Countering - OR It Must Be That Time Of Year Again

Countering - OR It Must Be That Time Of Year Again
(c) Melina Magdalena (2008)

just briefly
let me say please
i have no interest in:
attack
or
counter-attack;
accusation
or
counter-accusation;
rewritten history
or
rewriting history;
threats
or
threatening

there
is
already
enough
sorrow
pain
heartache
trouble
misunderstanding
in this world

there
are
so many
sleights of hand
and
flights of fancy

let it be
dayenu
let it rest
dayenu
finally
dayenu
it is enough
already
dayenu

no more
returning
to those sore spots

no more
wringing of hands
licking of wounds
opening of scars

i have reached my
limitations

i have resurrected my
boundaries

i have gone as far
as I would go

South Australian Teachers' Struggles

South Australian Teachers' Struggles
(c) Melina Magdalena (2008)

Comment posted to AdelaideNow (22/11/08)

After putting in a full day's work at my school (and despite the lack of students, there is ALWAYS plenty to be done at school), I was at the 4pm rally on the steps of Parliament House last night, together with hundreds of other angry teachers and school staff.

We were there to express our utter indignation and outrage at the State Government's bullying, strong arm tactics.

Rann, Caica, Foley, Lomax-Smith - these are the "culprits" responsible for yesterday's chaos and empty classrooms. Their behaviour is unconscionable. While the
Australian Education Union attempts to use the legitimate processes of lobbying and negotiation, the State Government of South Australia refuses to engage. The government's stubborn, arrogant refusal to meet the AEU and show some respect for South Australia's Public School Sector produced yesterday's chaos.

As well as refusing to negotiate, the State Government has lied, reneged on agreements and proposals and now removed our right to protest at their high-handed behaviour.

I love my job, and I love what I do. I won't compromise my professionalism by allowing this process to impede my work. But I will go to the steps of Parliament House in my own time for as long as it takes for Rann, Caica, Foley, Lomax-Smith to be stood down from office and face the discordant music of the havoc they have chosen to wreak upon South Australian families. I am ashamed to have voted Labor with the thought that Labor would be good for public education.

South Australia's politicians are the highest paid state government politicians in the nation.

South Australia's teachers are the lowest paid teachers in the nation.

Melina Magdalena

The Party Popper Incident

The Party Popper Incident
(c) Melina Magdalena 2008


my lips are sealed
I promised.

Smelly Compost

Smelly Compost
(c) Melina Magdalena (2008)

It was 5pm before I was able to force myself to go outside. I had plenty of excuses – it was thirty three degrees, after all, I had lots of planning to do, I’d got up this morning and washed 3 days worth of dishes and a week’s worth of clothes already; it wasn’t like I had been spending all day playing solitaire and checking other people’s Facebook Status Updates.

I put on some socks and shoes and trundled the wheelbarrow around from the front to the back yard. I was very conscious of the full bucket of composting materials still sitting on my kitchen bench, waiting to be taken to its final destination. Tja – it was time to deal with the big daddy compost.

There are two compost bins in my back yard – one quite a lot bigger than the other. I stopped using that one about a year ago, and started on the smaller one, in the vain hope that the stuff in the big one would miraculously transform into soil for my garden, as compost is supposed to. Alas.

I tried pushing the big bin over, and soon realized that the stuff inside was not friable, as composted materials ought to be. Or else it was just that the compost bin had been dug into the ground and was holding on. I grabbed the fork and began to work my way around the base, prising it up a little from several directions. It began to come loose. Good news. OK, so what next? Maybe I could try lifting it off like a mould.

I removed the lid and gagged. The surface was alive with bugs. It was black and it was slimy. I went inside and found some gardening gloves, which I put on. This made the dog very excited. I’m not sure why.

I approached the compost bin again, embraced it gingerly and slid it upwards. I twisted to one side and set it down on the ground, now empty, and turned back to view my glorious creation – 3 years worth of rotting vegetable matter. It looked like a bizarre sandcastle. It was the colour of babyshit and smelled much, much worse. I could identify bits and pieces, but other things were not readily identifiable and I quickly stopped trying to analyse them, because I was beginning to feel rather ill. When I prodded the mound with the fork, hoping I might be able to lift it bit by bit into the trench I’d dug to bury it in, the fork got stuck. By exerting some force I managed to yank it out again. There were slimy, gooey somethings hanging off the tines. I began to dry-retch, but thought better of it, and managed to curb the reflex. This nightmare was just beginning.

Gilles Plains is a swamp and even in a drought it is a haven for mosquitos and flies, but this beggared belief. Six-legged flying torturers cruised gaily in and out of my hair, my ears, my eyes, my nose, and calmly settled on my bare arms as I frantically tried to deal with the [not]compost. Goodness knows how many made their way into my digestive system. It does not bear thinking about. Of course, the flies were far more interested in the stuff that was supposed to be compost. I decided to bury it as fast as I could.

In the mistaken notion of being an independent woman and an ecologically minded world citizen, I made certain lifestyle choices after moving to this house. It had been supposed to be my final move, and now with six weeks until my sweetheart and I move into the home we’ve just purchased together, I chose to spend part of this weekend preparing for our impending move. She’s moving from a sharehouse in Melbourne, and I’m just moving suburbs, so we’re preparing separately for our lifetime of living together.

As well as purchasing the compost bins, a couple of years ago I purchased 10 untreated jarrah sleepers and constructed a large vegetable patch in the centre of our backyard. I’d considered leaving it here, but it’s several hundred dollars worth of sleepers, and since we do want to grow veges, it makes sense to take them with me when we go. My most recent purchase was the wheelie bin equipped with a handy hole in the top for the washing machine hose, and a tap at the bottom for emptying water out of it. I stopped collecting the water over the winter months, but it’s time to start looking after the fruit trees. It will be a bit sad to leave them all behind, but I don’t think I’ll have the energy to try and take them to our new home. We can start afresh.

How wrong I was, to think I could make compost… I wish I had had some guidance from a real person with experience in these matters (as opposed to printed materials). I’m hoping that life lived as half of a partnership will be more fruitful and less disgusting than this experience has been. I’m not a little worried that someone is going to come and angrily break down my front door demanding to know whom I killed and why I thought I could get away with burying the corpse in my back yard. Or irate neighbours whose backyard BBQs have all been spoiled by the stench still drifting in from my backyard. I’m very sorry about this. I hope the smell reduces quickly.

I’m not sure what went wrong. Note to sweetheart – I think maybe we should try chickens next time, if we can make a chook run that is Jack Russell-proof...

I worked solidly for two hours transferring the soil out of one-half of my vege patch onto the pile of [not]compost. Unaccustomed to such labour, I am now as tired as I could be. I finally stopped, coughing uncontrollably, still trying valiantly not to retch, and completely devoid of energy; went inside, stripped and got under the shower. I cleaned myself as well as I could, but the aroma of rot lingers on my fingers in the same way that poo will do. I’ve read about that. Our noses are more sensitive than we’d like them to be. Tiny particles of scent lodge themselves in the membrane and we are convinced that we haven’t washed ourselves under the fingernails as well as we should have.

Now I’m sitting by an open window that faces the backyard. I’m really not sure how stinky it still is. I’m pretty concerned that the dog is going to have a field day overnight. Oh well – maybe after some sleep I’ll be able to muster up more energy. If I empty the other half of the vege patch tomorrow, the compost will be a few feet under. Maybe we won’t be able to smell it anymore, and I can pretend this debacle never happened … just move on to our glorious and fragrant future.

Yep – and all those wonderful worms I found whilst digging the good soil might sprout wings and fly, too.

A nice day

It is a nice day when your former student pays you a visit on the last day of term, whilst he is fasting and recovering from surgery, to wish you a Happy Jewish New Year. I was incredibly touched by his intercultural reaching out. It came about this way.

Last year, around this time, there was trouble simmering in my classroom. The trouble centred around two students - one, a volatile, passionate Sudanese woman, and the other, a mischievous, curious, awkward Afghan man. I decided to take some lateral action, and planned to make Tashlikh with my class.

I brought along my best apple table cloth, some apples, honey, and breadcrumbs. I believe this was still during the time of Ramadan, but in that class only a few students were fasting. I prepared a worksheet with some information about Rosh Hashanah, which we read in class. I taught my students to say the traditional greeting "L'Shanah Tova". We then walked to the nearby River Torrens, where we threw breadcrumbs into the water and let go of our grievances.

The two students I mentioned above didn't come to this class. I was a little downcast by that, but went ahead with what I had planned nonetheless.

The student who visited me last week was there. The activity was obviously meaningful for him.

I wished him Eid Mubarak in return - the greeting he had taught me in return for my new year's greeting.

fear cancels love

So, we protesters are responsible for causing the Asia Pacific Defence and Security Exhibition planned to open on Rememberance Day 2008 in Adelaide to be cancelled.

NOT because we made our point.

NOT because ideals of peace won the day.

NOT because Rann's government saw the light.

NOT because of an overwhelming longing for cooperation rather than competition.

According to media reports, what I see as a victory for those opposing the Arms Fair is actually us bullying the poor little government into backing down from their monstrous venture.

