Yebo, sisonkhe

I have two weeks left in Swaziland.  I was going to write about joy.  The joy I feel living here.  The funny little moments in the grocery store where three or four cultures collide at once and I smile and buy my cheese and Swazi Times and feel so lucky to be here.  But I don’t think I can do that right now.

I was born in Santa Barbara.  My baby brother goes to school there.  I’ll be getting married there next year.  Getting lunch on the way back from Kruger, the TV was tuned to SkyNews and a Santa Barbara county Sherriff was describing a mass shooting.  I was frantic – where?  Who?  And slowly I learned that my baby brother, his friends, our family, were all fine, and slowly I learned more about what had happened in Isla Vista, and why.

This hashtag, YesAllWomen, breaks my heart and gives me hope.  This is the first time I have ever seen wedding blogs and science writers simultaneously address the treacherous, uneven bog that walking through the world as a woman can be.  I am overwhelmed by the sameness of these experiences, the wave of women’s voices saying they all feel this way.  The way that I thought maybe I was weak for feeling too, when instead I should always be smart and brave and adventurous and unafraid.

Tonight a friend told me about a conversation she had had with a bright, educated, hopeful young woman here in Swaziland.  The girl carries around condoms with her all the time.  Just in case.  Not just in case she meets somebody and wants to have a safe, spontaneous experience.  In case she is raped, she hopes she can at least talk the assailant into not getting her pregnant.  Last week another friend told me about a gardener who had molested an 8 year old girl.  Because there was no ‘forensic evidence’ the police wouldn’t do anything.  So the family tracked the man down and beat the hell out of him instead.  It wasn’t his first offense.

The papers in Swaziland are full of men murdering women, men raping women, men being outraged that women would suggest they have the right to own property, work, exist as equal human beings.  It is tempting to separate what is happening in America from what is happening in Swaziland.  Oh, those Africans, they are so backwards.  Sentencing gay people to death and treating women like second class citizens.

But yes, all women.  All women, in Africa and in America, we all live in fear of men.  No, not all men, but we all of us live under this constant threat of violence, this constant fear that comes with something as elemental as our gender.  We are, all of us, told that we are less than human, that we count for our ability to be fucked and not our ability to think interesting thoughts and do good things.  The experience takes different shapes, but the fact of it is the same.  I have been harassed in Swaziland, in South Africa, in Tanzania, California, Maryland, and Georgia.  I don’t sit too close to men on the bus because South Africa, and I won’t let men get too close to me in clubs because Los Angeles.

This is, pardon my language: fucked up.  I am drawn to my work for many reasons, but so much of it is that  while I have more privilege and more voice than the women I work with, talk to, pass on the street every day, we are still the same.  It is not my job to speak for Swazi women, to take their voice, but in this one way we are the same.  Yes, we are all women.  Yes, all women are constantly told we are a little bit or a lot less than human.  Yes, all women know this same fear.  It is intimate, it lives with us, haunts our memories, leers in our windows at night, warns us not to walk too close or trust too much.  I want to contribute in some small way to making people see this.  It devastates me that we all walk in a world shaped this way.  It infuriates me that yes, all women navigate these same dangerous paths together.  I am driven to come here over and over again, to spend my day thinking about HIV, violence, hunger, poverty, and inequality, not because the experience of women in Swaziland in South Africa is so unlike mine, but because at the core it is the same.

There is no difference between us.  My sisters in South Africa live in a country where a quarter of men have admitted to raping a woman.  My friends in America have been told not to make trouble, or to stop being such a bitch when they were assaulted by friends or classmates.  Yes, all women.  All of us.  This is personal.  I don’t know how to make it stop.  But I don’t know what else to do but try in some small way to push back.