Pink Chaddi Campaign

THE LADIES DO PROTEST TOO MUCH from the Telegraph, Calcutta, India
From pink underwear to passiveness, how can a modern democracy forge new forms of dissent that challenge bigoted notions of Indian Culture without being violent?

To protest against the assault and molestation of girls in a Mangalore pub by Pramod Mutalik’s Sri Ram Sena, the Pink Chaddi Campaign was launched by the Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose and Forward Women on February 5. The online campaign — a “nonviolent and loving response” to the brutal attack on the girls — asked women (and men) to send pink underwear (other colours were permitted, if pink underwear was unavailable) to Mutalik and his men. It also got women to organize a Pub Bharo Action on Valentine’s Day. This gesture was of considerable importance. By exposing themselves to risks in real time (of another assault perhaps), the protesters dismissed cynical arguments that the women were only interested in a flippant campaign protected by the privacy of the virtual world.

The Pubgoing, Loose and Forward Women have done what Indians and their elected representatives are averse to doing more regularly: object to a violent and depraved act, mobilize opinion and fight back against injustice. I remember one occasion during which I too had acted in keeping with the precedents set by the passivity of my fellow citizens. This is a story not just about a shocking incident. In a way, it is also a story about me and my uncomfortable, weighty silence.

Sometime in November last year, I boarded the Metro at Tollygunge. After we reached Kalighat, the sound of carriage doors opening and onrushing feet made me look up from my book. I watched as the near-empty compartment filled up with people, including a large group of men and women who had come to visit the temple. The men were wearing vests and lungis, and had tikas on their foreheads. They spoke loudly, as if they were excited and afraid at the same time. The women had their faces covered. They squatted on the floor, clutched one another, their bodies tied in one tense knot. With them was a child — he must have been about ten — who was thrust on the seat facing mine. From where I sat, I could see him shifting uncomfortably beside a smartly-dressed young woman on her way to work.

The woman looked uncomfortable too. She stared hard at the boy, her perfect eyebrows knitted into crooked lines. Suddenly, the boy touched her dangling identity card, turned it towards his face, and began to read from it. This unthinking act, which perhaps comes naturally to those unused to the city’s codes, soon lifted the veneer of civility from that very public space, exposing the faultlines underneath. The woman shouted at the boy, snatched her card back, and pushed him off the seat. Others joined her in abusing the boy and those with him, and forced the terrified group off the train at the next station. A few others, including myself, had chosen to remain mere observers. We said nothing, and went our own ways. Even now, I don’t know why I hadn’t defended the child’s inadvertent act. To ease my conscience, I convinced myself that I didn’t share the bigotry, prejudice and nastiness that were directed at the child. The woman’s behaviour, though vile, had not caused grievous harm. Protests, I was convinced, were meant for graver, grimmer violations.

The woman in the train was in the wrong. But so was I, in trying to believe that simple forms of exploitation ought to be put up with. That cannot be, simply because they grow unnoticed, mutate and acquire monstrous, ungovernable forms such as communalism, casteism, environmental pollution and violence against women, children or freedom of expression. It is not enough to hope that the State will come to the citizens’ aid with the immense resources at its disposal. The State has to be prodded by the people, who have to be equal partners in this act of transformation. A democracy has the space to accommodate legitimate forms of anger and dissent. These need not be of the kind that are practised in parts of Chhattisgarh, Gujarat or Kashmir, or even what we frequently experience in Calcutta: bandhs or unjustified, violent demonstrations by fringe groups such as the one against a writer from Bangladesh. Protests can be smaller in scale — acts performed by individuals — but they have to be risked, no matter how trivial the provocation.

Strangely, cushioned as they are in a democracy, the genteel classes are often wary of protesting. There is fear and shame in standing up and confronting a numerical majority that is in the wrong, in demanding what is rightfully ours, or in challenging those who deny what is rightfully ours. It is this shame and fear that relegate protests to the margins of the political, stripping them of their legitimacy, so that they are looked upon as the domain of the unruly and the dispossessed. This points to a larger failure — moral and institutional — on the part of the people and of the State.

I secretly admire these pubgoing, loose and forward women. They share the markers of my social identity — an education, a job and awareness — but they are different. At a time when we are busy building barriers to screen ourselves from disturbing actualities, they have managed to break a few in order to meet the enemy in the eye.

