Three Good Wives

Three Good Wives

16th Mar–28th Mar 2010

Dates & Times
Tues 16 – Sun 28 March (not 22 or 23), 8pm (4pm Sundays, 7pm Fri 26 Mar)

Tickets
£10 / £8 conc (£5 previews Tues 16 & Wed 17)

Little Angel Theatre
14 Dagmar Passage
Off Cross Street
Islington
N1 2DN

An original puppet theater piece that investigates the core themes of waiting, mourning, and healing. These themes are explored through the lens of contemporary US and UK military wives' stories and mytho-historic heroines: Penelope from Homer's Odyssey, Mandodari from the Ramayana, and Scheherazade from The Arabian Nights. The production is inspired by the stories of 21st Century women whose lives have been affected by war. It draws from personal accounts, news and radio stories as well as online social media.

Three Good Wives is a collaborative project developed the performers. Puppet and scenic design by Michael Kelly, sound design by Joemca, and direction by Alissa Mello.

There will be a post-show Q&A with the director on Wed 24 March.
"This production should be seen by all who love theater, science and peace."
- Larry Litt, NY Theatre Wire review of Inkfish's THE BRAIN

This project is made in association with The Little Angel Theatre and is funded in part by a grant from The Jerome Foundation with additional support from The Centre for Excellence in Training for Theatre, The Puppet Center Trust, Battersea Arts Centre, The Pleasance Theatre Islington, and Royal Holloway Department of Drama and Theatre, University of London. Inkfish has been awarded grants from The Jim Henson Foundation, and The Puffin Foundation.

On "Burqa Barbie": Girls, You Can Be Whatever You Want! Except a Muslim.

Sigh.

Italian designer Eliana Lorena created over 500 Barbie dolls for an auction hosted by Sotheby's for Save the Children. The dolls, created to coincide with Barbie's 50th anniversary, represent women from all over the world and three of the 500+ are meant to be from Islamic cultures and are covered to varying degrees.

The UK Daily Mail article on the exhibition (titled "It's Barbie in a burkha: World-famous doll gets a makeover to go under the hammer for 50th anniversary") quotes a Barbie collector with over 250 dolls in her collection who said, "I think this is really important for girls, wherever they are from they should have the opportunity to play with a Barbie that they feel represents them... I know Barbie was something seen as bad before as an image for girls, but in actual fact the message with Barbie for women is you can be whatever you want to be." This response, while decidedly Barbie-centric (more on that later), is a pretty reasonable assessment of the goal of the project, which was designed to be inclusive.

Nevertheless, the presence of dolls representing covered, Muslim women has driven a strange-bedfellows-coalition of establishment feminists, Zionists and Christo-conservatives completely APESHIT. The dolls are not being mass produced, but were designed for the purpose of the charity auction, however the fear-mongering rhetoric around the auction has suggested otherwise. While such Islamophobic/Orientalist rhetoric itself is nothing new, the dust up over the production of so-called "burqa Barbies" is instructive of the way these particular racist themes are expressed on the western Right AND Left. Let's have a look, shall we?

The amusingly-named blog Angry White Dude (which is subtitled, In defense of the the most ridiculed and unappreciated being on the planet... THE WHITE MALE. I am not making this up), covers the Barbie-imbroglio thusly:

"Just forcing the burkha upon women is terribly degrading. When one considers the horrible culture of genital mutliation, stonings, honor killings and the rest of the degradation forced upon Muslim women, it is appalling a doll maker or any other organization would manufacture the Burkha Barbie. Islam is deeply seated in barbarism and violence. There is no good that comes from this “religion.” Only death and violence. All the PC wishes in the progressive world cannot hide or deny the violence perpetuated by Islam and its followers. Of course, you will hear nothing about Burkha Barbie from the mainstream media and (lesbian and ugly) women’s groups such as NOW. Women’s groups don’t care about women…they only care about women aborting babies."

In other words, for the "Dude" the Arab/Islamic world is a single monoculture wherein every bad thing that happens to women at the hands of men is permitted, justified by religion and even celebrated. And that is Bad. However, homegrown American feminists are ugly, abortion-loving lesbians. This dynamic, justifying colonial violence under the premise of feminist concern while simultaneously denigrating western women who demand rights like reproductive freedom at home, is an old patriarchal trick designed to use the concerns of women against them. But apparently no one seems to notice (or care) that such "civilization-building" projects are less about freeing Arab/Muslim women from local patriarchy than it is about installing a new-and-improved colonial version. Or, that the loudest male western voices critiquing the position of women in the Arab and Islamic worlds often actively work against the rights of women in their home countries.

