bluesinateacup

October nineteen-ninety-seven. Mother Teresa and Princess Di are barely cold in their graves. I’m sitting in a low, concrete building in the middle of a Delhi slum with a bunch of other naïve foreigners, while a local doctor talks about her work with the women who live here. She’s explaining how a project that began as an outdoor clinic has progressed, via organising campaigns for improved community facilities, to giving loans so the women can set up small businesses. The inevitable happens. A man puts his hand up. Why give money to the women, he wants to know. Wouldn’t it be more effective in the hands of men? Aren’t men the ones with vision and energy? After all, they’re not hampered by minutiae like housework and childcare. Surely they’re better equipped to run businesses.

The doctor’s gracious. You can tell she’s been asked the same thing a hundred times. No, she says. It’s been tried. The men invested the money in ambitious schemes. Minimum-effort-maximum-return, look-how-great-I-am ideas, with feet of clay. Or they frittered it away on drink and card games, then came cap-in-hand asking for more. Either way, the women and children ended up no better off than before. The women, on the other hand, think of what’s best for their children. For their neighbours. For the community as a whole. They work together. Share resources. Co-operate, instead of competing. That way everyone ends up with a slice of the pie. The squalor of the slum is transformed for everybody, instead of escaped by the fortunate few.

Eighteen years on, and it’s International Women’s Human Rights Defender Day. I’m perusing my Facebook feed over my toast and marmalade, when a man puts his hand up in a comment on a post about domestic violence, just the way that one did all those years ago. Why don’t we have International Men’s Day, he wants to know. What’s so special about women? Actually, we do. It’s on November 19th. My mind goes straight for the jugular. Men have free rein 365 days every year. The world runs on testosterone. One woman in three will be subjected to male violence at some time in her life. Can’t we have a day off from all that now and again? Even it if is purely theoretical. Apparently, we can’t.

To my core I believe every human being is of equal value. No exceptions, no provisos, no quid pro quos, to misquote Aladdin’s genie. There have been generations of activism, from Suffragettes to Everyday Sexism, yet inequality remains the daily experience of women everywhere. We’ve been fighting this corner for more years than I care to remember. What on earth are we doing wrong?

I look back at 2015. It’s been a bit of a year for fighting. Shooting. Bombing. War. Terrorism. Revenge. Retribution. Come to think of it, was there ever a year in human history that wasn’t this way? Different places, different people. Same behaviour. ‘The war to end all wars’ ended in 1918, but alien observers of life on Earth might be forgiven for having failed to notice. And who’s led the charge through all this mayhem? Men. OK, there are exceptions I’ll grant. The Iron Lady springs to mind, but what did she ever do for equal rights? Even Hasna Ait Boulahcen probably wasn’t Europe’s first female suicide bomber after all. Our overlords are used to all this conflict. It’s in their blood. Maybe, just maybe, we women aren’t wired that way. All this time we’ve been up against men on their own turf, they’ve simply changed the rules whenever we got a sniff of victory. If you don’t believe that’s how it works, try living with an abuser for half a lifetime. Not that I’m suggesting for one moment that all men are unscrupulous, warmongering narcissists. When all’s said and done, a number of my best friends are men. Nonetheless, in a world that values competition ahead of co-operation, these are the dubious qualities that place people in positions of power. How else do you account for Donald Trump?

My ex nursed an irrational grudge against knitting. Not that he ever tried it, he just objected to me doing it. It was a waste of time, he said. If I was knitting, I wasn’t giving him my full attention, he said. There must be more important things I could be doing, he said. The excuses were many and various, but none of them made full sense of the ferocity of his hatred. After a while I began to realise that the bottom line was, he felt threatened. He couldn’t understand knitting. He didn’t get why I enjoyed it. When I was knitting, he had no control over me. I wasn’t on his turf any more, and he didn’t like it. Small wonder my living room’s littered with wool and needles now. Who knew knitting could be so subversive?

