News of August
Terrible news from Afghanistan which, with the arrival of the Taliban, is about to go back twenty years. The burqa is back, women will be required once again to be accompanied everywhere by a male chaperon, barred from leaving home without a man: the price tags are back on women’s and girls’ lives, while from the streets, where only men have been circulating for days, the posters portraying uncovered female faces disappear. The most affected will be all those women who had managed to go abroad to study, who had taken important degrees and then returned to their country only to see it grow, to give their contribution for a radical change where they could finally be active players. Educated women but mostly single women, already listed by the Taliban, while mothers throw their children over the barbed wire at Kabul airport, in the hope that American soldiers will take them away with them. In this new old regime, motherhood will be the only real task required of women, and it does not matter whether these new children to be fed to the Islamic Emirate will be really wanted, fruits of informed and autonomous choices or of unspeakable violence and brainwashing. As a sign of resistance and support to our Afghan sisters, Lunàdigas can only continue to do what it has always done: give voice to women, with courage and without compromises. Give voice to women who still dare to speak of the unspeakable, who claim the right to choose for their own life, despite having to deal with the pain of prejudice, ostracism, and the taboo that the choice of non-motherhood still carries with it, even in our “civilized” Western world. Giving voice to women by showing their faces.
Along with every nuance and every emotion, every wrinkle, every dimple, every smile and every shadow, every small gesture of their hands and every sparkle in their eyes, a living testimony of their existence, launched against anyone who would like to see women imprisoned and erased from the History. The protagonists of this month’s Live Archive, in this August marked by an attack aimed at erasing years of conquests and hopes, are two Lunàdigas who, in different ways, have committed themselves to the cause of women and children: on the one hand the volcanic and wonderful Rossella Faa, a Sardinian singer and musician, who talks about her desire for motherhood “miraculously” faded away at the news of not being able to have children, and her pain for the children of the world orphaned by wars, poverty and human wickedness, to which she gave voice in her compositions; on the other, the trade unionist and activist Luisa Morgantini, who proudly affirms her choice not to bow to any unwritten law for women, whether biological or social, and who tells of her activism as a citizen of the world in conflict zones full of violence.
Always with our heads held high and our faces uncovered even in Afghanistan, Palestine, Iran, as a sign of respect for our identity, and at the same time of resistance and sisterhood with the women of every place where she has been.
