Will the Violence Ever Stop? (Grave)

I was fifteen or sixteen years old. My age at the time eludes me but the events don't. They have been etched in my memory like a bad graffitti in an underground carriage.

I was still living in Cuba then and as it was usual for me on those days I was playing dominoes at my neighbour's. Mirth and laughter filled the narrow space we occupied as we banged the black and white pieces on the wooden table. Little did we know how much that joyful atmosphere was about to be altered within a few minutes. The mother sat to one side. Her daughter-in-law was her partner in the game and was positioned across from her. I paired up with one of the sons. We were all absorbed in the game. Although each of us wanted to win, competitiveness was as far removed from our minds as it was possible. Enjoyment mattered more. Then...

He burst through the door and I immediately sensed a sudden change in my companions' mood. He was angry. He was looking for a way to release that anger. He dragged his partner, who had just given birth to his few-months-old son, into the bedroom. He locked the door. And we did nothing. We just sat there looking down. In the meantime he beat her up to within an inch of her life. It was only after she managed to escape from his grip and stormed out of the room that we, or rather, one person intervened. It was his mother. And there was a reason to interfere. He had whipped out a gun and had thrust it into her throat. By now, they were on the balcony. I was a mere five yards away. I was fifteen or sixteen years old. My age at the time eludes me but the events don't. He was finally pushed off her by his younger brother. She was being consoled by the mother. I left. The police were never called. You see, he was a policeman.

Twenty years later and now in the UK, the events I witnessed that night have come back to haunt me. In Great Britain and according to the organisation Justice for Women one in three women will be subjected to violence at some point in their lives and one in six has been raped by her partner. Currently I am working on a special screening in partnership with the Birds Eye View Festival. Until the Violence Stops tells the stories of women from various parts of the world where violence against women is systematic and regular. Research that I have conducted on the subject has produced very odd facts. In the case of domestic violence in this country you'll find that only 2% of violent attacks are reported to the police. Why the disparity, I asked myself? One of the sad reasons is that many women choose to stay with their partner. However, far from vilifying them Daily-Mail style, a little bit of understanding is needed and called for if we are to tackle this heinous deed head-on. In many cases, men use a combination of mental, physical and economic force that step-by-step grinds the woman's will down. Faced with this scenario and the fact that many of these couples have children who will suffer as a consequence of their separation, many women prefer to stick it out with violent partners rather than cut the root of their misery there and then. Men, also, use the children as a weapon against their victims threatening them with social services, although it is worth remarking that social services are more inclined to place a child with its mother than with its violent father.

Another reason why women don't take flight is because in many cases they are yoked to their partners financially. Men often curtail a woman's freedom by controlling all economic matters in the household. This leaves the woman in a very delicate and fraught situation where feeding herself and/or her children becomes rigorous even at a basic level.

And then there's the small matter of a woman coming from a different culture to the UK. Hers is a much more dire quagmire. With no English language skills to shelter her from the hostile environment in which she is, threatened by draconian government laws that would most certainly banish her to the place whence she came and an often-times tightly close community which plays deaf to her cries for help and upon whom she depends for survival, it's not strange that her tale seldom meets a happy ending.

According to Home Office statistics, domestic violence costs the lives of two women every week. In March 2005 and following years of lobbying by pressure groups, a national report was published highlighting the grim and ghastly situation many women in the UK (89% of victims are female) face. It remarked, for instance, how in the age group 19 - 44 years old, domestic violence accounted for a bigger death toll than that of cancer, war and motor vehicle accidents. As a result of this report £14 million were pledged to tackle the problem of domestic violence as well as the creation of a Domestic Violence National Action Plan.

But, without willing to undermine the good and laudable efforts of the Home Office, is this enough? Will this make violence against women stop? More succinctly, will violence against women ever stop? Would £14 million have helped save the lives of Julia Pemberton and Rana Faruqui, just two of the many cases where police incompetence failed to spot the signs that put both women's lives in danger?

Money with no infrastructure in place is like water off a duck's back. Whilst the erstwhile Home Secretary John Reid pledged a grant of £2 million to unravel across the country in the form of 'Maracs' (multi-agency risk assessment conferences), the rest of the nation has seen a decline in conviction rates for rape (5.3% at the last count). Rape crisis centres, the frontline default place most victims of sexual assault go to when in distress, face a continuous funding ordeal, with some about to close shop forever.

But if the situation in the UK looks dire, we need look no further than Iraq to assess the havoc that the US-led 2003 invasion has wreaked, especially on women. In an interview with the German Internet magazine, Telepolis, Houzan Mahmoud, coordinator of The Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq', states that 'almost everyday armed groups kidnap, intimidate or murder young girls and women.' According to Houzan, 'women in Iraq live a more dangerous existence nowadays than before. Especially if they try to stand their ground against the perpetrators.'

Rape, sexual assault, domestic violence, genital mutilation, these are but a few of the elements that make up violence against women all over the world and the sheer diversity of them plus the amalgamation with other factors like culture, religion and politics renders even the most optimist of human beings forlorn and despondent.

Will the screening of this film change people's attitudes? Will those 32 rape crisis centres left in England and Wales (down from 84 in 1985) be saved from closure? Will similar cases like Doaa Khalil Aswad, beaten, kicked and stoned to death by a mob of excited men for having fallen for a Sunni boy in Kurdish Iraq, be prevented or even better cease to happen? Will the showing of this documentary stop more women, like Salima (not her real name), a female failed asylum seeker, from being deported back to their countries where they face torture, rape and possibly death?

