The OCCUPY Movement is a positive virus running rampant…fingers crossed that it can dislodge outworn modes, let alone Patriarchal Capitalism…

As a dawning realization emerges across the world that POSSIBLY there are OTHER modes of human behavior than  crime-petitive capitalism, as enunciated for years by linguist and philosopher Genevieve Vaughan and Her Good Work with The Gift Economy, and more lately by relative newcomers (younger that is…), Charles Eisenstein and his Sacred Economics, we dare to have a glimmer of HOPE.

Meantime, one expects the ENEMY to start employing yet more dastardly lawyers, (m)ad men and corrupt politicians to attempt to stave off what could UNDO their negative viral attempts, ages old and whatever the style and area of the world, at CONTROLLING planetary wealth, which of course includes the FOOD we need to live. The recent downing of tools in the Good Old USA of SOPA and PIPA as per Internet Control Attempts seems like a VICTORY on ‘OUR SIDE’…as well as the cancellation of the Sand Tars Pipeline by President Obama (on a technicality we are warned by our Good Websites) but one imagines that The Other Side will be working hard to offset any losses and probably were prepared for this (long ago).

I suppose we must become Just Better At It All.

I don’t worry or wonder about who reads my Wee BLOG but Whomsoever You Might Be, I suppose that you are On Our Side, The Angels, I guess…I am so glad you are out there, working with me and The Others, to TRY to MAKE OUR WORLD A BETTER PLACE TO OCCUPY.

December 17, 2010

Mohamed Bouazizi triggers The Jasmine Revolution, The Arab Spring— but long before, in many places, others had planted seeds

A year on

Protestors occupy Haymarket Square in nearby Norwich,

Occupy London stands by Wikileaks whistleblower Bradley Manning.

Tomorrow

They go to court with The Bank of Ideas to defend the Right to Protest.

Prosaic footsteps to found real democracy

On the doorstep of the Mother of Parliaments

This morning

The Czech poet-politician Vaclav Havel died.

The Velvet Revolution softens his fall.

January 1919

William Butler Yeats writes his Second Coming:

‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre’

What a man of his times he was

With the War to End All Wars at his back

‘Surely some revelation is at hand’

Knowing more was yet to come

Meantime

Occupy Wall Street will not go away

As Americans of all ages get to grip with

Lawrence Lessig’s Lost Republic

Now

Is the time, our time, we are

The Ones We Waited For

We were always here

Steve Jobs just made it easier

For us to call upon one another

We bit the apple at our first beginnings

Now we eat it all as wisdom seeps

Out and seeds sprout new trees of Knowledge

We are all part of Life

We can do it

There is a hippy genius in each one of us

All the other animals are just waiting for us to catch up

As soon as possible

Before it’s too late for us anyway

Time is just a concept

We invented to make sense

Of the passage of infinity

18 December 2011

Blackbirds cluster on crabapples

The black cat watches with yellow eyes

The garden sighs softly as winter drops

In nearby Norwich the protestors occupy

Haymarket Square; we drop in for a cuppa,

Mandy and me. They are Us, Reborn,

Ready for action. An old pal passes away.

I miss my Cousin Gary too. The older

We get, the more we lose. Mortality

Creeps into everything.

We must sing

Freedom, Justice, Beauty

As the days die, as we weep

And turn in our sleep

Deep

Meaning jumps out at me

Everywhere I meet myself

I shall place a mirror in my garden

To remind me of Alice

Of a wonderland that always

Never was will be evermore

One by one the birds eat the berry apples

They saved them for just now

They are shy friends but wise

Come rejoice with me about Life

As the earth turns and the sun does rise

After all. Remember

To remember. Pass on what you can

That is of value. Tell me true

And I will love you, treasure you well

By Leona Graham-Elen, for you all

Two years ago yesterday

You leapt into other dimensions

True to your philosophical bent

You chose when and how

Just as the angel image of you returned

Your white haloed hair you so kindly passed to me

Striking full force into my awakened dream state

We greeted one another as of old

Full of the joy of life

You live in my heart’s mind

What a woman you remain, not a lady you’d always say

A woman in full power

How we miss you

Thank go(o)d(d)ess for dreams and memory

I remember you, honour you, owe my life to you

Blessed Be.

