19 Nov 21 | China, News and features
Forget about the white lines. When it comes to tennis China might have just crossed a red one. That has been the lesson from the disappearance of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai.
Two weeks ago the Wimbledon doubles winner vanished after she made sexual assault allegations against a top Chinese government official. For those familiar with China, the plot unfolded much like other #MeToo stories there – victim speaks up only to be quickly silenced.
Except in this case, rather than a smattering of individuals and NGOs condemning the action, the world’s sporting greats have screamed with fury. United under the hashtag #WhereIsPengShuai Serena Williams has said Peng’s disappearance “must be investigated and we must not stay silent”. Novak Djokovic said he was shocked. Germany’s Olympic team have asked for “clarity” on “her well-being and current condition”; Even FC Barcelona football player Gerard Pique shared a meme of the star alongside the hashtag.
It’s not just sporting superstars. It’s organisations too. Organisations like the Women’s Tennis Association. WTA chair Steve Simon said on Wednesday that “the WTA and the rest of the world need independent and verifiable proof that she is safe”. Her sexual assault allegation must be investigated “with full transparency and without censorship”, he added.
Then, yesterday, when a letter surfaced claiming to be from her both denying the allegations and saying she was ok (a letter that was quickly discredited), the WTA chair said:
“We’re definitely willing to pull our business and deal with all the complications that come with it because…this is bigger than the business.”
This, despite years of the WTA building up the profile of tennis in China. It’s an astonishing show of solidarity.
Not mincing his words at all, the writer Christoph Rehage, currently chronicling his ‘longest walk’ from China to Germany, tweeted: “I totally did not expect the tennis world to be the first to say fuck you xi jinping this shit is enough”. Neither did we Christoph, neither did we.
And why would we? We’ve become so accustomed to the opposite – silence. In the face of series after series of human rights violations, ones of a scale that we said would never happen again, the world’s leading financiers, brands and sporting figures have usually opted to not speak up. Silence like that from the International Olympic Committee, who have said they would not comment on the Peng affair and favoured “quiet diplomacy”.
And not just silence, actual kowtowing, such as when the general manager of Houston Rockets basketball team apologised for a tweet in support of Hong Kong protesters, or when actor John Cena apologised on Chinese social media after calling Taiwan a country, or when the parent company of Zara reportedly removed a statement on their website relating to cotton in Xinjiang.
At the core of the Peng story is a tragedy on an epic scale, of a woman who might have been sexually assaulted and has presumably been threatened or even imprisoned – and of a nation where free expression is muzzled and showing solidarity with the victims of sexual crimes can be a crime in itself. But this is also a story of hope. It’s been very heartening to watch the international outcry, to see for the first time in a while people and organisations who have everything to gain from being friends with China actually saying “enough is enough”.
The tennis world is not the only one taking on China this week. Granted much smaller in scale, students at the University of Exeter called a meeting with senior management about the university’s links to Chinese universities deemed complicit in the genocide of Uyghur Muslims. The students used freedom of information requests to establish the link and as a result the university says it will rethink its policy. On the back of this victory, the external organisation they teamed up with – Students for Uyghurs – have expressed a desire to do similar work at other UK universities.
These two actions, one local one international, are hugely significant. We’ve been told for years that China is too big to take on, too powerful. We’ll be punished; people in China will be punished. We’ve even had the environment thrown at us “Don’t upset the Chinese! We need them on our side to achieve 1.5 degree goals!”). And yet where has silence got us? “Nowhere. We need to speak up”, wrote Rushan Abbas, an activist whose family is incarcerated in China, in a 2020 issue of Index on Censorship.
So to all those of you who have spoken up against atrocities in China this week – thank you. You’ve given us hope that a different future can exist.
