.
Ironically, however, beyond these complaints lay a history these supporters were actively erasing. In an act resulting from a frequent and toxic combination of historical revisionism and ignorance, these incensed supporters had obscured a set of “hidden” histories in their attempts to restore Clinton’s honor. In order to recover the radical history behind the phrase at the center of the controversy and contextualize the unfortunate events the erasure of its rich history has precipitated, I break things down in this modern drama in five acts.
Act I: Linda Sarsour
Palestinian-American activist and Women’s March Co-Chair Linda Sarsour (Source: Women’s Freedom Conference website)
The first of these hidden histories centers around the significant contributions made by one of the event organizers whom the disgruntled Clinton supporters had made their primary target. Upon first glance, the tensions that arose online appeared to be the inevitable spillover of what had been bubbling feverishly under the surface for months leading up to the “peaceful transfer of power.” Some of these supporters were understandably upset about Trump’s win – even more so that it had come by way of the grossly undemocratic Electoral College system – and dead set on turning anyone they considered even partly responsible into a scapegoat.
Enter Linda Sarsour, Palestinian-American activist, former Bernie Sanders surrogate, and one of the organizers called upon in an attempt to make the Women’s March on Washington a more inclusive event. Her presence as one of the organizers had already attracted the barbs of Emma-Kate Symons who, writing for the New York Times, argues that “organizers bent on highlighting women’s differences” had “hijacked” the march. Her use of the term “hijacked” in her title would be considered neutral under normal circumstances had she not spent half of the essay railing against Muslims and Sarsour, whose choice to wear a headscarf Symons contends diminishes her feminism. Surprisingly, that is the least offensive aspect of Symons’ prejudiced screed. But Symons was not the only person to set her sights on Sarsour. On the contrary, other so-called feminist journalists and, in a particularly nasty fit of tone deaf “solidarity,” men who cloaked themselves in support of Clinton to hide otherwise sexist tendencies, contributed to the pile-on as well, reserving their ire for Sarsour, despite many other organizers having worked on the program together with her.
Missing from the attacks, of course, was not only an acknowledgment of the work Sarsour had done to organize and promote the march, but also the magnanimity that characterized her approach to the Clinton campaign. Though Sarsour served as a vocal surrogate for Bernie Sanders and worked on pivotal campaigns to get out the vote among Muslims and Arab Americans during the primaries, Sarsour – herself Palestinian American – encouraged people to vote for Hillary Clinton during the general. This act is key considering that not only had she been snubbed by the Clinton-aligned New York State Democratic Party in June but, most importantly, she, her family, and her peers were targets in Clinton’s structural Islamophobia and reductive views of and policies toward Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians as expressed in multiple speeches and debates during the campaign. The Islamophobic language and policy for which several of Clinton’s most vocalsurrogates and donors had advocated likely did not make Sarsour’s decision any easier.
Though we may never know the full depth of Sarsour’s motivation in choosing to encourage voters in swing states to pull the lever for Clinton (albeit reluctantly and with considerable reservations), what is obvious is that she saw Trump as a more frightening alternative and responded accordingly. Attempts to erase the difficulty that lay behind Sarsour’s decision and the work she put into organizing a response to Trump’s incoming presidency rest on little more than thinly-veiled bigotry by those on social media who called for Sarsour to “rot in hell,” referred to her as a “Bernie Bro,” and laid all blame for the program omission at her feet.
What is most fascinating about this spat, however minor its reach, is how quickly lines from the campaign regarding solidarity with other women had come to mean nothing if those women were not white, wealthy, or standing in unwavering support for Clinton. The blatant disregard at best, and vitriol at worst, reserved for women who had expressed dissent regarding Clinton’s campaign messaging during the primary had spilled over into the general election and now well into its dark aftermath. The burden of extending an olive branch should not be placed upon the women who were actively marginalized by messaging that came from Clinton and some of her supporters, and those who opted to “go high” like Sarsour, despite their detractors’ opting to “go low,” should most certainly not be demonized.
