Ascribing Value to Women’s Experience.

Truth Is Beauty, from Burning Man 2013

The study of the value and/or importance of women in Australian Indigenous tribal life was left late… Really it wasn’t till the 1930’s (study began not long after getting here in 1788) till women anthropologists arrived and that the gaze was even rested upon women. Why? Well, women weren’t important in European culture, why would they be important in Indigenous culture? Twas not that they were not there to be seen, just that the gaze was biased. Not until works published such as “Aboriginal Woman Sacred and Profane” by Phyllis Kaberry did we understand just how intrinsic women are to tribal life.

Ascribing value, to manufacture importance, the making of meaning… we do it all the time. For ourselves, our families histories are written with meaning and artifact, often meaningless to anyone else…   but we create it for ourselves mostly, and as legacy for our generations to arrive.

Learning to value the female perspective is what my work is all about.  Learning to value our experience, have it somewhat included in our film industry, this is what the Bechdel Test is all about! Building space, importance, validation… is that “the” work? Are we justifying our need to become important, if only to ourselves? That our life is not here to be lived in deference to “him” or “the children” that we have a valid offering to make… yet only if it is in the male form does it seem acceptable.

Seems incredulous that we still need to be fighting for abortion rights in 2014, but Victoria is still the only state to have an abortion available upon request. Is this a metric for value… where our decisions for our own bodies are valued?

There is an incredible symphony of wisdom that occurs in a woman’s body to make it possible to have a baby. Yet most of it is ignored, misunderstood, loathed or disregarded. The deepened gaze will show us that our fertile force is not just for babies either, but for creating our emotional health, our balance, our lives lived in our core truth… if we will listen, if we will find value and meaning in our female experience.

Every woman in a functional menstrual cycle is having affect in her world. Whether anyone is paying attention to it or not, there is still influence. What if our lives, the experience we are having inside ourselves was valued?

“What would the world be like if women were truly safe to be free?” Truth is Beauty, Burning Man 2013.

My Mother Line.

At my Grandmothers 90th

Been quite some time since I wrote here… I have been processing the death of my Grandmother, and what that means to our family. Other health scares for our family have been fielded too, being present to them, the only thing that anyone can do.

Life. Tis ours to live as we can, not always as we choose it may seem, but perhaps we do choose, on some level, even if we just choose to ignore.

Gran died only a week after Seven Sisters. So, in lots of ways, I’m only just returning from there too, which was such an intense time as well.

As most of my work is about the bounty and beauty of being a woman, losing the Matriarch of our family hit deeply, perhaps much deeper than I thought. She was 95, this photo from her 90th was really her last real party. T’was her legacy that has been huge to bear, the stories of her, so much larger than life, than that tiny fragile woman laying so very still.

I was the only one of my generation that spoke at her funeral… I truly needed to. I am posting my words here in honour of her, my Granny Anne…

A Eulogy.

To let go…  to listen within… to let the grieving begin.

To turn and face the pain… the fear… to recognize the powerlessness to change this… for this is death… an end… a pathway closed beyond our vision… beyond… She’s gone…  She’d been going for quite some time… but seemed to need to linger… as long as she needed… As I accept the permanency of this corner turned, this leap across the divide made… I turn… and I invite you to, too… to focus upon the life lived by an invincible woman… a no nonsense, maybe not the best with children, take no shit, powerful woman…

When I really met her, in my 20’s, when there was no need for her to be responsible for me, I met the woman… the free spirit that flew off to Hawaii… that lived and loved Africa deeply… the writer, like me… only a little like her. My grief, as different from yours, as all of us will be… we all have such different views, perspectives, experiences of her… we would all have brought forward different parts of her, for her to experience…

I give thanks to the wonderful woman that made my wedding cake… That shared her wedding day in the beautiful Dandenong’s… I am grateful for the woman that would sun-bake nude no matter the noise of terrified teenagers… I give thanks for the stories I tell about her, tell myself and others of how courageous and power-filled she was… I give thanks for the truth of how fragile her strength was and how dependent she became and how that never seemed to diminish her absolute authority of her life… She know what she wanted and would have it thank you… for this I am grateful. That from her, this woman, loved me… as she loved all her family, fiercely… An era has closed… as the next generations flow… Her daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters, present, we all share that power now… as she has passed the baton… not that her son’s and grandson’s and great-grandsons are not cherished, nourished and loved but perhaps what they carry is a respect for women instilled by her… and to be fair, I never really knew her in partnership… But the legacy of a strong woman, is stronger daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters…. As we lay to rest our Matriarch, I am grateful to have known, loved and been loved by my Granny… May you rest in Peace Granny.

 

As I am learning to call myself a writer, as she described herself, I realize that there may not be harder words to write than a Eulogy for someone we love… Two weeks ago she arrived in my dreamscape, as I remember her from my 20’s, full of freedom and artistry. In the dream she was helping me achieve something… I am beginning to feel that her presence on the other side of my life is already bringing such power. May your Mother Line be clear and strong.  If not, then come and sit with me, for this is part of my life’s work.

Value of the Banshee.

Banshee/Cannibal From “Doomsday” the film…

There’s this joke… about men and women and relationships…. it goes like this.   Ask Ten women why their last relationship finished and they will give you a detailed map on what went wrong, where, when and what they will never do again… Ask the Ten men why their last relationship finished… they will say.., “Bitch went crazy!”

Being tarred with the Banshee brush does my head in, does yours in too… I’ve seen way too many women reduced to “crazy” when what they really are is furious, so full of fury they explode! That stuff is uber real, needing the respect we offer nitroglycerin. Normally though, what a woman will do as she feels the temperature rising is one of a few options left to her… Suck it up, shove it down, drown it out, cool it off… some of those involve eating, sleeping, swallowing, or any other form of self punishment we have conjured this week. Or sometimes we have a range of tools we use to access that rage and USE it to create the change it was sent to create.

I LOVE my Banshee… I LOVE my Banshee in my Mother and my Daughter… I LOVE it in my Sisters!  I LOVE it when the force of personal truth that will not be silenced today, will speak her total mind right now. Tis far greater than the other options. I would love to see our world where the Banshee is a valued part of every woman, where we respected her presence in a moment as necessary, as she would not be there if she was not needed. She is truly only there when she’s needed.

There is the learned emotional vomiting that many women do, the shrieking that fills your ears with dread when you hear it, but that is not what I am speaking to here. That is bad behavior, when someone has maintained the habit of making their problems everybody else’s problem… No, that is truly different to the Real Banshee. Learning the difference between the two can make a life lived in terror of our anger, or a life that has learned to harness the fire, not burn every one, mostly the self, alive… The difference between the two is the place they arrive from. The shrieking noise a woman makes to force people to do her bidding if only it will shut her up.. that is easy to spot as generally it’s in her pitch… the higher the noise, the greater the fear, the stronger the shrieking… The fury you can see burning in a woman’s eyes, that would be her Banshee, also know as her Kali… about to chop off your head, that pitch is totally different. There is a force moving through her that really ought to be heard, and if her world is her own, she will truly bring it… ALL THE WAY through… not the truncated depths that most women share with the world as that is all they seem allowed to share.

Time is changing beautiful woman. Our earth needs our Banshee! Learn the difference, and employ the fury in such a way as to burn through the dross that has encased your life… that is what she if for! To Burn away ALL that would contain you and Not have your world as your own.

Bosom Buddies with your Banshee… My latest work… a tool box for profound change…. Wont you join me?