I haven't seen any commentary from the government about why APDSE was such an abhorrent concept and why it should never have been planned for our city or indeed any city.

I think we need to continue to speak very loudly about our reasons for organising protest actions, and drown out the petulant voices of Foley and the rest.

To Foley I say - grow up and develop a backbone.
To Rann I say - develop some morals and get the courage to stand by them.

To all the protesters, I still say non-violence has won the day.

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Breaching the Peace - AIDEX 1989 and 1991

Breaching the Peace - AIDEX* 1989 and 1991
(c) Melina Magdalena 2008

BACKGROUND TO AIDEX 1989
There seems to be little recorded memory of AIDEX 1989, which was the precursor to the BIG protest in Canberra at AIDEX 1991. I was one of a small group of Adelaide activists who travelled from the Anti-Bases Campaign action at Nurrungar in 1989 to Canberra, to protest against the Australian promotion of an international trade fair of weapons and “defence” equipment.

The training we peace activists had previously received in Non-Violent Direct Action had prepared us to be clear-headed and thoughtful about how we would engage authorities (police, security guards, army) and what our purpose was, in standing up for what we believed in. This was mainly through our involvement in the Anti-Bases Campaign protest actions at Nurrungar. Yet even the History of the Anti-Bases Campaign Coalition fails to count AIDEX 1989 as one protest in which Anti-Bases Coalition activists were present and active.

We were fairly clear about what we believed in. Animal Liberation provides some good information about what NVDA was for us. We were ratbags, but we were non-violent ratbags. We wanted to be seen and heard and taken seriously, but we also wanted to be safe and have fun. We were creative and we took calculated risks. The idea of non-cooperation was as appealing as street theatre, and during our participation in the action at Nurrungar, our contact with police officers had been friendly and non-threatening.

I Was Only Nineteen, knew nobody who was directly involved in making war, and had every intention of keeping my nose clean. I would no sooner have considered applying for a defence force scholarship than applying to NASA’s Space Shuttle Program. A few years later when Richard, who had entertained all the protesters and the security guards alike with his hilarity and sharp wit, was knocked back from the Army Reserves, I imagined he had some kind of death wish. Come to think of it, one of my old school friends, Sheila who came along to AIDEX with us in 1989 for a holiday more than out of any conviction, ended up joining one of the branches of the ADF.

Now that I am older and have had contact with a more interesting and broader range of people, I know people whose lives have become entangled with warmongering, whether because there are too few peaceful outlets for their specialities, or because they needed a trade and the defence forces were the only creditable establishments who would take them on. But at that time we were purists. Life was black and white. It was quite simple. Us and them.

As Chris Hannaford writes: “it is our job to be the peace movement and set examples to the police and the community. In this way we can influence public opinion.”
(Accessed online 23/8/08)

We were mighty proud of ourselves for making it to Canberra on such short notice. When we arrived back in Adelaide after Nurrungar, dusty red and triumphant, Roman Orzsanski of Friends Of the Earth interviewed a few of us youngsters about our experience on Triple M Radio (Adelaide’s community radio station that has since morphed into Three D Radio). It was Roman who told us about AIDEX 1989, and it was Roman who inspired us to hire a bus and try to fill it with protesters to stop this trade in war.

I worked my tail off trying to convince people to come, but in the end the $2000 deposit I had put down on a coach was squandered, and my trip back to Europe was to become a never-realised dream. The bus was less than half full, and most of those who went were students or concession holders. Oh well, I was pregnant anyway. Life was taking a serious turn for the worse, what with the Hawke government promoting Australia as a venue of choice for war games and weapon exhibitions.

I was ashamed to live in Adelaide then, as I am now – Don Dunstan would surely turn in his grave to think that we have transformed from The Festival State to the Defence State.
Jones, Pestorius and Law of The Australian Nonviolence Network(accessed 22/8/08), write in relation to NVDA protest in Australia from the mid 1980s that: “There was bitter criticism at having to buy the whole non-violent package as well as the concept, particularly by those who were driven by a deep anger directed against the state and all its institutions”.

AIDEX 1989 - THE ACTION!
When I think back on our action at the Canberra Show Grounds in 1989 it is obvious that we were acting from our heartfelt belief in NVDA.
Our small group of activists was not involved in the Australian Nonviolence Network or the Nomadic Action Group. Though some of us had been involved for a while in activism, mostly through C.A.N.E., SANITY and the Anti-Bases Campaign, we were really just driven by our idealism which told us that we could make a difference just by being present and making a peaceful stand against the military industrial complex as we understood it.

We were not interested in attacking anyone. We were not interested in being attacked. The fact that we chose an arrestable action was influenced by our recent contact with the Catholic Worker movement and the Jesus Christians, though we were not representatives of either of these groups. We neither destroyed property, nor abused anyone verbally.

It didn’t take much for us to work out what kind of stunt we would pull at AIDEX. And it was a stunt. Our purpose was not to confront those whose jobs it was, to keep ratbags like us, out of the arms fair. Our job was to (a) draw attention to AIDEX in order to show the world that not every Australian supported this venture and (b) express our opposition and outrage about AIDEX.

The entrance to AIDEX was through the Canberra Show Grounds front gates. We got a ladder, climbed on top of the ticket booth, and pulled the ladder up behind us to prevent anyone using it to remove us from our chosen place of protest. We took with us, snacks, water to drink, fake blood, a megaphone and a banner. Once in place, my husband-to-be proceeded to blare out his Dylan-influenced poem through the megaphone. The rest of us unfurled the banner down from the roof and hurled our blood across it.

I can’t find a record of this protest online, but I know we made the Canberra Times the next morning. We ignored police demands to come down. We ignored police indignation that we would not comply, and give them the ladder. The police eventually found another ladder they could use to carry us off the roof. Fearing that we might fall, we did cooperate in our inevitable arrest. We spent the night in the lockup, and appeared in the Magistrate’s Court the next morning.

The men spent the night in the company of Bernie Maloney, who subsequently became a good friend. We women spent the night in the company of a young mother who had been arrested for outstanding fines and was frantic about the welfare of her little girl.

We were charged next morning with Breach of the Peace, which we all found hysterically ironic, and we were released on the condition that we not protest at AIDEX again. Since our bus was due to depart, this was an easy condition to fulfil, at least until 1991.

AIDEX 1991 - DEBACLE AND ANARCHY
My second child was born in mid-October 1991, and so both of my children are veterans of that protest. In hindsight I was utterly mad to have believed I could effectively protest outside the gates of AIDEX 1991 with a toddler of 18 months and a 6 week old baby, but I desperately wanted to be part of the groundswell of indignation and outrage that the Australian Government could be so short-sighted and stupid, in encouraging this trade in war machinery. I reasoned if I had been part of the first protest, I had every right to be part of the second. And I didn’t want my children to grow up in a world where war was waged in the name of keeping the economy productive!

The same group in Canberra organised the protest this time, but it was a very different picture. Activists from all over Australia swarmed to the site. There seemed to be no central organisation. It was loud, uncomfortable and chaotic. This was not really what we’d signed up for, and was in direct contrast to the protest of 1989.

Most of the protesters were in discomfort and distress of one kind or another, whether from lack of space to rest and recuperate before another shift of blockading the exhibition, or from lack of access to necessary amenities. The heady sense of anarchic excitement warped into fear as meetings were called that people either ignored or disrupted. Decision-making was not a successful part of the process, which proceeded ad hoc. There were quite a few casualties, including Non Violent Direct Action.

We were at least part of an organised group that fed us, and we had a tent. I distinctly remember throwing one of very few wifely tantrums when my husband absconded, leaving me to erect the tent single-handedly and without anywhere safe or comfortable to set the babies down. The whole protest contingent had by that time become so jaded that not one person from our group bothered to assist me in my small distress. My voice was very small amongst the clamour. I think some other women nearby held the babies for me for a few minutes.

FEMINISM AT AIDEX 1991
My experience at AIDEX 1991 gave me the needed impetus to become a feminist. I would probably have said I was a feminist prior to that protest; it would have seemed liked the right thing to do, but I wouldn’t have been able to articulate why. I was deeply resentful at the lack of support my large group of peace protesters gave me, as a young mother. I felt entitled to be there and had travelled there with some crazy notion that others would enable me to participate. This did not eventuate. It wasn’t until years later that I realised some of what the others had been going through at the protest.

I was unprepared for camping with two babies. We weren’t prepared for the prickles that assaulted my son’s tender feet all about the campground. At 18 months, he had wandered barefoot through the world to this point. One golden moment of altruism at AIDEX 1991 was when Kirsty and Matilda in an extraordinary act of compassion on their meagre AUSTUDY funds, found their way into town and bought him a pair of multicoloured sandals, size 5. This made the experience a little more bearable for both of us.