And now, as the dust appeared to have settled in the afterglow of the march, as organizers and participants reflect on their experiences and where to go from here, historical revisionism continues to rear its ugly head. In response to the Islamophobic harassment Sarsour has received after her speech at the march, the hashtag #IMarchWithLinda emerged in response. While the intentions of the hashtag were positive, the gesture nevertheless worked to sweep the march program controversy entirely under the rug. In write-ups on the hashtag, there is no mention of Symons’s Bill Maher-esque rant against Muslim women or the disproportionate targeting of Sarsour for not including Clinton’s name in the program. Now all the anger geared toward Sarsour by self-proclaimed liberals and feminists has been washed away, left only to the bowels of social media and scattered across screenshots. Yet, for better or for worse, the internet never forgets.
Act II: Berta Cáceres
Honduran environmentalist and indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres (Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize)
The second “hidden” history that complaints of Clinton’s erasure obscured relates to her troubling past regarding Honduras. During Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, Honduras underwent a 2009 coup that removed center-left, democratically elected President Manual Zelaya. At the time, Clinton and the State Department refused to acknowledge the gravity of the political situation in formal terms and, much like their subsequent mishandling of the situation in Egypt in 2013, never referred to the act of deposing Zelaya a “military coup” despite the Honduran military’s direct involvement. In failing to declare the Honduran situation a military coup, related cables and memos revealed, the U.S. government was able to continue providing aid to the Honduran military to protect the economic interests in the region. One casualty of the political turmoil and resulting expansion of violence by both the state and gangs alike was indigenous activist and environmentalist Berta Cáceres. Cáceres, followed by several of her colleagues from the organization Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Movements of Honduras (COPINH), met a tragic end at the hands of armed groups believed to have been backed by businesses seeking a lucrative share of the Agua Zarca dam Cáceres had long opposed.
Clinton’s record on the Honduran political crisis haunted her 2016 candidacy, despite having excised previously published content justifying the 2009 coup from the paperback version of her book Hard Choices. Cáceres’s fate became one of many symbols of Clinton’s abusive relationship with Latin America and the Caribbean while Cáceres herself became memorialized as the foil to Clinton’s style of privileged feminism. Likewise, the refugee crisis resulting from political instability and rampant violence throughout Central America overshadowed Clinton’s attempts to portray herself as a friend to immigrants. Despite this dark history looming above her campaign, Clinton remained steadfast in her justification of her 2014 opinion on deporting Central American refugee children by arguing she wanted to “send a message” to families in the region about the dangers of border crossing. And either in a fit of amnesia, hubris, or perhaps both, Clinton called for further military expansion in Central America based on Plan Colombia, despite the well-documented human rights violations of women and children during its implementation:
Berta Cáceres’s name is fifth on a list of twenty-seven women activists– many of them hailing from marginalized communities here in the United States and from nations far beyond its borders. Including Cáceres on the program but not Clinton, especially since Cáceres famously blamed Clintonfor the deteriorating political situation in Honduras that led to countless assassinations of activists, political leaders, and journalists and an exponential increase in femicide may have simply been a matter of respect.
Act III: Hillary Clinton
The entangled histories of Cáceres and Clinton prove far from the only controversial aspects of the program’s omission of Clinton’s name. Clinton’s use of the phrase “women’s rights are human rights” has a fraught “hidden” history of its own. Despite the progressive nature of the line in isolation, Clinton’s use of the phrase when examined in context was not the act of “standing up against the Chinese government” that she claims, much less representative of her record on human rights.
