Sherry Chandler

Women and the oil wars

Open Shutters: Iraq is an art exhibit put up by Index on Censorship in London. In this exhibit, ordinary Iraqi women were asked to take pictures of daily life under occupation. The Independent supplies a sample of four of these photo diaries. From the artist’s statement by Lu’lu’a, whose photos show dark interiors:

My husband distanced himself from me for a month after I was kidnapped and my mother still blames me for ruining the family. I open my eyes. I see the gun by my bed. My husband and I no longer talk, nor do we laugh together. We worry someone will attack us. I used to watch out of the window and feel alive. Now I make sure my face is hidden by the curtain. I look with longing at the street that was alive once upon a time.

Link from Informed Comment.

From Peter Linebaugh’s The Secret History of the Magna Carta at The Boston Review of Books:

The story of the extraction of natural resources and limiting indigenous people’s access to land is repeated around the world. Last summer hundreds of women seized the Chevron Escravos Oil Terminal in Nigeria (the word escravos means “slavery” in Portuguese). Its engineers have widened the Escravos River in the Bight of Benin, destroying the mangrove forest and the village of Ugborodo. Women can no longer hew wood for fuel or draw clean water for drink. Prostitution is the only “decent-paying job.”1

In the upland hamlets of Vietnam, where women collected firewood, bamboo shoots, medicinal plants, and vegetables, forest reserves have recently been enclosed by metal fence. Men can no longer legally climb trees for honey, nor cut timber for house repairs. The women of the hamlets suffer especially.2

These stories reflect three global trends: woodlands are being destroyed in favor of commercial profit,3 petroleum products are substituted as the base commodity of human reproduction and world economic development, and commoners are expropriated. “Life comes from women and food comes from land”—these are axioms to the critique of globalization, liberalization, and privatization made by recent advocates of a subsistence perspective.4 Michael Watts has dubbed as “petro-violence” the terror, dislocation, separation, poverty, and pollution associated with petroleum extraction. The United States has intensified this pattern with war.

Indigenous peoples are invoking the Magna Carta. Read the article to find out why.

Link via Heraclitean Fire.

In conjunction with the University of Kentucky’s Gender and Women’s Studies Program and the Women Writers Conference, Sedika Mojadidi brought her film, Motherland Afghanistan, to Lexington’s Kentucky Theater on Thursday. Here’s an excerpt from the PBS website:

A 2004 study showed that most Afghan women were forced into marriage before they were 16, with some as young as nine. The consequences are steep, impacting the young girl’s physical development and general health as well as her chances for education.

Pregnant women must cope with poor nutrition and scarcity of food in Afghanistan. Weakened by malnutrition, they are vulnerable to anemia while lactating, and this puts their bodies at higher risk for hemorrhaging. Vitamin deficiencies lead to scurvy, while iodine deficiencies cause goiters in mothers and a thyroid condition called cretinism in their babies.

Underlying these challenges is the fact that few Afghan women know how to recognize danger signs during pregnancy. For those who do, lack of money and transportation make getting to a hospital all but impossible. If she does manage to recognize the signs, acquire transportation, survive the broken roads and reach a hospital, the care and facilities a pregnant woman would find would almost certainly be inadequate, if not downright dangerous.

To read these statistics is bad enough but to see the women, beautiful and strong, in this film is heartbreaking.

Related posts:

Different from Ordinary Women

Tough Old Women

Women Writers Conference Prize for Creative Nonfiction

Culture Wars, post-election version

Importance of women on the court

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