However, despite his thoughtful analysis, it turns out the "Dude" is wrong, mainstream feminists are all over this Barbie thing. Marcia Pappas, President of the New York State National Organization of Women (NOW) released this statement,

“As feminists we believe that women must be able to make their own choices and that includes choices about the clothing they wear. But the burqa is more than a choice. Women are forced to wear the burqua or risk being murdered. Mattel should be ashamed. Making a profit by selling a doll that is clearly wearing a symbol of violence is not acceptable and there should be a public outcry to take this doll off the market.”

Okey-doke. So: covering is always about men controlling women. (Scary, violent, mostly Brown men who will murder you as soon as look at you! Because hey, if history has taught us nothing it's that white, Christian, European men LOVE women's rights. Love 'em!) In this paradigm Muslim and Arab women have no agency whatsoever to make choices that shape their lives. They need white feminists to save them. So that's the liberal feminist position. Check. And if we go a bit further to the right?

Feminist/Orientalist/Zionist Phylis Chesler's article on the dolls screeches, " What will they think of next? A be-headed doll?" (I wonder who she means by "they"? The list of related articles running alongside Chesler's "Boycott Burqa Barbie" includes, "Under the Islamic Veil: Faces Disfigured by Acid", so that should give you an idea where she is coming from). She writes,

"A wonderful Muslim feminist hero just stayed with me for a week. She is a lawyer and an author. Her name is Seyran Ates, she is a Turkish-German, and she lives in Berlin. Like Algerian-American professor Marnia Lazreg, whose book about the Islamic Veil I’ve previously discussed, Ates absolutely opposes the veil in any form. She will not wear a headscarf. Ates is a religious Muslim woman."

Oh, okay. You know a Muslim woman and she agrees with you. Well that changes everything.

My bad.

Although... if there are religious Muslim women who don't wear the scarf --and become lawyers and scholars and get to stay in your guestroom even-- then there must not be a direct relationship between Islam, covering and violence against women after all? Or are they safe from such oppression only in the West? And because they are halfsies? Is that the point, that their big brown badness has been properly diluted by western blood and culture? Ahhh, so it's not Islam per se, but rather those scary brown men of Africa/The Middle East/ South Asia who are racially predisposed to violence, you have to get rid of. Got it. Chesler concludes, "Mattel: take Burqa Barbie off the market. Parents: Boycott it. Calling all Charities: Save the children from it." Like her left-er leaning colleagues Chesler is calling for a boycott of Mattel for daring to acknowledge that covered women even exist. The logical paradox here: that the best way to support such women is to not allow them to be represented at all, seems to not bother anyone.

And a tick or two further Right on the crazy-lady meter?

Pin-up girl for internalized racial/orientalist self-hatred, Michelle Malkin writes, "No word yet on whether the dolls will be subjected to female genital mutilation or come with stoning pits in order to accurately represent their 'diversity.'" Yeah, diversity really sucks, Michelle. It inevitably leads to female genital cutting. Let's burn some books!

Malkin echoes the Dude's earlier point about genital cutting--a chorus that is echoed throughout the blogosphere, equating covering with genital cutting and then globalizing both throughout the entire Arab and Islamic worlds. Once again, these conflations rely on a blatantly racialized imaginary Islam, which flattens cultural differences between countries and confuses cultural practices for religious ones. Cutting is practiced mostly in Africa and Asia while Muslims live all over the world. The styles and requirements around covering differ greatly throughout the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. Even within single countries covering is not always consistent and there is no direct relationship between covering and religious piety. And there are significant historical examples of women assuming the veil specifically to frustrate their colonizers, as in Algeria and Palestine... But you probably knew that already, right?

As I've said before, I have no attachment to covering one way or the other. It isn't a religious or cultural value in my family. And like a lot of people who write about the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia I am weary of rehashing the same arguments about covering over and over. Which is not say that covering, like pretty much everything else connected to women can't be used against them. But the point I consistently return to is: what do Muslim feminists have to say about the practice? And then I take my cues from them. As far as I'm concerned, the fact that all of this "outrage" and "concern" for Muslim and Arab women doesn't ever translate into a large-scale western platform for their voices tells the tale.

Neither am I especially interested in the gender politics around Barbie dolls, whose dubious history as icons of femininity has been well-documented by others. Like the veil, Barbie has been reviled as a tool of the patriarchy and celebrated as a strategic weapon against it. I have no problem admitting that I have no idea which is the proper take, although it seems to me that such a range of interpretations suggests that simple answers are reductive and arbitrary. And, not incidentally, politically motivated.

So for me the element of this Barbie scandal that is most telling is that it was instigated merely through the presence of dolls representing unambiguously Islamic women. Imagine what might happen if they actually spoke.