Hellen Cooke of W.I.L.P.F. writes that she persuaded WILPF women to protest in Canberra’s Civic Centre instead of outside the gates of AIDEX, “because there were enough people there” (accessed 23/8/08). She goes on to describe what led her to be involved in a project to collect the stories of people who had been involved in AIDEX 1991.
“After AIDEX 1991, as after AIDEX 1989, people in Canberra seemed to be in a state of shock. Even people who had not been involved in the protest at all. Almost everybody who lived in Canberra knew somebody, or was related to somebody who had been in the protest, it was so widespread and well attended.“

My perspective during the protest itself was that it just seemed like more of the same. Our meetings leading up to going to Canberra had devolved into ugly obstructionist times where certain pig-headed men refused to allow the women any respect and blocked every attempt to seriously plan, learn, listen or seek consensus amongst ourselves. So when we became of the huge amorphous mob in Canberra any vestige of the voice of commitment, justice and integrity escaped from our lungs with a dying gasp. There was no energy and no goodwill left to try for NVDA, particularly when we were surrounded by the howls of unorganised protesters who seemed to be operating under very different agendas.

The truth was, our little peace group was already in shambles. We had been struggling to get it together for quite a while before going to AIDEX. The division between those activists (mostly women) who were strongly committed to NVDA and group processes were continually shouted down by the angry men who seemed to feel they were entitled to run the show because God had bestowed them with penises and deep voices. They effectively destroyed the bonds that had already grown between some of the women of the group, and the shy tendrils of sisterhood that occasionally crept out between the women who remained in the group withdrew in surprised hurt as soon as one of the men noticed them and reached out indiscriminately with his crude secateurs.

AFTERSHOCKS AND REFLECTIONS
Adelaide is a small city. I am kind of disinclined to get involved in so-called peace groups again. Try as I might to avoid the ghosts of my past, I’ve already heard disparaging remarks about people who want to sing at the protest
against APDSE. I’ve heard a member of the Anti-Bases Campaign express his strong view that it was lack of cohesive leadership that was responsible for the violence and injuries at AIDEX 1991. He believes that if there had been a stronger commitment to NVDA, and if protesters had been encouraged to adopt those principles at the protest, there would have been much less violence.

I’m not sure what to think about all that. It’s been an interesting couple of weeks, getting back in touch with the experiences of AIDEX 1989 and 1991. A great deal of shame has resurfaced and needed to be dealt with. My capacity to dredge up memories from those times that I thought I had firmly discarded has surprised me, and I’ve reached some new conclusions.

The only writing I did about my experiences at AIDEX 1989 and 1991 was in relation to how my attitude towards police changed from believing police were the enemy, as they were at these protests, to believing they might be able to assist women as we emerged from situations of domestic abuse and sexual violence.

It’s hard to believe that my children are now aged almost 17 and 18. They are now walking the footsteps of life’s journey that are parallel to those that I was on during my life as a ratbag activist from 1986-1993. As my daughter anticipates participating in the November 2008 protest action against **APDSE, I feel a mix of emotions – pride in her intelligence, liveliness, curiosity and idealism, bitterness about how short were my days in the sun, fear that she may find herself hurt or betrayed through her involvement in this protest, and jealousy that because I am now a staid fulltime worker I will probably be unable to participate in the protests myself, this time around.

I’ve been wondering whether to compare the protest at AIDEX 1991 with a war situation. Working as I do, with survivors of real war, I find the leap between my experience at AIDEX and the experiences they do not talk about, hard to make. But without being insensitive, my thoughts are wandering in that direction. Perhaps AIDEX 1991 is as close to being in a war as I have come during this lifetime?

The chaos and disorganisation that emerged as we protesters lost the veneer of living under the laws of our nation could be viewed as having taught us firsthand the absurdity of believing in human goodness and mutuality. This indeed comes very close to the accounts of wartime panic and institutionalisation that I have watched in films, read about, and heard survivors talk about. Niceness and compassion go out the window and it takes more time than we had to AIDEX to build up a sense of community welfare.

There was almost no altruism, no heroism and no self-sacrifice at AIDEX 1991. There was very little cooperation, and only isolated incidents of working together. I remember those who tried to change the world by meditating on the road outside the blockade, and I remember how they were taunted by their fellow protesters.
My personal experience as a young mother taught me that in this kind of situation it is each man for himself and damn anyone else. It was a sobering experience of lawlessness. A woman with children who had no attentive and benevolent patriarch looking out for her welfare could, but live in hope that her children would survive and she wouldn’t be trampled too badly. I felt vulnerable and unsheltered.

Police brutality at AIDEX 1991 came as a rude shock to peace activists, but there are clear lines of causality between the attitudes of protesters and the actions of the police. It was very scary to come into contact with that.

I suppose it is just as well that I did not find a way to take my babies and be part of the blockades. Instead, I wandered the median strips, admired the tripods and the daring of those who ascended into them, did a little fence weaving, and tried a few times to make eye contact with the feral mums who looked askance at me with my babies in nappies. Their babies went about with bare bottoms, and in the hierarchy of crunch, they won, hands down. They were so cool, with their hippy clothes, dreadlocks and bare feet. I was glad they had come out of the forests into the suburbs again, but we seemed like a separate species. Their experiences of protesting in the forests undoubtedly coloured their approach to protesting against AIDEX. Perhaps their experiences with the foresters and the police who allowed them to get on with their destructive work made them less surprised than some of us others, at the actions of the police.

I think it’s the bus trip home that I recall most vividly. Out coach broke down three times. My fellow protesters were mostly silent in shock; immersed in a state of dispirited disbelief at the inescapable fact that our world was nasty. Being at AIDEX 1991 propelled us out of our white middle class complacency and gave us just a tiny taste of the kinds of things that happen to bystanders and protesters in other parts of the world.

It was cherry season. We stopped to buy cherries from a roadside stall. I sat, longing for home and a soft mattress, while I breastfed my daughter and pipped cherries for my little son, to plug his mouth and keep his innocent chatter from interrupting the thoughts of those around him. They had enough on their minds.



*AIDEX = Australian International Defence Equipment eXhibition, Canberra Show Grounds, 1989 and 1991.
**APDSE = Asia Pacific Defence and Security Exhibition, Adelaide Convention Centre, November 2008.

Screaming is Required

Screaming is Required
(c) Melina Magdalena 2008

Re-reading Alice Walker this week - The Complete Stories - and in particular Advancing Luna - and Ida B. Wells (You Can't Keep A Good Woman Down, 1982), I vacillated between blazing anger and utter despondency. As usual, it took a day or two to recognise my anger. Despondency is still the far easier reaction for a socially conditioned middle class white woman in 2008.

Luna, the central character of this short story, is a white woman who didn't scream when a black man raped her as she worked for the Civil Rights Movement in southern USA of 1965.

What makes me want to scream, and LOUDLY, is not the idea that pale, patient, passive, unattractive, flat-chested Luna martyrs herself in the apparently misplaced notion that in so doing, she might spare the idealistic Civil Rights Workers the possibility that yet another young black man lose his dignity and his life by getting lynched as a rapist (even though in the scenario painted by Walker he might well have deserved such a fate). Yes, Luna's reply to the question
"Why didn't you scream?" is "You know why." And yes, we are told that subsequently, Luna goes on to date and sleep with exclusively black men including the rapist himself, though Walker leaves the circumstances of this night purposefully ambiguous. Luna appears to suffer from the idea that her duty is to count herself out as a human being with rights or feelings or opinions, because she is white. Like many a rape survivor, she suffers from a grandiose idea of her own personal responsibility, and she continues to punish herself for falling prey to the violence of someone she was trying to help. Walker's questions Luna's belief that she did the right thing by not screaming. This issue looms as the divisive catalyst for the destruction of a close friendship between two women - one white, and one black.

What angers me most is not the idea that a black man might use rape as a weapon to vicariously take revenge on white man for the wrongs he has suffered. Walker does not trivialise this idea; nor does she discount it altogether. In fact, she raises the idea that white men may have hired black men to rape white women in order to prevent the peaceful modelling of interracial projects to further the Civil Rights Movement of the times. I am neither shocked, nor offended by the idea that rape might be used by a man of any colour as a weapon of power. This is commonplace.

I am aware that anger as a destructive force invites people to make scapegoats out of others who are perceived to have less right to power than those who are acting out of their anger, no matter what its source. A person who is complacent and smug; comfortable with himself or herself, and who goes about the world with confidence about his or her place in the world, appears to be powerful. Such a person is less often prone to being attacked by someone looking to do something with his or her anger. The projected idea of "less right to power" is instead quite often manifested in a person who seems frail, harmless, vulnerable and weak. A person whose anger is a blazing fury, will target the vulnerable, failing to recognise that this in itself most often constitutes revictimisation. Luna fits the description of victim nicely, thank you very much.

But this also, is beside the point. I do not seek to excuse or understand a rapist.

What angers me most is this idea that for an act of cruelty, violation and annihilation to constitute rape seems to require the person who is a victim of this crime, to scream. Once again the onus is upon her to manifest the crime. If she fails to scream, the idea that she was raped at all is called into question, no matter what the circumstances, and no matter what her reasoning for not screaming.

I acknowledge that making a noise to alert passersby, neighbours and people who may be able to stop an attack is extremely important in some circumstances. Furthermore, a woman who can scream and shout and who defends herself against her attacker is sometimes successful in scaring him away.