Since Clinton delivered her speech at the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, she and her supporters have cited it as a testament to her humanitarian bona fides, noting that her speech had directly challenged the Chinese government to the degree that it “spurred real action” in their move to providing more rights to women. In a detailed assessment of the speech in 2008, Politifact found these claims to be “half true,” arguing that while the Chinese government had censored Clinton’s speech, the move was “routine,” well in line with common local practices to limit political “confrontation.” Furthermore, it bears noting that at the same time Hillary Clinton was in Beijing, Bill Clinton, then in his first term as President, “was trying to engage China and tone down U.S. condemnation of human rights abuses.” In other words, Hillary Clinton’s speech fell in line with the infamous Clintonian practice of triangulation by giving a nod to the human rights community while going through with political engagements that summarily ignored their concerns.
Noted leftist feminists take this view of Clinton’s politics a step further, panning out to review her stances on issues contemporaneous to her 1995 speech. Reflecting on the speech, journalist and activist Laura Flanders (who attended the conference as a speaker as well) notes in her contribution to the book False Choices that despite Clinton’s recognition of violence against girls, she continued her support of her “‘good friend’ and predecessor Madeleine Albright” who, “not quite a year later […] was telling Leslie Stahl that half a million children dying as a result of U.S. sanctions in Iraq was worth the price.” Flanders goes on to ask, “So what: it’s a violation if you’re starved simply because you’re a girl, but A-OK if it’s simply because you’re Iraqi?” reminding the reader that Clinton’s consideration of womanhood, of girlhood, and even of humanity, is contingent upon one’s nation of origin and the U.S. political relationship thereto.
Scholar Zillah Eisenstein elaborates further, bringing Clinton’s tenuous support of human rights struggles to the local level and into the present. In her article “HRC and U.S. Exceptionalism,” Eistenstein ponders why Hillary cites her Beijing speech and her “No Ceilings” project as proof of her commitment to human rights, but early in her presidential campaign “did not take the opportunity to go to Selma [during the 50 year anniversary of Bloody Sunday] to stand against the rampant racism in our country then and now” or discuss more issues that affect marginalized men, women, and children here in the United States. Eisenstein goes on in her article and more detailed chapter in False Choices to argue that Clinton’s failure to recognize human rights violations in the United States closely aligns with a belief in a form of American exceptionalism that obscures human suffering in which she is implicated:
Clinton assumes the “exceptional” status of the US because of its suppose just and democratic practices, especially toward women. […] Interestingly, despite some campaign efforts to talk about paid family leave in the United States, she has usually located the problem of women’s oppression elsewhere, and not here. But what about safeguarding access to medical care, demanding a living wage and alleviations to poverty, improving day care, lessening incarceration rates, and increasing contraceptive coverage for women of color, right here in the US?
[…] Too many Western feminists similar view women’s rights as primarily an agenda to pursue on behalf of the particularly oppressed abroad. Critiques of women’s rights in Egypt, in Venezuela, in Nigeria, and so on often overlap with similar indecencies here. Data shows that the US is well behind many countries when it comes to [rights for women]. There are women presidents now in several African and South American countries. We are hardly exceptional; in fact, we trail behind.
There is no need to commit more space to discussing Clinton’s extensive betrayal of marginalized women in the US and abroad that countless scholars, journalists, and many others (myself certainly included) have already addressed. It bears noting, however, that attributing “women’s rights are human rights” to Clinton as if to bolster her allegedly solid position on rights for all women hinges on little more than exaggerated projection, regardless of the hope that saying it enough might somehow turn this fiction into a reality. What Clinton’s record demonstrates instead is that often more has been made of what she says than what she actually does.
Intermission
What is most fascinating is that while Clinton has made a point of repeating the phrase and her supporters have likewise attributed the phrase to Clinton as though she was the first and only person to ever utter it, there is a history of feminists from all walks of life, genders, and racial backgrounds who have used the phrase for decades. In what becomes a microcosmic representation of the ways a privileged and predatory form of feminism has relentlessly shut out (and, at best, tokenized) marginalized groups, the dispute over including Clinton’s name on a list of women whom many of her political stances and selective silences harmed seeks to credit Clinton for a phrase that predates her public use thereof. The association between Clinton and the phrase in popular discourse has worked to divorce the saying of its origins, all far more radical than Clinton’s Beijing speech. The present internet scuffle provides a smaller example of the much larger problem of mainstream feminism’s incorporation of subversive movements toward gender equality for the sake of neutralizing them.
