That Takes Ovaries!

by Rivka Solomon

  $100,000.

  Still stuck with the false image of what good girls were not supposed to talk about, I began timidly. I naïvely called businesses rumored to support good causes (like Ben and Jerry’s) and wrote letters to friends, friends’ parents, and former employers, asking for small sums. Once I saw the results, however, I quickly changed my tune. When I realized how much money was out there to give, and that if someone wasn’t giving it to something I believed in, it would be money “wasted,” I unabashedly started asking for more.

  I called Susan, a friend and mentor, and asked her to lunch. Yes, I hesitated to cross this money boundary with her. I’d witnessed how money could split friendships. But with salad greens likely stuck between my teeth, I screwed up my nerve and said, “I know you know about our work at the Third Wave, and that you’ve given your commitment to similar causes in the past. I was hoping you would now support us as well.”

  “In what way?” she asked.

  Ugh. Why wasn’t she making this easy on me?

  Just as I was about to lose my gumption and minimize the support I was requesting to a simple verbal acknowledgment, I blurted out, “How about $10,000?”

  “Why didn’t you ask sooner?” was her response.

  After that, I got greedy. When I noticed how much people were giving to other institutions—the opera, their alma maters, and so forth—I blatantly challenged them to put their money where their politics and conscience were. And not only did I ask rich strangers, I also challenged my working- and middle-class friends.

  “It’s not that you don’t have the money, it’s that you are choosing to spend it differently. For instance, I know that your dinner out with friends cost $30, and your Kate Spade bag, about $300.”

  Yes, I actually said that. I figured the people who spend $10,000 a year on their country-club memberships could afford to give more than that, and, similarly, the people who spend $20 on a Gap tee shirt could commit at least that much to a good cause. In fact, the majority of contributions I’ve received come from people earning less than $25,000 a year.

  Whereas I used to think that money wasn’t something “good girls” talked about, let alone asked for, I now know that good girls don’t accomplish much in life. Better yet, let me redefine the term: Good girls are those who make good things happen. So, if I haven’t convinced you to drop the belief that women shouldn’t talk cash, and to become a fund-raiser yourself, then at least I hope I’ve convinced you to give to whatever cause is dear to your heart. Or perhaps, what’s dear to mine: The Third Wave Foundation, a National Organization for Young Feminists, 116 East 16th Street, 7th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10003 (www.thirdwavefoundation.org). The power you’ll gain is not a result of the amount you give, but rather from the simple act of giving.

  amy richards (amy@manifesta.net), contributing editor to Ms. magazine and cofounder of the Third Wave Foundation, wants you to be bad in the name of being good. Her latest book is Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Find out more at www.manifesta.net.

  Stage Presence

  phoebe eng

  Growing up in the ’70s in a suburb of Long Island, all I wanted to do was fit in. For most teenagers, that was hard enough. But for the Engs, the only Asian-American family in our little all-American town, fitting in was a full-time vocation. It meant learning how to act “truly American”—something that was very important to us, and something I thought I had achieved. That’s why I tried out for my high-school play.

  It was 1976, the bicentennial year, and my school decided Oklahoma! was the perfect musical to celebrate it. After all, Oklahoma! was all about manifest destiny, the American farmer and the cowboy, and all that was good and pure in this great land of ours. These sentiments were especially embodied in Laurie and Curly, the romantic leads.

  The play’s patriotism was lost on me, as it was on every girl my age. All I knew was that the annual musical was the biggest event my high school had to offer, and if I could get the girl’s lead role, I would be set for the rest of high school. Leads were instantly popular. For one year, I wouldn’t just “fit in,” I would be the equivalent of a homecoming queen.

  Five rounds into the tryouts, I found myself onstage, one of the last three girls up for the lead of Laurie, the ingénue. After the tough competition between Jean O’Callaghan, Stephanie Finkel, and me, I got it.

  But I guess not everybody was quite ready for me to play the lead. There were rumblings. At a PTA meeting some very vocal parents questioned the choice.