While we continue to be silent about rape, on the pretext that we are protecting the victim from being further humiliated or injured, rape continues to be a hidden, private crime. We need to scream! We do! But to question the validity of a rape survivor's experience on the basis that it may not have been rape at all, if she failed to scream and struggle in the moment that she was being violated, is a surefire way to revictimise her. Survival constitutes responding appropriately to the situation. It is not always appropriate to scream, and she should not be held responsible for the rape, if in that moment of surviving, she chooses not to scream.

So I thought I'd make a quick list, off the top of my head, of reasons it might be entirely appropriate that a woman notscream. Perhaps my readers will add to this list.

- When a knife is held to her throat, a woman need not scream.
- When her tongue has been cut out, as was done to the young El Salvadorean woman in Romero, she need not scream.
- When she is only a few months old and a man bought the right to take her virginity on the basis that raping her will take away his HIV, we cannot accuse her of failing to defend herself if she does not scream.
- When the rapist is one of a group of sadistic men, screaming is likely to not only incite worse physical damage, but excite these sadists. In such a situation, a woman need not scream.
- When her sleeping children are being threatened with violence and murder should she make any noise to wake them, a woman who is being raped, need not scream.
- When past experience has taught her that screaming will cause her rapist-husband-uncle-father-grandfather to choke her as well as raping her, she need not scream.
- When she has been drugged senseless and is unaware of what is being done to her, a woman need not scream.
- When the rapists are holding her younger sister, or her husband, or another family member hostage, in order to force her to submit quietly, and they are threatening to kill this person if she should struggle against them, a woman need not scream.
- When a rapist has done his worst, and believing she is already dead, is about to dump her body and flee, and if screaming were to alert him to the fact that she is still alive, a woman need not scream.

A Crunchie Chuppah

A Crunchie Chuppah
(c) Melina Magdalena 2008

"God, our merciful Father, I'm wrapped in a robe of light, clothed in your glory that spreads its wings over my soul. May I be worthy. Amen."
Yentl (1983)

Take a square of washed calico.
Press the four edges neatly.
Send the square to a friend with a request, and a deadline for action.
Wait to see what comes back.
Receive it with delight. Add it to the growing pile of calico squares, no longer plain, but decorated extravagantly, simply, naively, elegantly, with flair - each and every one.

Take a pile of decorated calico squares.
Open up the pressed hems.
Join them to make a large square.
On the ascribed day toss the large square over the framework of a pagoda, with four open sides. Create sacred space for a solemn and joyful ceremony and celebration.
The sky expands over the park. The river extends nearby. The chuppah, made by contributions from many loving hearts and hands, lies between earth and sky, waiting for the moment to begin.

Enter the clearing with your family members to guide and escort you to the sacred space.
Acknowledge the gathering.
Honour the day. Remove your shoes. Enter the chuppah. Marvel at its beauty. Take the hand of your beloved, and begin the ritual.

In the old story (Genesis 18), Sarah and Abraham offer hospitality to strangers who turn out to be God's representatives. Sarah is rewarded when her deepest desire is granted - she later gives birth at an advanced age to baby Isaac, but not until after Hagar, about to give birth to Ishmael, has been cast out of their tent in a fit of jealousy.
In the story of the Angels, the one who grants Sarah's wish also refers to her habit of laughing. As evidenced by her jealous treatment of Hagar, Sarah doesn't think much of her barren self, but has the dignity and presence of mind to conform nonetheless to the traditions of hospitality and welcoming the stranger.

The tent in which Sarah, Abraham and Hagar reside is both ephemeral and sturdy. Though constructed of fragile materials, it amply shelters Sarah and her family wherever they should wander. Any comforts that Sarah and her family find within their tent, are the products of the work that Sarah, Hagar and Abraham do, in providing for themselves.
The presence of God in their lives might feel no less ephemeral and transient. Jews often pray that God's wings might shelter them and keep them safe, in just the same way that a tent can shelter those inside its walls.

After her father's death, Yentl adopts and adapts time-honoured rituals to find comfort and to feel close to God. The heresy therein is of course, that Yentl is female and the rituals she adapts are traditionally barred from her practice.
Yentl takes her father's tallit (prayer shawl). She wraps herself in the tallit and she feels herself to be in the presence of God.

After wrapping the tallit around the body
Psalms 36:8–11 is traditionally recited:
מה יקר חסדך א להים, ובני אדם בצל כנפיך יחסיון. ירוין מדשן ביתך, ונחל עדניך תשקם. כי עמך מקור חיים, באורך נראה אור. משך חסדך לידעיך, וצדקתך לישרי לב.‏
Transliteration: Ma yakar hasd'kha Elohim, uvnei adam b'tzel k'nafekha yehesayun. Yirv'yun mi deshen beitekha, v'nahal adanekha tashkem. Ki im'kha m'kor hayim, b'or'kha nir'e or. M'shokh hasd'kha l'yod'ekha, v'tzidkat'kha l'yish'rei lev.
Translation: "How precious is your kindness, [O] God! People take refuge in the shadow of Your wings. They are sated from the abundance of Your house, and from the stream of Your delights You give them to drink. For with You is the source of life; by Your light shall we see light. Extend Your kindness to those who know You, and Your righteousness to the upright of heart."

What kind of heresy then, is this crunchie proposition? Not only is the couple not heterosexual, but only one of them is Jewish. What right have they to alter the ritual of the chuppah, and twist it to suit their own purpose?
Some might find the idea offensive. Some might label it perverse. Others might be indignant because the chuppah is reserved for Jewish-Jewish couples, and not for mixed marriages. Another group of people protest - what value remains, when you persist in picking apart rituals and blending them together in such a confused and watered-down form?
Then there are our detractors who say things like - why on earth would you want to ape heteronormative practice? No one is exacting this toll upon your relationship. You do not know your future. Why complicate matters by setting yourselves up to fail? Who benefits, from your attempts to commit publically to your partnership? This is a private matter. This is folly. It serves no purpose. Pure self-indulgence.

To such detractors I have a few things to say.
- What significance has a ritual if it has no personal value? Whom does it benefit? Are we so superstitious as to believe that making the right moves and paying lip-service will automatically confer some kind of benefit upon us and our lives?
- Mine is a faith that grows and transforms in the same way that I respond and change according to the experiences that shape me. It makes sense to me then, that my rituals and prayers are not static and rigid. My ritual and prayer response is in keeping with my experiences.
- Yes, we are a same-sex couple, and we come from different faith backgrounds. We seek to bring our lives together by enacting a solemn and joyous ceremony of our own creation. Neither of our faith backgrounds offers us their sacred space in which to do this. It is left to us to create our own sacred space for that purpose.

It is outrageous to consider that as a same-sex, mixed-faith couple we can answer to no authority. Yet we are far from dismayed by this. Our is a covenant we enter into voluntarily and with love and hope in our hearts. It's not that those heterosexual couples who choose to marry do so under duress - but rather our choice in this matter says a lot about who we are as human beings who choose a life of committed partnership.
Like many people who are unable to conform to societal norms, we have both spent years examining and questioning ourselves and decrying our places in the world. We wandered long and wondered bitterly like Sarah why our fates did not bring us the happiness we craved.

Indeed - there is no authority to whom we can look to bless our union. Our actions make very little sense in the usual scheme of things. We know very well that there are those who oppose what we are trying to do. We have searched our hearts and we have not found them wanting. We will do, what we will do, with or without their blessing, because we are people of integrity. We feel sorrow for the small-minded but ultimately it would serve no purpose for us to crush our own spirits in order to preserve their stubborn and privileged understanding of the world.

Our chuppah is a physical symbol of the people who have helped to sustain and nurture us on our separate journeys to this place, where our lives meet and converge. Our chuppah is a place for ceremony and celebration. We honour those who have helped to bring us to this place, because we know that without them, we would be far lesser people and our worlds would be much smaller.

Sarah did well to laugh inside her tent. As we shall laugh inside our chuppah, I belive the angels will laugh with us. Laughter is a life force that unites people and ignites us into positive action. We shall be enfolded by the good wishes of the people of our world, as we shall feel ourselves nestled in a safe place that is close to our understanding of God.

A Second Crunchie Proposition

A Second Crunchie Proposition
© Melina Magdalena (2008)

It’s becoming crunchier to own up to having and valuing some kind of spiritual belief system. When I say crunchier, I don’t just mean fashionable, trendier or more hip. Of course what I’m observing could be a flash in the pan, but I have a feeling that it reflects a deeper shift in understanding and appreciation of what it is to be human, and live in this world.

It’s hard to think in terms of generations, but if I consider the folk I grew up with, there were two main camps – those youth groupers who were openly and joyously religious, and the rest of us, who were not. That’s not a fair dichotomy, because many of us were in fact raised to be believers of one sort or another, but those who belonged to the youth groups were a special breed of youngster. I remember being irritated whenever I came into contact with them – and I received a number of invitations to join various social groups, notably the Mormons and Assemblies of God. Why on earth were they were so happy all the time? What was there to be happy about in this severely depressing scary big world we all inhabited? How could they be so insular and blind to all of the faults and dangers?