Once again but always different

As the fountains of Damascus flow red, as The People of Homs say

No

Once And For All

To dictatorship, corrupt elites, military might of the few, evil incarnate

Yes

To self-determination, hope for better rule, sadly but necessarily the use of guns, goodness pending

The Assad Regime and those who benefit from The Misery of the Many for the Riches of the Few

Must no longer sleep easily in their palaces as their dungeons stink to High Heaven

As every day more military defect, unwilling to abide killing their own

Lebanon teeters on the edge, the message from Yemen unlinked from Its People, merely a token from a drooping dictator

The Arab League finding its feet, drawing a line in the desert

As the old centre cannot hold, a new centre will emerge

Prosaic, this attempt to describe what is happening

The People sing and dance in deed as they die on the streets, as they mourn their dead

Once again, the fear of fear is dissipating across Their Land

We can only watch

As Syria bleeds

The day after the day before, the very day

That dictator died

The world watched, we hope the other dictators wake up and walk away

From such a destiny, a miracle in deed, spare their families and friends a worse fate

We wonder about revolutions and worry about The Egyptian One

Even as Tunisia goes to the polls

We The People, the 99% We May Call Ourselves as they tent out on Wall Street & Beyond,

We have hope. Dictators come in many forms, disguised as lambs

Whilst good wolves are persecuted by nasty gun toting two-leggeds.

We in the West still suffer fools too gladly, we have not reached No Fear

Yet. Give us time, we are working on it.

Thank you, Freedom Fighters for Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, Palestine & Beyond.

We’re very pleased to let you know that Leona’s new book of poetry, Cloudbank Across the Fens, is now available. It contains poems from the perspective of life in a village on the edge of the Fen Country, in the East of England. We do hope you’ll enjoy it.

It’s available from Amazon or you can get it through your local bookshop.

You can read more about the book here.

In the last several years I’ve been caught up in knowing ‘who we really are’–if it is indeed possible, that is, ‘deep ancestry’, beyond ancestry.com worldviews to genographic.org ones…

Both my husband and I have done the mouth-swab DNA adventure via National Geographic-sponsored (or linked…) Genographic Project (Dr Spencer & Co). He’s descended from the matriarchy-destroying Kurgans (supposedly) and myself, from the earliest types of agricultural settlers (in ancient Persia or present day Iran or thereabouts)–that is, our mutant genes from these folks, as we all descend ‘out of Africa’ from what is now East Kenya. I’ve now convinced my younger brother to do one so we can access my father’s line…

It’s quite an adventure, our Anthropocene Journey though the ages. Almost addictive. One of the last books I read on the subject is Stephen Oppenheimer’s Out of Eden: The peopling of the world (Constable 2003), which followed my reading of his fascinating earlier work: Eden in the East; The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia. It can become quite complex, the science of DNA etcetera so one has to bear with it…sometimes simply sift through the charts (glancing at them rather than get lost in them). But when I first started this adventure it was the works by Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes that really caught my interest, notably The Seven Daughters of Eve, Adam’s Curse and The  Blood of the Isles. He seems to have helped ‘popularize’ the study of our human ancestry by making the information ‘more available.’ Oppenheimer does this too, in his own style, and what I enjoy about his work is the inclusion of some of his own personal self, process and family.

This is all to say that I recommend this adventure, O Unknown Human, or more likely Known, as really only personal friends appear to read my blogs, which is just A-OK with me (for now). In doing so YOU add to the story–’hu[m]story’ perchance as vs ‘herstory’ , ‘history’ or even the unacceptable despite early feminist linguistic advice, ‘perstory.’ Just go to National Geographic’s website, picking up on the Genographic Project.

Happy Trails!

Here we are again, O World, watching A People suffer in the name of freedom against tyranny and despotic rule of an impoverished majority by an elite minority. And this time, even trickier to deal with, as the contortions at the United Nations HQ daily reveal.

