Dieula y las Muñecas Negras

por Ana María Belique

El Batey Naranjo es una comunidad un poco retirada de la ciudad, pero repleta de personas trabajadoras, llenas de entusiasmo. (...)

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< arte: «Tejedoras de sueños», Diana Mar

Difusión del Borrador Cero del Documento Final

• El Borrador Cero del documento (con fecha 16 de marzo), preparado por los facilitadores, fue difundido para su discusión durante la segunda sesión redactora a realizarse del 13 al 17 de abril de 2015.
• Durante la sesión de apertura, el WWG pidió que se incorporara al Borrador Cero la asignación de recursos específicamente para la igualdad de género y el empoderamiento de las mujeres, tal como lo estipulan el Consenso de Monterrey y la Declaración de Doha.

GenderJobs.org: This is a platform with a comprehensive list of job opportunities to work on gender equality and LGBTQI+ rights, curated by gender professionals and intersectional feminists who intimately know the sector and are extremely passionate about supporting other gender professionals and anyone who is aspiring to become one! (source: https://genderjobs.org/about)

El Foro es un ejemplo vivo de lo que el más grande NOSOTRXS podemos hacer. Vamos al Foro, somos semillas, luego nos sembramos. Esto lo tenemos que celebrar.
- Sara Abu Ghazal, Líbano

The Circle’s Conspiracy of Writers | Wazina Zondon

	Also known as the Teta Research Network, The Conspiracy of Writers was founded in 2021 in the context of Kohl’s weekly writing circles. The Network is a transnational group of queer and feminist writers who engage in collective writing, thinking, and world-making.	Wazina Zondon is an Afghan raised in New York City. Her storycollecting and storytelling work centers collective memories and rites of passage in the diaspora. Currently, she is working on Faith: in Love/faith in love which (re)traces her parent’s love story and family’s inherited love print.

Love is a contraband in Hell,
cause love is acid
that eats away bars. 

But you, me, and tomorrow
hold hands and make vows
that struggle will multiply.

The hacksaw has two blades.
The shotgun has two barrels.
We are pregnant with freedom.
We are a conspiracy.

It is our duty to fight for freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.

- “Love” by Assata Shakur

“If we can inherit trauma, can we inherit an imprint related to love?”

That is the question Wazina Zondon asks in her collective memoir Loveprint. Loveprint is a wandering, an overlap, a deviation that (re)creates, at the intersection of interviews and personal essays, our family’s stories and insights on love, partnership and romance. Under Wazina’s guidance, the circle’s conspiracy of writers came together and attempted to reproduce this literal blueprint in the form of collective writing, where our different stories, our genders and sexual identities complement and contradict each other. With our voices overlapping, we complete each other’s sentences to create a conversation, a memorial, pieces of ourselves that speak to a “we.”

What are the origins of your love print?

I am a so-called “happy accident.” There is much narration about this – an accidental life, one that is entirely wanted at the same time. I feel this shaped my way of loving, I don’t just fall in love; I risk the slips that lead to the fall. Perhaps it made me an amor fati kind of person. 

I was told that I was an unwanted child. So I grew up to become an unwanted adult. The origins of my love print are based on being eternally unwelcomed. I am not a fruit of love or any happy feelings but rather one pain and burden. I don’t have a love print – at least not in this sense.

I know for a fact that both my parents were in love at some point, but mental health is such a demon, and until one confronts their demons, there is no winning.

I will never associate “love” with my parents or normative family. Love growing up was full of violence and responsibilities I didn’t sign up for or was even ready for. For the longest time, it felt like life and love were about carrying a big rock uphill. While my parents “loved each other,” it was a toxic ethos of violence, jealousy, and insecurity to grow up in. I grew up wanting to crave stability, and this is what is me now. I am a risk taker, but never in my “love space.”

I don’t know why my mother chose to host a child (me) within her.
She does not love in this form.

My mother tells me that if I have to think about “finding” love, I should never look at her marriage as a template. My love print comes instead from my raising dogs for the last two decades (18 years to be precise). The other way around is true as well – they raised me. I understand more and more about love and its many layers in their company.

I haven’t known love from a “print.” In our household we don’t talk about love. I had to teach myself how to love. It was hard work. Still, I fail and still, I keep on trying and I fail everyday. Perhaps failure is my love print.

My love print is the care, warmth, and understanding I give to others
surrounding me, whether a stranger, a friend, a relative, a lover. 
My love print is political – uncalculated and unthought of.

I was born under heavy shelling. 
My love print is the negative 
print of that.

Lessons learned about love

I know more about what love is not than I know about what love is. 

Love is neither anxiety nor panic.

Love is not asking permission to live or breathe. It is always about love and there is no love without freedom.

Everything you do is about using your heart except love. Love is about using your mind. 

Sometimes I fear that my love language is lost in translation.