I remember being furious at the idea that everything bad in the world had somehow been cancelled out because of the death of a certain somebody 2000 years earlier. Not only did it seem grossly unjust for people to claim that his death set them free forever, but I didn’t understand why his death should seem so much more glorified than his life. I was not about to claim sinless status by letting him bear the brunt of my imperfections.

So I was not a youth grouper, but I was a believer and as I grew up into a ratbag activist my belief systems were knocked around pretty badly. It was not then and is still less fashionable now, to be Jewish of course, because the facile mentality of many left-wing political activists of my Australia says that Jewish means supporting Israel. Even naming our firstborn after one of Israel’s most famous traitors was insufficient to rid me of the taint of being both Jewish and American by heritage.

I denied my beliefs completely for a few years, tucking them away into the recesses of my snail shell along with all that other baggage, until I abandoned all hope of belonging to the activist community and felt safe in my isolation, to bring them out into the open once again.

Those activists I hung out with were for the most part not actively religious. There may have been one or two who expressed fond memories of their childhood church-going, and who persisted in identifying with some brand or denomination or other, and there were certainly those who were into alternative beliefs, but it was hard to see how these manifested in the way they lived their lives. Their values and beliefs were as underground as mine. What we emanated was anger and fear, for the most part. We were simply outraged at the state of the world and dismayed that THEY weren’t letting US fix things. The pressure we put ourselves under, to change the world left no room for considering, developing or practising living in the kind of world we wanted it to be.

We felt we had to take action against social conventions and institutions, and we were unsupported and aimless, rootless railers against injustice, without any place to call our own. We didn’t celebrate or worship. We didn’t talk about God. We barely talked about community, unless we were the co-counselling feminists who insisted on discussing process ad infinitum and trying for consensus decision-making in our meetings. At that point I really didn’t relate to feminists at all.

As we began to start families, some of us actively chose to raise our children differently from the way we had been raised. I was charged more than once, with the sin of giving my children too clear a picture of the ills of the world. Give them time to just be kids, my mother urged. They don’t need to know about all that horrible stuff. Don’t deny them the magic you were given, growing up – that feeling that everything is all right, and that even the mysterious can be acceptable. You don’t have to give them answers to everything. Don’t weigh them down with the cares and burdens of the world.

There was a lot of magic in my childhood. I had Santa Claus, I had the Tooth Fairy, I had angels and spirits and fairies and witches and goblins and mermaids and unicorns. I disbelieved those people who told me I was a fool to think any of this was real. I was the credulous kind of little girls whose mother had to tactfully take aside aged 11 and make sure I knew there wasn’t really a Santa. And of course, I also had God.

My God is not and has never been a personal God. Putting into words my ideas about God, I reveal myself to be almost completely a child of my time. Nature words come most easily to mind – wind, air, sky, leaves, rainbows, water, earth, seeds, and life itself. I have a particular affinity to sky. My sophisticated emotionally intelligent self might say that my God is not a vengeful God but rather my God is Joy.

There are two kinds of situations when I feel close to God. I usually have those moments of joy when I am at one with, or having a (usually solitary) encounter with nature. I stop in my tracks and marvel at the utter beauty, fascination and intricate magic of one small aspect of this world we live in. It’s like opening a window to God’s presence. Secondly, I feel joy when I am experiencing the warmth, closeness and connection of my life interwoven with the lives of those around me. This happens frequently in my classroom, with family members and with those rare kindred spirits I encounter from time to time, as well as with my love. In those moments of joy, I feel God is active within and around me.

I need to point out that in the absence of Joy I feel great Fear much of the time. That Fear points to the absence of my awareness of God in those times. I was heavily influenced by my mother’s and my mother’s mother’s beliefs about love, fear and all other such jampolskyesque miracles; (not that simply believing or thinking about these can ever equate to the conscious choice to practice such beliefs).

To my way of thinking, the generation that lives between my parents and me is less god-focused than the generations that embrace it at either end. Many people of that vintage have made concerted efforts to divest themselves of the useless superstitions of their own parents, and to free their offspring from the burdens of belief. I don’t think this was good for the children or their parents. The current pendulum swing back towards beliefs evidences a shift in thinking about the ramifications of spiritual health and emotional well being.

It will be interesting to see how my children become adults. Their parents both come from backgrounds of belief, but while I have explicitly exposed them to my belief system, and worked towards fostering their own spiritual growth, their father chose not to do this. In the last eighteen months one child has moved from the label atheist to agnostic. The other refuses to enter into discussion about beliefs or religion.

Within this new chapter of my life in partnership, I am simply revelling in being encouraged to open up and explore my spiritual side again. It’s amazing and affirming to be encouraged to let those aspects of my identity come out and play. I feel very excited at the prospect of putting concerted effort into revealing and establishing life-giving connections and enacting these meaningfully, whether through liturgy, prayer and ritual, or through conscious choices in our everyday lives.

The second proposition is of course, the ritual that we are creating as a signpost that we are joining one another as we journey through life. It’s fun, and it’s joyful work. Although we come from different traditions and perspectives, there are plenty of ding ding ding moments where we look at one another in frankly quizzical disbelief as if to say ‘you mean this is important to you, too?’ And then there are the head into brick wall moments of ‘Huh?’ All of these are strands in the rich tapestry of life.

Never boring, is it…

Prophecy 31508

Prophecy 31508
© Melina Magdalena (2008)

Dear Mr Sam-I-Am*,
I demand an answer from you.
What is your problem with my daughter?
What is it about her that frightens and threatens you so much?
I do not know what your reading age is,
But YOU are Professor Snape to my daughter’s Hogwarts**
And if you were her employer
She would have grounds to make a serious complaint against you
For your malicious, discriminatory behaviour
and your ruthless vilification of her
She has done nothing to deserve this
And I demand that this behaviour cease immediately

You are a teacher of long experience
Surely my daughter is not so unusual
Why does she stand out as one 16-year-old girl among so many?
What is your problem with my daughter?

I cast about, seeking answers,
Conjuring up fantastic tales of bewitchment and curses
Which I shall not dignify by repeating them here
Because I want to know from the horse’s proverbial mouth
What is your problem with my daughter?
I want your cruelty against her to cease immediately.
I’ve had enough of hearing
From her classmates and from the parents of her classmates,
That you hate and mistreat her in your classroom
It is not funny to say “Good” when she tells you she is leaving early.
It is not funny to refuse her feedback on writing she is keen to improve.
It is not funny to blame her for ruining your lessons
when all that she did was to read from a variant edition of the classroom text.
If you were any kind of teacher
You would have used that opportunity
To elucidate to your audience
The differences between editions
And why it makes life easier
In the classroom
When everyone is reading from the same page

Not that everyone should read from the same page
Indeed – the texts my daughter chooses
Are a reflection of her intense curiosity, openness and inquisitive mind
She has a thirst for knowledge and a keen intelligence to match
That you are steadily draining from her, drop by drop
Do you seek to turn her into some kind of a mindless zombie?
Is that the kind of student you enjoy?
What kind of teacher are you, Mr Sam-I-Am?
And what makes you think
That I will stand by
And allow you to do this to my daughter?
What is your problem with my daughter?
I want an answer – NOW!
I want your childish, churlish behaviour to turn around.
Grow up, Mr Sam-I-Am.

When I met you at our interview you had only negative things to report
About my straight-A daughter student
You seem to be intent
On destroying not only her confidence
But her chances for the future
Where is the justice in this?
What is it about her that warrants and attracts your utter disdain and derision?

I want your answer.
Your behaviour is unjust, unethical, unprofessional, unnecessary and cruel.
I feel you teetering on the edge of some profound unknown
A chasm you will never master
If you persist in shovelling blame onto those
Whom you are causing to suffer
Have you bothered to register in your own psyche the damage you are inflicting?
I cannot imagine that you are an evil person
But your behaviour borders on evil

I tried to say to myself that my daughter
Cannot get along with everyone she meets
That perhaps this experience
Of enduring one year in your classroom
Will help her to know her own strength of character
Will help her to learn where to seek support when she needs it
Will help her to understand in her heart
That she is OK despite what some other people may think of her
But my daughter
Who is bright, studious, motivated and witty
Despite being a sixteen year old teenager of her time
Would rather sit on a bench outside in the cold
Than endure long minutes of humiliation and misery in your classroom

How DARE YOU destroy her joy in learning?
How DARE YOU limit and deride her reading ability?
How DARE YOU question her intelligence?
How DARE YOU threaten her success with her studies?
How DARE YOU put her down in front of her peers?

That is unacceptable.
I want your answer.
What is your problem with my daughter?
And I will not cease
My demand that you stop this terrible behaviour
Until you do.
Get over yourself, Mr Sam-I-Am.
Stop mistreating my daughter.

I warn you
Do not take my words as a challenge
That is not their intention.
Let me tell you something about my daughter
Her spirit is strong
Her integrity was threatened when she was only 2 days old
Since then, she has taught me to be a fighter
As she has fought on her own behalf
In addition,
Her spirit is beautiful
It does not call to be broken
To do so would be a crime
Of unspeakable and unforgivable significance
I warn you once more, Mr Sam-I-Am,
I will rise to my daughter’s defence
Like a rabid dog
Because she has taught me to be strong
And she does not deserve this treatment from you.
No one should suffer such abuse.
Lest you disregard my bark
Know that my bite is much, much worse.