I first called myself feminist somewhere around 1975. We dreamed big back then, although in truth equality in the workplace wasn’t much to ask for. Ironically there’s still a million miles to go. It’s calculated that we’ll achieve our goal about 118 years from now at the present rate of progress. I sometimes wonder if we didn’t tackle the whole thing back end on. We could have re-imagined the world and worked towards a better life for everyone. Instead, we were lured onto their turf. The place they understood. Where they were safe and secure. Instead of weaving new dreams, we borrowed their fantasies of individual fulfilment. We failed to value our collective strengths – co-operation, caring, creativity, empathy and attention to detail, to name but a few – or to see how powerful we might be if we worked with those strengths. Instead, we trampled our traditional roles in the stampede for the citadel of male privilege. We made the basic, strategic error of agreeing with our enemy. What they had was better, and we wanted it. We confused equality with sameness. We ended up with neither. To be honest, it was never going to work. What dictator willingly relinquishes one shred of power, for heaven’s sake? The unscrupulous, power-hungry elite simply lowered the drawbridge, then robbed us of everything they could use and drew up the conditions for our surrender. Forty years on, most of us are still doing the lion’s share of the domestic drudgery we dreamed of escaping. Only now we’re considered inadequate if we don’t hold down a demanding full-time job at the same time. All this for around 20% less pay than a man.

In a world controlled by unscrupulous, warmongering narcissists small things often pass under the radar. The men in Delhi’s slums dreamed big. Nothing wrong with that, but someone has to do the spadework. You can’t leap from a slum to a palace without a good deal of hard work, especially if you choose to do it single-handed, although I’ll allow some exceptions for those who win the lottery, or become the stars of Slumdog Millionaire. The women dreamed big too. They dreamed for their children. For their friends and neighbours. For a better future for everyone, not just for themselves. They did the graft. They understood the importance of those piffling details.

The first thing they did was to get the stagnant pond at the heart of the slum drained. Now it no longer attracted mosquitoes and made their children sick. I can almost see men’s hands going up. Why bother? We won’t need to worry about a stupid pond when I make my first million. Next, the women clubbed together and bought a generator. They sat late at their sewing machines, making insignificant things, while the men played their card games and dreamed of that elusive big win. The things the women made brought in money to pay for their children’s education. As time went on, they began to campaign for proper sanitation for the whole community. They fought to be connected to mains electricity. Before long, they found themselves collectively powerful beyond all their individual dreams. I don’t doubt the men felt threatened. Oh, the subversiveness of sewing! I imagine some of the women paid a high price for their insubordination. But the fact remains that those women changed the face of their slum for ever, transformed the future for their families, and demonstrated something crucial about attention to the small things, and about the power of collective action.

Right now, all of us are living with chronic war and irreversible climate change. The resulting human misery stares out from our newspapers and iPads every morning. It’s getting closer by the day. Cities being bombed to rubble. Families fleeing for their lives. Children sold as sex slaves. Men and women beheaded for believing in the wrong god, blown to kingdom come on a night out in Paris or slaughtered in a Planned Parenthood clinic. All of us risk becoming the victims of those too focussed on their individual dreams to care about such piffling details as other people’s lives. We have to come together. We need to weave new dreams. We must learn to act collectively. To value one another’s lives. To work co-operatively for the small changes that will transform our communities. If we fail now, the face of the world will change for ever. Our children and our grandchildren may well be left with no future at all.

Hope. That’s her name, in a language not her own. We’re chopping cabbage and grating carrots for coleslaw. Negotiating the unexpected hazards of the English language as we go. She stops from time to time to write down an unfamiliar word, the letters ill-formed. Childlike. She used to be a teacher, she says. In her own country. How hard it must be to start all over again, in a language that doesn’t even use the same alphabet as the one you’ve known all your life. To leave everything and flee your oppressors, only to find yourself in a hostile place where even your style of dress can put you at risk of being identified with the very people who threaten your life.

