Defying Male Oppression With Women’s Laughter
In Turkey, women are truly worried about the future. One reason for this is that those who rule the country — rather than solving real problems such as stemming the rise in violence against women, finding solutions for female homicide or generating employment for women — are limiting their political engagement with women to issues […]
Poetry Is a Tunnel, a Forest in the Human Heart
As I move down the streets, where the fog from the sky melts with the dust, the streets become hazy…. And this reminds me of my own soul — The perennially hazy evening that my soul is. I still remember the afternoon when one of my boisterous uncles, perhaps out of concern, said to me, […]
Homage to My Mothers: Restavek, Vodou, and Haiti’s Stolen Children
“There are no orphans in Haiti!” After a long silence at the other end of the line, my friend Jordan murmurs: “Come again?” He must be thinking I lost my senses. I realize how I sound. Someone else might imagine that I am ignorant of the extreme poverty in which most Haitians live, but Jordan […]
Empowering Words: From Raped and Abused to ‘Without My Consent’
By Meltem Arikan Have you ever wondered about the act of speaking, about the words we say and their importance? To speak is to reassemble the words stored in our brains in a logical order. Babies lack the ability to create sentences. They must first learn individual words before they can string them together in […]
No Rush in Ethiopia to Pry Misery from the Mirage of Capitalism
I visited Ethiopia for only three days, but that was enough for the cruelty of the system to burn my eyes. Once again I felt the pain within. Addis Ababa is under construction. You see green and yellow striped metal site fences everywhere. For me, there’s a big question whether these new buildings under construction […]