Act IV: Angela Davis
Thankfully, the women who are part of such radical movements refuse to be silent bystanders as the suffering of others continues. Indeed, on a day that some have heralded as so peaceful there was no need for police involvement(ignoring, of course, that other peaceful protests, such as those in Ferguson, Missouri or at Standing Rock, North Dakota were met with disproportionate police responses because of the race of the majority of the participants), former Black Panther, feminist, and activist Angela Davis took to the stage and reclaimed a phrase she knew well. “Women’s rights are human rights all over the planet,” she declared in her short, but incredibly rich speech, “and that is why we say freedom and justice for Palestine!”
Davis’s intersectional, internationalist approach to feminism came through every word of her remarks at the march, where she laid out before the crowd a progressive platform for a future firmly in opposition to what Trump and the state represent. She encouraged a “feminism against state violence” and against “capitalist exploitation” that continues to destroy social safety nets like a living wage, job and housing security, and healthcare. She reminded those willing to listen of the plight of activists who remain unjustly imprisoned and of the fight ahead for the recently freed. Furthermore, Davis linked the ongoing struggles of the residents of Flint, Michigan, Standing Rock, and Gaza to various forms of discrimination and violence inherent to systems of oppression rooted in what began and continues as an occupation of indigenous land.
Davis did not stop there. In fact, one of the lines most closely tied to our discussion of erasure was her assertion that “we are agents of history, and history cannot be deleted like web pages.” Though her statement likely refers to the Trump administration’s new version of the White House web page, which is scant on references regarding social justice and environmental protections, it applies rather neatly to the “hidden” histories that have been virtually wiped from public discourse.
Davis has personal experience with this problem, more specifically the act of destroying radical histories in hopes of protecting the honor of women with far more economic and racial privilege. In her book Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, Davis attributes the popularization of the phrase “women’s rights are human rights” to a 1985 conference for women in Nairobi, Kenya that grassroots organizations and NGOs had organized in protest of the UN World Conference on Women happening simultaneously in the same city. At the heart of the grievances that prompted the protest was Maureen Reagan, daughter of then-President Ronald Reagan, who had been assigned to lead the US delegation. Davis argued that as the daughter of the president who had turned the United States government into “the most sexist, the most racist, [and] the most warlike” the nation had ever seen, Maureen had no place as the person to “represent the masses” at the conference. Interestingly enough, it is this conference in Nairobi, the very conference that Davis and her fellow activists had protested, that Clinton credits in her speech in Beijing for having turned “the world[’s] focu[s] for the first time on the crisis of domestic violence.” Though she uses a popular phrase from the protest conference, Clinton never refers to it directly.
The alternative conference proved a key moment in the history of intersectional feminism before it even had a name. Forum ’85, as the protest conference was called, hosted “for the very first time…a very large delegation of US women of color” and happened at a time activists were engaged in debate over how to address the perceived “universality of the category of ‘woman’ [and of] ‘human” and to re-center “groups and communities” in place of the individual in discussions of human rights. In Davis’s reflection of the event, she notes that including a group of women that was racially diverse was not enough to “have addressed the problem of exclusively of the category [of women]” but “that [they] would have to rewrite the whole category, rather than simply assimilate more women in to an unchanged category of what counts as ‘women.” As feminists continue to grapple with these questions in the present, the history and discourse of movements like those of Davis and her peers should not be erased in acts that parallel the very motivation of Davis’s 1985 protest, that is reducing the struggles of women facing a vast degree of adversities into the avatar of one.
