Feminist Freedom Warriors

Genealogies, Justice, Politics, and Hope

Chandra Talpede Mohanty, Linda Carty, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Linda Carty

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781608468973
• eBook ISBN: 9781608468980
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Social Sciences

Born out of an engagement with anti-racist feminist struggles as women of color from the Global South, Feminist Freedom Warriors (FFW) is a project showcasing cross-generational histories of feminist activism addressing economic, anti-racist, social justice, and anti-capitalist issues across national borders. This feminist reader is a companion to the FFW video archive project that is currently available online.

Using text and images, the book presents short narratives from the women featured in the FFW project and illustrates the intersecting struggles for justice in the fight against oppression. These are stories of sister-comrades, whose ideas, words, actions, and visions of economic and social justice continue to inspire a new generation of women activists.

No Freedom without Connection

Envisioning Sustainable Feminist Solidarities

Margo Okazawa-Rey

Coming of Age: Margo’s Story

Margo Okazawa-Rey: I think I am the classic the-personal-is-political example; by that I mean I started my life journey in a transnational context, in a sense, by the way my parents met. My father was part of the US occupying force in post–World War II Japan, working-class, a conscript for the “war effort”; my mother was part of the occupied, upper-middle class, the college-educated daughter of Japanese corporate executive. My own birth signifies, or I personify, something that was not supposed to exist at that historical moment. So in my life I’ve had to figure out questions of identity and place. There was a time when I just really wanted to fit in. This was before I came out. I tried to fit in racially and in terms of gender, but when I came out as a lesbian, I thought, “Oh, my god, there’s not going to be one place where I am going to fit.”

Chandra Talpade Mohanty: When was that? How old were you?

MOR: I was twenty-four. I had just finished my masters. After a couple of years of trying to coming out and all that stuff, I realized the thing to do is to help create places for people who, according to established categories, “don’t fit.” So my feminism and politics really did grow out of a personal place of figuring out a place for me.

Linda E. Carty: And where was the place that happened?

MOR: The geographic place was Boston. Boston, Cambridge, in 1972 was quite a place. I met lots of other feminists—feminists of color, white women, and a whole generation of us were going through that journey, of who we are, what our politics are. It was a very exciting time, because there were so many ideas that we were trying to explore, like monogamy, non-monogamy, and even little bits around transgender stuff. We tried living collectively. Through all of these kinds of social experiments I learned a lot, to say the least. One of the things I learned and became clear about was my politics. Also became clearer about my ethics and values and what really mattered. That was almost a ten-year journey, from 1972 to 1982. That was the personal part, but it was very much connected to the political.

My politics are deeply rooted in what I notice around me, as well as what I’m reading, the conversations I’m having with people. But they are not abstract; they are not theoretical, in a kind of a classic sense. They are theoretical in a feminist theoretical sense—theorizing from lived experience, then putting that together with things I’m learning through reading and conversations with folks like you. So I feel very grounded and steady as I’m growing in what I think, how I think, and where I have landed at this point of my life. So the first point has to do with the situation I was born into and the events and forces in the political moment and geographic location that politicized me. Much, much later, a crucial turning point for me was doing the Fulbright research fellowship to South Korea. That is where I really began to think about and experience the category of nation. When you’re in a dominant category, you don’t really think about it until you have a contrasting experience. That’s one of the “invisible privileges” of having a US citizenship.

CTM: When was that?

MOR: That was 1994. Before then I had been active in various activist projects, and I was a member of the Combahee River Collective before we named ourselves Combahee River Collective.¹ In winter of 1975 I met up with this group of Black feminists. I can’t remember how I got connected to them. We used to meet in one of our members’ living rooms—Helen Stewart. At that time there were maybe five of us meeting together. The ages ranged from twenty, who we considered the baby of the group, and the oldest person was Helen. I think she was twenty-six or twenty-seven. We were young, and we were just trying to explain our lives, really. Many of us were lesbian—not all; some were bisexual. We were active in lots of different projects and struggles and just trying to figure out our place in our communities as Black women, as Black lesbians, as socialists, feminists, and anti-imperialists. We were not setting out to make history. We simply were trying to explain our lives and theorizing about what was going on around us and our place in it. It’s kind of a shock to me every time I hear the Combahee River Statement referenced as an important touchstone for younger generations of feminists and people are doing dissertations about Combahee in one way or another.