--- There are many ways
to map the origins
of how to
how not to
love
not love
love just enough
love far too much
some love
some loss
to love
to love lost ---

I cannot stand the idea of the couple. I cannot stand the idea of living alone while aging either. I am tired of doing the chores alone, moving houses alone, paying rent and bills alone... I imagine getting a stroke alone, and it scares me. I have no plan of “partnering up.” I want a world where I can get married to a friend, buy a house with a friend, not have sex.

Loving many does not corrupt a love shared between two, and whether love is romantic or not is really not that important.

When I reflect on the shoddy state of my relationships, I realize that I am in the relationship I was trained to be in. With all my “radicalness” I have not yet unlearned shitty gendered norms.

My need for stability feels “not radical” enough. I want to get out of this labeling. I want something I never had. I want to make it beautiful. I want to feel beautiful and safe – and only stability makes me feel that. Safe, sound, knowing home is neither about violence nor strife.

--- Love print – love to smell the books to see 
where they were printed
I try to think of the origin of my 
understanding and practice of love
Do we need origin, it is not the same as purity? 
No purity or origin of love. 
Why is it understanding and practice, 
and not “emotion” that comes to mind? ---

When I call my parents, I don’t hang up the phone after we’ve said
goodbye, so I can hear the sounds of home.

What do we need to be/feel loved in death?

During my Sunni burial, I want all the women and men to come together for my burial. What’s with not being able to go say goodbye to dead people from a different sex? It will be Sunni because my mother would want it to be. It will be eco-friendly; no need for the headstone. I love all burial rituals. Quran is good, but I also want music. I really like Asmahan, Um Kulthum, and The Stone Roses.

I have a Monday-Friday playlist and two different ones for the weekend: one for Saturday and one for Sunday playlist. I would like those who loved me to play the music that I used to listen to, respecting the days – with some margin of tolerance as long as they stick to the playlists.

I want to be surrounded by the one(s) who have loved me, even for a moment. And in music and embowered in fresh cut flowers. I don’t want to be discovered dead; I want to pass away mid-laugh with loved ones.

I want to be remembered as someone who loved.

I don’t need to feel loved in death. I need the people around me to feel I loved them, even after I die. Being loved in death is about those who are alive. So I think more about how we come together as a living and loving community in the death of those we love and live with. How we take their memories with us. How we become archives of their lives.

 --- Sometimes, you can only love people in their death. ---

I have to think back to the body being connected to a space. My family is very tiny and although we come from different places, it is as if every generation moved somewhere new. Perhaps this is the reason why death is not connected to a special place, a cemetery. It is common in our family to bury the dead without names or gravestones, or to distribute the ashes in the wind. I feel at peace with this kind of spaceless remembrance. The idea that my ashes fertilize new life gives me the sense of being loved, being remembered through recreation. My grandmother died earlier this year due to complications after the vaccination. Two hours after she died, my family sat laughing tears about her jokes, her hilarious way to tell stories. We laughed and loved, and it was as though she sat with us again. This is what would make me feel at peace – fertilizing soil, fertilizing conversations, and collective remembrance.

--- There were
Two streets that I used 
To walk
To run
To play
To stay

There were 
Five hours when the sun
Was hot
The sky was blue
The earth was green

There was 
A flower I could
Smell
Touch
Squeeze
Crush

There were
The friends I could
Caress
The food
I could 
inhale
The language
That would roll off my
lips

There might still be

Those many places

And things

And people

After me  ---

Perhaps a promise that I will be “spatially commemorated” as a plant and taken care of in turns until it becomes a tree is enough. No name, no plaques – just the plant/tree, and knowing that it will be cared for. As for my body, I want to be cremated without any rituals and my bone ashes set free in the Arabian sea.

I need my body to be treated as subversively as it’s lived.

I do not want to be buried next to my family. In this tiny drawer next to all of the people who never knew me. Trapped in death as I was in life. I want to be cremated, and my ashes finally set free. 

I want to be allowed to pass, not hang in the in-between, so it is a presence, an active process, a trespassing.

I will ask of you: 

• To release me and let me pass
• To not let nostalgia muddy this moment because I will ask only for the normalcy of your expressions
• I have snuck the gentle glimpses and hoarded away the already small and large ways you loved me in order to be sustained. I kept myself alive on these
• To set a finite amount of time to grieve
• To be be reminded there is no separation in the beauty of loving; it is infinite and it regenerates without the body

I want to be remembered for the love I put into the world.
I want my body to be given away, and my organs
to further fuel love in (an)other live(s).

--- The smell of jasmine ---

Notre programme final du Feminist Film Club est maintenant disponible: « Films from Nuestramérica » est une série de films sur les réalités féministes d'Amérique latine et d'Amérique centrale organisée par Alejandra Laprea (Venezuela).

Regardez

Le processus de l’Organisation des Nations Unies (ONU) sur le financement du développement (FdD) vise à traiter  différentes formes de financement du développement et de coopération pour le développement. Selon le Consensus de Monterrey, ce processus comporte six axes clés :

• La mobilisation des ressources financières nationales au service du développement.
• La mobilisation des ressources internationales au service du développement : investissements étrangers directs et autres flux financiers privés.
• Le commerce international, comme moteur  du développement.
• L’accroissement de la coopération financière et technique internationale pour le développement.
• La dette extérieure.
• L’examen des questions systémiques : amélioration de la cohérence et de la constance des systèmes monétaires, financiers et commerciaux internationaux en faveur du développement. 

