Angela Carter, Julia Kristeva, and the ‘Masquerade of Reality’:

In a new study from the University of Michigan psychologist Terri Conley, the findings reveal that women and men are more alike than most are willing to admit. This has even become clearer through Conley’s study on sexual behavior. Like the Kinsey Reports in the 1950’s, the new study reflects on details much of society has already known, but just has not confessed. The study from Terri Conley entitled, “Men, Women, and the Bedroom” demystifies the traditional claims of differences that are not innate and specific to gender. This is not the first time mainstream ‘accepted’ definitions have been disproved. Limited perceptions are classic to mainstream acceptance, yet their very actions prove to differ from their speech towards sexuality and psychology. The very masquerade of reality that the philosopher Julia Kristeva and author Angela Carter have dealt with throughout one another’s respected oeuvre gain resolve with Conley’s new statistical findings.

In Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun, she reflects primarily on the subject of melancholia. Within society’s masquerade of reality, when it comes to depression and melancholia, there is a ‘learned helplessness’ that has inhibited the population. For example regarding sexuality, she states, “One cannot overemphasize the tremendous psychic, intellectual and affective effort a woman must make in order to find the other sex as an erotic object” (Kristeva, pg 30).  She notes that the cathexes in social bonds between men and women are found through aesthetic substance, and that an individual must visually create an attraction that supersedes natural instinct in today’s culture. She states: “Literary creation is that adventure of the body and signs that bear witness to the affect … the semiotic and the symbolic become communicable imprints” over choice and action (Kristeva, pg 22). One’s perceptions of sexuality and perceptions on sadness, in respect to depictions in the Black Sun, tend to be too often generalized with false perimeters. “Sadness is the fundamental mood of depression … Mood is a ‘generalized transference’.” Yet the institutions of psychiatry and even psychology blur the borders of clinical melancholy with excessive prescriptions dependent on drugs and Freudian definitions.

In likeness to Kristeva’s theory, the Surrealist novelist Angela Carter embodies in her fiction the “dangerous pleasure of demystifying the individual self” from the role-playing masquerade of reality. Carter’s characters, in her novels Shadow Dance and The Magic Toyshop, whether it is through shadow puppets or individuals toyed with like objects for play, find their treatment disheartening and nearly helpless in a world limited to false institutions.

The characters of Angela Carter’s two novels react to their depression or emotions in different ways and they find that the very predicaments, which follow them, in a sense, within society are determined where ‘women are not born, but made’ or even further, ‘humans are products of their society’. Their predetermined emotions, sexuality, and rules begin to crumble the more each character comes to terms with actual reality.

Depression, like madness, either due to obvious or metaphysical reasons, with regards to subjects who may merely have a different temperament than accepted norms, becomes a means for society to control individuals. Historically, confirmed perceptions of ‘accepted norms’ have been decided through church, therapy, and especially today through film and media. Sexual norms and psychological norms have been limited throughout history, but with more and more outlets of influence, certain elites try to control our emotional reactions and our physical activity. However, prohibition did not work for controlling alcohol, nor does it work for sexuality. When it comes to depression, the power of drug companies seems to hope to control human alienation as well.

Freud was never able to understand the concept of female in a social context let alone in a psychology context. Yet this did not stop the greater Western society to use his definitions to maintain the psychiatry industry, which is now usurped via the pharmaceutical industry. Sigmund Freud was the benchmarker for 20^th Century sexual and mental politics. However, long before Freud, back in the 18^th Century, Marquis de Sade reflected on a different analysis of human politics. Angela Carter was a strong admirer of Sade.

In Angela Carter’s analysis on the ideology of pornography entitled the Sadeian Woman, she states: “The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation. Flesh has lost its common factor; that is the substance of which we are all made and yet that differentiates us. It has acquired, instead, the function of confusing kind and gender, man and beast, woman and fowl. The subject itself becomes an ‘object de luxe’ in these elaborately choreographed masques of abstraction and of alienation” (Carter, pg 146).

