Fighting for the Freedom of Ideas in the Caribbean

It is dangerous to be a woman with ideas in the island patriarchy. Cuban womanish blogger Yoani Sanchez knows this. She was assaulted, detained and threatened by government agents on Friday in Havana and warned that she was going too far in her blog, Generation Y in her criticisms of Cuba. Her account of the assault is already up on her blog. This young woman was punched repeatedly, dragged into a car by her hair, fighting all the way, where they forcefully and violently continued to restrain her, and continued to beat her. She writes that as one man pinned her down with a knee to her chest until she almost couldn’t breath she managed to grab the offender by his testicles and sink her fingernails into him screaming, “Kill me now!” They let her breath after that. When the vicious beating was over they left Yoani and her companions lying in the street. Not long after she wrote and published her chilling story, never crying victim, only telling the truth, and ending her post with these powerful words: “I managed to see the degree of fright of our assailants, the fear of the new, of what they cannot destroy because they don’t understand, the blustering terror of he who knows that his days are numbered.” This Caribbean woman is, as we used to say, bad out there. She is fighting an epic battle for the freedom of her ideas, and her right to express them. She knows how powerful her words/ideas are, how powerful the internet is in her quest to be heard. (Her blog gets one million hits a month.) Apparently her adversaries know it too. But she is not deterred today, she is writing on, fighting on, changing the world by telling truth about her life, against all odds. That she can indeed change the world by writing and speaking her truth is Ms. Sanchez's most dangerous idea of all.

The Womanish Words of Yoani Sanchez

I am thinking about Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez, winner of a 2009 Maria Moors Cabot Award, the oldest international award for journalism and given by the Columbia University School of Journalism. Sanchez is an ordinary Cuban citizen who won the coveted award for her weekly blog Generacion Y. She was denied permission to travel to New York City to receive her prize at formal ceremonies at the university recently.

As I write I am looking at her blog for the first time. Just a quick perusal and already I have learned things I didn’t know about the way Cubans survive on a daily basis in this restricted island country that is so close to my own. I learned that folks have learned how to loot abandoned buildings for building materials for their own houses because these materials are otherwise unobtainable. I’ve learned that while government radio warns about the need for more hygiene to combat the spread of the flu, many Cubans cannot afford soap. I’ve learned that efforts to bring the technology of internet publishing to Cubans in rural areas will bring on a visit from the state police. And I have learned that one woman speaking out for her human rights on the web can get the world’s attention.

“Yoani Sanchez is an ordinary Cuban citizen using the internet with extraordinary power,” says the Journalism School of Columbia University. “In barely two years her weekly blog has put the rest of the world in touch with Cuba – at east digitally. It is a pitch-perfect mix of personal observation and tough analysis which conveys better than anybody else what daily life is like for Cubans living their lives on the island today. “

Sanchez, a 34 year old philologist, “persues her craft with ingenuity, scarce resources and an enormous amount of guts, buying a few minutes here and there on one of the few internet-connected computers available to Cubans in Havana, quickly downloading and emailing her written and video comments to devoted supporters who post the blog in 15 languages. She has a loyal following of thousands around the world. For her courage, talent and great achievement in such a brief period of time, the Maria Moors Cabot board is proud to award Yoani Sanchez a special citation for journalistic excellence.”

I am not one of those who likes to argue about Cuba. For most of my life my main source of information about Cuba has been the South Florida television news and so I try to do more listening than talking on the subject. But I feel compelled to pay tribute to Yoani Sanchez today, a revolutionary island sister using the power of her voice and the web to tell her stories and to focus the world's attention on her daily struggles and triumphs, despite her government's efforts to silence her. I salute her bravery and the way she has owned her personal power, and her voice, and put it to such good use.

She assures her readers in a recent post: "Offices with uniformed people confirm, "you may not travel at this time," although I am already thousands of kilometres from here, in this virtual world that they cannot understand nor fence in."

Thank you Yoani Sanchez for your bravery, your vision, your world-altering womanish words.

Queen Nanny of the Windward Maroons Remembered on Emancipation Day

On Emancipation Day I am thinking about Queen Nanny of the Windward Maroons of Jamaica. It is said she was an Akan/Asante woman of the Gold Coast (now known as Ghana) sold into slavery in the early eighteenth century who escaped into the mountains of Jamaica to form the community of the Maroons. Others say she came to Jamaica from Africa a free woman with slaves of her own. Either way, she is famous for leading her people in an heroic struggle against the British colonial empire and its institution of slavery in Jamaica.

Queen Nanny was the spiritual, cultural and military leader of the Windward Maroons, guiding them through the most intense period of their resistance against the British, between 1725 and 1740. She and her people were “fierce and ferocious fighters with a preference for resistance, survival and above all freedom and refused to become slaves.” (www.jamaicans.com). Led by Queen Nanny the Maroons repeatedly won battles against the British. Story has it she was an expert in guerilla warfare and trained her troops in the art of camouflage, covering soldiers herself with tree branches and instructing them to stand as still as possible so that they would resemble trees. “As the British soldiers approached completely unaware they were surrounded they would swiftly be picked off by the Maroons,” says writer Deborah Gabriel. Queen Nanny built Maroon settlements high in the mountains with only a narrow path leading to the towns, so that soldiers approaching single file could be seen from far off and taken out one by one. The Maroons’ ability to beat back great numbers of British troops with only small numbers of their own is now legend.

