Mersigns

Returning to my woggy roots

2011-10-02T18:50:00.000-07:00

Returning to My Woggy Roots
(c) Melina Magdalena (2011)

In the meantime, we had to replace our trusty gardening fork and spade. Both of the old ones were about 20 years old and their handles broke off in the same week. It was such a pleasure to be given a $100 budget and go replace them. I took the baby and he rode on the trolley through the hardware store.

It's more than a year since I wrote the post Gardening Outside the Fence. The guerilla garden in the vacant lot over the road didn't work out. The blocks are still up for sale, and people walk across it regularly. Someone dumped a truckload of what I hope was clean fill on the block a couple of months ago. The kids have had a great time compacting it, and climbing up and over.

Outside our fence this year is an enormous crop of broadbeans. There's some dill and one silverbeet plant struggling in amongst them. I've widened the strip to include the area outside our front yard too, and the soil there hasn't had a chance to be built up and enriched. So many poppies volunteered themselves in the front flower patch, that I spread some in amongst the broadbeans, too. We've enjoyed eating them, but I'm not sure many of our neighbours have! I've put in some more sunflower seeds in between the ageing bean plants, hoping that the new plants will be sheltered as they sprout.

Around the corner from us is a mulberry tree growing happily on someone's nature strip. It is a marvel - still young, but green and prolific with fruit. I'm not sure the people whose house it is growing outside of, want to share! We planted a mulberry in our backyard early last winter. It lost all its leaves and looked like a stick in the ground. Then suddenly it sprouted large leaves again, AND fruit.

It's amazing to look back at what was here when we moved in, and the changes that we've made in the last three years. These are changes inside the fence - not just outside. The backyard vege patch has been remade completely, and the seed I sowed there a few weeks ago has sprouted enough for me to be able to differentiate the plants (mostly). In fact this morning the baby and I thinned the radishes. My Grandma had a theory about nutrition that said - if a child puts strange things in its mouth, it is probably lacking nutrients, and so you should feed it radishes. Well, I tested that theory this morning. It's too early to tell!

I've had my eye on a patch of the nature strip outside our house for a while now. The nature strip, also known as the 'verge', is the land between the footpath and the kerb outside a residence. We had requested some time ago, that the local Council cease spraying our nature strip, after the herbicide blew into our yard and killed some of our flowers. So now it is our responsibility to keep our nature strip under control - sans herbicide.

The weeds are quite diverse, but there is a great deal of grass in the nature strip, as well as clover and other plants with prickles. We had a terrible time last spring with Caltrop, and I'm concerned that my activities outside our fence do not lead to another outbreak of this horrible plant.

I may be addicted to digging. For advocates of the no-dig garden, this may seem a little odd, but I find it immensely satisfying to work at soil and transform it into something that I can use. The soil around here is great!

A few weeks ago I used our new spade to break up the patch of nature strip into small sections. I didn't get back to it until today, but that is a good thing, as we got so much rain last week that the soil has softened. I managed to dig up about one-fifth of the area this morning, and during that time I had some interactions with 3 neighbours. I didn't reveal my plan, however. When asked - why are you doing that? I replied - so that I can grow something in here other than weeds!

Actually, I plan to put a fig tree in the centre of this patch. I hope the council will allow it to grow. If I prune it cleverly, I think it won't be obstructive to traffic, and we just don't have room for a fig in our yard! The fig tree will of course, be very small for quite a while. So I've planted out some seed trays of zinnias and portulaca. And I've reserved some sunflower seeds as well.

It's the first day of my two week school holiday break, and I'm loving it.

the gynaecologist

2011-06-18T02:50:00.000-07:00

The gynaecologist
© Melina Magdalena (2011)

I was of no use to her.
She could not make me pregnant.

Your pituitary gland
She explained
Is working hard to stimulate the ovaries
But every woman is born
With a finite number of eggs

So that’s it
I said
Stunned
And
She shrugged

I remember
She used the word
Unfortunately

She’d fluffed around for 15 minutes
Before showing us in
We’d sat waiting
The baby was fussy

By the time we got settled
In her consulting room
Faces turned
Expectantly
Awaiting her plan of action
For making our miracle
He was on the boob

What had she been thinking?
I can’t possibly charge those women $120
Just for giving the results of a blood test
But she did

I tried to make small talk
What can I expect from
Menopause?
She wasn’t interested
In giving me advice
On that

I changed the subject.
Instead
We discussed the décor.

Ashamed
Of my condition
I couldn’t face the receptionist
So I let my partner pay

I took the baby
out to the car

Averted my gaze
All the way home
Drummed on the steering wheel

Impatient
For my pillow
That would capture
My lost dream
sorrow

My Cuckoo's Nest

2011-06-16T04:12:00.000-07:00

My Cuckoo’s Nest

© Melina Magdalena (2011)

It isn’t fate, so I am told. This is a world of my own making. I created my circumstances, made my choices and have therefore no reason to rail against them. Instead, let me accept the situation in good faith, realising how much better off I am, than others in this world who, I must assume, equally chose their fates and have therefore no logical reason to deplore their circumstances which are, I admit, so much worse than mine.

The cuckoo famously lays its eggs in the nests of other birds, which raise the young, while the biological young of the cuckoo-raisers are evicted from their parent’s nests to splatter splatter on the ground and die.

This is not quite the scenario I am painting. My own young, raised successfully to adulthood, have just about flown the coop already.

The cuckoo is also a symbol of someone who is foolish, perplexing and confounding. How can one understand a person who refuses to raise his or her own young, and deposits them in some other nest for some other person to love and care for? Is it craziness? Is it callousness? Is it rampant individualisation, free market policy, and economic rationalism at its best?

In order to be happier, we are told to stop seeking after our own fortunes, and allow ourselves to be like those birds, who do not wonder, when night falls, where they will find their sustenance on the morrow. Perhaps the problem was that the plan was too well thought-out, leaving too few variables to chance? That other truism – we get what we need, is always followed implicitly by – we don’t get what we want. I didn’t want my role in this family to just be, just be the breadwinner.

The English word ‘cuckold’ is derived from both of these words – the bird, and the deluded person. The cuckold is conventionally the generous though gullible man who raises the children borne by his spouse; children fathered by someone else. (I discovered the more contemporary usage of the word, which seeks to reclaim the power of the man and reinstate his dominant position over “his” woman, but this piece is neither about sexual objectification, nor gratification.)
So to the Cuckoo’s Nest of My Own Making – I’m unsure what part I play in this. Am I the fly-by-night twofold shouting bird, butting in and putting my eggs where someone else can incubate them? No. Am I the bird who made the nest the cuckoo put its egg into? No eggs! No eggs! Am I the bird who raises the chicks that were laid in the nest I made? Apparently not. Who’s the cuckoo then?

This has been brought on, of course, by the onset of menopause, tragically early in my case, following after the early menopause of my mother and my grandmother. Mine started just as I started finally trying to fall pregnant with the child I had hoped to raise with my partner. I’m the infertile cuckoo – and menopausal women are known to be a bit crazy and out-of-control, at least some of the time.

Best laid plans make best farm eggs and all that – but my ovaries have ceased to make follicles. My fertility has run its course. So my/our plans were laid to an untimely rest.

As well as the grief associated with the shock of diagnosis, the death of my happy dream and my rage at finding that I did wait too long, too long, but for all the right reasons, it’s thrown up in my face questions about family, roles and lifestyle choices that zap me out of my comfort zone and into emotional chaos.

As my Beloved says – most breeding couples need never question the assumptions around roles, allegiance and ownership that pervade every family structure. Our lives as a pair of breeding lesbians are far more complex than many might imagine.

Once it was as simple as – each has a womb, each bears a child, we raise them as siblings, of whom we each are the mothers.

Once it was as simple as – the biological mother will breastfeed, the other will support her through the birthing process and beyond. And then we will swap roles and give the other mother her turn.

Once it was as simple as – the birthing mother stays home with the baby and the other is the breadwinner.

This all seems a mockery, a mockery now.

My long-held happy dream proved itself flexible enough to adapt to a changing set of parameters that moved from defiantly single motherhood, to partnered; from stable public housing, to private mortgage stress; from welfare dependence, to work. My happy dream shattered into pieces that can’t be reassembled. I cannot recognise my place within this cuckoo’s nest of my own making.

Once upon a time my happy dream made economic sense, based on the resources I had at hand – my own resources to generate income, and the resources I knew I could count on, as a citizen of this state. By gaining a partner I lost access to welfare. The road is much tougher on us all, these days.

Once upon a time my happy dream afforded me a lifestyle though poor in monetary terms that would be rich in opportunity. My plans were dignified by my creative inspirations. I would be time rich, if resource poor, which suited my simple living intentions. However, I find myself robbed of time, robbed of time, and struggling to generate any creative ideas in the midst of full-time teaching.

Once upon a time my happy dream was joyously intertwined with my/our involvement and enactment of my cultural heritage and its traditions; I so wanted to bring my children into a home replete with Jewish symbolism and ideas, so they could grow into a Jewish identity that was celebratory, life-affirming, and not divisive. Due to the different faiths that we follow, the identity of our children is cut cleanly in half; two-faced and discursive.

As these elements shuffled off, my happy dream was cut down to the exact size and the exact shape of the cuckoo’s nest I now inhabit. I’m finding it harder and harder to reconcile, let alone to be happy with this situation. I keep saying – I need to find another narrative; this one is no longer viable. It’s hard to keep breathing in an environment that contains only imaginary oxygen. My faith in world creation wears thin, wears thin indeed.

My children – thou wert still a hope, a love; Still longed for never seen – it’s not true! The one that we created together is no less mine, than hers. This won’t change just because I am unable to bear a sibling.

My understanding of feminism, and my desire to live out some of those feminist ideals to which I relate, wars with those other desires and assumptions that help to make sense of who I am, as a person. I lay claim to all those warts, scars, wrinkles and scabs that lie both on the surface of my skin and deep within.

But then again – who am I, am I? The cuckoo, cuckoo, or the cuckolded? Neither of the two? Is it necessary or helpful to weave my new narrative within this dichotomy? Perhaps not. It may be just my rage, my rage and my endless disappointment that renders this vision with such bitterness.

I so wanted to be the birthing mother, the one whose belly swelled, who felt the baby swimming safely inside her, who brought that new life forth and nursed it. I so wanted to be the homemaker, the home mother, the primary carer, the breastfeeder.

I so wanted my turn to come soon, come soon, and now it will never come at all. I don’t know who I want to be now. I don’t know who I can be now. I don’t want just to settle for the crumbs that are dropped. It’s not fair not fair not fair not fair.

Her children are my children are our children. But what kind of mother will I get to be? There are no glib responses. I’ve hit the rock bottom of this nest. And that’s so hard, so hard.

(*with thanks to William Wordsworth, 1804 To the cuckoo)

Mitzrayim in Kilburn

2011-04-15T16:18:00.000-07:00

Mitzrayim in Kilburn

Ugliness is what I found outside our door this afternoon.

There is a large vacant block opposite our house. When we moved in, there were 4 houses on this block. The houses are long gone, it has now been subdivided again, and the blocks are up for sale. In the meantime, water mains have been dug into each block, which meant digging up the street and the footpath. The parts of the cement footpath were cemented over, and the soft, wet cement had been carved into. Not just the usual stuff - names or so-and-so loves so-and-s0, or even so-and-so is a homo, which would have been bad enough.

Dayenu

No, I took the baby across to see. He was excited by the red and white striped safety banners that had been erected around each soft part of the footpath. The wind was flapping them and I was hard-pressed keeping him off the street, chasing after the ends. But something caught my eye. I picked him up and went to see.

My heart sank deeper than the pollution that lines the shallows of our shared waters of life.

So we went back home and got the chalks and I went to work. People were driving home and gawking at my big behind as I was on my hands and knees, passionately chalking out alternative messages. Well, I felt self conscious.

But undeterred.

My beloved took matters into her hands, picked up the phone and called the police. Such viliifying racist vandalism is surely against the law. The police referred her to the Local Council. It was after hours.

She too, was undeterred.

"Well then, I understand what you're saying," I heard her say calmly, "so in that case, may I please speak with your supervisor? You know what Kilburn is like. There are African kids walking up and down that street all the time. There are so many Afghani families living around here. This is not acceptable. It needs to be erased tonight. It can't wait until next week."

An hour later we were eating dinner. We heard a vehicle pull up. Clutching my bowl of risotto, I ran out the front gate and found a Council man with a tool, scratching out the hateful messages. My beloved brought up the rear, carrying the baby.

"Thank you so much for coming out to do this tonight," we told him. "Have a great weekend."

"It's just kids," he said.

"It's not just kids," I retorted. "It's nastiness."

"Yes," he agreed. "It is nasty."

And it is. Kids learn their attitudes from their elders. And it's no excuse. This is our neighbourhood, too. We are the strangers in the midst of a cultural sand storm. We are the weirdos in the village. It's our child who will grow up to inherit the world that we have helped to produce and sustain. It wasn't just for the sake of the African families, the Iraqi families, the Burmese and Afghani and Indian families that I did what I did. It was also for my sake and for my own family.

homophobia amongst AFL supporters

2011-04-09T17:35:00.000-07:00

Homophobia amongst AFL supporters (c) Melina Magdalena (2011) Dear Mr Clough and others, I turned on Radio National yesterday in the middle of your documentary "Cheers", about AFL supporters. I listened for a few minutes, but felt disgusted and upset and had to turn it off shortly thereafter. Therefore my comments must be taken in light of the fact that I did not have the whole context of the program. What I heard that upset me, was comments from a supporter about abusing the cheer squads of other teams, and about abusing the players of his own supported team. Not only did he comment about his own behaviour (implying that this behaviour is shared by all AFL fans no matter which team they support), but there was also some recorded sound from his actual "cheering" and "jeering" during a football match. I heard him say something to the effect of "I like you too, mate - you can fuck my sister", which was bad enough, but prior to this, he talked proudly and boldly about calling players paedophiles and poofters in the same breath, as though all "poofters" are automatically "paedophiles" as well. As a queer person myself, I am sensitive to homophobic comments. This upset me in two ways. As long as I live in a culture where it is acceptable to use homophobic comments to incite footballers to be stronger, more aggressive and hence more "masculine", the level of homophobia is intolerable and unacceptable. Secondly, the fact that this homophobia is expressed so "naturally" does not mean that it should not be countered openly. The fact that his homophobia is simply part of a wider cultural context and was not concentrated within a narrow window of countering homophobia specifically does not make it any less hurtful and dangerous. I don't know whether the homophobia was commented upon, because I can't find a written transcript of the documentary, and I refuse to listen to the whole thing. If it wasn't, I would ask you to please consider making a comment about it in your next program, and explaining that it is not the ABC's position to support such hatred, nor to condone or incite hatred against minority groups in Australia. Many thanks for your attention, With kind regards, Melina Magdalena

The Trouble with South Kids

2011-03-25T15:29:00.000-07:00

The Trouble with South Kids
(c) Melina Magdalena (2011)

Last night was a bad one. Our 10 month old son was restless, fretful, and would not settle, even in our bed. The three of us got very little sleep. In one of those fleeting moments of falling asleep only to be dragged back into wakefulness, I had a nightmare. I was buried up to my neck, about to be stoned. My son, now about 11, was being encouraged to gather the sharpest stones that he could find. He weighed the stones in his hand with an air of bravado, but terror and doubt were scrawled across his face. My crime? I had formed an alliance with another woman. We had raised our children as a woman-headed family.

Homosexuals in other countries suffer such treatment regularly. They are beaten, stoned, tortured, raped, hanged, poisoned, lynched, burned, strangled, stabbed and killed in the multitude of ways that humans have perfected over the millennia. People do this to homosexuals without their victims having harmed another person. They do not need to justify themselves. Simply to be different is enough to be denied life. Religion provides some solace to the killers, by naming homosexuals as unnatural, demonic and evil.

The trouble with South Kids is not that the editorial team is homophobic. It wouldn’t surprise me if the editors had queer friends and even family members. This is not unusual in contemporary Australian society. Certainly it would explain the Ms Smart’s catty responses to letters of complaint about her compliance and implicit support for the homophobic religious views expressed by some readers, and her denial that the publication could do anything better than it already does.

Naturally, we don’t expect a person in a professional capacity to offer her personal opinions on personal matters, but Ms Smart’s decision to publish the hate-filled and homophobic opinions of others in her magazine needs to be explained somehow. SouthKids does not profess to be only for heterosexuals. Wouldn’t that be as illegal as stating it were only for married couples, for conservative Christians, for white families, or for Australians who speak English?

I would venture to guess that the reason Ms Smart did not come out and claim to have queer friends, is her fear that the published homophobic religious block that spouted such hatred of homosexuals would come out in force against her, for associating with us in any way. On the other hand, it’s possible that her personal views correspond with hatred of homosexuals, but she may be reluctant to make that stand for fear of alienating the more reasonable sector of the readership. It’s a fine line of deceit in the name of making an honest living, but who can blame her for that?

SouthKids needs to be viewed in light of its purpose and goals. It is a for-profit publication, aimed squarely at aspirational white, Australian middle-class families who are living in Adelaide. This is nothing to be ashamed of. Ms Smart seems to have landed a prize niche career, which I imagine she performs largely at the same time as home-making for her darlings. She is to be congratulated and envied for finding a job that utilises her skills and enables her to have the best of both worlds – public and private.

The publication makes no secret of its purpose. Why should it? It is chock-full of images of white children. Most of the photographs that depict adults, privilege the heterosexual couple with two (or daringly, extravagantly – three) white children. The magazine is funded through advertising by businesses that cater to white, middle-to-upper-class English-speaking consumers. If you leaf through a couple of issues, you will probably discover in amongst the multitude of clean, well-groomed, bright, white children, one – or at the most – two brown kids. One is probably Indian, and the other indeterminate. There may be another Asian child. There may be a child with southern European olive-skin and dark eyes. These children will probably not feature in the illustrations of the articles. They most often feature in amongst a group of children in an advertisement.

South Kids contains no philanthropic advertising except for its partner, Community Lifestyles Incorporated. There is no promotion of sponsoring poor children overseas. The publication is cozy and insular. It is a feel-good publication which aims to make mainstream South Australian parents feel that they have every right to expect the best for and from, their children. Help is available for the little problems that crop up along the way. This is the luckiest of countries.

The trouble with South Kids is its brash banner – the best magazine for SA parents. This is inaccurate and misleading. Many homosexuals in South Australia are also parents. Is this publication not also for us?

The articles are well-written, the publication and website are glossy and attractive, and it is well-marketed. However, South Kids makes no attempt whatsoever to be inclusive of any kind of the diversity we have come to accept as Australian, and that we expect to view in Australian media.

It is these aspects of the publication that rub salt in the wounds of its detractors, because we want to belong! We are led to believe that this is a publication that represents, supports and serves us, our families and our children. Our misplaced aspirations jar painfully against the misleading claims made by South Kids that it is for us.

The token articles which appear in some issues about token situations and token families, whether they be queer or refugee, only serve to highlight the differences between these families and normal South Australian families. There is no attempt to sugarcoat the situations of these families, and the message is crystal clear – the members of these families are grateful to be included, pleased to be Australian, and trying their best, despite the impossibility of the task, (given their obvious genetic, linguistic and socio-economic failings), to fit in to normal society. Tolerate us, despite our differences, is the premise of these articles. Please be nice to us!

No one likes to be marginalised. It’s ironic that the majority of lesbian breeders grew up in white Australian middle-class families. We inherited the sense of entitlement that goes along with this territory. We understand very well that to be marginalised means to miss out. We’ve been witness to this far too many times, and it is intolerable – unkind. Those who are marginalised get a whole lot less cake than the rest. How is that fair? We get the crumbs, and once in a while, we might get some kind of hand out to keep us salivating for more.

The tantalising promise that we will belong someday, that we aren’t evil degraded terrible witches, and that we might even get legal equality sometime, is hard to release, because in its place, hard reality tells us we are but a few thousand kilometres away from being buried up to our necks and stoned to death for our apparent sins.

to the reclaim the night collective

2011-02-11T14:14:00.000-08:00

to the reclaim the night collective
February 12 2011

Comment received anonymously on my previous post:

The Reclaim the Night poster is not yours - it is the property of the collective. You agreed to design it but that doesn't give you ownership or indeed the right to sell it on. For someone who claims that women's rights is one of her interests, this completely undermines the feminist collective. I would appreciate it if you stop selling the posters for your own personal profit and direct the funds to the reclaim the night collective

What can I say?
1. I designed the poster out of my own experience. I painted the original banner with my own materials. This was prior to my offering it to the collective of that year for use that year to promote the event that year.

2. I paid to have the banner professionally photographed.

3. I paid to have the posters printed.

Who are you? And who is the reclaim the night collective? And how long have you been participating on this collective? And is this collective active?

From my recollection the Adelaide Reclaim the Night fell by the wayside during the first half of this decade in favour of commemorating the 16 Days Against Violence Against Women. There was an attempt by bureaucratic paid public servants to maintain the apparatus but due in part to the reluctance to undertake work that was unpaid, and in part to the difficulty in organising alongside unpaid grassroots women it gradually withered away. If there has been a resurgence of interest in Reclaim the Night I welcome it.

It's not the first time I have been accused of undermining "the feminist collective" and I admit I have had no training in feminism. I don't know what this means. I don't know what I have done to undermine it. It feels confusing. It triggers my inner conviction that I am a fraud, that I am dishonest and stupid. Perhaps I am. Perhaps you would care to explain to me what you mean and how I could change my ways?

A little herstory -
I joined a reclaim the night organising collective in Adelaide and designed a poster for that year's event. Perhaps you recall it? It was landscape orientation, painted joyously in blues, purples and reds, showing shoes around the border, and advertising that year's Reclaim the Night march. I enjoyed being part of the organising collective and participating in a event that had become integral to my identity and that I had been faithfully attending for several years.

The following year I again participated in the organising collective. At that time most collective members were students at Flinders and Adelaide Universities. I was very excited by a banner that I had painted of a poster design I had entered in a competition many years earlier for Reclaim the Night. That original design was pencil and it was the wrong dimensions and it was not chosen as the winner of the competition that year.

I offered my newly painted revamped design for use to promote that year's Adelaide event. I did not offer it in perpetuity and it never crossed my mind that someone might have considered that I had.

[I do not claim that poster is representative of Reclaim the Night or that no one else could design a poster to better represent Reclaim the Night. I welcome the expression by others to represent the event and all that it stands for. I may be misguided in my feminism but I am not that arrogant.]

I was so scarred by my experience that year in that organising collective that I stopped attending Reclaim the Night events at all. I was lied to, unsupported, attacked and generally so abused by some of the women on the collective that I decided it wasn't really safe to participate anymore.

I had had the idea that the Reclaim the Night event might be revitalised if it had some publicity prior to the march, to remind Adelaide's women about the march. The collective agreed to support a poster launch, and then failed to support it in the event, to the extent that at the poster launch, there were no posters. It was a farce. Leaving aside my personal humiliation, the lack of support by the collective members for something we had collectively agreed to do, undermined our collective efforts to gain momentum and participation in the march that followed.

At that point I embarked upon finding another way to participate in changing the world and acting against violence against women; particularly sexual violence. The result of this was The Reclaiming Anthology, published a few years later. The book is organised around the poster design, with a section for each window of reclaiming as represented on the poster.

I later paid out with my own money to have my poster reprinted for the purposes of promoting the book and the poster together. No one has requested to use the poster to promote subsequent Reclaim the Night events. It has fallen into herstory. It has fallen into disuse. Why not onsell the pieces of pretty paper to other women around the country who might gain something from it?

The design is my personal creative property. It was not commissioned by the collective of that year or, indeed any collective. It is wrong for the collective to lay claim to it now, and it rankles that someone would do so anonymously with such an intrinsic lack of integrity.

By all means make contact with me if you value my poster and wish to use it. By all means acknowledge the work that I did. By all means treat me as a human being and respect the fact that I am at least attempting to live and deal openly in this world.

FOR SALE

2011-01-23T15:21:00.000-08:00

FOR SALE
January 2011

ideal as raffle prizes, gifts, or on-sale items for International Women’s Day 2011.

The Reclaiming Anthology: healing our wounds (2005), Melina Magdalena (Ed), Seaview Press.
This inspiring collection of stories, poems and non-fiction prose is on the theme of healing from trauma such as sexual assault.

Contributors: Nicole Albert, Henry Ashley-Brown, Kathleen Bambridge, Chris Battams, Fabienne Bayet-Charlton, Catherine Black, Beatriz Copello, Janet Crease, Sally D’Souza, Heather Eaton, Yvonne Judith Ferris, Sarah-Jane Flaherty, Eileen Geoghegan, Leah George, Joylene Hartnet, Kathryn Healy, Laura Henkel, Gabriele Ingerson, Mary Kastanos, Adrian Kitchener, Susan Leisavnieks, Marilyn Linn, John Lind, Melina Magdalena, P.J. McConachy, Brooke McReynolds, Rachael Mead, Margaret Metz, moonlight, K.N., Nina, Jane Seagull, Beverley F. Searle, Aviva Sheb’a, Alice Shore, Kathy Silard, Angel Sister, Jannette Stevens, Sumi, Jean Taylor, Tori, Amelia Walker and G.M.Walker.

There are only a few copies left from the original print runs.

Originally selling at $27.50rrp, now just $10 plus postage.

Reclaim the Night Poster © Mersigns (Melina Magdalena)

This full-colour poster has always received a favourable response, and was the inspiration for the Reclaiming Anthology. Copies can be purchased from the artist at different rates, depending on how many copies are ordered.