Act V: Kalamu ya Salaam
Activist and educator Kalamu ya Salaam (Photo by Alex Lear)
Someone who likely understood and agreed with Davis’s message was Kalamu ya Salaam, a black activist, poet, feminist, and educator who published an article in The Black Scholar entitled “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights!” in 1979, six years before Forum ’85. In the essay, which Salaam wrote after a conference speech of the same name he had given at Xavier University in New Orleans, he discusses the roots of sexism and ties the problem to capitalist, imperial systems that had worked to destroy the matriarchal practices among indigenous peoples in regions beyond Europe. After outlining the meaning and history of such matriarchal societies, Salaam argues further that universalizing sexism as a historical “constant” tends to obscure respective histories of women’s equality that predate Western concepts of the same while simultaneously oppressing women of color at home.
Salaam’s arguments do not exist in a vacuum. On the contrary, the clear internationalist, socialist undercurrent of his essay reflects pervasive thought of his left-leaning contemporaries on the subject of inclusive feminism. Much like Davis, Salaam was on a mission to take the fight against sexism and patriarchy beyond the individual, to expand its scope to address the material needs of the women who experienced it in every aspect of their lives.
One year after he published “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights,” Salaam published a book of essays entitled Our Women Keep Our Skies From Falling: Six Essays in Support of the Struggle to Smash Sexism/Develop Women. Salaam continued to write prolifically and published many more articles and books in the years that followed, in addition to expanding his work to include filmmaking. He remains politically active in his hometown of New Orleans and lectures nationwide on social issues, culture, and politics.
For reasons one can only guess, his name has been left out of the debate on the history of “women’s rights are human rights.” Along with the women activists who used the phrase before, during, and after holding their alternative women’s conference in protest of the alignment of US state terror to the cause of women’s rights, the specific historical moments in which Salaam and countless others recognized the line as a rallying cry for equality for all women have been cast aside. These activists’ contributions to political discourse that precipitated Clinton’s mainstreaming of the phrase have been lost by way of a form of revisionism that places only one woman at the center of a history that involves decades of others’ work.
Whether the erasure of these figures was intentional is irrelevant when we consider the act as part of a much larger social pattern of failing to accurately credit those who are routinely marginalized on the basis of their lower rung on the social strata. As Davis argued in her speech at the Women’s March, we as a nation have yet to acknowledge that the land on which we stake claims of ownership is not even ours. It is no coincidence that in a society where such behavior is normalized, those calling to #AddHerName would decry what they believe is an act of erasure while committing one more grave.
Author’s note: At the time of its publication, the #WhyWeMarch section of the Women’s March on Washington website included the list of twenty-seven women activists, but has since been removed and replaced with the following quote from Audre Lourde, “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” The original list was as follows:
Bella Abzug • Corazon Aquino • Ella Baker • Grace Lee Boggs Berta Cáceres • Rachel Carson • Shirley Chisholm • Angela Davis • Miss Major Griffin Gracy • LaDonna Harris • Dorothy I. Height • bell hooks • Dolores Huerta • Marsha P. Johnson • Barbara Jordan • Yuri Kochiyama • Winona LaDuke • Audre Lorde • Wilma Mankiller • Diane Nash • Sylvia Rivera • Barbara Smith • Gloria Steinem • Hannah G. Solomon • Harriet Tubman • Edith Windsor • Malala Yousafzai
References to the line “women’s rights are human rights” remain in the “Values and Principles” section of the website.
+++++++++++ Wendi Muse is a Contributor to Progressive Army.
“Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One,” starring the director William Greaves as himself, screens this weekend at the Metrograph in NYC (Image credit: Janus Films)
It is 1968; late director William Greaves (1926-2014) and his student crew are in New York’s Central Park filming a screen test. The drama involves a bitter break-up between a married couple. But this is just the “cover story.” The real story is happening “off-camera” as the enigmatic director pursues some hidden agenda, leading to growing conflict and chaos amongst the students, which explodes on screen, producing a brilliant kind of raw energy and insight.
“Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One,” the cinema verite film-within-a-film, can’t be easily defined. But it’s one of the most innovative movies about making movies. It generated 1 sequel titled “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2,” released 37 years later.
“Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One” screens this weekend at the Metrograph in New York City.
A well-respected, if unheralded independent, working in both film and television, producing, directing and editing films for over 4 decades, Greaves created at the intersection of many cultural focal points, including as an original co-host and producer of the landmark “Black Journal” public television series.
He, however, is perhaps best known for his prolific work as a documentary film director and producer. He was associated with more than 200 productions during his career. His documentary films on the African American experience include classics like “From These Roots,” “Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice,” and “Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey.”
His best-known film, the aforementioned “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One,” faced a lengthy road to recognition. Greaves shot the film in 1968 and completed production in 1971 in hopes of debuting it at the Cannes Film Festival that year, but, maybe incredibly, was rejected. The film then spent two decades mostly unseen before being rediscovered by a Brooklyn Museum curator who premiered it at a retrospective of Greaves’ voluminous work in cinema.
The film is a unique 1960s time capsule, a telling look at the myriad tensions involved in film creation – a film on the making of a film – with three camera crews recording different parts of the process and personalities involved (director, actors, crew, bystanders). Though Greaves is undoubtedly the film’s visionary auteur – especially notable for an African American filmmaker in the 1960s – it is a film made collectively by Greaves and his multi-racial crew, whose staging of an on-set rebellion becomes the film’s drama and its platform for sociopolitical critique and revolutionary philosophy.
Filmed entirely on location in New York City’s Central Park, with a score by Miles Davis, Greaves’ film serves as a vivid look into a significant historical era, and a memorable document of what was a creatively prosperous period of American independent filmmaking.
Greaves has been honored with many awards, including an Emmy for his work as executive producer of the pioneering public television series, “Black Journal,” and a Career Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association.
He was a long-time member of the Actors Studio, where he often substituted for Lee Strasberg as moderator of acting sessions.
His oeuvre comprises of significant social documentaries on a variety of issues, recognizing and preserving the history of a people, while also challenging the rules of filmmaking, creating a new language for documentary and dramatic cinema, thus becoming a true film pioneer.
Sadly a lot of his work isn’t readily available for rent or purchase. Easiest to find is the work that he’ll likely be most remembered for – “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm” both parts, which are available for purchase in a 2-disc Criterion Collection DVD set. I recommend you start there.
And if you’re in New York this weekend, add the Metrograph’s screening of “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One” to your to-do list. Visit metrograph.comfor more info.
Ngugi wa Thiongo was recently hosted by the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg where he gave a rousing lecture on African languages.
Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist Achille Mbembe was at the event and said on Facebook that “the atmosphere in the Great Hall was electric.” He also reports that there was over 1000 people in the crowd, all “listening intently” and holding on to every word Ngugi said.
The lecture titled “Secure the Base” (which is available online at this link ) touched on themes that have always been dear to Ngugi’s heart. He called attention to the “pauperizing” of African languages both within the continent and globally. African languages are used in daily life. But they are pretty much absent in African institutions—government departments, law courts, schools, etc. African writers and intellectuals seem to find little or no value in creating work and sharing ideas in African languages.
In the lecture, Ngugi explains this unfortunate situation but also proposes the way forward. It’s not about abandoning European languages, he insists, or pushing an isolationist program where African languages become the only thing we know. For Ngugi, it’s about working hard to put African languages on the global stage. It’s about learning to “use English instead of English using us.” It’s about “making it cool and clever to know an African language.”
The lecture hits all the right notes. It is inspiring.
We have extracted a few hard-hitting moments. Enjoy! Follow this link for the full lecture.
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1. “African scholarship has achieved this great visibility in the world by the tremendous feat of making itself invisible to Africa.
2. “We can only see ourselves through European eyes, at the minimum. This makes us look at Africa with the eyes of an outsider, thus in effect giving up on our responsibility to secure the continent for African people.”
3. “In any independent African nation today the majority are rendered linguistically deaf and mute by government policies that have set European languages as the normative measure of worth in every aspect of national life.”
