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Francesca Bortolotto Possati, The Ambassador of Venetian Elegance Muslim Women in Transition Juliette Foster The Saga of a Novel: One Woman’s Story The Resilience of the Women of Tajikistan Alessandra Ghisleri. The most powerful woman in Italy has got your number.
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Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 1
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MISSION STATEMENT BY THE EDITORS Dante and Beatrice p. 6
Food for thought p. 8
DIVINA COMMEDIA AROUND THE WORLD p.12
index FILM
Eden: A Film Journey into Human Bondage p. 52
DESIGN
Closing the Gap: Women and Furniture Design p. 60
POLITICS
The Ambassador of Venetian Elegance p. 16
A Woman’s Place is on the Front Line: The Evolution of Female Combat Soldiers p. 68
Reigning Supreme over Salzburg’s Olympus p. 26
Muslim Women in Transition p. 76
ART AND CULTURE
LITERATURE
The Saga of a Novel: One Woman’s Story p. 32
MUSIC
Joana Carneiro: The Maestrina Conducts Further Ahead p. 40 Rock Divas p. 46
BUSINESS
The Most Powerful Woman in Italy Has Got Your Number p. 84 Kem Issara: Fashion and Business in the 21st Century p. 92
COVER
Am I a Human? A Look at the War on Women p. 80
Window of the soul Beneath the Veil p. 114
MENS SANA IN CORPORE SANO TRAVEL In Transition: The Resilience of the Women of Tajikistan p. 122 La Isla Bonita p. 130 Health Serotonin: The Happy Hormone? p. 138 FOOD Delight & Function: The Indispensable Art of Intelligent Snacking p. 144
COLUMNS Nonno Panda tales Nonno Panda and... The Gorilla Strike - Part II p. 148 Leviathan.. p. 152 Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 3
catandnat.com! Our website is the first English lifestyle website and content-based magazine to not only highlight the latest trends in Thailand, but also discuss the cultural issues and opinions expressed by prominent people living here.
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contributors Editor in Chief Massimo Gava
Business Editor Martin Shah
Deputy Editor Caroline Udall
European Correspondent Mattia Braida
Editor at Large Chris Kline
Online Design Editor Lavinia Todd
Editor Asia and Middle East Joseph Mayton
Online Research Editor Mary Shulze
International Editor Reya von Galen
Art Director Nicola Sasso
Design and Architecture Editor Julian Taylor
International Correspondent Mike Jerovia
Photography Director Annagiulia Santoro
Director of New Media and Web Adargoma Mejias-Sanabria
Sub-Culture Editor Rufus Smith
Sales and Marketing UK Antonio Sanna
Music Editor Dean Sabino
Marketing and Communication Italy Novella Donelli Just in Time http://justintimesrl.wordpress.com
Copy Editor Philip Rham Arts Editor Jean Philippe Vernes Associated Research Editor Louis Romero
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Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 5
Letter from the Editors
Letter from the Editors
S
Sometime around the year 1274, when he was nine years old and she about eight, Dante Alighieri saw Beatrice Portinari for the very first time. Though he did not speak to her, then or after, he immediately fell deeply in love with her. He did not see her again until nine years later, when she was seventeen. They met in the street, she was accompanied by two older women. She greeted him and then she and her companions passed by. Dante was so overcome by her salutation that he retreated to his room to ponder the encounter. There he slept, fell into a dream, and emerged with the first sonnet in La Vita Nuova. Dante, in legend, only encountered Beatrice this couple of times. She died at the age of 24. She would become his muse and the centre of some of his works, including his greatest, The Divine Comedy. If, in fact, Beatrice Portinari was the real-life model for the Beatrice of Dante’s works (most scholars now agree she probably was - though there are doubters) then he knew almost nothing of her real character or of who she herself was, as a flesh-and-blood human being. This left him free, of course, to place her at the centre of his poems of courtly love, with their romanticised conventions and stylisations and also to invoke her as his guide in the heavens in the grand allegories of the Divine Comedy. He could project all that was good upon her, fulfil an idealised vision of a woman embodying the very qualities of the perfect, the good and the beautiful. He did so with such effect that he created some of the greatest works in world literature. In his ‘relationship’ with Beatrice, however, he never had to confront a bad mood, moments of melancholy, headaches, frustrations, exhaustion at the end of a long day, demands, needs, contradictory opinions, hormonal surges, the occasional inopportune breaking of wind. His – and therefore our – image of her is never tarnished by anything so mundane. There is no shadow in Dante’s depiction of Beatrice. But what might Beatrice herself say if she were allowed to speak for herself beyond that one brief, late-adolescent greeting on the street? What if she were allowed her voice and thereby the full expression of her own humanity? We’ll never know, of course, and there are those who will say it doesn’t matter. Dante said it all for her, and it was incontestably a glorious addition to our culture. It seems in some ways that we have not moved out of this state of male-female relations since the medieval days of Dante and Beatrice. Men project all that is good within themselves onto women
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and breathtaking poetry (and other good things) can result. Men also project all that is bad within themselves – their own desires, appetites, dark impulses – onto women and atrocities result. In either case, women are denied their humanity. Women and men have been working their way to a new integration, a new way of being between the sexes – slowly, painfully, sometimes violently – since at least the time of the Enlightenment. It is a multi-generational project and we, in our time, must move it forward for the next generation to advance, just as it has been advanced to us. We see, in nearly all societies – even in the West, which in many ways has progressed the furthest in feminist terms – backlash, anger, resistance, and recrimination. This backlash comes from some women who disdain and reject the efforts of the generations before them, while at the same time enjoying the very advantages that have been bought for them – for them specifically – by their foremothers and forefathers, at considerable cost. But backlash comes in the main from men who, it seems, are in the midst of an existential panic. There is somewhere at the heart of the contemporary ‘conflict’ between men and women a fear that grows more virulent in its expression, the more men’s projections – and their dominance – are threatened. As the screen that women have traditionally presented to men for projection becomes narrower, that is, as women continue to assert their full humanity, men must pull in those projections, face their shadow impulses and integrate those impulses with their nobler ones. In short, they can no longer either culturally or individually corral women into functioning as their soul, their anima. They must be able to live their own emotional lives and meet women as full and fully equal human beings with independent lives – both internal and external – of their own. So perhaps if Beatrice could magically come to our day, and could speak, full-throatedly with her own voice, she might say something along these lines: ‘Dear Dante, it is long past time for you to break free from visions and look at me, at my real human presence. You have not developed your own soul – you have channelled it through me and then worshipped it from afar. ‘There is nothing, ultimately, to fear, either from the depths of your own soul, no matter how dark, nor from me. You have no need of guns or swords or their proxies; the only ground you need to stand on is the ground within your own mind and heart. What I need and want is simply the full expression of my own humanity. That is something you cannot give me. It is something I can only claim to.
Letter from the Editors
‘What I expect from you is that you listen. Stand still and let your feet settle into the Earth. Listen. I will tell you what my lived experience is. I will live in my own flesh, and I will do so without your leave. Just exactly as you do in your flesh. ‘I have come to this place in history at great cost and with great struggle. I can go no further until you begin to bear your part of the burden. Stop; breathe; let your heart slow down. Pull in your projections. See who I am. I am neither dream, nor vision, nor hallucination, nor a vessel of your dark desires. ‘And then do your own work. ‘Your work is to do what the men in Tahrir Square did in Egypt when they stood in a ring around their sisters to protect them from the gangs of men who would rape them. Rather than send women into confinement for their own ‘protection’, they stood and said, no! These are our fellow human beings. We will no longer countenance your violence against them or protect you in it. ‘Do what male journalists in India have begun to do – to put their names and faces online in a viral protest, posing with placards decrying the epidemic of gang rapes in their country and protesting at the lack of investigation and punishment of the perpetrators.
Three women (Beatrice, Laura and Orsolina) that three Italian poets (Dante, Petrarca, Ariosto) loved. Created by Boulanger, published in Magasin Pittoresque, Paris, 1840 ‘Do it not because, as the American president put it, women are ‘your’ sisters, ‘your’ wives, ‘your’ daughters, ‘your’ mothers. Do it because they are human beings. You owe it to them simply on those terms, and on those simple terms they deserve it.’ In this issue of Dante, dedicated to Beatrice, we hope you, our readers, will stop and listen, and begin to hear her voice. Dante & Beatrice Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 7
Food For Thought!
Food For Thought! by Caroline Udall Malala Yousafzai: The Girl Who Lived ‘Harry, Harry.... Don’t you see? Voldemort himself created his worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realise that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back!...’ ‘But –’ ‘It is essential that you understand this!’ said Dumbledore, standing up and striding about the room, his glittering robes swooshing in his wake. Harry had never seen him so agitated. ‘By attempting to kill you, Voldemort himself singled out the remarkable person who sits here in front of me, and gave him the tools for the job!’ ...[Harry] understood at last what Dumbledore had been trying to tell him. It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew – and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents – that there was all the difference in the world. - J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
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Food For Thought!