1-5 $4 each*
5-10 $3 each*
10+ $2 each*
1 book + 1 poster $12*
(*please contact me for details of postage costs)

ORDERS c/- Melina Magdalena
email mersigns@hotmail.com
snailmail 20 Second Avenue, Payneham South SA 5070

If you would be so kind as to pass this information through your networks, I am very grateful for your support. Have a great International Women’s Day!

sincerely misguided

2010-09-26T20:22:00.000-07:00

sincerely misguided
© Melina Magdalena (2010)

for grandparents

Yesterday was another important day in the life of our family. We held a thanksgiving service at home in the afternoon, and our son had a dedication in the morning, at my partner’s church. We get some pleasant compliments when we throw parties – and in doing so, we are building a community of friends and family here in Adelaide that feels strong and positive. It is great to offer hospitality and share our events with people we love and respect.

It occurs to me that we ask a lot, of the people around us, by being who we are and by living the way that we live. In making our expectations explicit through our actions and commitments, we merely reflect back the similarly unspoken majority mainstream, which is rarely brought into focus or questioned as to the correctness, validity or tastefulness of its presence. By choosing to live quietly and openly as a same-sex, mixed-faith couple with a child, there are an awful lot of aspects to our identities which cause anxiety and disquiet in people who position themselves squarely in the mainstream, and for whom coming into contact with us is far removed from what they perceive as normality.

However, we are not only interested in engaging the so-called mainstream. Naturally, most of our friends and family members do not identify as mainstream. But in preparing for our thanksgiving afternoon tea, we were acutely aware that in choosing to invite our neighbours to the celebration we hoped to build on the tenuous threads of connection that we have tentatively been establishing whilst living here, as well as sharing with them, our joy in the new life in our family. We live in an area that is rich in cultural and socioeconomic diversity. Building on the threads of common connection and shared humanity is the only way to find any hope of cohesion.

In the ceremony which we conducted to bless our baby and welcome him into the family, we omitted, for example, a Kiddush or blessing over wine which is a traditional and indeed central part of nearly every Jewish ritual. We could have used grape juice, but chose instead to incorporate a blessing over water, something with which our Muslim neighbours could also identify. We’ve all been experiencing a similar relief at the breaking of a long drought in our state.

Food is always an issue with us, as my partner is vegetarian and I am coeliac. This time we chose to have a vegetarian afternoon tea, not only because it is easy for us, and out of deference to the many vegetarians in our circle. We also chose not to have meat out of deference to our Muslim neighbours, for whom food that may not be halal, is problematic.

It irks me that they did not come and that indeed they did not even respond to our invitation. It’s ok – we’re a long way from giving up on this! But I’ve been thinking about it today, and realised that my own Jewish tradition, like Islam, has long demanded that its adherents separate and keep themselves apart from the general community, instead gathering in tightly insular, self-sustaining groups. In the light of certain interesting questions that were asked of us yesterday, and issues that have been raised because of yesterday, I have been tracing back what happened to make me the way I am, and to break me out of the mould of needing to keep myself apart.

I could not do the work that I do, which is teaching English to newcomers to Australia, without being open to the complexities of cultural and religious diversity. I am continually confronted in the classroom, by manifestations of diversity and incipient conflicts that arise from this. Ethics and conflict resolution are not directly part of our curricula, but maybe they need to be.

I was surprised week or two ago, whilst planning an end-of-term event with one of my classes, when a student challenged the easy statement I made, that if we were to have a BBQ of course the meat would need to be halal. “I’m not Muslim,” she said, “I’m Christian. So why do I have to have halal meat?” Good point, particularly since she comes from a war-torn region where religious conflict tore apart her family and community with the direct result that she is orphaned in Australia as guardian of two younger siblings, and worries incessantly for the safety of the other four who remain, inexplicably, marooned in their home country.

I didn’t have an adequate answer for her, but it’s something I would dearly love to take up in the classroom, after our holidays.

A Jewish friend commented last night that it must have hurt, to have my son dedicated in a church. She also asked, as though it were given, whether he had had a bris (ritual circumcision). My sister referred in passing, the other day, to the fact that our son won’t be raised as a Jew. I was struck by my strong internal reaction to all of these comments. I found these questions harder to deal with, than the question of a young boy in church yesterday, who asked me whether I was my son’s Dad.

Clearly, I am not completely reconciled to our situation, but I take comfort from the fact that our family is in a process of continuous transformation and conscious evolution. We are not set rigidly within a mould that would impose upon us certain conditions that we might not be able to live up to. With such freedom comes a great deal of responsibility. I feel that it I am responsible not only to my family and myself, but to exploring and explaining our situation to others, in the hope that they might also find understanding and acceptance of us. It’s not something I can take for granted, and it’s not something I feel comfortable in imposing upon those who would impose their ways upon us.

There have certainly been times in my life when I have felt threatened by Christianity, and when I could not have felt comfortable with having any kind of formal or semi-formal associations with a church, or church-members. Happily, I now dwell in a certainty that we share far more than I was once able to acknowledge. This does not feel threatening, most of the time. I still insist on certain latitudes of choice and distance, and as I said in the previous paragraph, my situation is in process of continual transformation. I am getting comfortable with who I am, and how I came to be.

I can state with flippancy that it would take far more than my son’s severed foreskin to convince others that he is Jewish, or to usher in the messianic age. But the issue of ritual circumcision is difficult and mystical, not very different from issues that confound me when I think about some of the difficult and mystical things that Christians do and believe. Indeed, the peculiar things central to all religions that seem strange to outsiders.

I cannot be flippant about my son’s religious identity. I did not birth him. Therefore the Jewish tradition that a child follows its mother’s Jewish identity cannot apply in our situation. Does this mean therefore that he is Christian, like his birth-mother? Christians do not have the same tradition – whether they are of the view that a baby can be baptised, or whether a person must choose to be baptised into a Christian church. Nevertheless, this is truly a dilemma for both of his mothers. We create ourselves as a family that is both Jewish and Christian.

We intend not to impose a singular identity on our children. Some might say such ambiguity in itself is cruel, but it is our conscious intention to not demand that our children choose one over the other. If we as parents can live (un)comfortably with our multiple identities, than so can they, we hope.

My understanding of life is directly related to the fact that I am a third generation person consciously committed to interfaith and intercultural understanding. My mother’s mother appears to have made a deliberate choice to intermarry and to raise her children in a new country and a liberal faith tradition that embraces diversity. Her husband of choice came from a family that brazenly defied the national xenophobic law and culture which destroyed most of her family. Her 6 children, as I am fond of reporting, adhere with their respective spouses to 6 different religious traditions!

My father’s father married a woman who had been raised within a small, insular German-speaking community. He and his wife (my paternal grandmother) raised their four children to recognise and respect diversity, something which each of them has passed onto their children, in a myriad of manifestations.

My mother and father have, in their lives, directly engaged in interfaith and intercultural activities that have spun a vast web of connections that sparks off every continent of this planet. This has been part of their personal and professional lives, and is a source of great pride and inspiration to me. They are quiet achievers, but their achievements have a depth of integrity which I draw on, in my own personal and professional life. It’s not for nothing, that we migrated to Australia; that they adopted children into our family as well as birthing them; or that we earnestly and sincerely bounced from one religion to another.

To turn back to my partner and me – at least we cannot be accused of lazily adhering to empty tradition for its own sake. Our situation demands that we grapple on a daily basis with what is at the hearts of our belief systems and values. Some might well accuse us of being misguided, but no one can accuse us of insincerity.

a protest vote?

2010-08-14T15:08:00.000-07:00

a protest vote?
© Melina Magdalena (2010)

It was because of Facebook that I became aware of Wendy Francis and her obnoctious, hurtful, defamatory and vilifying comments. If I do a quick scan of my Facebook Friends, a good percentage of them are lesbian friends whom I’ve never met in person. I don’t have many face-to-face connections in Adelaide where I live, and my online lesbian parenting community has become a big part of my life.

However, during this election campaign I have been aware of Bob Day, and his obnoctious, excluding electioneering propaganda, because it came right into my letterbox, despite the “No Junk mail, thanks”, painted thoughtfully on said letterbox a week after we moved into Kilburn. The Family First Party proudly captions its candidates’ photographs with statistics on how many years each one has been happily married and, if possible, how many lovely children they have.

First of all, I watched the link posted to Facebook, of Wendy Francis and Fiona Patten, of the Australian Sex Party, when they appeared on
Sunrise, August 2 2010. I was first of all appalled by Wendy Francis’ complete lack of respect for the courtesies and formalities of a debate, and her gleeful verbal attack of everything that Fiona Patten said. I felt Wendy Francis came across as a defensive bully, who couldn’t allow Fiona Patten a chance to speak.

A few days later a different Facebook Friend posted a link to the comments that Wendy Francis published on Twitter, against gays having children. I was incensed and offended. For the next week, my updates on Facebook were mostly about this issue. The whole thing about Gay Marriage does not really move me one way or the other, but to accuse me of being a Child Abuser because I am a parent in a same-sex relationship really hurts and frightens me – especially because I’m quite open about my identity.

What is interesting is to see the reaction of my Facebook Friends to my furious status updates. Usually, there is a range of responses to my pithy and often ridiculously banal status updates. However, an uneasy silence seemed to reign this week, from many corners. So – is this the silent majority to which conspiracists enjoy attributing election results? Everyone was busy? Refugee issues are more important? We’re fed up with “liking” bits and pieces of election coverage? I don’t know.

Piqued, I chose to post a link to Clemetine Ford’s article published on ABC’s The Drum Unleashed, Family First Worth Fighting For. I picked out Ford’s argument about the demographic which happens to really be responsible for perpetrating most abuse against children in Australia, and commented: yup the stats on child abuse - whether physical or emotional or otherwise - speak loud and clear against straight white men parenting children. Of course, neither Ford nor I meant that therefore no one in that particular demographic ought to be allowed to parent children. Naturally, neither Ford nor I was implying that the majority of straight white men in Australia are Child Abusers.

In hindsight I don’t think I need to apologise to my Straight White Male friends or their spouses. Certainly, Wendy Francis can only tick two of those three boxes, so it would possibly have made more sense for me to be attacking Straight White Married Female Religious Fanatics. But even in our family-unfriendly society no one is claiming that Straight White Women should not be having babies!

On a side note, I really do need to take stock and mind my attitude, because as the mother of two sons I don’t want them believing they need to fit the stereotype’s mould and thereby earn my wrath and scorn. I don’t want them to be exposed to the kind of anti-male sentiments that women – both straight and bent – tend to indulge in, which of course, is the corollary of the kind of misogynist male talk that pervades our society (posted, incidentally, by another Facebook Friend). And no, while I am big enough to admit to this tendency of mine, I am not accusing all of my male friends of indulging in this. And seriously, I don’t want my boys thinking there is no way we can relate with mutual respect and affection.

What interests me is that a few of my Facebook Friends took great umbrage at my comment. I realise it is politically correct to swaddle Straight White Men in the heady embrace of adoration and abject gratitude for taking seriously, their roles as fathers and partners, and while my gag reflex is thereby triggered, it is mostly sour grapes for the lack of similar encouragement that women tend to receive for stepping outside their perceived roles and treading unfamiliar paths, with similarly varying degrees of success. Will these fathers and partners stop performing their roles if they aren’t given sufficient reason to keep them up? I don’t think so!

But this was not supposed to be another heterophobic verbal onslaught. I am fascinated by how people rose up in indignant affront when I was seen to be attacking the group who least require our support. These are the people who through no fault or effort of their own, have power and status granted to them simply because of their skin colour, gender, and sexual orientation.

Wendy Francis made very personal attacks on me, my partner and our child. She accused my partner and me of being Child Abusers. And this was supposed to be an intelligent and considered piece about why some of my Facebook Friends thought it was more important to stand up for the rights of straight white men, than to show empathy to families who have been attacked and publicly vilified across Australian media.

Gardening Outside the Fence

2010-07-11T23:59:00.001-07:00

Gardening Outside the Fence
© Melina Magdalena (2010)

I call it gardening outside the fence. It’s so easy and productive, that I think this style of growing vegetables and herbs could become as popular as Lolo Houbein’s “One Magic Square”. At present there are radishes, Japanese turnips, silverbeet, red chard, beetroots, snow peas and coriander in this garden strip. There are also two volunteer sunflowers, reminders of our first crop outside the fence, last spring and summer.

This morning I harvested some radishes and beets, sowed some carrot seed and planted out a few tiny parsley seedlings. While working I chatted with a few passers-by. One man just smiled and grunted a greeting. He’s the one who warned me not to bother planting the sunflowers, as the “kids around here” would just destroy them. A couple of months later though, he was also very happy to take home a seed-filled sunflower head for his cocky. Another man stopped and admired the crops. This was the first time I had spoken to him. He told me he has cabbages and carrots in his garden at home. Some kids ran past, busy with a project they have going on the back fence of the vacant lot over the road. They waved.

Last week I was hanging out the washing, and heard my bamboo poles being removed yet again, from the snow peas that have been straggling across the footpath instead of climbing them as they should. “Who is that outside my fence, stealing my sticks?” I roared in an imitation of the troll in Billy Goat’s Gruff. The chattering paused, and moved a little bit up the path. When I finished what I was doing, I took the baby out to see whether there were any sticks left. I chatted with the two little boys, aged 9 and 10, who live around the corner and were engaged in a vigorous sword fight with my bamboo poles. I explained to them what they were for, and told them to come back every week to check for peas. I said they can eat the peas if they find them on the plants.

Most of the houses in our suburb of Kilburn were built by public housing. They all seem to have their fence lines 30-50 cm away from the footpath. We are lucky enough to live on a corner, with the long side fence facing north. I noticed last winter that this strip of dirt was full of healthy weeds and I thought – why not dig up the weeds and replace them with something I want to grow? I set to work with my fork and spade and had soon filled the compost bin with weeds, and had a garden bed full of rich soil, which I have since manured and mulched at least twice, to keep it in good shape.

The sunflowers as I mentioned, were our first crop. They grew with strength and beauty in that sun, against the colourbond fence, and attracted a lot of positive attention. We are new to this area, and I’m keen to try and strike connections with other members of our community, which is diverse and changing. As well as the very poor, multi-generational unemployed white public housing residents, there are Aboriginal families and also families of new immigrants and refugees. I sometimes wonder whether they would take up gardening in their new homes, if they could access the tools and the seeds.

We already have a vege garden in the backyard. We have a couple of fruit trees as well. We are slowly working to establish a native garden in the front yard. I love gardening, and try to do a couple of hours in the garden every week, rain or as it mostly is in Adelaide, shine. So why garden outside the fence?

I grew up around Maylands and Payneham. Most of our neighbours were post-war southern European immigrants. Everyone had olive trees, fig trees, grape vines and vegetable gardens. This was part of my culture, way back before the subdivisions started. Every year, my brothers and sister and I were sent out to gather flowers and leaves to decorate our Easter nests. We built the nests out of grass clippings – my Dad always mowed the lawn on Easter Saturday. It was our time-honoured rule that anything hanging over or outside of the fence was fair game, and we could pick it with impunity. We could not, however, pick anything that was inside someone’s fence.

It occurred to me that I can adopt a different philosophy with the produce that I grow. I can share it, instead of keeping it just for us and ours. I’ve had my eye on a couple of traffic islands around the corner, wondering whether we could establish a community orchard on them, harvesting rainwater from the stormwater drains next-door to keep the fruit trees healthy.

Food growing on plants is not something that kids around here see every day. I’d like to show the kids around here how easy it is to grow good food. I rely on my fork for nearly all of the digging work that I do, and I would happily lend that fork to someone else, if she wanted to start a garden outside her fence. Or, I could help that person purchase a fork and spread the work around.

And so I’ve made a start. Last week a pair of Housing Trust maisonettes just like ours was knocked down opposite us. Apparently it could take a couple of years before building work commences on them. In the meantime, I think I’ll plant sunflowers over there, too. One of our neighbours pointed out that because this vacant lot is on a corner, people are sure to use it as a shortcut. That was useful information. I’ve decided to plant a double row of sunflowers marching diagonally from open corner to open corner. I imagine us Kilburnites might enjoy walking through an avenue of sunflowers when spring comes…

vegetables

2010-07-11T23:58:00.000-07:00

sunflower_strip

2010-07-11T23:57:00.001-07:00

Chicken Livers

2010-03-25T12:51:00.000-07:00

Chicken Livers
© Melina Magdalena (2010)

“ I’m off to cook chicken livers for my children now,” I announced to my colleagues as I left the office.
“What?” asked one of them.
“Chicken livers – we all love them. When we were really poor we found out they’re one of the cheapest sources of iron-rich foods.”

As soon as I was ready to cook, I measured out 2 cups of basmati rice, washed it once and left it to soak in some cold water for 15 minutes.

My son accepted my dinner invitation with one proviso. He was going for a run later, with an old school friend, so he couldn’t stay all evening. (He must be doing OK again, if he was willing to see me.) I had told him I would cook fish, so it wasn’t just the lure of the chicken livers.

I bought 500g free range chicken livers last time I was at the Central Market. Well, haha – when they were attached to the chickens they were not free range. I froze them and then thawed them in the fridge overnight, but they were still half-frozen this afternoon when I was ready to cook. That made it easy to slice and dice them into small pieces.

My daughter had her first prac in a piggery today, and she was not going to go to karate if she smelled too bad. But she really wanted to go to karate, so I agreed to drop her off after she had a shower. (She usually catches the bus.) She made sure I would leave her some pilaf for when she got home.

I heated a little olive oil in a heavy-based saucepan and sautéed the livers whilst I chopped up a lot of garlic very fine, and added it to the livers. Our parsley dried up in the late summer sun, so I had to make do with some celery chopped fine. Parsley is better – it looks good to have the dark green flecks, and it adds flavour. The celery went in next.

After I learned to make this dish, I used to cook it a few times each year – always in sufficient quantities that we could eat the leftovers for breakfast, and lunch next day. It’s a simple recipe, and so nutritious and delicious. I do recall once, during the most strenuous growing times, there were no leftovers – everything was eaten and the bowls were licked clean.

I strained the rice and added it to the garlic, celery and livers, and stirred frequently with a wooden spoon. We were out of currants, so I throw in a couple of handsful of sultanas, and about 2 teaspoons of cracked black pepper. Then 6 cups of water (no need for stock because the livers make it flavourful), stir it through one last time, turn up the heat, put the lid on, and let it cook.

Despite the extra drive to Kilkenny and back to get my daughter to karate, I managed to prepare the cucumber and yoghurt by the time my son arrived, and I was chopping some vegetables for a side dish. His face lit up.

“What are we having? That smells good! Ah, vegetables!” (It was just carrot, cauliflower and broccoli in a pot with some water – nothing special. (He’s not eating terribly well at his Dad’s, I note.)

He sat down to read bits of the newspapers that were lying around on the table. There was an article about the primary school he and his sister used to go to. There was a lot of sport in the Messenger this week. There was an image of virile masculinity on the front cover – representatives of all the SANFL football clubs with their faces and shoulders painted. My son called them a rude name. He didn’t sign up for football this season, on the grounds of unfitness. I’m thankful once again, that he has friends to go running with.

Here’s how I prepared the cucumber and yoghurt salad: grate a large cucumber, drain off the juice and drink it – it’s delicious. Sprinkle on a pinch of salt, a scant teaspoon of dried mint and twice that amount of dill tips. Scoop in a lot of plain yoghurt, and dribble a dash of lemon juice or white vinegar over the top. Mix well, and stash in the fridge to serve with the pilaf.

My son and I dished up enormous quantities and sat down together at the table to eat and chat about life, university and whatever he felt like telling me about. I managed not to annoy him too much with details from my working life.

“What’s the kid going to be?” he asked at one point, “a girl or a boy?”
“We don’t know yet,” I said. Then – “Everyone says it’s a boy.”
He looked at me sharply – “Who’s everyone?”
“Oh you know,” I mumbled, regretting bringing up hocus pocus, because now he’s living with his Dad such matters are clearly off limits, “People who think they have a feeling about such things. They all think it’s a boy.”
“But the doctor?”
“No, we didn’t get it looked into. It’s going to be a surprise.”

At that point I realised I’d forgotten to toast the pine nuts – whoops! So I got up and did that, then added some to the pilaf on our plates and the rest to the pilaf still in the pot.

After tea, he used the computer in the dining room to do some study. I used my laptop in the lounge room to check my emails. It was very companionable. He left for his run before his sister came home. By that time, I was reading a novel. I only regret not getting up to hug him as he went out the door, but on the other hand, maybe it’s better I didn’t push that boundary too far…

His sister eventually returned from karate, sniffed the air and said “Did you leave some for me?” She devoured two plates full of the stuff, plus veges on the side, and then drank all the water that the vegetables had cooked in. After all, she’d spent 8 hours at university today, plus an hour and a half of karate. She had earned her appetite.

“Yum,” she said, “Do you like this stuff too, Mum?”
“It’s bitter, isn’t it?” I said.
“No – here, you taste it.”
I did. It tasted like a mild vegetable soup.

My partner, who is vegetarian, goes to her Christian lesbian group on a Thursday, so I didn’t need to worry about having meat for tea. This pilaf is good made with mushrooms instead, but if you use mushrooms, sauté them with a lot of chopped onions first, and use a bit of stock in the water.

I fantasise a little that when I’m at work today and my daughter is at uni, my partner might lift the lid off the leftover chicken liver pilaf that’s in the fridge, and just take a tiny taste. I know she’s vegetarian for political and ethical reasons, but if she just tasted my pilaf, it might be good for her, and for the baby.

In recalling my vegetarian years, the transition phase came after I bought dill pickles and mettwurst at the Central Market. My kids were still preschoolers at that time. We ate these foods ravenously and I realised again how much I was missing the food I had grown up with. But I didn’t know how to prepare meat dishes.

Then I went to my very first Passover Seder. It was the Communal Seder at the Reform Synagogue here in Adelaide. On every table was a little dish of chopped livers, made – I found out later, by the husband of the head of the Catering Committee. Well – I took one taste and could not stop. It was so delicious!

This is a fitting memory as we approach the Passover Season once again this year. My daughter asked me last night when we were going to have our family Seder. “Then we get to have chicken livers again!” she said gleefully, “and I’m going to eat a lot of Charoset, as well. I still don’t understand why people don’t make that at other times of the year!”

“Well, if you learn to make it, you can have it whenever you like,” I told her.
All is well at our house, when chicken livers are on the menu.

Chicken Liver Pilaf
500g free range chicken livers – chopped fine
1 tablespoon olive oil
4-6 cloves garlic – chopped fine
½ cup chopped parsley (celery plus leaves is a good substitute)
2 cups basmati rice – washed once, soaked in cold water, then drained
1 cup dried blackcurrants, or sultanas
2 teaspoons cracked black pepper
6 cups water
½ cup toasted pine nuts
salt to taste (when serving)

1.Use a heavy-based pot if possible. Sautee livers gently in oil.
2.Add garlic and parsley, stir intermittently for about 5 minutes.
3.Add pepper, rice and currants, stir well. The idea is to mix everything together so that the oil will stop the rice from sticking.
4.Pour on the water, bring to the boil, put the lid on, turn the heat down, and allow to cook undisturbed until the rice has absorbed the liquid (15 minutes approximately). It’s ok to lift the lid to check on the rice, but try not to open the pot too often because it lets too much steam escape.
5. Stir in the toasted pine nuts just before serving.
Serve with cucumber and yoghurt, and a side dish of vegetables of your choice.

Cucumber and Yoghurt Salad
This is a close relation to the Turkish cacik and the Greek tzatziki, but milder. I think there is a European cucumber salad too, that’s very like this one.
1 large cucumber, grated and drained.
pinch of salt
scant teaspoon dried mint, or 1 teaspoon fresh mint, chopped finely
2 teaspoons dried dill tips, or 4 teaspoons fresh dill tips, chopped finely
dash of lemon juice or white vinegar
2 cups plain yoghurt (greek style is good)

Mix well and refrigerate until serving time.

And Ain't I A Human?

2010-03-18T13:25:00.000-07:00

Ain’t I A Human?*
© Melina Magdalena (2010)
*paraphrased from Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech “Ain’t I A Woman?

While we prepared for our union, deliberately not called a wedding, we laughed a little bitterly about the role of institutionalized worship in our relationship. A Reform Jewish Rabbi would have been happy to formalize my partnership with another woman; if only she had also been a Jew; a Christian cleric might have been persuaded to officiate at a mixed-faith ceremony; if only it had not been a same-sex union. And on and on and on the merry-go-round turns, scarcely deviating in its course of division, subjugation and demoralisation.

As for the state of our union? A year and a bit down the track, all of our friends and family members refer to our carefully and cumbersomely titled “Promise Making Ceremony and Celebration” as our wedding. We bow to the inevitable, and do the same. There is no essential difference between our marriage and how any couple learns to make a life together. Life is good. We are expecting our first child in a couple of months, and so our world expands, unfolds and blossoms.

By the way we did mention God – and even Jesus – in our ceremony. The multitude sanctioning our union by their presence included a Catholic nun and representatives of Protestant Christian ministry in their double digits, but sadly no representatives of Jewish ministry, mostly because I have chosen in my last ten years or so, not to engage with my Jewish world on an institutional level. No lightning struck.

The reflections by Gordon Preece, commissioning editor of Zadok Perspectives , on an article written by my beloved’s mother, and printed in No. 106 of this publication, (Autumn 2010) deny our humanity in a vicious and sustained attack upon us as lesbians. I found it shocking, but my beloved assures me that she could have a “conversation” of this nature every day of every week of her life, with someone in “the church”, if she chose to embark on such a self-abnegating venture, which she doesn’t.

The banality of Preece’s so-called scholarship is exposed by the various and oft-cited authoritative texts and ideas to which he refers in his editorial, compared with the single source chosen by him to represent queer thinking – the lyrics to the satirical and deliberately outrageous song by Lily Allen and Gregory Kurstin. In a paragraph where Preece denies church leadership roles for “practising gays”, he demands that “Both sides should move from hostility to hospitality”. Preece is sadly mistaken to assume that his carefully scripted attack on queer humanity is any less damaging than Allen and Kurstin’s song lyrics, just because of the format he has chosen. His attack cuts far more deeply, because it is couched in hypocritically nice language of “clarity and charity”, which very clearly expresses his hatred for me as a lesbian.

