Imagining Ourselves

"Imagining Ourselves,” (IO) an ambitious online project featuring personal stories by hundreds of young women from more than 100 countries around the world. The women were asked to respond to one question: "What defines your generation of women?"

Phillippa Yaa de Villiers in Johannesburg describes herself as a “refugee from legitimacy.”

Amanda Tumusiime, Ugandan visual artist, makes works in oils.

Monique Wanjala, social economist from Kenya, has changed the way “my brothers treat women” by coming out to her family about her HIV+ status.

Zimbabwe’s Netsayi sings of the longing for connection on the journey to claim herself.

Iman Shaggag of Sudan recalls the forcible circumcision of her childhood friends.

Nigerian photographer, Toyin Sokefun, captures women both owning and disowning concepts of female beauty.

What do all these women have in common? Their songs, stories, films, artwork, photos, are in "Imagining Ourselves,” (IO) an ambitious online project featuring personal stories by hundreds of young women from more than 100 countries around the world. The women were asked to respond to one question: "What defines your generation of women?"

Produced and presented by the San Francisco-based International Museum of Women, IO sets out to capture the voices of women in their 20s and 30s – a generation poised to take the reins of global leadership. Launched on March 8th, International Women’s Day, in Arabic, English, French and Spanish, the exhibit logged an astonishing 65,000 “hits” in 24 hours. In its first week, over 200,000 hits were recorded. Contributors from 154 countries posted comments, responses, and their own stories. By mid-April, the numbers had risen to 3.5 million hits, from 130,000-plus unique visitors, in over 170 countries.

Clearly, IO taps a global need – for young women to share their visions and voices, and to connect with their peers internationally. African contributors range from the famous – Hafsat Abiola, Rokia Traore – to 20-year-old Odette Mukeshimana, orphaned at 9 by the Rwandan genocide, and left to raise her 6 siblings single-handed.

In a week when South Africa’s Jacob Zuma was acquitted of rape, when we heard of UN peacekeepers and aid workers in Liberia and the Congo extracting sex from 8-year-old girls in exchange for food and money, IO is a vital injection of nutrients for the artist-activist soul. Not because it offers escape from the grim realities African women face. On the contrary. In the words of Kenyan journalist, Mary Kimani, who has covered Rwanda, Burundi, and the DRC for the last 6 years:

“The poems I have sent in are not romantic poems. Imagination is not just about things we would wish to be, but a lens through which we can also see truly. There is a place for dreams, it is the place that tells us all that we can be if we were allowed wings and could soar. But all real dreams must be firmly anchored in reality.

“What defines my generation of women? In one word: resilience.”

This resilience is the hallmark of the African contributions to IO. They are juicy, vibrant, outrageous, creative, defiant, humorous, stoic, determined. They are charged with talent, fuelled by razor intelligence, honed and polished by professional skills and training, driven by vision and purpose.

The resilience shines through the groundbreaking performance of the Vagina Monologues in Lagos, a production that prompted the First Lady of Lagos State to declare: “Every woman is on that stage.” It infuses the passion of South Africa’s Monica da Silva, who pioneers community homeopathic treatments for HIV+ children. It underpins the words of 18-year-old Marie Josee Nyirabisabo, as she describes her YWCA training in literacy, reproductive health, microfinance, and her business plan to generate income for herself and her two younger siblings.

The one gripe I have with IO is the limitations of its search tool. The site carries no single comprehensive listing of every story, event, and contributor, so tracking down the African voices becomes a treasure hunt. But the hunt throws up endless riches – compelling photos and visual art, uniquely individual voices, powerful film and music. The site is beautifully designed, both clean and rich, visually striking, yet clutter-free. I’m not surprised that the average visitor stays 20-30 minutes.

“Women catch courage from women whose lives and writings they read,” wrote the renowned American writer and scholar, Carolyn Heilbrun, “and women call the bearer of that courage, ‘friend.’” The great strength of IO is that its genuinely interactive design allows this ‘catching of courage’ to take immediate form alongside each exhibit in the posting of comments and responses. So for example, Lisa Russell’s short film on obstetric fistula in Niger, elicits a story from Sudanese Iman Shaggag, about the childhood friend who, after circumcision, had no interest in any game other than mutilating her dolls just as she had been mutilated.

Scheduled to run for four months, March – June 2006, IO presents a different theme each month, with featured contributions and conversations online, and linked live events around the world.