Once again we see the gruesome footage of mutilated youth and fleeing refugees across borders, this time Turkey’s with Syria. Meantime, further over in North Africa the incessant pounding of Gaddhafi holdouts, weapons caches and command posts by NATO planes eats away at the crumbling regime, with daily reports by the revolutionary Libyan freedom fighters that they will soon converge on and liberate Tripoli. An all too awful fascination of what will actually happen when that happens–lurks at the edges of our foresight.

What to do, how to do–for the Syrian anti-regime democracy and freedom aspiring millions, as HELP US is written all across the country despite the ban on media coverage–as The People find a way, at great personal danger, to get us images, so we can choose to find a way. Russia and China play the reluctant participants, for various reasons particular to them both. They don’t like the extent of where NATO has taken the UN mandate (“we really didn’t mean you to go so far” ) but are content actually to get rid of Gaddhafi and his thugs sooner than later– and China especially would be openly even more hypocritical to endorse putting down internal uprisings with Tibetans and other millions of aspiring democrats (think Tienanmen Square) waiting their turn…

So Syria suffers and some of us, a lot of us I suspect, suffer with them, but we feel helpless even as France and the UK (supported by the US and some others) take the lead again, however ‘weak’ the condemnation (no sanctions or backup)–but at least it’s a symbolic beginning we might whisper as we struggle to sleep whilst Syria erupts into nightmare proportions.

Recalling ‘the energy-field’ just before the UN and then NATO went after the Gaddhafi regime, it was a build-up of world opinion–following the exhilarating and positive events– still ‘revolutions in progress’–of Tunisia and Egypt. These North African countries, Tunisia and Egypt especially as they have been popular tourist destinations from ancient to modern times by Europeans and latterly, ‘the world tourist market’. They are almost really ‘part of the European ethos’; we share a lot of history, notably Roman. We might like to think that wasn’t so of Syria–but not true, remembering that most popular Christian expression ‘the Road to Damascus’–Syria was indeed very much a part of ‘our joint European-Middle-East’ history–it’s just that it never made it to Our Top Tourist Destinations (for various reasons) and it’s been rather ‘hidden from view’ culturally compared to Tunisia and Egypt. But for that matter, Libya was never a popular contemporary tourist destination either. ‘The Colonel’  made himself and his regime so unpopular  (despite more recent attempts to normalize) that ‘we all got damn well fed up’. With Syria’s Assad replacing his cruel tyrant of a  father (rather than the eldest son who was meant to), ‘there was hope’ for change and some of that still slightly clings on. But it is evaporating quickly with Turkey’s horror of what they are receiving across their borders, tales of monstrous acts. Maybe it will be Turkey, on the eve of an election itself, who will help move the impasse.

But on a different level, it is Us, Those of Us Who Are Watching and Yearning with freedom-aspiring Syrians, it is Us Who May Turn the Tide Again, as We Did with Egypt and Libya–Tunisia happened so quickly, it made it ‘easier’ with Ben Ali and his hated wife (and family) fleeing ahead of the storm he’d brought upon themselves.

Watching, sending ‘the energy of solidarity’, however mixed and conflicted by not knowing much of this ancient culture, but knowing the basics that People need, that is our beginning. With the apparent collapse of hope in Bahrain due to Saudi Arabia’s thuggish support for the regime there and the mixed intricacies of the Yemeni Situation, We The Watchers in The Stream (vide Aljazeera’s coverage by that name), we can eventually help tilt the axis of good against evil (so to speak) –will it be soon enough to prevent mass slaughter in Syria (as was done in a relatively media-free hidden way by Assad’s father)? Maybe, maybe not. We managed to prevent it on the Road to Benghazi, let’s hold the hopeful vision for a New Awakening (in some form, maybe a Miracle as it was for Paul) on the Road to Damascus.

And then again in the end, it is The Peoples of these countries who “will do it for themselves”–we can only support their choices, their aspirations for a better life.

Ever since my journey to Egypt–nay, before, in preparation too–I have been reading books about Egypt, books about people who’ve visited Egypt, books about people who love Egypt, books about fictional lives in Egypt and of course, books by Egyptians.

