| by Amber Poole |
“Mother said (motherhood) takes strength. A different kind of strength than being a teacher or a nun. But you have someone helping you, and you are in your own pueblo and with your own relatives all the time, and that helps you, too. Every woman has her own strength to do what she needs to do. You have to know what kind of strength you have and how to use it.” Maria Martinez, American Artist
Gaza.
Sudan.
Yemen.
Ukraine.
Nigeria.
Syria.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo.
To name but a few, suffer from chronic stress due to hunger. In some cases famine, a specific term defined by the UN as occurring when malnutrition rates exceed 30 percent; more than two people per 10,000 dying each day due to severe lack of food access.
These are not the first man-made famines. The Holodomor was one of the first of its kind to ring in the 20th Century. A Stalin specialty. Holod means hunger in Ukrainian. Mor means plague. Murder by starvation is how it translates.
According to a recent article in the Kyiv Independent, a 2015 study conducted by demographers from the Ukrainian Institute of Demographic and Social Studies and the University of North Carolina-Chappel Hill, around 3.9 million Ukrainians were killed during the Holodomor. Ukrainians were dying at a staggering rate of 28,000 per day.
(Pause)
28,000 per day. Dead from starvation.
Who deserves to starve and who deserves to eat?
Who deserves shelter and who does not?
Stop there.
(Pause)
Yesterday I saw a beautiful, clear-skinned woman, well-dressed with thick dark hair. She looked comfortable. She was definitely a woman of means. She was asked about those who were starving.
“Should they starve?” asked the old woman dressed in black.
The beautiful, clear-skinned woman was offended by this question. She swished her hair to the left and then again to the right like the tail of a horse swatting flies. She raised her voice to the old woman and shrieked:
“Let them all die. Let them starve.”
(Pause)
Mothers and their children.
Some women say...
Let them starve.
Hubris.
Stealth Luxe.
Let them starve...they say. We can’t be bothered.
There was a time when I thought all women could gather together in unity, circling around the others as female elephants do in the wild; fierce protectors of their sisters. I don’t feel that way anymore.
Number One. Tell those you are occupying that they are inferior to the greater collective. Deny their existence. Distort history.
Number Two. Wipe out their language, their recipes, their high holidays, their religion and their way of dress.
Number Three. Kill the artists, writers, poets and intellectuals.
Number Four. Tell the world the people you’re starving are uneducated, backward, and uncivilized.
They are dangerous.
They are expendable.
“Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh....All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realization, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression ever again, and it will sure yield the same fruit according to its kind.” Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Gaza.
Sudan.
Yemen.
Ukraine.
Nigeria.
Syria.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo.
(Pause)
For the women who can, then do. Circle your sisters
There was a time when I thought all women could gather together in unity, circling around the others as female elephants do in the wild; fierce protectors of their sisters. I don’t feel that way anymore.
We have become isolated. Aloof. To starve. To starve to death is not even a passing thought in the mind of some women, bathing on a fine spring morning. And if it does happen to land there, in the mind, on that fine spring morning, it’s a lost thought...at best, the belief that one can do nothing, that war, poverty, genocide, rape, murder, hunger will always be with us...why then disturb one’s peace on such a fine spring morning?
Estragon: What do we do now?
Vladimir: I don’t know.
Estragon: Let’s go.
Vladimir: We can’t.
Estragon: Why not?
Vladimir: We’re waiting for Godot. (Samuel Beckett)
We’re waiting for someone else to fix it.