Soiree's Past Week

At My Soiree - for the week of December 7 - 12/09

Purple Prose Rides Again - Monday, December 7/09
Hardwiting 101 for Women - Tuesday, December 8/09
Fun with Dictionaries - Wednesday, December 9/09
Hardwiring 101 for Shoppers - Thursday, December 10/09
A Meat-Eater's Love for Vegetarian Restaurants and Cookbooks - Friday, December11/09
The Weird, Wild, Wonderful Four from December 7 - 12/09

Unveiling Abstraction

Robert Fulford writes about Marnia Lazreg in The National Post article The politics of the veil:

Lazreg's fascinating book, Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women (Princeton University Press), tells us that the veil comes and goes, according to the rise and fall of ideologies and the change in male perceptions of women and women's beliefs about themselves. Algeria illustrates the point. After women helped achieve independence from France in 1962, many ceased to wear the veil. It lost its political force as a form of rebellion and became an archaic custom of an older generation.

In the book, Lazreg writes about, what Fulford calls, "the most potent human symbol on earth," although it is not a symbol for piety. According to Fulford, Lazreg believes:

In truth, the veil stands for political ideology and male power.

Further, any woman wearing the full body and face covering is erased:

...Unable to look anyone in the eyes, lacking peripheral vision, her hearing muffled, she becomes an abstraction.

In the Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra ( nom de plume of Mohammed Moulessehoul), a woman must be executed, but the individual woman under the burqa is not really the issue. The identity of the prisoner is never verified because the need to assert control over all women is so strong - any woman will do and must die.


The execution is concrete enough; but the whole process is symbolic of political ideology and male power. The woman becomes an abstraction.

Marnia Lazreg teaches sociology at Hunter College CUNY. She elucidates these issues on behalf of us all, as she studies, lectures on, and writes about development, gender, and geopolitics of Islam.

I would like to invite Marnia Lazreg to my soiree.

Cursing Silence

I first learned of Linda McCarriston in Bill Moyers' film series The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets that I showed to a first-year literature class. I was awed by her poetry, especially the work she read from her 1991 book Eva-Mary.

Many of the poems in Eva-Mary deal with McCarriston's cruel and violent childhood with a father who beat her and her brother, and sexually abused and assaulted both McCarriston and her mother.

In these poems, McCarriston, with pointed and precise language, transfixes the reader, as her gaze does not waver from the brutal scenes of her past.

My earlier post -Voice of Silence - reminded me of McCarriston's poetry, especially the poem "To Judge Faolin, Dead Long Enough: A Summons" from Eva-Mary. McCarriston summons the spirit of the judge who sent her mother back to her violently abusive husband. He would not hear the agony of the woman appealing to him. In short, he gave her testimony little weight when set against the preservation of the family and the law.

In her interview with Bill Moyers, McCarriston says that this poem is an example of "flinging the curse."

Reminds me of Solnit's curse on Mr. Very Important II and my borrowing of it to curse Mr. Justice Douglas Cunningham - To Judge Faolin: "a carbuncle on the face of humanity and an obstacle to civilization".


I would like to invite Linda McCarriston to my soiree.

Voice of Silence

I had never heard of Rebecca Solnit until I read her LA Times article "Men who explain things." In the article, Solnit discusses the imbalance that creates both women's literal and virtual silence.

She tells of an occasion when a "Mr.Very Important" dismissed her book in favour of another very important work on the same subject - but Solnit had written that other very important work (River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West).

On another occasion a "Mr. Very Important II" sneered at her assertion that the group Women Strike for Peace had contributed greatly to the ending of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the early 1960s. Solnit was correct.

Solnit uses both examples to show how women's voices are silenced in various ways around the world. Solnit experienced sneering and overtalking, but women are silenced legally and violently too. She reminds us of some "Islamic countries where women's testimony has no legal standing."

At this point, I had planned to say how pleased I was to discover Solnit's other books in a bio of her, but something happened in Canada last week that totally distracted me and demonstrates how the forces of silence are still present and powerful everywhere.

Mr. Justice Douglas Cunningham of the Ontario Superior Court would not accept the evidence of a member of the provincial parliament in the influence-peddling trial of Larry O'Brien, mayor of Ottawa. The member has to commute between home in Ottawa and the provincial parliament in Toronto, leaving HER family. Lisa MacLeod's testimony is, thus, unreliable because of the distraction this causes, and the judge felt that he "must assign it little weight." And just where is it that a woman's testimony has no legal standing?

I will borrow Solnit's description of Mr. Very Important II for Mr. Justice Douglas Cunningham: "a carbuncle on the face of humanity and an obstacle to civilization."

I would like to invite Rebecca Solnit to my soiree.

A Wise Woman

Elizabeth Pisani is an epidemiologist specializing in infectious disease. She writes about, cares about, and advises about HIV around the globe. Her blog covers things sexual and scientific.

Her book The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of Aids (released today) outlines the ways we fail to do what it takes to end the Aids epidemic.

She says that political correctness about sexual practices is killing people.

Agencies and governments don't want to label common sexual practices, especially in Africa - like multiple partners - as bad for fear of offending!

Pisani also concludes that we have to begin thinking of this epidemic as being about sex, and not predominantly about poverty and gender.

Pisani discusses her book in the Times Online. And Alex Renton reviews it in the Times Online. She makes sense, plus she knows several languages and has a degree in Classical Chinese from Oxford and was for a time a correspondent for Reuters. Wise and interesting.

I would like to invite Pisani to my soiree.