29 Oct 21 | About Index, Australia, News and features, The climate crisis, Volume 50.03 Autumn 2021, Volume 50.03 Autumn 2021 Extras
The bushfires that tore across Australia in the summer of 2019-20 left in their wake 18 million hectares of scorched land. A total of 33 people – including nine firefighters – lost their lives, and close to 3,500 homes were razed to the ground. Ecologists calculated that as many as one billion animals perished in the fires, while economists estimated the cost of recovery at an unprecedented AU$100 billion.
Faced with tallies of destruction too big to comprehend, Australians cast about for clarity on why this disaster was unfolding, and how it could be prevented from happening again the future. Conveniently, there was a living culture with 65,000 years of experience in caring for the country to turn to for answers.
The fires precipitated a sudden torrent of interest in traditional Aboriginal land management techniques. First Nations rangers, practitioners and traditional knowledge experts – so rarely afforded time on the airwaves – were widely consulted on national television and radio shows. For many Australians, it was their first time hearing about “cool burning” and “fire-stick farming”: traditional methods of burning patches of bushland at low temperatures to clear the undergrowth without damaging root systems and curtail the risk of out-of-control bushfires in the arid heights of summer.
Yet these practices are ancient. They’ve been passed down through generations of Aboriginal Australians, forming part of the symbiotic relationship that First Nations people have with the environment as custodians of the land.
“Think of it like this: an Aboriginal man 300 years ago didn’t have to worry about handing a climate emergency on to the next generation,” said indigenous cultural educator and Wiradjuri man Darren Charlwood.
“What they were handing on to their children was an understanding of how to survive, how to respect their country, how to respect their ancestors in doing so, and how to practise all this through land management, through ritual, through their interactions within their social organisation and systems.”
While the unprecedented interest in traditional knowledge from the media, the government and conservation organisations was undeniably welcome, for educators such as Charlwood – who works for Sydney’s Royal Botanical Gardens and the New South Wales government’s National Parks and Wildlife Service – it was also frustrating.
“If that sort of engagement had come into play a lot earlier, we probably wouldn’t have had as big a catastrophe as we did,” he said. “Traditional fire management is wonderful, and it can really help with the plight of our environment in Australia. But, mind you, this was a climate catastrophe. Traditional land management would have saved only so much. The bottom line is the climate is changing.”
The consultation-after-the-fact that occurred in the wake of the 2019-20 bushfires is symptomatic of a more troubling “selective listening” that Australia’s First Nations people encounter across the political spectrum – from the prime minister’s office to the halls of local government – especially on land and environment issues.
It’s something that Yvonne Weldon, Australia’s first Aboriginal candidate for Lord Mayor of Sydney, is looking to change.
For Weldon, the principle of inclusion is at the core of an indigenous approach to leadership and environmentalism. It’s a value she places at the heart of her campaign.
“Inclusion is who we are as First Nations people,” she said. “Our ability to be inclusive – to hear what others are saying and act with sensitivity to their existence – is how we have been able to survive.”
She added that the same logic applied to the environment. “Prior to Invasion we didn’t have polluted parts of our country. We didn’t take any more than was needed. Whatever ecosystem you were a part of, you had to live in harmony with it. You didn’t do it at the expense of other living things.”
Reaching for the top
Weldon and her team at Unite for Sydney launched their campaign at Redfern Oval in May, nearly 20 years after then-prime minister Paul Keating’s historic Redfern Speech, where he recognised the impact of dispossession and oppression on First Nations peoples, and called for their place in the modern Australian nation to be cemented.
“It’s about creating moments that represent a landmark for inclusion,” explained Weldon. “And, hopefully, those moments happen closer and closer together in time until inclusion is no longer the exception, it’s commonplace.”
Weldon is a proud Wiradjuri woman who grew up in the inner-city suburb of Redfern, Sydney. With 30 years of experience as a community organiser and campaigner, she has spent her adult life advocating for the disadvantaged. She is a board member of Domestic Violence NSW and Redfern Jarjum College – a primary school supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children needing additional learning support – as well as deputy chair of the NSW Australia Day Council. She’s also the first Aboriginal person to run for the top job at the City of Sydney Council.