4. “In colonial conquest, Language was meant to complete what the sword had started; do to the mind what the sword had done to the body.”
5. “They gave us their accents in exchange for their access to our resources…When African intellectuals and leadership were busy perfecting their borrowed accents, Europe and the West were busy sharpening their instruments for access to the resources of the continent Accents for Access: that, unfortunately, is the story of post-colonial Africa.”
6. In Africa today, the defenders [the dominance of European languages] are African intellectuals and policy makers. Some of them act as if it is the English and European languages whose existence is being threatened by African languages: African languages interfere with the English accent.
7. “We need the globe, we are told, and that globe can only hear us in English. The English accent blinds [us] to the reality that what [we] are getting from the global table are simply the remnants of the global access to African resources.”
8. “There is nothing wrong in wanting to take English or any other language as one’s own…Each language, big or small, has its unique musicality.”
9.. “Pamper European languages; Pauperize African languages.”
10. “[African] universities…ought to be full of scholars who know and even work in several African languages; translators into African languages; theorists of African languages in African languages.”
11. “Use English instead of English using us.”
12. “Make knowledge of an African language count in awarding degrees and in promotions, at the university, civil service.”
13. “Make it both cool and clever to know an African language.”
14. “If you know all the languages of the world and you don’t know your mother tongue or the language of your culture, that is enslavement. But if you know your mother tongue or the language of your culture, and add all the other languages of the world to it, that is empowerment.”
*************
AINEHI EDORO holds a doctorate in English from Duke
University and recently joined the Marquette University
English faculty as an Assistant Professor. I love teaching
African fiction and contemporary British novels. Brittle
Paper is the virtual space/station where I play and
experiment with ideas on how to reinvent African fiction
and literary culture.
REPEATING ISLANDS News and commentary on Caribbean culture, literature, and the arts
Call for Papers:
Commemorating 1917
A Discussion of Citizenship and Freedom in Caribbean Literature
1917 was a significant year in the Caribbean:
On March 2, 1917, the Jones‑Shafroth Act was signed, conferring U.S. citizenship to inhabitants of Puerto Rico, the territory it had annexed at the conclusion of the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898.
Twenty-nine days later, on March 31, 1917, the Danish West Indies formally became the Virgin Islands of the United States, as the United States had purchased the islands of St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. John for twenty‑five million dollars from Denmark. (The inhabitants of these islands would be granted citizenship a decade later.)
1917 marked the third year of a U.S. military occupation in Haiti that would last for seventeen years: during the first months of the year, the Haitian legislature rejected a version of the constitution drafted by the U. S. State Department which included a provision that allowed for foreign ownership of land, a feature that had been excluded in previous constitutions.
In the Dominican Republic, 1917 marked the first year of a war of resistance against the U.S. military occupation happening in that country; this guerrilla war would last five years.
Finally, the year would see the end of Indian indentured labor in the British Empire, including the colonies of Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica.
In commemoration of the centennial of these events, sx salon: a small axe literary platformseeks discussion essays that examine how these historical moments are reflected in the region’s literature, then and/or now. How did literary writers of the time respond? Given the ongoing legacies of these occurrences, how have writers of later generations interpreted this critical year in the region?
This special section on the centennial of 1917 is slated for publication in October 2017. Discussion articles are typically 2000-2500 words and offer a targeted exploration of the topic. sx salon, launched in 2010 as part of the Small Axe Project, is an electronic publication dedicated to literary discussions, interviews with Caribbean literary figures, reviews of new publications (creative and scholarly) related to the Caribbean, and short fiction and poetry by emerging and established Caribbean writers. View past issues and submissions guidelines here.
Proposals for this special section are due by 1 June 2017 and full discussion articles will be due by 31 August 2017. Please send proposals to Vanessa K Váldes at vkv@smallaxe.net.
(St. Thomas Harbor, March 31, 1917 – View from the fort before the Danish Flag came down. Photo by H. Petersen, courtesy of NPS-HFC)