African spiritual practices like Obeah and Voodoo were always at the heart of African slave rebellions and it is likely that Queen Nanny was herself an Obeah priestess, expert in the Earth Religion arts of ancestor worship, herbalism, and rituals that brought the community together in ways that made them a united and unbeatable force to be reckoned with. Legend has it that she placed a large cauldron on a mountain path that was said to be boiling even though there was no fire beneath it. British soldiers are said to have looked into the pot, fallen into it and died, or they collapsed and fell down the mountain. Some say she juiced the pot with special herbs with anaesthetic properties. Another legend tells of a time when the Maroons were near starvation and about to surrender when Nanny heard the voices of the Ancestors telling her not to give up. When she woke there were pumpkin seeds in her pocket, which she planted and grew a hillside of gigantic pumpkins in a few days, saving her people. Pumpkin Hill still exists in Jamaica today.

Some said Queen Nanny could catch bullets with her hands apparently a highly developed art form in some parts of Africa. But I like better the story that says she could catch bullets with her buttocks and fart them out again. This vulgar spin on the story was added by the British who hated and despised her in an effort to be deliberately offensive when speaking of her. But I have a feeling she would laugh out loud to hear it. Some said she wore a belt of many knives, others said her belt was hung with the teeth of colonial soldiers. She is a mythical, magical figure in the national narrative of Jamaica, a folk shero with an identity always growing and changing with every new generation. But as Gabriel writes, “the story of the Maroons endurance and ability to hold off the British troops for almost eighty years is one that has never been repeated in history.” Their greatness as a force of resistance and rebellion in the face of the massive Colonial empire is fact. And it is undeniable too that Queen Nanny was the greatest of all their leaders.

Queen Nanny of the Windward Maroons is loved and revered by her descendants who still live in Jamaica today, though the male writers of patriarchal Jamaican history have largely ignored her. The best Caribbean poets of today like Kamau Braithwaite, Lorna Goodison, Grace Nichols and Honor Ford Smith have all written of her, her image is on the Jamaican five hundred dollar bill. Present day Maroons consider themselves Nanny's progeny and call her Grandy Nanny or Queen Nanny. She has become a symbol of resistance, endurance, survival and triumph for all oppressed people.

It would have done me good to hear about this iconic womanish figure of the islands when I was growing up a brown child of difference in Nassau in the 1970s. Maybe I could have prayed to her as my Caribbean ancestor and in turn been inspired to more bravery, more fighting spirit, a better sense of self preservation, a greater sense of justice and how to create it. I'm grateful to know about her now. I feel sure I have the right to claim her as one of my sacred, womanish ancestors of the Caribbean, even with all my apparant whiteness. I wonder if Queen Nanny was known to my own Black great grandmother, Helen Minns Drudge, who most probably had a great grandmother of her own who survived slavery. I hope so. I believe so. I also believe that the present-day, global women's movement would do well to revisit the legacy of Nanny as we continue our struggles against oppression, violence and inequality in a patriarchal world. I feel called to point out here that at the time of this writing the American State Departmnent reports that over the past year at least 700,000, and possibly as many as four million men, women and children worldwide were bought, sold, transported and held against their will in slave-like conditions. The victims are mostly women and girls from developing countries.

So to celebrate Emancipation Day I light a candle for Queen Nanny of the Windward Maroons, invite her in to join my ever-emerging, personal pantheon of Caribbean goddesses and sacred grandmothers, thank her for her good fight to free us all.

The Revolution Continues

"Where are the activists, where are the crusaders?" My friend, former journalist Marcia Reynoso asked. We are here. Bahamian Feminist writers like Marion Bethel, Helen Klonaris and Asha Rahming of the Bahamas are all writing and publishing the books they came here to write. Nicolette Bethel is writing and publishing good books too, and on the blogosphere she is a relentless voice for the Bahamian artist at home and in the Caribbean community. I have a new manuscript too, taking shape on the desk in front of me. I'll be reading from it at "Witness!", a poetry reading that is a part of the Bahamas Writers Summer Institute programme, along with Helen Klonaris and Obediah Smith, Saturday, July 25 at The Hub, Nassau. Poetry, Stories, they are so powerful, essential to the good revolution, writers are the small, troubled country's brightest and strongest hope. A call is out for submissions to the anthology of writing the Institute plans to publish and our country's most conscious and gifted voices will certainly be gathered up there. These are the places and spaces where the revolution continues, where excellent writing and social consciousness are webbed together, where the personal becomes the political, the political the personal. Where our voices are freer and stronger and more transformative than ever before.