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As I sit down to write this column the 40th anniversary of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp is fast approaching, with hundreds of women planning to retrace the 130 mile march from Cardiff to Greenham in order to honour the legacy of those who founded the camp, and who spearheaded one of the biggest \u2013 certainly one of the most culturally conspicuous \u2013 women-led protests in the UK since the campaign for women’s suffrage. A number of discussions surrounding the march have framed it as an act of solidarity with both our radical activist foresisters, and with women living under conditions of armed occupation, conflict, and the threat of war globally. The anniversary provides an opportunity to reaffirm the aims and objectives of the original camp, the ultimate goal of which was not only the removal of missile silos from Greenham Common, but a radical dismantling of the military-industrial complex worldwide.<\/p>\n
While this last ambition remains unrealised, the legacy of the Greenham Peace Camp has continued to serve as an inspiration to future generations of activists and artists, offering a powerful model for non-violent direct action, and for collective creativity. From the earliest months of the camp, the women at Greenham Common produced their own newsletters, booklets and broadsides, incorporating and merging an array of forms from analysis to anecdote; to sketches, songs, drawings and poetry. These publications served a variety of purposes both inward and outward-facing: to circulate information, to generate discussion into demands and tactics, and to persuade and inspire new participants. These various projects also provided the women with an opportunity for creative expression often lacking within other contexts. They situated and prioritised the women as a cohort of thinkers, artists and makers, fostering a sense of shared identity.<\/p>\n
Poetry was integral to this creative outpouring. One of the most iconic and arresting images to emerge from the camp is ‘Dancing on Silos’ by Rassia Page. The photograph features a ring of women in silhouette, holding hands and swaying on top of the missile silos while two police cars idle ominously in the foreground, and a cordon of barbed wire stretches off beyond the edges of the image. Page’s poster appeared in City Limits magazine with the poem ‘Life Against Death’ by Dinah Livingstone superimposed onto the picture. Livingstone’s poem juxtaposes the prosaic details of camp life: ‘soggy sandwiches, brandy, ox tail soup’ against the enormity of the threat of nuclear war: ‘seeds of destruction whose sorrowful journey\/\u00a0 is speedy doomsday’. Faced with the might of the military industrial complex, the women in the poem appear immensely vulnerable, and yet it is the ‘uneasy personnel’ in ‘sinister looking vehicles’ who are ‘protecting themselves from the women’. Livingstone’s poem shares an intimate and detailed experience of camp life; it also provides an eloquent rationale for the actions of the protestors. It contextualises Page’s photograph, offering a visceral and immediate insight into what it was like to be at the camp and exactly what was at stake for the women in protesting. It communicates both the shared vulnerability and the collective political power of the protestors in a way that straightforward reportage may have struggled to articulate.<\/p>\n
Women and war<\/strong><\/p>\n Throughout history women and girls have suffered \u2013 and continue to suffer \u2013 disproportionately at the hands of the military-industrial complex. The experience of women during and after war is particularly grim: existing inequalities are magnified as social institutions break down, rendering them ever more vulnerable to numerous forms of exploitation. Among the most traumatic of these is sexual exploitation and gender-based violence, which have profound and long-lasting psychosocial consequences. Other gendered effects include the recruitment of girls as child soldiers, girls and women becoming internally and externally displaced refugees, and the collapse of public health services rendering reproductive health care inadequate or unavailable.<\/p>\n Because of the central role of women in maintaining the fabric of family and community through times of war, they become tactical targets of some significance during armed conflict. Owing to their unequal status within the majority of patriarchal societies women and girls of all ages share a uniquely sharp experience of displacement, loss of home and property, the involuntary disappearance of relatives, poverty, rape, sexual and other forms of slavery, and sexual abuse. All of this while their responsibilities toward family and community remain formidable. Armed occupation and economic sanctions hit women hardest, while their gendered suffering is symbolically deployed as the justification for both these strategies.<\/p>\n With the Taliban now firmly in control of Afghanistan, the immediate future for women and girls in the country appears monumentally bleak. This bleakness is not unfamiliar. Following the overthrow of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan in 1992 by the western-backed Mujahideen, the situation for women and girls in the region deteriorated rapidly: treated as second-class citizens by successive regimes, women continue to be the foremost victims of western aggression.<\/p>\n It has always been with us, across the globe and throughout recorded history, in Western Europe past and present, as well as the Middle East. Talk on social media turns on the need for feminist solidarity with the women of Afghanistan, but what does that look like? And how do we meaningfully and practically manifest this solidarity through cultural activity? In broad-left discourse, the notion of solidarity is everywhere invoked, but what do we actually mean<\/em> when we use that word? And how might we achieve a measure of it through poetry?<\/p>\n These are big questions, without one single easy answer, although every so often I am fortunate enough to glimpse a possible route through the fog. For example, I have recently completed a project, working with Hari Rajaledchumy, for Poetry Translation Centre, to translate into English a collection of poems by the Sri Lankan Tamil poet Anar. Anar was born in 1974 in East Sri Lanka, and her early childhood was marked by intense outbreaks of ethnic violence that would later push the country into civil war. During this period education was not considered a priority for women and girls in general, and for the daughters of orthodox Muslim households in particular. Anar\u2019s own education was interrupted when her home town of Sainthamaruthu was caught up in the chaos of the Indian Peace Keeping Force\u2019s withdrawal from the region.