I
It might seem strange to introduce the words of a girl who was the target of a real and nearly lethal attack on her life by quoting the words of woman who has written a famous fantastical account of an imaginary world. But JK Rowling, whose first professional job was as a researcher and administrative assistant at Amnesty International, understands tyranny. (Google her 2008 Harvard commencement speech – it is well worth a listen.) Beneath its confectionary childhood treats, the Harry Potter series is an outraged cri de coeur – against racism, sexism, classism, and the violence of oppression in whatever form. The series itself begins with an attempt to murder a child perceived to be a threat to the powerful. And in the above exchange between that child, the eponymous hero, and his mentor, Rowling cuts straight into the hearts and minds of tyrants. For it is ultimately fear that drove the attack on Malala Yousafzai: fear of free, educated minds; fear of losing control of people’s hearts, thoughts, bodies; fear that fear itself is beginning to lose its grip; and perhaps most of all for the Taliban, fear of women. That last is a fear I confess I do not fully understand. But in Malala’s case all the fears of tyrants came to be embodied in one delicate, yet thunderously powerful young girl who stood up and insisted on her right to the free use and development of her own mind. She rose up against the tyrants in her world and struck back – not with blows, or bullets, or violence, but with the power of truth, the rightness of justice, and the courage of her own soul. The deadly fear of that terrifying threat was enough to unleash the death-eating fury of the Taliban on October 9, 2012, when Malala and two friends were shot by an assassin while travelling home on a school bus. Yet she survived, as did her friends. Through the ministrations of healthcare workers and government officials of many nations, and through their own tremendous will, they were brought to safety and they now live. And in an act of jaw-dropping strength and courage, on July 16, 2013, only nine months after being shot in the head at point blank range, Malala stood at the lectern in the United Nations, with the white shawl of the martyred
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Food For Thought!
Benazhir Bhutto wrapped around her shoulders like an embrace, and called on world leaders to make education available and compulsory for all children, male and female, throughout the world. It was her 16th birthday – one she very nearly did not live to see. Dante is proud to present the text of her historic speech in full. “In the name of God, the most beneficent, the most merciful. Honourable UN Secretary General Mr. Ban Ki-moon, respected president of the General Assembly Vuk Jeremic, honorable UN envoy for global education Mr. Gordon Brown, respected elders and my dear brothers and sisters: Assalamu alaikum. Today is it an honour for me to be speaking again after a long time. Being here with such honourable people is a great moment in my life and it is an honour for me that today I am wearing a shawl of the late Benazir Bhutto. I don’t know where to begin my speech. I don’t know what people would be expecting me to say, but first of all thank you to God for whom we all are equal and thank you to every person who has prayed for my fast recovery and new life. I cannot believe how much love people have shown me. I have received thousands of good wish cards and gifts from all over the world. Thank you to all of them. Thank you to the children whose innocent words encouraged me. Thank you to my elders whose prayers strengthened me. I would like to thank my nurses, doctors and the staff of the hospitals in Pakistan and the UK and the UAE government who have helped me to get better and recover my strength. I fully support UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in his Global Education First Initiative and the work of UN Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown and the respectful president of the UN General Assembly Vuk Jeremic. I thank them for the leadership they continue to give. They continue to inspire all of us to action. Dear brothers and sisters, do remember one thing: Malala Day is not my day. Today is the day of every woman, every boy and every girl who have raised their voice for their rights. There are hundreds of human rights activists and social workers who are not DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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only speaking for their rights, but who are struggling to achieve their goal of peace, education and equality. Thousands of people have been killed by the terrorists and millions have been injured. I am just one of them. So here I stand. So here I stand, one girl, among many. I speak not for myself, but so those without a voice can be heard. Those who have fought for their rights. Their right to live in peace. Their right to be treated with dignity. Their right to equality of opportunity. Their right to be educated. Dear friends, on 9 October 2012, the Taliban shot me on the left side of my forehead. They shot my friends, too. They thought that the bullets would silence us, but they failed. And out of that silence came thousands of voices. The terrorists thought they would change my aims and stop my ambitions. But nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage were born. I am the same Malala. My ambitions are the same. My hopes are the same. And my dreams are the same. Dear sisters and brothers, I am not against anyone. Neither am I here to speak in terms of personal revenge against the Taliban or any other terrorist group. I am here to speak for the right of education for every child. I want education for the sons and daughters of the Taliban and all the terrorists and extremists. I do not even hate the Talib who shot me. Even if there was a gun in my hand and he was standing in front of me, I would not shoot him. This is the compassion I have learned from Mohammed, the prophet of mercy, Jesus Christ and Lord Buddha. This is the legacy of change I have inherited from Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Mohammed Ali Jinnah. This is the philosophy of nonviolence that I have learned from Gandhi, Bacha Khan and Mother Teresa. And this is the forgiveness that I have learned from my father and from my mother. This is what my soul is telling me: be peaceful and love everyone. Dear sisters and brothers, we realise the importance of light when we see darkness. We realise the importance of our voice when we are silenced. In the same way, when we were in Swat, the north of Pakistan, we realised the importance of pens and books when we saw the guns. The wise saying,
Food For Thought!
“The pen is mightier than the sword.” It is true. The extremists are afraid of books and pens. The power of education frightens them. They are afraid of women. The power of the voice of women frightens them. This is why they killed 14 innocent students in the recent attack in Quetta. And that is why they kill female teachers. That is why they are blasting schools every day because they were and they are afraid of change and equality that we will bring to our society. And I remember that there was a boy in our school who was asked by a journalist why are the Taliban against education? He answered very simply by pointing to his book, he said, “a Talib doesn’t know what is written inside this book.” They think that God is a tiny, little conservative being who would point guns at people’s heads just for going to school. These terrorists are misusing the name of Islam for their own personal benefit. Pakistan is a peace-loving, democratic country. Pashtuns want education for their daughters and sons. Islam is a religion of peace, humanity and brotherhood. It is the duty and responsibility to get education for each child, that is what it says. Peace is a necessity for education. In many parts of the world, especially Pakistan and Afghanistan, terrorism, war and conflicts stop children from going to schools. We are really tired of these wars. Women and children are suffering in many ways in many parts of the world. In India, innocent and poor children are victims of child labour. Many schools have been destroyed in Nigeria. People in Afghanistan have been affected by extremism. Young girls have to do domestic child labour and are forced to get married at an early age. Poverty, ignorance, injustice, racism and the deprivation of basic rights are the main problems, faced by both men and women. Today I am focusing on women’s rights and girls’ education because they are suffering the most. There was a time when women activists asked men to stand up for their rights. But this time we will do it by ourselves. I am not telling men to step away from speaking for women’s rights, but I am focusing on women to be independent and fight for themselves. So dear sisters and brothers, now it’s time to speak up. So today, we call upon the world leaders to change their strategic policies in favour of
peace and prosperity. We call upon the world leaders that all of these deals must protect women and children’s rights. A deal that goes against the rights of women is unacceptable. We call upon all governments to ensure free, compulsory education all over the world for every child. We call upon all the governments to fight against terrorism and violence. To protect children from brutality and harm. We call upon the developed nations to support the expansion of education opportunities for girls in the developing world. We call upon all communities to be tolerant, to reject prejudice based on caste, creed, sect, colour, religion or agenda to ensure freedom and equality for women so they can flourish. We cannot all succeed when half of us are held back. We call upon our sisters around the world to be brave, to embrace the strength within themselves and realise their full potential. Dear brothers and sisters, we want schools and education for every child’s bright future. We will continue our journey to our destination of peace and education. No one can stop us. We will speak up for our rights and we will bring change to our voice. We believe in the power and the strength of our words. Our words can change the whole world because we are all together, united for the cause of education. And if we want to achieve our goal, then let us empower ourselves with the weapon of knowledge and let us shield ourselves with unity and togetherness. Dear brothers and sisters, we must not forget that millions of people are suffering from poverty and injustice and ignorance. We must not forget that millions of children are out of their schools. We must not forget that our sisters and brothers are waiting for a bright, peaceful future. So let us wage, so let us wage a glorious struggle against illiteracy, poverty and terrorism, let us pick up our books and our pens, they are the most powerful weapons. One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world. Education is the only solution. Education first. Thank you.”
Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 11
comedy THE DIVINE Around the World
Half along our life’s path. Lost in a dark wood. Unable to find the right way….