The mayonnaise stirred in, we find ourselves with time to talk. She’s tired, she says. She doesn’t sleep well. Her husband wakes often at night, and she has to get up early in the morning to pray. There’s a stirring in my conscience. It’s been a long time since I was so disciplined in any spiritual practice. Her face lights up as she talks about her faith. I’m not sure mine would these days.

The topic moves to families. She asks about my children. When I return the compliment I realise I’ve strayed over a boundary. She can’t look at me for a moment. She has four children, she says. One’s still with her. She’s lost two. The last has disappeared. She has no idea if she’s alive or dead. We hold one another wordlessly and weep. Yes, I’ve lost a child. How it feels to have no idea whether your child’s alive or dead, I can’t even begin to imagine.

Less than forty-eight hours on, I’m typing a tribute to my niece. It should be her twenty-fifth birthday. Instead, it’s a little over three years since the accident that took her life. My conversation with Hope blends raw with the pain of loss. It’s then the news of the Paris massacre begins to filter through. A hundred-and-twenty-nine lives pointlessly ended on a Friday night out in the city. Hundreds more changed for ever, by injury or loss. Hearts broken. Bodies maimed. More suffering piled upon that of the attack on Beirut the previous day. Upon that of all the attacks perpetrated in pointless wars throughout human history.

I’ve never understood the need to have everyone else see the world your way. I can see how it might be comforting to be convinced of your own rightness. But what if it turns out you’re wrong, or have only a part of the truth? What if you’ve brought misery to millions in pursuit of a mistake? Daesh, ISIS if you prefer, is only too willing to exploit this thirst for crude certainty. Fundamentalism, if you like. From medieval crusaders to the Hitler Youth, people have been seduced by its heady blend of triumphalism and self-assurance. It’s found in religions, political parties and patriotic movements the world over. It thrives on persecution. It feeds off fear and ignorance and grows like a weed in the face of opposition. The cruel and the clever exploit it for their own ends. The rest of us play directly into their hands when we retaliate in kind.

There are few phrases in the English language I dislike more than ‘collateral damage’. It sounds like a handful of tiles knocked off a roof. A couple of broken windows. An electricity pylon taken out of action for an hour or two. Inconvenient, but unavoidable. It masks a grim reality. Lives destroyed, hearts broken and loved ones lost for ever. Hope and her husband are collateral damage. Forty-three people in a market place in Beirut, their friends and their families are collateral damage. 4,287,293 refugees from the conflict in Syria are collateral damage. Real people, flesh-and-blood human beings. Just like you and me. Collateral damage is the price we pay for crude certainty. Someone else’s, more often than not.

I’m not in the habit of disagreeing with total strangers on Twitter, but this morning I was lured into a conversation by those very words. Collateral damage. A red rag, under the hashtag #PrayforSyria. There will surely be innocent lives lost (collateral damage) but you CANNOT berate France for defending herself, said the tweet. It was the mention of innocent lives, as if they were of no consequence, rather than the scarily blurred line between self-defence and retribution. I asked whether the tweeter would feel the same if said lives were those of his friends and family. He responded. Would I be tweeting #PrayforSyria if my friends and family had been in Paris? I wouldn’t be tweeting at all, I thought. But after a moment I realised that if I were, I’d be singing of empathy between the bereaved. Of art and music and poetry and all the other things that transcend man-made borders. Of Hope’s childlike trust that God will bring good from all her suffering. Of hearts brought together in the quest for peace. And of the inextinguishable beauty of the human spirit. I couldn’t squidge all that into 140 characters. Madam Empathy he called me. I think he meant it as an insult, but I wouldn’t want to be any other way.