The answer is I don't know. But it's a long way I've come since that evening when I was fifteen or sixteen years old, my age at the time eludes me but the events don't, when my eyes witnessed the death of innocence.

The Bohemian Night at The ArtsZone and Birds Eye View Festival

Present

Until The Violence Stops

Dir. Abby Epstein, USA 2005

Eve Ensler's award winning book The Vagina Monologues has grown from an award winning play to an international grassroots movement to stop violence against women and girls. Until The Violence Stops documents women from Harlem to Ukiah, California; from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to the Philippines and Kenya - just some of the 800 cities around the world who participated in V-Day benefit stagings of The Vagina Monologues.

Director Abby Epstein takes a poignant journey into the hearts of women and includes revealing testimonies from men, who expose social and cultural attitudes that perpetuate the pervasive violence against women. In emotionally charged interviews and performances, everyday women and celebrities (including Rosie Perez, Salma Hayek and Jane Fonda) embrace their bodies, reconcile their past, and bond together to break the silence that surrounds abuse.

More than just testimonies and performances, Until the Violence Stops is a film about empowerment and the importance of dialogue in the healing process. A celebration of women reclaiming their bodies and lives, this moving documentary leaves us with hope that change can happen.

Wednesday 12 September
6.30pm (doors will open at 6pm)
The ArtsZone
54-56 Market Square
London
N9 0TZ
Admission fee: £3
For bookings and information call 020 8 887 9500
Or e-mail mailto:info@enfieldartspartnership.org

There will be a Q&A session after the screening with speakers from various women's organisations like Family Justice Centre, Latin American Women's Rights, Birds Eye View Festival and Women's Aid.

Copyright 2007

Native Son by Richard Wright (2) (contains spoilers)

Read the first part of this review here

‘… If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we could call it injustice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout the country. If this state of affairs had lasted for two or three years, we could say that it was unjust; but it lasted for more than two hundred years. Injustice that lasts for long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life. Men adjust themselves to their land; they create their own laws of being; their notions of right and wrong. (…) Your Honor, injustice blots out one form of life, but another grows up in the its place with its own rights, needs and aspirations. What is happening here today is not injustice, but oppression, an attempt to throttle or stamp out a new form of life. And it is this form of life that has grown up here in our midst that puzzles us, that expresses itself, like a weed growing from under a stone, in terms we call crime. Unless we grasp this problem in the light of this new reality, we cannot do more than salve our feelings of guilt and rage with more murder when a man, living under such condition, commits and act with we call a crime…’

With these words, defence lawyer Boris A Max puts the entire American society in the dock in the closing pages of Native Son. In order to understand the flaws of the American War of Independence and its subsequent Civil War, we needn’t look further than Bigger Thomas, here characterising the uneducated black man, coming from the lowest rung on the American social and economic ladder. As his options comprise no more than menial jobs, Bigger’s life becomes a trap, which feeds him nothing but resentment and hate. He fears the whites, who determine his existence and this fear makes him see the white race as a collective that tells him where to live, where to work and what to do.

The setting of the novel, black and white colours with shades of grey thrown in and cloudy skies, eases the reader into the desperate plight the main character, Bigger Thomas, has. He is the focus of the novel and the embodiment of racism in the psyche of its black victims. Bigger and his compadres suffer from a popular assumption that whites are sophisticated whereas blacks are either subservient or savage. All throughout the novel and up until the dénouement Bigger’s thoughts change from shame (of his family’s abject poverty) to fear (of the whites who control his life)

Native Son is one of those novels that, although they focus on social and political issues, draw heavily from the work of other writers whose oeuvre might not be directly related to the issues raised in the novel in question. In this case it's that other great American writer, Edgar Allan Poe whose short-stories are the leverage that produce the effect in the novel . In Native Son, I saw clearly ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. The feeling of paranoia caused by the ‘vulture eye’ in ‘Tell-Tale Heart’ is on a par with Bigger’s mix of hate and fear towards Mary Dalton. The criminal modus operandi is the same. Both perpetrators smother their victims. They both stay in the same room where their dead victim is, as the police or investigator search the premises. They both panic in a moment of self-consciousness. Poe’s narrator begins to hear a faint noise that grows louder and louder. Bigger avoids replenishing the furnace. The atmosphere is the same, repressed, silent, grim and cold.

There’s an important lesson in Native Son and it’s mainly aimed at the liberal, white, middle class person. Mary Dalton, the victim and turning point in Bigger’s life, professes a benign type of racism, one whose own naïveté escapes its owner. Richard Wright, very deftly, criticises Mary’s attitude towards blacks, and specifically towards Bigger. Her youth and immaturity do not allow her to see beyond those rose-tinted spectacles she wears and therefore she fails to recognise Bigger’s signs of confusion and surprise when she approaches him in a such an open and friendly manner. Her assumption that Bigger will accept her friendship proves to be one of many fatal errors she and Jan, her boyfriend, make.

This is not to excuse Bigger. I wrote in the first part of my analysis of Native Son that as a father and husband, Bigger’s deeds tested my liberal credentials. They still do. But I feel now in a much better position to judge, and not too harshly, this human being who, rather than acting, was re-acting to the society that put him in that condition in the first place.


Copyright 2007