Womankindの November 2017 の目次

When I travel by plane I’m always disturbed by turbulence, as if the presence of turbulence means something is wrong. When the plane is gliding along with no jolts it feels safe, while wind currents feel ominous. But turbulence is simply the result of strong winds or vertically rising air, or wake turbulence from another plane. We do not exist in a vacuum. The onset of turbulence on a plane’s flight has much in common with the onset of disturbances in an otherwise plain-sailing life. A death or breakup, illness, money worries, bankruptcy, an argument with a friend, a feeling of injustice, these too generate turbulence. And when they occur, we regard them with contempt as if they just should not happen. “No one deserves such a thing.” “What a…

The percentage of adults reading literary novels, short stories, poems, and plays has plummeted to a three-decade low. More people today are likely to watch a movie, or dance performance, or even attend a live book reading, than sit down with a cup of tea and read a novel, according to the NEA’s Annual Arts Basic Survey (AABS), based on data from the US Census Bureau. In fact, in the survey the only activity that people did less than reading literature was attending art classes. While literary fiction is down, adult non-fiction sales are on the rise, particularly in the categories of crafts, hobbies, and self-help, which rose 6.9 per cent from 2015 according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 80 per cent of print sales in the US. Back…

“During these last ten years the myths that men created have crumbled, and many women writers have gone beyond me and have been far more daring than I. Too many of them for my taste take sexuality as their only theme; but at least when they write about it they now present themselves as the eye-that-looks, as subject, consciousness, freedom.”– Simone de Beauvoir There’s the old saying from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” It refers to someone who speaks too much about a given subject or point of view; it’s often suspected, and rightly so, that when one speaks too much that the opposite of what’s professed might actually be the real truth. Companies use words to deflect attention from their day-to-day actions. An oil company…

When I was little, I was a sickly kid. I went to school for two days only to fall sick. I’d be admitted into hospital, return home, and fall ill again. Sometimes blood would spurt from my nose, or I’d cough it up; other times I’d lose my balance and crumple up on the floor. Maybe I lacked something in my body, but I suspect witchcraft. Some family members in my native Iringa village had fallen out with locals. One day I blacked out completely and was taken to hospital. Shilaz, my twin brother, came to visit me as I lay in the hospital bed. He never had health problems at all. But that night, after visiting me, he died. He was only six years old. I can’t stop thinking…

What was Tanzania like when you first arrived? When I first arrived in Tanzania in 1957 it was very undeveloped. There were not many roads, and there were animals everywhere. It was a wild place, the Africa of my dreams. Today, there are many more people. There are roads all over the place. Wilderness areas around the world are vanishing as human developments take over. Animals are confined more and more to national parks. Species that are highly endangered - elephants and rhinos - are still disappearing at a horrifying rate due to the international ivory trade. And my little paradise of Gombe - it used to be part of a forest that stretched along the western part of Tanzania, known as the equatorial forest belt - by 1990, when…

Child marriage is legal in over 90 countries. Some 700 million women alive today were married before their 18th birthday, with Asia having the highest number of child brides, and Africa the highest prevalence. In Tanzania, 37 per cent of girls are married before they ‘come of age’. In 2011 over 600 civil society organisations from across the globe joined together to form Girls Not Brides with the express purpose of ending child marriage. In 2014, the United Nations called for every country in the world to outlaw the practice. And in 2016, the ‘Elders’ - including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Graça Machel, and Kofi Annan - threw their weight behind efforts to end child marriage within a generation, declaring that few of the Millennium Development Goals could be met without…

Sohini Chattopadhyay Kolkata, India Artwork: Catrin Welz-Stein Midwife. From old English. ‘Mid’ means with, ‘wife’ is woman; midwife: the one who is with woman at birth. When Susanna Roth travelled to America in the 1980s, she was eager to introduce herself as a midwife. She had undergone training, inspired by the writing of Ina May Gaskin, the American natural birth pioneer who was awarded the alternative Nobel in 2012. She imagined Americans valued midwifery, unlike Germans who considered it just another blue-collar vocation. “People were puzzled when I said, ‘I’m a midwife,’” Roth said, “One person said, ‘Okay. So where is your mid-husband?’” I am not a midwife, but I have been researching the subject for a couple of years. Some time ago, a superstar Indian writer called Chetan Bhagat…