I’m never going to forget the smell. This unspeakable blend of stale urine and rotting vegetables. It stings my throat. Clings to the air so thick you think you’ll never get away from it. The street’s uneven. Dirty. Dark as pitch. You can’t see where you’re putting your feet. The day’s debris is strewn everywhere, so you’ve no idea what that squishing on the sole of your shoe might be. The blackness deadens everything, except the smell. The chaos and colour of the market all swallowed up by the night. We speak in whispers, as if we might awaken something unholy. A scrabble and it breaks cover in front of us. Just a rat. The silence is broken though. From the shadows under the abandoned stalls, they emerge. A skinny boy. A girl, the baby on her hip almost as big as she is. Two younger boys. They crowd us. Seize the bread and the coffee, eating as if they’ve not seen food in weeks. They grow louder. The boys jostle and bluster. They flex their muscles and elbow one another aside. The girls hang back and watch the sideshow. A scrap of a girl’s tugging at my coat. She talks in a half-whisper. Rapid. Incoherent. As if our attention’s too brief for her need. She’s drunk. I hear baby. Dead. Anniversary. She can’t be old enough to have a baby, much less to lose one. Her first one died too, someone says as she melts back into the shadows. I feel sick.

Anna hoists her own baby higher on her hip. She offers to show us where she lives. In the shadow of a shuttered shop, a fortress of security grilles, we duck behind a wheelie bin. The torch lights up a brick alcove. There’s a sleeping bag rolled against the back wall, a pink blanket spread on the concrete next to it. Anna sits the baby on the blanket. The baby shuffles and pats at the sleeping bag. She’s thin and none too clean. Her nose is running. Anna uses the sleeve of her jumper to wipe the baby’s face.

I used to go to school once, but then Dad lost his job.

She tells us how she started selling cheap combs and chewing gum at the age of five or six.

Mum couldn’t afford to feed us. Dad started drinking after the steelworks closed. He got mad if I didn’t bring enough money.

The baby begins to grizzle. Anna lifts her jumper and puts it to her scrawny breast.

I worked at the traffic lights. We used to run out and knock on car windows when the lights were red. It was like a game at first. One day a man in a big, dark car opened the door and told me to get in. He took me to the car park. He gave me ten pounds afterwards. I was just turned seven.

How old are you now?

Fourteen.

The baby falls asleep. Anna lays her on the blanket and tucks the end of the sleeping bag over her. There’s a fierce chill blowing under the wheelie bin. I shiver. The baby stirs. Anna strokes her head.

Katy’s baby got ill. We went to the hospital, but they wouldn’t help. We didn’t have any money to pay for the medicine. I’m so scared of losing Aleysha.

My eyes are adjusting to the torchlight. Anna’s belongings are stacked in the corner. Some rolled clothes. A half-used pack of nappies. A few cans of food. Sitting against them is a huge, pink-plush rabbit.

The ladies at the Food Bank bought it for Aleysha. Most of the things they gave me got stolen though.

Do you see your parents?

No. Dad went mental when he found out I was pregnant.

She touches a finger to the cigarette burn on her left cheekbone.

Will you use the Night Shelter now it’s getting cold?

Nah. It’s not safe. The men do things to you in the night. They steal everything. They might even take Aleysha. People give you more money if you’ve got a baby.

Is that how you live?

Begging? Mostly. Sometimes Danny looks after Aleysha. He’s little and I can still trust him. The men pay well, but I don’t like it. And I hate leaving her. One man said he’d pay big money if I brought her with me next time.

She shivers and tucks the blanket tighter round the sleeping baby. I wonder how much longer she’ll be able to resist offers like that, once winter sets in.

This brave, new world we’ve chosen. I grew up in a kinder place myself. Once, there were well-trained teachers. Good schools that didn’t run for profit. Hospitals that cared for sick people instead of money. We had social workers who’d have looked after Anna and Aleysha. Places where they could have been housed in safety. We sold the lot for a few shiny baubles. iPhones and Big Macs. We fell for the propaganda. Newspapers told us our teachers weren’t good. Governments told us our Health Service would be safe in their hands. There were child abuse scandals, and we held social workers responsible. We lapped up the myths of welfare scroungers and benefit fraud. Fell in love with austerity. Thus we allowed our rulers to dismantle the net that kept us from falling into destitution. We identified with the bankers and the corporations. The very ones who were bleeding us dry. They farmed us like battery chickens. After all, it couldn’t happen to us, could it? Poverty only happens to bad people.