How can one grasp the world outside of the conventional limitations, when the real world is beyond conventionality, but culture has simply been misguided over the centuries? In parallel to Kristeva and Carter, the poet Marianne Moore, described by Cynthis Hogue, used poetry to “eschew conventionally feminine identifications” that masquerade positions constructed through contradictory fabrications, and her texts “indeed fray the orthodox views she quite literally scraps,” instead Moore stitches new fragments to create new ways of knowing, new truths, and new identities” (Cynthia Hogue). Like Marianne Moore, Kristeva and Carter break down the false parameters of understanding psychological, social, and sexual identity. In Kristeva’s Black Sun, she uses the notion of seeing and going ‘beyond the looking-glass’ referring to the infamous Alice in Wonderland motif. In Carter’s novel, A Passion of a New Eve, the main character goes through countless forced transformations from male to female to male and back to female. When the story nears completion the entire concept of gender has been twisted and eschewed that one can no longer keep track of the changes, creating a new paradox of identity.

The displacement of systematic personal projections and role reversal leads Sue Roe to compare Carter’s work with that of the Surrealist, Leonora Carrington, who she quoted from My Mother is a Cow, “To be one human creature is to be a legion of mannequins. These mannequins can become animated according to the choice of the individual creature” (Carrington). Nowhere in society has the masquerade of reality taken place most than in the modern and contemporary expectations of sexual politics. Hampered realization through depression and selective routes leads to internal and external acts that often do not pass over the illusion but leads to new illusions or delusional non-meaning. “I am that which is not.” Sublimation requires additional energy to overcome the obstacles rather than lead to depression for not living up to a false standard.

In Ally Foggs, Gaurdian article on Terri Conley’s findings ‘Forget Mars and Venus: There is no great sex difference’ (October 25, 2011), Foggs reports on the finding that though the myth that “men think about sex more than women is confirmed, they do, about 18 times a day as opposed to 10 for women. But men also think more about their other physical needs too, such as food and sleep. The authors point out that this is in keeping with models of socialization where females are raised to worry about the needs of others more than their own” (Foggs). Yet these minor differences are highly generalized and there can be no universal.   

Foggs confirms Conley’s report, stating: “Fundamentally, what Conley et al are claiming does seem to be true. Gender differences in sexuality are not immutable and are certainly affected by the social environment. They're also remarkably small.”

Terri Conley reflects the importance of her study on-line in the faculty profile of University of Michigan, she confirms: “Gender differences in sexual experiences and attitudes are among the largest gender differences demonstrated empirically. My goal is to understand the socio-cultural reasons for these differences and to determine situations in which these prominent differences are absent. Currently, I am examining the large differences between women and men in preferences for casual sex. Two main explanations for these differences are a) pleasure or anticipated pleasure in casual sexual experiences (expectations of pleasure seem to be higher for men than for women) and b) stigma against women engaging in sexual activity” (Conley).

Conley’s findings are not dramatically huge or rather new under the sun. However, the findings strengthen with research the definitive voice that both Kristeva and Carter have been expressing for decades that gender difference is highly fabricated through cultural conditioning. Society and cultural norms nurture sexual and emotional behavior in unconscious and conscious ways. Many times, these forced or fabricated illusions society force onto men, women, and those individuals who do not align with either gender or who align with both genders can be alienating. This alienation can lead to depression, where yet another institutional code book attempts to control or prescribe limited metrics on individual choice. What Angela Carter and Julia Kristeva attempt to do in their reflections and abstractions are to challenge the eye and the mind on the social cultural limitations and to create a new identity. Will the masquerade of reality be overcome leading to a more healthy reality? One cannot be sure. It will take a lot of energy. Going beyond the looking-glass is a good first step. One cannot create utopia through force.    

Russell Peters: Bringing the World Together through Comedy

In a stadium in London, Russell Peters comes on stage with a velvet jacket, jeans and sneakers. His Attention Deficit does him well as he scopes the audience for material as it comes at him. In the crowds he finds people from nearly every background imaginable: Irish, Saudi, Iraqi, Chinese, Spanish, Senegalese, Indian, and countless more from all regions of the globe. He may be the only comedian who can bring people together to laugh at and laugh with one another from all ethnic possibilities.