  “Can a little Asian girl really play the part that Shirley Jones played in the movie?”

  “So many other girls, with nice voices and pretty blond hair, can play the role, too, can’t they? Won’t it be a little unconvincing if the lead is … Chinese?”

  “It’s a bicentennial year, and this, well, this is un-American!” Up to that point, I thought I had succeeded in being all-American. I thought I was hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolets. I mean, I had been trying for so long. It never occurred to me that I shouldn’t be entitled to what every girl in my high school wanted. Now I suddenly saw that no matter how hard I tried to fit in, no matter how much I deserved the part, some people would continue to see me as different, as “foreign.”

  It was hard to hear those comments. I made believe they didn’t hurt, swallowed hard, and tried not to embarrass myself by crying. I felt I couldn’t share these feelings with anyone—not my best friend, not even my family. They’d never understand, I thought. Mom and Dad had worked hard and sacrificed so much, just so this kind of thing wouldn’t happen. Telling them would break their hearts.

  At fourteen years old, I wasn’t equipped to deal with this. I had no sudden revelations, like, for example, that the parents who voiced those concerns were narrow-minded and silly. I didn’t have the chutzpah to defend myself against the PTA parents. (Not until I went to college at Berkeley did I learn the skills of protest and defiance.)

  What I did do was go on with the show. I didn’t let anyone stop me from getting up on that stage and showing everyone that, Chinese or not, I could play a magnificent Laurie. After all, I knew I could sing. I knew I was being given a chance to shine. By showing up to rehearsal every day, in the midst of some parents’ misgivings, I would defeat those comments that had tried to defeat me. In doing so, I learned a valuable lesson. Not every act of defiance is an “in-your-face” act of a fierce girl. Sometimes just sticking to your guns and not buckling under pressure can be the most radical and transforming thing one can do.

  So I played that lead; I sang it loud. I made sure my entire Eng family—including aunts, uncles, and cousins—sat right in the middle of the auditorium for the rest of the community to see. On those three glorious nights, my little Long Island town got a glimpse not only of what America was, but, more important, what it could be.

  phoebe eng (www.phoebeeng.com), a best-selling author (Warrior Lessons: An Asian American Woman’s Journey Into Power, Pocket Books), has since learned a lot about speaking up. She is an award-winning community and business leader whose work focuses on leadership, corporate social responsibility, identity issues, and Asian-American women. Phoebe resides in Manhattan and now makes a living by getting up in front of packed international audiences and telling it like it is.

  Remaining Whole Behind Bars

  fauziya kassindja

  If you come to the United States seeking political asylum, you might be surprised—I was. Upon arrival you may be placed in prison-like detention. In fact, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) sometimes uses American prisons to hold its detainees, including people who are escaping persecution, fleeing for their physical safety, or even their lives. People like me.

  I was seventeen and living in Togo, my homeland in West Africa, when my aunt told me one morning, “You’re getting married today.” She pointed to the beautiful gown and jewelry she had laid out on the bed.

  “What?” I shouted. Apparently it had all been arra
nged behind my back.

  “And your husband wants you circumcised, after the wedding.”

  “No, please,” I pleaded. “You can’t do this to me!”

  But she could. My aunt and uncle had legal guardianship over me now that my father had passed away and they had banished my mother from our home. I was terrified. Not only was I to marry a man I barely knew, a man twice my age with three wives, but also I was slated to have my genitals cut.

  A harmful traditional practice among some African, Asian, and Middle Eastern cultures, female genital mutilation (FGM) is performed on about 2 million infants, girls, and women each year. That’s more than five thousand a day. Depending on the local custom, you will either “only” have your clitoris cut off, or you will lose the whole thing, including labia minora and majora. If it is the latter, you are sewn up, leaving a small hole, hardly big enough to allow pee and menstrual blood to squeeze out. Then, with each baby you birth, you are recut and resewn anew. The rationale behind FGM is complex: It is tradition; it is thought to protect virginity and prevent promiscuity; uncircumcised females are considered dirty; girls must be cut as a requirement for marriage; and circumcised girls and woman are deemed more sexually desirable. The practice of FGM subjects women to a number of longterm physical and psychological problems. Often carried out without anesthesia and with unsterilized razors or knives, it is a sometimes deadly practice. My other aunt died from it, as do many girls every year, either from hemorrhaging or infection.