We crawl out of Anna’s alcove. Our breath hangs on the blackness of the city street. I try to remember how it was when the golden glow of street lamps wasn’t restricted to the gated communities of the super-rich. In the background, Aleysha begins to wail. The sound’s drowned by the roar of a motor approaching far too fast. We’re immobilised in the sudden headlights. There’s the screech of a handbrake turn. Catcalls. Laughter.

Come on then. You know you want it.

A hand beckons through the passenger window. A flame sparks up. Something breaks cover behind us. The flame spreads its wings and flutters to the ground. Anna’s on her knees, pounding at it with her bare hands. She ignores the howls of derision. I’m not sure she even hears. The car screams away in reverse. Anna stands up. She’s shaking. Cradling something in her blistering palm. A shred of paper, printed with the number 50. A few ashes. And a singed portrait of the Queen.

Today has been National Poetry Day in the UK.  It’s also been one of those days when I’ve wondered more than usual why the world has to be the way it is.  In honour of both these facts, I thought I’d post a poem here tonight.  The poem’s called ‘Epitaph’.  It was written for someone I lost a little over a year ago, whose life could have been so much more than it was.  But I suppose that’s part of the human condition.

Epitaph

You were a vintage Jaguar,

racing green with leather seats,

rusting in a corner of the yard,

a rosewood chest

whose drawers were stuffed

with things I didn’t want.

You were a plump pear, overripe

and rotten at the core.

You were a game of poker,

where you always marked my cards.

An old black hat

that hid your eyes,

threw shadows on your face.

You were naked fear, disguised

as everlasting love.

You were the empty bottles

in the puddle on the floor,

the stench of unwashed flesh,

stale smoke and sweat,

infused with alcohol.

I don’t make much of a habit of disliking people, but there are exceptions to any rule. One of them’s in the street outside when I leave the Community Café. I can’t pretend I haven’t seen him. He’s with Sid and Sid’s at that stage of mellow drunkenness when he wants to tell the world how wonderful I am, or to be more precise, how wonderful my bread pudding is. There’s no avoiding him. I haven’t seen Brian for a while. His once-shaven head’s sprouting hair. I’m surprised to see how much he has. I’m even more surprised that it’s snow white. He looks so much older. He’s still got that tic in his left eye though. It’s unnerving. Makes him look as if he’s winking at you all the time. There’s no sign of Lucy. I hope he hasn’t killed her this time.

A year and a hundred yards away I spent an hour with Lucy in the café over the road. It was a miserable morning. I’d found her huddled under the awning, sheltering from the downpour. She’d been too scared to go inside because she had no money. And maybe she’d been caught begging out there once too often too. Brian had thrown her out of their bedsit. Not for the first time. Over coffee, she told me he’d done time in the past for beating her up. Twice. I’m not being over-dramatic in wondering if he’s finally managed to finish her off. The last time I saw Lucy alive, she was sitting on the steps of an empty shop in the city centre. The landlord had thrown Brian out of the bedsit as well by this point. They were living in a tent in the park.

Things we do for love, huh? Cling to a man who makes your life hell, for fear of being alone. Bludgeon a woman half to death because you’re scared she’ll walk away if you give her a sniff of freedom. What kind of love is that? I made the age-old mistake of asking Lucy why she was still with him. She’d had two golden opportunities to escape. Why would she go back for more when he came out of prison? She looked up from her coffee.

I forgave him

I think it was the only rational explanation she could come up with. Domestic abuse doesn’t make sense. Least of all when you’re embroiled in it. It has its own hideous internal logic of course. An appalling, till-death-do-us-part cycle of fear. It’s a better-the-devil-you-know terror, that whispers a constant stream of poison.

He loves me really. It’s all my fault.

Why does she do that? She knows I don’t like it. She’s just trying to wind me up.