Rehema Chachage studied fine arts in Cape Town, South Africa, in a predominantly white male faculty. As a black Tanzanian woman she felt like “the outsider, the other, alien and often voiceless”. Rehema Chachage Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Artwork: Rehema Chachage If you hosted a radio program, who would tune in and listen to you? If you’re young, you may concede with some resignation that few people would be interested in hearing the worldview of a young woman. “She’s barely lived. Her views are little more than uneducated guesses. What would she know?” As an older woman, you might be equally reticent. “The air waves are for the young. No one wants to hear from an older woman”. Media artist Rehema Chachage studied fine arts at a university in Cape…

MEREDITH PENMAN Day one: What to say about The Bachelor? Having never been able to endure an episode, I coaxed myself through it tonight. The fantasy system of a single handsome man at the centre of a hive of peroxide and fake tan is fairly monstrous. Given its popularity, you’d hope that the series could recommend itself on some other anthropological level. Scrutinising the one episode, however, it appears not. The can’t-look-away factor does a number on me, though. What drives these women to apply for such a gig? Is it a blatant grab for upwards media mobility? Or are they actually interested in falling in love? My questions are left unanswered, and perhaps it is this curation of surface sheen without messy undertow that drives the ratings. The ad…

“Self-knowledge... is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.” Jane’s Journey Dr. Jane Goodall gave up her career as a primatologist to devote her life to saving our endangered planet. She spends over 300 days a year travelling the globe on her mission to spread hope for future generations. In Jane’s Journey, documentary filmmakers accompany Goodall on a journey across several continents including Gombe National Park on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, Tanzania, which is her second home. Chasing Coral A team of divers, photographers, and scientists set out to discover why coral reefs are dying on such a massive scale. Using time-lapse cameras and over 500 hours of underwater footage, the documentary explains how coral bleaching occurs as the ocean temperature rises.…

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Bad habits are like a bad dose of the ‘flu: they spread from one person to the next. And the more severe the habit, the more eager the feeder of the habit is to wish to offload it on to others, much like a mutating germ. It’s why angry people spread anger, gluttons overfeed those around them, the drug-addicted organise events so habits can be passed on to others. In the past, encountering a feeder in your life - a parent, spouse, or sibling, a school friend or neighbour - was a matter of bad luck. They caught the habit and gave it to you. But today, thanks to social media, feeders in your life can originate from someone located on the opposite side of the globe. In fact, social…

JANE AUSTEN Perfect happiness Perfect happiness, even in memory, is not common. NANCY MATCHETT A lifelong project You can’t just decide what happiness is, go get it, and be done. Since both wants and needs are subject to change, being happy turns out to be a lifelong project. HELEN KELLER Mastery of hardships A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships. The giraffe is the tallest animal on Earth. Giraffes only eat plants, leaves, fruit, and flowers of woody plants. Their main food source is the acacia tree. Giraffes can go without water for weeks at a time. They are preyed on by leopards and lions. Female giraffes bear sole responsibility for raising the young. A giraffe has two toes on each foot. Giraffes…

My father was on a night shift when a lion escaped from a national park near his hospital - devouring dozens of people in nearby villages. We kept calling him. That night, I lay awake in fear counting down the minutes until I heard my father’s footsteps. He was amazed at the number of hugs he got. My father is a doctor and a martyr. He is short with afro hair and legs with childhood scars from untreated wounds. As an elementary student, he stayed with his aunt in Ebuyu village. He often slept on an empty stomach, and toiled away his childhood doing chores in and out of the house, sleeping on cold floors without even a mattress. He attended secondary school at a Christian Seminary school in Ulanga…

Elizabeth Catlett was born in Washington, D.C., in 1915 and died in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 2012, and in the 96 years she was alive she produced a body of work at once so formally varied and so committed to illustrating the lives of African-American women and men that the United States government declared her an “undesirable alien”, barring her from re-entering the country of her birth. “I have always wanted my art to service my people,” she once told a former student of hers, the artist and art historian Samella S. Lewis, as reported years later in her New York Times obituary, “to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential”. Hers was a potential that eventually blossomed into a decades-long career,…

November is a good month for a wedding in northern Tanzania. In November the rains come and the jacarandas turn blue, pushing out blossoms no bigger than your thumb; their masses of petals float above the rooftops of Arusha like puffs of blue mist. Rain on a wedding day is a sign of luck - rain makes a knot grow tighter, they say - and so is a jacaranda blossom that lands on the windshield of your car. You can be fairly sure that one or the other, raindrops or blue petals, will fall out of the sky to bless a November wedding. Arusha is Tanzania’s safari capital; I arrived with a tourist visa. My guide Patrick, a Frenchman, was new in town. Three years later, I married him. The…

