Mothers in black
Woman's-eye View
This Friday, mothers (and grandmothers and aunts and wives and sisters and daughters), dressed in black, will stand on the pavement opposite the Parliament for the third week running, to demand an end to road slaughter. The first Friday - July 7, 2000 - the Mothers in Black standing in Georgetown came from different parts of Guyana. Last Friday, a small number of women from Linden who had been in the original action in Georgetown took their demonstration back to Linden. Friday, July 21, if all goes right, Mothers in Black will also stand in Berbice. The first action was spearheaded by members of the Alicia Foundation. In Guyana we tend to think in old ways, so as we were standing opposite the Parliament the first day, more than one person from the media asked who was the "person in charge". Leaflets prepared and handed out by the women answered this question: no one is, in that sense, in charge. There's no main spokesperson. Mothers in Black is not a new group. It is (for us here, at least in recent times) a new kind of action, a way for women (or any people) who are aggrieved to demand redress. A way for victims to reclaim rights. Mothers in Black is a new kind of action for Guyana but we didn't invent it. (No one ever invents anything, not from scratch). There are earlier and contemporary examples of the same kind of action elsewhere. - In Argentina, for years, there was something called Las Madres de la Playa or Las Abuelas de la Playa - mothers and grandmothers who, each week, would stand in a square demanding an accounting of their children and grandchildren who had been "disappeared" by a murderous government. - In several countries, there is something called Women in Black. Women in Black, like other actions by women elsewhere, has no formal membership, no official spokesperson, no political "line". They are against violence, from male violence against women to war and the "conspiracy of militarism - global and local". For those who have followed events in Yugoslavia, there are Women in Black in Belgrade who demonstrate against the vicious Milosevic government, but who also demonstrated against the NATO bombing of Serbia, which was said to be aimed at Milosevic; Women in Black rightly anticipated that the bombing would strengthen him, and weaken the opposition to him. Women in Black inside and across countries have ongoing contact with each other. Inside Yugoslavia, there is ongoing contact between women who are Serbs and women who are Kosovo Albanians, even though the two "peoples" are at war with each other. The idea of "Women in Black" was started in Israel in 1988 by women protesting against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza. They were the first to begin the form of action now adopted by Women in Black everywhere - "...mainly silent vigils, by women standing alone, wearing black, in public places, at regularly repeated times". - In England, right now, there is something called "Women's Wednesdays in Whitehall", a weekly picket of women who rotate the following themes in their demands: "Asylum for rape and all other victims" (the right of women who are raped in their countries of origin to be granted asylum in England); "Wages for caring work" (an end to all the unwaged and low-waged work, done mainly by women, in caring for others); Cancellation of Third World debt" (a call for rich countries and agencies to remove the huge burden of debt from countries like ours); "Pay Equity" (Equal pay for women and men for work of equal value). These demands might not be familiar to us here yet. But they are demands that women all over the world made during a women's strike on the last International Women's Day, March 8, 2000, and we will hear more about them. Notice how similar all the actions are in form. They are actions that women, with all their responsibilities at home and out the home, can take - they last for one hour, once a week. They are actions which are regular and visible. They are actions by women. Here, after Mothers in Black had their first vigil men said we were excluding them, although from the first Friday, men were invited to support. The problem seemed to be that they were asked to support an action initiated by women and carried out by women. The point was not to suggest that fathers don't mourn. But it is not an accident that it was women who went out in Argentina demanding an accounting for their children - and it is not an accident, either, that in Guyana it was women, and specifically mothers, who found it impossible to go on with their lives without stopping to demand an accounting for theirs. The most recent handout by Mothers in Black said something like that. It said:
"WE ARE MOTHERS WHO HAVE LOST LOVED ONES- Slaughtered on our roads.
Two footnotes: And two, to the man passing in a minibus who shouted at the women standing outside the Parliament last week that they should stop what they were doing and go and develop the country: I hope no children of yours are ever killed in the kind of mindlessness and heartlessness that pervade the country, and of which you are an example.
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