“To me, the fact that I’m the first Aboriginal person to run for Lord Mayor of Sydney in 2021 is insulting,” she said. “It’s an insult because it hasn’t been done before in this country, and yet we think we have progressed.”
Running on a platform of effective climate action, genuinely affordable housing and better community engagement, the campaigner-turned-candidate sees plenty of opportunities for improvement.
“True leadership has to be inclusive of all, and what I’ve seen in local government has fallen way short of that.”
She realised she had to take a run at the job after six years as elected chair of Sydney’s Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council (LALC) – an organisation set up by law to advocate for the interests of local Aboriginal people in relation to land acquisition, use and management.
In her experience, representatives of the City of Sydney Council have chosen to engage only when it suits their purposes, and either reject proposals for meaningful change out of hand or use inordinate process as a way of keeping them in check.
It’s an all-too-familiar story in Australia, where the government has been unwilling to reach a treaty with its indigenous people comparable to those of New Zealand, Canada or the USA.
Aboriginal calls for recognition were formalised in 2017 with the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which called for a First Nations Voice enshrined in the constitution, and a treaty to supervise agreement-making and truth-telling with governments.
But the historical consensus was rejected outright by then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and denigrated by the deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, who called it an “overreach”.
Following a 2018 parliamentary inquiry which found the Statement from the Heart should indeed be enacted, the current Australian government has delayed plans to introduce relevant legislation until after the next federal election in 2022.
A long fight
The application of “selective listening” to First Nations calls for autonomy over their own land is, historically speaking, one of the foundations that modern Australia was built on.
“The damage that’s been done to Australia over 250 years of not respecting indigenous people or knowledge… you can really see it in our environment, it’s very much on show,” said Charlwood. “Because of the way that people have introduced invasive animals and plants to Australia, because of practices like mining and the way people engage with the landscape here, Australia has lost more wildlife in a shorter time than anywhere else on Earth.”
According to Heather Goodall – professor emerita of history at the University of Technology in Sydney – there is historical evidence that Aboriginal people in New South Wales made efforts to secure broad tracts of land where they could feel a sense of safety and belonging, access sites of cultural significance and act as custodians for the environment as early as the 1840s, when the first “reserves” were established.
Despite a movement which involved direct action, writing their own petitions and recruiting sympathetic white men to convey their demands to authorities, Aboriginal people were gradually moved to government-delineated reserves, missions or small parcels of land for agricultural use.
“Consultation is often about seeking opinions which will be used to justify a decision that has already been made. It’s a very hard-to-define term that often doesn’t mean having decision-making power,” said Goodall.
That’s a sentiment Weldon can relate to. “Aboriginal people are not one people – there are hundreds of different nations and tribes and clans all across the country,” she said.
“Bearing in mind the diversity of Aboriginal Australia, often what people in power do is if they don’t want to hear what one group has to say, they’ll go to another group until they find someone to say what they want to hear. I call it ‘shopping around’.
“They’ll play people off each other, they’ll offer little crumbs, they’ll do all these types of things because that’s the colonial viewpoint. It’s about creating the notion that you’re open and inclusive, when actually you’re orchestrating it all for self.
“Sydney represents ground zero, where the impact of colonisation began,” she added. “But you can’t talk about reviving or respecting traditional knowledge if you’re not inclusive of First Nations people.”
As another generation of Aboriginal Australians stands ready to share knowledge and lead the way to a more sustainable future, the question remains whether other Australians are ready to listen – and ready to vote.
22 Oct 21 | Afghanistan, News and features, Volume 50.03 Autumn 2021, Volume 50.03 Autumn 2021 Extras
Documenting the lives of women in Afghanistan, Forty Names by Afghan poet Parwana Fayyaz is a poignant reminder of lost opportunities, of freedoms given and then taken away, of a new generation living without enlightenment through education.