No topic and no background can avoid Russell Peters ability to reflect on our cultural differences, our flaws, and our idiosyncrasies in the contemporary world. His style of humor reflects the third important task that Cornel West describes in his book Democracy Matters, which along with the ideal of Socratic questioning and prophetic witness, the tragicomic hope. His fearless speech to discuss all politically incorrect topics brings to the front the “ability to laugh and retain a sense of life’s joy” (West). Humor, like jazz, can free the stress against inhumane injustice.

Russell Peters is the epitome of what Cornel West would call “the profound tradition to inform and embolden the struggle against the callous indifference of elite and empirical injustice.” However, Russell Peters uses humor as his bold tool to entertain the diverse masses. He feeds off of the reactions and language anomalies of those he comes across throughout his continual world tour.

At one time in his performance on the London stage, he discusses how in London the use of the word cunt is commonly used and not at all used in the same context as it's most commonly used in North America. His analysis on how certain words in a cultural context when pulled from one context to another can easily change the way an audience perceives a word. In a parallel of juxtaposition, like Eve Ensler, Inga Muscio, in her book, Cunt, reclaims the word, which was once a term used for the Indian goddess Kali, who was independent and powerful. In her manifesto, she strives to transform the context of the word to re-instate its initial power rather than insult. Her emphasis is to know one self, love one self, and express one self.

Russell Peters makes us all take a long look in the mirror and in a far connected way with different approaches than Inga Muscio, he pulls us to appreciate and laugh at our differences that make us all significantly unique and yet quite similar.  

Awaken, Occupy the Rural, Suburban and Urban Decline:

In perhaps a cynical delight harbored within ideals to rupture an awakening, the decline of the American system has been evident for those critically aware since the beginning of the Neoliberal experiment. The visual evidence of the decline reflects the limitations of the capitalist ideology.

Firstly, the American Rural dependency and bullying from the corporations particularly Wal-Mart and Monsanto has limited the one-time American ideal of independent farmers and business owners. Throughout the rural wasteland, coining the voice of T.S. Eliot, where the decline from one phase of societal evolution passed to another, and hyped progress hailed industrial technology, yet trapped dependency on big business farms left seed owners to be dominated through property-rights from usurpers of pesticide, fertilizer, and grain. Yet on the other rural path, where small towns throughout the countryside once had independent grocers, butchers, tailors, bakers, and more, now they have been put out of business. Wal-Mart has made ghost towns out of self-reliance.

Secondly, the American Suburban decline reflects decadence too often. Apathy and indifference to the reason for much of the luxury; a throw-away society of consumer goods most often from resources taken from overseas, put together from overseas, and when discarded without clear where, gets dumped in fields, landfills, and wastelands. Commercial realism consumed with materialism that unfortunately is dependent on the goods from elsewhere. For when imports or exports cease due to the economy, most cannot fend for themselves on sustainable gardens, clothing that isn’t sold in the shopping mall, or gathering the raw material to rebuild their wants that have been trucked in from rural and other natural areas: Home Depot, Staples, Lowes, Gap, Banana Republic, and more. Always taking, and yet forgetting to give back to the ecological cycle, there is little to assure clarity before it is too late.

Finally, the Urban areas, even more dependent on food from outside the city limits, has left the poor little choice but to assume inflation is a pay or starve choice. Made passive or divided against one another poor verses poor, hard working cop versus hard worker or unemployed while the elite remain apart. The middle class has always been a fortunate wall between the haves and the have-nots. Convinced that joining the armed service would be their only escape route, they are left to fight wars for someone else’s benefit. Ill health insurance or ill health seems reason enough to feed depression with alcohol and other vices to strategic marginalized streets. But the city is more akin to Baudelaire than T.S. Eliot. Child of giant cities, we as citizens are convinced that it is better to be infantile adults consumers for life than to be critical thinking developers of a better structure.

The Urban, Rural and Suburban wastelands may not awaken without significant leaders who are beyond politics. Organizing is prime. Organizing like Cesar Chavez in the fields or Grace Lee Boggs in the city. Spontaneity is of the essence. How can we see if we do not open our eyes? How can we think if we do not use our brains?  

SOURCES FOR REVOLUTIONARY INSPIRATION:

Albert Camus discusses the difference between a rebel and a revolutionary. He notes that a rebel is merely challenging authority as a means to identify himself as someone making noise. The rebel image needs the authority as a means to create a fashion statement. However, a revolutionary is someone who wants to change the system completely in order to make a better system, and a more inclusive system.