=Fuck You Very Much is a refreshingly honest response to those who like to practice their bigoted faith with low acts of hypocrisy and violence against people like me. I’m not just referring to Gay Bashing, as practiced against men in Australia; Corrective Rape, practiced against lesbians in South Africa, and Other Forms of Murder, practiced against homosexuals, transsexuals and queer people the world over, from Uganda to the = United States of America .

Homophobia is mainstream hatred which queer people face every day of our lives, from the ordinary bigoted people who inhabit the worlds in which we as queer people also dwell. The idea that homosexual people are not human enough to lead other human beings in a church context is as homophobic and potentially murderous as physical violence. With his denial of church leadership roles for “practising gays”, Preece advocates spiritual murder.

The issue is always the same. Whether it is the colour of one’s skin; one’s status as a slave or free born; the religious heritage of one’s grandparents and other forebears; the language one learned as a child; the borders of the nation where one was born; physical deformity, infirmity or simply difference, human beings are expert formulators of reasons as to why some people are awarded the title of being human, whilst others are resolutely denied that privilege. Such narrow-mindedness is almost amusing, in an issue of this publication which is sub-titled “Difference & Difficulty”. I cannot laugh at it however. It makes me angry. I must express that anger, lest I internalise it and fall into a depression. Unlike my beloved, I do not have decades of resistance behind me, to bolster my reactions.

Preece has a plethora of groups to choose from in this issue of Zadok. Should he marginalise and condemn people with mental illness? No, that is no longer politically correct, because sufferers who are appropriately medicated can live fulfilling (heterosexual) lives. People with schizophrenia may be dangerous and street-people are tragic, but Preece correctly defines mentally ill people as victims who are deserving of Christian charity. Perhaps then, the spotlight should be turned on the women and men of the church who remain single? Does their failure to marry not mask the fact that they are running around and engaging in illicit sexual relationships outside the institution of marriage? We cannot, surely, in good conscience, accuse virgin missionaries of such shenanigans. Let us let the single people be. Ok, so if not the mentally ill, nor the single people, what about people whose physical bodies fail to match up with what we refer to as normal? These are people whose bodies work in different ways from ours; those who compensate for a lack of hearing, by developing a rich and creative culture from which normal people are barred from participating, simply because we do hear. They are shutting us out. Should we not shun them, and stop them from cultural expression? Surely not! Jesus is cited as specifically including people with disabilities in his house as “an indispensable part of God’s family”. We must instead demand that these groups return the favour.

It is notable that Preece avoids the debate over whether homosexuality is a choice, or biological. The choice that he mentions involves homosexual practice versus (presumably) celibacy. I fail to understand how my homosexual practice hurts anyone at all. The artificiality of separating sexuality from sex is highlighted when religion tries to defend its homophobic stance. The only people who are supposed to be having sex are those who are having sex with their heterosexual marriage partner. So he can have sex with his wife. Fine. But two women or two men who are in a committed marriage-like relationship are not supposed to express themselves sexually, because…?

For religious adherents, whether they be Christian or Jewish, (since those are the two religious systems that come directly into play in my life), around the heart of the fear of same-sex attraction lies a framework of control devices – belief systems, dogma and rules – that are designed to ensure compliance and conformity. This structure need not be thorn-covered, to divide the acceptable, from the unacceptable. Anyone who is born unable to conform and comply because of the nature of their being is constricted and tortured if he or she is brought up within that structure. My partner describes how wonderfully safe it felt during her childhood, to know her boundaries and where she fit in. She also tells how impossible it was to fit in, when she discovered that she was the wrong sexuality. This was not something she could alter, but in order for her to survive, her worldview had to shift radically in order to accommodate her difference.

Preece expresses concern that in our postmodern world we are kneeling down to difference. He suggests that the concept of difference has taken centre stage on the altar of our western culture and threatens to become the idol of our religious focus, as well. It is a strange fear. Fashioned by God as we were – perhaps even created in the image of God – diversity exists at the deepest level of creation. What use is there in denying the differences that exist between us? With such a fear focus, Preece forgets that there is much more that unites us, than what divides us from one another.

The fear of what is similar lies at the heart of homophobia. Heterosexual people fear homosexuality not because it hurts them or even affects them directly in any way at all, but because they have been taught that it is something to be feared and avoided. To be called homosexual is to be called sub-human and abnormal – Preece has clearly never conquered an upbringing where he was told that homosexuals are mutant deviant dangerous monsters. I can presume he would pass this message onto his own offspring as well, which is monstrous.

The issue is always the same, and it is sad that a publication which purports to “promote informed theological reflection and engagement by people from all walks of life, in relation to Australian public, working, and personal life” continues to support homophobia and to deny the status of homosexual people as human beings. Naturally, issues around bisexuality, transgender and intersex people are ignored in his editorial. It is as though Preece, as representative of Christian thought on the matter, remains firmly blinkered to the realities of human diversity. As my beloved’s mother points out – Jesus was not so blinkered.

What is it, to be human? Like my beloved, I also work with new-comers to Australia. It is work that never fails to move me, in many directions. One of my students posed this question last week, in an English class. We were on the topic of Open Questions; based around the wh- words: who, what, where, why, which, when and how. He wrote on his form “Why are you a human?” and proceeded to parade that question past his bemused classmates, who were unprepared for such a deeply philosophical task. (Their questions were at a different level: “When did you come to Australia?” “Where do you live?” “Which bus do you catch?”) No one could offer a satisfactory response to my deep-thinker and when I turned the question upon him, he could only laugh, and say “I asked you first!”

The concept of a tribe of homosexuals is no less frightening than any tribe of outsiders. For those within the tribe there is at least a feeling of safety in numbers. The reality is that in most Christian congregations there is likely to be a smaller ratio of queer Christians than the 8-10% cited by my mother-ex-law in her article. The reasons for this are clear. Queer people are hated and feared by most Christians and would see little benefit in participating in church unless they had a personal faith that sustained them to find worth in their existence and their participation that was able to raise them above that hatred. A relationship with God (Jesus) might do the trick. I hesitate to posit that this relationship with God could be labelled “Christian” because of the obvious contradictions this poses in a world of mainstream homophobes who also use that label.

As a Jew, I was taught always to heed the fact that as an eternally homeless stranger myself, I can expect no less a welcome than that, which I am willing to offer to other strangers. The apartheid to which my mother-ex-law refers in her article, which “We have practised with our homophobic shudders and avoidance of encounter”, is something which my beloved has experienced all her life, as a member of Christian congregations, and it is wrong. It also exists in Jewish congregations.

As teachers, my partner and I are lucky enough, partly through working directly with marginalised new-comers to Australia, to reach a level of self-understanding that enables us to love our oppressors. We acknowledge that the hatred continually thrust in our direction, does not need to destroy our sense of well-being and purpose. In order to triumph, to flourish and to express our love for the world, we do not need to descend to the level of expressing hatred towards those who hate us.

The merry-go-round grapples with shallow concepts such as acceptance and tolerance at the same time as using a cattle prod to push us further away from the spotlight, and slam the doors of churches (and synagogues) behind us. Walls of words are built to keep us apart from the deserving minions, so that we might not taint the purity of so-called Christ-centred practice.

There is little depth to Preece’s preaching against homosexual humanity. He fails even to take a baby step in the direction of informed research collected about homosexuals. If he had bothered to do so, he would have discovered that many queer people also develop mental illness as a result of their mistreatment by mainstream society and marginalisation by Christians. Many homosexual adults remain single because they have been taught that same-sex relationships are not sanctioned by God and are therefore evil. Though they are attracted to people of the same sex, they choose celibacy in order to not be ostracised from their communities. Thirdly, some people with disabilities are also homosexual. How will “the church” deal with those?

Preece does not mention the unforgivable fact that a same-sex-attracted young person who has grown up in a church community is far more likely to kill himself or herself at discovering that he or she is not heterosexual, than a queer person who grew up outside Christian practice. Perhaps he recommends suicide as the better answer, for queer Christians?

On Exposure: a journey

2010-01-09T15:50:00.000-08:00

On Exposure: a journey (Joel Magarey, Wakefield Press, 2009)

I the Reader

I approached Joel Magarey’s book Exposure: A Journey with twin measures of hope and scepticism. I hoped that he might enlighten me about certain aspects of my own life during my late teens and twenties, but I was sceptical that there was very much to discover through the perspective of someone who was actually writing about something else.

I took the book personally – after all, Penny was Best Woman to the man I married, Joel juggled at our wedding, and Basil’s band provided the music at the reception afterwards. The shattered constellation of my first marriage remains as a facet of my identity that looms large when an old ghost like Joel pops into view from time to time.

Had my first marriage lasted, we would be coming up to our twentieth anniversary this month. It’s a staggering idea. It is significant that Joel’s book appeared in 2009 – a year during which I have been learning how to be a partner within a new marriage; how to mother children in their late teens, when I myself became a mother; and some different ways and contexts there are to be Christian. My response to the book is necessarily framed within this context, and would have been a very different response had my circumstances not changed so greatly.

I was never taught that suffering is the human condition; or that good can emerge from suffering. These kinds of Christian ideas were foreign to me and in bumping up against them again as a mature woman in my 30s I find myself better able to deal with them than I was, in my late teens.

Joel and I grew up in two very different worlds. Our respective backgrounds set us up to impact upon one another in different ways. The fact that I as a non-Catholic ended up pregnant and married at 19 is ironic. I recall the sex education that I received at school – we were told about condoms yes, but only for prevention of AIDS and other STDs. I knew about the birth control pill yes, but only for sexually active young women (not me) and those whose menstrual agonies were such, that the Pill could alleviate their severity. I got pregnant very easily and thoughtlessly. I did not entertain the notion of terminating the pregnancy, even though I wasn’t sure how it had happened or how having a baby was going to affect my life. The idea of abortion was repugnant to me.

It might sound quite odd, but the fact is that I was brought up in silence more than spokenness, when it comes to sex and marriage. I had never been inculcated into the idea that the best way for humans to live is as part of a heterosexual couple who have children together. I had not been taught that I needed a partner at all. I did not feel loneliness or isolation – I was filled instead with the ebullience of knowing I had my life to live and that I could be the person I wanted to be.

Some might have assumed that I grew up in a permissive household – that is far from my experience! The unwritten rules that I unwittingly broke were not defined and never made explicit to me until it was too late. So I was fascinated to learn that Joel was explicitly taught about those things I didn’t know about – what it means to have sex with someone, and how the consequences of these acts may impact on his future life choices.

Book Review

Exposure moves frequently between times – distant past, recent past, present – but never into the future. This structure effectively builds and maintains momentum and injects suspense into the narrative. As an insider I was aware of certain elements of the story, but still found myself guessing and occasionally gasping with surprise whilst reading it. I finished the story wondering – what next?

I enjoyed immensely the well-crafted descriptive elements of the travel narrative. I was conscious of reading Joel’s descriptions, closing my eyes and imagining the skies, lakes, mountains and weather conditions of those faraway places.

Although Joel’s diagnosis and experience of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is prominent in Exposure, I see the main themes as being sex and responsibility, inlaid with a heavy dose of questions about morality.

Extramarital sex and the unwanted child are prominent triggers for the OCD, and occur as motifs throughout the narrative. These issues are linked with the relationships that Joel writes about, most obviously his relationship with Penny, but they are never framed within the expected context of marriage. This forms the underlying crux of the matter. The idea of marriage pops up at the tail end of Joel’s narrative, after long journeys of separation and rapturous rejoining. Penny and Joel’s relationship could be seen as a kind of marriage, with the implicit understanding that these years of learning how to travel and live together were all part of a togetherness that would continue to be built upon in years to come.

One of the largest limitations of the novel is in itself significant, because it functions as a signpost as to why things turned out the way that they did. The lack of insight into Penny as a person with her own needs, her own motivations, her own desires and her own responses has left me wanting to know so much more about her.

When it comes to the crunch, Ahmad and Joel set themselves up as rivals, with Penny choosing one and rejecting the other. However, this still seems to occur without Joel’s realising that Penny has some agency in the matter – she has needs and desires that he has not yet considered fully in light of their relationship and its future.

I am intensely curious about Penny’s life now. When I heard what she had done, I was appalled. It looked to me as though she had deliberately placed herself in a position of being oppressed and repressed. It felt to me at the time as though she were punishing herself. I could not imagine her choice as being real. Knowing more now than I did then, about other cultures, I have a less closed-minded attitude as to who she might have become within the structure of her chosen culture. I would love to hear what her experiences have been; how she has grown within the parameters placed around her, what she has been able to achieve and discover about herself, her husband, her new family and the culture in which she now lives, loves and works.

My Narrative

As a 16, 17 and 18 year old, the years between meeting the man I married and our wedding itself, I was still firmly fixed on my future as being one of
- travelling and seeing the world
- learning languages and getting to know the people of the world
- never getting married
- never having children
- living independently with my cats
- writing, making, creating, studying.

Ever afraid of being forced to do things against my will, I was well aware that I was not on the ball when it came to producing appropriate reactions and responses to what confronted me. I have always required more time to process things than is generally allowed me, particularly by intelligent, selfish, manipulative and aggressive young men who see themselves as invincible and entitled to whatever catches their fancy at any given moment. Isn’t that how I ended up pregnant in the first place?

Of those who condemned my actions in leaving that marriage after three years, one of the strongest came from Joel’s father, whom I had known from my first days at university, when I was part of the Sudan Relief Committee that held its meetings in his staff room in the Napier Building at Adelaide University.

Kevin took me aside at a New Year’s Eve party some time after I had left. I described the circumstances that had led me to my leaving and he told me I was wrong. He painted a picture for me of some of the lowest, most difficult points of his marriage and explained that such things occur in every marriage; that they don’t mean the marriage should break or be destroyed; rather that the people in that marriage need to work harder to strengthen the marriage.

I had no idea what he was talking about. It made me very angry to hear him blame me for breaking up my marriage. It felt as though he conceptualised marriage as a separate entity from the two people who had entered into the institution; an entity precious and valuable as to subjugate both parties into its service, to their ultimate self-denial and self-destruction. And I wanted no part of such a condition. I was unwilling to bend and to break myself down in order to fit into the mould of marriage, if in fact that was, what marriage meant.

The thought that parents can lecture children about sex and marriage fills me with a certain amount of dread, particularly as I have also failed to make this a part of my children’s education. I wonder to what extent my ideas about being the poor girl who set such a bad example to her peers had any impact on the moral struggles that Joel experienced as a sexually active young man who had been exceptionally well educated on the evil consequences of sex outside marriage?

When I was pregnant with my first child, Joel waylaid me at one end of our share house and mischievously teased me, trying to convince me that if I were to have sex with him it wouldn’t matter at all, because I was already pregnant – whom could it possibly harm? (Secondhand Notoriety, 2007) I have pondered Joel’s behaviour many times since that afternoon, and assigned several possible reasons to it. Was he jealous; was this some kind of resistance action against the institution of marriage; was he just testosterone-driven? He scared me.

His sister took me aside and encouraged me at one point after I had already fallen pregnant. She said it is idiotic to “wait to have sex until you’re married”, because you can never know whether you’ll be sexually compatible with your chosen partner until you try. I was just embarrassed. None of this had been my idea.

I attended Joel’s birthday party at his family home just off King William Road. I wonder whether this was the party he describes, where he and Penny first got together? I remember walking home from that party to my parents’ house in Payneham. I was unaccustomed to being out so late at night, but the young man whom I regarded at that time as my “best friend”, entertained me and encouraged me as we walked. I recall our late night walks with some fondness.

Just before I agreed to have sex for the first time in my late teens I was confronted with a similar situation to the Penny / Ahmad / Joel triangle. I wanted neither suitor. Attracted to neither man, I was not looking for marriage, and the situation was both ludicrous and unwelcome. When I first heard about Penny, I wondered whether something similar had happened to her. I assumed it had, and I pitied her.

Penny is clearly an unconventional woman, with her own ideas about right and wrong. We see this in Exposure mapped out through Joel’s eyes as they form their bonds and celebrate their relationship outside the bounds of his parents’ explicit expectations. I also remember Penny as an important member of the Legal team assisting protesters at the Narrungar Protests (late 1980s to early 1990s). She is capable and smart. Her plain-spoken sensible attitude was refreshing, matched against the snobbish and intellectual cynicism that prevailed during our university days. It should not be mistaken for stupidity or a simplistic Pollyannaish response to the world.

I felt squeamish, reading the idealised version of Penny’s character – just as squeamish as when twenty years ago she was held up to me as an example of the kind of woman I ought to be aspiring to become. And I wonder, who was she, who has she become?

What I remember about Penny is worth remembering. She was independent and resourceful, and lived alone, without any family around her, in a little converted garage off Grange Road. I never thought very much about how she afforded this, although at that time our peers were dependent on their parents for support. She was interesting and knowledgeable, and passionate about seeing the world. She was left-wing and alternative. During my fuzzy-headed days of reproduction and new motherhood, I failed to take very much in, but I do remember seeing books and posters at her place that roused my interest and caused me to howl in the depths of my soul for the chances to see the world that I had given up, having married and borne children so very young.

I recall a conversation Penny and I had, that terrible spring when I had lost all control of my own life and future. The man I married set this conversation up, just as he had carefully impregnated me and then injected me with the poison of his own anti-abortion beliefs. Penny may well have been aware of this, but she would have trusted me as an intelligent young woman to be capable of seeing the other side and making my own choices and decisions.

We were outside the Art Gallery on North Terrace. I was a little awestruck, as Penny had never really paid me much attention. My husband-to-be and I had already performed our “Three Foetuses” manoeuvre on the floor of the university refectory so that the whole group had been clued into the fact that we had (unprotected) sex and conceived a child, as he had planned. That I remained clueless was an option no one seemed to have considered, and it probably didn’t matter to anyone but me.

The way I operated mostly back then, was on pure intuition, and my intuition has always been excellent. I would tune in to the person who was speaking to me at the time, intuit what she or he wanted me to say, and say it. It was simple. That it bypassed any interpretation, decision and choice-making on my part was beside the point. I did not allow myself the slightest bit of agency.

“You know the choice is up to you,” Penny said. Or something very like that. Startled, I said “What do you mean?” “You don’t have to have a baby.” “Oh,” I replied brightly, defensively, feeling as though Penny were a traitor, steering me up the steep path towards abortion. “It’s OK. I understand. But I want to have this baby.” “Well that’s all right then,” Penny said gently, “just as long as you don’t forget it’s your choice.”

Months later, my husband and I went to her place to meet some friends for a meal. Our baby, a winter child, was just a few weeks old. We travelled across town on at least two buses. The weather was cold and wet. The food wasn’t ready on time, because keeping to time was unimportant. No one but me was responsible for anything but themselves. I was hungry, tired, nipple-sore and miserable, being both on show as “the new mother” and overlooked as a human being with needs of my own. I sat in a corner with my baby and cried. Penny was kind and sensible. She took my husband aside and suggested he take me home to rest. I was very grateful to her.

Of where he used to be

2009-12-19T15:40:00.000-08:00

of where he used to be
© Melina Magdalena 2009

He
is breaking himself out
of the habit of having a mother

wants
no part of Kilburn
with its seething streets of neglect
its hungry, disaffected youth
and paths that glisten with broken glass
(although we
are better off than we have ever been before
in the short history of his life)
doesn’t come home
to our little house of colours
where his mother’s lover shouted at him once
in exasperation
at his abject refusal to be part of
what we’re trying to create here
precious boy
as if no one had ever shouted at him before
as if his own mother didn’t sometimes get angry with him, too
as if he had never shouted or even sworn at anyone
his whole life long
allows himself
no luxury of comfort
no occasional home-cooked meal
no night in the room he decorated, just to his taste

curt
on the phone as though split in halves by the wires that connect us
always rude all right now goodbye he says
and don’t fuckin’ text me ever again
loathes
me actively
with every fibre of his being
straining to get further away from me
at chance meetings when he’s visiting his grandparents
or ferrying his sister from place to place

What kind of withdrawal symptoms must he suffer?
All I sense is the negative space
of where he used to be.

Self Harm

2009-10-10T21:28:00.000-07:00

Self Harm
(c) Melina Magdalena (2009)

Years ago when counsellors advised me to be “my own best friend” I learned to be kinder to myself. One counsellor suggested I seek out a teddy bear or stuffed toy to cuddle when I needed to, but this never appealed. My cats served this need nicely.

I go through patches of abject misery where I cannot bear the thought of remaining in this world, and I have learned to wait these out in the knowledge that they will pass over and through me and I will emerge out the otherside still breathing, still alive, still capable of creativity and joy, ever-tempered by my experience of their shadow opposite states.

I never talked to my counsellors about self-harming, though I know in some tense sessions they probably saw me rip and tear at my cuticles. And I never realised the impact that my self-harming habits have on me until I got to see them through the eyes of someone who loves me. She is horrified, terrified, repulsed and shocked that I could put myself through what I do.

It’s not necessarily good to decide to stop self-harming because of the impact it has on another person, but it has certainly been a wake-up call for me to think about the choices that I’m making. I know compared with others my level of self-harm is paltry. But I’m realising that any level of self-harm is potentially dangerous, because of the mind-set that it perpetuates.

When I was going through my worst weeks of sleeplessness these last months I wanted nothing more than to obliterate myself; failing that, to punish my body for its refusal to allow me the relief I required. I was sleep-deprived and dream-deprived. My spirit was parched, pursed, dried up like an old prune. I faced the prospect of and endless slide into physical deterioration – ageing, menopause, wrinkling, pain and more pain, losing teeth, infirmities, loss of functions left, right and centre. Nothing cheered me.

One night after things had already started to improve I fell off the wagon. We had had a late meal, or been up and out late at a party and my “sleep hygiene routine” had been disrupted. Frustrated because at that moment there seemed to be no cause and no effect to the senselessness of the of my sleep pattern, I got up and sat on the loo and slapped myself in the face, very hard, quite a few times. I hoped the pain would send me reeling into the sleep that I craved. I hoped that changing state from dull numbness into sharp pain might help change my wakefulness into sleep. I had thought about banging my head against the wall, but I thought it might hurt too much and damage my brain besides. I wasn’t after permanent obliteration – just a temporary whack from being awake, into being asleep.

That night, like so many others, I did manage to fall asleep eventually, after cocooning myself in a blanket on a pallet on the floor. My Beloved had rubbed my back and curled up into me, trying to soothe me into sleep, but I had crawled back out of bed and onto the floor where eventually the sweet joy of sheer relief took over as I rolled over and realised – I had been dreaming – therefore I had been sleeping. (Once that moment hits, I convince myself that I can fall asleep again. Doesn’t matter that there are only 50 minutes until it’s time to get up and start the day – 50 minutes is better than no sleep at all (and I speak from grim experience).

It wasn’t until several days later that I admitted what I had done that night. It hadn’t worked, and I’d felt foolish and betrayed by this fact. My Beloved said “I heard those noises and I didn’t dare ask what you had done.”

Other times when I self-harm are just at the level of consciousness. I would say they are long-entrenched coping mechanisms that comfort and distract even as they hurt physically.

For example:
Preparing and waiting for social occasions to begin I invariably end up with reddened, torn, searingly painful fingers, from gnawing, chewing and pulling at my cuticles. I can stop myself just before the skin tears, when I’m conscious of what I am doing, but this is rarely the case when the nerves take over. And the shame that wells up when I realise what I’ve done more than compensates for the self-belief that people don’t want to see me, won’t have enough to eat, may not like to be in my home. I’ve gone to job interviews in the same state and practically sat on my fingers to keep from showing them. Not a good look.

I’ve wondered why other people don’t seem to have the same problems with their cuticles that I do, and also why other people seem to have a greater tolerance for skin irritations such as insect bites, and manage to restrain themselves from picking them open until they bleed.

To some extent I know that I am formed and set in my ways of being as much as in my ways of doing. Whilst I believe in the capacity of humans to change and transform, there are some aspects of my identity that I doubt I am willing to give up. Negative and self-destructive though they be, they remain a part of me.

I hear the owl in the night
and I realise some things never are made right*

So I am thankful to have my Beloved, though I feel bad that she stands helpless to shift me when I’m relentlessly pursuing a course of self-destruction. And I never want to push the limits of her tolerance past the point of no return. Not only for my own selfish reasons, but it must be horrible for her to be able to do nothing but be
stacking sandbags against the river of [my] troubles* .

That is not a nice thing to do to another person.

*Saliers, E. (2004) Come On Home, All That We Let In.
http://www.indigogirls.com/home.html

The La La La Factor

2009-08-30T00:21:00.000-07:00

The La La La Factor
(c) Melina Magdalena (2009)

I heard a while ago about a method of taking one’s mind off the ickiness of what one is having to witness or having to do. Whether it is dealing with excrement, or other gunk in unwanted places, or trying to mask the sound or the smell or the sight of something unpleasant, all you have to do is loudly say “La La La La La” repeatedly until the distressing phenomenon has disappeared or finished.

This is what I wanted to do a week ago when confronted with blatant rampant heterosexuality being flaunted in my face. I was in somebody else’s house and there was nowhere I could go really, to escape it. I tried to be polite and simply turn my attention and my gaze elsewhere – certainly there were more than three people in the room. The man seemed to take possessive and powerful pride in his chosen mate and she was all wrapped up in adoration of his person. Really it’s quite boring put into words, but all I could think was La La La La La let this stop and let them go be private someplace where I don’t have to see.