  I wanted nothing to do with either the marriage or the so-called circumcision, so with the help of my sister, and my mother from afar, I fled that very day.

  But all that is just background. My story here is about something else entirely. It isn’t about how I thought America would be my refuge, or how I arrived at the Newark airport and asked for political asylum, or how I was sent to prison instead, to wait (wait and wait and wait, like other refugees) until a judge could hear my case. No, my story is about resistance and holding on to one’s Self in the face of cruelty, and it goes like this….

  Kim was evil. She was the corrections officer on duty the night I was brought, shackled, straight from the New Jersey airport to prison. She was the one who conducted my strip search, the first of many. I had my period at the time, and now, naked and humiliated, I meekly asked, “What should I do with my [soiled] pad?” She ignored me, until I asked again. Then she barked, “Why don’t you eat it.”

  That was Kim.

  Kim worked the night shift. When she did her midnight count she didn’t just come into our dorm cell and count bodies; she pinched, slapped, and startled each sleeping woman, one at a time. Kim.

  I had been in prison a few weeks already and had come to know the million rules, including “No showering before 6:00 A.M. wake up.” So, like the others, I didn’t. But I did get up at 5:00 to recite Muslim words and wash parts of my body in preparation for first prayer. It was an important ritual in my religion, and something I had done every day since I was a child. Kim was still on night duty at 5:00 A.M., and one morning she rushed into our cell screaming, not caring that women around her were sleeping.

  “Turn that water off! No showering until six.”

  Surprised, I looked up at her, “I’m not showering, I’m preparing for prayer.”

  I was nowhere near the shower; she could see that. I was standing in a totally separate location, at the sink, with all my clothes on, washing and silently reciting holy words.

  Kim, ugly with anger, stormed toward me, turned off the water faucet, and left. I was almost finished, so I turned the water back on.

  “Turn it off, I said,” she yelled.

  I was done by then, so I did.

  The next morning, when I began my washing prayer, she rushed into the room, “Off!”

  Again, I was obviously fully dressed. “But it’s for my prayers.” She has to understand there is someone called God, and she must have heard about prayer, I thought.

  “No showering until six.”

  I stayed cool, unruffled: “I’m washing for prayer. I’m not showering.”

  “No washing until six.”

  She was changing the rule. There may have been a million rules, all meant to control prisoners’ every move, but this one was about showering, not washing. I stood my ground. God was too important to me to stop my prayers for a whimsical change of the rules. I’ll ignore her, I thought. She’s just being mean, as usual.

  “I’m sorry. To pray, this is what I have to do.”

  Kim thought differently. She grabbed me, handcuffed me, and snarled, “I’m taking you to seg.”

  Segregation. My prison friends, loving and generous women who were more seasoned than I, had warned me about it, told me I never wanted to experience it.

  She brought me through a dizzying number of hallways, opened one of the many metal doors, pushed me into a tiny cell, and locked me up, alone, in a concrete box. A metal bed, sink, and toilet, no more. No phone calls, no TV, no contact with humanity. The miniscule window on the door was too small to see anything. Where am I? Is this the America I’d heard so much about?

  I was stunned, horribly scared, and cold. The cell was freezing, the lighting harsh. I couldn’t stop thinking, This can’t be. How long will it last; how long will they keep me here? A few hours maybe; then they’ll let me out. Right? With nothing to do, my mind whirled round and round, Why? Why? What did I do?