The voice of the victim. Jess Hill’s recent Guardian article makes the point. Perpetrators … will plead their case to police, even as their partner stands bloody and bruised behind them. They can genuinely believe their partner provoked them to commit the abuse, just so they could get them in trouble. Reeva Steenkamp’s killer’s courtroom histrionics were a case in point.

I’ve said it before. The older I grow, the more I realise I know nothing about human psychology. One thing I have learned though is how much we love to see ourselves as victims. It’s a problem that extends way beyond domestic disharmony. The victim mentality has flowed free all through human history, right from the moment Adam told God it was Eve’s fault he’d eaten the apple. Or, to be more accurate, took a pop at God for creating Eve in the first place.

I’d really recommend revisiting the Genesis story. Read as metaphor, the way it was intended, it’s a brilliant insight into human nature. There’s nothing we hate more than coming face-to-face with our own shortcomings. It’s so much safer to blame the mess on someone else. You’re a well-known politician who’s late for an important meeting? It’s all down to those nasty immigrants clogging up the M4. With a bit of luck, no-one will ask why you didn’t bother to Google the route beforehand. You might even pick up a few extra votes from people who’d like to think they feel your pain. After all, we love nothing more than to be victims-by-proxy. All the pleasure. None of the inconvenience.

It’s scarily easy to manipulate anyone who derives comfort from being a victim. Abuse perpetrators and politicians alike are adept at it, and at finding ways to cast themselves as victims in the same breath. Fear is the weapon of choice for any great manipulator. Am I alone in having noticed how few terrorist attacks have taken place on British soil in the last fifteen years? Yet ask a random passer-by and he’ll likely tell you we’ll all be blown to kingdom come any day now. In reality, that was far more likely thirty or forty years ago, when there were still IRA cells active on the UK mainland. I grew up in a nation terrified of communists and Irish people. Now I’m supposed to live in mortal fear of Islam instead. I’m not suggesting there’s no risk. But the victim mentality is fertile ground for the sowing of fear. Frightened victims so often turn to their abusers for protection, just as Lucy did. It’s in the interest of the dominator to keep that fear well fed.

Nigel Farage is a past master of the the fear-promoting victim role. He played to perfection during the last election campaign. A proportion of the populace fell hook, line and sinker for a retired stockbroker posing as the hard-done-by bloke down the pub. A step or two further into the cycle of control and you’re piling on the terror, like David Cameron in the wake of a Jeremy Corbyn victory. “The Labour Party is now a threat to our national security, our economic security and your family’s security” Now that’s scaremongering like a pro. And I’ve met a few in my time. DC’s been grooming us for years. He knows we’ll buy the fear and run to him for shelter. Or he thinks he does.

Fear’s the worst thing in the world. It’s a liar. It’s a thief. It makes a victim of every one of us. No prisoners. I’ve seen first hand what fear can do to the human spirit. Fear is where murder grows. It’s how wars begin. It breeds hatred and mistrust. It makes people turn their backs on those who most need help because ‘they’re not like us’. Politicians and perpetrators alike love fear. It makes them feel powerful.

The antidote to fear is love. Not that desperate, romanticised clinging that suffocated Lucy. Those butterflies in her stomach were pure fear. Nothing to do with love. Trust me. I’ve been there. It’s a shame the English language has only the one word. Love. I love your dress. I love ice cream. I love my job. I love writing. I love my children. Your dress is great, but I wouldn’t risk one hair of my head for it. My children are a different matter. I’d die for any one of them, any day of the week.

The world we live in is topsy-turvy. F**ked up. We love money. We use people. We work ourselves to death for the latest iPhone and ignore drowning toddlers on foreign beaches. On a rainy Monday when the news seems nothing but bad, I find myself wondering if we know the first thing about love. Then I remember the blossoming grassroots movement to support migrants in the ‘Jungle’ in Calais. I read that Jeremy Corbyn has chosen a vegan woman as the new shadow secretary for environment, food and rural affairs. I see pictures of friends and their children marching to welcome refugees. And I know the tide is turning. Things are going to change. I’m not the only dreamer, after all.