Saturday's Child (67 page)

Now I get to see the world very differently, go where I'm needed, learn from the women, share with them, try to be useful, then take what they've taught me and go someplace else, to another country or to my own page, to share it. I've become an itinerant messenger, a town crier, passing it along. Being a poet stands me in good stead here, though poetry and politics are considered inimical in my country—but not in the Arab world, Latin America, or ancient China and Japan with their histories of distinguished poet-politicians. Being a poet has taught me how to listen. The women I meet with are often nonliterate, and they speak in imagery, which is further distilled by the brevity of interpretation. These women
speak
in poetry.

Squatting on the mud floor of a hut in a Philippine rice paddy in the Cordillera Mountains, I talk with a peasant woman about her dreams for a better life. The longing in Gunnawa's voice is clear even before the translation reaches me through another woman. What does she want, more than anything? To learn to read, she says. Not more food, better housing, some easing of her intense labor? No, Gunnawa insists with solemnity: to
read
. “Because,” she continues, a shy smile flickering across
her weather-beaten face, “though I have never been outside this village, someday I might go somewhere. I know you must walk for half a day until you come to the road. I hear there are signs on the road.
If I could read the signs, I could know where I was going
.”

Becoming an internationalist doesn't mean you get to relax in your own country. One day the phone rings and it's Theresa Funiciello, luring me into a project she herself got roped into, because organizers, like misery, love company.

Theresa and I had met in 1979 when she'd phoned
Ms
. to announce that poor women were about to stage a sit-in at the Emergency Assistance Unit of New York City's central welfare office, down at Church Street, to protest demeaning and unconstitutional treatment they'd received at the hands of welfare system bureaucrats. I dropped whatever I was doing and hopped a subway to Church Street. With its three-month lead time,
Ms
. can never cover breaking news, since it hits print too long after the fact, so I wanted to be with these women not to cover the action but simply to support it. To the surprise of both Funiciello and myself, I was apparently the only well-known feminist out of the many they'd called who responded this way, so it would take time and further meetings to convince these activist welfare moms that the feminist movement wasn't all rich, snobby ladies who gave not a damn for their poorer sisters.

I immediately loved Theresa Funiciello. A former welfare mother herself, she's a genius on poverty issues: tactically inventive, a stirring speaker, an indefatigable organizer, and a woman equally unafraid to express anger, humor, and love. Theresa's group at that time, Downtown Welfare Advocate Center (DWAC), was composed of very smart women who mostly had little formal education, and who hotly denied they were feminists while every word issuing from their mouths glowed with incandescent feminist rage. We got on famously once the labels were reexamined, and soon they were claiming (with some justification) that
they
were the only
real
feminists around. I remember one wintery night in early 1980 when Blake, then ten, came with me to a DWAC meeting near Union Square so that he and I could have a snowball fight in the park's fresh
powder before it melted to morning grey slush. Everybody still smoked cigarettes furiously back then, and Blake muttered to me as we left, “Great women. Really like Theresa. But you people better not smoke so much if you want to live to win this revolution.” A few months later, Theresa and I were together again, this time at a demonstration outside the Grand Hyatt hotel, noting that Donald Trump and other real-estate czars and their companies received increasing city and state subsidies and tax abatements (“corporate welfare”) while poor women's and children's stipends didn't even keep up with cost-of-living increases. We belted out our statements on bullhorns to crowds gathered around our makeshift stage, a flatbed truck parked in front of the luxury hotel. (But privately Theresa and I were crestfallen, since we'd been forced to abandon our plot of putting odiferous dead fish into the Grand Hyatt fountain, to be aided by a stink bomb in the ventilating system. This is my kind of woman.)

Now, in 1986, Theresa was hauling me onto the New York State Committee of the Hands Across America (HAA) campaign. HAA was one of those mass do-good/feel-good projects like “We Are the World” rock concerts; in this case, people donated money for the poor here in the United States, and held hands in long lines to demonstrate concern while TV cameras rolled. It was one of those banal charity ideas where the donors get to feel sanctimonious, the money goes to pay office overhead and the high salaries of national honchos, and little if any help ever gets to the folks who need and deserve it.