The entire spectrum of western politics is invested in the silence of Muslimahs, from aggrieved white men to mainstream feminists whose common concern, the overriding threat of super-violent, oppressive maleness emanating from the East, unites them. So in the end, this conflict over Barbie dolls is not about Arab and Islamic women at all. If it were, someone might have asked them how they felt and taken their thoughts into consideration before making sweeping racist, culturally and historically inaccurate statements. Rather, this--like almost everything else-- is really about the threatening specters of Arab and Islamic boogeymen, who must be conquered, controlled and/or destroyed to preserve "our" way of life.

How the Rapist Was Born premiering in London 9/28-10/17

London's Theatre Waah is premiering Sabina England's play, How the Rapist Was Born as part of their Double Dutch Espresso series, on a bill with Punam Ramchum's Jesus Christ and Chocolate Pudding. The plays run from September 28-October 17th. If you are in London, go and see it and report back.

Finger-Wagging Won't Help Muslim Women

By Geraldine Brooks (for the Guardian UK)

"I'm proud to be a western feminist – but we're not the only ones exquisitely sensible of gender injustice"

The question: Can western feminism save Muslim women?

"By Allah, we're an arrogant lot.

By 'we', I mean modern western feminists, a group among which I am generally proud to be included. Except when we're full of ourselves.

Western feminism is not the only ideology exquisitely sensible of gender injustice. Nor are western feminists the only ones willing or able to speak up about it. Muslim women have been doing this themselves for decades, loudly and often effectively. To cite just a few examples: It was Egyptian Muslims, Huda Shawari and Saiza Nabarawi, who publicly threw off their veils in 1923 at the Cairo railway station, leading to wide acceptance in Egypt that wearing hijab is a personal choice. Tamam Fahiliya, a Palestinian Muslim, started a women's group to protest honor killings in 1991. In the US recently, a young Muslim writer named Asra Nomani posted her list of theses regarding women's Islamic rights on the door of her local mosque in West Virginia, sparking spirited nationwide soul-searching among members of America's fastest growing religion. And in Iran, it is observant Muslim women who have achieved the most positive change in matters of economic and social equality.

By contrast, western feminist finger-wagging or attempts by pro-western governments to alter Islamic laws by fiat have been spectacularly counter productive. In 1979, Anwar Sadat enacted mild reform of marriage and custody laws, but by 1985 Egypt's Islamists had succeeded in having those laws struck down. In Iran, on the other hand, a young generation of Koranically-literate Islamic revolutionary women sparked a national conversation on personal status issues, using Islamic jurisprudence rather than legislative measures. By educating women in the use of Islamically sanctioned pre-nuptial agreements, for example, an Iranian woman can secure for herself the right to divorce in set circumstances, to continue study or work after marriage and to establish her share of property if the marriage is dissolved. All of this was done without parliamentary debate, because Muslim women argued their case from within the Islamic establishment.

Reporting in Iran in 1995, I witnessed a similar exercise of Muslim feminist power. A university professor had looked out on his incoming engineering students and commented with disgust about the number of females, who would marry and waste their training. The women in the group who were the more "westernized" and less Islamically "correct" in their dress and beliefs felt their position too tenuous to object. But a band of chadoris, young women who were conspicuously observant, led a demarche on the professor, demanding a retraction and an apology. Which they got.

I'm not saying here that a human right is what the local despot says it is. I find the kind of moral relativism that justifies practices such as female genital mutilation disgusting and fatuous. What I am recommending is a little humility. Western feminists with a genuine desire to raise the status of oppressed women in Afghanistan or elsewhere should call their nearest mosque and make an appointment to talk to the sisterhood there. (I'm not talking about Wahhabi or Salafi-dominated mosques, which really are hopeless.) But in the majority of mosques they will learn of efforts long afoot to reclaim the positive messages about women's rights in the Koran, messages obscured for too long by patriarchy and oppressive social customs. It is those efforts that we western feminists should support if we care about the women, and not the sweet sound of our own politically correct bleatings."

* The above appeared in the Guardian UK on August 28th as a part of its "question" series and I have reprinted it in its entirety including the internal links, which are her references, not mine.

I am curious to hear your responses to Brooks' essay, which is not perfect (by Allah?) but is unusual in my experience for referencing actual Muslim feminists (!) Nevertheless, the comment thread for the original Guardian article quickly reasserts the Western arrogance that Brooks is attempting to address. This is annoying and I think it highlights two significant conflicts 1) The tensions between European "values" and Muslim immigrant populations in Europe and 2) the default tendency of white, Western feminists to speak on behalf of "women" in general, as if women who fall outside those categories cannot decide things for themselves. The common thread here is the casual disregard for the basic humanity of Muslims, which becomes racialized contempt for South Asians, Arabs, and even Eastern Europeans (Borat, anyone?)...