  I was being punished, but I had no idea for how long. Hours, days, two weeks, a month? I was served three meals a day, but besides that had no way of telling the passage of time. Lights off, day one ended. Lights on, day two began. I tried to convince myself that I didn’t exist. It was too painful to fathom what was going on. Okay, I’m not here. I cried so much there was nothing left inside. I was hollow. Day three, four, then five, and they came to get me. Five days, long enough to bring me close to madness.

  I later found out I was lucky. Isolation can last months, even years, in American prisons, sometimes as a form of punishment, often for seemingly arbitrary things. Like being forgotten. I don’t know for sure if I was forgotten, but it certainly seemed that way. It happened when I was eighteen; after an inconclusive TB test, the prison quarantined me. They locked me in a tiny room and seemed to forget I existed. I was scared for my life.

  Am I sick? Shouldn’t they be giving me medicine? They passed meal trays through a slot in the door, but nobody would talk to me. No one explained what was going on. Days and days of being alone passed. What kind of bad dream is this? Am I going to wake up? Weeks went by, and my time in that cell turned into a complete blank. I remember only bits and pieces, like when I stood in front of the metal sheet that passed as a prison mirror and watched myself say, “Oh, Fauziya, you’re not going crazy. Everything will be okay,” only to hear myself demand a minute later for God to take me, take me now! I flipped back and forth between elation and despair, out-of-control laughter and sobs. I’m definitely going out of my mind. Finally, after I lost it and screamed my head off, they let me out. It’d been twenty days of crazed, mind-numbing isolation—something no one should have to go through.

  Earlier, when I was released from my first experience in isolation (the five-day stint for washing), my heart was filled with hatred. I was brought before a prison official.

  “Number Seven Six One?”

  “Yes.” I was so nervous.

  “You broke the rules and fought with an officer,” he said.

  What? Not true, but the truth—justice—didn’t count in prison.

  “Your sentence is five days in segregation. You have already served your sentence. Return to your dorm.”

  The prison official didn’t let me say anything. But I was free to go back to my dorm, back to my cellmates.

  The very next morning I was up at 5:00 A.M. The fact that I am in prison doesn’t mean you can stop me from praying. I turned the water on just a trickle and washed as quietly as I could. Maybe Kim heard, maybe not. From then on that was how I washed for p
rayers every morning. I was scared of being caught and taken to isolation again, yet at the same time I didn’t want them to win. I was willing to take the risk; my religion was a big part of who I was, part of my Self and not something I would easily give up. I now knew if they sent me back, I might go crazy but I wouldn’t die—and I could still continue to pray in there.

  It took sixteen months before I won political asylum. In a landmark, precedent-setting decision, I was the first woman to be granted asylum by the INS’s Board of Immigration Appeals for fleeing a forced genital mutilation. Now, when I look back, I think something must have gotten into me in prison. All the things I did, I don’t know how I did them. I often think, “Gosh, I really did that?” The answer is always the same: Yes, that strong woman is me!

  fauziya kassindja now attends college and lectures around the globe. This story was written with Rivka after an interview, and contains adapted excerpts from Do They Hear You When You Cry by Fauziya Kassindja and Layli Miller Bashir. Copyright © 1998 by Fauziya Kassindja. Used by permission of Dell Publishing, a division of Random House Inc. Fauziya can be contacted through Equality Now (see below).

  To learn about the movement to end the human rights abuse known as female genital mutilation, contact:

  Equality Now

  P.O. Box 20646

  Columbus Circle Station

  New York, NY 10023

  Phone: (212) 586-0906

  Fax: (212) 586-1611

  E-mail: info@equalitynow.org.

  Website: www.equalitynow.org

  and

  The World Health Organization

  Department of Women’s Health

  Avenue Appia 20, 1211 Geneva 27

  Switzerland

  Phone: (41 22) 791 21 11

  Fax: (41 22) 791 31 11

  E-mail: info@who.int

  Website: www.who.int

  To get info on prison reform, contact:

  Prison Activist Resource Center