RIGHTS-AFRICA: Women Gang Up Against Gender Censorship

By Mercedes Sayagues Reprint | | Print |

Mercedes Sayagues

HARARE, Aug 6 1999 (IPS) - The African programme of the women against gender censorship network was launched at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair held in the capital Harare from 2-6 August.

Behind the effort is the Women’s World Organisation for Rights, Literature and Development (WORLD), a network of women writers active in the Americas, Europe and Asia.

Founded in 1994, World wages is an international campaign for women’s rights to free expression, which includes access to education, to publishing resources and to the media.

WORLD defends women writers under attack, researches the different ways of censoring women’s writings, and supports the development of autonomous women presses and media.

Censorship of women’s voices does not begin when the state or the religious fundamentalist right bans their books, but much earlier, was the conclusion of a workshop held during the Book Fair.

Zimbabwe-based feminist author Dr. Patricia McFadden analysed censorship as the by-product of the masculinisation of thinking and of the construction of female notions of self and of identity.

“Censorship is a mechanism of surveillance to control women’s ability to move, to dress, to act, to write and to think, or not to act, not to write, not to think,” she said.

McFadden, who is a Swazi citizen but has lived in Zimbabwe for many years, is a social scientist known for her radical feminist writings. She was deported by Zimbabwean authorities in 1997, as a result of a battle for resources at the Feminist Studies Centre which she co-directed.

She claims she was accused of being a lesbian and a threat to the women’s movement in Zimbabwe. By giving up the centre, she recovered her work permit until the end of 1999.

McFadden’s view was echoed by Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo, who described censorship against African women writers as “the combination of our socialisation with conservative education policies, sprinkled with the negative comments of our male companions, and the negative views on women’s writings of publishers and editors.”

Furthermore, said Ata Aidoo, the political volatility of Africa and the sensitivity of political leaders conspire to make women writers skirt certain topics. “It’s terrifying the way we don’t touch sensitive issues,” said Ata Aidoo.

The African programme involves developing partnerships with existing women writers groups to build a network to fight gender- based censorship in the continent.

In Latin America, a group of writers has set up Relat (Red de Escritoras Latinoamericanas) in 1998. Last month, Relat held its first conference in Lima, Peru, to discuss its analytical document on Latin American women writers.

The WORLD chapter in Europe is based at the Centro de Documentazione delle Donne in Bologna, Italy. Its programme focuses on “the South within the North” in Europe, namely, women writers from immigrant and persecuted minority groups, and from areas of conflict like the former Yugoslavia, Kosovo and Chechnya, and how they are affected by nationalistic politics.

One of their projects is an oral history of Albanian women.

WORLD South Asia coordinator Ritu Menon, who is also founder of India’s oldest women’s press, Kali for Women, described a change for the worse in the region’s levels of tolerance.

“The violent reactions of the religious right, whether Hindu or Muslim, makes us think twice before we publish something that will inflamed the zealots,” she said.

Book burnings and death threats are in the public eye, but a more insidious form of censorship begins in the family, said Menon. In all the workshops Kali for Women has held with women writers, they say it is nearly impossible to write about domestic violence. “Marriage is the worst inhibitor of women writers,” said Menon.

The programme in South Asia involves a survey of women writers to establish the forms of gender censorship they experience, and an analysis of works by women that have been censored or attacked.

Author and feminist activist Meredith Tax explained that the US programme has developed a “Voices of the Voiceless” outreach with Hunter College of New York with a writing class for women students on welfare. In the USA, explained Tax, gender-based censorship stems from the conservative campaign against feminism, which has scared publishers and influenced the media.

Conservative politicians have attacked women studies programmes in public universities, whereby conservative governors appoint people to board of trustees who are opposed to feminism, sex education and academic freedom.

The workshop stressed the importance of networking among women writers worldwide and using e-mail and the internet to campaign against censorhip.

“Sometimes women in one region can say what women in another cannot, and we must come out in support of each other,” said Tax.

Although British author Salman Rushdie may be the most famous case of a writer under threat, many women writers have been censored, driven into exile, put under death threat and had their books prohibited. But generally their cases are less well publicised or taken less seriously than men’s.

WORLD has defended persecuted women writers, such as Taslima Nasrin, from Bangladesh; Gertrude Fester and Miriam Tlali, from South Africa; Aicha Lemsine and Khalida Messaoudi, from Algeria, Svetlana Alexievich, from Belarus; Rosemary Keefe Curb, from the United States; Fahmida Riaz, from Pakistan, and Elena Potiguara, from Brazil.