UDDALAK MUKHERJEE

From the IndianExpress:
Mumbai: Thousands of Indians, many fuming over a recent assault on women in a Mangalore pub, are vowing to fill bars on Valentine's Day and send cartons of pink panties to Sri Ram Sene that has branded outgoing females immoral.
A ‘consortium of pub-going, loose and forward women’, founded by four women on social networking website Facebook has, in a matter of days, attracted more than 25,000 members with over 2,000 posts about the self-appointed moral police.

The women said their mission was to go bar-hopping on February 14 and send hundreds of pink knickers to Sri Ram Sene, that has said pubs are for men, and that women should stay at home and cook for their husbands.

Collection centres have sprung up in several cities, with volunteers calling for bright pink old-fashioned knickers as gifts to the Sri Ram Sene as a mark of defiance.

"Girl power! Go girls, go. Show Ram Sene who's the boss," reads one post on Facebook from Larkins Dsouza...
There are more heated discussion threads as well that range from the limits of independence to religion and politics, reflecting the struggle facing a country that has long battled to balance its deep-rooted traditions with rapid modernisation.

Not to be outdone, the Sri Ram Sene, which has cautioned shops and pubs in Karnataka against marking Valentine's Day, has promised to gift pink saris to women and marry off canoodling couples to make them ‘respectable’.

For Valentine's Day: Grace's Anti-Love Poem

Sometimes you don't want to love the person you love
you turn your face away from that face
whose eyes lips might make you give up anger
forget insult steal sadness of not wanting
to love turn away then turn away at breakfast
in the evening don't lift your eyes from the paper
to see that face in all its seriousness a
sweetness of concentration he holds his book
in his hand the hard-knuckled winter wood-
scarred fingers turn away that's all you can
do old as you are to save yourself from love

Non-Violent Protest to Save Coal River Mountain

February 3, 2009
In Pettus, West Virginia, five Coal River Mountain activists were arrested and charged with trespassing after locking themselves to a bulldozer and a backhoe at a Massey Energy mountaintop-removal mine site.

In the face of an impending 6,600 acre mountaintop removal strip mine, they planted a banner for the Coal River Wind Project, a nationally acclaimed proposal that would create 200 local construction jobs and 50 permanent jobs, enough energy for 150,000 homes, and allow for sustainable forestry and mountain tourism projects, as well as a limited amount of underground mining.

After the TVA coal ash disaster in December, when a billion gallons of coal ash poured out of a pond and deluged 400 acres of land in six feet of sludge, the Coal River Mountain activists fear blasting for the proposed mountaintop removal site on Coal River Mountain, which rests beside a 6 billion-gallon toxic coal waste sludge dam above underground mines, could be catastrophic for the communities downstream.

"Massey could flood the towns of Pettus, Whitesville and Sylvester with toxic coal sludge," said Julia Bonds, of Rock Creek, W.Va. "Blasting at a multi-billion-gallon sludge lake over underground mines could cause the sludge to burst through and kill thousands of people."

For a powerful documentary about this struggle over mountain top removing see http://www.burningthefuture.org/

Burning The Future: Coal in America - Trailer from Odessa Films on Vimeo.

Wanted: Drafts and Photos from Women's Pentagon Action

Marianne Hirsch is writing a short essay on Grace's anti war writing and, particularly, the collectively written Women's Pentagon Action Unity Statement. She would like any manuscript drafts of the statement that would be available to reproduce. Are there any photographs of the action in which Grace is featured? She asks if Grace herself was arrested in DC in 1980 or 81?
Please contact mh2349 at columbia.edu

Theater Opening in March in San Diego

Thanks for your wonderful blog on Grace Paley. She inspired many women of a "certain generation" (I was one of them) and continues to inspire younger folks of today.

I can trace the influence of her work on me back to the 1970s, when I was a young mother in NYC trying to figure out how to balance intimacy and creativity in my life, with, at the time, one small boy who took up, to use Grace's language, all my "lumpen time and bourgeois feelings".

I went on to teach women's studies for the next thirty years or so and then left the university to write full time.

I have just finished a play, based on Grace Paley's The Collected Stories. "Acts of Faith," written in collaboration with Sharyn C. Blumenthal, who will direct, will premiere in San Diego in March 2009.

Maybe you can make a trip out here to see it at the small non-profit theater where I am managing director, and where it will be produced? http://www.laterthanever.org for info.