It’s not so much the sour grapes factor. I didn’t wish to conduct myself in a similarly amorous manner with my chosen mate. Conscious that we were already on enemy territory, taken in as a matter of duty more than because our hosts wanted us to be there, we were very careful not to draw too much attention to our deviant state of homosexuality. I did start to wonder why I was being treated to this lavish display. I suspect part of their enjoyment was in making me feel uncomfortable.
La La La La can you imagine what would have happened had I reached out and taken up her hand in mine for simple comfort? If she’d gathered me up into her arm or kissed me for heaven’s sake, on the cheek if not the lips? We’d have been accused of flaunting our degenerate state and we’d have been asking for trouble.

Of course I didn’t say anything audibly. I just kept thinking La La La this is so gross La La La take me away please La La La why are they so unspeakably selfish and so unspeakably rude and La La La what am I doing in this place? I don’t belong here.
I began to analyse their (hetero)sexual behaviour in the context that these two young people are not married and perhaps were putting on this elaborate and La La La La disgusting display in public because of their cultural context. Perhaps they were carefully going just as far as they could go in front of us to prove that they weren’t breaking the covenant or breaking the unspoken expectation that premarital sex is a no-no? Perhaps this was all they could do for want of privacy to enjoy themselves and their unmarried state?

I may have it all completely wrong. To some extent it also felt like everyone there was in La La Land. No one was real. No one was engaging with another person on a deep and thoughtful level – we were all skating along the surface like small water bugs who fear getting sucked under and losing our ability to escape into the blandness of two-dimensions.

Anyway it’s all beside the point really. Maybe everyone there around the dinner table was going La La La La La about the fact that I was sitting there with the woman I married in their presence several months ago? We were of course there because we’d invited ourselves over to try to break through the rejection and the silence enforced by an older generation unwilling to even grudge us room to breathe, space to exist, a chance to prove ourselves…

I tried to raise this over dinner – tried to turn the conversation to a topic that I thought was relevant to everyone present. At that point every person at the table except my Beloved turned to the person next to them and went loudly La La La La – or at least that’s what it sounded like to me. No one acknowledged what I had said, let alone engaged with it. I had broken a rule without even thinking. What was that rule?

You shall not challenge the older generation for fear that they will be driven out of their comfort zone. We must at all costs preserve their comfort for fear that otherwise they shall make things very uncomfortable for us.

You shall keep yourself small and meek because you are not deserving of attention or care or kindness.

You shall not speak of matters that concern you because if you do speak of these matters others will be forced to either take positions against you or to be complicit and culpable in your wrongdoing.

You shall above all be nice.

La La La La

Knife's Edge

2009-06-30T17:40:00.000-07:00

Knife's Edge
(c) Melina Magdalena 2009

I sit poised and frozen
Astride that cruel steel blade
Awaiting the split
Second when everything
Changes and nothing
Can be reversed – ever!

Dividing then from then
Transient as a chalk circle
Eternal as an inscription
On the book of life
Acceptable as is anything
When one lacks the choice
Even to imagine another outcome.

My hands already rubbed raw
From futile clutching
At saltwater currents
Which bear away
Irretrievably those golden
Grains of sand
That represent time – my time
Spilled wastefully
Like milk across a dirty floor.

Inside my chest
Behind my breast
My heart beats strong and slow
No nervous flutter
Betrays my inner disquiet
Mistrust, fear, despair, hopes concealed
Within the golden egg
Of my heart’s desires.

What will be
Gory mess, scattered scales,
Broken bones, sliced muscles
Severed vessel
Will be that’s all there is.
That’s all there ever was.

Longing for quick resolution
Transformation without pain
Is a cheat’s way out.
To gain legs
I must go through this
Have legs, will walk
Means accepting the price,
Heavy though that price may be.

What I wanted
What I want
What I worked towards
For so long
On the wisp of pure conjecture
For a promise now
Emptied of fulfilment
Like the rainbow filament strand
That connects my DNA
With past present future
Figures only slightly
In the equation
Of what I might attain.
Who do I think I am
– God – ?

Of Dead Cats and Getting to Know the Natives

2009-05-15T08:52:00.001-07:00

Of Dead Cats and Getting to Know the Natives
(c) Melina Magdalena (2009)

I am enjoying living in Kilburn. Outside our kitchen window is a large grevillea tree. When we first moved in we were a little dismayed by the tree. It is large, and was dominating the lemon tree which we considered to be of more use. We were not even sure what kind of tree it was, until my father took a cutting to a local nursery and returned with their verdict. A grevillea tree is a native and – what’s more, it is a flowering native. Clearly it does well in Kilburn. Soon after we moved in, small clusters of red blossoms began to appear as if at random, along its branches and at the tips. There is a small colony of honeyeaters (also native) which make their home in the grevillea tree. It is pleasant to stand at the sink and gaze at them as they flitter confidently about in the tree.
We did prune it back considerably during the last school holidays, mainly to give the lemon tree some chance at revival. It did the lemon tree no end of good and we even have lemon blossom at last, as well as a few ripening fruits. All is well, in our back yard.

Last Thursday we were sitting on our IKEA lounge under the window, yawning and chatting and generally winding down for the day. A knock came at the door, and it was our neighbour – two houses down. He brought us the unwelcome news that there was a dead cat on the corner. We looked out and saw the soft, dark heap. My heart gave a leap – after having already lost one of our cats since moving here, I hoped it wasn’t my Ripple. We walked over and saw a large, soft black and white cat, and I recognised it (I thought) as belonging to our across the street neighbour. We didn’t know what to do, and decided in the end to leave it until the morning for identification purposes. It seemed to have been struck by a car and to have crawled across to the safety of the street corner.

The neighbour who brought us the news is a native to Kilburn. He is one of those people who makes it his business to know what is going on in his street. He has a wealth of knowledge and a kind heard to go with it, so we don’t feel too impinged upon by his visits. His long experience in the area has given him a healthy perspective on what to expect from those of his community. This is useful for us, as we try to eke some credibility as new residents of Kilburn.

I spent some time next morning out by the back gate with the handy pruning saw, chopping up the grevillea and lemon tree branches that we’d removed from the trees several weeks earlier. They were too long and unwieldy for the bin, and we had nowhere to store them. So I reduced them to usable lengths – we have an 18th birthday bonfire coming up in October, stored them in the shed, and tidied up the area around our back gate. The cat was still there.

With no excuses left, I took my fork and went into the front yard to continue weeding our flower patch. Most of our front yard will be nativised (take a look at this website: http://www.backyards4wildlife.com.au/index.php?page=butterflies), but we’ve already planted a frangipani tree and some mint in the square outside the lounge room window. It’s a long job, clearing grass, and I want to try digging it out first, before simply poisoning the stuff. We’ve already got poppies and cornflowers sprouting in the area I cleared a couple of weeks ago.

Our across the street neighbour came out of her house, through her gate and across the street. My heart sank. “I just wanted to let you know,” she said, pointing to the cat, “that’s Nemo.” She had arranged for the council to pick him up and take him away, and turned down my offer of burying him in her back yard. I kept on digging until the council man came, and then I abandoned my silent vigil and put away the fork for another day.

We took this neighbour a home-decorated Easter egg several weeks ago. And she brought me some homegrown chrysanthemums out of her garden on Mother’s Day. Very sweet.

We were rather selective about whom to give our Easter eggs to. The Afghani family with whom we share a party wall, received some, of course. We’re hoping that over time we will get to know them and that they will become confident to share some of their culture with us. And our two houses down neighbour as well.

Since moving here, we’ve become aware of some of the issues that embroil this community. Groups of shiftless youths, some white, some black, some multicoloured, roam the streets from time to time. Clearly, they need something to occupy themselves. Our house was home to a drug-dealing prostitute before the public housing people put it on the market. There was a shooting here a while back, and there have been several murders in the suburb over the past couple of years. It’s generally been from native Kilburnites that we’ve received the response – you bought a house in Kilburn? Why?! Didn’t you know what it was like?

Our yard – front and back – is infested with couch grass. I think it is couch. My son scoffed at me recently when I mentioned it. Did he say it is kikuyu? I always imagined couch grass to be the sly, narrow-leafed grass that creeps its way in and takes hold before you even notice it. That’s not what we have. We’ve got the bold as brass bright green thick-leafed runner grass that pokes its nose out of freshly-weeded soil hours after you put away the fork. It is thriving here, and its long runners and juicy roots seem to be everywhere I stick my fork in and pull.

People do think we're a little crazy to think we can eradicate this grass by manual labour. My father has said patronisingly that we need to be left to make our own mistakes. He, like others is a keen promulgator of poison. We may yet need to resort to that.

There is a different ground-cover that we’ve noticed in the neighbourhood. It appears on the odd nature strip, as well as in our back yard. I was worried at first that it was three-corner jack, or some other kind of thorny creeper. It looks a little like creeping thyme, with small dark-green leaves a little grey on the underside, and tiny pink and mauve flowers. I think it’s very pretty actually. We took some to a nursery for identification, only to be told it is a weed and nursery folk are not interested in weeds. We tried again at another nursery and after asking friends, have decided it is a kind of saltbush, and does not produce thorns. So we’re keen to help it take over the areas where at the moment, the grass usurper reigns supreme.

However, the vegetable patch must naturally take some precedence, even over the native saltbush. It was while trying to dig up a patch of the stuff that I discovered its rooting nature to be quite different from the runner grass. Like everything else, our vege patch is a work in progress. At present it is comprised of two long and narrow beds (1.5m x 2.5m), with sleepers on either long side as the borders. The first one runs East – West, parallel to the side fence in the back corner. The second is splayed a little, running North-North-East – South-South-West, with the western end meeting at the corner of the first. Eventually, there will be six beds, each with a triangular path separating them, like a semi-circle.

Instead of sending out runners here there and everywhere, as the colonising grass does, the saltbush seems to grow from one very long, very thick, deep taproot. It spreads above the surface, but not below. I didn’t realise this until after cutting it back with the secateurs to make room for the vege patch, I realised I would need to dig one plant out completely. The fork, alas, was not much help. I got out the spade, but it would not cut that root. So I found myself on my knees with an old, blunt hatchet, chipping away at this root. The root was twisted and fibrous. It felt rather awful to be destroying it with such a blunt instrument. Perhaps next time I’ll sharpen the hatchet before I try this.

While digging and chipping and planning, I began to think about the process of developing our yard and creating our home. We have fairly clear ideas about why we chose Kilburn and how we hope to live here. We don’t mind at all, becoming part of its living history, as the colour of the community changes and transforms. We don’t mind coming into contact with its past history and the characters who inhabit its past. We are keen to be part of its future. We want our back yard to be productive, colourful and vibrant – to reflect in short, our inner lives, which is no small ambition.

I keep thinking about the native saltbush and the runner grass invader. It’s interesting that the native can survive and spread over the surface of a large area, through one large root. It’s almost as though this plant does not want to affect the soil beneath it, but just live cautiously, quietly, mindfully upon the surface. The grass on the other hand, behaves in a very different way. It pops up continuously, and sends its roots wastefully, capriciously in all directions, as though by doing so, it is guaranteed that part of it will succeed, somewhere, even if the rest is dug up or poisoned.

It reminds me of the different ways of different peoples. Some peoples recede into the background, doing their own thing, quietly getting on with life in an undemanding way. Others are much louder, more flamboyant – not only giving of themselves unasked and often unsolicited, but unaware of the impact they are having on their environment.

Where do we sit, along that continuum of extreme opposites? Are we not the enthusiastic invaders of this neighbourhood, determined to move in and make our mark? I’ve long considered myself to be essentially homeless as far as having sovereignty over a little piece of earth is concerned. I’m still getting to know myself as a homeowner. At the same time, I’m a homebody, and I enjoy pottering about, working on our garden, setting up and keeping house. I am drawn to my metaphor of living quietly and gently – not impacting or damaging this place that we have moved to. Perhaps it’s just one more thing to keep in mind as we continue our work in creating our home.

creeping saltbush

2009-05-15T08:49:00.000-07:00

birthday (2009)

2009-04-11T00:03:00.000-07:00

Birthday (2009)
© Melina Magdalena (2009)

1.
Gestation

becoming
rotating
nesting
listening
growing
moving
beating
beckoning
being

2.
Birth (one)

Shocking, bleeding, mess
Sucking, pulling, contracting
Bones shift, so that I become
Time stops – until
I arrive
Heart pumps
Lungs fill
Mouth opens

3.
Enslaved

Coming to was like
A growing awareness
Of a gnawing pain
So chronic it had passed unnoticed
As we had passed our years, our lives, our every days
In bondage.
Awareness changed to shame
Stripped to bare bone
Naked indiscretions exposed
To all and sundry
With nothing at all
To clothe ourselves
Or hide our shame.
No dignity
No shelter
No pride
No selfhood
No safety
We strove mightily
Under these conditions
Until
One magical day
Shame changed to rage
Anger stirred our hearts
We rose up as one
And departed from that place.

4.
Birth (two)

The Red Sea was no easy passage.
Wild waters rising up on either side,
Meeting far above our heads.
We ran for our lives
Through the narrow strait
Never questioning
Our final destination
Never stopping
To look back
At what we were running from
We lost our breath
And still the pressure
Of all that weight of water
Pushed us further in, further out.
Our blood drained of oxygen
We breathed water once more
Until, reaching the distant shore,
Every bone softened,
Every sinew stretched to breaking point,
Every muscle burning,
Drowned of thoughts and understanding,
Collapsed amongst the reeds
Allowed our lungs to fill
With the dry desert air
The taste of freedom
Reborn
Despite our never having planned this, either, of course
These things just happen.
But why do they happen to us?

5.
40 years of wandering

And now…
wandering
for forty years
through this desert
calling, calling
knowing this for certain
that all my plaintive melancholy
is all for this – for I am homeless
Wandering for forty years
fording creeks of fire
wallowing through quicksand
begging it to pull me
Down Down Down
into the bowels of the earth
where my skin might disappear
and where my bones might melt
into some form of someone else’s making
wandering for forty years
without guidance
without language
without purpose
without direction
without companion
without –
whilst within dull numb deadness
grappled in vain with turmoil and chaos
wandering wondering wandering
lack my defining characteristic

6.
This desert

This wondrous desert sand
red of the blood in my body
yellow of my skin
sticks to the hairs on my leg
creating friction between me
and the world that I live in
This miraculous desert sky
enfolds me in its depth
shelters me in peace
creates a veil that hangs between me
and the world I live in
This mysterious desert water
fragrant and life-giving
a well-kept secret
nourishes me
comes up and goes under
And around the world I live in
This treacherous desert path
wending and winding
un-mappable and mutable
a bridge that is teaching me
about the world I live in
These desert stars are music makers
moving of their own accord
offering hope amidst an inky sky
illuminating sternly,
the world in I live in
This unforgiving desert sun
casts shadows
makes wrinkles
causes thirst
a necessary solo star amidst a cast of millions
makes possible the world I live in

7.
Death by dessication.

Death by dessication.
Is this not what each of us faces?
Climate change our collective doom?
Souls shrivel, ideas wither, feelings die
Without lifegiving water to nourish them.

Death by dessication.
It’s a slow and painful attrition.
From the inside out,
Marrow crumbles to dust
Creative juices evaporate into thin air
Air cuts its way in and out of our lungs
With no attenuating moisture
to soften the blow
of every breath
Blood ceases to flow
Tongue loses its saliva
Eyes lose their tears
We have nothing left to give.

But before the death comes the living.
Nourished by means
We are unable to comprehend
Manna falling from the sky
Like snowflakes raindrops hailstones
Bringing us briefly to life again
Each time, each time, each time.
Life of dubious value
When it is borne of sameness
Repetition hones the senses
Until senselessness becomes our only escape.
But life nonetheless
Is what propels us
Footsore
Heartsore
Longingly
And clueless
From one end
To the other
And back again
We dared not leave the desert
For fear that what lay beyond
Might be even worse
Than the nothing that we had now
Or what we had left behind.
Fear marked us out
Drove us on.

8.
Letting Go

Fear and love
The driving forces
Loving nothing
Keeps us in limbo
Fearing
Keeps us in stasis
Fear and hope
Dichotomous poles
Hoping for something
Propels us to strive
Fearing
Renders us invisible
Fear and anger
Two sides of the same coin
Anger’s energy
Can bear poisonous fruit
Fear
Remains barren
Fear and Joy
Cannot co-exist
While joy
Banishes fear
Fear
Destroys all joyous potential
Sooner or later
We all have to choose
Fear
Or
Love

9.
Promised Land

I never dreamed of riches.
I never dreamed of love.
I never dreamed a wet, tropical night,
Lying fertile beneath a sky
Spread with sparkling jewels
Of promise, of hope, of a future
Crowded with possibility.

I never dreamed of those high places.
I never dreamed of climbing down.
I never dreamed of pointing out the crevices
Neither crushed, nor giving in
Each holding for dear life, what we consider precious
Reaching for a place of mutuality
In this process of transformation.

I never dreamed of strength.
I never dreamed of giving back.
I never dreamed that being intertwined
Mingled, nested, overcome by togetherness
Could feel like a new kind of freedom
Each of us in loving one another
Thereby loving ourselves.

I never dreamed of a companion.
I never dreamed her sweetness.
I never dreamed a partnership so vital,
With liveliness and laughter
Of unexpected pleasures and discoveries
Of family, of friends, of a lifetime
Of growing into one another.

10.
Decades

0-10 Birth growth movement food family friends language love wonder child
11-20 Teenage alienation depression aloneness school travel stain mark fail work
21-30 Growing learning cooking cleaning driving making moving sewing talking mothering
31-40 Resources choices support companion network prayer garden work loving life

Or Forever Hold Your Peace

2009-01-31T16:31:00.000-08:00

Or Forever Hold Your Peace
(c) Melina Magdalena 2009

I’m writing today from within the eye of the needle.

What is a needle? A needle is a tool. I use needles for sewing, for knitting, for mending, for weaving. I have used a needle to apply paint to a tiny surface. I have used a needle to prise a splinter out of my daughter’s foot, to scrape grime from beneath my fingernails. When I was ten or eleven a doctor used a needle to stich my lip in three places where I had bitten through it during a somersault on Kathryn Turner’s trampoline. After giving birth to my son, two surgeons stitched me up down below because I had torn myself badly in my haste and inexperience.

When I contemplate needles, the point of the needle comes immediately to mind. However, the last few weeks has also brought the eye of the needle to my attention, when I was able to assist three dear friends with threading their needles for sewing projects, including the chuppah we created for our Promise Making Ceremony and Celebration.

That’s another nice metaphor; gentler than pushing someone’s barrow for them. Used without literality, I am sure I have helped many other people to thread their needles so that they could get on with whatever projects their life journeys had laid out before them. I know many people help me to thread my needles, too. The magic of this metaphor lies in the possibilities not only of what might be done with that thread once it’s in the needle, but what kind of thread it is in the first place. I could for example, use a golden thread to sew a silver lining to the clouds that beckon on the horizon, for example.

I’m wondering what a needle has to do with gaining access to heaven.

To a micro-being, the eye of a needle must seem vast. Poking the point of a needle around in a Petri dish teeming with micro-organisms must be the equivalent of dropping bombs on fragile human communities. It wreaks death and destruction. This hardly evokes an image of heaven to my mind.

To a human being, whether she is rich or poor or somewhere in between, the eye of a needle is tiny.

In any case, we none of us gain access to heaven through the eye of a needle (Mark 10:22-25). A needle binds two pieces of fabric together, allows us to make things of function and beauty. It’s not a means for gaining access to heaven, and I will always prefer the concept of using the tools we humans have at our disposal, to create heaven on earth. It’s that old Tikkun Olam again.

I’m wondering about the meaning of life.

It’s a frequent preoccupation of mine, but I have reached my own conclusions and beliefs. They are not incompatible with those of some mainstream religious – at least where they are concerned with the implications for how I choose to live my everyday life.
I believe that life goes on before, during and after. I believe there is much more to Life than what we conventionally acknowledge – perhaps there are many more kinds of life which are distant from the narrow focus that human beings on this planet choose to include within the concept.

As to the belief that my actions today will determine my future – I have seen this enacted time after time within my present, so I do not discount the idea. However, I don’t have a strong or rigid idea of where “I” will “go” after “death”. I do not believe that my life journey is leading me either to the door of heaven or to the gates of hell.

Many people do believe this of course. They purport to know with maximum efficiency and minimum effort, just what rituals and choices they must make in order to determine their eventual destination. And this leads me to a whole set of other questions.

For people with such beliefs, just how does a person gain entrance to heaven? Apart from the gauzy gaudy idea of a reward for hard work and difficult choices, what purpose does heaven serve, in the life of a person here on earth?

Does one gain entrance to that heaven by hurting … judging … rejecting … through bigotry … building walls to separate … burning bridges to enlarge an already existing divide … directly condemning … explicitly refusing to affirm other people’s endeavours?

Is the quality of being saved more about belonging to a special chosen group of people, or is it more about the moment of salvation, which propels one’s feet upon a journey to seek commonality and to foster inclusion amongst those whose eyes remain closed to the possibility that they themselves are valued and loved, as members of the human family?

What people can be so arrogant as to assume that their feet alone keep to that true path, whilst simultaneously claiming that it is their mission to serve? How can they live lives of questioning, judgment and rejection; blinded to the fact that in doing so, they project their arrogant, parsimonious and uncaring attitudes onto everyone who is different, and on those who had believed that they were loved?

What kind of life is it, to be ever blinkered by the shadow of heaven hovering above, beckoning one away from temptation, removing from one’s gaze, every possibility that might lead one from the path?

I’m wondering about the rigidity of people’s beliefs when they encounter the truth about the nature of homosexuality and same-sex unions.

In the lead up to our ceremony, more and more people began to refer to it as our “wedding”. At the beginning, I was uncomfortable with the idea that we were going to “get married” – I preferred to mask reality behind the euphemism of making promises to one another. It felt good to be defiant in the face of the legal and religious opposition to our union. This awkward position between a so-called lifestyle choice that is too often linked with promiscuity, and a social convention of mandated coupledom was certainly a queer position for us to take.

I grew to accept that what we were doing was the same as what other couples choose to do – to seal our bond by openly and publicly stating our intentions to nurture one another within a life long partnership. I also grew much more comfortable with the idea that we were getting married, and I felt excited that we were having a wedding to ceremoniously celebrate this deed.

Although I had felt a little unhappy that “my” guest list was so much shorter than my beloved’s and that the distance most would need to travel precluded their attendance, the irresistible urge to be part of our wedding drew people from my circle into our lives with an ever strengthening undertow, the closer we came to January 17, 2009. It was so affirming for me that so many of my invited friends and family members made the effort to attend. I felt surrounded by their well wishes, love and support.

I’m wondering why someone who refused to make a square for our chuppah, and refused to give an rsvp to our promise making ceremony, on the basis that she believed that what we are doing is against god, might still choose to attend.

My beloved and I are the kind of serious people who practise liturgy often in our daily lives. We took a long time and expended a lot of energy in writing our promises, and in working out the logistics and specifics of our ceremony. This was important to us.

We wanted, for example, to welcome everyone who came to be part of our day. We specifically wanted to rejoice in what we were choosing whilst affirming the choices that others have made and the places they find themselves in that are different from ours. We have both spent large portions of our adult lives as single people. We know that this can often feel like a contested and defensive position. We know that people move in and out of partnerships and likewise feel ousted from the norm because of these circumstances. We know both first and second-hand how it feels to live under siege because we are in a minority. In a world where we as a lesbian couple are not always welcome and free, we wished to extend an open-handed welcome to others.

We had worked from the assumption that those who had chosen to be present had their reasons for their presence. Equally, we reasoned that people who chose not to attend had reasons for their non-participation.

It never occurred to me that people might choose to attend and stand in open judgment as witness to what they label as being “against God”. I can only ask what they hoped to achieve in so doing. Was their God paying attention at the time? Did they receive extra Brownie points in their favour? Or was it their intent to cause harm to the people who had invited them to be part of our special day?

I wonder whether they can understand that the fact they were invited points to the value we place on our relationship with them; the esteem in which we hold them; and our hope that this may be reciprocated. Certainly from my side, I chose not to invite people who have attacked me in the past, just because they happen to be family members.

I’m wondering about the motivations of someone who would place responsibility for attending our ceremony on those who invited her, rather than being accountable for her own uncomfortable feelings. If we hadn’t wanted her to attend, than surely we would not have issued an invitation?

I get, that it’s not pleasant to be the bearer of unwelcome news. I get the moral courage that it takes to stand against something that seems to be receiving overwhelming support from all other quarters. This ought to be obvious to anyone who changes his or her vantage point from that of rigidly religious righteousness to that of renegade.

It is my contention that people who fail to act upon that moral courage, as we did, for example, in celebrating our union and inviting our friends and family to be part of the occasion, can’t really claim to possess that moral courage.

It pisses me off that the rigid religious fail to acknowledge the effects of their actions and beliefs upon those they judge. They either fail to recognise that their choices are hurtful, or act in full knowledge that their actions will cause pain and distress. They fail utterly to stand in the shoes of someone else, and are incapable of contemplating how hard it is for others to stand up and be counted in the face of their implacable hatred and homophobia. This seems blatantly hypocritical and prideful, when the message they speak from the other side of their mouths is a message of love and acceptance.

The commonalities between our two positions are clear to me. Both of us feel we must defend our positions in the face of hostile or indifferent opposition. Both of us feel that it is only by digging in our heels and refusing to bend that we are being true to what we believe about ourselves. The difference lies in whether we choose to interact with and embrace our antagonist, or whether we hold ourselves separate and aloof in disapproving judgment.

I never imagined someone might offer to turn her back at any portion of the ceremony that she could not bring herself to affirm. Such rigid judgmentalism had no place in my thinking about our day.

I’m wondering why someone would explicitly choose his view of morality over his relationship with a person he had known all of his life.

On the one hand the stance this person chose shows integrity of the upright, courageous kind.