CTM: What makes the Combahee River Collective statement powerful is that it is so explicitly socialist and anticapitalist. There aren’t that many examples of those kinds of connections being made that include a very central critique of capitalism.

MOR: Yes, exactly. I get so upset when these days many feminists in the academy and other places have reduced intersectionality down to multiple identities, because that was just one strand of how we saw the intersections. There was absolutely an anti-imperialist, materialist analysis. My goal now is to really push back and say, “You can’t do intersectionality without looking at those two or three other strands.”

LEC: There is a particular kind of history and a particular kind of materiality attached to that history that locates women of color in specific places, particularly in US capitalism. If we don’t understand that, then what is intersectionality? Nothing but identities.

MOR: Yes, exactly. I absolutely detest it. I want to go on record saying that. Let’s go back a bit. I went to Korea as a Fulbright scholar. My proposal was to try to understand what Korean people thought of African American people before they arrived in the US, because this was a time when there were serious tensions and violence between Korean merchants and African American communities. There was the big Red Apple incident in New York,² LaTasha Harlins in LA,³ there was stuff in Boston. Everywhere, everywhere. I was living in Washington at the time and had helped found a group called the Afro-Asian Relations Council, trying to bring together the two groups. I thought, “Well, they couldn’t have just come here clean slate. They had to have some ideas and opinions about Black people in the US.” So I went with that as the starting place, but I actually ended up looking at the extensive presence of US bases. At the time there were over a hundred bases and installations in South Korea, which is about one-fourth the size of California. I was shocked. There were lots of military personnel. There’s a base right in the middle of Seoul. Although I did not speak Korean, I spoke Japanese, and the way I could communicate with many of the Korean people of a particular generation was through Japanese. That was because of the Japanese colonization of Korea.

So here I am, in the middle of Seoul, having the US passport and speaking Japanese, and finding myself connected to these two imperial nations that had and is having such an impact on Korea. Because of how I look—pretty ambiguous—people couldn’t figure me out. I remember being in a phone booth, trying to make a phone call, and somebody taps on the window and asks me in very rough English, “Are you Filipina?” and I said, “No.” On this one day, and all the time I was there were these kinds of micro things happening, and all the macro and global things happening right in the middle of Seoul. I can look backwards and see my location much better than I could when I was there. So by getting a sense of the importance of “nation,” looking at militarism, looking at my own origin in a military context, and looking at Korea, and then through my friend Gwyn [Kirk] making the connections of the bases in the Philippines, Korea, Okinawa, and Japan is how we launched the International Women’s Network against Militarism.⁴ It started as East Asia–US Women’s Network against U.S. Militarism in 1997.⁵ That brought in the East Asian countries with US military presence as well as the US. Being part of creating the network is another example of being in a particular situation and trying to make sense of it and then something coming out of that.

CTM: Right, but it is more than also just being in a particular situation. From what I’m hearing from you, it’s also about how you anchor yourself and your identity and your politics and your questions in that particular space so that there are connections between the intellectual, political questions you take on and your own life as you see it.

MOR: That is a lovely way to put it.

LEC: In some ways you are the embodiment of all those intersections and contradictions. It helps you to really understand them, not only as an outsider within, like when you are in Korea, but as an insider without, as Japanese, as relating to the coloniality of Japan and Korea/the US and Korea, as you were saying before. It brings them to a center for you that makes complete sense to you individually.

MOR: Yes, and what you are saying is really a good way to talk about what my mother said to me, in a very concrete way. This was when I was very young, living in Japan, and there were some kids who were teasing me. I said to my mom, “Am I Japanese?” and she said, “Yes, you are absolutely Japanese, but that can be mostly inside the house, and when you go outside, people are going to see you as Black.” I don’t know how she knew that, but that’s exactly what you’re getting to. She gave me the permission to be both, but also to contextualize it, which was a very important early lesson.

LEC: A lesson in self-empowerment, because she is giving you permission to be.

MOR: Yes, and she must have understood it on some level for herself as well.

CTM: It is a very concrete way to understand multiple identities—that they are not multiple in the sense of one plus one plus one, but they are multiple in the sense of the layers that we live, that are relevant at all moments of our lives. You may be Japanese indoors, but you are also African American.

MOR: It depends on the context. Those glass jars that have multicolored layered sand? They’re different colors, but they’re not layered absolutely horizontally. You can see the ways that the sand settles, and if you shake it up, you get a different image.