Unfortunately, most revolutions have had leaders that entered after the initial actions of change and usurp the potential of the revolution. This happened with Napoleon and Stalin. Other revolutionary leaders, like Mao, passionately fought in the revolution only to get corrupted due to the nature of power once gained. Other significant leaders who pressed passionately for change died before they had the opportunity to prove their true quality of post-revolutionary pedagogy.

During Ho Chi Minh’s early years, he contacted Presidents Wilson in 1919 and Truman 1945 to help bring independence to Vietnam from the French in the similar spirit of the American Revolution. Both Presidents in their perspective time, snubbed him and without compassion disregarded the notion that the Vietnamese would want freedom too. The reactions only directed Ho Chi Minh to embrace socialism further and to eventually be certain Communism was the only means to overcome colonial hubris and capitalist greed, ideological double-standards and the contrast of who democracy is willing to protect and who not.

Gandhi opted not to seek a political position in the independent government of India, because he felt that he could reach the people without predetermined posts designed from prior oppressors. Politicians tend to replete their promises and perhaps fail to honor their initial will. Falling back into the same leadership roles of those who oppressed the public before independent change has merely reflected new wine in old bottles.

In particular, the revolutionaries who impassion me most at this time in my research and thoughts are still Emma Goldman, Mother Jones, Rosa Luxemburg, Tina Modotti, and Louise Michel. There are many others. However, these five women had an edge we can still learn from. Two of which were considered the most dangerous women in America at one time. 

Mother Jones’ famous cheer was “Pray for the dead, but fight like hell for the Living!” She not only wanted to liberate women from patriarchy but she primarily fought with the labor movements to liberate men and women from the exploitive chains of a growing corporate elite that dictated over the mass public. In the society of her day and today, regardless of gender she invoked that all forms of slavery including those in capitalism, if not especially, were negative and unjust. “You don’t need to vote to raise hell!” (Autobiography of Mother Jones).

Louise Michel admits that her revolt went beyond the silent pity of suffering, “My revolt against social inequalities went further. I grew, and I have continued to grow, through the battles and across the carnage. It dominates my grief and it dominates my life. There was no way that I could have stopped myself from throwing my life to the revolution” (The Red Virgin).

Like her predecessors in the US and France, Rosa Luxemburg in Germany was adamant about change and just action in a society where workers were manipulated through the elite capitalist class. The suppressive system continually reflected that legislative reforms and electoral political party change would be insufficient and misleading. Embracing the “element of spontaneity” and spontaneity was not just referring to “instinctive action as a conscious direction” but on the “contrary, spontaneity was a driving force … because revolutions do not allow anyone to play the schoolmaster with them” (Reform and Revolution).

No one single individual is the key to a revolution. During the spontaneous act of revolution all fractions are significant elements in the chemistry process, only after the revolution if alertness and awareness are put down do faces takeover and claim or usurp the leadership role: Lenin in Russia, George Washington in the US, and the Ayatollah in Iran. A singular face to a revolution drowns out the multitude reasons for the necessity of change. Then the repetition and resemblance of ill-pedagogy steps in: new wine in old bottles.

The artist and revolutionary, Tina Modotti, as an Italian immigrant to the US and active in the struggles of the working class knew that art and revolution complemented one’s internal force with his/her outward dissent. Yet as her most common quote would reflect, “I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art.” Her art would come secondary to her commitment to society when it was necessary to fight.

Emma Goldman was no stranger to the creed that Tina Modotti followed. “It is the obligation of each of us to make human equality a reality, starting in our own lives,” Emma Goldman states, and during her time and our time “Industry is the ceaseless piracy of the rich against the poor.” Her intellect noticed how “under the present conditions the antagonism of economic and social interests results in the relentless war among the social units, and creates an insurmountable obstacle in the way of a cooperative commonwealth” (Anarchism and Other Essays).     

Sources for revolutionary inspiration, high and wide, remind us of how far we have yet to come in the continual struggle for uploading human dignity to each individual  who is unconsciously unaware. Overcoming the resemblance of new wine in old bottles, one hopes that enough voices can speak out so that eventually society learns from history and so that revolutions do not fall ill to similar patterns.   