Elizabeth Oliver Sydney, Australia Artwork: Aida Novoa & Carlos Egan It’s either a very short consultation, or a very long one. Because it's often the first real question they’ve asked in their life, and the opener goes something like this. "It's a bit of a weird one. I'm afraid, like terrified, of death." "Yes." There is no upward inflection in my yes, no encouraging question at the end of it. It's like they've told me that the Middle East is a tragedy, or we landed on the Moon, or salted caramel is getting old this decade. They laugh self-consciously. Sometimes I can’t resist making the obvious joke and say, “I can't help you.” Then we both laugh, in the desperate camaraderie of two dying soldiers in a battlefield trench. Working…

Lucy Treloar Melbourne, Australia Artwork: Monica Barengo One morning not long ago, feeling low, I headed into the garden. I stamped about, deadheading spent flowers and pulling weeds. Gradually I slowed, finally stopping to watch bees tumbling in plum blossom and a starling cavorting in the birdbath I’d just filled. Calmness settled over me, my thoughts ran clearer, and I was restored to equilibrium. I call it the gardening effect. It turns out that gardening is good for us all, and for the world, in just about every way possible. In fact US biologist E.O. Wilson believes that “nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction”. The physical benefits of gardening are well documented. Being active in the garden increases our blood rate and strengthens…

Food We spend most of our life in pursuit of it, since it’s vital for our survival. Food nourishes and sustains us, but it’s also something that we often obsess over, worry about, analyse, and critique. What does food mean to us? Here, Womankind is pleased to present the winning entry and finalists of Photographers’ Award XII ‘Food’. WINNER Eva Schroeder’s dramatic winning photograph, entitled Mouthwatering, was captured in a home kitchen in Canberra, Australia. Schroeder states: “This scene is of Archana, a migrant and passionate hobby chef who creates vegetarian cuisine that amplifies the flavours of her birth country India, and who also loves to share her knowledge with the young. In this case Archana is teaching Jennifer the techniques for making an exceptional roti, the Indian bread staple.”…

Antonia Case: Antonia Case is Editor-in-Chief of Womankind and Editorial Director of New Philosopher. In 2014 she was awarded the AAP Media Professionals’ Award for excellence in the presentation of philosophy in the media, and was shortlisted for Editor of the Year in the 2016 Stack Awards. Jane Goodall: Jane Goodall is a British primatologist, ethologist, anthropologist, and UN Messenger of Peace. Considered to be the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees, Goodall is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and its youth program Roots & Shoots. Lucy Treloar: Lucy Treloar’s novel Salt Creek won Debut Indie Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the 2016 Miles Franklin, Australia’s most prestigious literary award. Lucy also won the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Pacific). Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore: Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore writes for…

“You find the burden of life too heavy? Then you must increase the burden of your life.”–Friedrich Nietzsche The pursuit of happiness is so much a feature of our time that former US president Thomas Jefferson enshrined it as a basic right in the Declaration of Independence, and Buddhist Himalayan kingdom Bhutan measures prosperity not by gross domestic product (GDP), but rather by the happiness of its people. But not everyone is so convinced of the merits of happiness. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is one opponent, viewing happiness not as the goal of life, but as an outcome. For Nietzsche, the lot of humankind is to struggle, toil, suffer, fail, and fail again; happiness is a rare, fleeting reward once a mountain of struggle has been temporarily surmounted, or an…

My husband is a policeman. And a Tanzanian policeman’s wife soon learns to be resilient, especially when she has many children. The frequent call-outs outside rostered hours are part of her husband’s routine and she gets used to spending time at home alone. In Dar es Salaam we have problems with burglaries, armed robberies, drugs, and prostitution. My husband has been fighting these for years. On my part, I do my best to create a peaceful environment at home for him to unwind when he returns. The minute I see him step inside the house, I rush to the kitchen to bring his food - and never ask questions. We married when I was 19. Now I am 59. We have four children, aged between 30 and 37, two boys…

For thousands of years, the Maasai people have survived the drought-inflicted, arid soils of Tanzania. But over the past decade, Tanzania’s vast wilderness has become a battleground, a land grab on a scale not seen since colonial times. Like many tourists, Romanian photographer Vlad Cioplea chose to visit Tanzania to behold its ancient tribes. “In Tanzania there are lots of beautiful tribes like Maasai, Bushman, and Datoga,” he says. “Maasai are known for their colourful way of dressing and their beautiful welcome dance.” Cioplea spent 20 days in the Tanzanian rangelands, sleeping in a tent. He photographed the tribes as they hunted, sold handicrafts at village stalls, and as the young boys left their families for months in the wilderness, dressed from head to toe in black, their faces disguised…