Now, I’ve just (finally) finished The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif, whom, synchronistically I believe I happened to see interviewed on Aljazeera during the recent Egyptian revolution. She was talking about having been down in Tahrir Square and some young relatives were down there–reading her work, I can see why she’d be part of it and encourage young relatives.

The Map of Love was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize, a worthy achievement  for an Egyptian writing in English– Wiki  refers to her as an Anglo-Egyptian who studied for a PhD in linguistics at University of Lancaster. Translated into at least 21 languages it’s sold over a million copies. It’s sent me to search for her debut novel, In the Eye of the Sun (1993). I won’t describe its plot or style — it’s a great read on all fronts and hope you get to read it. It informed me about aspects of Egypt I had no idea, reminded me about some I had forgotten and especially useful, gave me an ‘insider’s view’ about the complex early process of the Palestinian Problem as seen by the Palestine-linked characters.

One might be tempted to say it’s almost like returning from the sublime to the…less sublime…when I say that before The Map of Love I finally managed to read  Margaret George’s very thick popular novel: The Memoirs of Cleopatra (1997). However, in fact, Memoirs is a bloody good read too and Margaret George is an aficionado/lover of Egypt..as is pointed out on the first page, she “first visited Egypt when she was nine years old and wrote her earliest version of Cleopatra’s story as a school project in 1956.”

Of course, before these two fictional works about Egypt, I had read Amelia Edwards’ [1831-1892] travelogue A Thousand Miles Up the Nile and (on the Nile itself) Florence Nightingale’s [1820-1910] Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile, as well as of course Lucie Duff Gordon’s [1821-1869) particularly well-know Letters from Egypt. I discussed these earlier in the year on this site: "Isis Unveiled: Letters from Egypt, The Freedom March & the Shared Pain of Revolution (Feb 2011)" as well as Margot Badran's study of the life of Egyptian feminist Huda Sharaawi: "Remembering the 1919 Revolution" (February 2011)

In between I read (having fortuitously found them as I exited the British Museum's "Book of the Dead Exhibition") the renowned Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz' three early historical novels  Khufu's Wisdom, Rhadopis of Nubia and Thebes At War. I look forward to reading a selection (if not all) of his more contemporary-set novels. Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988 and suffered seriously (including an assassination attempt) for his willingness to tell it as he saw it. More on Mahfouz when I have tred his world more thoroughly.

There are others and more to come, being on an Egyptian role as it is, and I hope to continue over into other North African and Gulf and Middle Eastern fictional and non fictional worlds--with a special focus on women writers. I have also picked  up a copy of: The Goddess: Power, Sexuality and the Feminine Divine by Shahrukh Husain [1950-] of Pakistani origin living in London.

Maybe you can see where I am going with this–picking up from where long ago I read Egyptian feminist Nawal el Saadawi. There’s a first class video clip featuring her in a Guardian article from April 2010: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/apr/15/nawal-el-saadawi-egyptian-feminist.

There are a lot of older feminists still out there, still “holding up half the sky” and younger ones (some may not call themselves that or know they are, but they stand on our shoulders as we stand on others’). The battle is a very long one, as long as humankind’s story. Nawal points the finger at religion as the major source of the problem, in particular the patriarchal religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam–which is where she started out in her long fight, with resisting the mutilation of young girls (and boys for that matter) based on religious practice.

And so my Journey to and through Egypt, the Great Motherland of Civilisation (mmmm…..)  continues…

PS: I also recommend Anthony Sattin’s The Pharoah’s Shadow: Travels in Ancient and Modern Egypt.

PPS: Ahdaf Soueif’s first novel In the Eye of the Sun is certainly worth a read--it gives a picture of the author as much as it does the heroine Asya as one suspects the work is quite autobiographical (although I can’t prove it!). The tortuous coming of age of a freedom loving Egyptian girl-woman is charted with great detail and verve, thus it’s not everyone’s cup of tea but one thing is certain, its picture of Egypt is strikingly authentic as well as the English-Egyptian cultural multilogue...