CTM: Nice image about multiplicity. Sometimes the way we talk about those things, we separate stuff. It’s difficult to talk about in-tersectionality and multiplicity in dynamic ways, and this is a very dynamic image of shifts.

MOR: I think that’s how I experience my life. Things change a lot. Certain things always remain. They get moved to different places, depending on where I am. It is through my work with the network where I really began to understand what transnational feminist praxis is about, and the core of it is building strong relationships. It is the sturdy connections that keep the network going. It’s not just the tasks. Of course we are about the various activities and actions, but over the years—now the network is going on twenty years—it is the quality of the relationships among the members. There’s a core group of us in all the countries, and it’s those relationships that have really carried the day. For example, I just came back from Gwyn’s seventieth birthday party, and every country group sent something talking about the impact she’s had on their lives and the network.

CTM: It must have been so moving.

MOR: It was very moving, because in the moment you’re not thinking about what impact are you going to make; you’re just fully present, engaging, doing the work, being human, being feminist. Looking back, all of these things are brought forward, so to speak, and you are reminded that you don’t necessarily think about what impact you’re having in the moment.

CTM: How did this lead you to Palestine?

MOR: There was a conference in 2003, called “Womanoeuvres: Feminist Debates on Peace and Security.” It was in Zurich. A friend of mine named Malathi de Alwis,⁶ a Sri Lankan feminist whom I had met in another context, emailed me and said, look, there is a conference going on, and there is nothing from Asia, maybe you should send them something. So, uncharacteristically forward, I did. I sent them an email and said, “Maybe I can contribute something about Asia,” and immediately they replied, and I ended up there. It was just an amazing experience. One of the highlights, of course, was meeting my friend, the late Maha Abu-Dayyeh.⁷ I gave a keynote and she gave a keynote, then we ended up in a workshop together, where she and Cynthia Cockburn were talking about women living under occupation and militarism and I was in the audience.⁸ We got to know each other through that conference, then about a year and a half later she invited me to come to help start the research and documentation unit at her organization, the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling in Ramallah and Jerusalem at the time.⁹ I just couldn’t believe it, and of course I went. When things come up so serendipitously, I always jump at it and then see what’s in store for me. That was exactly ten years ago.

Similar to my time in South Korea, I started thinking about what it means to be connected to the US, as part of an occupying force, and my country, the USA, being a supporter and the foundation of the occupation—economic, political, and ideological. And what it means to be in Ramallah or the West Bank, more broadly, or occupied East Jerusalem, and doing the work I’m doing, and asking questions about what is my role there. I was invited there. I didn’t just barge in or go on a tourist adventure, but it still raises those questions. What is my role, what is my responsibility, and how do I enter into those places? Ten years later I can say with all humility that it’s about the quality of the relationships—of going in, unassuming, and absolutely showing up and actually being of service, in whatever ways I could. And then, the other side of that is seeing the disconnect between academics and the NGO [nongovernmental organization] folks. I was very in the swim with the NGO people, and less connected with the academics. One of the reasons I was brought in is there was a sense, among staff at the center as well as Maha, that the academics do what academics often do: gather the data, use the knowledge of those at the center, and then not really give them credit, or not be very service-oriented. In Palestine it’s very specific, because everybody knows each other, and there’s a history of struggle, but at the same time there’s still a structural divide.

I remember having a conversation with one academic, at Birzeit [University], and she was asking me what kind of research I was teaching. I said, “Well, I come from the perspective of feminist research methodologies and really honoring women’s experiences, and so it tends to be qualitative.” And she was so adamant and said, “That’s going to get you nowhere, and that’s not going to show you anything.” I was shocked at the vehemence with which she came back at me. I said, “Well, I disagree with you, and it seems that the ways that we’re talking about research at the center resonate with the staff and the volunteers who are working with us. So let’s just agree to disagree.” I saw her when I was at Maha’s funeral, and she was very emotional with me, not just about the passing of Maha. I inferred from that that maybe she had some second thoughts.

CTM: I am thinking about how you conceptualize being a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: An Archive of Feminist Activism
• 1. No Freedom without Connection
• 2. Troubling Explanatory Frameworks
• 3. Materializing Class, Historicizing Culture
• 4. Being in Motion
• 5. Bridging through Time
• 6. Searching for Truth in Community
• 7. Toward a New Feminist Politics of Possibility and Solidarity
• Postscript: Toward a Politics of Refusal and Hope
• Biographies
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover