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Monday, August 22, 2005
Cuizon: Long, numerous tales
By Erma Cuizon
Bird by Bird
OH, yes, when I run out of things to talk about, I go back to the subject of women.
I guess it comes natural, after all. The women cases anywhere in the world are varied and where there’s a struggle to try to respect the woman trapped in a community’s tradition of a low place for her in men’s society, she will prevail.
It was from my readings of old China and some countries in Asia that I first learned about how unfree the women were in those times, in those places. The girls would be sold as slaves by their own families, for money. They got no names and slept no higher in level than the boys.
In conservative Asian cultures, the married woman did not eat with the family, she waited on her husband and the children; she ate last. Nor was she introduced to visitors, it was better if she slipped quietly away with a veil in her face and in her mind. A father would count his children for the information of a new friend without including the girls.
I learned about the fate of Mexican women in Juarez, Mexico when it was mentioned in a short script I was asked to read during a Vagina Monologues presentation some time back. Juarez is a border city of Mexico where there are 340 factories mostly hiring men. It is in this city that bodies of women have been uncovered in shallow graves; they were also raped.
News of such things happening seem unreal, But the fate of the women in Juarez is in the news and international women’s organizations have urged the Juarez officials to solve the crime.
You could move along to another story, as though it’s the usual next move, but what the woman is going through will again take you by surprise.
You should read a NY Times article in the Internet about women in Africa, beaten as a matter of course -either by their boyfriends or husbands. It is a way of life in Nigeria, and in southern Africa, such as Zambia, Zimbabwe and Namibia.
In South Africa, according to a medical research, the estimate last year was male partners killing girlfriends or spouses every six hours. In Zimbabwe, murder committed out of domestic violence was “more than 6 in 10 murder cases in court”. Even the women themselves submit to the tradition -that is, getting a beating (if not being killed) for watching television (according to one husband), or burning the dinner, putting too much salt there, or refusing sex.
Beating is normal, said a father-in-law.
But from time to time, they could get a gutsy woman like Isimeto-Osibuamhe -articulate and assertive. She has left her husband after she was last beaten unconscious, lying in the street in 2001. It will be the last time.
(bird_song2002@yahoo.com)
(August 22, 2005 issue)
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