PARADISO Dear Beatrice… CANTO I
A ninety-two-year-old widower has married a woman seventy years younger than him. Moussali Mohammed alMoujamaie, a farmer from Goubban, a village in central Iraq, has celebrated his wedding at the same time as that of one of his grandchildren. The (young) happy couple are aged 16 and 17. ‘I am very happy to be married for the second time and the same day as my grandchildren, I have kept asking them to wait for me till I have found the perfect woman,’ he said the day of the celebration. The new wife, Mouna Moukhlif al-Joubariis, comes from the same village and said she hoped to be accepted by his sixteen children and that she hoped she would make her husband happy. And why shouldn’t she be accepted by Moujamaie’s twelve sons and four daughters. They will not have to worry when their father gets old . . . I meant older . . . a good caretaker will be on the spot. What love can do these days!. . . . Let’s wish the best to the happy couple. .
CANTO II
We go from one happy woman to an 11-year-old bride from Yemen, Nada al Ahdal, who has refused an arranged marriage and posted her video online, moving the entire world with her story. Her father sold her to a rich Yemeni man who lives in Saudi Arabia, but her uncle rescued her. ‘I’d rather die than be married,’ she said in the video she recorded and posted on YouTube. She stated in her own simple words: ‘I escaped from my family. I cannot live with them anymore. I want to be with my uncle. What have girls like me done to deserve to be married like this? I managed to escape, but many girls like
me cannot.’ Her protest reached the Arab media first, then her story was fully reported on a Lebanese news site by Yemeni activist and journalist Hind Al Eryani. The English translation has been seen around the world by more than five million viewers. ‘To any family, I want to tell them: Why do you want to kill our dreams? What have we done to deserve this?’ Nada lives at Sana in Yemen with her uncle Abdel Salam al Ahdal, a graphic designer and technician who works for a local TV station. Although Nada’s video message to the press seems to resemble more the thoughts of an adult rather than those of a 11-year-old girl, what this story has brought to light is the dramatic situation of girls like Nada who have been less fortunate. A study made by the UN in 2006 states that 50% of girls from the Yemen have married before they reach eighteen and 14% of them even before the age of 15. There is no law on the minimum age of marriage in the Yemen. In poor countries, according to a UNICEF report, pregnancy and birth complications are the principal cause of death for girls aged 15-19. It is a fate Nada seems, thankfully, to have managed to escape.
CANTO III
One happy marriage, one escape from an arranged one, and finally, a divorce. It was pretty much in the air; rumours have suddenly been swirling of late. Even if you are Catherine Zeta Jones – and who has reputedly objected to them - when your husband of eleven years goes public stating that he probably contracted his cancer
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of the mouth through oral sex, it not only casts serious doubt on the relationship, it rather ruins the image of a beautiful, Hollywood, Oscar-winning actress. A moment of senility, perhaps? Misquoted? Not sure, considering that when we are talking about this star couple, everything is so carefully managed. Anyway, whatever the secret dynamic of their relationship may be, it is, in the end, their own business. However, since all their health problems have been public knowledge for so long now, it has somehow become ours as well.
Oh! Dear Beatrice, a divorce is always a bad thing for couples and the children involved, even if $300 million is at stake. But as another Hollywood star said: “Think what you can do with that money! You can buy a better therapist, but is that really enough? Maybe. Who knows? They are, after all, in a league of their own over there….
CANTO I
...the Marie Antoinettes of Italian politics. Emma Bonino, Minister of Foreign Affairs since 28 April 2013, a former EU commissioner responsible for Consumer Policy, Fisheries and the European Community Humanitarian Office (ECHO). For her engagement in the promotion of human rights and civil rights in the world, she received the Open Society Prize in 2004 and the Prix Femmes d’Europe 2004 for Italy. Laura Boldrini, President of the Chamber of Deputies of Italy since 16 March 2013. From 1998 to 2012 she was spokesperson of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), for whom she also coordinated public information campaigns in Southern Europe. In recent years she has specifically dealt with the influx of migrants and refugees in the Mediterranean. She has taken part in numerous missions to crisis spots, including the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Caucasus, Angola and Rwanda. Anna Maria Cancellieri is the former Italian Minister of the Interior and the current Minister of Justice. These are three women who stayed silent when Alma Shalabayeva and her daughter Alua were expelled or ‘illegally taken’ from Italy. The Ablyazov affair, as it has since been called, happened when the Kazakh ambassador informed the ‘non-existent’ Interior Minister that Shalabayeva and her daughter were in Italy. He said he
Purgatorio INFERNO Virgil what can be said of... did not know anything about it so it is therefore not worth mentioning his name. Nevertheless he allowed the deportation of the wife of Kazakhstan’s most wanted financial fraudster who has political asylum in the UK. We would like to think the shortsightedness of the minister of interior, deputy prime minister and party secretary in the frail coalition government is due to overwork, but we decry the silence of these three women who play key roles in respect of the treatment meted out to this woman and her six-year-old daughter, who, despite their request for political asylum, were kept apart for fifteen hours, then repatriated, on the Kazakh ambassador’s private jet to Kazakhstan, where they are now facing trial and kept hostage till the husband stumps up the money for bail. This is a perfect example of how, despite all their expertise when it comes to government and politics, there is no difference between women and men – they are as bad as each other.
CANTO II
Bradley Manning, the US soldier condemned for 35 years in prison for leaking secret documents to WikiLeaks has announced he wants to become a woman. This could be part of a defence strategy by Manning to obtain a status of mental infirmity in order to get his sentence reduced. ‘From now on I want to be called Chelsea’, he said, on The Today Show on NBC, and wants to start hormone therapy immediately. His defence attorney has blamed the psychological pressure the man has suffered during the military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy, during which gay people were tolerated as long as they did not come out. A spokesperson for the USA army said that it is not their policy to offer hormone therapy, nor surgical support for sex changes. Manning – sorry, Chelsea – is also about to ask President Obama for a pardon. Chelsea said that she enlisted voluntarily as a soldier and behaved like any other soldier in the Iraq war, but changed her mind when she saw how innocent civilians were killed. ‘We decided to hide behind national security with classified information
rather than accept our responsibility.’ Therefore she apologised for the leak, but does not regret her actions. I wonder if Edward Snowden, the other whistleblower fugitive, will consider similar action and go back to States, or if he would be better off keeping on exporting the US democracy working model abroad?
CANTO III
Is it purgatory or inferno? It is hard to tell, with the news that Irish legislators have proposed a law which allows abortion if the life of the mother is at risk. This is all in response to the horrific death last October of thirty-one-yea-old Savita Halappanavar, an Indian citizen working in Ireland as a dentist, who died in a Galway hospital in October after repeatedly having her requests for an abortion turned down. She had started to miscarry, but because there was a foetal heartbeat, her husband says, doctors refused to carry out the termination. She died of septicaemia. The tragic irony, of course, is that Savita’s abortion could have been carried out legally because it fell under the purview of a court ruling made in 1992 in a case known as the X case. In that case, a fourteen-year-old girl, pregnant as a result of a rape, was prevented from travelling to England to terminate the pregnancy and had become suicidal. The court ruled that in the case of danger to the life of the mother, including suicide, an abortion could be performed. The judgement was never codified into law (and the girl miscarried before the abortion could be carried out) and medical personnel have since had, in the words of one health care provider, ‘a sword of Damocles hanging over our heads’. If an abortion is performed with good intent, but turns out later to be adjudged to have been illegal, doctors could be in serious trouble. So women’s lives are held hostage in these situations, as ever, though perhaps it is an important symbolic shift, now that there is actually legislation in place. Women seeking abortion for other reasons will still have to travel abroad, but they may be spared a horrific death in Ireland now, if things go wrong with a pregnancy. Perhaps they’re out of the Inferno, though still wandering in Purgatory....
CANTO I
‘You’ve got to decide what to wear the night before, so you can print your own shoes and wear them in the morning’, says fashion designer Janne Kyttanen. ‘It takes about seven hours to do so from scratch.’ She has created a line of shoes with high heels to print in 3D. You can download the free file from the 3D marketplace Cubify. Choose size, colour and model, then, using a Cube X 3D printer, print out your shoes. Fiction? I don’t think so! Four different models are available in different heel patterns. So although it could be a turning point in the world of fashion, I cannot think of anything more infernal than having to plan what you are wearing seven hours before going out. What about matching outfits and what if it doesn’t print correctly? Argh! But I guess this is just the beginning of another revolution. Soon now we’ll have to pay people to come to our houses to tell us we look good because it’ll no longer be possible to exchange opinions directly in shops. Or we’ll have to send a picture on instagram. What a nightmare!