In the Spirit of Nonviolent Resistance:

Of course today is the birth date of John Lennon, now I am not one to harbor on the idea of birthdays and instead believe every day is worthy enough to celebrate surviving. But as Lennon imagined a utopia of peace and prosperity, he was not the only one to do so. He had some of the most dedicated and courageous warriors for peace on his side. For the cowardly are the ones with tanks and guns, but those who fall in the tradition of nonviolent movement, they are the strongest of wills because they believe in another way possible to solve the problems than harboring continual aggression.

     

Like a never-ending track medley, where the baton of resistance hands off to the next strong enough to learn from the preceding march, civil disobedience carries the torch. The first voices to be recognized as prophets for peace were the leaders of today’s religions: Abraham, Buddha, Moses, and Jesus. These voices lived their ideal of nonviolence to such an extreme that they influenced billions of souls over the past three millennia.  Don’t kill, don’t harm another, and love all as equals.

When the ancient Egyptians exploited and manipulated the Jews, Moses did not fight back, he gathered his people and walked away into the desert escaping from slavery. They resisted and yet did not return with violence. The ideal of civil disobedience during the Romantic Era and after the Enlightenment was significantly discussed in the ideals of American Transcendentalist writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. While in the southern states, Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery and began the famous Underground Railroad.

An admirer of Thoreau, moved by his beliefs, sought to write letters to soldiers in his own native land. “You are a soldier. You have been taught to shoot, to stab, to march. You have been taught to read and write led to exercise and reviews; perhaps have been in a campaign and have fought with the Turks or the Chinese, obeying all orders. It has not even entered your head to ask yourself whether what you were ordered to do was good or bad” (Leo Tolstoy, Notes to Soldiers). Tolstoy had sought to enlighten soldiers to use their courage to put down their weapons and consider why it was necessary to obey orders that permitted them to kill.

Thoreau and Tolstoy had an admirer as well, and the young Hindu lawyer found instant karma; “All terrorism is bad whether put up in a good cause. Every cause is good in the estimation of its champion. … In other words, pure motives can never justify impure or violent action” (Mahatma Gandhi). Gandhi went beyond the writings of the two idealist authors. He activated on the ideals and made them into a reality. He moved millions of people in India alone to overcome the British Imperialism. Walking throughout the countryside and the cities, refusing to pay false taxes, as Thoreau had done in the US, and bringing people together to make enough noise to rattle the establishment.

Yet before Gandhi had shaken the world of identifying resistance through other means, a significant Women’s Suffrage activist in the United States in the first ten years of the 20^th Century did just as Gandhi but sooner. Alice Paul picketing the streets and obstructing traffic with her fellow Silent Sentinels in 1917 brought to the government’s attention that it was due time to grant women the right to vote.  Alice Paul along with Ida B Wells and Lucy Burns were not merely going to walk away. They were going to stand up to the government and make sure that women were noticed.

As Albert Camus, another contemporary of Gandhi, reflected, “Yes, Man is his own end. And he is his only end. If he aims to be something, it is in this life” (Camus). Camus, a French Algerian, was aware that if people choose to act violently they most often end in violent ways. If one chooses to act a life of peace and motivation, nonviolent and resistant they will be enthralled throughout history as saints for a cause. Unfortunately, like Gandhi who died via the very means they abhorred, the act of violence is a constant vice of society. But these individuals even aware of this fate would live on through their legacy and inspire others beyond their mortal time.

Martin Luther King Jr. was significantly influenced by Gandhi’s message even after Gandhi had passed away via violent means. The end did not justify the life experience of talking truth to power. In his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, King promoted: “The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than a dialogue” (MLK); regardless of the physical threat, the Civil Rights Activists who marched with King chose to act peacefully when they knew that their oppressors were brutal. Though he lost his life for his cause, King represented a quality of leadership during his time and today.

