Rafeef Ziadah – Shades of Anger

N j‡'$&
Allow me to speak my Arab tongue
before they occupy my language as well.
Allow me to speak my mother tongue
before they colonise her memory as well.
I am an Arab woman of color.
and we come in all shades of anger.
All my grandfather ever wanted to do
was wake up at dawn and watch my grandmather kneel and pray
in a village hidden between Jaffa and Haifa
my mother was born under an olive tree
on a soil they say is no longer mine
but I will cross their barriers, their check points
their damn apartheid walls and return to my homeland
I am an Arab woman of colour and we come in all shades of anger.
And did you hear my sister screaming yesterday
as she gave birth at a check point
with Israeli soldiers looking between her legs
for their next demographic threat
called her baby girl “Janeen”.
And did you hear Amni Mona screaming
behind their prison bars as they teargassed her cell
“We’re returning to Palestine!”
I am an Arab woman of colour and we come in all shades of anger.
But you tell me, this womb inside me
will only bring you your next terrorist
beard wearing, gun waving, towelhead, sand nigger
You tell me, I send my children out to die
but those are your copters, your F16′s in our sky
And let’s talk about this terrorism business for a second
Wasn’t it the CIA that killed Allende and Lumumba
and who trained Osama in the first place
My grandparents didn’t run around like clowns
with the white capes and the white hoods on their heads lynching black people
I am an Arab woman of colour and we come in all shades of anger.
“So who is that brown woman screaming in the demonstration?”
Sorry, should I not scream?
I forgot to be your every orientalist dream
Jinnee in a bottle, belly dancer, harem girl, soft spoken Arab woman
Yes master, no master.
Thank you for the peanut butter sandwiches
raining down on us from your F16′s master
Yes my liberators are here to kill my children
and call them “collateral damage”
I am an Arab woman of colour and we come in all shades of anger.
So let me just tell you this womb inside me
will only bring you your next rebel
She will have a rock in one hand and a Palestinian flag in the other
I am an Arab woman of color
Beware! Beware my anger…

An interesting read in the wake of the Salman Khan verdict and its aftermath

Bombay Pavement Dwellers and OLGA TELLIS – And a Quiet Verdict in Ahmedabad : N. Jayaram

Posted by subhash gatade

Guest Post by N. Jayaram

After the order in the case of film star Salman Khan over a 2002 hit-and-run case was delivered by Sessions Court Judge D.W. Deshpande on Wednesday, 6 May 2015, there understandably were divided opinions on whether he deserved to be handed five years in jail.

But the rather more shockingly breath-taking comments from some of his friends in the industry and his fans were to do with pavement dwellers, such as the victim Nurullah Mahboob Sharif.

“Kutta rd pe soyega kutte ki maut marega, roads garib ke baap ki nahi hai (If a dog sleeps on the road, he’ll die a dog’s death. Roads are not poor people’s property)…,” singer Abhijeet Bhattacharya tweeted. “Roads are meant for cars and dogs not for people sleeping on them…,” he said, appealing to the film industry to back the star, whose sentence has now been suspended by the High Court.

Designer Farah Khan Ali chipped in with this:  “No one should be sleeping on the road or footpath. It is dangerous to do that just like it is dangerous to cross tracks.” She quite rightly laid the blame on the state: “The govt should be responsible for housing ppl. If no1 was sleeping on d road in any other country Salman wuld not have driven over anybody.”

Perhaps she had read the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights, to which India is a state party:http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CESCR.aspx. Article 11.1 of the Covenant says: “The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions. The States Parties will take appropriate steps to ensure the realization of this right…”

The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the treaty body monitoring states’ compliance with the Covenant’s provisions issued a General Comment in 1991 setting out specific measures states need to take to ensure adequate accommodation, what “adequacy” implies and how to deal with homelessness:https://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/gencomm/epcomm4.htm.

Bhattacharya, Farah Khan and others questioning the presence of pavement dwellers and advising them not to be there could have benefited from reading one of the most remarkable documents generated nearer home – the remarkable judgement of the Supreme Court of India almost 30 years ago inOlga Tellis and others Vs Bombay Municipal Corporation and others(10 July 1985). Journalist and activist Olga Tellis, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights and others had challenged the municipal authorities’ move to forcibly evict pavement dwellers.

A pithy summary of Olga Tellis – and importantly – its failure to provide for adequate resettlement is available on this website devoted to Economic, Social and Cultural Rights:http://www.escr-net.org/docs/i/401006.

