Review by Noaman G. Ali / Photos by Steve da Silva
Rating: 4/4
Last week I sat in a meeting called by a councillor in one of Toronto’s “priority neighbourhoods,” populated by immigrants and working-class folks.
He talked about how the police run drop-in programs for youth so that they can get to know them, and keep an eye on them, so that they can easily question youth about other youth who they are running with and get them to snitch. When these youth grow up and maybe get into trouble, police will know who they are beforehand. The youths will be “known to police.”
“Known to police” is a phrase that gets tacked onto mainstream media reports about a lot of crime and violence. “Known to police” is supposed to mean that the persons involved were already suspicious, shady, irresponsible to begin with. Isn’t this what they said about Ahmed Hassan after he was shot dead at the Eaton Center on June 2, or Nixon Nirmalendran, who died of his wounds over a week later? Maligned, not mourned. What the media didn’t tell us was that one of the main reasons Nixon was known to police was for witnessing Alwy Al-Nadhir’s murder at the hands of police on the night of October 31, 2007.
For those of us who don’t live the daily reality of police terror in this city, Jane and Finch’s resident people’s theatre troupe, Nomanzland, offers us a glimpse into what it’s like to be “known to police”:
It’s about neighbourhoods that are systematically ignored, neglected and oppressed. It’s about youths who have no job options, even when they get university degrees, because of their race and class status in a system where there’s a lack of jobs overall. It’s about families trying to make ends meet and build community in difficult conditions. It’s about politicians and developers trying to make a quick buck off of the land on which poor people live through “revitalization.”
And it’s about treating children and youths as criminals or potential criminals — about dealing with problems through racist and oppressive policing rather than through building communities and providing opportunities to the people there.
‘Known to Police’ doesn’t try to hide any of the problems of the hood. It lays them out for us to see — it revolves around two beefing youth, Dante and Kelvin, who are involved in criminal activities. But it also shows us the lived realities of the peoples involved, and that the problems aren’t with individuals but with the system that they live in.
We meet a group of women who are organizing against politicians’ and developers’ attempts at “revitalizing” — that is, gentrifying — the neighbourhood. We meet an OG revolutionary who resolves the beefing and seeks to unify the hood to build a revolutionary movement. We meet mothers who are single-handedly raising their families and keeping their kids on the right track. We meet people who tried to escape the violence of their homelands (caused by Canada and other Western powers’ imperialism) only to find themselves facing violence in the hood.
We see the cops killing yet another youth in the hood, and getting away with it – a likely reference to Junior Manon’s murder on York University campus on May 5, 2010. We also meet an undercover cop entrapping youth in a web of violence by selling them the same guns that they’re banging out on each other.
All of this is put in the context of world revolution — the uprisings of working people in Egypt and Tunisia are our backdrop. Rhymes, raps and songs are dropped throughout the play — all of them written by the actors themselves. And the acting is amazing, it’s easy to forget that we’re watching a play. (No doubt, because so many of them are from the neighbourhood.)
The play was raw enough to provoke an older, white audience member to ask which parts of the play are based on actual events? “All of it. All of it” – answer a number of cast members, almost in sync.
In the end, the youth of Nomanzland tell us that there are no easy solutions to the problems — and that we certainly can’t rely on politicians of any party. Instead, just like the peoples of the Arab uprisings, communities have to organize to build self-reliant organizations and build their own power to take on the cops, the politicians and developers.
They tell us that we need a proper revolution.
Known to Police was performed at the Young People’s Theatre, June 15-17. Hit up Nomanzland and get them to perform the play in your hood.
by Ashley M.
Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment
Edited by Carole Boyce Davies
241 pages. Ayebia Clarke Publishing. $24.95.
Picture this. It is 1948 and at the age of 23, your citizenship is denied to you because of your political activities since you were 18. How would you feel?
Claudia Jones, activist of Trinidadian origin, was outspoken as early as when she was in Grade 4! Yet, her deportation case was a big part of her life because it was the first time she was arrested. Jones knew that she was a thorn in the side of racist legislators in 1930s USA: “I was deported because I urged the prosecution of the lynchers rather than the prosecution of the Communists and other democratic Americans who opposed the lynchers, big financiers and war mongers, the real advocates of force and violence in the United States”.
Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment is a collection of the works of Claudia Jones, who created a ripple effect for many women of colour in the United States as an intellectual pioneer — daring to speak out against racism, sexism and class exploitation. The book, edited by Carol Boyce Davies, also highlights Jones’s life story through her many writings, essays, and poetry, which reflect how her personal experiences led her to rise up and resist. Her poetry was an outlet of creative resistance, capturing intense emotions that could only be expressed outside of political, formal writing and speeches. Read more…
By Meg M.