CANTO II
There is no other way to describe the scenes of violence in Cairo except as carnage. The fierce crackdown by Egypt’s militarybacked, interim government on supporters of deposed President Morsi has already caused (at time of going to press) well over six hundred deaths and the body count shows no signs of abating, as violent clashes between demonstrators and security forces ensue across the country. Alarmingly, unconfirmed casualty figures put the death toll at over 2600 men and women, but this is impossible to verify. A peaceful political resolution seems distant, as does any diplomatic intervention from outside powers. The battle lines on both sides only grow more implacable by the day. The dream of a peaceful, inclusive and democratic Egypt is on hold; instead, Egyptian streets are evocative of a civil war in the making, the showdown between secularists and the Muslim Brotherhood echoing the terror that gripped Algeria a generation ago. But is Egypt now on the road to becoming a second Iraq and could
it unravel even more and become the next Syria? Neither the present crisis nor these more dangerous parallel scenarios for escalation offers hope for reconciliation. When only the guns speak, a greater descent into hell seems the only immediate prospect on Egypt’s bloodstained horizon. Egypt is burning. What will put out the flames? Sadly nobody can say.
CANTO III
A Femen is the new Marianne of France. French president François Hollande has unveiled the new choice at the Elysee Palace on the 14th of July – Bastille Day – the most important day for the French Republic. The Marianne is the official symbol of the republic and is printed on stamps, the image periodically updated. The role in the past has been portrayed by Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Sophie Marceau. But never before has the face of the French Republic been that of a non-French heroine. The selection process took place over an entire year in schools. The kids voted for different choices and then the president chose one from among the top three. Only now has the creator, Olivier Ciappa, revealed that the new Marianne was inspired by Inna Schevchenko, the founder of the feminist movement Femen. It’s been a shock for the mostly traditional French public. It’s the sign of the times, after all, and it might pave the way for the first female president of the Republic. Marie le Pen is running high in the polls and certainly the way that Inna has taken the opportunity to express her thanks has not been, let’s say, the most conventional way…. But vive la France!, where anything can happen, even going alone to depose a Syrian dictator after the success they had in Lybia. I guess they could, right?
To what other terraces of doom and pain, dear Virgil, will you accompany me...next time...
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The Ambassador of Venetian Elegance Francesca Bortolotto Possati, interior designer, hotelier and scion of a prominent Venetian family, promotes the culture history and style of her unique hometown – not as a theme park or living museum, but as a vital, working city, looking toward its future as well as back at its past. DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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By Massimo Gava
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Francesca Bortolotto Possati in the Bauer Palladio’s garden
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Francesca Bortolotto Possati is as iconic a figure of timeless Italian style as the inimitable city upon the water in which she lives. A third-generation Venetian, she heads the family-owned Bauer hotel chain, hailed by connoisseurs of luxury boutique hotels as the most distinctive jewels in the crown of Venice’s homes-away-from-home. When almost all of Venice’s landmark hotels have been appropriated by multinational corporations, Ms Bortolotto Possati is fiercely proud that the Bauer mystique remains in local
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Villa F Hall
The Bauer il Palazzo - Bar Canale
hands. She is just as adamant that her family’s legacy will never cave in to the generic style of so many international hotels. Bortolotto Possati is proud of her Venetian roots; she revels in the grace, colour and design that the unique and ancient Venetian culture has fostered. She may adapt it and modify it to suit her creative eye, but her aim is always to let the fortunate guest know that he or she is nowhere else but in Venice. That organic sense of place is the very thing that anchors a Bauer hotel sensibility, a conscious engagement with one’s sorroundings that somehow also seems effortless. Perhaps it is best described as a love of home, and Bortolotto Possati’s heart beats to a Venetian rhythm. DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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Whether it’s the sharp, art deco lines of the Bauer hotel, the classical Il Palazzo, the newly renovated private residence for rent, Villa F, or the Bauer Palladio Hotel and Spa, all bear the distinctive mark of Venetian tradition in their atmosphere, be it modern or an enduring homage to the Renaissance. Having spent eleven years living and working in the United States as a famed interior designer, Bortolotto Possati returned to her native city when she inherited the Bauer Hotel from her shipbuilder grandfather. She loves America but Venice courses through her veins. In a city steeped in history, she considers herself a guardian of that history and is actively involved in preservation efforts as member
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Palladio Hotel & SPA
of the board of directors for “Save Venice”. “I inherited this hotel from my grandfather who had bought it from Mr. Bauer. In those days, it was a sanctuary where serious affairs could take place. Mr. Bauer entertained heads of state; it was a meeting place for political discussion. My grandfather was a shipbuilder, so this place was like an extension of the house they lived in. It was like an embassy and this was the idea that I had when I came back from the States. I wanted this place to return to this concept, to the old concept of the true Venetian-style hospitality.”
Palldio Hotel - Lobby
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Francesca Bortolotto Possati
Residenza F
And when – as with Rome or Paris or Florence – an understanding of the real Venice can be easily overcome by cliché, what does that mean exactly? “The average image somebody has of Venice is kind of stuck with the idea that it is only the gondola and it looks like a postcard. Don’t get me wrong. I regularly take the gondola. I am also an honorary gondolier member, as my grandfather was, because I DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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think it is a wonderful way to look at parts of Venice that are not accessible from the streets above. But Venice is such a unique city that it deserves far more respect, in every sense – from both the people that visit it and those who live in it. It is not a theme park and not an open air museum. Neither is it only a city of love. This notion that Venice is only for romance or for couples is a total misconception. Venice is perfect also for the solitary traveller, who can come to get lost in the intriguing history of this place. You
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Villa F Meditation Pool
need to breathe the history of the city to appreciate it fully. Getting lost is the best way to discover the thousands of hidden gems in this magical place. And that can’t be done in just a few hours.” I could not agree more. Despite romantic notions of the city that have been promoted by the movies, there is another reality to Venice which I find less stereotypical and certainly more intriguing. I remember once see-
ing the late French President François Mitterand wandering alone in the streets; on more than one occasion he told people close to him that he was himself when he came to Venice for a weekend to relax in this beautiful city. The city treated him like a normal visitor – entering a local gallery or visiting a church – as he came on quite a regular basis It gave him a sense of peace and tranquillity away from the buzz and noise of the French Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 21
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capital. The garden complex at the Bauer Palladio on the island of Giudecca, and Villa F, her latest acquisition, both lovingly restored under her personal guidance, are two such marvellous locales where one can become happily lost and transported deeply into a more spiritual Venetian reality. The Palladio’s gardens are now among Venice’s most splendid gardens, embellished by gazebos, covered with climbing roses, surrounded by hundreds of hydrangeas, and furnished with tasteful, retro chaise longues for the ease and comfort of guests.
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The Bauer Palladio Hotel and Spa building was a 16th century Zitelle convent designed by Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. The exquisitely restored former home for nuns and other unmarried women on La Giudecca island is a haven of tranquillity to soothe the most harried soul. Next to the Zitelle complex is the latest addition to the Bauer collection of sublime sanctuaries and the one that Bortolotto Possati is the most proud of. The exclusive Villa F was also built in the 16th century and offers eleven self-contained, luxurious, villa-like residences in a setting that was once the seat of a noble Venetian family. With three acres of lush gardens and impeccable Renaissance architecture on which to feast the eye, the peace and beauty of the setting makes it easy to grasp why it was once also
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View of Venice from Villa F
a haven for artists and writers.
Italy has seen negative growth for the past seven years?
But for all of her devotion to and pride in Venice, Ms Bortolotto Possati insists ‘we need to reboot Venice’. Another one of the hats she wears is that of vice president of the Altagamma Foundation with a mandate to boost tourism and culture. Since 1992, Altagamma has gathered together highend Italian companies to better promote Italian excellence and globally renowned, home-grown brands. The diverse sectors represented by the Altagamma Foundation all boast highly regarded, landmark brands whether in the fields of design, fashion, food, jewellery, speed or hospitality. Altagamma has a project to relaunch Italy, but where do we start when
The shortsightedness and parochial ways of some Italian enterpreneurs vexes Francesca Bortolotto Possati when she sees the business sector as the driving engine of a revitalised Italy. “At present we are constantly bought out by foreigners and I am not sure this is right. Once the know-how is taken, no matter how creative Italians are, the concept of madein-Italy becomes washed away. Look at how the French market their uniqueness so effectively, how they preserve their identity and promote France. We could learn from the French model but we are a bit lost at sea at the moment.” Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 23
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The Bauer Hotel - Hall
Altagamma is an institution devoted to preserving and promoting Italy’s image in the world, to uplift Italy at home and abroad. It could not have a more capable emissary for culture and tourism than Bortolotto Possati. It is true that she inherited her mantle, but to her credit she did not rest on her grandfather’s laurels. She earned them all over again, expanding her family’s holdings and fortunes through a potent combination of creativity, DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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labour and innovation, bringing yet more fame to Venice’s reputation as one of the most splendid cities on earth. As glamorous and refined as any of her magnificent hotels, she is a woman who exudes success with an unmistakable Italian flair. And just like the Bauer Hotel, which is not merely a Venetian treasure, but a world-class venue by any standard, Bortolotto Possati transcends her sorroundings in reminding us what true elegance and style should mean. It shouldn’t be remote and untouchable, but inviting,
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Villa F - Residenza Zaffiro
accessible and warm – as she is. If you want to discover the real Venice, you will be sure to feel at home in any of the havens Francesca Bortolotto Possati has prepared for you. And of course you cannot claim to have truly lived unless you allow yourself to get lost in Venice. www.bauervenezia.com
Francesca Bortolotto Possati
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Reigning Supreme over Salzburg’s Olympus By Reya von Galen
Anna Netrebko, Cecilia Bartoli and Helga Rabl-Stadler hold the prestigious Salzburg Festival firmly, but effortlessly in their elegant grip.