Kathy Jones

Blog about Grace Paley

I Dreamed I Saw Grace P. Last Night by Nomi Hurwitzhttp://neverdied.blogspot.com/

Thetford Remembers Grace

Hallie Zens, 9, of Thetford Center, writes a message on the blackboard at the Thetford Community Center during a letter-writing session held in memory of poet and activist Grace Paley, who was a longtime resident of Thetford. People attending the event wrote letters to state, federal and international leaders to express their opinions on topics including global warming, torture, nuclear proliferation and gay marriage.
Grace Paley was born December 11, 1922 in the Bronx and died August 22, 2007 in Thetford. This year, on what would have been her 86th birthday, people gathered at different places around the country to celebrate her life as an artist and activist. The following is an edited interview with her daughter, Nora Paley.

My mother believed in civil disobedience and non-violent resistance. She also believed in the simple power of writing letters and working as a community. She believed in action; she wanted people to step out of their comfort zones and stand up for what they thought was right. She always said it’s important for people to act on their beliefs and it’s important for them to not have to do it alone.

During the Vietnam War she was arrested a lot and put in jail. She said her political activity began with the P.T.O. when I was in elementary school, that she had been shy before that. For most of her life, she was responding to the world around her in a moral, ethical and really radical way.

A lot of people were touched by her in different ways in their lives. One woman who contacted me was in Austin, Texas. She had been a graduate student of Grace’s and she was just interested in doing something on her birthday. When Chrissie Robinson told me they were organizing this letter-writing event here in her memory, I thought, “Great,” because Grace was an activist all her life.

We’re trying to establish a legacy for my mother. It has three parts. One part is to have yearly readings of her work on her birthday. There’s a big reading in Boston, another one in New York, one in Portland, Ore., and I think two different things happening in Texas. The second part is to start a library of non-violent resistance, though we don’t have the money to do that yet. The last part is to give an award to a student or a teacher at a community college who’s living the spirit of Grace’s life, which would be an artist-activist who takes great pleasure in the world around them.

It’s nice for us, since we miss her, to have a community event like this to go to. I felt it was really important to bring my kids here so they could be around adults who don't feel victimized, who feel that they can do something to make a difference. Her memory is very much alive with her family, but it’s good to see that there are people that didn’t even know her who are interested in continuing the spirit of her life’s work.

The Grace Paley Organizing Felowship

The Next Generation: Organizers and Activists Learn the Ropes
By Beth Schwartzapfel Wed. Jan 21, 2009
From the Jewish Daily Forward
By 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning, a dozen bleary-eyed idealists were already milling around, chewing absently on bagels and sipping from little orange juice cartons. Sunlight streamed into the windows of the fifth floor of the brownstone on East 10th Street in New York City, where they had gathered to talk about leadership development and oppression. Later that day, they would use such words as “invisible-ize” and discuss systems of power and the best approach to knocking on doors on the Lower East Side. But they began the morning with an invocation of sorts, a reading from Grace Paley’s short story “Midrash on Happiness.”

“For happiness, she… required work to do in this world,” read 29-year-old Alissa Wise, who serves as the education director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a Manhattan-based group that provides organization, education and advocacy. JFREJ had convened the Saturday meeting. “By work… she included the important work of raising children righteously up,” Wise continued. “By righteously she meant that along with being useful and speaking truth to the community, they must do no harm.” The 14 community organizers, seated in a circle, went around and read until the story ended. Then there was silence. Wise spoke first. “I love Grace Paley,” she said.

This was the fourth meeting of the inaugural class of the Grace Paley Organizing Fellowship, which JFREJ launched this year to train a new generation of organizers and activists. The fellows are mostly in their 20s, but they range in age from 19 to 45. Their religious observance runs the gamut from secular to Modern Orthodox. About half of them were already involved in JFREJ when the fellowships were announced, and they applied so that they could take their involvement to the next level; the other half used the fellowships as their way of becoming involved in JFREJ.

Rob Browne, a dentist who lives on Long Island with his wife and three children, had given money to JFREJ in the past, but otherwise had not been involved. Then one day, he heard some of his neighbors mention that they were looking to hire someone to clean their houses. “I said, gee, well, that’s a dynamic,” Browne said. “There seemed to be no rules. How much is paid, what the standards are in terms of hiring and firing people. It was all done differently from person to person. I thought, I know that’s what’s done, but there’s got to be something more organized.” Browne’s research into what Jewish law has to say about domestic workers led him to JFREJ and, shortly thereafter, to the fellowship.

Founded in 1990, JFREJ organizes its members to act on behalf of progressive causes in New York, such as labor and immigrants’ rights. In 1994, for example, JFREJ worked in support of the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association in the association’s efforts to unionize a restaurant in Chinatown. For the past several years, two of JFREJ’s major campaigns have been Shalom Bayit, which aims to pass statewide Domestic Workers Bill of Rights legislation, and a Housing Justice campaign for affordable housing.