Anyway, let me know what you think.

Paul Sakoilsky: Are these the Dark Times? Art in the Age of Media Panic

By Mike Watson
via art a part of cult(ure)

It was 2007 when Paul began collecting London’s free (and other) newspapers from trains, buses, the street, ‘editing’ the covers using paint and collage techniques, adding, altering and deconstructing images and text to create a new periodical: The Dark Times.

Across Austria, Germany, England, Italy, Sakoilsky has provoked thought on the status of our world, or our times, with one question, issued over and over, daily, ‘are these the dark times?’

This moniker ‘The Dark Times’ (after The New York Times, The Times, and so on) serves to remind the viewer of the difficult times we live in, whilst also satirising the absurdity of the media world we live in, driven by its desire to shock the public in order that papers may be sold, but possibly for more sinister reasons; is a fearful public a more malleable public?

Such questions are raised unflinchingly by the huge body of work that has now been amassed, and which has adorned many gallery walls - such as those in BonneliLab, Cannetto, Oct’02 to Feb ‘09 as part of group show ‘Paradiso Terrestre’ - as a vast tapestry of individual ‘newspaper’ editions, all collated and created by the artist-’Editor’ Paul Sakoilsky.

Days after revealing the first Dark Times: News Stand, an art installation at the V22 Sculpture show in London (opening 26h April), Sakoilsky’s next exhibition sees him assume the role of curator and Editor-proper as he presents Mayday: The Dark Times (Editor’s Choice ≠1) in Hastings. As the artist once maintained, of a live-in performance, in which he slept and worked in a makeshift ‘press office’ as part of the well documented environmental awareness exhibition ‘Climate of Change‘, ‘this is categorically not a performance’, so too we find his role as artist-Editor of the Dark Times newspaper takes on real-life proportions as he collates a genuine ‘newspaper’ consisting of writings and artworks from over 20 practitioners.

As he mounts the now familiar daytime ‘press-office’, collaging and painting his take of the days news upon free newspapers within the F-ISH gallery, Hastings, East Sussex, editions of this first ever print version of ‘The Dark Times’ will be for sale both as an affordable, standalone newsprint catalogue-paper, and as a limited edition boxed-set, comprised of digital C-Prints of selected submissions.

When you add to this the curated exhibition that will appear simultaneously at F-ISH, involving, amongst others, Gavin Turk and Liam Scully, we are presented with a metaphorical hall of mirrors, as art mimics life, mimicking art; found newspapers providing the impetus for painted works, which then inspire a printed edition.

This all compliments the forthrightness of Sakoilsky’s work, in which we are asked remorselessly to account for the times we live in now, right now, yet in the full knowledge that we will be asked the question over and over ad infinitum.

There is no easy answer to whether or not we live in the Dark Times, the end of days, yet it seems appropriate that Paul Sakoilsky asks this same question at the opening of this show on May 1st - the official International Workers Day, but also the date of a Pagan festival signifying renewal - in the town of Hastings; a seaside jewel that lost its lustre many aeons ago.

At a time when the fate and security of the United Kingdom seems constantly under threat from terrorists, from failing banks, from freak weather patterns, and at a time when the frivolity of art comes into question, Sakoilsky takes his mixture of dry wit and pointed wisdom to the heart of the UK itself; not to London, but to the environs, to the kind of place where people of normal aspirations (to remain safe, to remain calm, and so on) live and work.

In doing this Paul asks, amongst all the other questions, whether the UK art scene has really collapsed – as some doomsayers argue - or even diminished? If the activity of the artist seems frivolous in times of economic hardship this is in part due to the artwork’s ability to stand aside from the indignities of financial squalor, just as the best art stands aside from the indignity of gross wealth in times of prosperity. If these are the Dark Times, Sakoilsky reminds us that Art is in a unique position to shine a light upon them.

Art cannot bemoan the current state of the economy: The financial industry wakes periodically to the illusory reality that is, in any case, art’s premise. It is this illusion - that which makes it possible to take and transform a daily newspaper into satire, for example - which adds the lustre to these Dark Times.

Upcoming Show: MAY DAY: THE DARK TIMES (Editor’s Choice≠1). F-ISH, Hastings, UK, England. 2nd May - 12th June Wednesday, V22 Sculpture Show, The Biscuit Factory, Bermondsey, London, SE16. Exhibiton and Artist Preview.

The first ever print edition of ‘The Dark Times’ will be issued in a run of 2,000, and also as a Limited Edition box-set. Editor, Paul Sakoilsky, Art designer Rogan Jeans, in conjunction with F-ISH Gallery.

More about Paul Sakoilsky here.