The collection, the title verse of which won the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem “focusses on stories and experiences from my childhood” and the ingrained attitude of acceptance that comes with a lack of schooling.
The title itself is reference to one of those very stories, where 40 women throw themselves off a cliff in order to protect their honour, rather than die with dishonour.
As she told Carcanet Press: “I grew up among women who told stories, stories concerning women. As the time passed, the women themselves became the stories. The majority of these women never went to school. They share their philosophy of life down through generations. [They say] “in the face of hardship, be patient, patience is the remedy”.”
Born in 1990, Fayyaz’s education challenges this idea. Now with a PhD in Persian Studies from Cambridge University, how can silence possibly make sense?
“When I left my home and Afghanistan to embark on my journey to become more educated, I began to reflect on the lives of the women I had always admired,” she said. “I began to question my admiration for them. They were suffering and yet they accepted it. To suffer in silence is seen as a token of patience.”
“With more education, patience became more elusive.”
Indeed, the choice now for so many women and girls in Afghanistan, sadly, is only silence and patience, but without the reward the piety is supposed to bring. As the Taliban tightens its stranglehold over the country, it forces out the oxygen required for art and literature to flourish and for women to learn how to express themselves in this sense.
Certainly, more than they previously should have done, everyday people in the west are taking notice of Afghanistan. The stories and images that have shocked so many people are not new, but it quite obviously takes a feeling of personal involvement – Nato troops were caught in a dangerous evacuation process – for people to take notice for long.
Even the process of translation for Fayyaz was important in this regard, “My poetry makes use of the art of translation to enhance the meaning of my story-poems for a Western audience, specifically involving the translation of Persian names into English. In active translation, the Persian names are the sounds and the English translations their echoes.”
Perhaps, to the English-speaking world, the plight of Afghans under the Taliban will remain as far-distant noises that will not reverberate so loudly for long. Forty Names, then, is in its truest sense a reflection of what has been lost for a whole generation of Afghan girls: a reminder that Afghanistan’s brief experience of democracy will never be forgotten.
Forty Names
by Parwana Fayyaz
I
Zib was young.
Her youth was all she cared for.
These mountains were her cots
the wind her wings, and those pebbles were her friends.
Their clay hut, a hut for all the eight women,
and her Father, a shepherd.
He knew every cave and all possible ponds.
He took her to herd with him,
as the youngest daughter
Zib marched with her father.
She learnt the ways to the caves and the ponds.
Young women gathered there for water, the young
girls with the bright dresses, their green
eyes were the muses.
Behind those mountains
she dug a deep hole,
storing a pile of pebbles.
II
The daffodils
never grew here before,
but what is this yellow sea up high on the hills?
A line of some blue wildflowers.
In a lane toward the pile of tumbleweeds
all the houses for the cicadas,
all your neighbors.
And the eagle roars in the distance,
have you met them yet?
The sky above, through the opaque skin of
your dust, carries whims from the mountains,
it brings me a story.
The story of forty young bodies.
III
A knock,
father opened the door.
There stood the fathers,
the mothers’ faces startled.
All the daughters standing behind them.
In the pit of dark night,
their yellow and turquoise colors
lining the sky.
‘Zibon, my daughter,
take them to the cave.’
She was handed a lantern;
she took the way.
Behind her a herd of colors flowing.
The night was slow,
the sound of their footsteps a solo music of a mystic.
Names:
Sediqa, Hakima, Roqia,
Firoza, Lilia, Soghra.
Shah Bakhat, Shah Dokht, Zamaroot,
Naznin, Gul Badan, Fatima, Fariba.
Sharifa, Marifa, Zinab, Fakhria, Shahparak, MahGol,
Latifa, Shukria, Khadija, Taj Begum, Kubra, Yaqoot,
Nadia, Zahra, Shima, Khadija, Farkhunda, Halima, Mahrokh, Nigina,
Maryam, Zarin, Zara, Zari, Zamin,
Zarina,
at last Zibon.