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ART AND CULTURE
Salzburg - View of the Hofstallgasse ©SF/Kolarik
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Since it was established in the summer of 1920, the world-acclaimed Salzburg Festival, held in the picturesque Austrian city from the end of July through August each year, attracts high society and the jet-set, as well as true lovers of art. After almost ninety years, it has lost none of its electric and eclectic sparkle. Founded mainly by three outstanding personalities – the dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the composer Richard Strauss and the legendary theatre director Max Reinhardt – the festival has grown from strength to strength and has always been associated with outstanding men who have shaped and formed it. Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 27
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Anna Netrebko with Placido Domingo in rehearsal for Giovanna d’Arco, © Silvia Lelli
Anna Netrebko in performance as Giovanna d’Arco in Salzburg 2013 ©Silvia Lelli Anna Netrebko © Ruven Afanador
Arturo Toscanini was artistic director during the festival’s golden years from 1934 to 1937, but he resigned in protest after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938. Many renowned artists of Jewish descent such as Reinhardt or Georg Solti emigrated to escape the Nazi menace. In 1944, the festival was cancelled altogether by Reich Minister Joseph Goebbels. Following the end of the war, the Salzburg Festival regained its old glory, especially under the guidance of its artistic director, charismatic conductor Herbert von Karajan who completely identified himself with the city as a venue for opera, concerts and theatre at the most refined level. Since his death in 1989, the festival has been modernised by his male successors but has unobtrusively and subtly become less a playground for male egos than a serious setting for the light but steely touch of feminine hands. This is due in no small part to the enduring and relentless work of Helga Rabl-Stadler who has presided over the festival since 1995. Though her elegance and charm are famed for tickling money out of any sponsor’s DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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pocket to benefit her beloved festival, RablStadler’s biography belies her soft-spoken, light-hearted manner to reveal a warrior at heart. Born in 1948, she is the daughter of Gerd Bacher, arguably the most distinguished former director of state television Austria has ever had. After graduating from law school the young Rabl-Stadler became the first female journalist for domestic politics in Austria. She subsequently became member of parliament for Austria’s conservative People’s Party, along the way marrying one of the leading print editors of the country with whom she has two grown sons, and from whom she has since amicably divorced. And somewhere in between these diverse and full-time stages of her career, she led the family fashion company “Resmann” in Salzburg, which employs a staff of 70. The woman’s energy and drive are mind-blowing; she never stops, and she seems to be in a constant good mood, having – according to her own estimation – inherited a gene to acknowledge happiness. The Salzburg Festival has become associated with her name and has profited from her presence, even though (and this comes as no surprise for women in decision-making roles) she has an array of enemies who she has come to outlive. Gérard Mortier, past artistic director, for example, compared her to a dirndl-selling shop-girl (a dirndl being the traditional Austrian folk dress
ART AND CULTURE
Cecilia Bartoli in the title role of “Norma”, Salzburg August 2013 ©Hans Jörg Michel
for women). She admits that such remarks have hurt her but they certainly have not broken her. Aside from her financial astuteness, she has the rare ability and intuition in choosing brilliant collaborators, particularly in her encouragement of women to take a larger stake within the festival. One such choice has definitely been crowned by success. The celebrated Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli was appointed last year as artistic director of the Whitsun Festival – an extension of the summer festival created in 1973 – a role she took over from Riccardo Muti. Though Bartoli’s nomination was decided by the artistic director, Alexander Pereira, it was fully backed and welcomed by Rabl-Stadler. Bartoli has already stamped her characteristic signature on the festival’s programme as well as performing herself in Handel’s “Giulio Cesare” last year and in the title role of Bellini’s “Norma” this year, much to the delight of a mesmerised audience. The New York Times simply called her performance a triumph. In the traditional and conservative domain of classical music, it is customary for opera divas to take centre stage, but the pulling of strings backstage is still seen as a very male role. A strong and talented personality such as that of the 47-year-old Bartoli, who never shrinks from speaking her mind, is a fresh and more-than-welcome wind to blow away the clichés that still haunt this artistic world. It is a sign of the times and an encouraging symbolic decision of the Salzburg Festival to have dared to entrust Bartoli with this prestigious post, sparking the International Herald Tribune to remark that the Whitsun Festival has become “Bartoli’s festival”. The trust Salzburg has invested in this expressive singer, who relishes her dual role, has well and truly paid off, not only on an artistic level but – and this is essential for a festival that relies partly on private funds – also in ticket sales.
Cecilia Bartoli © Uli Weber - Decca
Visitors and revenues have also soared every time Anna Netrebko has graced the festival with her illuminating presence since her breakthrough as Donna Anna in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” in 2002. Under the direction of conductor Nicolas Harnoncourt, that performance has since become legendary. To many, the Russian-born Netrebko is currently the most accomplished soprano in the world. Her voice and her looks, coupled with her remarkable talent as an actress, have catapulted her to the absolute summit of her profession. At 41, Netrebko turns heads as she walks through the old city of Salzburg, her sense of style and her contagious passion evident with every step. She is the mother of a small son, Tiago, on whom she dotes and who accompanies her on her travels. Tiago’s father, Netrebko’s partner, is fellow singer, handsome Uruguayan bass-baritone Erwin Schrott. Their relationship has been filling the press since they met and this year Salzburg was alive with gossip over their alleged split. Referred to lovingly by her fans as ‘Bellissima Anna’ or ‘Donna Anna’, she cannot be weighed down by such petty and banal banter. If nothing Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 29
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Helga Rabl-Stadler © SF/Julia Stix
else, she hasn’t the time. She made headlines together with Dmitri Hvorostovsky, the celebrated and charismatic Russian singer, at a live concert on Moscow’s Red Square this year. She performed alongside Placido Domingo in the title role of a breathtaking concert version of Verdi’s “Giovanna d’Arco” at the Salzburg Festival this August and launched a CD with works by the composer for his 200th anniCecilia Bartoli, versary in the same month. Instead Artistic Director of the Whitsun Festival of recording works that she has © Alberto Venzago perfected, she has made it her aim to take on new challenges – works that she has never sung on stage. The CD surprises and deeply moves; the singer’s own choice of roles is bold, including those from “Il Trovatore”, “Don Carlo”, or “Macbeth.” Anna Netrebko understandably professes her delight with the result. On stage as Giovanna d’Arco, it was palpable to the audience that Netrebko had yet again successfully reinvented herself; every nuance had been flawless and polished, from her voice and in her gestures, down to the most detailed and only just perceptible facial expression. Her characteristic and expansive voice translates the intelligence of her powerful performance. She is a hard act to follow and is in a league of her own: for Anna Netrebko, according to her own account, there had never been another option than the stage. While a student in St. Petersburg, she had been a janitor at the Mariinsky Theatre and was discovered by Valery Gergiev, who became her mentor. Her career soon took on a dynamic of its own. Her talent, ambition and hard work have carried her to stellar heights. DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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It is neither coincidence nor an accident of fate that Anna Netrebko’s star shines especially bright in Salzburg. Though undeniably still ruled by men, a feminine touch at the core of the festival has dominated the summer venue to an ever-growing extent. Reigning women have climbed Olympus in the artistic, as well as the business domain of the event. The festival could do worse than replace the parting director, Alexander Pereira, with a woman. Pereira has decided to cut short his term in Salzburg in favour of taking the post of artistic director of La Scala in Milan as from 2016 amid quarrels and controversies surrounding state funding of the festival. The decision-makers in Salzburg would be well advised to contemplate appointing a woman with insight, vision and competence to the post, thereby launching a renewal process from which even a successful event such as the Salzburg Festival can profit. A woman to spearhead the festival may be seen by some as a revolutionary concept in the closed and traditional Salzburg society, known at times to be merciless towards newcomers. However, Rabl-Stadler’s term as president of the festival is due to end in 2014 should her contract not be prolonged, Pereira looks set to depart even before the end of his contract in 2016; opportunities should be seized as they present themselves. A woman at the helm of this most prestigious European festival, guiding it through the young 21st century, could and should build upon the work of pioneers such as Rabl-Stadler, Bartoli and Netrebko currently dominating this unique event.