Seventeen years ago, 10,000 metres above the English channel, I managed to talk myself into a minor panic attack. It started when I noticed a disconcerting change to the pitch of the plane’s engine. Then I (thought I) saw the stewards’ anxious faces. I also reminded myself that we’d taken off late, and that this was a new budget airline with no proven safety record. After a few moments of conversation in my head, I convinced myself that the engines were faulty, the stewards knew we were doomed, and it was all because of dangerous cost-cutting by the airline. I sat there in sheer terror thanks entirely to my own negative, catastrophic thoughts. The idea that our thoughts or how we perceive a situation can drive our emotions is one…

Life and death are a package deal. You cannot pull them apart. In Japanese Zen, the term shoji translates as “birth-death”. There is no separation between life and death other than a small hyphen, a thin line that connects the two. We cannot be truly alive without maintaining an awareness of death. Death is not waiting for us at the end of a long road. Death is always with us, in the marrow of every passing moment. She is the secret teacher hiding in plain sight. She helps us to discover what matters most. And the good news is that we don’t have to wait until the end of our lives to realise the wisdom that death has to offer. Over the past thirty years I have sat on the…

Too many of us fail to notice happiness because we’re too busy daydreaming about a time and place when we will be happy. We ignore what’s in front of us, and happiness unceremoniously passes us by. One secret to happiness is to spend just one minute each day filling in a happiness diary - listing just two moments that made you happy that day. At the end of the quarter, you will have a list of happy moments that you can use as proof that you are, indeed, happy - at least some of the time.…

Maria Sarungi-Tsehai Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Artwork: Marianna Gefen Womankind: What are some of the biggest challenges facing women in Tanzania? Maria Sarungi-Tsehai: The first challenge is the mindset - present in both men and women - towards the role of women and their place in society. For many, the fact that women in Tanzania bear the brunt of family upkeep, yet are expected to also be productive at work or business is overwhelming. Yet it is ‘expected’ that they bear the burden. Another major challenge has been childhood marriage, which appears to manifest in different ways including school dropouts or women not continuing with studies. Statistics show that 37 per cent of young girls marry before the age of 18 in Tanzania. Shocking figures! Another challenge is…

Todd Sanders Toronto, Canada Artwork: Catrin Welz-Stein Seoul, South Korea Antonia Case: As an anthropologist you decided to study Tanzania. How did your journey begin? Todd Sanders: When I arrived in Tanzania, I lived in my tent for the first few weeks. One village had three small colonial-era houses for local dispensary staff and one was vacant. The houses were still standing because they had brick walls, cement floors and tin roofs. The Tanzanian government owns them now, and they let me live in one - which I did for two years. From there, I spent the early months trying to get to know people: I mapped villages, where and how people lived and farmed, whatever I could do really with limited language skills. The longer I stayed,…

The Challenge for Africa By Wangari Maathai Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize-winner and founder of the Green Belt Movement, offers a new perspective on the troubles facing Africa today. Too often these challenges are portrayed by the media in extreme terms that connote poverty, dependence, and desperation. Wangari Maathai sees things differently, describing what Africans can and need to do for themselves. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories Ernest Hemingway An ideal introduction to the work of Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories contains ten of Hemingway’s most acclaimed and popular works of short fiction. Beautiful in their simplicity, and unsurpassed in their craftsmanship, the stories in this volume highlight one of America’s master storytellers at the top of his form. Gravel Heart By Abdulrazak Gurnah…

HARN MUSEUM OF ART Gainesville, Florida Becoming a Woman in the Age of Enlightenment: French Art from the Horvitz Collection UNTIL 31 DECEMBER 2017 Becoming a Woman features nearly 120 works by some of the most prominent artists of the 18th century, including drawings, pastels, paintings, and sculptures selected from one of the world’s best private collections of French drawings. The exhibition is organised into thematic sections that address some of the most important and defining questions of women’s lives in the 18th century. These include how the stages of a woman’s life were measured; what cultural attitudes and conditions in France shaped how women were defined; what significant relations women formed with men; what social and familial rituals gave order to their lives; what pleasures they pursued; and what…