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Abandoned Amusement Park in New Orleans
Even though she grew up playing football, shooting hoops and running races against all the boys in her neighborhood, U.S. 800-meter champion Alysia Montano never wanted to be thought of as one of them.
As a result, she started wearing a flower behind her right ear to remind the boys they were getting beat by a girl.
“The flower to me means strength with femininity. I think that a lot of people say things like you run like a girl. That doesn’t mean you have to run soft or you have to run dainty. It means that you’re strong.”
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1 - Shadowboxer 2 - Sleep to dream 3 - Angel 4 - Criminalhere have 20 minutes of fiona being a goddess
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Seventy years ago , on May 15 1943, History was made in Somalia. The Somali Youth League, a revolutionary, freedom, and political movement was formed. There has been much written about the SYL. A simple Google research will result in a wealth of information and photographs on this historic and dynamic organization.
All Somalis I know are deeply proud of this movement for fighting the good fight and freeing Somalia from European colonization.
However, what concerns me, angers me and saddens me is how the pivotal role of Somali women in this struggle has been completely erased. When one reads about the movement and views the photographs from this era and of the SYL, women are nowhere to be found.
The conversations and remembrance of the SYL and this period have no recollection of the significant role of Somali women as if women didn’t even exist.
Yet women not only existed, but they were at the heart of the struggle. The freedom struggle in Somalia, and elsewhere in Africa would have never been possible without women, but what are the dominate narratives of our histories namely as told from the perspective of men telling us?
I do attribute much of the misogyny which exists in Somalia and elsewhere to the erasure from history of the pivotal role and significant contributions of women.
The removal of Somali women from the narrative for the liberation of Somalia is just one example. We need to reclaim our history. We need to learn about the many stories of that history, not just the role and contributions of men.
One of the few sources on the role of Somali women during this historic period I have come across is from: Safia Aidid’s Haweenku Wa Garab (Women are a Force): Women and the Somali Nationalist Movement, 1943–1960
Safia quotes women poets and freedom fighters from that era, who being women are usually not in the collective memory of their people.
Hawa Jibiril is mentioned several times. Hawa Jibril is a legendary Somali poet and has a book, which I will be ordering and I encourage if this subject is of interest be Somali or not to also order. The book is called: Saa Waxay Tiri, And Then She Said: The Poetry and Times of Hawa Jibril. (It’s in English)
(A young Hawa Jibril on the cover of her book. Here is a recent youtube video of her and her daughter reading some poems from the book).
Below are quotes from the article linked above and below.
The historiography and metanarrative of nationalism in Somalia is often one of “men, their movements and parties, and struggles over power,” with the nationalist movement itself framed as a masculine project.10 In what is perhaps the only comprehensive analysis of nationalism in Somalia, Saadia Touval’s Somali Nationalism, there is not a single reference to Somali women, let alone any references implying a secondary, supportive role..
Women were there from the beginning,” recalled Jamaad Diriye Ali, one of the Somali Youth League women I interviewed. “When it was said that we would struggle for independence, the women joined.
Known as the Sisters, SYL women throughout the 1940s and 1950s were involved in organizing and recruiting new members, promoting Somalinimo and nationalist feeling, raising funds and collecting membership fees, housing and concealing nationalists from authorities, and participating in demonstrations. At times they were imprisoned, tortured, or killed.
Hawa Jibril’s poem describes women’s activities:
At the time we were fighting for our flag
Sisters, we chanted and we clapped
Till our hands and jaws got sore
Sisters, we sold our jewelry
Depriving ourselves
And donated to our League
Enriching the struggle.
When told by men that women lack the capacity for leadership
Hawa Jibril replied:
Are you not really arguing as the Italians? Are you not, in fact, supporting their contention, as expressed at the United Nations, that the Somalis are not ready for independence, because they allege that we have not sufficient education or political maturity?
All credit goes to Safia Aidid: Source
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Alexandra Kollontai, member of the Bolshevik Central Committee who participated in the decision to launch the armed uprising of November 7, 1917, and in the revolt itself. At the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, she was elected Commissar of Social Welfare in the new Soviet government.
«What – the new woman? Does she really exist? Is she not the product of the creative fancy of modern writers of fiction, in search of sensational novelties? Look around you, look sharply, reflect, and you will convince yourself: the new woman is certainly there – she exists.
You already know her, you are already accustomed to meeting her in life, and indeed on all rungs of the social ladder, from the woman worker up to the young women adepts of the sciences, from the modest woman clerk to the most famous representative of the liberal arts. What is most amazing about all this is that although you meet the new woman in life with ever increasing frequency, it is only in most recent years that you have had an opportunity to find her facial features more frequently again in the heroines of literary works. Life in the last decades, under the heavy hammer blows of vital necessity, has forged a woman with a new psychological sense, new needs, and a new temper. But literature still portrayed the woman of the past, still created the decrepit, self-sublimating former type. What shining images of the nascent “new woman” was offered by the reality of Russian life in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s! But the poets and novelists passed them by. They neither perceived nor heard them, nor did they comprehend them or distinguish among them. Turgenev almost brought them to life with his delicate brush, but even in his novels the images are dimmer, poorer than the reality. Only in his poetry, in poems in prose that are dedicated to the Russian girl, did Turgenev bare his head reverently before the deeply affecting images of those who had dared to cross the hallowed threshold.
A long train of “nameless” ones follows the women militants, namely, those who are listed in the annals of history. They were destroyed like bees in the destroyed beehive. The rocky path to the holy, longed for, and awaited future is strewn with their corpses. Their number grew, increased year to year. But the novelists and the poets passed them by, thickly blindfolded. The poet’s eye, as though it were absolutely oriented upon the traditional view of woman, was not able to grasp this novum, to appropriate it and stamp it upon his memory. Literature, in perfecting itself, developing by seeking utterly new paths, new colors and worlds, stubbornly continued to produce the betrayed, abandoned, suffering creatures, revengeful wives, bewitching predators, will-less “misunderstood natures,” pure, colorless, charming girls.» Moscow, 1918
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Camilo Jose Vergara
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