<\/p>\n Her family\u2019s attempts to obtain the necessary paperwork for Anar to sit her O Level exams were consistently thwarted by military-imposed curfews and civic disarray. As a result, her schooling stopped, and she became confined to her home from the age of sixteen. Throughout these difficult and precarious years Anar\u2019s one outlet was the radio, on which she would listen to poetry being recited. It stirred something in her, and eventually she began to work in secret on poems of her own, submitting her work under pseudonyms, gathering inspiration and encouragement from an emerging cohort of writers.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t intend to share Anar\u2019s biography in its entirety here, but it does feel important to talk a little about her life and work in the context of \u2018sisterhood\u2019, because it offers proof, if any were needed, that the oppression of women and girls is a global continuum. How many girls like Anar are now living in Afghanistan? Or in Palestine? How many girls throughout the world and throughout history? It is enough to make your head spin.<\/p>\n I also wanted to share something of Anar\u2019s story because it speaks very specifically to poetry: what it can do for us, and what we can do \u2013 through poetry \u2013 for each other. It speaks to the idea of solidarity, and how this might be forged and encountered on the space of the page and within the breath of the poem. To talk about this, I’m going to invoke one of feminism’s most radical and compassionate foresisters, the black lesbian activist and poet, Audre Lorde.<\/p>\n A communion of compassionate subjects<\/strong><\/p>\n Lorde insisted throughout her life as a writer, thinker, and political activist upon sustained attention to the granular particularities of women\u2019s experience, and upon the recognition of \u201cthe fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic\u201d. It is a demand for otherness and diversity of voice within activist cohorts and within art and poetry as a precursor to radical change, and it stands in defiance to the homogenising inclination of mainstream white feminism, which used a white, western subject-position unreflectively as a model for all human experience.<\/p>\n Crucially, this does not mean that Lorde foresaw feminism\u2019s collapse into a morass of oppositional interests, but rather that she dared to envisage feminism as a network of varied experiences and positions, coalescing around the common goal of liberation for all <\/em>women. Lorde\u2019s writing about her own struggle with illness is telling in this regard:<\/p>\n The women who sustained me […] were Black and white, old and young, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual, and we all shared a war against the tyrannies of silence. They gave me strength and concern without which I could not have survived intact. Within those weeks of acute fear came the knowledge \u2013 within the war we are all waging with the forces of death, subtle and otherwise, conscious or not \u2013 I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.<\/em><\/p>\n Lorde\u2019s suffering becomes an occasion for discovery, a kind of self-revelation within a community of female fellow sufferers, a communion of compassionate subjects. To speak and act out of our experience of suffering, acknowledging that this is something we share \u2013 this is the measure of true solidarity.<\/p>\n From casualty to warrior<\/strong><\/p>\n Which is all well and good, but how do we transform this feeling from a vague rhetorical gesture into meaningful practical action? How do we move \u2013 in Lorde\u2019s words \u2013 from casualty to warrior? This is a timely and pressing question. Speaking to a Palestinian friend over social media we got into a conversation about how \u201csolidarity\u201d had become the left-wing equivalent to the Christian right\u2019s familiar \u201cthoughts and prayers\u201d, ie aimed in the general direction of any person or group experiencing hardship, as a substitute for actually having to do<\/em> anything. Solidarity as a noun, my friend said, is no use to anyone. For solidarity to be meaningful, to be worthy of the name, it has to be a verb.<\/p>\n And for poetry this raises a difficulty. In recent history, at least in the west, poets have not had a great deal of political or economic power. We cannot impose sanctions or meaningfully withdraw our labour. Our work is largely solitary, our wider \u201ccommunities\u201d disparate and scattered. If we went on strike nobody would notice or care. Our ability to affectively mobilise and protest is limited. Our field of cultural activity is so specialised, subjective and personal, that we often fail to form recognisable labour cohorts. This is not to say that poets are not politically engaged and active as individuals, but that collectively the pressure we are able to exert is minimal.<\/p>\n Or is it? I find myself returning to the work of Anar, to our translation project, and to the story of Anar\u2019s girlhood, listening to poetry on the radio, the volume turned down low to avoid detection. Poetry was not inconsequential for Anar, and the act of writing poetry was not for her an absorbing hobby, but a life-sustaining necessity that grew out of the particular pressured context of a country in tumult. There might have been grave consequences for her daring to write, but she wrote nonetheless, and in turn inspired others. None of this would not have been possible had she not apprehended first, through the airwaves, that community of compassionate subjects to which she could aspire and belong. I also find myself thinking that translation at its best can enact a form of reflective solidarity: furthering the reach of voices and experiences that might otherwise have been excluded from national poetic canons. This matters because it allows us to understand ourselves as women as part of a global struggle. It allows us to see each other and ourselves in all our difference and collective strength.<\/p>\n