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LITERATURE
The Saga of a Novel: One Woman’s Story In a famous interview published in the Paris Review, Ernest Hemingway told George Plimpton that he had written the last page of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times before he was satisfied with it. Plimpton asked what the problem had been and Hemingway replied: ‘Getting the words right.’ Turns out though, that if you are brave enough to attempt a novel, there is a bit more to it than that – and then again there isn’t. Juliette Foster recounts her journey to get the words – and a whole lot of other stuff – right. “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia”
- E.L. Doctorow
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By Juliette Foster Photo by Paul Burrows
D through the mailbox.
Doctorow might also have said that writers are gluttons for punishment who relentlessly pursue literary recognition no matter how many times they’re rejected by publishers and agents. Thank God for that bulldog refusal to not give in to self-doubt when one of those annoyingly polite ‘thanks, but no thanks’ letters finds its way
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The literary world is paved with stories of authors who struck gold after interminable periods of uncertainty and rejection. The British author J.K. Rowling is a case in point. Reports of the numbers vary, but it’s thought that up to eight publishers turned down the Harry Potter manuscript before Bloomsbury spotted the boy wizard’s potential. I don’t doubt the truth of this as a publishing executive once admitted to me that he was one of those who binned it. “Why did you do it?” I asked him. He glanced at the ceiling before sheepishly admitting that Ms Rowling’s punctuation had been the problem. It was all right, but not as perfect as he thought it ought to have been. ‘So you rejected her because a couple of commas were in the wrong place?’ I said. ‘Yeah. That’s one of way of putting it I suppose.’ He gulped down the wine he was drinking and stared tragically into the bottom of the glass. It was hard not to feel sorry for him. J.K. Rowling is an exceptionally wealthy woman thanks to Harry Potter, while his bad call means the executive can only wonder how his bank account might have looked if he hadn’t been so sniffy about the boy wizard’s magic. Punctuation DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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and grammar may seem like trivial reasons for rejecting a manuscript but in reality they’re not that bizarre. Publishers care about syntax in much the same way that employers like well-presented résumés. That’s not to say that story narrative doesn’t count. Of course it does, but poor spelling and grammar are the curse of a good novel and they can certainly influence whether a script will get published. Yet there’s no guarantee a publisher will take a manuscript even when it ticks all the right boxes, especially if its literary style is thought to be going out of fashion. In that situation, internet publishing is the obvious way out. I’ve met quite a few people who’ve gone down that road and while it doesn’t guarantee stratospheric financial success, at least the book can be accessed by a potential audience of millions – and that’s not to be sneezed at. Maybe if I had been brave enough to take that step I wouldn’t have spent seven years trying to get my own novel published. My literary journey began in the summer of 2006 when I found myself with too much time on my hands after I was made redundant from my job as a TV journalist. Everyone assumes that journalists are naturally good storytellers because they make a living reporting real events – hence the logic that writing novels comes easily to them. However there’s a difference between
LITERATURE
telling a story in three and half minutes with a couple of sound bites, as opposed to holding a reader’s attention with a one-hundred-thousand-word script and characters who may be a combination of scheming, loving, suffering or dying. I discovered the hard way that a story plotted in the head has more holes in it than a string vest when it’s written down. Things got worse when my manuscript ballooned from 100,000 words to over 150,000 words. Six years and four major edits later, I signed with an agent who said that, although she liked my book (a quasi-murder mystery set in a television newsroom), it was in no fit state to be offered to a publisher. ‘Why?’ ‘Because I’m not hearing your voice’, she said patiently. ‘I don’t understand. What do you mean?’ ‘You need to talk through your main character. At the moment I’m hearing Juliette Foster, the journalist. That’s not you! It’s your voice the readers want to hear.’ It went on like this for weeks. Every time I thought I’d cracked the formula,
the manuscript would be sent back with the same criticism, until she suggested that an Arvon course might yield the breakthrough we were both looking for. As I had no idea what Arvon was, I logged onto the internet and found their website. The Arvon Foundation runs weekly residential creative writing courses from four UK centres: Shropshire, Yorkshire, Devon and Scotland. Everyone is welcome, no matter what stage they’re at in their literary journey, with published authors leading all the workshops. How many courses can boast the services of such luminaries as Carol Anne Duffy (Poet Laureate), Frances Fyfield, (Blood from Stone), and Cory Taylor (Me and Mr. Booker)? To say that I was intrigued is an understatement. I was also excited and fearful. The idea of spending a week in a nurturing environment with people whose literary aspirations were identical to mine was appealing, yet I was worried I would hold everyone back. Suppose my writing wasn’t good enough or that the novel which had taken up so much of my time was a noIssue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 35
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hoper? I discussed my anxieties with a woman from Arvon’s London office who assured me there was nothing to worry about, as it was normal to feel this way. Two weeks after that conversation I boarded a flight to Inverness and afterwards took a taxi to Moniack Mohr, a house and cottage nestling in the wild, stirring beauty of the Highlands. Twelve of us, (eleven women and one man), had enrolled on a course for first-time writers struggling to get their novels off the ground. Once we all got talking, I realised I wasn’t the only one wrestling with self-doubt, frustration and the uphill struggle of making a novel readable. Anna had been working on hers for more than five years DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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and couldn’t decide whether the child or its neurotic, egocentric mother should be the principal character. Lola abandoned her novel after a family trauma and was struggling to pick up from where she had left off, while Geoff was working on a collection of short stories that lacked a unifying theme. Slowly, carefully, and patiently, our tutors, Marilyn Bowering (What it Takes to Be Human) and Kathy Page (The Story of My Face), eased us into action with writing exercises, story structure analysis, and readings of each other’s works. Afternoons and evenings were given over to tutorials, working on our novels, or simply taking inspiration from the gloriously rugged scenery. As our confidence grew, we were less bashful about appraising each other’s work or offering constructive suggestions on how manuscripts could be moved ahead. Some days were more emotional than others but that was counterbalanced with plenty of laughter and the magnificent sense of achievement when we did things which had once seemed impossible. The highlight of my five days was writing a short story - something I haven’t done since I was a teenager - about a woman who uses a cloud to commit a murder! When the time came to say goodbye, we promised to stay in touch and to keep up with the writing. Sadly the cold dawn of reality is in danger of kicking our good intentions into dust. It’s hard to write if you’re self-employed,
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working five days a week, raising a family or doing all three things at once. Having said that, we’re determined not to give up and are trying to organise an online group tutorial. In the meantime, I think I might have found my voice. It wasn’t easy, as it meant switching my novel from the third to the first person, a medium I’m not naturally comfortable with, although the change-over is getting easier. Do I believe my novel will get published? Who knows? But in the final analysis it isn’t important. What matters is that I wrote a book, something many people would like to do but which very few get around to doing. What’s more, every word of it is mine not a ghostwriter’s!
It’s taken a long time to reach this point in my thinking and I’m thankful for the ups and downs I’ve gone through to get here. I also know that at some stage I’ll be hunched over my computer, writing my script, and then swearing like a trooper when a sentence doesn’t come out right. What a prospect! But then I wouldn’t want it any other way.
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Consorzio Tutela Lugana DOC Parco Catullo 4 37019 - Peschiera del Garda Verona - Italy tel +39 045 9233070 fax +39 045 8445434 www.consorziolugana.it info@consorziolugana.it join us on facebook: www.facebook.com/consorzioluganadoc
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a wine supreme
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Joana Carneiro:
The Maestrina Conducts Further Ahead By Mario Moniz Barreto
Music is a constantly evolving, ever-changing language. Joana Carneiro, acclaimed young Portuguese conductor speaks it fluently. A rising star in the rarefied world of orchestral conducting, she communicates to listeners with both aplomb and passion.
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Writing for this special, women-themed issue of Dante’s about my conversation with Joana Carneiro in what may be one of the least gender-specific European languages – English – is an interesting, if somewhat contradictory, premise. Carneiro herself embodies some of these contradictions as a woman who is a powerful presence in a male-dominated field.
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She is, at 37, one of the world’s most formidable young conductors or Maestrinas. Recipient of numerous awards such as the 2002 Maazel-Vilar Conductor’s competition at Carnegie Hall, Carneiro has, since 2009, been Music Director of the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra and for the last year has also been working with the Gulbenkian Foundation Orchestra. Between these two permanent collaborations, Carneiro has been engaged by some of the most prestigious orchestras, philharmonics and concert halls. This has, over the past four years, also included increased experience as an opera conductor, from the Peter Sellar’s stagings of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Symphony of Psalms in Sydney, to the Cincinnati Opera’s production of The Flowering Tree by John Adams.
