Human Rights Day

Sixty one years ago today the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and set down the basic principles at the heart of the human rights movement. “Human Rights Day” is a high point on the UN calendar and organizations and activists around the world are holding events today to commemorate the anniversary. I am saddened to see that there will be no official marking of this day in my country. But I am grateful to still have the means to make a personal call to end all forms of discrimination, here and everywhere.

Bahamians who are comfortable love to talk about how there is no discrimination to speak of in the Bahamas. But the rest of us know the truth. As Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in his message today: “No country is free of discrimination.” And he pointed out that “discrimination targets individuals and groups that are vulnerable to attack: the disabled, women and girls, the poor, migrants, minorities, and all those who are perceived as different.”

His words make me think of the girl who was raped by a police officer while in custody this past summer. She and her parents know about the terrible danger girls are in because of discrimination against them. I remember too the woman from three years back who was dragged through the street naked by arresting police and held naked in the public area of the station for several hours like an animal on display. She also knows all about the nature of discrimination against her kind, ie, woman, unmarried mother, poor. I think about the thousands and thousands of women battered and abused in their homes every day across this land of islands. I think about the recent efforts to change laws that would return to married women the right to press rape charges against their husbands and all the hateful opposition that we heard, most of it coming from that premier oppressor of women, the church.

I am also thinking of my friends who are Gay and who struggle every day against a hatred especially reserved for them, and think of those who have fled the country all together in search of equality and inclusion.

And yes, I am thinking of myself too and the discrimination I have been able to survive and transform so that I can be here writing these words.

I write on this day to affirm human rights for all people who are at risk for discrimination here and around the world and once again call on my government to begin to take some serious action against violence against women and children in the Bahamas.

Amnesty International's Global Write-a-thon for Human Rights

Tonight I signed up for the Amnesty International Global Write-a-thon, the world's largest letter writing event, organized to mark International Human Rights Day on December 10, and to give people like us a chance to use the proven power of writing letters to pressure authorities around the world to release those who have been unjustly imprisoned and to stop the torture and abuse of others.

"The pen is truly mightier than the sword," says Amnesty. "Millions of Amnesty International members around the world have taken up the pen to bring freedom and hope to prisoners of conscience, human rights defenders, victims of torture and other individuals at risk since 196.1 They've acted on the words of imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who asked the world: "Please use your freedom to promote ours."

I've pledged to write three letters for the write-a-thon and apparently in November the website will provide a list of the featured cases, the people who need our advocasy and I can choose then who I will write for. I've promised to write and send them between December 5 and 13. These letters, Amnesty says, "make a difference in the lives of real people." They give two women realeased from prison in February 2009 as examples: Ma Khin Khin Leh of Myanmar (Burma) and Hana Abdi of Iran, both women's rights advocates, both unjustly imprisoned and both freed largely because of the letter writing pressure that Amnesty International brought to bear.

The letters I write will advocate for the freedom and protection of women like these, but they will be an act of personal revolution too. The island patriarchy has worked hard to make me believe that I am powerless. But try as it might this wicked culture cannot take away my voice, or the belief that my voice joined with others can indeed set an innocent woman free and make a difference in the world.

I promised Amnesty I'd encourage you to sign up for the 2009 Write-a-thon for Human Rights, to use your freedom to promote freedom for others, so consider yourself encouraged!

Bloggers Unite for Human Rights

Today I'm happily joining Bloggers Unite and writing to promote human rights for all people of the world. I dedicate this poem to the cause, and to all women and children at risk especially, and offer it too in celebration of the global women's movement uprising everywhere in this new age, for the good of us all.

For the Power

i write for the power
that is, the authority
to shape
and color
and guide
my own life
my own name
my own meaning
and purpose
in this world
in this house
in this body
in this mind
that is a room
with an open door.

yes, that’s right,
I said power,
that is, the freedom
to choose
the road
the coastline
the interior
of blue holes
and old trees
the windy bluffs
and mangrove wastelands
of the country
of my story
my experience
that so many
have tried and failed
to poison.

this verse is
my liberation
into life
alive
inside
the tale
of me
my lucid dream
of being
hard
as three nails,
unwavering
as the mountain
I stand on,
power, I tell you,
stolen
or given away
returns
like blood transfused
like breath
to the drowning woman
rising
to the surface
one last time
in the writing
of one
true
poem.

Imagine

Sometimes a woman Member of Parliament in the island patriarchy has to FREAK OUT and disrupt the House when presiding men are attempting to silence her because she is making a plea for justice on behalf of the mother of the teenaged boy hanged in a police station cell. Sometimes she is removed from the chambers by police, shouting to be heard, everyone around her in an uproar. "Tell the truth about a woman's life and the world splits open," Muriel Rukeyser said. MP Glynnis Hanna-Martin told the truth about a mother's grief and desire for justice in the death of her son. She couldn't think about the Budget, she couldn't think about anything but her chance to speak to the most powerful people in the land about this most urgent issue of excessive force by Bahamian police, (if I'm understanding the story correctly) to speak on behalf of all the grieving mothers who have lost their children under suspicious circumstances involving police in our country. This is a mother's issue, a woman's issue. Meaning that it is of serious, fundamental importance to all of us. Imagine if the all the women MPs from both sides had joined Mrs Hanna Martin on the floor of the House, locked arms with her as sisters, women united against violence, now that would have been a groovy sight, all of them being trooped out together, it would have been our generation's mace-out-the-window, a real, Age of Aquarius, Obama moment, it could have been a herstory-making moment in Caribbean politics, it could have signalled hope to all the grieving mothers that the women elected to the Bahamas Government really do care about stopping the violence.