Never mind the fact that as the unknown member of this couple, I was automatically placed under suspicion and judged to be of dubious character and reputation before I had even met any of these people – I am used to being cast in that role. Yes, it hurts. And no – I felt no compunction to overdo my niceness and prove them wrong. I was quite willing to crawl into my shell and give nothing away.
I wonder how much it cost him, to make this stand, and to hammer in this point of contention, dismantling with hard intent, every point of connection that had previously existed between him and my dearly beloved?

I think this was perhaps the easier moral position to take. Facing the situation openly and honestly would have taken a different kind of courage, and would have been less destructive. He was not even willing to test the waters and seeing whether indeed any connection of value remained between them.

There was no specific place in our ceremony, where we demanded that those present affirm our relationship. We never asked for anyone who disapproved to make his or her disapproval known. Ours was a rewriting, a reframing and a refashioning of a traditional wedding ceremony. As women standing openly and proudly outside the laws of our religions and our country, we felt no compunction and little desire to adhere to traditions and forms that hold no meaning for us. We chose to develop a ceremony whose every facet would hold meaning for us.

I’m wondering whether any of them got it at all on the day, at the park, amongst the crowds of rejoicers.

Countering - OR It Must Be That Time Of Year Again

2008-11-29T13:57:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-21T13:00:00.001-08:00

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

2008-11-12T12:23:00.000-08:00

The Party Popper Incident
(c) Melina Magdalena 2008

my lips are sealed
I promised.

Smelly Compost

2008-10-18T02:54:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-06T18:26:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-07T14:47:00.000-07:00

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.

hit counter

2008-09-01T02:19:00.000-07:00

Free Counter

Breaching the Peace - AIDEX 1989 and 1991

2008-08-23T04:12:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-28T01:57:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-13T22:16:00.001-07:00

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

2008-06-15T02:05:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-30T16:29:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-05-24T04:39:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-15T23:33:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-07T17:36:00.000-08:00

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.

T-Shirt Corruption

2008-02-29T22:19:00.000-08:00

T-Shirt Corruption
© Melina Magdalena 2008

Synchronicity comes to me this week in the loose conjunction of four events. Firstly, I read A Thousand Splendid Suns, my birthday present from my own splendid son, and the oppression of women in Afghanistan has been heavily on my mind; secondly a teacher at my school displayed a blatant disregard for democratic process and has deprived a fairly elected young Afghan woman of her position of President in our school’s newly formed service club because she is a young Muslim woman; thirdly, a male colleague asked me recently what I thought about a South Australian parliamentarian who blamed the t-shirts women wore, for their being raped; and finally let’s not forget the commemoration of International Women’s Day this week, the eighth of March.

T-Shirt Culture
Just before Valentine’s Day this year, Independent MP Bob Such is reported to have accused women who wear t-shirts with provocative slogans, of demeaning their sex, and encouraging sex attacks. The article does not describe the T-Shirts to which he refers. I was naturally outraged when I heard about this on commercial radio as I drove to school that day.

Such sensationalised trivialised news items always trigger me back to a moment when I remember what I was wearing when I was raped – a flannelette nightgown. Hardly provocative, you might say. And where was I? Tucked up in my own bed.

DO RAPISTS STOP TO READ THEIR VICTIM’S T-SHIRTS? I DON’T THINK SO.

It reminds me of Ramadan 2006, when Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali compared uncovered women to abandoned meat that the cats will come and eat. Remember that?

I don’t know about you, but I don’t tend to go out and eat the meat I find in the street; nor have I ever been tempted to leap upon and have sex with men who wear provocative and demeaning t-shirts, not even during my most desperate sperm-seeking adventures.

I am neither cat, nor man – and I wish no disrespect to either creature. Cats are known to be discriminating. Cats are known to be survivors. Men are human beings, with the same capacity for compassion and empathy as women. I don’t believe it is because a man is a man that he rapes. This proposition is as demeaning and outrageous as the proposition that a woman is to blame for being raped, because of the clothing another woman was wearing. Where is the causal link?

When a (male) colleague raised this issue with me in the staff room recently, I was speechless. I gazed at him with pity and horror – after all, he has two young sons himself. Does he really believe men cannot control their sexual impulses and lust for power over women? I wanted to say to him – just listen to what you’re saying for a moment. Where is the logic? Do you believe this about yourself? And what does it say, about the way you relate to me?

Instead I said simply “No, the women who wear those t-shirts are not the women who get raped.”

As for the t-shirts that I have seen on men’s bodies in the last year or so, here in Australia, where the culture of alcohol prevails, these t-shirts frequently have lewd, crude, boozy messages on them, whether displayed pictorially, through stick figures, or with words. I no more enjoy seeing men dressed in clothes that display their apparently cavalier and uncaring attitude towards women, than I enjoy seeing women who are dressed in clothes that to me, scream sensuality and sexuality. I don’t think this is a new phenomenon, although perhaps the rise of so-called raunch culture amongst young Australian women might be seen as something new, though the web references to it date back to 2006. It’s something I know little about, and find confrontingly uncomfortable.

In some ways it’s odd to compare the ubiquitous and concealing baggy t-shirt favoured by so many people, with the scant, flesh-revealing styles of dress favoured by many contemporary women. From what Bob Such said, it seems it’s the almost defiant messages on the t-shirts worn by young women that have caught and offended his eye, rather than the flashy eye candy of the sleazy and skanky.

I note that Khaled Hosseini quoted in A Thousand Splendid Suns the decree of the Taliban as they took power in Kabul, 1996, several special laws:

Attention women:
You will stay inside your homes at all times. It is not proper for women to wander wimlessly about the streets. If you go outside, you must be accompanied by a mahram, a male relative. If you are caught alone on the street, you will be beaten and sent home.
You will not, under any circumstance, show your face. You will cover with burq when outside. If you do not, you will be severely beaten.
Cosmetics are forbidden.
Jewellery is forbidden.
You will not wear charming clothes.
You will not speak unless spoken to.
You will not make eye contact with men.
You will not laugh in public. If you do, you will be beaten.
You will not paint your nails. If you do, you will lose a finger.
(Khaled Hosseini (2007), A Thousand Splendid Suns, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New York and Berlin; pages 248-249)

I am tempted to ask – for whose protection are women to be so severely restricted? Is it that men risk their afterlives because they may come into contact with a provocative force so strong that they may temporarily forget their own humanity and commit acts of such depravity that G-d will not forgive them?

Is a woman not a human being? Is she not worthy of freedom of expression, freedom of movement – of laughter, for heaven’s sake? It is such apparently small things that make life worth living.

Service Clubs
Our school has a philosophy of peace and multiculturalism. It is our explicit aim to educate our students so that they may fully embrace life in Australia. Explain to me then how it can come about that a miscarriage of justice is justified and talked away. How does this not contradict everything our school stands for?

I recently took my class to the Australian Electoral Commission, where they learned about elections, the history of voting in Australia, and had a mock election to demonstrate how preferential voting works. The phrase that our guide used continually, was that Australia has free and fair elections. Not one of my adult students had ever had the opportunity to vote in a government election.

How an election which a student won by a landslide, chosen by her peers for the leadership qualities they see in her every day, can be distorted into invalid because of her success, makes no sense to me. As another teacher exclaimed angrily, it does violence to our students who are taught that elections in Australia are free and fair.

The only reason offered for this distortion and perversion was that a young Muslim woman would not be allowed to go out at night and therefore cannot be the president of a service club.

Let alone the obvious answers to this claim – the young woman in question enjoys a trusting relationship with her parents who are also adapting to the different demands of Australian public life, and she is in fact awarded a degree of independence that reflects her background and has shaped her into the person she is – the teachers who decided she could not take on the role she was elected to came to this conclusion without even talking to the person in question. She would not have accepted her nomination, had she believed she would not be able to do a good job in all aspects of the role.

I’m spitting mad about this, but the issue has been hushed up and whitewashed. It smacks of paternalism and racism, and has burst my bubble about my workplace and colleagues.

Happy International Women’s Day 2008.
Clearly, there is more work to be done.

Apology and Dissent - The BIG But!! (part two)

2008-02-16T19:00:00.000-08:00

Apology and Dissent - The BIG But!! (part two)
(c) Melina Magdalena

Well well well, I am so happy that Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd spoke an apology on my behalf and on behalf of Australian people past and present, for the horrors, atrocities, bureaucracratic abuses and other wrongs committed by us and on our behalf, with our tacit assent and ignorance, towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of this continent and nation. I was lucky enough to be able to turn on the radio and listen to his address last Wednesday, along with my students, and some other teachers who wanted the opportunity to be part of this occasion. We then had a vigorous and interested discussion about Australia's track record and history, which my students were ready for, all having lived here now for between 3 years and 6 months.

And what I'd wanted to go on and say on this topic has of course changed with changing circumstances... When I Google 100 revs now, I am no longer directed to motorhead sites. Instead, there are numerous articles, letters and posts about the Reverends who hope to march in Sydney's Mardi Gras next month. More on that in a moment.

I also got a direct email reply from my MP, Pyney himself - a surprise. Perhaps I could interpret it as an oblique apology thrust in my direction, for treating me as an insignificant minion whose experiences and ideas were not worth regarding. Or perhaps he sent the same pdf copy of the Sunday Mail article to the thousands in his electorate, who responded to GetUp's call to keep the Liberals humble, and join in The Apology?

My first day back at work this year consisted of a day-long professional development workshop about restorative justice in schools and classrooms. It was my first formal introduction to the ideas and the process.

Restorative Justice can begin with the recognition that forcing an insincere apology from a wrongdoer who is ignorant of what harm s/he has instigated and of its consequences for the wronged, is utterly meaningless, and dissatisfying for both sides. As a young parent I had it modelled to me time and again “Say Sorry!” And again, with a threat to back it up “Say sorry, or you won’t…” Clearly, it was a social convention, and did little to repair the damage or the relationships involved.

So what is the value of Apology?

Apology is an open-handed gesture that someone makes with a particular intention.

The intention can be to preserve the status quo; stop the boat from rocking anymore; pull back from a previously-stated position because it’s too scary to keep up one’s outrage or distance from the fold. This kind of Apology is about giving one’s power away, and placing it at the feet of the Authorities. The Apologiser becomes weaker as an effect of guilt and shame.

You will note my use of “Apologiser” and not “Apologist”. If Apology is made in order to maintain a phony harmony and power-stricken status quo, the Apologiser is in effect, an Apologist for that status quo. A little like the reaction to Brendan Nelson’s so-called Apology (paraphrased as – we did it for your own good, and it hurt us just as much as it hurt you, and you don’t even have the grace to be grateful for our attempts to save you from yourselves).

Apology is just the beginning - the opening of the window of opportunity for a new way of relating.

A sincere Apology is an acknowledgment of Harm, more than it is about wrongdoing, blame or punishment. A sincere Apology is not an easy thing to offer. It takes great moral courage, particularly when the implications are that things are going to have to change. That kind of Apology is about rocking the boat and making a noise.

In Apologising, one can feel bereft of potency – who is to say that my Apology will be accepted with the same sincerity with which it is given? Who is to say that the Harmed Person or People will understand and believe my contrition and my regret? And furthermore, in making this Apology I must acknowledge that the effects of my Harm are further reaching, more deeply rooted, and longer lasting than ever I imagined. The more I listen, the more is exposed; the more deeply I fall into that pit of despair. I must see, and accept the effects of this Harm, no matter where and how it began. My accountability is to the Present, whilst I cannot alter the Past. In making my Apology, I am setting a new course for the Future.

There were some letters in the Sydney Star Observer, in response to 100 Revs. One of them in particular I think demonstrates the ongoing effects of harm and how the effects manifest themselves as they bounce from hurt to anger to fear to anger to hurt again. Can a guarantee be given, that an Apology will not cause further Harm, by raising expectations of healing that are never achieved?

The Harmed often carry a great deal of anger for what has been done to them, and the effects of this. There is no guarantee of graciousness towards the Apologiser. In this sense, an Apology must be unconditional. It is possible that the Harmed are not ready to accept a burden of working with the Apologisers to create new ways of relating. It is possible that the Harmed are stuck inside the web of their distress. When this happens, it does not render an Apology meaningless. It means the Apologiser must seek other, less direct avenues for making amends and creating a new Future.

I think we must remain open to the possibilities that a sincere and unconditional Apology creates.

Here’s an example of an Apology that is sincere but conditional:
Imagine if you will, an Institution with a long history of maltreatment of certain minorities. The maltreatment involves spreading vicious rumours, exclusion and stigmatisation and denial of access or comfort. One day, the Institution is forced to acknowledge and recognise the far-reaching effects of its policies, processes and the behaviours its adherents have promulgated in the name of Convention and not rocking the boat. The Institution makes a decision to formally apologise to the Wronged. The Apology is sincere. The people in the Institution genuinely regret the effects of their policies, processes and behaviours. If they could just separate the effects from the Wronged, (whose behaviour – alas – continues to contravene Convention), perhaps the Wronged would relent and change their ways? Then everyone would be on the same side, and we would all have a happy and unified ending.

The point is, that Apology is not about taking sides, but about building bridges.

The 100 Revs are not requiring those within the GLBTIQ communities who have been harmed by the treatment in churches to change themselves at all, in order for their sincere Apology to be offered. The whole point of taking their Apology onto GLBTIQ turf (the Mardi Gras) is to meet the Harmed in a place where the Harmed are more powerful and have more voice than those who are making the Apology. It is a humble gesture, and one which has caused controversy within the GLBTIQ communities, which, it must be acknowledged, are themselves far from homogenous.

The relationship between Apology and Dissent has something to do with Moral Courage. In acknowledging that things are not perfect, one expresses a desire for change. The effect of a sincere and unconditional Apology can be to shake the very fabric of Convention and tearing at the roots of what passes for a Peaceful Society.

What responsibilities do we have, as Australians who are part of an openly multicultural and culturally diverse society? Must we forever be engaged in acts of Apology, in order to co-exist, because our differences are brought to the fore, whilst our commonalities are reduced to the banal? Surely this is a negative spin on the cultural diversity? Is there not more that unifies us, than divides?

Dissent is a verb of action, whilst Dissension is a noun, a state of being. There are many ways to dissent. Some promote peace; some promote revolution and violence. Fomenters of dissent all work within the understanding of a need for deep and radical change at the heart of the matter.

To dissent is to act when we recognise the need for change. Dissent implies the acknowledgment of Harm, and Dissent can only begin from that recognition. It takes a great deal of moral courage to act in such situations. It means separating oneself from the fold of convention, stepping out and making a noise to attract the attention not only of the Wronged, but also of those who continue to harm, either with intention or through malicious ignorance. Apology is one of the first meaningful actions of Dissent.

It’s nice to think we can all exist in our disconnected bubbles of homogeneity, where everyone thinks and behaves like me, and we all feel safe and comfortable all the time, because we know what’s expected and that’s not too hard to keep up.

Trouble is, as self-seeking and comfort loving as Australia has become, we are also embroiled in serious exploration of individuality and expressions of freedoms. The implications are severe. Our bubbles are not homogenous. The illusion is shattered, every time some individual chooses a different path, and takes it unashamedly, insisting on his or her right to do so and furthermore demanding unconditional acceptance from everyone else.

We are not a homogenous society or culture. It’s about time our thinking caught up with our reality.

When someone comes out as being other than heterosexual, it takes enormous moral courage. An analogy for what it takes to step outside the bubble of one’s comfort zone is the crazy idea that a fish might one day decide for no particular reason that any of its cronies can comprehend, that it wants to live on the land now, and not in the water. Its cronies are too busy running around and asking stupid questions, comparing notes, spreading rumours about the land-dwelling fish, to see that there are vital aspects of that land-dwelling fish’ life that remain the same, and also that the land-dwelling fish would be much happier if her cronies and associates chose to support her in her new venture, rather than condemn her and whisper behind her back; let alone acknowledge what an incredibly brave and gutsy thing she is choosing to do, despite all the flack she is copping from left, right and centre.

And this is where response to the 100 Revs from within their own bubbles, falls far short of the mark. The coming out that the 100 Revs are doing, concerns the idea that belonging could be extended beyond the strict borders of conventionality and heteronormativity, to encompass a broader understanding of human sexuality within the beliefs and thinking of what it is to be Christian, than what has commonly been accepted by church-goers.

Apology and Dissent - the big BUT!!! (Part One)

2008-02-09T22:52:00.001-08:00

Apology and dissent – the big BUT!!!
PART ONE © Melina Magdalena 2008

I began this week with a sour taste in my mouth; realizing that my refusal to consider my Uncle F’s apology to my parents was pushing me into the same corner he was trying to scramble out of.

Then came an email from GetUp requesting me to write to my local MP, seeking support for Prime Minister Rudd’s commitment to saying Sorry. My local MP is smarmy Liberal politician Christopher Pyne. I wrote a short, but passionate email, urging him to support The Sorry on the basis that it is just, necessary and important for his future credibility, the credibility of his Party but most of all, for the credibility of the apology that Rudd will make on my behalf, and on behalf of us all, for the wrongdoings past and present Australian perpetrate against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of this nation.

Next, I received an email from my sweetheart’s parents. They are among the group of reverends who intend to march in this year’s Sydney Mardi Gras, bearing a public apology to “gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people” for the way they have been treated in general, by churches and the people who attend them. To see their full apology, go here (100 Revs). This endeavour has been widely reported in the last few days. I have heard that those involved are suffering repercussions for the stand that they are choosing to take. Here’s one of the news stories that caught my attention. It links Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations with the 100 Revs.

On Lesbian_Parents_Australia this week, a focus has been on the issue of which schools will welcome our children. Many mothers on the site have had bad experiences as non-heterosexuals growing up Catholic, and also with working in Catholic schools. They do not wish their children to grow up stigmatized. This is their basis for choosing not to subject their children to an education in a Catholic school.

So apology has been on my mind a great deal, as my students returned to school and I began my second year of teaching.

We spent a great deal of time in the classroom on Monday discussing and committing to a set of classroom rules and expectations. This group of students has already had up to one year of schooling in an Australian context, and was quickly engaged in a process that is already familiar to them. We made our list, and felt good about it.

Yesterday, a young Sudanese woman interrupted class with a “What the HELL are you doing?” to a young Afghan man as he walked past her, to his seat. I didn’t catch what the hell he had done, and my automatic reaction was to question the woman, rather than the man – I am sorry for this, because it works directly against the principles of Restorative Justice , to which our school is committed. I feel that my reaction definitely falls into a “blaming the victim” mode. I do not know what happened in my classroom, except as a teacher, who was interrupted mid-flow by an interaction, accidental or purposeful, between two students of different genders and different cultural perspectives.

In speculating, it could be the man brushed past her accidentally. This woman often sits with her chair very far out from the desk, in order to work closely at her exercise book. It could be he touched her head (a severe cultural taboo) because she was not wearing one of her wigs that day, and this particular student has a fascination (borne of envy) with African hair. Or it could be something completely different.

Like so many classroom incidentals, it has been left unexamined and unresolved. If we were to devote our full attention to such occurrences each time they arose, we would have scarcely any time for teaching of the content that is deemed so vital.

On the other hand, such classroom incidentals clearly indicate a need for finding a way to work within our multicultural and culturally diverse communities so that we do not end up at perpetual war with one another.

To summarise, the focal points for me this week are:
· Homophobia
· Cultural Diversity
· The nature of formal apology
· Harm and Harmony

And that’s all I’ve managed to pull together this week. More next week, I hope.

Bones in the Family Closet

2008-02-01T18:09:00.000-08:00

Bones in the Family Closet and Why I Won't Be Going There Again
(c) Melina Magdalena 2008

Well this is unbelievable, except that he's done it so many times before. I suspect my uncle expects us all to just forgive and forget, like the good Christians we aren't. I think I've had it this time around.

My inbox just went BEEP, as I was sitting here, minding my own business, preparing a worksheet for my students. My first thought was - oh goodie, another person responding to my birthday party invitation - and then I saw the sender's name, and the subject header RE: Children's 'Education' Accounts. My heart skipped a beat or two as I contemplated whether to open the email, fearing I would be subjecting myself to another torrent of abuse and racial vilification, but I went ahead and opened it, ready to delete at a moment's notice, if necessary.

Some background -
In 1980, after my parents brought us to Australia for the second time, it was clear we would be making this our permanent home. To their dismay, we were followed within 2 years by my mother's mother, her second husband, and their youngest two children my Uncle F, who is three years my senior, and my Aunt X, a year my junior. Much more is tucked away in our Family Closet, unspoken and unseen, than is talked about, but these things nevertheless enact their toll upon us all from time to time, as we are held accountable for the actions of our forebears, and find ourselves struggling for breath in the stranglehold of past wrongs that were never revealed, let alone amended.

Forgive the obtuse nature of these revelations - obviously I can't just lay it all out on the table here publically, lest I risk finding myself up to the neckio in legal proceedings by irate family members intent upon preserving the afterlife dignity of the aforementioned. Besides, since no one is willing to go beyond the Pale of Denial and talk about it, nothing has been proved. Without the evidence, all I have ever had to go on, is its very real and somewhat painful consequences.

So, as far as extended family goeth, I have only my aunt and uncle, their spouses and children (4 boys between them) here in Australia. I don't know my American family.

Although my beloved grandmother (their mother) seemed to take a long time between declining and then dying, it all happened in the space of a few intense months, during which I spent a lot of time visiting her in hospital, at home, at hospital again, and finally in the nursing home. I would not change anything about this experience even if I could. I have no regrets and no guilt in my heart, where she is concerned. We had a deeply honest, compassionate and loving relationship; I feel loved and cherished by my grandmother, and I believe she knows how much I loved and cherished her in turn. The only topic we didn't discuss was her late husband. So you can see I held up my end of the bargain, and kept the closet doors firmly childproofed and locked.

In the absence of any other likely villains, Uncle F leapt, quite early on in his career, upon my parents as the source of his anger, alienation and general frustration. Time and time again would go round and round the cycle of betrayal, abuse, apology and contrition. It started when he was quite young. He would steal something from them; sometimes something very precious, such as my great-grandfather's collection of stamps. Spectacularly outraged by the accusation, Uncle F would do a disappearing act. Unlike the stamps, he came back eventually. In returning, he'd try one of two tactics
(a) do a prodigal son manoeuvre and expect to be feasted and feted as the returned lost prince
or
(b) crawl back in on his belly, lower than the proverbially malilgned snake, expecting forgiveness in greater measure than his self-loathing.

As time went on and history repeated itself in expanding histrionics, Uncle F was more often met by suspicion and hurt, than welcome. We're only human, after all.

I would have to say he had it fairly tough, but certainly no tougher than any of us. I first became villainised after he moved out of my house. I was a young wife and mother, going through the great life changes that wifedom and motherhood tend to engender, along with all that other stuff I went through at the same time. Uncle F moved in, took advantage, embellished and embroidered his victim state that had led him to be homeless, ate, drank and made merry and never contributed to household expenses until he moved out again, trailing a wake of anger and hurt behind him that we would feel he ought to have behaved any differently towards us, the only members of his family at that time, who would give him the time of day.

Tja!

whatever!

Ah, the ebbs and the flows... I am reminded of "Watershed", that Indigo Girls' song in which they sing
Every five years or so I look back on my life
And I have a good laugh.
You start at the top, go full circle round
Catch a breeze, take a spill
But ending up where I started again makes me wanna stand still.

Then one day Uncle F found his God and His God found him. He was saved and forgiven for all past wrongdoings - and forgive my faulty understanding of the subject at hand, but it seems he considers himself forgiven of any future misdemeanours as well. The idea of being saved and forgiven extends itself widely from past, through present, to distant future. There is nothing he need do in the meantime, to preserve his State Of Grace. He is free from blame, free from responsibility, free from relationship or consequence.

Considering that Unvle F's transformation more or less coincided with my branch of the family's finding our Jewish feet, some conflict was sure to ensue. I can believe we found the same God, even though I've actually been a believer of some description, all my life. The expressions of our faithful selves naturally took quite divergent paths. We were no more open to expressing ourselves as Christians, than Uncle F was to express himself as a Jew, despite the fact that it was the same family member - my grandmother, his mother, my mother's mother, whose heritage had led us finally to our home of faith.

And so we painted another layer of mutual distrust onto the surface of our Family Closet.

When my grandmother died, she left me a small inheritance - something I had neither anticipated, nor expected. I was dismayed to learn she had left considerably less to her youngest children, my Uncle F and my Aunt X, and I was worried about this on two levels. On the one hand I felt it was unfair, and that as her mere granddaughter, I had no right to my inheritance. On the other hand I was afraid that there would be consequences to my grandmother's choices. I was reassured by various family members, including my Uncle F and my Aunt X, that my grandmother (their mother) had good reasons for choosing to distribute what she could not take with her in the way that she did; and that I should discard any feelings of discomfort about it. So I did.

My mother, (their sister) took steps to pre-empt disturbing consequences, and make amends for her late mother's (in)discretions. She decided she would like to take part of what her mother had left her, and give it to her nephews - the children of Uncle F and his wife, and Aunt X and her husband. In doing so, she enlisted my support. She knew I was on fairly good terms with the pair of them, and she knew that as her only adult child who was in the same city, it would be practical for us to share the signatory role to the accounts she set up in her nephews' names. I agreed to this.

It means that every time I get a bank statement, indeed every time I take a look at my bank accounts online, I get to see the accounts of my four young cousins (aged 1 - 8 years). It has been wryly frustrating over a summer of earning no income, to see my accounts gradually dwindle to nothing, whilst theirs maintain their steady, slow upward pace.

When all this took place, my mother contacted her brother, Uncle F, and her sister, Aunt X, and explained her intentions. These were immediately dismissed and rewritten by her outraged brother, who accused her amongst other things, of believing him to be incapable of providing for his own children. Nevertheless, the accounts exist, and my mother adds to them from month to month, because otherwise they would no accrue any interest at all. My Aunt X has taken quite a different view of the opportunity, and contributes to her son's account quite regularly. The boys will gain access to this money, such that it is, when they turn 18 years old.