Maestrinas – makes her exude a quiet brand of confidence, one that is not afraid to smile. As a mere lover of music myself, before meeting with Carneiro and talking with her I was reminded of something Proust said: ‘The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes’. In this case it was about trying to understand some of the most superficial intricacies of a language one does not speak, but nevertheless likes the sound of.
Women Composers – why only so late?
A native of Lisbon, Carneiro comes from a well-known family. Both her mother and father were and are in politics: one as MP, and the other as a long-serving Education Minister. Her parents are what would be described in the UK as upper middle class. Highly articulate, devoted to their children – all nine of them musicians and/or singers – it could be said that there is a certain ordinariness in the way that these extraordinary families all are.
Over a hearty Portuguese espresso, or ‘bica’ as it is called in Lisbon, I start by expressing my surprise to Carneiro at the difficulty I had, when looking at the history of music, in finding female composers. Musicians, interpreters, performers there were many. Composers there were too few leading up to the twentieth century. I couldn’t find many more noteworthy names than Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn’s sister, or Clara Wieck, later married to Robert Schumann.
Arriving at Carneiro’s home during a sleepy, Lisbon August, in a recently developed part of the city, I find myself in what used to be a large well-appointed nineteenth century Manor house, gazing out, not at crops, but at tall apartment buildings rising from what were once the house’s holdings.
Carneiro replied by rattling off a long list of names of women composers of the second half of the twentieth century, a time when, according to her, greater gender equality helps explain their appearance. Even so women are still a minority in music composition.
Looking at the sophisticated, jeans-clad Carneiro, one senses the solidity of her upbringing, which – together with the passion that drove her to become a member of one of the most exclusive clubs in the world, that of the
She went on to add that in conducting, the premise – the organising metaphor – has been that the Maestro is the leader, the guiding hand. Historically, there were no cases of women conductors, at root because of the denial
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of female authority. As a result the feminist turn-around – the reversal of the established order – has been, in a way, even harder. So she has been particularly thankful to women such as Baltimore Orchestra and São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra conductor Marin Alsop; or to Australian-born, Hamburg Philharmonic conductor Simone Young; or to Susanna Mälkki, a Finn heading the Pierre Boulez-founded elite French music school, Ensemble Intercontemporain; or also to the Chinese-born New York Orchestra Conductor Xian Zhang. Joana Carneiro points out the introduction of the ‘blind audition’ system last century as another stepping-stone. After this system, by which examiners could not see who was applying to play, was introduced the gender composition of orchestras drastically changed with greater equality achieved.
Globalisation and her not-discontents At a time when globalisation is criticised by so many of those it has left behind, it is being hailed as a force for good by most of the music world. Carneiro starts by commenting how much technology and the somewhat less restricted movement of peoples and ideas have led to a democratised, increasingly shared music creation and music enjoyment experience. She points out that several orchestras and opera houses transmit a live Internet feed around the world. Anyone with net access can listen in. It is way too soon to say where this path will lead us. Carneiro is not convinced that national or regional or even continental music identities will fade. On the contrary she says that there may be two cumulative, concomitant trends. One trend is of fusion and merger, where we are witnessing collabo-
ration between different countries’ musicians but also between differentiated music styles. The other is of a rally behind each country or region’s music traditions as people may fear the loss of national identities. Carneiro believes that most musicians maintain, in what they create or perform, elements pertaining to the places from which they come. Carneiro, it could be said, is an advocate of former Singaporean diplomat (and current Singapore National University professor and dean) Kishore Mahbudani’s theory of The Great Convergence. His theory of The Great Convergence is that of one world, working together, closing in and maintaining the richness of differences at the same time. I thought, at this stage, of a slight provocation to put forward. How would Carneiro explain that in Europe we saw three main countries at the forefront of music composition: Germany, Italy and Russia? Why had wealthy countries like the UK not had world class composers until later? Carneiro, on the contrary, looks at music, her history, her past and present in a more expansive and inclusive way than I have and therefore asserts that she would not identify these three countries as the main producers of the most prolific and relevant composers. She would include a Débussy and Ravel in France, Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 43
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occurrence and a moment, or an instant – even when the conductor, or players have performed that piece many, many times.
Music: atonal tonality
an Elgar or Purcell in Britain, as well as composers from several Central and Eastern European countries in this group. When confronted with another possible effect of globalisation – that is a ‘mercantilisation’ similar to what one can observe happening in painting, with phenomenally successful artists doubling as CEOs of multi-million euro companies devoted to producing and reproducing lines of works that can be flogged off to investors who are no longer, in the traditional sense of the word, collectors – Carneiro argued that, even though music was a highly organised business, with the advantages stemming from that fact, she could not identify that as a trend due to the nature of music. This is especially because concerts are free-standing events, valued as a single DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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Music is not impervious to the time. I asked Carneiro how she saw a possible replication in music of the trend that is observable in painting – that is, the return to the figurative which is comparable to the controversy led in France by pianist and composer Jérôme Ducros at the Collège de France. Ducros is a far greater critic of the Vienna school than Carneiro who claims she derives pleasure, although differently, from tonal and atonal music. Carneiro says that wherever music goes in the next few years, be it to evolve back to tonality, or to a new form of it, it is still – like most other forms of art – a reflection of whoever we are at each era. According to Carneiro, music, composers, artists are always moving further ahead, ‘para a frente’. This happens despite the fact that there are moments of rupture and despite the fact that whatever happens further ahead is always, at least partially, connected to the past. She believes that, as Oliver Sacks explains in his Musicophilia, it is music per
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se, whatever the school, that affects and has effects on us. It provokes dance, it changes the brain, it contributes to further development of a child’s brain. It has these effects, be it tonal and maybe more easily listenable; or be it atonal and not so automatically intelligible.
The Portuguese caring-and-eclectic-music-listener Joana What does a conductor, who was educated in the classical, and let it be said, tonal music tradition, listen to? Only classical music? Far from it, says Carneiro, as she rises from her sofa and walks over to her hi fi to flick through some CDs she had recently acquired. She lists Portuguese styles such as Fado, artists like Carminho, or Gisela João, national ‘pop’ singers such as José Cid. She also indicates she has recently listened to Fatboy Slim, the Icelandic Sigur Ros, Copeland, Rolling Stones (she found their London concert, which she attended with her husband, an unforgettable experience) and a lot of Led Zeppelin.
Carneiro says that she can’t really listen to music while talking to someone. Maybe that would be like trying to listen to two different interlocutors speaking two languages at the same time. She also adds that whenever she listens to a piece she has conducted or is rehearsing to conduct or to programme, she cannot help but listen to it in an analytical way, so it is not exactly conducive to a relaxing experience. Aaron Copland is supposed to have said about the meaning in music that there is certainly a lot of it, maybe as much and as complex a meaning as in language – and the difficulties are equal to those one has in expressing meaning through words. It was therefore interesting to detect in the couple of hours I had the privilege to spend with Carneiro how often she repeated the word ‘afecto’. ‘Affection’, ‘fondness’ or ‘an attachment to’ may just about be the most singular way by which she remains, at heart, connected to her idea of Portugal. In this stance she is in the best of companies, like that of the seventeenth century Jesuit philosopher and master of the pulpit Father António Vieira: ‘To be born, Portugal: to die, the world”
And what about the way she listens to these different music styles? Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 45
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It’s a man’s world, as the saying goes. And that’s doubly so for rock‘n roll. Despite a continued presence in the world of pop and rock music, it seems women are perpetually being rediscovered as artists. Hey! I think they’re actually playing those instruments! Mark Beech presents a sampling of the long-time presences and those who are new on the scene.
Eileen Rose
Rock Divas By Mark Beech
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HAIM Band Caroline England, a singersongwriter from north-west England, has released an iTunes album, “Who Said All Is Fair in Love and War?” Her songs include “On Resererve” and “Tumbleweed.” Photographer: Colin McPherson.
Ashley Monroe poses in the photoshoot for the cover of her album “Like a Rose.” The country star, from Knoxville, Tennessee, duets with Blake Shelton on one track, “You Ain’t Dolly (And You Ain’t Porter).” Source: Warner Music via
I
It really ought not to be in any way surprising that women make music, given that they are half of the human race! Yet this fact has almost been ignored in rock, which for much of its history has been relentlessly macho.
companies to try more of them.