*Dr Seuss (1960) Green Eggs and Ham (Random House Publishers).
** J.K.Rowling (1997) Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Bloomsbury Publishers).

A Crunchie Proposition (part one)

A Crunchie Proposition (part one)
(c) Melina Magdalena 2008

I’ve never wanted to be like everyone else. I’ve never longed to do the conventional thing. In fact I have embraced the other, as though being other is more natural to me, than being the same…

Yet by embracing the other, and incorporating aspects of other into my identity, I necessarily move from embracing the strange, to embracing the familiar. Whether it is accepting and celebrating my Jewish heritage, my single mother status, my multiracial family, my lesbian identity, I wear these aspects of identity like a technicoloured coat that spreads over my shoulders, covers my back, welcomes me into the warm embrace of belonging, even as such label might be seen to set me apart from the norm.

And so there are the twin aspects of wondering who am I from the inside, and hovering somewhere outside my body, guessing at the judgments others might make about me from the outside.

Like many people, I had a rocky passage from hiding in a closet of denial with my thumb in my mouth while the many doors kept slamming shut, to coming out of said closet and feeling defiant, sticking out no matter what, like that proverbial sore thumb, angry and exposed. From such strident assertions of my rights to be who I am, I have gradually shifted to a more patient and calm awareness of myself in this world which is to some extent of my own making.

Amazingly, where I find myself today is a beautiful place, full of opportunity, sprinkled with plenty of struggles to keep me honest and aware of my good fortune. I am happy to be me today… but for a long time, a large part of being me has meant not conforming. Not at all. Simply doing my own thing.

I was in my late teens in the late 1980s. The young people around me were dead set against following conventions. We didn’t have a gentle flower power way about us, either. We were brash and rude and our opinions were not always reasoned or coherent. We stood perpetually against and never for. We were anti-war, not pro-peace; anti-establishment, not pro-social justice; anti-car, not pro-public transport; anti-military-industrial-complex, not pro-humanity; we were anti-family, anti-marriage, anti-children and anti-future.

I’ve heard people say that in the shadows of the Cold War the people of my generation lived in a denial of their fear so icy, that many were unable to express what it meant to live from day to day wondering when that mushroom cloud would appear on our horizon. I grew up charmed and sheltered and naive. I wasn’t aware of this fear that permeated the lives of many of my peers. But still, I joined them in standing against whatever it was they said should be opposed.

The man I married had decided that getting married and starting a family would be his non-conformist stance. Or perhaps it was his response to being set adrift in a world of uncertainty. It was an aspect of his existence that he felt he could control.

When I learned that I had choices and I chose to end the marriage I rejected the sentiment of happily-ever-after-dom that had insinuated itself into my psyche despite itself, thanks to social conditioning. Now I knew for sure that THAT was not for me. The course of my life had been altered irrevocably, and I was going to do my damndest to make sure that never happened again. Marriage was really not going to be part of my future.

After 13 years I fell in love again. It was fun, but short-lived. I thought – well at least I know what it is to be loved and to love someone in that way. At least I won’t die without the knowledge that I can physically love another woman. It was liberating. I accepted my lesbian identity once and for all at last. I was (and am) the real deal. No longer that frightened little fence sitter.

I’ve been challenged of late, with discussions about the nature of lover relationships. People I know and people I know of are living polyamorous lives, in which they have multiple love-relationships and extended blended kinds of families. Again, it’s not anything I’ve ever wanted.

I’ve been challenged of late, with my own longing to make myself one with another person; to commit myself to our relationship; to live our lives together… The intention to make this commitment is undeniable, but something in me balks at naming our relationship a marriage.

I feel very reluctant to join the throngs of people who are suddenly embracing their right to celebrate their same-sex relationships. I don’t just want to do it because everyone else is! But I suspect my reluctance has more to do with wanting to be different, than with defining my role within my relationship; my partnership, as anything other than spouse to my beloved.

When I heard
ACT Attorney-General Simon Corbell on Radio National recently, defending the Government’s decision to register same-sex relationships but not to allow us to celebrate them as marriages, I felt the stifling walls of grey bureaucracy closing in around me. How typical it is, that the one perk of being a lesbian mother in a relationship will now be denied me (and my partner), at the same time that the Government openly denies us the right and the pleasure to celebrate our partnership as equally as any heterosexual couple.

What Simon Corbell said was so mean-spirited that as I sat in my car driving to work that day, my whole thinking on the business of marriage was turned around. I burned with a white hot flame of outrage to think that while my duly-registered relationship will be open to scrutiny and monitoring, particularly if we have children together, my partner and I will remain forever outside the circle of married couples. He said we have no right to a ceremony because a ceremony creates the relationship – obviously to the detriment of wider Australian society – whereas signing a register reflects a relationship that is already in existence.

The logic is somehow flawed, hopelessly dated – how many offspring preside at their parents’ weddings these days? Is legitimacy magically and retrospectively conferred upon said children because of the solemn vows to which their parents commit after the fact? The blatant hypocrisy of his position really makes me mad.

Dear Simon even had the gall to claim that the Government’s position on denying same-sex couples the right to marriage while opening up the possibility of registering our relationships was a way of protecting the rights of the children that “these people” might have.( If you listen to the audiocast you’ll notice he seems pathologically unable to say “lesbian” or “gay” though I believe he managed to utter “homosexual” at least once during the interview.)

Again my beloved and I are right on the money as per usual. In addition to being officially designated second-class citizens and not even a strictly de facto couple; as well as the discrimination and endless need to pick winnable battles for recognition of ourselves as a couple and of our family, we will be together in poorer circumstances, rather than in the security of anonymity that we could have gotten away with had we met a decade ago under the admittedly ever-tightening reins of Howard’s regime.

Once upon a time I envied the lesbian families that crossed my path from time to time. For one thing, the women had each other, even though they weren’t recognised as families, and even though the mothers were not recognised as a couple who were sharing the responsibilities for raising their children. In fact, one spouse was entitled to be named a Sole Parent with all the financial benefits that entailed, whether or not her partner was working, studying or indeed collecting Sole Parent benefits herself.

As I say, this was the one perk of being a lesbian mother.

Once the same-sex register is made a reality of 21st century Australia’s Fair Go we lesbian mothers can wave goodbye to any benefits whatsoever. Our families, like all the others, will be on the same punitive Centrelink regime. Even to get the normal rate of what was once called Child Endowment, we will be queuing with outstretched hands. So it goes.

Anyway, turning to a more pleasant topic, just how did our crunchie proposition come about? Incredibly, she and I employed the same linguistic conventions that couples immemorial have used and continue to use. It made no difference that we are both women. We were online at the time, though of course we’d spent the summer together in person. One of us said cheekily, “Will you marry me?” to which the other, with equal audacity and mounting enthusiasm replied “Yes! Yes! YES!” And in evoking this concept, it became real for us, whether or not we choose to label it as marriage.

In been developing our plans for the day, we’ve evolved two distinct ways of referring to it. Our homemade title “Promise Making Ceremony and Celebration” has given way to the more generally understood “Commitment Ceremony”. We are deliberate in choosing not to call it our wedding, or our marriage ceremony, because of course, that would be a lie. We are not entirely happy about this.

She and I and we have been having a lot of fun developing our own liturgy and rituals for our day, and despite the underlying wound that will not heal, of the public denial of our relationship, we expect it to be a meaningful, wonderful occasion to mark the official beginning of our living together. Yes, Mr Corbell, our relationship began last year, on the Melbourne Cup weekend, but our marriage, for lack of any better way to term it, will begin on January 17 2009 (Tevet 21, 5769).

Doin' the Crunchie - part two

Doin' the Crunchie - part two
What's Your Poison?
(c) Melina Magdalena (2008

A couple of weeks ago I went walking in Paradise, down by the riverside. Across the dried-up riverbed in some long grass, I saw a mother and a dog, followed by two little girls. The little girls were brandishing large leafy branches over their heads. They marched along as though on parade. It took a few renditions of their chant before I realized what they were saying:

I love God! I hate Devil!

I wonder what Devil means to them? Interesting that like God, for these little girls, “Devil” implies a vast uncountability. Certainly if the whole world were reduced to simplistic terms of black and white; good and evil, a vast evil threatening, beckoning on the horizon is definitely something to hate and to fear.

And I wonder, what’s your poison?

These days we are so obsessed with number crunching. It seems a lot of it is being done to erase accountability, rather than to face one’s behaviours, consider them and take action to change them if our considerations warrant such action.