Know a Funder? Add them to the Database!

Are you a funder? Or do you know funders that support feminist and gender justice movements? Apply to be a part of the Who Can Fund Me? Database now!

Join the database

Le Forum international de l’AWID est un événement phare que l’association organise tous les trois ou quatre ans. C'est la plus importante manifestation au monde entièrement consacrée aux mouvements féministes et de justice de genre dans toute leur diversité. Il s'agit d'un rassemblement mondial qui réunit activistes féministes, mouvements alliés, universitaires, bailleurs de fonds et décideur·e·s politiques. Les forums se tiennent successivement dans différentes régions et différents pays du sud mondial.

Chers mouvements féministes,

Au nom du Conseil d’administration, je souhaite exprimer notre plus profonde gratitude, notre appréciation et tout notre respect pour Hakima Abbas et Cindy Clark, nos deux extraordinaires codirectrices exécutives ces cinq dernières années, qui quittent leurs fonctions pour laisser place à un nouveau leadership de l’AWID, alors que nous entrons dans une nouvelle phase de la vie de notre organisation avec un nouveau plan stratégique. Elles ont systématiquement mis en application les meilleurs principes de leadership organisationnel féministe et d’éthique du soin lorsqu’elles nous guidaient, lors des temps bien troubles et imprévisibles de la récente histoire du monde, cette syndémie de COVID-19 et la spirale politique mondiale descendante qui s’en est suivie. Elles ont tenu l’AWID, notre personnel et notre CA fermement, doucement et avec amour alors que nous éprouvions toutes et tous ces situations inconnues. Elles se sont également accrochées à la vision et à la mission de l’AWID lorsqu’elles ont dû, avec respect et stratégie, réagir aux différents changements, dont la difficile annulation du forum de l’AWID.

Reconnaissant tout à fait le potentiel immense qui existe au sein de l’équipe actuelle, le CA a décidé de privilégier un processus de recrutement en interne dans un premier temps. Nous pensons terminer cette transition d’ici la fin de l’année 2022. Hakima et Cindy décaleront leur départ, pour permettre une transition en douceur vers le nouveau leadership.

Il est difficile pour le Conseil d’administration et d’autres, qui ont travaillé étroitement avec elles et qui les aiment, de voir Cindy et Hakima quitter l’AWID. Rassurez-vous, le CA de l’AWID mène ce processus de transition de manière à ce que les belles marques indélébiles et inspirantes que laissent Hakima et Cindy soient inscrites dans les quatre décennies de notre histoire. Nous assurerons l’arrivée et le soutien de la nouvelle direction et veillerons à ce que ce processus nous inspire à faire mieux encore à cette étape de la vie de l’AWID.

Les grandes transformations dans les organisations ne sont jamais simples ni faciles. Elles sont parfois contraintes, hors du contrôle de quiconque, tendues, voire destructrices. J’ai vu, mais vous aussi, des exemples de telles transitions. Il arrive également que les besoins et les aspirations du personnel soient alignés avec ceux de l’organisation. Bien que nous n’ayons ni choisi ni souhaité le départ de Cindy et Hakima, leur décision et l’entrée de l’AWID dans un nouveau plan stratégique et une nouvelle décennie d’existence sont alignées. Et mieux que tout encore, nous sommes entre les mains merveilleuses, super compétentes, créatives et féministes du personnel et du CA de l’AWID.

Nous vous remercions, chers mouvements féministes, pour votre confiance dans l’AWID. Nous vous demandons également de soutenir notre transition de leadership au cours des mois à venir. Continuons à construire, approfondir et renforcer nos connexions, comme nous le faisons depuis 40 ans.

Nous reviendrons vers vous dans les prochaines semaines pour vous tenir au courant de nos mises à jour et des évolutions concrètes.

Avec solidarité et amour féministes,
Margo Okazawa-Rey,
Présidente, Conseil d’administration de l’AWID

Check out the AWID Feminist Film Club program “Holding up the Skies” - a film series on Feminist Realities from Africa and the African Diaspora curated by Gabrielle Tesfaye

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L'appel à propositions est maintenant fermé.

Nous avons lancé un Appel à activités le 19 novembre 2019 et la date limite de réception des propositions était le14 février 2020.  

Trouvez d'autres moyens de vous engager sur le chemin du Forum

In 2023, feminist and 
women's rights organizations 
had a median annual budget of $22,000

In contrast, over $1 billion went to three anti-rights groups 2021-2022, with funding for anti-gender networks still rising.¹

¹ Global Philanthropy Project, 2024

Registration will start early 2024. We will announce the exact registration date and registration fee soon. Registration will include participation in the Forum, plus lunch and snacks (breakfast to be provided at the hotels), and one onsite dinner.