As signatory to the accounts, I was fortunate enough to be the recipient of a vitriolic email addressed to my mother from her brother (Uncle F) in January this year. In this email, he accuses my parents of stealing Aunt X's money that she has been contributing to A's (her son) account, in order to fund their own bathroom renovations. Here are some excerpts from this first email, provided as examples of the nature of his communication to us.

"I think it's pretty obvious that I was wrong, and that you are in fact nothing more then [sic!] hypocritical thieves, liars and con-artists ..." (21/1/08)
"I have writen today to ask you (assuming you haven't already spent their
money on your bathroom rennovations [sic!] and/or all the other things I hear
you've been spending on) to transfer B, K and W's deposits directly to X ... to partially remunerate them for the money you so shamelessly have stolen from them."

Now when tempers flare, this kind of strong language is to be expected. What really offends and hurts me is Uncle F's misuse of certain Jewish texts, in this case what he calls "The Gemara (A key part of The Talmud - every Jew's most 'sacred' oral
tradition)" to back up his reasoning for why my mother and father would have behaved in the way he accuses them of behaving.

I am no Jewish scholar. I have not studied anyone's Bible or other religious texts, and I have never claimed to cling to Torah, Talmud or Bible as a person who takes them literally. I think to take such a complex set of texts literally would be crazymaking, because they are narratives that interweave, explore, cry out in anguish and despair, explain, rejoice, contradict and question, as much as they instruct. This I know from my limited experience as a Shul-attending Jew, which I was, for a few years.

Part of Uncle F's transformation into what he calls a Christian has involved a lot of study. He uses this study to explain and justify his behaviours, whether they have been to label his mother and sister as "evil incarnate", or to deny his children any contact with "magic" via evil Disney cartoons.

Setting aside my previous assertion that it could be taking his Bible literally that has produced such crazymaking, I am deeply wounded by my Uncle F's using his so-called knowledge of Judaism to accuse his sister and brother-in-law of theft.

I realised I could not let this lie unchallenged. I could no longer maintain any level of relationship with my Uncle F, if he were so cruel, disrespectful and abusive. The terms he lays out in this email are terms I can no longer condone or ignore. So I replied to him. Here is some of what I write:

"Dear F,
"I am not sure how to respond to this email. It makes me shrivel up inside and want nothing to do with you ever again. And this is such a shame, because I enjoyed visiting you and your family on Christmas Day, and had thought you accepted me as part of your family.... I would like you to refrain from using the Bible and Talmud to back up your defamatory, hurtful, disrespectful and abusive accusations. It seems such hypocrisy that you adhere to a religion that preaches such hatred against others whilst speaking from the other side of its metaphorical mouth of love. I can't see any love in what you've written here, to my mother and your sister....
"As an out lesbian, I know I need to tread carefully around you and your belief system. I have tried hard not to offend you. It is ironic that despite my efforts, you appear to make no consideration on my behalf. Consider for a moment how it feels as a lesbian and a Jew, to receive these accusations? They affect me no less than they affect my parents. There is absolutely no sense of relief in my mind to realise at this moment that you do not accept me; and that on the contrary you deride and revile my existence as a lesbian and a Jew; your niece; the cousin of your children. I had hoped to maintain a friendly and civil relationship with you on terms that I could accept. However, I cannot accept the terms you present in this hateful email to my mother....
"There is no truth in your accusations. I shall not dignify them with a detailed response." (23/1/08)

Clearly, I opened myself up to his further abuse. It did not take long.

".... Melina, I could understand your being upset if I were offering my
interpretations. After all, I am not Jewish, and I have only studied Judaism (off and on) since 2000 to try to understand your parents better. (About 1 year of full time study over those 8 years.) However, because I did't [sic!] offer interpretations cannot understand your being upset at quoting your own oral tradition to you....
"Perhaps your [sic!] upset at having the truth thrust into your face? If so, don't
blame me for the fact that you're following Rabbi's [sic!] so corrupt that G-d sent
His people into captivity through The Babylonianians in the 6th Century BCE
to force them to turn back to Him!
"If you don't like/agree with what's in the Babylonian and Jurusalem [sic!] Talmuds,
I suggest you find another set of beliefs. ....
"I think it's really sad that:
(1) You take personal offense to an email not specifically addressed to you
(2) That you can somehow conclude that I'm attacking your sexuality!!!???
(3) That you can discount my actions to bipolar or some other mental deficiency
(4) That you can attack me for no other reason then I'm trying to help my sister
(5) That you twist my words so... incompetently!!! ....
"This email is one of the worst examples of deflection I've seen in a long time. With your high IQ, combined with your formal education I really expected a lot more... Frankly, I've seen people with half your IQ and no matriculation do far better at changing subjects and avoid accountability." (23/1/08)

I did not reply to this email, but the torrent did not end, there. The next day, I got more in my inbox from him. I could not bear to read it, and stashed it in my 'family' file until today. OK, I've gathered my strength. This time, he makes no pretense of writing to me. After a series of 20 progressively vile, disgusting and violent quotes:

"Oh, I could quote many many A4 size pages containing the vile filth Rabbi's [sic!] have claimed to have been passed on by Moses in your written traditions...
Things these vile individuals claim to be as equally divinely inspired by the All Mighty as the ten commandments, the prophets and the pentatuch [sic!] - but so obviously are so obviously not that Jesus called them painted tombs full of dead mens [sic!] bones. (Beautiful on the outside but dead on the inside.)
"Now... I have shown you MANY examples of religious hatred in your most current and so-called 'holy' writtings... I hereby challenge you to list one (single) solitary example of the teaching of religious hatred by Christianity to justify your false accusation." (24/1/08)

MOST CURRENT?????

What century is this idiot living in, I ask you!

On the subject of my sexuality, he tells me of his sister-in-law, a woman I've never heard him speak of before. Apparently she and her female lover visit Uncle F reguarly:

"We do not treat them any differently then the way we have ever treated you at any time. We do not 'hate' either of them (or you) we love them - just as we love you. We love them as purely as we can - doing our utmost to treat them as Jesus did when he ministered to the prostitutes, murderers, liars, thieves, tax-collectors and/or any other kind of sinner the Pharrisees [sic!] and Saducees condemned as worthy of death by stoning.
"They (the religious leaders of Israel) didn't understand that Christ came not to condemn, but to to turn all sinners back to the Father anymore then you do." (24/1/08)

WHOAH - I can tell you it made me feel a WHOLE lot better to know that my Uncle F regards me and my so-called "lifestyle" in the same category he regards prostitutes, murderers, liars, thieves, tax-collectors and so on. I can also safely assert he does not show the same degree of lovingkindness to my parents, whom he at this point in time also considered to be thieves. He concludes by calling me crazy.

"I think you need serious help when you write things like the above to me.
"Perhaps I will address the more crazy stuff you wrote another time... I'll think about it after I've calmed down." (24/1/08)

My replies to this email are terse "don't bother, F" (24/1/08) and "F, Do not email me again." (24/1/08)

to which he confidently and in sane? mind replies:
"If you cannot accept what I have written, that's fine, and I'll be happy to accept that and not initiate further unwelcome contact...
When you email me, I have the right to reply. Stop emailing me, and I'll stop replying... It's really that simple!"

Unfortunately, is isn't that simple. I did not reply, but alas, received another email from Uncle F today. I paste it here in its entirety, without [sic!]s. He addresses my mother, who is Y. My father is L:

"Y,
"X just rang me to confirm that it was in fact the Bank that had made an accounting mistake which proved your and Ls innocence from all/any wrong-doing regarding the gift account you setup for A.
"I should have known that my initial belief was correct (that you and L are not thieves) and apologise for coming to the wrong conclusion.
"Aditionally, it occurs to me that it is not impossible that you did not know some of the deeper writings - afterall, not everyone studies their history as deeply as I have studied Judaism, and not everyone follows the teachings of Judaism totally.
"Regardless, I am gratified to have been proven wrong, and unconditionally apologise for accusing you of theft, as well as unconditionally apologise for making assumptions that you followed Judaisms total teachings word for word; and hope that 2008 is a fantastic year not only for you - but for all those you care about as well.
"F"

I shan't reply to this further confirmation of his loopiness. I take no responsibility for his loopiness. I won't be going there again.

Adventures in Stasiland (1985)

2008-01-25T23:44:00.000-08:00

Adventures in Stasiland (1985)
(c) Melina Magdalena 2008

As I write this post, on Australia Day 2008, I call to mind my younger self on Australia Day 1985, as she prepared to journey to West Germany for a 12 month student exchange. I was 15 years old, and had led a politically sheltered existence. I knew very little of what was going on in the world, and was not prepared for making decisions and choices based on oppression, social justice or politics. I was travelling on a US passport. I only became naturalised as an Australian citizen in 1988, when I was 18 years old.

I'm also revelling in the return of my daughter, after a 2 month student exchange to Vannes, France. She stayed with a family and went to school there, but apparently spent most of her time wandering around the medieval city with the other exchange students. School was irrelevant and boring, and the French students weren't much interested in mixing with the exchange students. It's good to have her home, and to hear the stories she has to tell, about being a foreigner in France.

This afternoon I finished reading Where the Road Leads (2007), the memoires of Jean Calder, an Australian woman who has spent her adult life working with people with disabilities in Lebanon, Egypt and the Gaza Strip. As I reflect on what the Berlin Wall was for me, as a callow 15 year old in 1985, I am conscious of the Wall between Israel and Palestine, and the gross human rights abuses that are being perpetrated in that region of the world, a region I have never visited, but which is often in my thoughts.

Earlier this Summer I read Anna Funder's astonishing book, Stasiland (2002), which opened my eyes wide to some of what was going on in East Germany before that Wall fell. The Stasi were the State's Secret Police, made up of a multitude of bureaucrats, paid informers and unpaid informers. I am horrified by the stories Funder tells in her book, but I am not disbelieving. They set a few puzzle pieces into place for me - things that had affected me, and my family members who lived in East Germany, and things I had not been able to understand until I read the book.

It is interesting to reflect on the passage of time, how that affects the revelation of secrets, and how in turn, the revelation of secrets affects the world as it has changed through the passage of time. The things that can be told, and the things that people are prepared to hear, depend a great deal on what is considered to be acceptable at any given time. Over the past 23 years, I have often thought about what happened to me in East Germany. It is only now, after reading Funder's book, that I am prepared to accept that like so many of the citizens of East Germany, I as a foreigner also fell prey to their evildoings.

I visited my great-uncle, Immo Lucchesi, and his family, three times during 1985, but only two of these visits resulted in our spending any time together. I was rigorously drilled on the border crossing procedures; had my passport in order, and knew what I was allowed, and not allowed to do. I laugh at my younger self now - if only I'd been a more independent, adventurous teenager, I might have taken more notice of my environment. Instead, I relied solely on what I was told, and my own resources. I have no memory of what the Berlin Wall looked like, or what it was like to travel through West Berlin on my way to the East. My memories of East Germany are uniformly grey - no sepia nostalgia - neglected, cheerless and ugly, with a no frills atmosphere.

I was told at the time, that the reason for what happened on my failed visit, was the Sondermarke (special issue postage stamp) that I had chosen to put on the postcard I sent to Onkel Immo, in which I confirmed my arrival date and time to East Berlin. Even as a 15 year old I found this hard to fathom. Who would take the time to go through each and every postal item from West to East Germany; select out those items with the offending stamp; and set them aside or simply throw them away, so that the recipients never knew what they had not received?

Yet after reading Stasiland, I no longer doubt that this was precisely the kind of project to which the East German regime would have devoted a sector of its workforce. It's a shame I don't recall what was on that stamp, but apparently, it was unacceptable to the East German Government. My postcard did not reach my uncle, who was not there at the station to meet me.

A part of me wonders egocentrically whether this was a small, unplanned occurrence as part of a larger-scale effort, or whether it was a more targeted omission. Onkel Immo was well-known as a musician in East Germany. Members of his family were persecuted on many petty levels, that all added up to one big heartache. Unlike the rest of his family, he was able to travel with his orchestra. He was a flautist. He drove back from a tour of China one year, having requested payment in gold. A golden tube lay in the boot of his cardboard Trabi, wrapped in an oily rag. It wasn't detected as he crossed the border back into East Germany. He had it made into a flute, and flaunted his ability to resist the State every time he performed thereafter.

This tale was family legend. It had a huge bearing on my choice to learn the flute when I started highschool. A nice piece of synchronicity is that my second cousin Albrecht Lachmann, (the one who proposed a marriage of convenience to me during the first of my visits to East Germany that year) took me to a production of Mozart's The Magic Flute. Our uncle was not playing that night.

Christa, my exchange mother, put me on the train to Berlin, and waved goodbye from the Hamburg platform. I felt confident. I knew from previous experience that my Tante Ursul would not permit me to leave them any Western money or chocolate, and I had in my bag an appropriate (and legal) set of gifts for my family members.

It was around six in the evening by the time we reached Berlin. I got off the train and went to the area where I would meet my uncle and go home with him. But there was no one there to meet me. I tried to be patient, and work out what to do. I simply stood against a wall, expecting to see someone I knew at any moment. But no one came.

A brainwave! I could call them on the public telephone. But I had no Eastern money. I went to the money exchange desk to ask for help, and to exchange some of my West German marks for East German legal tender. There were people there behind the thick glass. I knew they could see me. One woman sat with her feet on the table, glaring belligerently at me. I gestured politely, knocked on the window, and tried to gain her attention; I had it, but there was no way she was prepared to offer me any assistance - not after hours! She kept on staring at me through the glass, unwilling even to acknowledge our shared humanness.

Later, people asked why I didn't just hop on a taxi with the understanding that my uncle would pay the fare when we reached his home. This idea never occurred to me. I'd never caught a taxi alone before, would never have presumed that my uncle had the money to pay anyway, and was not prepared to get into a taxi with a strange man, when I did not have legal money to pay him with.

So I stood around some more, whilst commuters flowed around me. I felt resentful. They had someplace to go. What was I going to do? Eventually, my gaze fell upon a sign that showed the train timetable. Ah - there was a train back to Hamburg that evening. I could catch it, and at least when I got back to West Germany I knew how to get home from the station. And yes, there was time for me to figure out where to catch it.

I gathered all my courage and approached a middle aged woman. I asked her how to get back to the western side of the station so that I could catch another train. She explained the pathway. From memory, I had to go down some steps, through a short tunnel, around the corner, and up another set of steps. Something like that. I presented my passport and my return train ticket at the counter, as requested. The officers, in their green uniforms, took it away and left me standing there.

After a while, a uniformed someone came onto my side of the counter, and led me into a small room. It had no window, and was furnished with a desk and two chairs. A naked light bulb swung from the ceiling. Unschooled and naive as I was, I still recognised the cultural conventions of an interrogation chamber. He fired questions were at me in rapid German. I struggled to cope.

First, to confirm my personal details, as set down in my passport.
Secondly, to establish my reasons for coming to the GDR (East Germany). Who was I planning to stay with, what was I going to do there, and why hadn't I gone where I was supposed to go?
Thirdly, the bureaucratic necessities, and my failure to observe them correctly. Why hadn't I registered with the police as a foreigner was supposed to? Why had I not exchanged my West German money for East German marks?

While all this was happening, and for years thereafter, all I could see was how these soldiers or police - these human beings, for crying out loud - WHATEVER their role, had all the pieces of my story in front of them. Why couldn't they have taken the small leap of intelligence to assist me in my distress? What would it have taken, to call my uncle for me, and have him not only confirm my story, but also give him the opportunity to pick me up and take me home as planned?

Now I understand - they no doubt saw me as a bona fide East German citizen, posing as a US citizen, trying to make my escape to the illustrious West. I thought my story was straightforward, and my German bad. Perhaps it was not bad enough? I don't remember their searching my luggage. Funder mentions that some would-be escapees placed western goods in their bags in an effort to look like Western tourists. People were also told to cut the tags off their garments "so that they did not read 'People's Own Manufacture" (page 210).

Eventually, my interrogator left the room and returned 10 minutes later with my passport. I ran up the stairs to the platform to see the train to Hamburg just chugging out of the station without me.

The petty meanness of this deliberate act cut me to the quick, but I was determined to be strong, and not let it get to me.

The next train was in 12 hours time. I had a whole night to wait, and nowhere to go. I was hardly your streetwise 15 year old. What could I do? The platform was deserted, so I sat down on a bench and took out my novel to re-read. At least that would help to pass some time. I tried to read slowly.

After a couple of hours, when it was nearing midnight, I was still reading slowly. A trio of soldiers paraded intermittently along the high catwalk that spanned the East German platform. I suppose their role was to look for potential defectors, and that from so high up, they could see just about everything. I heard them shouting and talking amongst themselves, but I tried to ignore them. Eventually, I realised they were trying to get my attention.

"You can't stay here all night!" they shouted sown at me.

"Why not?"

"You just can't."

"Well, where am I supposed to go then?"

"To the West. That's where you belong!"

They laughed at me, and I felt the impact of their derision. At the time I felt sorry for them. I thought perhaps they resented my freedom in comparison with their repression. Now I'm not so sure. Maybe they were just poking fun at me.

I took them seriously, and put away my book. They were armed and dangerous, after all. I asked them how to get to the West, and they told me the route. It involved more steps and more tunnels to get to another train platform in the same station. Uncertain of what I was going to do once I got to the West - would I, for example, be able to get the morning train to Hamburg from the same platform - I left East Germany, and boarded a busy West German subway. I didn't have a ticket, and almost hoped I would be caught. At least then someone would listen to my story, and perhaps assist me.

BErlin Zoo Station - lots of people were getting off, including an elderly woman with her shopping trolley. I followed her out of the train. I must have looked rather lost, because she spoke to me, and asked whether I had anywhere to go. She directed me to the Red Cross office, which was in the station. I later found out that Berlin Zoo was notorious for its drugs, prostitution and other manifestations of homelessness and dysfunction.

I knocked on the window, though it was obvious to me the office was closed. But somebody answered! The shelter was full, but the worker took pity on me, and found a chair for me to sit on, around a table that was crowded with people who were all valiantly trying to sleep, sitting up. Were they all victims of the Sondermarke?

In the morning, we were all given tea and a roll. A worker accompanied me to the correct platform so I could board my train to Hamburg. I thanked her profusely. I can't remember the journey, but I remember wishing I was there already.

I got off the train and ran into Christa's waiting arms. She knew I hadn't reached my destination, and had had no way of knowing where I was in the meantime. She had waited to contact my parents on the off-chance that I might have found my way back to Hamburg on the morning train.

That intuitive optimism saved her a long-distance phone call to Australia! And I had an interesting story to write in my next weekly letter home.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Jean E Calder (2007) Where the Road Leads, Hachette Australia
Anna Funder (2002) Stasiland, The Text Publishing Company, Victoria, Australia.

Our Excellent Roadtrip

2008-01-21T21:57:00.000-08:00

Our Excellent Roadtrip
Melina Magdalena
(c) 2008

Yup! One month into 2008 already, and one month since last I posted... I got home yesterday after three most wonderful weeks with my Honey - one week here in Adelaide, one week on the Great Ocean Road to Melbourne, one week in Melbourne. T'was excellent.

So this is one of those holiday posts that bloggers seem to indulge in from time to time. I didn't do a round up of 2007, as I spent New Year's Eve on the beach at Semaphore. And I've been too busy since. There's a lot happening. It's going to continue to be a most excellent year.

Perhaps this will be the year to learn some more about blogging - images, artwork, links to other blogs, etc. - perhaps?

Here we go with the post proper.

GOOLWA and THE COORONG
We left Adelaide for Goolwa and the Coorong, after a quick trip to the Gepps Cross Sunday Market to stock up on fresh fruit and veg. In hindsight we didn't see much of the Coorong - it certainly wasn't the Coorong of my childhood, with massive flocks of birds on the water. I was reminded again and again of the warnings issued on behalf of the women of Kumarangk, that the Murray will dry up if a bridge is built . We didn't cross the bridge. I haven't been to Hindmarsh Island since it was bridged.

On our way to the Coorong, we walked across a large salt pan!
Honey directed me to a "bush site" where we could pitch our tent and camp for about $5. I hadn't been camping for quite a few years, and was a little nervous, but we got the tent up with no hassles whatsoever, went for a walk through the dunes, and got back in time to cook our dinner on her little butane-fueled camping stove.
Our walk was uphill and downhill and we met a red-bellied black snake which was soaking up the late afternoon sun beside the path. When I say "met" I mean the poor creature was inadvertently kicked by Honey, and screamed at by a terrified me. We looked it up later and indeed, these snakes generally slither away at provocation - thanks be to the Goddess.
I worried all night she'd been bitten and didn't know it and I'd wake up to find her dead beside me. But she was fine, and got me up in the early morning hours to go outside and see the awesome Milky Way as it careened its way above us. I didn't sleep again after seeing that sky. My mind was full of gratitude and wonder.

NELSON and GLENELG RIVER
Next day, we drove through Mt Gambier and stopped at Nelson, on the border. The caravan park was chokkers, but the lovely woman who ran the place, gave us the option of the last tiny tent site, or a spot in the "overflow". Seeing that it was lush with green grass, and hedged in for privacy on three sides, we chose the overflow. We felt very blessed.
We went paddling up the Glenelg River for an hour or so the next morning. On our way back, we heard the rich male voice, guitar and penny whistle we'd thought we had imagined the previous evening, as we walked down to the seashore. We looked to the opposite bank where a man was singing outside his combi van. The woman who hired out the canoe to us said she wished he would stay there forever for her to listen to.

SAWPIT PICNIC GROUND
We stopped at the Nelson Tourist Information Bureau to ask about a good campsite to go to next. It was very hot, though we were very lucky with the weather. It cooled off every night.
Sawpit Picnic Ground looked to be a better option than the other two sites near Portland, because although it wasn't on the beach, it had water and loos.
We stayed two nights at Sawpit, because it was so lovely.

CAPE BRIDGEWATER
We swam nearly every day in the ocean. I haven't done that since I was a child. It was amazing to reconnect with that part of me. My favourite swim was when we drove down to Cape Bridgewater. This is a small town nestled in some steep hills. We bought scones at the kiosk, and went swimming after lunch. The water was cool and about shoulder high, with continual waves that we could jump and dive under to our heart's content.

PORT FAIRY
It was in Port Fairy that we spent one half-hour on a public library computer, checking our emails. Honestly, I hardly missed my computer the whole time we were away.
Our evening meal at Port Fairy was, of necessity, hot chips and salad by the beach. It was a total fire ban situation. We were entertained during breakfast at Sawpit that morning by the Firies who rocked up in their engine to put out the illegal fires at several campsites. A van full of young, male German backpackers had made a fire the night before in the concrete fireplace, and not doused it sufficiently. They were still asleep when the Firies turned on the hoses. But there were some Aussie campers at Sawpit too, who really ought to have known better.
We walked along the foreshore to the lighthouse at Port Fairy that evening. On the rocks around the lighthouse, we saw a soft, brown wallaby. It was trying to evade us, but we hadn't seen it until it was almost to the water.

WARNAMBOOL
After two nights at Sawpit, we drove past the Codrington Wind Farm and on to Warnambool, where Honey has some friends, and we stayed with them overnight. It felt odd to be in a bed in a house, but it was nice. The winds of Warnambool played havoc with the windmill outside our window that night, and at one point a weird whistle was created when the wind blew into the empty fireplace in our room, and woke us up.
Warnambool is where the Great Ocean Road proper begins, but I didn't know that at the time. There was much more in store. I can't remember where the Petrified Forest was, but we stopped and looked at it, as well as the Blowhole nearby. This place will be most remembered for its flies, its impressive scenery running a close second.

PRINCETOWN and PORT CAMPBELL
On our way to Princetown, we stopped at Port Campbell, where Honey spent several summers in a row as a teenager and young adult. We looked at the Bay of Martyrs, what's left of London Bridge and the Grotto that afternoon, but saved the Twelve Apostles and Loch Ard Gorge for the evening, after the tourist buses had gone home.

LOCH ARD GORGE

We were there at sunset. We had the beach all to ourselves for twenty blissful minutes.

JOHANNA
Our next campsite was at Johanna. We were flummoxed by the two Johanna's - Red and Blue. It turned out these were roads that joined up at the bottom. The campsite was enormous and well populated, though not crowded. It had no water for campers, but there were toilets. Unfortunately, not too far away was a large crowd of yobbos who kept us all up with their raucous behaviour, far into the night. We didn't rev our engine as we drove out the next morning, though we thought about it.
We wanted to drive up to Lavers Hill that night to see the glow worms, but the dirt and gravel Blue Johanna Road was something of a deterrent. However, Red Johanna Road was paved, and drove us smartly back up to where we needed to be - this is something for future campers to bear in mind.
We splurged that day and visited the Otway Fly Treetop Walk, for $19.50 each. We arrived at 6:00pm, and I wish we'd had a couple of hours to spend, but unfortunately, the park closed at 7:00pm. We climbed on the steel walkway, and up the tower, which was scary for me, but scarier for Honey, who doesn't like heights. The ranger picked us up as we were strolling through the trees, and transported us on his small car to the exit. But this place was also awesome, with great signage and amazing wilderness.
It was another total fireban night, so we ate at a Roadhouse and sat around reading, waiting for the sun to go down.
It still wasn't dark enough for glow worms when we reached Melba and Lavers Hill, so we had a game of Scrabble in the car. Eventually it got dark enough and off we traipsed, down a path. We spoke to a vet who works at the Warnambool Abattoir. He told us they're always on the lookout for workers, and that we should advise our students (newly arrived refugees and migrants) that if they want work, Warnambool's the place to be.
I loved the glow worms. I wonder what they look like in the light?