If you’re interested in statistics, consider the following:

A recent Australian study found that gay-identified young men (aged 18 - 24) were 3.7 times more likely to attempt suicide. Most of these attempts occurred after the person had self-identified as gay, but before having a same-sex experience and before publicly identifying themselves as gay. Wesley Mission (accessed on-line 14/3/08)

People who are bisexual or homosexual are at greater risk of having depression than people who are heterosexual. This is reflected in suicide statistics which have found that bisexual and homosexual people are six times more likely to attempt suicide than people who are heterosexual. This may relate to people who are homosexual and bisexual being more likely to struggle with their sexual identity and/or being discriminated against or bullied because of their sexuality. BeyondBlue (accessed on-line 14/3/08)

I heard anecdotally this week that within this group of non-heterosexual people, those who had religious upbringings are four times more likely to attempt and succeed in committing suicide than the others. (If any readers can confirm a source for this staggering statistic, I'd be keen to publish it properly.)

CRUNCHY PARENTS
I first came across the term crunchy in the domain of parenting. The criteria for being crunchy parents include our choices about nappies (or no nappies), vaccinations, breastfeeding, co-sleeping and schooling. Take a look at the quiz, and see where you fit. According to this quiz I’m probably not “a natural mama you are – you know, crunchy, like a "granola girl." I only scored 84 out of 130+ and that makes me “pretty crispy”.

But it got me thinking about judgments. I got so upset at the way my food choices were labelled traif – my Jewish identity is clearly a difficult, complex and touchy topic! I’m touchy about a whole lot of other subjects, too – driving a car, cleaning products, meat eating, plastic bags, and all those ecological ideas that position me in a place of power, according to my product and lifestyle choices. I suppose it’s no different from political correctness or that carbon footprint, in that it’s a way to track and judge and compare your actions against those of others, according to someone’s grand plan of what is right and wrong.

Now who’s to say any one of us is more correct than the other? Who gets to make those judgment calls? Who says homeschooling is better than pumping one’s children through the factory process of institutional schooling and socialization? Who says I’m wrong to put my children in childcare so that I can spend my waking hours working in some secondary or tertiary or post-tertiary industry for a living? Who says I should not feed meat to my children? Who says I am irresponsible for keeping cats?

Such ontological and unnecessary questions stem from the years I spent under the tutelage of a professor of linguistics whose belief was that if we stopped talking about the environment as though it were separate from us instead of as though we are part of it, the perceived problems would go away or naturally be dealt with as a matter of course and perception. I think it takes a great deal more than talk. Like the professor, I question my ability as an individual, to make an effective impact on our environment through my product and lifestyle choices. But if it makes me feel good to be contributing in some way, however small, then why should I question it?

I cast my mind back to the days before Linguistics, when I followed, blindly and mutely, the tutelage of another man – my husband. He never doubted his responsibility in taking action to save the world and the environment. Yes, he may have ruled our home with an iron fist, and I may have been the household member who worked hardest to do my bit in order to prove myself to him, but the way we lived back then has many admirable qualities. It took me quite a while to break myself of certain habits. Some I choose to retain, and others I have made my own.

My husband objected to childcare in a big way. But that was one battle I managed to win. My kids both had one half-day session of childcare on a fairly regular basis from the age of one. And when I studied, they had more. His argument was miserly – why pay someone else to look after his kid? And he’s carried this attitude throughout our long years of separation, in refusing to pay child support. I don’t like the idea of long daycare. I prefer the ideal of parents caring for their own children, and I am passionate about the recognition of child rearing as a legitimate form of work.

Homeschooling though, is a notion that just doesn’t grab me. I’m a state school girl, and I’ve sent my kids to state schools, too.

CRUNCHY IN THE BATHROOOM
For example, I had to convince myself it was OK to use hygiene products such as shampoo, conditioner, moisturizer, pads, deodorant and the like, even though they are marketed in plastic packaging. I tried to reuse my bottles for a few years, but the inconvenience broke me of that habit. Life got too busy, what with raising two kids, running a household, studying and working all at once. I’m sure many can relate to that.

These days I’m trying to swing back to the reuse of packaging. I’ve recycled religiously my whole adult life, and I don’t know that I can reduce much more than I already am.

CRUNCHY IN THE LAUNDRY
It goes without saying that my kids only wore cloth nappies. And we washed them in our twin tub. And we recycled a great deal of the water. And we used only soap flakes that had to be dissolved in hot water first. I say “we”, but of course it was mostly “me”, doing my eternal bit for the family and the environment, just as when I dug the bed, planted the seed and raised the homegrown spinach crop that was one of our son’s first foods.

This predated the data that compares the use of water in washing nappies with the ecological cost of disposable nappies. It predates the new technologies of truly disposable nappies. When I have my babies this time, I’ll probably still be washing nappies, but I may also use some truly disposables on occasion, and I’ll feel fine about that.

How does one measure the crunch between these two things? It’s tricky!

The first new appliance I ever bought in my life was a front-loader washing machine. It has 4 stars (out of 6) on its energy rating, and I save the water and dump it on my trees and pot plants.

CRUNCHY IN THE KITCHEN
I had the occasional backslide even while I was still in the marriage. There were the times I bought things I shouldn’t have, like a tub of yoghurt. Heaven forbid we have anything packaged in plastic. Our lifestyle was continuously evolving. When the Jesus Christians visited, they were still able to obtain most of their food from the bins outside supermarkets. In those days, the bins were not locked, and people could get access to an incredible array of products that were discarded because they’d passed their use by date. It was an affront to my husband to be served food that they had prepared – NOT because it came out of a bin, but because of how it had been packaged before it went into that bin.

We weren’t allowed to use food that came from tins, either – only glass and paper were kosher, according to my husband. But I learned to use tins after I left him. They are recycled as a matter of course.

Indeed – food between us was always a fraught issue. I grew up on a plethora of culturally diverse foodstuffs. Both my mother and my father are superb cooks, and I am well used to good food. Ours was a table at which everyone could have second helpings if they so wished. And we always had fresh fruit and salad available.

I was vegetarian through both my pregnancies, except for when I could get away with eating meat, such as at my in-laws house, and (before I left home) at my mother’s table. I used to sneakily patronize one of the Chinese takeaway cafes when I was at uni, and scoff down a lunch of greasy Chinese flavoured meat and vegetables whenever I could get away with it. It wasn’t that I minded being vegetarian, especially if it was the “right” thing to do, but my body craved meat.

So in 1992 when Bernie Maloney of the illustrious sombrero stayed with us for the second time and introduced me to the art of roasting beef and lamb, I happily embraced this concept into my repertoire. After all – not many come with his kind of credentials. I wasn’t willing to limit my diet in the way he did (tomatoes, strawberries, red meat, garlic and kiwi fruit), but I remember coming home from a Palm Sunday Rally at Peace Park to a kitchen filled with the aroma of roast garlic lamb he’d left in a slow oven to cook in our absence. I practically devoured the roast single-handedly, standing up. No surprise to learn I was chronically anaemic due to the depletion of my iron stores during pregnancy and breastfeeding and prolonged unsystematic vegetarianism.

But Bernie went on his way to yet another action, yet another protest somewhere else, and a new regime was put into place in my home. Yes, we might eat meat, but it must be the meat of vermin (rabbit) or native meat (kangaroo). These were not part of my cultural heritage and I could not smell them cooking or eat them without retching.

CRUNCHY ROAD USERS
We were staunch users of public transport. There were many occasions when we were offered lifts in someone’s car, and were obliged to turn them down. I used to stand on Main North Road outside Sefton Plaza, brandishing a homemade banner that read “YOUR CAR STINKS!” Oh yes – I did my bit for the environment. And when the bus came, I folded my banner, stuck it into my backpack, got the kids out of their pusher, folded the pusher single-handedly and loaded us into the bus and we were on our way.

I’m hopelessly addicted to my car. Even now I feel a tremulous excitement every time I get behind the wheel. I feel a sense of freedom and exhilaration – I can go anywhere. I learned to drive when I was 25. Now that I’m 38, I’m wondering how to reduce my car use. I’m still working on that.

CRUNCHY CONSUMPTION
So what’s the story these days, with all the organic cotton garments that are available in chain stores all of a sudden? I’ve not been in the habit of purchasing new clothes at all – and I figure there’s no point in limiting my op shop choices to garments that were not manufactured in China. The garment manufacture maze is very hard to navigate. This year’s Adelaide IWD focused on fairness for Outworkers – garment makers who work from home under very poor industrial conditions. I’ve not been in a financial position to make many choices about what I wear. Maybe this too will change as I enter a new phase of my life.

Well friends, expanding on the original Granola Girl I’m aiming to devise my very own crunchiness quiz. The scoring system is completely arbitrary, but it might be fun. I’ll try to have it up by next week, if other more pressing matters don’t crowd my writing time.

Oh – one last muesli-related story: 1976, we’re visiting my mother’s family in Germany. A cousin in West Germany has two kids around the same age as my brother and me. We stay with them. They have an incredible basement with tricycles and things we can ride around on. Every morning they have muesli for breakfast. You get to make your own! They have a cupboard with a myriad of little wooden drawers. Each drawer contains a different ingredient. You pull out the drawer and use a small scoop to make your own muesli. Never the same twice. What a gift!