“Never mind,” Theresa said. “This time we can change that. Since each state determines where its share of the money goes, our committee can actually make an impact.” The sum allotted to New York was only $839,000—not enough to buy even one meal for every poor person in the state. Consequently, that money had to be used creatively, in order to try to make a lasting difference: to educate, advocate, mobilize. Theresa is an impossible person to say no to, and I somehow wound up being voted in as chair of the New York State HAA Committee. It soon renamed itself the Committee for Justice and Empowerment,
Not
Charity—thus putting the national HAA office on notice:
These are New Yorkers you're dealing with, so goddammit get the hell outta our way
. Other state committees were largely composed of representatives from “poverty establishment” groups—“poverty pimps,” as Theresa succinctly terms them. These are
the professional experts who never want to address the issue systemically because they
need
the poor to be “always with us,” so that they can continue their lucerative careers of providing Band-Aids for temporary solutions. These are the organizations running institutionalized begging sites—shelters, food pantries, soup kitchens—on huge corporate-level budgets while women and kids receive “charity” handouts of stale bread, moldy cheese, and Ronald Reagan's favorite “vegetable,” catsup.
⁵

Our committee, on the other hand, took the position that people living in the world's richest country had a
right
not to starve to death, freeze, or lack housing. We were the only HAA committee with representatives from all over its state and the only one with a real bloc of
poor
people
on
it, as well as some direct-service providers, civil-rights leaders, lawyers, and activists. We had the strongest representation of black, Latin, and Native American members of any HAA committee,
and
we were
90
percent women—fitting, since “the poor”
are
women: poverty wears a woman's face. We also issued the liveliest statements of any state committee—collaborations reflecting the scrupulous research of Tom Sanzillo (a longtime policy advocate on poverty issues), the fury of Jackie Goeings (a great-grandmother from the welfare rights network), the vision of John Mohawk (a professor of Indian law and activist with the Seventh Generation Fund), Theresa's magnificent fire, and my blue-pencil editing.

Our ideas for ways to use the HAA funds were aimed both at practical solutions and at long-term systemic change. We wanted to put some of the money toward building a statewide campaign to educate people about the need for a children's allowance (the United States is one of last few industrialized nations in the world without one), hoping that eventually New York might lead the way for the rest of the country on this as it had on some other social-justice issues. Second, we wanted to use some of the money to establish a children's survival fund, to be augmented by future
fundraising, in order to give grants to grassroots nonprofit organizations active in advocacy, empowerment, and justice for the poor—so that academic poverty experts weren't always the only ones with platforms from which to speak. Third, we wanted to distribute the balance to direct-service providers who sought directional advice and input
from
poor people and who were committed to legislative and economic change, not to perpetuating the problem.

Seven months of intense work later, we'd been tagged the problem-child committee of HAA, whose national leadership tended toward fancy offices, back-room rule-changing, outright fiat, and the startling overuse of first-class air travel and overnight couriers instead of plain mail. The poverty establishment saw our spunky group as its worst nightmare, and mobilized against us as if we were calling for a storming of the Winter Palace—which I suppose in a way we were. Though we had the strongest statewide backing of any state committee, national HAA threw out every one of our decisions. At last, we countered with the suggestion that the New York money be distributed as cash—literal
cash
—to poor people. At least this way we'd know it would be
getting
to them and would make a difference in their lives, but we suspected that HAA would take out a mob contract on our entire committee rather than let that happen. Indeed, its leaders demanded that we award grants to “established service provider agencies” or they'd fire us. Since we were serving without pay,
that
was a fearsome threat.

We held a press conference at which we resigned en masse and exposed the farce publicly, renaming ourselves the New York Hands Across America Committee in Exile. Marty Rogol, executive director of national HAA, formed a New York scab committee of poverty bigwigs. Less than six months later, HAA went down in the flames of scandal, excoriated in the press for having been somehow “unable”—a full year after the deadline—to distribute the $16 million collected from hand-holding Americans. Whaddya know.

But Theresa would go on to write the most important analysis of women and poverty we yet have,
⁶
including in it solutions that still give the
poverty pimps ulcers—in addition to the indigestion they deserve to get from eating too much.

Meeting me at Parliament buildings in Cape Town, South Africa, the Inkatha Freedom Party MP Suzanne Vos is a likable woman, albeit an odd spokesperson for Zulu women: she's a blond “tall poppy”—a transplanted Anglo-Australian former journalist who self-identifies as “a feminist and a fanatical pluralist.” But her defensiveness about Inkatha is evident, nowhere more so than in her use of the cultural relativist argument. She claims all Zulu women are strong supporters of traditional Zulu culture, including such practices as mass virginity testing:
⁷

“It might appear that the parade of virgins before the king and his men is horridly sexist, but this revival of a puberty custom halted by missionaries is the Zulu way of trying to combat the rise in teenage pregnancies and the soaring HIV/AIDS rate. Once it's publicly known that a girl is a virgin, in Zulu culture she's safe, men honor her. So it's actually a way of
protecting
women!” When I respectfully suggest that, based on thirty years' experience of listening to women at the grassroots, I suspect that the women I am about to meet
in
the villages might tell a different story, Vos asks me to let her know if that's the case. So I am letting her know.

The Midlands Women's Group, whose focus is on rural women in the KwaZulu-Natal province, hosts a meeting to network me with some of these women, and with women from the Association for Rural Advancement (AFRA), Hlomelikusasa, and the Rural Women's Movement.
⁸
We
convene late one afternoon in the sparsely appointed but well-scrubbed Tembaletu Community Centre, needing to drag more chairs in as more women than expected—over seventy—arrive. Ten Zulu women have journeyed in the open back of a pickup truck from their villages more than a day's drive away.

Vuyisile speaks through translation, but her direct gaze never leaves mine: “I want to tell you about myself. From my earliest memory I was told, ‘You are only a girlchild. Your job is to fetch wood, haul water. You are the family ox. You must marry and obey your husband and in-laws. He will pay
lobolo
for you so he owns you. Your money, from marketing what you grow, is not your money, but his. This is the Zulu way.'
I
say, this is a bitter way to live.”

Other voices chime in, a chorus filtering through translation:

“They make us marry when we are still little girls.”

“Women around here get killed every day!”

“I'm a widow with eight kids. I miss the money my husband made, but I don't miss
him
. He beat me to stop me going to women's meetings.”

“See this scar on my forehead and cheek? The traditional leaders thought because I was for women I must be ANC,
⁹
so they slashed me.”

“I was called into a chief's court and punished by a fine for talking in a meeting with men.”

“I ran away because I didn't want to be a third wife. But they caught me and whipped me until I gave in.”

“They started calling me a witch, because I said women should have the right to own land. They still might kill me. Who will hear my screams?”

“By the time I was twenty-five, I had six kids. Our culture says,
‘Woman, you will sit on the ground while men sit on chairs. You will not speak at meetings. You have no need of education.' I can speak no language but Zulu, so I can't talk directly with any outsiders. But you come from a far distance to hear us, and your eyes fill for us, so to you I can maybe ‘speak female.'”

We “speak female.” I tell them about my conversation with Suzanne Vos. After the hoots of laughter die down, Zandile, a woman who looks to be in her seventies, responds.

“
Culture
,” she murmurs thoughtfully, “
is not a rock. Culture is a river
. It changes. It flows. Streams feed it. As a woman, I was never allowed to feed the culture of my people. Zulu culture is Zulu
men's
culture. Believe no one who tells you otherwise. If it is too late for me, I want my granddaughters to feed the culture, so it flows to the sea for
all
of us.”