Roza Amara
What brought us together
From all over the world women are repeating the slogan first cried out by various peoples of Iran after the killing of Jina Emini: WOMEN LIFE FREEDOM. In history it is the first time that in resistance and in widely spread protests the word WOMEN is being shouted out loud. This needs an analysis in which we need to differentiate some aspects of this delicate time.
This delicate time is a time where the capitalist system is falling to pieces all over the world. A pyramid system based on patriarchal dominance that has changed its colours for 5000 years without changing its mentality. As the first victims of male dominance, women have been in the shadows for decades. People have risen and fallen, resisted and fought, but only been able to soften these systems to which we are physically and mentally subordinated. In a time where individual freedom is everything, and in the name of liberalism, community and human interaction are under constant attack systematically by means such as media, technology, education system, and even by biological warfare such as the corona virus. The uprising of women has a meaning that many of us cannot comprehend because we’ve lost some of our naturalised core qualities that lay in our femininity. The everyday codes that have been embedded in our bodies and minds are the codes that enable slavery in every form. Ancient slavery was very direct and undisguised . However, we must realise that today’s slavery is much more complex and more difficult to name, let alone to rise up against it.
Why women life freedom?
What do women have to do with these initial words under a system that has in modern times made women free to do anything? So free that her body is not only hers. One of the delicates of our time, is that womens’ bodies are for everyone to own. It may sound absurd, but that is practically how it is. Just look at Instagram and Facebook for it! In our time there’s no need to buy Playboy magazines because the internet fills the exactly same role. But no, that`s real freedom to do whatever we want with our bodies, right?
Another delicate of our time, women are so free, they don’t need to spend time reading books or expand their intellectual power, when there is so much shopping to do. Brain does not make a boyfriend, nice body and outfits do! This behaviour has made us mass consumers that feed the mass industries.
This delicate time, as much as it teaches us to be free, makes us be anything but ourselves and we, women, learn this the hard way. We love to be loved, but don’t know how to love. We yearn to be looked at, and thus like means for that specific cause. We speak, but never what our heart says, even when our heart is questioning itself, because we feel like its tricking us even though it’s our own. So when will we stop being scared of ourselves?
Therefore, modern slavery is not with chains, but made up of chains in the brain that construct our choices and behavior. Killings in some parts of the world, rapes and assaults, suicides, stress and mental and physical illnesses in others are the consequence of the same mentality. But modern slavery in all of its colours is an abuse that knows no ethnicity or specific area. It is an abuse that every woman can relate to only if we open our eyes not to watch but to see beyond the norms, forms, rules, laws and mediabombardment. This abuse is a history of despair where women have always been told who, what and how to be, a.k.a not ourselves.
Change happens at the time when we find ourselves in one another, and that is a reason that makes revolution. That is what is happening. From all corners of the world, women are searching for what life means and what real freedom is. There is no way that freedom can be reached by obedience, by force, or by feeling heavy. But this make up is somehow feeling heavy. So is this hair. So is this daily life that makes us mothers, sisters or whatever. We want to be girls and women. Maybe even revolutionaries. This is a history that is coming out of the ashes. A history that tells us that women are essential to communal life. She is the source of community in which empathy and care and equality are essential, and these are the things that make up humanity. Well, not a surprise, because she brings life to human beings, right?
Therefore, this is only the continuation of the beginning. The beginning is the free woman, and she was always there and always will be. Through all the pain and horrors of time, stronger than ever to resist against male dominance, hierarchy, globalization and the current world capitalist system, knowing that it is against nature, life and freedom. In this delicate time, women need more than ever to become self aware and spread awareness, spread femininity. By being ourselves we can save towns, cities, countries and the globe. This is not an utopia. As Abdullah Öcalan puts it: “The 21 century will be the century of women’s revolution”.