Dirty Ways the Single-Story Robs Our Dignity

"There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you." - Maya Angelou

Imagine, you're trapped in a country. Rumours are spreading that you're either an Ethiopian spy or a drug dealer. Foreigners and local alike are spreading their clout. As a last resort, you go to your embassy in hopes of assistance. Only to find that your instincts, which kept you from going earlier, are verified.

"Well we share information with the ISI (Internal Security Intelligence)," she says, while speaking in code to your lawyer. "After all, the passport is our property."

In essence, conveying a message that you are their property.

Fast-forward to a year later, you're in Cairo, your phone is hot and the embassy is keen on spreading rumours as a means of letting you know whose the master.

Never once do they bother to ask for your side of the story. In fact, nor do those who are being fed the rumours. As a result, a select few have used their power to make their story the definitive story of you. This was my story.

How the Single-Story Steals One's Dignity

Globally, world leaders, state-run, and mainstream media have left Mama Earth's children in agony. We burn with untold stories of injustice, poverty, and a desire to no longer be treated like slave labour in their factories and corporations otherwise known as countries and borders.

Have you ever felt like that?

Several months ago, I had the pleasure of discovering a TED talk by novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie that I wish to share it with you.

Here is an excerpt from the talk:

"The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story."

"Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African states, and not with the colonial creation of the African states, and you have an entirely different story."

Introducing Migrant Stories 

As an experiment, I've put together a short eMagazine. It's a collection of stories from women forced across borders.

I made this especially for the Her Blueprint audience.

It is my firm belief that when we stop and listen to one another's story without judgement then we're able to correct what world leaders have undone. They've torn us, the earth's citizens, apart.

Recently, the world celebrated Mother's Day but how many of you took time out to give remembrance to Mama Earth? When was the last time you sat in silence and listened to her story? Every day she speaks to us. Every day she burns in agony that she can't capture our attention long enough because she too wants to be heard.

And respected.
And adored.
As well as have her dignity restored.

Enjoy the eMagazine.  Click here to grab your copy!

CLIO TALKS BACK: Why did so many young Irish women leave Ireland?

Early Irish Immigrants

In the years 1885-1920 nearly 700,000 mostly single women under the age of 24 left family farms in Ireland to seek a better life in the cities of North America. They travelled by themselves across the Atlantic Ocean. No family members – no fathers, mothers, husbands or brothers accompanied them. Single women emigrants from Ireland in these years outnumbered male emigrants – exceptional among European migrants to the New World.

Why did so many young Irish women emigrate? In those years of great deprivation following the famine years when Ireland’s potato crops collapsed, they simply sought a better life, one which would – according to Janet Nolan – allow them to reclaim their earlier status, to earn their keep, to marry as they chose, and – most of all – to create lives free of severe hardship. Many (well over two-thirds) first sought employment as domestic servants in the cities of the eastern United States. They generally married after a few years and often bore large numbers of children. Upwardly mobile, many of the offspring of the families these young women founded, obtained an education and became wildly successful by the standards of the land their mothers had abandoned.

What is striking in Nolan’s account of this emigration in her book, “Ourselves Alone,” was that, very unusual for the times, the young women’s travel was mostly financed by female relatives. Networks of older women helping younger women. Older women sending back money to help their little sisters and nieces emigrate as they had. In Nolan’s words (p. 95),“They were the first generation of Irish women to realize fully their own social and economic modernization as women.”

Then, when the emigrant women were settled in their new country, many of them sent money home to assist those who had remained behind – for example, to purchase a horse to replace the one that had died. Ironically, “the most expendable group in post-Famine Ireland – dependent daughters and sisters – became the saviors of a society that could not have remained intact save by their emigration and their remittances” (p. 71).

Some of these emigrant women and their daughters became prominent labor organizers in the U.S. Nolan names Kate Mullany, organizer of the laundry workers in Troy, New York; Leonora Barry, head of the women’s work committee for the Knights of Labor; Mary Kenny O’Sullivan, of the A. F. L. [American Federation of Labor]; Leonora O’Reilly, of the Women’s Trade Union League; and Mother Jones (Mary Harris Jones) and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, respectively founder and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World. All these women activists supported equal pay for equal work and the rights of laboring women.

Clio celebrates the courage and initiative of these thousands of Irish emigrant women to bettering their condition by “packing up and leaving,” to create new lives in a new country.

Source: Janet Ann Nolan, Ourselves Alone: Women’s Emigration From Ireland, 1885-1920 (University of Kentucky Press, 1989).

1000 WORDS: Rebuilding

When most of the men in the village of San Miguel Amatitlan in Mexico left to find jobs in other cities or countries, the women in the village took on new roles and new challenges. From Marcela Taboada's work in Focusing on Latin America, "Women of Clay."

When Home and Work are Separated by Hundreds of Miles

Photographer Arianna Sanesi submitted a photo essay to Economica that's really gotten under my skin. Arianna's photo essay, "Ludmilla's Story," captures a Ukrainian woman named Ludmilla who returns home from working as an elder caregiver in Italy to see her family in the Ukraine for the first time in three years.

Can you imagine going three years without seeing your family? This is one of those sacrifices that women around the world make all the time. I'll often complain about a 30 minute commute, or how hard it is to visit parents or friends who live in other parts of the country. "I haven't seen them in months!" I'll complain. Of course, Ludmilla's sacrifice is for her family. She sends a portion of her earnings back home every month, and some of the money she sends back was used to help pay for her daughter's wedding. It's a difficult position to be in--one many middle class American women (like me) will likely never face.

Apparently the trend of hiring migrant careworkers is growing in Italy, where families have the resources to pay for carework, and no time to take on the job themselves. Apparently the Ukrainian immigrant population in Italy is growing exponentially as a result of this demand--Ukraine was particularly hurt by the economic crisis, and the country's current inflation rate is nearing 17%. This seems to be just another iteration of that classic economic concept of supply and demand--Ukraine has the supply of unemployed women caregivers, and Italy has the demand for this kind of skilled labor. But the emotional and personal impact of this harsh economic reality is still mind boggling.

Economica: Women and the Global Economy [The International Museum of Women]
Ludmilla's Story [Economica]