IV
No news. Neither drums nor flutes of
shepherds reached them, they
remained in the cave. Were
people gone?
Once in every night, an exhausting
tear dropped – heard from someone’s mouth,
a whim. A total silence again.
Zib calmed them.
Each daughter
crawled under her veil,
slowly the last throbs from the mill-house
also died.
No throbbing. No pond. No nights.
Silence became an exhausting noise.
V
Zib led the daughters to the mountains.
The view of the thrashing horses, the brown uniforms
all puzzled them. Imagined
the men snatching their skirts, they feared.
We will all meet in paradise,
with our honored faces
angels will greet us.
A wave of colors dived behind the mountains,
freedom was sought in their veils, their colors
flew with wind. Their bodies freed and slowly hit
the mountains. One by one, they rested. Women
figures covered the other side of the mountains.
Hairs tugged. Heads stilled. Their arms curved
beside their twisted legs.
These mountains became their cots.
The wind their wings, and those pebbles their friends.
Their rocky cave, a cave for all the forty women.
And their fathers and mothers disappeared.
Three Dolls
During the wars,
my mother made our clothes
and our toys.
For her three daughters,
she made dresses, and once
she made us each a doll.
Their figures were made with sticks
gathered from our neighbor’s garden.
She rolled white cotton fabric
around the stick frames
to create a skin for each doll.
Then she fattened the skin
with cotton extracted from an old pillow.
With black and red yarns bought from
uncle Farid’s store, my mother created faces.
A unique face for each doll.
Large black eyes, thick eyelashes and eyebrows.
Long black hair, a smudge of black for each nose.
And lips in red.
Our dolls came alive,
with each stitch of my mother’s sewing needle.
We dyed their cheeks with red rose-petals,
and fashioned skirts from bits of fabric,
from my mother’s sewing basket.
And finally, we named our dolls.
Mine with a skirt of royal green was the oldest and tallest,
and I called her Duur. Pearl.
Shabnam chose a skirt of bright yellow
and called her doll, Pari. Angel.
And our youngest sister, Gohar, chose deep blue fabric,
and named her doll, Raang. Color.
They lived longer than our childhoods.
Her Name is Flower Sap
Somewhere – in the no-man’s land,
there are high mountains, and there is a woman.
The mountains are seemingly unreachable.
The woman in her anonymity is untraceable.
The mountains are called the Tora Bora.
The woman is known as Sharbet Gula, Flower Sap.
In her faded-ruby-red Chador, she appeared
a young girl with a frown, with her green eyes.
Not knowing where to look.
When the world looked back at her.
As young kids, refugees of wartime in Pakistan
we were equally intrigued with her photograph.
‘Her eyes have the magic of good and bad.’
‘The light of her eyes can destroy fighter jets.’
So went Afghan children’s conversation
in the aftermath of 9/11. ‘But could she take down
The Taliban jets,’ we wondered,
as the jets crossed the skies in one song.
But Flower Sap could never answer us.
For she had disappeared like our childhood.
*
As the borders became damper lands,
Afghans like soft worms crawled toward their homeland.
In the in-between mountains,
Flower Sap re-appeared, without any answers.
Now she was a grown-up woman.
A mother of four girls. A widow.
There were some questions in her eyes.
The ones I had seen in my parents’ eyes.
Where do we go next? Now that our country is free.
She still did not have any answers.
And where was the power of her eyes?
I then saw her smiling. As an immigrant, I smiled too.
For her name saved the day.
She was taken to a hospital for her eyes.
The president of the county met her,
and sent her on a pilgrimage.
Her name educated her daughters,
it gave her a house and a reason to return to her homeland.
What else is there in the names and naming?
If not for reparation.
Forty Names was published in July 2021 by Carcanet Press, carcanet.co.uk