What is the relation between Muesli and Granola? One is a brand-name variety of a kind of breakfast cereal, the other is a traditional food from middle Europe. But in Australia we don’t have granola bars – we have muesli bars. Hence the connection.


ps Just for fun, here's a photo from 1985 of my original crunchie Grandma Barnes, eating a gelati in Adelaide. During their working lives, Grandma and Grandpa ran a healthfood store and tree surgery, amongst other vocations as well as raising their brood. When I knew them they were the most amazing gardeners, and Grandpa caught a lot of their protein as well, in the form of fish and venison.

Doin’ the Crunchie – part one

Doin’ the Crunchie – part one
To Traif or not to Traif
© Melina Magdalena 2008


Remember Bert and Ernie – how unbearably earnest, serious and dorky was dear Bert, in contrast to joyous, quirky Ernie? Bert did have his moments of course; who could forget his paper clip
collection? This week I’ve been feeling a little like Bert and like Doin' the Pigeon.

The Jewish Lesbian Group Anthology has finally been published on-line. There’s a poem of mine in there that I hadn’t read since submitting it to the group several years ago. The anthology contains other well written, moving writings from Jewish Australian lesbians.

Making Spaces is about my relationship with my grandmother. I never did show it to her, always intending to share it with her once it had been published. I hope I never make that kind of mistake again.

Reading through some of the other contributions, I laughed and I cried, and was surprised at one point to be shaken by a surge of unexpected rage. This Summer when my sister and my niece were visiting Adelaide, they came over to my house one stinking hot afternoon, with the rest of the family. My niece (under two years of age at the time) was hungry. I bustled about my kitchen, preparing her a kindy lunch. For the uninitiated, that’s a plate of healthy finger food made attractive to the preschooler; less messy than some other meals I could mention. I had some sultanas, cheese, cracker biscuits … “I’ve got some fritz in the fridge”, I said to my sister. Do you think she’d like some of that?

My sister, a vegetarian for many years, had reached a difficult decision to allow her child to eat meat at least in the meantime. My brother-in-law is not a vegetarian. But she whipped her head around at me and snapped “I might allow my child to eat meat, but I’m not letting her eat traif!”

This was not the anger of someone who was feeling insecure. Unlike other aspects of mothering that had been internalised battlegrounds for my sweet sister, this time she clearly felt she was on higher moral ground.

I was swamped by a flood of shame. How could I have suggested that my precious niece put anything filthy and forbidden into her sweet little pure mouth? What kind of Jew am I? What kind of aunt am I? What kind of sister am I?

I’ve taken a little trip down memory lane this week. You know how it is – once you’re sensitised, everything feeds into the sensitivity. In my new NAP Teacher’s training course this week another new teacher made a remark about the assimilation of German Jews and how their assimilation into the German culture was the trigger for the Holocaust. Charming. Is this really the kind of person we want in 2008, around our newly arrived Australians? I don’t think so.

Then there was the blog post I came across, which starts with the paragraph
"I am so sick and tired of the terms slut and whore. I find anyone who uses these terms without thinking is being selfish. These words have caused a lot of harm. The terms slut and whore and the fact that they are still around today is a product of not only the fluency of language, where the word slut has evolved from it's original meaning of “dirty” to mean a demeaning word for sexually active women, and the word “whore's” etymology can be derived from the Danish word “hore” and the Swedish word “hora”, both meaning “one who desires.” (Stephanie Insiengmay, Leogurl’s Blog)

This post works its way through etymological, cultural and religious origins of some the differences between men and women and cultural expectations of our respective sexual behaviours. It’s an interesting piece of writing that resonates with me on many levels, as a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, a rape survivor. Insiengmay eventually reaches her core question – does the Bible condone rape? Well might she pose that question.

I return to the idea of my Jewishness and deplore my lack of authority over this aspect of my identity. What do I know? What kind of Jew am I?

The little I know of the Bible, Torah and other Judeo-Christian texts highlights to me the lack of woman’s voice. For the most part, these texts were produced and promulgated by men who saw no need to include the experiences and voices of women. They are male-dominated, patriarchal documents to which for the most part, I cannot relate. I’m not interested in being the kind of Jew who adheres to something just because others do, when it is meaningless to me.

And when I look at the Bible, I don’t see all of myself reflected in its stories.

As a human being, yes – some stories touch me to the core. I think particularly of Jonah, and how I chose my Jewish name to be Jonina Shirah – dovesong, recalling how a very reluctant Jonah allowed himself to be dragged into the spotlight at last, to deliver his important message. I think of Penelope Farmer’s Eve; she the innocent, who had such a brutal rebirth into a terrifying world of responsibility for others when she had not yet found herself. Lilith of course has been erased from these texts. I think too of Mary of Magdalene, for whom I am also named. And I recall the radio program I heard last week, in which it was postulated that Christianity and Judaism may yet revise their common links on the basis that Jesus would not have separated himself from his people, in order to found a separate, anti-Jew religion. Of course, it was a Christian who made this claim. As a Jew, I don’t have any problems with Jesus the teacher, healer, poet, human, friend.

As a woman, I also think of Esther/Hadassah, she who had it good. She risked it all, to call attention to the need of her people. Like Esther, I am privileged, and am frequently reminded of my responsibility and my opportunities to work towards a fairer and happier world for other women. I think of Na'amah, also written out of the official texts. She was Noah’s wife, who saved the seeds of a drowned world that the world emerging might flourish and feed the survivors. I think of Dinah, who was raped and discarded as damaged goods, unworthy of carrying on our traditions and our line. I think of Lot’s daughters, valued only for the currency of safety the violation of their bodies might award their cowering father.

As a Jew, I love the traditions and stories of Pesach. I am particularly drawn to Zipporah, Moses’ wife. She embraced the strange, the uninitiated, the haunted, and at least according to the animated version of the story, Prince of Egypt, she accompanied him back to the scene of the crime, to help in the liberation of her people. Again, I know little of how she is represented in the texts of my people. I know that Miriam cops a raw deal, and I love the feminist revisitations and interpretations of her power. I wonder about other Jewish heroes and humans, male and female. I know so little of them.

As a lesbian, there is none of my self in these texts. And this is painful. No matter its origins, we are fixated on sex and sexuality in this world, and my identity is skewed in turn. I probably give too much weight to my unbelongingness, but such are the circumstances that surround me and reflect my inner concerns.

Like so many of the men of the Bible, so many of the men who people my world are unpleasant, rough, inconsiderate, mean, cruel, stupid human beings. Not only the men who question the role of provocative t-shirts in inviting women to be raped; not only the man who blames the German Jews for their own annihilation; not only the man at my table today who argued over the use of some words, instead of working towards finding some shared, legitimate meaning to enable us to get on with the task at hand. These are incidental, momentary glimpses into the things that occur in my world on an everyday basis.

When I look around me and see men who are almost all embittered, angry, apparently dispossessed power trippers, who reflect the ills of the communities and the twisted aspects of their social upbringing, it’s no wonder I find so little value in reading the texts of my heritage. They were probably created by men who felt the same way - insecure angry little nothingnesses who falsely enlarge their grandeur because they could not bear to see themselves as such insignificant motes, in this gorgeous, mysterious, vast universe.

So back to the question – how do I justify having fritz in my fridge, and seeing no wrong in serving it to my little niece? If you are what you eat, and I eat fritz, the connection is clear. It is not to Traif or not to Traif, but it is:
What kind of person am I?
Am I Traif?

Apparently, I've been routinely misspelling the word, anyway! Now I know why Miss Holier Than Thou made a point of showing me the correct spelling in a recent text message. Whew! I need to process this anger, and how!

When I started to think about the word, it was easy to reel off a list of adjectival synonyms (though Traifitself is a noun – filthy, dirty, disgusting, damaged, horrible, diseased. And so it goes.

Of course traif is actually the opposite of Kosher, or halachic, or in Muslim-speak, halal. It is the preoccupation of millions who believe that how they prepare their food and keep their homes is more important to G-d, than putting food in the mouths of the hungry. It is the opposite of clean, pure, wholesome and (in current terminology) crunchy.

I looked it up on Google and was taken to a site that claims the word Traif is in some parlance, used to refer to lesbian. Clearly, I am on the right track here. Shall I continue to self-flagellate, never mind that that practice belongs to the adherents of another tradition altogether, to which I do not lay claim? Am I damaged goods, no use to the pure, unmarried, upstanding man who seeks his wife to complete his life, cook and clean and bear his children? So be it.

Why would I wish to forsake being who I am, in order to adhere to and live up to the demands and expectations of others, who would deny me my freedom to live and express myself according to my own moral compass of right, wrong and all the shades of grey in between? Can these others prove to me my failings and my failure to be human? Where is the evidence that the colours that surround us are not more important than the black and white? Why must worth be calculated always upon the brutal dichotomy of an absence and presence that can be seen and measured with the eye and the hand? What about the wildness of spirit, the illumination of heart, and the brilliance of gut?

So if, because, maybe I in my feminist lesbian jewish essence am Traif, is it possible for me to reclaim this, in the same way others have reclaimed queer, wicked, filthy and bad? Can I ameliorate Traif and rekey it to emote and connote only its positive qualities?

Because for me, I think now that Traif has mostly positive qualities. I know who I am. I know where I’ve come from. I know who I am being, and who I am working to become.