APOLLO BAY
Did we spend a night at Apollo Bay? I can't quite remember how it went, after that. We went swimming there, and I had the most excellent pot of Earl Grey Tea, and I know we went to Lorne the next day, so we must have stayed somewhere that night. All in all, we put up the tent and the air mattress about 7 times in 8 days. We got very efficient at it, and it never stopped being fun.

AIREYS INLET
Our last night was at a caravan park at Airey's Inlet. I know this was on Sunday night, because Honey and I had a discussion about traffic, and decided it would be better to drive up to Melbourne on Monday, rather than through the end of weekend madness. It was a good decision. We stopped and asked at the caravan park, whether there was a tent site available, despite the notice outside that told us there was no room at the inn. Lucky for us, there was one spot left, and it was very nice. Some teenagers were in the tent next to us, and gave us a long rendition of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" into the early morning hours. Listening to them - a boy/girl couple plus a male friend - Honey and I made a decision never to bicker and whinge to one another the way that girl whinged to her boyfriend.
Airey's Inlet is the place where "Round the Twist" was filmed. In the evening we walked along the top of the cliffs, because the tide was in. In the morning, we walked down along the beach and the rocks. At some points we had to wade through the water, to get to the next section. It was a lovely adventure to have at the end of our journey.

BELLS BEACH
On our way to Melbourne via Geelong, we stopped at Bells Beach to watch the surfers. This photo is not at Bells Beach, but it is a good photo to represent the multiple layers and diverse views of the ocean that we were treated to on our journey up the Great Ocean Road.

Highly recommended!

An Illustrated Christmas (card) Story

2007-12-21T14:34:00.000-08:00

An Ilustrated Christmas (card) Story
(c) Melina Magdalena 2007

**please note, some names and identifying details have been altered, to protect the identities of people involved in these incidents**

In early December, I received a Christmas card from an old friend. I call her that, because for a couple of years we socialised regularly, and exchanged quite a lot of information about one another. We had a mutual friend in common, and she remains one of the brightest stars in the constellation of my social network.

Here's the card:

(I have no idea to whom this image belongs, but this is the copyright information on the back. © distributed by Austwide Wholesalers Pty Ltd)

Inside, it read

To Dear Melina, K, I & family …
With Season’s Greetings
and All Good Wishes
for the New Year
from (those pesky Christians!)
Nancy & Michael Smith
X

It was quite a relief when Nancy and Michael moved interstate two or three years ago. Since that time, we have exchanged pleasantries on the phone from time to time, and a couple of perfunctory emails. All contact has been initiated by Nancy. She always uses the opportunity to enquire about our mutual friend, who had already curtailed even this level of contact with Nancy, finding the hypocrisy of maintaining friendly relations more than she could bear. There’s more to their story, but I’ll just stick with mine here.

I wrote her a card in response. It wasn’t a Christmas card. It wasn’t a Channukah card. It was a blank card with a picture of butterflies, one of a set of cards I’d purchased from the Foot and Mouth Artists. I chose the card carefully, knowing that Nancy and I had strong reactions to butterflies, as a symbol of beauty in survival.

11 December 2007
Dear Nancy,
Thank you for your Christmas card and funny message. It’s good to know that you and Michael are doing well.
I do have to wonder though, about your choice of card for me, showing the Nativity scene. A culturally sensitive friend might have chosen a more neutral image for her Jewish friend. I’m not offended. I happen to love the Christmas story, and stories of Jesus the Jew, the teacher, the poet, the activist, the man, the friend…
I have nothing against Christians. In fact, I’m deeply in love with a Christian. I would, however, urge you towards a little self-reflection. Do you understand that it’s precisely because you are a white, Anglo, Christian woman, that you feel you are entitled to deliberately send me a culturally-inappropriate card at this season?
Do you remember several years ago, when you asked to participate in a Jewish Sabbath meal? I arranged this for you, in good faith, as a friend. My parents welcomed you into their home, shared their food with you, and gave generously of their time. I was alarmed, ashamed, offended and upset when you then began to express your racist attitudes. Consider for a moment, the impact this had on people whose family were refugees and migrants, and who choose to work with refugees, migrants and Aboriginal people. Just as with this Christmas card, you failed to show any sensitivity to our cultural differences. Perhaps because you feel part of the powerful, oppressive majority, you felt at home to speak your support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation policies, for locking up asylum seekers indefinitely in concentration camps, and to express your view that Aboriginal people have it far to easy in Australia, compared with whites. Your behaviour was outright offensive and fear-provoking. It’s taken me a very long time to find a way to tell you about this.
Nancy, I do thank you for your kind wishes, but I don’t wish to cultivate a friendship with a racist.
Best wishes for a bright future.
Merry Christmas & Happy 2008.
love, peace and blessings,
Melina Magdalena

I was away for a few days, visiting my sweetheart, and upon my return, this message was on my answering machine:

Message received 17/12 @ 7:03 pm
Oh hi Melina, it’s Nancy Smith calling. I received your Christmas card today. And first of all I’d like to say I’m really sorry if I’ve offended you, but I also found what you wrote in there very very offensive. I’m not going to grace the insults that you dished out in defense; they’re completely wrong, and I’d be very careful who I call those kinds of names. And you have deeply offended me, because I am not those things, and you’ve taken my comments out of context. And I suggest you look in the mirror yourself at the resentments that you’ve been harbouring. I also invited you into my home, and I never had any idea that you harboured those pathetic resentments about me. I’m very sorry that you’ve written such untruths about me. I’m very happy that you’ve been emotionally honest, and that you haven’t been two-faced anymore, which you have been all these years, and I’m very glad to disassociate from you and your insults. OK? And I do wish you well, but yeah, we’ll leave it at that, hey? Goodbye.

It’s worth pointing out that I had only ever spoken of that Shabbat meal to our mutual friend. I’d never spoken about it to Nancy, or even to my parents. We felt too ashamed and bewildered to mention it.

My first reaction to Nancy’s phone message was one of abject fear. To hear her accusations and the hurt in her strident voice felt threatening, ominous. I know she has criminal connections and a long history of illegal goings on. I wouldn’t put it past her to organize something nasty to happen to me or to someone I love, in retaliation for the “insults” I dished out to her, even though we are physically thousands of kilometers apart.

I acknowledge two things in her defense
a) it wasn’t particularly nice for me to choose Christmas as the time to finally raise this matter with her
b) yes, I have been two-faced in not speaking of this sooner.
However, I take no responsibility for her selective memory. The impact of her behaviour has stung ever since, like a resounding slap in the face, or a brick thrown through a bedroom window.

My mother invited me over for tea, and while my father was outside struggling with an overenthusiastic BBQ, I told her about the phone message. I’d told her about my earlier reply to Nancy’s Christmas card, so she knew the story. She had laughed, when I told her that I’d finally made some response to what had happened at Shabbat that night.

“You’re so much like your father,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“You worry at things, and carry them around until finally, you can’t keep hold of them anymore and out bursts your response.”

“I’ve been wanting to say SOMETHING to Nancy for a long time, I just didn’t know how,” I replied.

My father came in then, and I spoke to him of what had happened. He has a history of misplacing my friends and acquaintances. When I tell him stories, he usually spends quite a long time organizing in his mind who I’m talking about and how that person fits in relation to my messy life.

“Is she the one?” he said, as soon as I’d barely begun.

“Yes,” I replied, knowing instantly, that he had placed her.

He continued speaking doggedly, as though if he didn’t say it then, he never would, “We thought she was on our side, and then after dinner, she started talking about how good the detention centres were, and so on….”

“Yes, that’s Nancy,” I confirmed.

My father turned and carried the dish of burnt chops out to the table. “Well, since that night, we’ve stopped inviting total strangers to sharing Shabbat with us.”

Shabbat = Jewish day of rest, day when one ceases work; also called “Shabbos”, and in English, Sabbath.
Shabbat Shalom = peace of the Sabbath; the traditional greeting exchanged around the Shabbat table.

The Double Bind - book review

2007-12-07T15:23:00.000-08:00

The Double Bind - book review
(c) Melina Magdalena 2007

I’ve read several novels by Chris Bohjalian. Each time I close the books feeling a little depleted and possibly misused. It’s a curious sensation, because I enjoy every minute of every novel while I’m reading them – it’s just that the endings leave me with a sense of betrayal.

Perhaps it is my trite and feisty longing always to be on the side of the woman who was wronged. If I am so shallow then I disappoint myself. Maybe life isn’t really so black and white! Bohjalian’s plots turn the tables on his women protagonists, leaving them in either an overtly bad light, or floundering with serious ambiguity as to their ability to avoid consequences of poor decision-making or their actual feminine nature, which in his eyes appears to invite said dire consequences for these women protagonists and those unfortunate enough to become involved with them.

The Double Bind is not a novel about blaming victims. Much of what it has to say about PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) is valid. Bohjalian’s compassionate view of his character’s world is not offensive in itself. At least in this plot, the hurt that protagonist Laurel Estabrook inflicts upon the people in her life is clearly unintended and unavoidable. What Laurel suffers is the fault only of the men who attacked her. The consequences of their attack can never be blamed on their victim. The people who love Laurel understand clearly that she does not intend to cause them harm; indeed that her every action is directed from the vantage point to which she has withdrawn. To protect themselves, they keep Laurel at arm’s length every bit as much as she keeps them at bay.

The book for me was a head-spin in that it left me questioning my own sense of reality. I wondered to what extent I have created an illusion of health, a glamour of safety, a delusion that the world still belongs to me even as I still belong to the world, when in fact, perhaps I would be better off dead. Do I need my fantasies in order to continue to function? Are my delusions necessary for my survival? Must I trick myself into believing I am more than that to which I was reduced, through the actions of the men who damaged me, so that I can convince myself that life is still worth living?

I did not drift for too long, in the howling winds of such existential agonies. I am not a fictional character – I know there is a lot more to me and to my life, than a few isolated events that had far-reaching effects on the way I choose to live my life.

Instead, I pursued this thread by questioning to whose benefit it is, that Laurel confront, define, acknowledge and own every nasty little detail of her experience. In order to be a “true survivor” is she to be left undefended and indefensible, with no dignity of choice and no delicacy of privacy? Is it necessary, in order for her to wear the mantle of “survivor” as opposed to “victim”, to somehow step out from under the burden of her experience and say – hey look at me, I’m still a valuable, contributing human being, even though those men did this and this and this and this to me?

In this sense, the demand that Laurel be open about her experience runs parallel to the demands that every person whose identity falls outside the mainstream, whether through race, gender, ability, or affiliation come out repeatedly, consistently and continuously, in order to be validated as a healthy human being. These demands call for superhuman effort. Most of us are too busy living our lives to waste our time constantly bringing our differences to the attention of those who would just as soon ignore them.

Is not Laurel, by the nature of the life that she is leading, proving her worth and her survival with each and every waking moment? She remains defiant, intelligent, unbeaten and spirited to the end.

I wondered anew about the nature of true healing. The sour taste that was left in my mouth when I finished Double Bind was more to do with the big question of – is it possible or even desirable to heal from such a major traumatic event? Clearly, if PTSD leads directly to madness, and if madness by its definition is mental disease, than the most that can be hoped for is a set of coping mechanisms and a network of support people to prop up the unfortunate victim.

It is unquestionable that no one should go through what Laurel goes through. It is undeniable that many people do experience abuse and torture, and that most of us do not die as a direct consequence of such maltreatment. So what should be done to us, or what should we do, in order to choose a different path, than the path that Laurel takes on her quest for survival? How different are our journeys, from Laurel’s experience of survival?

If healing means denying oneself the liberty or luxury of rewriting the past to something that is more acceptable and tolerable to us, than what other people know really happened, than do we all not live in a state of denial? Do we all not tend to rewrite our pasts, dampen down the emotional states to bearable levels, in order that we continue to function?

We do not all descend into madness. Nor is madness necessarily a permanent state. Madness can provide the respite we need sometimes, in order to regroup and find our feet again. PTSD perhaps, is a life sentence – a direct result of specific traumatic experiences. Not everyone with PTSD experiences madness all, or even some of the time. Nearly everyone with PTSD is accused at some stage, of at least being emotionally extravagant and at worst, of being mad.

The human mind and spirit is incredible in many ways. Those of us who live successfully with PTSD develop our meaning-making skills of intuition and connectivity to a level that others can barely glimpse as possible. It is difficult to verbalise this amongst ourselves, let alone to medicos whose understandings are relegated to regulated mechanical understandings.

Bohjalian does not seem to realize in his PTSD character, the depth and levels of self-talk that must necessarily interweave in a complex and strangely harmonious manner to enable Laurel’s survival in this hostile world. Her world is indisputably hostile, despite the mostly benign characters with whom Bohjalian has peopled it. Were it not hostile, at least in the way Laurel perceives it, why would she have needed to develop such strong defences against it? Laurel’s defenses range way beyond the defense of her own mutilated body. Her purpose is to defend anyone she cares about, from being affected and destroyed by the forces that came so close to destroying her.

So for Laurel herself, since the novel deals mostly with her internalized world as she comes to externalize it, I was gripped by the buzzing current that keeps her sleepless, that runs through her body and circulates in her blood. How could she appear to be anything but calm, in the face of constant panic? How can she possibly escape her past? She is guarded, day and night; vigilant against any attack upon the semblance of sanity and good health that she has created around herself.

Would it be better for Laurel to meditate every morning about the horrors that were enacted upon her body, count them off in a litany of gruesome acknowledgement, and then rise from her bed and go about her day along with the constant physical reminders of these acts? Perhaps it’s her ability to repress part of the knowledge from her everyday consciousness that enables her to function at all? Perhaps it’s amazing that she functions as she does, despite the unvarying murmuring of self-talk, panic and mind-messages that are playing in the background? Perhaps this ability to hear around and despite all this, is healing and health.

What is not spoken of in this book is the question which drives Laurel. Her story, and the story in this book, is infused with the question “WHY?”

Why did this happen to me?
What is it in me that caused this to happen?

Why did they do this to me?
What kind of people imagine and consciously carry out such horrifying acts?

Why did I survive?
What does it mean for the rest of my life, that I must carry the scars from these unspeakable acts?

When there are no answers to these questions and yet these questions cannot be avoided, the only way open is for Laurel to deal with them herself. She seeks meaning, and she finds it on a level that others define as madness. The other people in her life cannot follow her, because they do not understand the path she took to reach that place. Their experience of Laurel is not her experience of herself. That doesn’t make her completely wrong, misguided and crazy. When there is no one left to blame, the blame must be self-inflicted. And that is precisely the shame.

There is no Goddess in Laurel’s world. She must birth herself. Life is hard. To find new meaning in her life, Laurel looks beyond the confines of her own rich inner world, and extends her compassion to those whose realities are even harsher and stranger than her own. Such is the depth of her character.

boundary runner

2007-11-26T13:04:00.000-08:00

boundary runner
© Melina Magdalena 2007

you know the kind of dog I’m talking about
overgrown, full-blown, slightly out-of-control
everyone would like to love her because she is so loveable
but that slightly wild aspect that permeates your every interaction
causes people instinctively to throw up their hands
back away, retreat to higher ground – she’s all too much, so
they keep her on that short leash that defies any possibility of intimacy

she doesn’t need obedience training – good lord no!
she doesn’t need her spirit crushed with harsh words and demands of martial precision
a large portion of her charm lies in her ability
to transcend those social norms, to insinuate herself beyond those walls
and end up with her wet nose pushed into your face,
those liquid eyes that beseech you to become your own best friend
it’s uncanny. she doesn’t push or barge her way in
no one sees quite how she does it
she’s just there! suddenly! where she wasn’t, a moment before
and after no one beckoned her to enter

rare are the moments when she yaps like a terrier
alerting you to the fact that she is well aware of the silly games you’re playing
the patrols you set around your barbed-wire fences who only
begrudgingly permit the passage in either direction of anything at all
no one ever told her this was not the way to do things
and she’s knows it’s not the way to do things

she really doesn’t mean to find herself lurking where she’s not welcomed
chastized, she hangs her head, droops her ears, lets her tail sag into the dirt
banished, she starts that slow creep once again around the edges
sniffing the perimeter, leaving her mark at every sapling like a promise that
she’s still out there waiting for the good times when you will finally let her in

energised, that slow lope picks up momentum – yes, she’s passed this way before
gaining confidence, she’s completely forgotten
how she came to be here in this barren, unfriendly place,
on the outside in the first place … second place …
time immemorial has faded into insignificance
memory is meaningless when possibility hovers enticingly at the horizon line

around and around and around she circles, alert now
to the murmurs, the panic-stricken yelps of alarm, the dull drone of despair
it’s so much more than she can bear
she leaps frantically against the windows and barred doors, she’s scary now
that persistent, rhythmic scratching – let me in, let me in!
because she knows full well that it’s her purpose to be there,
to witness and to soothe
it makes no sense at all when you lock her out
she wants only to love and be loved

it’s not harsh words, obedience training, choker collars, short leashes and rewards
that keep her going – she’s tough, well schooled in hard knocks
she survives this periodic maltreatment, yes
but how she would blossom and thrive on
gentle training, a loving hand and consistent guidance
to teach her how to navigate those places without again
coming to grief or causing that endless offence

Marriage and Other Great Acts of Political Resistance

2007-10-25T14:24:00.000-07:00

Marriage and Other Great Acts of Political Resistance
(c) Melina Magdalena 2007

Reflecting upon the so-called "gay marriage debate" (the opposing sides are not speaking to one another), my first marriage proposal came to mind. I was 15, visiting relatives in East Berlin. I was up in the bedroom of ny second cousin, Albrecht Lachmann (1967-2002). He had just finished playing for me, his blackmarket recording of Pink Floyd's The Wall . Albrecht burned with a passionate desire for freedom. In my callow state of ignorant, apolitical, inhibited youth I rejected his proposal.

I first met Albrecht when he was 8 and I was 6. He used to take violin lessons. I was visiting Germany with my parents and siblings. My mother had reconnected with her father for the first time since he left the USA in the wake of his divorce from my grandmother Ruth. My mother's father Christof Lucchesi was the brother of Albrecht's mother's father, Immo Lucchesi.

Seven years later, I still had only a dim understanding of what it meant to live in a police state like the German Democratic Republic. I knew fresh food was chronically short, travel was restricted, the currency was practically worthless outside the USSR, and that families remained divided across the internal German borders.

I heard murmurings from Onkel Immo and his wife, Tante Ursul.... Albrecht was only making things more difficult for himself, with his attitude. All students were forced to study the Russian language. Only by excelling in this subject, could a young person be guaranteed a chance at further study and a career.

I had also met another young second cousin, whose name I have regrettably forgotten. She lived in Dresden with her mother. Her chances of further study were nil, due to the fact that her father had defected from East Germany after divorcing her mother. The justification for this? Bear in mind - there were no secrets about her plight. There was no chance for her to resist the decisions imposed on her by the police state in which she lived. The already slim chance this young woman might find a way to join her father in West Germany had been increased by a mere smidgeon. Therefore the East German government deemed it a fruitless exercise on their part to educate this young woman.

Here in South Australia, we do not labour under a police state. But the rules and restrictions that the state and federal governments impose upon our people, young and old still have those affected chafing at the bits of their confinement.

In the case of my teenagers, both have chosen to focus upon the mandatory learning of "Australian Studies" as the site of their resistance. Australian Studies is a Year 10 subject. My son weasled his way out of taking it last year, by becoming overinvolved with cricket - a legitimate passion. However, he was forced to take the subject this year as a Year 11 student. My daughter took the subject during the first semester of this year. She is currently a Year 10 student.

Their tactics of resistance are lamentably crude. I would have to say they are ineffective in so far as their rage is enacted against their teacher, poor thing, who has to mark their work and cajole them to do any work before she has anything to mark. From what I've heard, neither of their Australian Studies teachers has been too impressed, impassioned or informed about what wisdom, history and values she is supposed to be imparting to these youngsters. One of them focused her curriculum almost entirely on US Indigenous issues; the other asked her students to produce a piece of work about imported species. Perhaps the teachers are sneakily resisting in their own way.

I cannot resist posting this example of resistance by a South Australian teenager. The task was supposed to be 1000 words long.

For this illustrious example of academic excellence my very smart teenager received a grand total of 7 (out of 20). I suppose this is Recorded Achievement, at its best.

I believe the best acts of political resistance are personal. I believe these may be acts of outstanding courage and fortitude, but they do not need to be showy spectacles that draw the awed attention of passersby. Most importantly, effective acts of political and personal resistance must not hurt the actor more than he or she would be hurt by not resisting. Yes, there are times and there are situations where people risk their lives in order to stand for what they believe in; this usually takes the form of standing against what they disbelieve. But there are many ways in which ordinary, humble, brave, optimistic human beings may resist the seductive pull of conformity, the thrall of convention, and the deadly boredom of only ever doing what others expect of you.

Hence, Loved Up!.

Crushed

2007-10-11T16:54:00.001-07:00

Crushed
(c) Melina Magdalena 2007

To K.L. with best wishes on her 38th birthday next month.

I didn’t want to be with her. I wanted to be her. She fascinated me; from the moment I laid eyes on her. At almost twelve years of age, I had no one to talk to about this. Newly arrived in the small Queensland sugar town, I had no friends, no cousins, no aunts, and no older siblings. I remember the day so clearly.

It was the last weekend before school started for the year. The Girl Guides in that part of the world were active throughout the year, so I went to my first meeting in this new place. The Guide Hall was a long weatherboard building. I think it was painted blue. I walked up the three steps and in through the door to be greeted with the sight of many busy girls, all in uniform, sectioned off into their patrols along each side of the room. Our Guide Leader walked me across the wooden floor to meet my new Patrol Leader. I met her second first, a merry, round-cheeked, frizzy haired girl who became my best friend for the two years we lived there. She tapped S on the shoulder to get her attention.

Thinking back, I can’t figure out how S was already Patrol Leader, because from what I know of the story, she was also new in town. Maybe she had moved up with her family the previous year, and had had some time to establish herself. She looked at me through her glittering brown eyes, down the curve of her arrogant nose, smiled cursorily and set me to work. In that moment, I became hers for the taking.

What must she have seen, when she glanced at me, that tall, willowy girl, a study of brown on brown, with her long, tanned arms and long, tanned legs? What was I? A short, stocky little girl in a Girl Guide uniform, her light brown hair in two preposterous pigtails that stuck out at odd angles over each ear, the aftershock of a haircut several months earlier. I was too shy and nervous to smile. I didn’t make small talk. What eleven year old does?

The rest of my family spent the afternoon house hunting. When my mother came to pick me up, I bubbled and burbled my way to the car, excited about the new best friend I’d made. Her name was S. She was so great. I was going to be so happy there. I got some kind of “That’s nice, dear” response. That’s OK. I understood; there were other things on my mother’s mind.

What does one do, in the grip of sudden infatuation? Within a matter of weeks, I transited from being a happy little girl, to a confused and awkward adolescent. A month or two earlier I had kicked a boy in the balls when he looked up my dress as I played on the monkey bars. I was severely spoken to for that incident, but I didn’t appreciate his interference in my games. It seems while I was preternaturally disposed to intercept and deflect the male gaze, I was sorely unequipped with words to explain my new superpowers.

I had grown breasts and hips over the past eighteen months, and I didn’t like them. I used to wear a tight zipped cardigan to squash my chest, but just before we moved, my mother took me downtown and got me fitted for some proper bras. We referred to them as my unmentionables. I was sure that if I tried hard enough to pretend I was still a little girl, I could make them – and my messy, painful, frightening periods go away.

And now this – what did it mean? I just wanted to be her friend, that’s all.

Maybe I looked at her with too much intensity? Maybe I tried too hard? Maybe I infringed on the boundaries of the friendships she’d already established within the group. She was after all, the undisputed queen bee of the hive. That is not why I was so attracted to her. I liked her elegant brownness, her suave, smooth way of moving through the world. I admired her adeptness at dealing with authority figures, and the ease with which she interacted with her peers. I wanted to be just like her.

Maybe she just didn’t like me. That’s always possible. If she were so remarkable that I would want to be like her, if follows doesn’t it, that there is no way she would aspire to be anything like me!

School started. I drifted through the classes, separated thanks to our untimely arrival in the town, from any of my guiding buddies. High school was hard for that fact alone. At least I had someone I could hang out with during lunch and recess.

The next clear incident that I recall was in November, at my best friend’s birthday party. She lived next to the swamp, which was one of the mangrove areas around the town. The party was not at the swamp, but we giggling girls went for a secret walk to the swamp so that S could meet her boyfriend.

I didn’t really mind that she had a boyfriend, although I didn’t want one. I thought it was stupid really – I stubbornly resisted all those teenage flirtations, knowing instinctively they were somehow not for me. I seem to remember his name as Kermit, though I’m sure it wasn’t. It must have been some Germanic name like Klaus or Kurt or something. S had ostentatiously used a black marker to write his and hers initials on her arm. I know his first name started with ‘k’, because in an insane moment of identification with S, I secretly took up that same black marker and copied the four letters onto my own arm, along with the heart that linked them.

How S mocked me for that unforgivable act. It was her best buddy who revealed my indiscretion to all and sundry. I was shamed, without even being able to adequately explain my actions. It didn’t make sense to anyone, let alone me. I was sullied in their eyes, no longer a known entity, but something dangerous and strange.

I’ve blocked out most of the memories of what happened after that. I managed to avoid Susan during most of that summer, but the next year, school became a nightmare. She contracted glandular fever towards the end of the school year, which was a blessing for me. I remember hearing that she was so weak that her mother had to bath her.

I was not a sophisticated type. Even before the birthday party, I didn’t pursue S, or seek her out, as is common when people are in the grip of infatuation. In this small town, we all knew where each other lived, but I had never been to S’s house. The infatuation had long disappeared, submerged beneath the combined weight of my bewilderment and misery. Now I imagined going to her house, pushing her head under the water and holding it there until the bubbles stopped.