Perhaps religion plays a part in the leadership of those who seek nonviolent means or perhaps it is a spiritual discipline that enacts courage and strength. Regardless of religious faith, the universal value of human life has individuals from all religions who have activated the approach of nonviolence, just as individuals from each religion have acted violently due to misreading the message of prophets. Gandhi’s Muslim counter-part in Pakistan and India Gaffar Khan moved thousands of people to not seek brutal means to reach independence. Gandhi’s disciple Mridula Sarabhai as well would seek justice in Kashmir as she dedicated her life to promoting human dignity. The Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King Jr. Aung San Suu Kyi, and others from Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Arab and Hindi traditions pushed the prominence of ethical messages that the founders of such religions encouraged.

Somehow politicized fractions, greedy for power and control lose the underlining message of religions: do not harm or exploit your neighbors. Responsible leadership with responsible teachers is vital in the education of future leaders and to overcome the double standard of defining what it means to be civilized.  Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator, whose famous book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, underlines the emphasis of responsible teaching: organizing, consistency, boldness, unity for liberation, objectivity to understand otherness, and critical thinking, which involves having the ability to ask hard questions.

“Problem-posing education, as a humanist and liberating praxis, posits as fundamental that the people subjected to domination must fight for their emancipation. To that end, it enables teachers and students to become Subjects of the educational process by overcoming authoritarianism and an alienating intellectualism; it also enables people to overcome their false perceptions of reality” (Freire). These false perceptions are hopelessness, skepticism, helplessness, and victimization. Education can help us overcome these false precepts. A moral teacher, like Martin Luther King or John Lennon, or Cesar Chavez, tends to teach the best lessons outside of the classroom.

Cesar Chavez followed the lessons from his predecessors and utilized organizing tools to bring his fellow Hispanic American farm workers together and overcome exploitive working conditions in California throughout the 1970’s and 80’s. His organization known as the United Farm Workers, worked with local communities to unify and maintain pressure on the exploitive farm owners through peaceful means.      

Does ‘power come from the barrel of a gun’? Is it the only way to break class structure and confront the establishment through violent means? Can getting organized and fighting back for one’s rights merely be interpreted through brutal acts? These men and women mentioned throughout the essay beg to differ. True strength comes from the actions and reactions one takes in life. As John Lennon sang for imagine world peace, some audiences could not imagine the idea other than in a fairytale. However, the footprints left in history from such responsible leaders felt that leading by example would continue to motivate this constant struggle to protect dignity.

In 2011, several leaders on the streets across the globe have chosen to follow the lessons of nonviolence. In Chile, Camila Vallejo, at 23 years of age, motivates and strengthens the student protests. She preaches nonviolence, and has connected protestors throughout the university system to stand up for the right to a better education. One form of protest that has been used is known as cacerolazos­ – banging pots and pans, making noise to overcome the police brutality, and shouting slogans of resistance.

In Syria, Razan Zeitouneh, 34, utilizes journalism and peaceful protests to shed the message that the people of Syria are tired of an oppressive government; and though the Assad dictatorship atrociously kills its own dissidents, Razan Zeitouneh and her fellow citizens continue to resist.  She states, “If we didn’t believe that we will win, we wouldn’t be able to bear all this.”   

As well as in Yemen, Tawakkul Karman, 32, has shown leadership in the face of military force to overcome abuse via peaceful means. Her fellow protestors and her organization Women Journalists Without Chains, carries onward against unnecessary tactics by powerful elites, in order to make necessary democratic reforms.

Camila Vallejo, Tawakkul Karman, and Razan Zeitouneh are potentially the next great teachers to follow the tradition of nonviolence to lead the world from the current paradigm of limited hegemonic fear to the open sharing freedom with the multitude. The legacy that Thoreau taught Tolstoy, Gandhi taught Martin, and Lennon sang to the hippies, lives on, while those in repressive power at previous times are only remembered for their crimes against humanity. How will you want to be remembered? Which form of leadership moves you in your heart and which moves you by the fist?      

Yemen Peace Activist Tawakkul Karman: Who is she?

In the past week Tawakkul Karman of Yemen was one of the three women who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her activism and non-violent mobilization during the continual unrest in the Middle East throughout the year. The other two celebrated voices were President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leyma Gbowee both from Liberia. Highlighting these women to global awareness will strengthen the strides these women have made individually for women’s rights and human rights. Tawakkul Karman is known for her organization Women Journalists Without Chains.  Many people are curious to know who Tawakkul Karman is, how can people separate the often slanted politics of the Nobel Committee with the individual’s life commitment, and how she falls in line within the historic nonviolent tradition?