On February 27, 2011 Women United Against Imperialism (WUAI) hosted the community forum Confronting Precarious Work in the Era of Imperialism to educate and organize around the theme of precarious work for the upcoming International Women’s Day events that took place in early March.
Petrolina Cleto began the forum by sharing her poem titled “A Place” with the group. Her words set the tone for the discussion ahead; about the sacrifices women make under global imperialism, as they migrate to foreign places for their families’ survival and the love behind migrant women’s work. Cleto explained, “working with the community of women migrant workers in Toronto has deepened my understanding of forced migration and the effects of imperialism on the majority of women in the world today. I now clearly see their courage. I also see what is often taken for granted… the great love with which they do their sacrifices, is also what they give to the people they work for.”
The following speaker, Brigitte Dang-ay, shared with the group that she arrived in Canada in 2006. She has since been separated from her four children in the Philippines while caring for Canadian families as a temporary foreign worker under Canada’s Live-In Caregiver Program (LCP). LCP caregivers are required to complete 24 months of documented, full-time, live-in domestic work within four years of arrival in Canada. On completion of this requirement they become eligible to apply as permanent residents to Canada. Although it takes great courage for caregivers under the LCP to speak out on the vulnerabilities they face at work due to their precarious migration status, Dang-ay gave voice to the difficulties many women migrant workers experience and presented a powerful account of the impact of global imperialism on her life. Read more…
Petrolina Cleto shared her poem at the Women United Against Imperialism forum on Confronting Precarious Work in the Era of Imperialism on February 27, 2011. The following poem is inspired by the struggles and courage of women migrant workers.
A woman who toils in any place
Because she has no place
Where she is
Finds that every morning
She grows more unsure
Of this place
A place awash with gestures
Full of movements imbibed from shells
Of other creatures
Living in films,
Filmed as if they lived,
Creatures staring at you
From billboards or magazines,
As if they were alive in another world
Where money had another meaning Read more…
This year marks a historic celebration as we commemorate the 100th year of militant women’s tradition since the formation of the International Working Women’s Day. In 1911, millions of women in Europe and the US gathered and took their struggle to the streets to fight their oppression and for better working conditions. A century later, the women of the millennium is facing the worse impact of imperialist globalization as they experience the global depression and poverty. Local governments have prioritized the needs of corporations and instead deserted social and basic programs which has been essential services that is gravely needed by the working people. These cutbacks have mostly affected the local and migrant women and their children as they experienced discrimination, state abandonment and massive unemployment.
Filipino women comprise 60% of the 180, 000 Filipinos in the GTA, Rob Ford’s proposed cuts to transit, affordable housing, and recreational centres will certainly affect our families who are already marginalized as they are mostly under the Temporary Foreign Workers Program, a federal government program that have put our women in a precarious and vulnerable situation. In spite of their professional training as nurses, engineers and teachers, this program has de-skilled our women and kept them working as caregivers, farm workers and hotel workers. They have been living in poverty line while being kept docile as they are forced to put up with abusive situations in fear of jeopardizing their temporary status. The federal government’s cut in immigration and settlement services presents in impediment to further the integration of our families to the Canadian society as they are reunited after long years of separation. Affordable and low-cost housing have been out-of-reach from the working people which leave parents with no choice but to work 2-3 jobs just to make ends meet leaving no time for the family that they just got reunited with. Read more…
Reposted: Patrick Mac Manus, Copenhagen (Denmark), http://patrickmacmanus.wordpress.com/
It was Clara Zetkin, a leading socialist of her time who introduced a proposal, which called for an annual international socialist women’s day.
“In agreement with the class-conscious, political and trade union organisations of the proletariat of their respective countries, the Socialist women of all countries will hold each year a Women’s Day, whose foremost purpose it must be to aid the attainment of women’s suffrage. This demand must be handled in conjunction with the entire women’s question according to Socialist precepts. The Women’s Day must have an international character and is to be prepared carefully.” (August 27, 1910. From a proposal to the Second International Women’s Conference in Copenhagen).
The date – March 8 – was chosen because of an event that had occurred on that day in the United States. A women’s demonstration was called on March 8, 1908 under the leadership of women workers in the New York City garment trades. Hundreds gathered to demand the vote and to urge the building of a powerful garment trades’ union.
The success of the 1908 demonstration became known internationally among socialist women and Clara Zetkin proposed that the day of the demonstration of American working women become an International Women’s Day and that March 8 each year be dedicated to fighting for equal rights for all women in all countries.