It’s literally at this moment, twenty-five years later that I begin to realize S may have been smarter, or savvier, than I ever gave her credit for. Certainly, she found her target every time with me, and I was so innocent, I had no knowledge or prior warning of what she would aim for next. S seems to have known quite well, what she thought of me – dirty, hairy and perverted.

I once wandered into the change rooms before PE, to discover to my shock, that S and her crowd was already in there. I took another bite of my apple, and nearly choked, as her harpy’s voice berated me for being so dirty that I would eat my lunch in the toilets.

When she started taunting me with the gorilla tag I begged my mother to let me start shaving my legs. I hated the whole process. I didn’t want anything to do with my misbegotten body. One Saturday afternoon I sat in the bath and doggedly dragged the razor with such ragged pressure up my shin that the bathwater turned shockingly red with my blood and I had to shower whilst attempting to staunch the bleeding so that no one would find out. I bore those scars for about fifteen years before they faded – and that was long after I had stopped shaving my legs for good.

A new girl started at the school, and was immediately taken under the shelter of S’s malevolent wings. She still wore her uniform from her previous school. Her dress was far too short, and she would sit on the benches at lunchtimes, rubbing and rubbing the section of her legs between the hem of her dress and her knees. When S gleefully claimed that I had been looking at this girl’s legs, I wasn’t sure why I felt so shamed, but I felt it anyway.

S was merciless in avenging her honour. I had crossed a boundary into a new country where I was to be persecuted for the rest of time. During my childhood, I always had close friendships, and being a naturally studious and motivated learner, I had been popular with nearly all of my teachers. I hadn’t experienced such severe ostracism. I wasn’t brought up to be a pariah. The shock was too much to bear.

I took myself off and tried to find some other friends. Even the gentle, longhaired girls who belonged to some variety of Brethren background could not suffer my presence in their midst. S made sure my reputation caught up with me. So I tried to stay alone at school. This was difficult. I found it was necessary not only to be alone, but also to become invisible. I acquired this skill by virtue of necessity.

I began to have nightmares. There was something dangerous and corrupt in me. My nightmares were all about my need to protect those around me, from my influence. My sister was in particular danger, and I pushed her as far away from me as I dared.

My hitherto best friend was a dear and loyal soul. She weathered my bizarre behaviour and maintained her earnest desire to be my friend, though I did my best not to corrupt her with my presence. From her point of view, I was still welcome to join her and her friends at school, at band, and at Guides, but I could not feel welcome or safe in any place where S was.

So after two years, when we left that town, I tried to leave all of that behind me. My spirit was crushed beneath the weight of my despair. There was something very wrong with me, and there was not a damned thing I could do about it. I could not even name what it was, though the corruption was like a vivid, ugly stain across my face that everyone else could see. I could only stare out of my sullen green eyes in utter incomprehension, and strive to be invisible.

My Own Private Xenophobia

2007-10-07T02:56:00.000-07:00

My Own Private Xenophobia
(c) Melina Magdalena 2007

Xenophobia - a fear of foreigners or strangers

A question for this week - to what extent are my attitudes and prejudices governed by my fear of the strange?

This question can only arise if I subject myself to the same level of scrutiny to which I subject and judge others. It emerges as I wallow in a cloud of grief that envelopes me from time to time, like a cloak lent to me by some friendly stranger to shelter me from the the indifference of those who allow my tears to fall unremarked.
Why a friendly stranger? The tears are mine. My griefs run both deep and wide. Under this cloak I can let them flow in private. I can honour my grief, express my sorrow with no expectation that others will allow me this unimpeded. A friendly stranger indeed. I know no one who suffers other people's tears easily.

Another question - to what extent must 'safe space' be constituted within exclusivity?

This question arises from my intense personal need for safe space, a need which I believe I share with every other human being. But what may be safe for me is not the same as what is safe for others. So to what extent can I reasonably expect that my need be answered?
I first encountered the concept of 'safe space' when as a university student, I was introduced to the Women's Room on my campus. I readily took advantage of this room for study and time out. This was well before I was a wife, a mother, a divorcee or a lesbian. I was intrigued by the idea, and I welcomed this haven. Even though I had no words for verbalising why I felt so refreshed by spending time in the Women's Room, I felt acutely the difference between being in a male dominated sphere and being in a female exclusive sphere. It took me many more years to appreciate the insight, strength and intelligence that must have been required for the women who first set out to carve their own space on campus.
The idea of a Women's Officer was similar. For quite a while I didn't know why I thought it was a good idea for there to be a women's officer in the Student Union, but I was glad that she existed.
Later, I noticed there were new positions, new categories, some of which I could enter, others that excluded me. Suddenly there was an Environment Officer, a Sexuality Officer...

As well, my personal journey of discovery coincided with the merging and transformation on university campuses around Australia of women's rooms, women's departments, women's studies into shared spaces. At the university I attended for example, Women's Studies disappeared into Gender Studies, into Gender and Labour Studies. In other places, Women's Studies was similarly subsumed by something called Queer Studies. These merges have not been popular in all quarters. There are as strong arguments to support the separation of Women's Studies from Queer Studies or Labour Studies, as to support their subsumption.

When I was abused and then separated and then raped I discovered to my chagrin and outrage that there was no safe space on this planet. Not for me. I learned to live with the feeling that danger was ever present.
I imagine this experience is similar to the experience of desensitisation that people go through when they live in a place where there is constant warfare, under the threat that at any moment, they might be blown to pieces, or see someone next to them annihilated in an instant.
I hope it is not perceived as insensitive for me to compare these two human experiences. But if safe space is something which every human being requires; if safe spaces are a human right, than it is important to explore what happens to people when safe spaces are not available.

Because I am a mother of a son and a daughter, lesbian separatism was never something to which I felt I had access. Although on the one hand I felt far freer and safer in the company of only women, there was no way I would abandon my son in the expectation that he would grow up to abuse his position as a white male. With hindsight, I have come to appreciate how lucky I have been to avoid the excesses of separatist attitude.
And again, this insight was not gained without due pain. When I left the mixed company of idealistic patronising misogynist racist peace activists and entered a female-exclusive peace group, it was with an expectation that we would all treat one another as we expected to be treated; that justice, sweetness and light would prevail; that the burden of hard work that was required to mend the world would be a burden shared amongst friends, not a matter for endless contention and the obsessive controlling power of consensus blocking that was the favourite ploy of male peace activists who were afraid of taking action.
How my mighty expectations were brought low is already a matter of public record. It's my naivete that makes me cringe to remember it these days. And yet - the promise was there, the possibility still hovers endlessly on the horizon - it is power that corrupts and shatters love and goodwill and courage and perverts them into the same old same old patterns of exclusion and victimisation time and time again, whatever the gender of those who seek to use their positions of power and control others.

My next foray was when I took on the mantle of Reform Judaism. Here is my home, I thought! Here I can be myself, I can explore my heritage, I can mend the torn shreds of my secret longings to reconnect with my past and paint a colourful, positive picture for my children of what it means to be Jewish in the world today.
The synagogue didn't approve of me or my children. I lacked both the funds and the chutzpah to convince them of our worth. I tried to give in kind, but got rejection after rejection in return. This was no safe space for me, or my children.

I went to a LesFest soon after I came out as a lesbian. At last! Safe space! Women's only space! But what on earth is a woman born woman? It took a few years for me to understand what this meant.
Perhaps I'm a slow learner? Perhaps it's my natural optimism that prevents the cynicism that would pop up like those annoying balloons on my monitor to ensure I didn't stray from the stoic path of realism. I don't suppose I've ever lived in anyone else's "real world". Mine must be very different from the norm.

On the other hand, lesbian space has come to be very special to me. The world I inhabit in my everyday allows me to be myself so long as I stick to the paths and keep off the grass. Within reason, I can be surprising. I can speak out. I can come out sometimes, and expose myself as a lesbian. I prefer to pretend that I am out, when in fact most of the time no one questions my sexual identity. And that can be quite convenient. It feels almost safe, in a funny kind of way.
My days are spent in this heteronormative world, where I live a kind of half-life. Although I do not feel constricted or confined to the closet, nor am I free to relate to most of the other women in my world, and certainly NOT to any of the men, in any way except as an apparent heterosexual.
This is familiar to me. I have adapted to living in this way. It begins to burden me only when I have no respite. No lesbian safe space. No lesbian company.

And this is where the question of my own private xenophobia begins to play out.

As a woman, what must I do to find women's only space some of the time?

As a lesbian, what must I do to find lesbian only space - just occasionally?

Is there something wrong with me that I define lesbian safe space as a space where lesbians are free to gather and socialise where we do not have to suffer the endless gaze of heterosexual men?

This week I sought lesbian only space at a public restaurant. It was Adelaide's monthly lesbian dinner, at a gay-friendly restaurant, on the first Friday of the month. This has been a long-running event in a city which boasts very few regular public lesbian get-togethers.
Yes! This dinner was at a public restuarant.
No! We have no rights over who dines at this restaurant on any particular night.
Yes! Restaurant management reserves the right to open its doors to whomever it pleases, in order to turn a profit.
For me, it has become an unfriendly, unwelcoming place to be. On this occasion, as well as the lesbians, there were two other groups there. One was a group of men who were attending a men's health conference. Interestingly, they did not impinge on lesbian space. The second group was a mixed bunch of people who are into BDSM.
Perhaps this is where my xenophobia and prejudices kick in? I freely admit - BDSM does not attract or interest me in the slightest. In fact, I find the idea repugnant. I'm not interested in being converted.
It was my observation that this group of people used the restaurant space to their full advantage with no consideration for the needs of anyone else in the restaurant that evening. We lesbians were relegated to a few tables into which we were packed like sardines, trying earnestly to communicate and socialise as though the BDSM men and women were not loudly and rudely flaunting their presence and impinging on our space.
Their arrogance was all the more profound because it felt as though there were a quality that they were enjoying it all the more because they were opressing a weaker group and getting off on this fact, rather than it simply being a quality of relief and refreshment to be gathering for once, in a BDSM safe space.

Which brings me back to the question of exclusivity. It seems that for me, safe space is constituted equally by what is not there, as what is present. In order for me to feel safe, something must be lacking.
My impulse is to reject the possibility of finding safe space at Out4Tea anymore, since the first Friday of every month is now marked not only by the lesbian dinner at Caos Cafe, but the BDSM dinner in the same small space.
There are probably places where we would like to all be weirdos together, safe and free and happy in the fact that we are different from the mainstream, but just because we are two facets of queer does not mean we all get along like one big happy family, even if we ought to. Just because neither group is heteronormative is not enough of a bond to make all of us feel safe in the presence of one another.

Perhaps it is my xenophobia that prevents my embracing the presence of queerness in all its forms as constituting safe space for me? How can I own this fact, without being blamed for it? Am I automatically at fault because of my attitude?

The truth, and nothing but the truth…

2007-09-28T16:03:00.000-07:00

The truth, and nothing but the truth…
(c) Melina Magdalena (2007)

Are these two things unrelated?

a) Yahoo! News today includes Why Women Worry So Much which posits a more developed mind connection in females than males, between the past and future. These connections, far from being useless stressors by overemotional, hysterical females, provide a basis for reasoned arguments and decision-making. As Andrea Thompson writes, “This skill, in its simplest form, is critical to social understanding as it is important to making decisions and assessing risk.”

b) Wikipedia’s article about "Truth" is unrelentingly male. Not one woman’s voice is quoted in this article, though women wrote some of the references (diligently doing their research on men’s ideas). Two of the three images on this page portray “Truth” as a naked woman – one being rescued by “Time”, as he vanquishes “Falsehood” and “Envy” (both male?) and the other (naturally the work of another male artist) portrays Truth as a naked white woman with long, dark hair, who holds a shining orb of light. Interestingly, the light is neither a long and pointed flame, nor a beacon, but a glowing sphere.

You tell me! Can you see a connection here?

In my experience, it is not possible to be on the ‘right’ side of the Law. The Law has no ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ side – it is merely an instrument for establishing and maintaining a system of decision-making, which is based on layer upon layer of previous decisions. Those who are touched by the Law, even when they firmly believe that ‘right’ is on their side, usually end up burned, along with their treasured version of Truth, which has been maimed beyond recognition.

There is very little transparency in Law. Those who practice the Art of Law are hard-pressed to explain its ins and outs to those whom they represent. The best example of this fact is the unwillingness of lawyers to be able to say which way any case is likely to go. Both sides enter the game with the possibility of emerging the victor. Where is the justice in this?

My interactions with lawyers, judges and barristers have been overwhelmingly frustrating. There are never any clear answers. Advice is invariably couched in terms of perhaps and could be. This has the effect of making me feel that there are prevarications on every side. Like a character in a Kafkaesque story, the unwitting victim has no recourse.

There is no easy way out, once the process has begun. Those who fight their way out are blamed for failing to show proper respect to the Law, and end up with egg on their faces. Look at those survivors of Family Violence who steadfastly refuse to press charges against their abusers on the basis that having to go through the police and court system will be more painful and achieve a less satisfactory outcome, than continuing to survive the abuse. Especially once they’ve already been exposed to such risks, women can be very skilled at perceiving and avoiding further risk of pain, exposure and humiliation.

When we refer to arbiters of the law as sleazy, untrustworthy crooks, it is because of the contradiction between the message we are given, that Law is pure, logical and just, and our experience of Law, which is mystifying, illogical, painful, humiliating and unfair. In my experience, Law has no transparency and very little logic.

It’s not fair to lawyers, that laypeople complain and abuse them, and hold lawyers and politicians to blame for all of the ills of the world, but nor is there much fairness in the Law. Such accusations should not be taken personally.

The Law, you see, is played at by Experts. These Experts may be familiar with the strange fire they encounter, but the layperson very often doesn’t, as those who become tangled in Law discover, to their great cost. The layperson’s objections to the great monetary cost of legal battles are justified. What is the price of a life?

Monopoly is the board game most akin to legal battles, in which vast sums of meaningless cash are handed from one player to another, without there being much fairness or justice involved in the transactions. It all comes down to the roll of the dice. Once the Experts have creamed off their portion of the spoils, there’s sometimes not much left for the person to whom these sums of money were awarded.

And who really believes that money can repair, undo or make good the damage done to people? I am as guilty as the next person, in believing that having more money will make me happier and more comfortable, but I don’t have to dig very deep to find an inner voice that tells me I will always, no matter how well off I am, have something to struggle with, and that wrestling with those demons is what life is really all about.

Those who enter the world of Law do so at risk of their privacy and wellbeing. Few emerge unscathed, even if their cases do not get sucked into the maelstrom of sensational news reporting. In fact, journalists usually ignore those whose stories ought to be told, but that’s another story.

Things happen. They are rarely planned. Causality is most often a product of hindsight. Those who find comfort and happiness in seeing the connections, and those who are skilled in choosing their path may find their path is smoother than those whose dispositions lead them to grumble and complain and always believe the worst of any situation. But even an optimist can be thrown for a six at the worst of times, and find herself struggling for her next breath.

Or is that an unbearably facile proposition? Is it inane? Am I insane? Allow me to try just once again.

If Truth is a shining orb of light – not the harsh, damaging, life-giving sunlight, but rather the gentle, silvery glow of moonlight – then surely we must be equally preoccupied by what is hidden, as what is exposed? Perhaps it is a happy accident that Men have chosen to represent Women as the bearers of Truth?

In this simplistic dichotomous world, Women are often seen as those who seek to make connections, to see causality, to predict the future in ways that are renowned for mystifying and frustrating the Men who just can’t keep up with our brilliant leaps of logic.

Add the Male versus Female Power quotient into the brew, and attempt to discern Truth, and it is as clear as the proverbial mud. This is a sick, sad world and that’s the truth.

Come on Women – you know the answer to my next question even before I go so far as to ask it:
What is most often, the product of frustration?
Anger, of course! Accompanied by violent outbursts!

Many are the foul crimes that are committed in blind rage as a product of humiliation. It is a perverse situation when such crimes in turn are the direct product of a lack of humility in those who commit them. Those who take themselves too seriously expect others to do the same. Though they appear unpredictable and occur unpredicted, such acts of violence horrify, terrify and suppress resistance. Such crimes compound and multiply, all in the name of truth and justice and logic and causality, although these are in fact rarely acknowledged.

I’d better watch out now, lest I be accused of inciting male violence as inflicted upon females who are just too smart to know any better.

Perhaps you’ve heard the sentencing arguments before. Perhaps it’s because their uncle abused them, or because of how their mothers brought them up? People find it easier to believe that criminals and those who start wars are tragically flawed in some way, than to believe that they are no better and no worse than any of us, and that they make considered, though horrifying and greedy choices to harm others for their own personal gain.

Of course you’re entitled use Law to pursue damages. You believe Right is on your side. You believe Law is based upon Truth and Justice. Your lawyers will guide you through the labyrinth, but they won’t explain, illuminate or enlighten you of the outcome. They can’t, because they have no prior knowledge of the outcome. Some things, such as media attention, simply can’t be predicted.

Enter at your own risk. Maybe you will get satisfaction from playing the game? But beware! If you play the victim when you find you have jumped out of the frying pan that was your life, and into the strange fire that is Law, you may be hard-pressed to find sympathy. Perhaps it’s human nature to blame people for their own misfortunes. Who ever said that life would be easy, or that the Law would treat you fairly?

I rest my case.

Begging Your Pardon

2007-09-21T14:49:00.000-07:00

Begging Your Pardon
(c) Melina Magdalena 2007

Today is Yom Kippur, the most solemn day in the Jewish calendar. On this day, Jews fast from sunset to sunrise, pray, meditate and seek forgiveness. We seek forgiveness from those we harmed intentionally, and from those whom we harmed without meaning to, and without knowing that we did so until after the fact. We seek forgiveness from those we love, as well as those we despise. Jews do not require or demand of G-d that we be forgiven. We have no right to do this. On Yom Kippur we stand before the Book of Life as humble human beings, capable of great good and terrible evil, and await judgment. It is not for G-d to forgive us our wrongdoings against other human beings. G-d can only forgive our wrongdoings against G-d.

Forgiveness can be given, but not bought. Forgiving oneself is as important as being forgiven by someone else. The important element is the acknowledgment of pain, the acceptance of one's responsibility for causing this pain, and the wish to undo that pain, however impossible it is, to rewind the videotape of life and start the segment over.

For me, I wonder when I will have time to be a good Jew. Last night, I lay in bed and thought about fasting. I planned to spend today in penitence and meditation. I considered those people to whom I would like to make my amends. There are several. But this morning, I got up and showered; watered my garden, put the kettle on, and ate some almonds along with my daily regime of vitamins. Everything I put in my mouth has stuck in my throat.

I finished Harry Potter's Deathly Hallows this morning, for the second time. I was deeply moved again, at arriving at the conclusion of this epic. The end of course, marks the beginning of Harry Potter's life - a life now not determined by the evil intentions of somebody else... a life in which he is free to be a humble human being, albeit a magical one...

Dictionaries distinguish "pardon" and "forgiveness" with reference to punishment. One who is "pardoned" is excused from being punished for one's wrongdoings. I believe the quality of "being forgiven" is different. In order to seek forgivness, one accepts the punishment that is part and parcel of the outcome of wrongdoing.

Some people are like House Elves. They seek out punishment because of their acute awareness of their inability to avoid wrongdoing, no matter how hard they try. Such people punish themselves. This can be separate from their seeking forgiveness from those whom they have wronged. When they are warped, they begin to enjoy their self-inflicted punishments, because this is all they know.

Some people are more like Lord Voldemort. They deny that there is any "wrong" in their evildoings, and when pushed to acknowledge the dire consequences of their actions, they make excuses, still avoiding culpability.

There are people who are unaware of their wrongdoings. Like the "simple son" of the Passover Service, these people are not necessarily in denial. They are not perfect people - their oblivion does not make them angels, but their lack of self-awareness makes them slippery characters on whom it is difficult to pin any specific wrongdoings. For those of us who are vulnerable to taking full responsibility for the actions of others, because our self-doubt and self-hatred drives us to seek punishment wherever it may be found, it is easy to blame oneself for hurting the Oblivious, rather than acknowledging the pain that one has suffered through the indifferent and often callous behaviour of the Oblivious.

I can be a smug, self-righteous bitch sometimes, and I know it. I can be blinded to everything, except my own pain. In flailing around not only do I fail to notice the compassion extended towards me by others, but I inflict further pain upon those who would come to my assistance.

I am sorry.

I can be inspired by my own good intentions sometimes, to the detriment of those whome I seek to rescue and assist. My pushiness and busyness means I fail in the tests of compassion and disable, rather than enable those whom I would help and support.

I am sorry.

My egocentricity often makes me the centre of my own universe, believing that everything revolves around me, and that I have the power to determine what will happen next. This hubris removes me from the reality that is me as one small speck of consciousness, floating in space, seeking to grow and learn. This deceit inverts my intention and my experience, so that I am unable to truly connect with those around me, even those I love.

I am sorry.

To all of those whom I have hurt and harmed, whether intentionally or unintentionally, I am sorry. I acknowledge that I have hurt you through my egotism, my own suffering, my own pain and anger, and my own need for recognition. I take full responsibility for my actions and my inactions; for speaking out when I should have remained silent, and for not speaking when words of strength, courage and compassion were required. I am sorry for my failings. I am sorry for being too busy and preoccupied to see what I could do in situations where I left you in need. Please forgive me.

One of the Faceless Majority

2007-09-15T16:05:00.000-07:00

One of the Faceless Majority
(c) Melina Magdalena 2007

Two weird things happened to me at school this week that made me reassess my ideas of cultural identity and my place in the world.

The first thing, was the reaction of several students in my class when we went into the Library's Seminar Room for our reading lesson. A number of new books had been pinned to the noticeboard in the hopes of attracting favourable attention from said students.

"Miss!" One young woman's hand shot up (she's one of the brightest sparkles in the group), "Is that book about you? Is that you in the picture?"
"Er, no..." I replied, looking around to see what she was referring to, "That's a book about Princess Diana."
And sure enough, as the rest of the students dribbled through the door, two others made very similar comments.

Now I know my younger brother bears a distinct resemblance to Prince William - this has been an oft-remarked fact during the course of his life, much to his chagrin. And indeed, our Germanic family colouring and build (apart from the fact that I am height-challenged) is very British Royal. We are not the weedy, pale English flowers, but the rosy-cheeked, hearty German peasant types.

But still - no one has ever mistaken me for Princess Diana before. And I'm not sure whether to be disturbed or flattered!

On the same day, after school, I was standing at the Reception Desk, sorting out some paperwork for next week, when one of the school's BSSOs (Bilingual Support School Officer) came up and congratulated me for winning a permanent teaching position at the school.
"Er, no..." said I, "It's not me. I didn't even apply!"

Oh my, was she embarrassed. Seems she had mistaken me for one of the other teachers. Now again - I'm not sure whether to be disturbed of flattered! The other teacher is also a lesbian; neither of us wear a hijab; we both have short, dark hair - hers is curly. Neither of us wear glasses, and I've never seen the other teacher in anything but trousers, which is the same for me.

I've grown to enjoy the plaintive questions from children - always around the age of 4-6, who wail "Mummy, is that a man or a woman?" As if the large breasts on my chest were not a dead giveaway. I really don't look very masculine, I think?

Anyway, I've been lucky enough to grow up in a multicultural, multiracial society and family. I can hardly imagine what it would be like to have to relearn to read faces and identities if I'd grown up in a homogenous place, where everyone was more or less the same eye, skin and hair colour and where the differences in facial features, build and posture were far more subtle.

It's not as if I'm a know-it-all, and I'm learning new things every minute I'm in the classroom with these students. The subtlety of an eye-brow lift, for example, to indicate assent and understanding, versus the looking down and refusal to meet the teacher's gaze, to indicate compliance and respect.

This week, another teacher revealed to me that when some Sudanese people look away over their shoulders after being offered food or drink, this is not embarrassment or shyness, this indicates their having been gravely insulted.

As if!

As if, they were not able to supply their own needs! As if they were dependent upon the charity and goodwill of others, for their survival. They are a proud people - and this turned my naiive notions of the universal value of hospitality right upon its head.

There are people who nod their heads and make pleasant noises, just in order not to show disagreement, so vital is it in their communities, to present a united front. Occasionally I play games with the Asian students in my class, where I try to force them to reveal their true opinions. So far, I think I've lost out at every attempt.

People watching is one of my all time favourite activities. I watch people, examine their faces and body language, and make up stories about them. I observe their interactions, and when I see family groups, I like to compare features and see the interplay of genetic inheritance. I find this utterly fascinating.

In the playground of a school whose population is mostly new arrivals to Australia, I get the opportunity to look at a myriad of faces every day. There are some groups whose faces are scarred - one group, as ritual scarification and the other group pitted and torn by the ravages of war. The hair is absolutely amazing, on the groups who show their hair, and for the other groups, whose women keep their heads covered, the variety of hijab is colourful and awe-inspiring. It is sometimes more than I can bear, to look into the eyes of those people who allow eye contact. What lies beneath the surface runs far deeper than many would give them credit for.

As a teacher, there are days when I feel depleted and irritated by the many demands for my attention, the clamour of need, and the awareness that what I have to offer is quite often not what the students feel they want. But there are other days touched by the glamour of golden sunshine, days that are filled with love. Of course these are the days that make it all worthwhile.

I'm reminded of Kim Stanley Robinson's character Frank in 40 Signs of Rain - a scientist, who assesses every situation as though humans were a group of primates running bewildered through this modern world in search of our primeval savannah. We are a weird bunch. I often marvel at the things we do, what we choose to see as important, how we select particular features or activities and prioritise them for no good reason. It's not just about survival anymore...

As for the students, and all the people I watch, they are every one of them individual, and every one of them is beautiful.