Throughout the year in numerous Arab nations thousands upon thousands of individuals have gathered together to standup for their human dignity and fight off totalitarianism, secularism, capitalism, fundamentalism, and feudalism. When individuals are being exploited via their own government and outside forces, eventually there is a tipping point to how much suppression they can take. How is it that one particular person can be pointed out as prize worthy, when so many people are involved in such movements?

As a journalist, Tawakkul Karman refused to remain silent and has written about human rights issues continually in the public eye since 2005. In a February 22, 2006 article in The Times of India, entitled 'Controversy Pits Muslim Against Muslim,' Karman is quoted in saying "This has become a game between two sides, the extremists and the government,” and that too often most reactions from either group leaves the bulk of the masses left to violence from both sides: terrorism or state-terrorism.

The Women Journalists Without Chains organization heads the way for women to get involved in the often one-sided masculine monologue of how society should be directed. Having women’s voices in democracy and society building is a necessity in the 21^st Century, and some of the key crisis in the modern world come from limiting the voices of the many to only the voices of an elite few, who far often tend to only be men. As part of the 2011 protests inspired throughout Egypt and Tunisia, the voice of journalists and those on the streets fueled the global attention with reports across the social on-line network community. On the ground level she lead in the organization of spontaneous sit-ins and planned protests.

Though her actions are of the highest courage and nobility, one still can wonder why did this particular activist win the award. The Nobel Peace Prize has throughout its tradition shadowed political motivations for many of the awards granted. Over the years, certain winners of the prize represented an oppositional view to a government that Western nations wanted to reform for multiple reasons. In 2010, the award was given to Liu Xiaobo from China, and the Chinese government was displeased with the committee’s nomination. Shirin Ebadi from Iran was awarded the prize in 2003, Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma in 1991, and Wangari Maathai in 2004. These amazing human rights activists who have courage, never committed their life work for any prize but for the greater goal of human dignity. The Nobel Committee, potentially on the negative reflection, uses the lives of great people for an underlining political purpose. Other times, the prize is awarded to individuals who have not yet proven their credibility or have invested heavily in encouraging war and not peace, such as President Obama and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

In a recent Guardian article entitled, “All-Female Nobel Peace Prize Risks Being Seen As A Political Move”, Nesrine Malik makes the point that “the very fact that it was awarded to three women, as opposed to one, suggests that there was a theme established at the outset, that of women's rights and activism, with a nod to the Arab spring, which then dictated the nature and number of recipients” (Malik).

Though the Nobel Peace Prize has political motives, many key activists have utilized the publicity of the award regardless of its politics, to promote their causes and strengthen their dedication to human rights. Shirin Ebadi, Jody Williams, and Rigoberta Menchu have pushed human rights initiatives to end oppression continually.

In the spirit of Non-violent civil disobedience, Tawakkul Karman may follow in the tradition of Alice Paul, Mahatma Gandhi, Ghaffar Khan, Mridula Sarabhai, Cesar Chavez, Leo Tolstoy and Martin Luther King; or will she be led in time to a similar disbelief like Kwame Nkrumah? Kwame Nkrumah led the people of Ghana to overcome British Imperialism. During his leadership, like that of Salvador Allende of Chile, he sought an alternative policy of economic and social development from that of the dominant Western trade system. Because he sought to create a more inclusive system and an independent approach, he was ousted through a military coup that was CIA backed. Unlike Allende who lost his life during the coup, Nkrumah spent the rest of his life in exile. During his exile, he moved from being a supporter of nonviolence, to understanding that the capitalist elite would stop at nothing to control national and international trade and that their greed would not be phased with humility and compassion. Near the end of his life, Kwame Nkrumah felt that the only way to make African nations unite against oppression would be through conflict. He was bitter and disappointed.

Tawakkul Karman, unlike Kwame Nkrumah, has not reflected any political-seat of ambition. She is seeking to stand equal and in solidarity with her fellow protestors in Yemen and throughout the Muslim world.