In 1911, the first International Women’s Day was celebrated in four countries, Denmark, Austria, Switzerland and Germany. The demands were voting rights for women, improvements of women’s working conditions, the right to be hired as public servants.
It was with a sharply defined Marxist vision that Clara Zetkin pointed out that women’s struggle is primarily class struggle.
“As far as the proletarian woman is concerned, it is capitalism’s need to exploit and search incessantly for a cheap labour force that has created the women’s question. It is for this reason, too, that the proletarian woman has become enmeshed in the mechanism of the economic life of our period and has been driven into the workshops and to the machines.
“She went out into the economic life in order to help her husband in making a living, but the capitalist mode of production transformed her into an unfair competitor.
“She wanted to bring prosperity to her family, but instead misery descended upon it. The proletarian woman obtained her own employment because she wanted to create a more sunny and pleasant life for her children, but instead she became almost entirely separated from them.
“She became an equal of the man as a worker, the machine rendered muscular force superfluous and everywhere women’s work showed the same results in production as men’s work. And since women constitute a cheap labour force and above all a submissive one that only in the rarest of cases dares to kick against the thorns of capitalist exploitation, the capitalists multiply the possibilities of women’s work in industry. As a result of all this, the proletarian woman has achieved her independence. But verily, the price was very high and for the moment they have gained very little…
“The proletarian woman has gained her economic independence, but neither as a human being nor as a woman or wife has she had the possibility to develop her individuality. For her task as a wife and a mother, there remain only the breadcrumbs, which the capitalist producers drop from their table.
“Therefore the liberation struggle of the proletarian woman cannot be similar to the struggle that the bourgeois woman wages against the male of her class. On the contrary, it must be a joint struggle with the male of her class against the entire class of capitalists.
“She does not need to fight against the men of her class in order to tear down the barriers which have been raised against her participation in the free competition of the market place. Capitalism’s need to exploit and the development of the modern mode of production totally relieves her of her having to fight such a struggle. On the contrary, new barriers need to be erected against the exploitation of the proletarian woman. Her rights as wife and mother need to be restored and permanently secured.
“Her final aim is not the free competition with the man, but the achievement of the political rule of the proletariat. The proletarian woman fights hand in hand with the man of her class against capitalist society.
“To be sure, she also agrees with the demands of the bourgeois women’s movement, but she regards the fulfilment of these demands simply as a means to enable that movement to enter the battle, equipped with the same weapons, alongside the proletariat”.
Source: Clara Zetkin, Selected Writings, pp 76-78. Edited by Philip S. Foner. Foreword: Angela Y. Davis (1984).
BASICS Issue #22 (Sep/Oct 2010)
by Ashley Matthew & Pet Cleto
August 16, 2010 now marks the formation of the International Women’s Alliance. On that sunny historic day in Montreal, over 300 women representing some 130 countries together declared the creation of a global anti-imperialist alliance of feminist and women’s groups. Through the International Women’s Conference workshops that were held over the course of that weekend, avenues were opened for delegates to discuss several topics, and then convened to declare the birth of the alliance, agree on its bases of unity, and form an action plan. Read more…
Media Advisory, Montreal, Quebec, Friday, August 6, 2010
The first Montreal International Women’s Conference hosted by the Committee of Women of Diverse Origins is set to get underway August 13-16, 2010 in Montreal, Quebec.
For close to a decade a group of Montreal-based women have been working tirelessly to improve women’s lives here and abroad. They are the Committee of Women of Diverse Origins, and as the name suggests, their members have roots in several countries and they take on a number of social issues from migrants’ rights to violence against women. What makes their approach unique are their strong links to and participation in women’s struggles in their countries of origin including the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Iran, Palestine, Pakistan, Mexico, Ecuador, and Mali, bringing militancy and a truly global perspective to their work here in Quebec and Canada.
International Women’s Conference in Montreal, Canada, August 13-16, 2010
Cynthia Palmaria – BASICS Issue #19 – May/June 2010
This year marks the celebration of the centennial of International Toiling Women’s Day, which will be commemorated by a historic conference initiated by ILPS (International League of People’s Struggle) to strengthen the international global women’s movement. The conference, entitled “For a Militant Global Women’s Movement in the 21st Century,” was conceptualized with the objective of assessing the achievements of the global women’s rights movement during the last 100 years. We will be honouring the pioneers, celebrating the centennial and drawing up an action plan for advancing the women’s rights movement, starting with the formation of an anti-imperialist women’s alliance. The international initiative committee is composed of Gabriela Philippines, the convener of the Women’s Commission of ILPS and Women of Diverse Origins in Montreal, Canada.