The six-month fellowship began in September 2008 and runs through February. In addition to attending these monthly training sessions and retreats, fellows commit to spending 16 hours per month working on one of the two campaigns, and to raising $500 toward JFREJ’s work. In addition, each fellow is assigned a seasoned organizing mentor from progressive groups around New York City, such as the Bronx Defenders and the not-for profit Jewish Funds for Justice. JFREJ received a grant from the Elias Foundation to help administer the fellowship, but participation is on a volunteer basis; no one is paid, including the fellows and the experts who lead workshops or conduct training at the fellows’ retreats.

JFREJ’s approach to training leaders is not simply to teach them concrete organizing skills, such as how best to knock on doors, make phone calls or organize a rally. The fellows certainly do learn these types of skills, both at these retreats and on the ground, in their work on the campaigns. At the recent Saturday meeting, for example, Yasmeen Perez, leadership development director of the group FIERCE, which is by and for gay and lesbian youth of color in New York City, taught a workshop on leadership development. But building of concrete skills is paired with theoretical and cultural analysis so that the fellows will have a context within which to understand the work they’re doing. On this particular afternoon, JFREJ’s executive director, Dara Silverman, and community organizer Danielle Ferris taught a workshop on anti-Jewish oppression. Some other topics have been imperialism and white supremacy, Jews and class, and gender and sexuality.

“The more knowledge I have as an organizer about how these systems work, the more power I have to affect positive change,” said Zach Scholl, 21, who has been involved with JFREJ for a year and a half, first as an intern and now as a fellow. “I really need to understand the ways that these systems of oppression affect us and divide us.”

After the Grace Paley reading, the fellows spent some time studying musar, or Jewish ethical practice. Wise is a fifth-year rabbinical student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and has, over the course of the fellowship, led discussions and study on taking responsibility for the “other.” The group reflected together on a passage from Exodus in which Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, asks Moses to allow others to help him: “Why do you act alone, while all the people stand about you from morning until evening? The task is too heavy for you…. You cannot do it alone.” The group then broke into pairs to discuss what it means to be a good leader — when to ask for help, and when to take on tasks themselves. Most of the fellows are students; many work full time. Balance is a big issue.

After musar study, the fellows discussed the readings assigned to them that day, which included “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Relationships Between Black and Jewish Women,” written by feminist icon Barbara Smith, and “The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere: Making Resistance to Anti-Semitism Part of All of Our Movements,” a self-published pamphlet by Philadelphia activist April Rosenblum.

The fellows are mindful of the fact that they are rarely affected directly by the issues for which they are fighting. The question of what it means to work on behalf of, and in solidarity with, others is one that occupied much of the day’s discussion.

Vered Meir, 26, has been involved with the Shalom Bayit campaign for three years. She chose to apply for the fellowship even though she moved to Boston last fall. She has been commuting to New York once a month for training, and doing as much work as she can on the campaign remotely. “What’s hard about organizing as allies is that we have a choice to be involved or not, whereas somebody who’s being abused by their landlord, let’s say, doesn’t really have a choice,” she said. “I want to feel like my liberation is tied up in the liberation of [Domestic Workers United] members. I don’t want to feel like, yeah, I moved, so I’m not going to be involved anymore.”

Grace Paley, writer, activist and longtime JFREJ member, died in 2007. Wise says that the organization was looking for a way to honor her, so when the idea for the fellowships first emerged, it seemed like the perfect fit. Paley’s daughter, Nora, agreed. “This JFREJ fellowship is the right ship on the right sea to continue in her name,” she told the Forward. “How wonderful that these shining young people are on earth and willing to continue the human race in adamant decency. My mother would have been honored to meet each of them and work beside them, too.”

After Perez’s workshop, the fellows broke for lunch. They told stories, laughed, teased each other and chatted about their plans for the holidays. Before they reconvened to talk about oppression and what it means to be “out” as a Jew, they stood in a circle in the sunlight for a post-lunch warm-up. Lane Levine, community organizer for the Shalom Bayit campaign, had devised an “organizer stretch” — kind of like the hokey-pokey, but more grown-up. Sort of. “Stretch up for high goals!” he said, and all the fellows reached their arms to the ceiling. “Reach down to your grass roots!” They followed Levine’s lead, touching their toes, leaning left and right, touching their heads and wrapping their arms around themselves. As they finished, the room filled with flailing arms and legs: “Shake it out for social change!” Levine said, and they did