“Let us be clear,” she states, “the Yemeni revolution has already brought internal stability to a state riddled with war and conflict. I call on the global community to support the peaceful revolution as it did in Tunisia and Egypt. I call on the United States and the European Union to tell Saleh that he must leave now, in response to the demands of his people. They should end all support for his regime, especially that which is used to crush peaceful opposition – tear gas canisters have ‘Made in America’ on them. They should freeze the Saleh family's assets and those of Saleh's henchmen and return them to the people. If the US and Europe genuinely support the people, as they say, they must not betray our peaceful revolution” (Guardian, ‘Our revolution's doing what Saleh can't – uniting Yemen’, April 8, 2011)

Tawakkul Karman, now the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, at 32, has the lifetime ahead of her to continue her message and prove to her people and the globe, whether or not she will remain a voice for human dignity. Regardless of the Nobel Committee’s underlining political motives, the tradition of human rights activists of the nonviolent ambition strengthens the overall definition of humanity and quality of leadership. 

DEVIATE FROM EVASION

Aid as Imperialism is a common phrase in international development outside of the meeting rooms and conferences. The perception that all agencies involved in the development field are better to exist than to not exist at all is a flawed notion. When Occupy Wall Street protests are standing up to the corporate greed throughout the United States, the need to extend to the development field is just as vital a route.

When USAID, the US Agency for International Development, is far in the pockets of corporations like Monsanto and Pfizer, more damage can be done than positive development. The entire occupational field of development from a capitalist perspective is unsustainable, because in order to continue the illusion of development, no true changes can be made, or the workforce of such a field would be proven unnecessary.

On October 4, 2011, CNN and Bloomberg News, as well as other news sources, noted the shocking and ironic fact that HIV Risks in African Nations that have received Depo-Provera injections have doubled. While citizens in low-income areas in the US have avoided the injections and have the available legal outlets to sue if negligence has occurred, developing nations in Africa have been herded into development health projects promising treatment and even potential cures for HIV.

When foreign development policies are too close to the corporate interest, human lives are left as lab-rats. Pfizer and Monsanto are just two of the key US corporations using the US government as tools to dump their products in developing countries.

But this is not the first time we are learning about this. In the past few years, Dambisa Moyo has written a book shocking the popular markets entitled ‘Dead Aid’; however, long before the book was an awakening for passive audiences, writers and activists such as Susan George, Paul Harrison, Nigel Harris and Teresa Hayter have covered this issue from the 1960’s up through today. Many times these writers have been strategically pushed out-of-print to evade their calls.

A short list of books worth finding, if you can, regarding the issues of aid and underdevelopment are: Susan George 1) Another World is Possible If… 2) A Fate Worse Than Debt; Nigel Harris 3) The End of the Third World, 4) Of Bread and Guns; Paul Harrison 5) The Third World Tomorrow, 6) Inside the Third World; Teresa Hayter 7) Aid as Imperialism; and Michael Harrington 8) The Accidental Century.

The newest irresponsible blow to the global community that statistics on Depo-Provera has highlighted may be surprising for those unaware of the nature of the development aid. What appears true is that health experts are apathetic or passive victims of amnesia when it comes to development aid they recommend to civilians already struggling to gain the basic needs in Malawi, Nigeria, Botswana, and across the continent and across the globe. Companies like Monsanto, whose genetically modified corn dumps aid packages in rural areas, are not altruistic. Monsanto, notorious for products such as Agent Orange dumped in Vietnam during the war as a chemical weapon, should never be trusted with feeding the planet.

Already there is a cancer epidemic in the US, why should we be outsourcing our diseases to those who cannot even defend themselves? Like Canada’s Asbestos sales as a productive trade, selling negligent products that spread diseases is a crime against humanity. Now when governments, bowing down to corporate pressure, swindle poorer nations and poorer neighborhoods in our own countries to believe we are aiding them to progress, then we must hold our government regardless of party politics accountable.    

There are development workers whose actions and activities sustain a steady paycheck, and then there are human beings willing to take action for the development of society home and abroad because they are passionate people. Are you a Nelson Mandela, a Wangari Maathai, or a Margaret Sanger, or are you the man in the suit working in the development agency preparing a powerpoint presentation for a room that already knows the same facts that push nothing more but more weightless pages of a report? My advice friend, deviate from evasion!