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Three days of bliss – a women’s arts & changing the world conference at London’s South Bank Centre 11th-13th March. It isn’t women-only, it’s broad and busy – worldly in the best sense of internationally connected. There are events for teenage girls as well as middle-agers like me.
I’m tempted to get a 3-day pass, only hesitating because of . . . family responsibilities. Yes, it’s 2011, folks!
Friday highlights:
- The pram in the hall – arts prizes, with Kate Mosse
- Shami Chakrabarti – women’s struggle for freedom
- Mother Earth – Rosie Boycott, Caroline Lucas & Jyoti Mhapsekar
- Girls and young women, individualism & a hyper-sexualised media
- EQUALS concert – music with Annie Lennox (who’ll also be On The Bridge on 8th March) & others
Saturday:
- Wonder who’s involved in this one, slightly loaded language, could be dire, could be brilliant - In God’s Own Image: Women and Faith – how do women of faith deal with the roles that many religions dictate for them? How much scripture is manmade language? And can women harness other spiritual forces? Kate Mosse lifts the lid on the God box with members of the clergy and a female shaman.
- Rape as a weapon of war, female genital mutilation, domestic violence – depressingly topical
- Plus ‘Free Barbie’, speed-mentoring, Helena Kennedy, Fawcett Society,Yasmin Alibhai-Brown + concert
Elif Shafak "fiction can overcome identity politics" (Friday)
Sunday:
- Spinsters, Susie Orbach, Kwame Kwei-Armah (yes), Hildegard of Bingen & other women who write music
- Newsnight’s Susan Watts, Turkey’s Elif Shafak & LSE female students – if they ran the banks
Multifaith life probably offers more opportunities than most for women to enjoy each other’s company intentionally. It’s been a very long time since I was a member of a (non-religious) feminist group – do they still exist?
I’m planning a women’s multifaith conference – on nothing like the scale (or budget) of WOW – in south London later this year and we’re deciding whether to have half of it for women only or not. I’m in favour.
If you’re going to be at the South Bank for any of these WOW events – let’s meet up :)
Just back in London from an *intensive* day in Brussels with a bunch of remarkable people.
Four of us from the UK met up with eight more from a variety of religious and humanist traditions from other European countries. We squished into a tiny office and offered our thoughts on a possible Europe-wide network of existing intercultural or all-faiths-&-none groups.
What’s the best way to describe this kind of grassroots group? Multifaith & interfaith have ‘faith’ in them, which excludes humanist and secular value-based traditions. Someone suggested ‘interconvictional’ – is that going to catch on?
I was extra pleased that there were plenty of women – and action women at that, no messing.
Five of us had a further meeting at the European Commission in the afternoon. The Berlaymont building would drive me nuts to work in – endless grey and blue corridors. There must be a consultancy specialising in this kind of bureaucratic design – you find it from Fez to Finland.
Looks like there may be a gathering towards the end of this year, probably in Brussels. Would your interconvictional group be interested in joining us? Let me know :)
Luc on butler duties at what was Caux Palace Hotel
This place wasn’t just a hotel, it was a palace hotel (& during the Belle Époque, not Edwardian era – I’m learning). We all take turns with cooking and cleaning chores which helps jumble us up.
Today I had breakfast with Claire from the CEJI course and a Russian sociology student who has a passion for cooking. We discussed chicken-in-oven dishes: she puts the potatoes (a staple in her part of Russia) in with the chicken from the start and has tried a rice stuffing.
At lunch I chatted to someone based in Geneva who is involved in group conflict mediation both here and in Guatamala.
Lunch on the terrace
At supper I sat next to a Hungarian studying in the USA with strong views on the importance of civil society – positive social capital, trust between neighbours & colleagues, youth groups, sport, artistic communities, etc.
This is not evident, he says, in Hungary at the moment – people tend to be scrabbling for themselves and don’t see the point in coming together to start up, say, a youth club or athletics team. I think he was saying that in Hungary the individual’s responsibility is to earn money and the government’s job is to do anything else which is necessary – education, health care, etc.
He reckons globalisation hasn’t worked in favour of post-communist European countries. Combined with a poor economic outlook, lots of young people are trying to leave the country – often Germany, the UK or the US. Interesting contrast with the Broken Britain/Big Society we’ve been hearing about recently and the drive for social cohesion and local involvement. I suggested he get in touch with the New Economics Foundation. I wish there was a better term for ‘civil society’ – too much like ‘civil service’ and being coldly polite. ‘Third sector’ isn’t much of an improvement. Ordinary people don’t use these words and don’t think of themselves as part of a sector or civil society, even if they are.