The opening theme for March was Love. Notable contributions include:

Ugandan artist Amanda Tumusiime’s oil paintings of the Kiga Hug. The vivid textured images show the greeting embrace of the Bakiga of Southern Uganda, “The Kiga Hug is a personal invitation to cherish, love and embrace the future with a purpose.”

The story by Monique Tondoi Wanjala (Kenya), of her journey from a newly-married “enthusiastic Christian wife” who believed AIDS only affected “promiscuous people”, through the discovery that she had been infected with HIV by her husband. Wanjala takes us through her cycle of denial, despair, and the choice to move forward, educate herself and others, come out as HIV+ and become an advocate and activist. “For me, knowledge is power.”

“Unfolding Posture”, by multidisciplinary artist Heba Farid (Egypt): a series of photos of a woman’s body turning under water. The views of limbs, hair, torso, fluid and distorted, become a metaphor for all the shifts women address in IO.

Nigerian Toyin Sokefun reflects on beauty, in photos of women claiming, manufacturing, and contemplating their physical selves.

And finally, Hafsat Abiola interviews Amina Lawal, an illiterate villager from northern Nigeria, made famous in 2001 when an Islamic Shari’a court sentenced her to death by stoning for bearing a child out of wedlock. Two of Lawal’s responses stand out with heartbreaking starkness:

Q: What are your expectations for your life?
A: I leave my life to God.

Q: What were your dreams when you were growing up?
A: We had no dreams. We were not brought up to think that we could dream.

In April, the theme was Money, perhaps the most crucial determinant to women’s ability to define themselves. We meet Winnie Gitau, who against all odds, started her own health foods business in Kenya - and revolutionized the market for holistic products. Her story demonstrates the challenges faced on the continent, even by educated, professional, middle-class women, in financing business ventures.

At the other end of the spectrum, Carolyn Asapo (Uganda) describes her work with the Village Enterprise Fund, which offers start-up capital to rural women. “My wish is to have a world where challenges are transformed into opportunities.”

Culture and Conflict is the focus for the current month, May. Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, South African writer, delves into the complexity of mixed-race heritage in the apartheid years.

“ I am the colony of their forbidden love,
where Africa's son
and Scotland's grand-daughter
dna-ed, denied their offspring”

And ends with a clarion call to all her sisters:

“No ring adorns the marriage of myself to myself,
it is endless and golden.”

Netsai Mushonga (Zimbabwe) narrates her evolution as the founder of WPP (Women’s Peacemakers Program), and Director of Women's Coalition.

“I was alarmed when my distant cousin was killed by her husband and then not arrested. He was made to pay a cow to his in-laws and got a younger fresher woman. That memory from my childhood sticks out to me as I finally realized that women's situation was akin to slavery.”

Tessa Lewin’s short film, “Conscious Dreaming” is a charming, whimsical, thought provoking, musical animation piece. In just a few minutes, it captures the dilemmas of all young women negotiating the quest for self with the longing for connection and stability.

It’s hard to click out of the IO site. It feels like walking out of an electric conversation between a group of women, a conversation that bubbles with laughter and inspiration, throws up fresh argument and challenge moment to moment, leaves your brain and imagination crackling. Perhaps the most important thing IO does is make my generation of women present, in their own voices, through their own lenses, for all the world to see and hear.

Hafsat Abiola says, of her interview with Amina Lawal: “I meet so many women who are still waiting for permission to be present. Ultimately, Imagining Ourselves must be Imagining Ourselves Authorized.”

Mary Kimani sums it up:

“When I hear the term 'Imagining Ourselves', I think reality and hope mixed together. It is who we are now and who we want to be. It is love and pain, joy and anger, hope and fear all mixed together. We imagine ourselves whole, human, complete, and that has never in any language or culture, translated to perfect or ideal. It has always translated to complex, multifaceted, and annoyingly human.”

Phillippa Yaa de Villiers wraps up her poem with uncompromising solidity:

“Here we are then. Here we are.”

Imagining Ourselves Curriculum available for educators, partners and community organizations to download from the Museum Website at:

http://www.imow.org/education/curricula_exhibit_io.php

* Shailja Patel is a Kenyan poet, writer and theatre artist. Her work features in Imagining Ourselves this month at:
www.shailja.com

* Please send comments to [email protected]