The historical verdict  (http://indiankanoon.org/doc/709776/) is cited not only in courts around India but in many other Common Law jurisdictions. Moreover, Olga Tellis is studied in law schools around the world and is cited in books and journal articles. During an intensive course on refugee law at the University of Hong Kong in 2006, this writer heard Australian jurist, Professor Penelope Mathew,[1] extol the poetic language that figures in parts of Olga Tellis. And it is worth savouring the words written by Chief Justice Y.V. Chandrachud on behalf of the distinguished five-judge bench:

“The sweep of the right to life conferred by Article 21 (of the Indian constitution guaranteeing the protection of right to life) is wide and far reaching. It does not mean merely that life cannot be extinguished or taken away as, for example, by the imposition and execution of the death sentence, except according to procedure established by law. That is but one aspect of the right to life. An equally important facet of that right is the right to livelihood because no person can live without the means of living, that is, the means of livelihood. If the right to livelihood is not treated as a part of the constitutional right to life, the easiest way of depriving a person his right to life would be to deprive him of his means of livelihood to the point of abrogation. Such deprivation would not only denude the life of its effective content and meaningfulness but it would make life impossible to live. And yet, such deprivation would not have to be in accordance with the procedure established by law, if the right to livelihood is not regarded as a part of the right to life. That, which alone makes it possible to live, leave aside what makes life livable, must be deemed to be an integral component of the right to life. Deprive a person of his right to livelihood and you shall have deprived him of his life. Indeed, that explains the massive migration of the rural population to big cities. They migrate because they have no means of livelihood in the villages… So unimpeachable is the evidence of the nexus between life and the means of livelihood. They have to eat to live: Only a handful can afford the luxury of living to eat. That they can do, namely, eat, only if they have the means of livelihood. (Emphasis added.)

Chief Justice Chandrachud declared that

“the economic compulsions under which these persons are forced to live in slums or on pavements impart to their occupation the character of a fundamental right”.

Abhijeet Bhattacharya has mockingly tweeted: “Mumbai ke road Aur footpath pe sone ka shauk hai ?? (You have a thing for sleeping on Bombay’s road and footpath?) Y not at your village no vehicles to kill u.”

Olga Tellis had addressed that:

“It is a notorious fact of contemporary life in metropolitan cities that no person in his senses would opt to live on a pavement or in a slum, if any other choice were available to him. Anyone who cares to have even a fleeting glance at the pavement or slum dwellings will see that they are the very hell on earth.”

The judgement had taken note of some fascinating findings of contemporary social scientists about the contributions pavement dwellers were making to society and their interest in leading peaceful lives in amity with others on the street as well as with affluent folk nearby.

Pavement and slum dwellers give back to the economy far more of a share of their income than the super-rich do. The indigent spend almost all or all of their daily earnings on buying food and for transport and other services. The ‘multiplier effect’ of their incomes on the economy is immense. Not even going into the issue of how much of the incomes of the super-rich is jetted away to Swiss Banks and tax havens, the billionaires can only consume so much of the daily necessities that keep the economy oiled. In Hong Kong, for instance, some of the poorest people renting tiny “cage-homes” pay more per cubic metre than the tycoons do for their palatial flats or houses in one of the prime locations in the city, namely The Peak.

Bhattacharya, Khan et al, might want to ponder a little about the pavement dwellers’ economic worth and the contribution they make to the economy before making dismissive remarks that insults their inherent dignity.

Meanwhile, on the same day that the Indian media was giving saturation coverage of the sentence handed to Salman Khan, was it a mere coincidence that a man named Keshav Joshi had his death sentence for having raped his two-and-a-half-year-old niece and left her to die in 2007 commuted to life imprisonment by the Gujarat High Court? (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ahmedabad/HC-commutes-death-penalty-to-life-term/articleshow/47168578.cms)

The surname Joshi, as with Pandit or Shastri, indicates the Brahmin caste. How might India’s media and public have reacted – and on a slow news day – if a Muslim or a Dalit convicted of an identical crime had gotten a commutation? Did the Gujarat High Court choose carefully the day on which it announced commutation for Keshav Joshi?

To be sure, this is not to begrudge Joshi his commutation, which is most welcome, and not only because a person who raped and murdered such a young child must have been suffering deep psychological disturbance. As Judge Jyotsna Yagnik said while pronouncing sentences on Maya Kodnani, Babu Bajrangi and others in the Naroda Patiya case (in connection with the 2002 Gujarat pogrom), the death penalty “undermines human dignity”.

But a question arises as to why large percentages of under-trial detainees, convicted prisoners and those on death row happen to be from among Muslims, Dalits and Other Backward Castes. It took near-superhuman efforts on the part of a large team of lawyers and human rights activists to get the death sentence passed on the Dalit, Surinder Koli – perhaps unfairly convicted in connection with the “Nithari Killings” – commuted to life earlier this year.

The bail and sentence suspension afforded to a Salman Khan is denied to tens of thousands of others who cannot afford decent legal counsel. And a commutation so quietly extended to a Keshav Joshi is often denied to Muslims, Dalits and OBCs. Rather, an almost entirely innocent Kashmiri named Afzal Guru was hanged two years ago to satisfy the “collective conscience of the society”.

[1] Author of Reworking the Relationship Between Asylum and Employment, Routledge, 2012:http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415580793/

( N. Jayaram, is a senior journalist who blogs at https://walkerjay.wordpress.com)