View from the terrace across Lake Geneva
A couple of excellent women on form this morning: Annemarie Sancar from the Swiss Agency for Development & Cooperation and Samia Allalou who is a journalist, activist and member of the ‘Women Living under Muslim Laws’ solidarity network in France & Algeria. Annemarie was scathing of what she saw as a simplified public conversation about women’s rights in Europe – in particular of Muslim women’s rights, often reduced to either/or groups -
- natives v immigrants
- emancipated v oppressed
- black v white
- modern v traditional
- when the reality is a lot more complex. Women with less power are more vulnerable to labelling, less able to challenge it. She didn’t have much time for western feminists who want to free oppressed migrant women by charging in like Crusaders to ‘rip up their cultures on the operating table’. The focus on headscarves detracts from important economic and political issues, with assumptions that they represent the oppression of women by men – this is not her experience (neither is it mine) and waging war on a piece of clothing, she said, does not make you a human rights activist. Behind each scarf is a life story, and, as importantly, behind every criticism of a headscarf is a life story, too. Being told to stop wearing a scarf by feminists or governments can feel pretty much like patriarchy.
I missed a very good workshop on LGBT immigration within global diversity – will have to catch up on papers. It’s fascinating living with people from so many different places – just like south London! My internet connection was set up by a young man from Mombasa.
Tomorrow tackles ‘Europe – the Fortress’ before settling down to the World Cup match – plenty of intercultural material there, too.
Stef O’ Driscoll (award-winning theatre director) and Mark Griffin (St Mary’s University College, London), friends I’ve made through my thespian daughter, are off to Sarajevo on Friday. They want to dramatise some of the wonderful stories in Miljenko Jergovic’s Sarajevo Marlboro, a collection of short stories on how the young people of Sarajevo from the different communities – Croats, Serbs and Bosniacs – helped each other to survive during the siege. They plan to stage performances in London and in Bosnia.
They’ll spend much of their time listening, I suspect, and it will be hard.
Amila and Niko at Blackburn Cathedral
We had a wonderful time in London this evening with some of the Bosnians who have been taking part in the Forgiveness Project exhibition at Blackburn Cathedral. They fly home tomorrow morning. Stef met Silva (a young woman from the Croat community), Amila (who teaches English in Tuzla and is connected to the beautiful madrassa there) and Niko (Deputy Bishop of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the Tuzla area).
In a wholly uninspiring hotel lobby, conversation ranged from the dreadful and continuing pain of multiple and unexplainable bereavement, to justice denied, the thirst in Bosnia for creativity, beauty and the arts, the power of women’s stories and of the life-giving and transformative possibilities of carefully devised theatre. It’s impossible to have conversations like these with our Bosnian friends without a great deal of laughter, too – I love it.
I also caught sight of Chris and Anjum from Blackburn Cathedral, who worked hard to bring our Bosnian friends to the UK. We’re hoping that the final report of the original UK visit in October 2009 will be the kind of document that people will say, “If you’re going to Bosnia, read this”.
SANA’s Paul Johns has been pulling together the report on our visit to Bosnia last month – heard from him yesterday, as well as from Anjum at Blackburn Cathedral which is hosting a visit from our Bosnian friends in February to launch the F-word Exhibition – sounds great & I’ll be there.
At the Women’s Interfaith Network today, I heard about a recent gathering in Birmingham of the European Women of Faith Network – part of Religions for Peace (if you’re involved, let me know) – but more significantly for Zajedno people, the EWFN started life in Sarajevo with a Bosnia-Kosovo women’s interfaith conference in 2003. We met the Interreligious Council in Sarajevo but I don’t remember hearing about the women’s network.
We have met wonderful women in Bosnia
A month ago, there was an unpleasant incident in Tuzla when a Christian nun was verbally attacked in public by Muslims. The Federation of Women (a Muslim women’s group which draws women from all the mosque congregations in Tuzla) supported the nun and issued a public statement denouncing the incident. It was the combination of personal support and public action at the right time which made this a very effective rebuttal. When it comes to new or risky multi-faith activities, it is sometimes easier for women to take the lead – we are less likely to be in senior positions (of any world faith) and can organise under the radar.
The deep respect shown by men towards women within the Muslim community here is striking.