Now, at last, things are changing as women achieve more commercial success and that encourages record
Adele and Taylor Swift were among the biggest-selling artists in 2012, followed by Lana Del Rey and Pink. Of course there have always been stars proudly ‘kicking against the pricks’ with anthems such as ‘Woman Is the Nigger of the World’, ‘Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves’ and ‘I Am Woman’. Thanks to Yoko Ono, Annie Lennox, Aretha Franklin and Helen Reddy. The long-term commercial giants are household names: Madonna, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Beyoncé. Even though they are big-sellers and widely known, they’re seen as a mere subset in the eyes of some rock critics. For these outdated (read: overwhelmingly male) writers, a Jake Bugg or Bob Dylan is listened to for what he sings: simply a singersongwriter, not a MALE singer-songwriter. Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 47
MUSIC Dido
Rita Ora - Purple PR
“Once I Was an Eagle” by U.K. singer-songwriter Laura Marling. Marling, who has moved to Los Angeles, has been acclaimed for albums “Alas, I Cannot Swim,” “I Speak Because I Can” and “A Creature I Don’t Know.” Source: Virgin
On the other hand, Sinead O’Connor, Regina Spektor, Neko Case, Tori Amos, P.J. Harvey, Bjork and Kate Bush get noticed more for their appearance than their words by the same male-dominated media establishment. All have been pigeonholed in a special section reserved for ‘nutty girls’, whether they deserve it or not – often marginalised, misunderstood and mocked. Progress has been slow, for all the efforts of feminism, and the ‘riot grrl’ movement. It was rather a long time ago that Amy Raphael wrote the underrated book Never Mind the Bollocks about women in rock. (I get it off a shelf to check the publication date: 1995.) The revolution of which Raphael wrote has been some time in coming to fruition, as can be seen by the names of those she interviewed. Bjork and Courtney Love are included, as well as Kim Deal of the Breeders, whose groundbreaking 1993 LP Last Splash has been re-released in a deluxe form this year. Apart from those women, Raphael got optimistic responses from female members of Echobelly, Elastica and Sonic Youth – innovative acts all, though not ones on everyone’s lips as leaders of music in 2013. So, here are some names to watch, with some live notes on where I saw DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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them. It’s June 9, 2013: Skyy Vodka Tent at Governors Ball Festival, Randalls Island, New York. Azealia Banks is wearing an orange and pink psychaedelic cut-out bodysuit. The revealing outfit is pretty breathtaking. So is the music. The single ‘212’, named after the area code for Harlem, where Banks grew up, first appeared at the end of 2011 and it’s an instant antidote to boy-bragging rap popularised by Jay Z and Kanye West. Her set confirms that the hit will be far from the best thing on Broke With Expensive Taste, her debut studio album, due later this year. It’s June 29, 2013: Park Stage, Glastonbury festival, Somerset, U.K. Haim is a group which has yet to release an album, but is already hyped to the heavens – and deservedly so, just like Banks. The three California sisters and their drumming buddy are showcasing their work so far. Songs off their Forever EP have some serious, female don’t-mess-with-me empowerment going on: ‘I never wanna see you again/ With the beating of my heart witness/ I say no no no, I’m done.’
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Tracey Browne, from Manchester, U.K., has made an album called “Everyone Is Ordinary.” The record features backing vocals from Thea Gilmore, who praises Browne for songs such as “Paradise Found.”
Tegan & Sara
The comparisons of Haim to Stevie Nicks-style Fleetwood-Mac aren’t just lazy journalism in the year of a new tour by the veterans, who have a 35th-anniversary edition of Rumours being issued. Haim covers its fellow West-coast group’s “Hold Me,” and rather well, as it turns out. There are also echoes of Janis Joplin and some splashy guitar that would do Bob Seger or Tom Petty proud.
well improve on her debut Ora. The wonderful Fatoumata Diawara from Mali also sounds great.
On the Pyramid stage, Laura Mvula, a graduate of the Birmingham Convervatoire of classical music, takes another step away from her previous career as a teacher. ‘Sing to the Moon’ is seductively stripped down to showcase her voice. It hardly rocks, though it is one of the year’s quiet growers.
It’s April 8, 2013: Hammersmith Apollo, London. Emeli Sande has the confidence to sing ‘Heaven’, one of her best-known works, as the OPENING song of her show. Oh, the chutzpah of a 26-yearold with the world at her feet! She holds back on ‘Next to Me’ for an encore which has pretty much everyone of the 4,000 present standing to dance and applaud. Sande is almost old news now after a couple of years in the spotlight: she’s rocketed from Scottish medical student to Olympic concerts star with a huge selling album, Our Version of Events. People have endlessly compared her to Adele, which isn’t so surprising, given her vocal prowess and that her real first name is Adele. Perhaps unhelpfully, she’s also been likened to Aretha Franklin. No matter. She’s good – and a live show recorded at London’s Royal Albert Hall (again, following Adele) hints at better to come.
Rita Ora is on hand at Glastonbury to suggest that her next CD could very
It’s July 11, 2013: The Green Note in Camden, London.
The Haims pop up about six times at Glastonbury, on various stages and some acoustic sets, even guesting with Primal Scream. The sisters’ debut is one of the year’s most anticipated. Your critic obviously cannot be everywhere at once but across the more than 50 stages and 1,000 artists at Glasto, there’s a lot of good music from female artists including the ubiquitous Banks.
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Thea Gilmore, a U.K. singer-songwriter, has made more than 14 albums since 1998 including “Rules for Jokers” in 2001 and her latest, “Regardless,” released in 2013. Her fans include Bruce Springsteen, Richard Thompson and Joan Baez. Source: Thea Gilmore/ Full Fill Records
Laura Pausini
Eileen Rose is across from the U.S. The gig is a sellout – not quite what it seems since the tiny room is packed with maybe fifty people. It could have sold out many times over. There is a little chalked board outside the vegetarian restaurant-and-bar’s ten-foot frontage advertising the show. The commitment and quality of the performance is the equal to any of the above. I have reviewed all of Rose’s stuff favourably. Shine Like It Does was a stunning debut in 2000 and she has hardly put a foot wrong since. It’s slightly beyond comprehension that someone this talented isn’t mega famous. She has moved from Boston to Nashville and teamed with the impressive guitarist the legendary Rich Gilbert. In the interval, the duo happily chat with fans and sign their new record, Be Many Gone, which has a warm, country flavour. So far, I’ve picked names tied to live performances. Now for some based on my CD review pile – a thousand new ones a year, just the best. DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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Laura Marling is still only 23 and has already made her name with literate records that recall and sometimes even surpass Joni Mitchell. Her latest, Once I Was an Eagle, is a challenging, but rewarding listen. Her material is matched by Thea Gilmore. I was introduced to Gilmore by playwright Suzi Almond, who is herself making music now. The first song by Gilmore I heard was “This Girl Is Taking Bets” with its quickfire wordplay: ‘This girl is a black eye, she’s a bruise on your knee, She’s the ashes of the people that you really meant to be, This girl’s the resurrection, she’s the comeback, She’s the absinthe in whiskey, she is poetry and Prozac.’ Gilmore has carried on with an output that is variable and sometimes as
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good – as in the case of her most recent album, Regardless. Tracey Browne’s songs come from the same sort of territory, though with more than a hint of the late, great Kirsty MacColl. Her Everyone is Ordinary LP is heartfelt and melodic. On Browne’s website, Gilmore calls her ‘the real deal, an exciting new talent.’ That description – ‘the real deal’ – is also being applied, (at least by her publicists) to Ashley Monroe. (That’s fine, though I’m not so sure about calling someone ‘the real deal’ anymore. It was used to note the tribulations of another country gal, Mindy McCready, who took her own life in February as her career sank under problems with love, money, drugs and custody battles.) Monroe has written with Guy Clark and Vince Gill, who produced her album Like a Rose. The title is apt in that she’s not as good a country songwriter as Eileen Rose. Instead there’s the air of a young Dolly Parton. A couple of months back, I got a review copy of Tess Henley’s High Heels and Sneakers. It was a while coming to the top of the pile and I have to say it’s really good, a soulful fusion with mainstream rock that works best on ‘From the Get Go’. I discovered Caroline England only when she sent me a tweet with a link to her songs. She has music on iTunes and a delicately beautiful video called ‘Tumbleweed’ which deserves a wider circulation. Some great singers are making impressive comebacks: Mari Wilson (yes, she of beehive-hair fame), Alison Moyet (the voice of ‘Only You’ and ‘Love Resurrection’) and Agnetha (the blonde one in ABBA). Dido’s The Girl Who Got Away keeps her in the gentle mainstream, with her folky edge now
blurred with ambient and dance sounds. India’s A.R. Rahman produces, adding a children’s choir from Mumbai. Dance has always been foremost for Katy B, who is working towards a second CD after the dubstep classic ‘On a Mission’, which was nominated for the U.K.’s Mercury Prize in 2011. More mainstream club music fans may be waiting for Lady Gaga’s ‘ARTPOP’ in November. I’ll probably be more likely to recommend Janelle Monae’s The Electric Lady in September if it’s anything as creative as its predecessor Archandroid. I could go on. Somewhere I should be making space for Dante favourite Laura Pausini; Jessie Ware; Katy Perry; M.I.A.; Solange; and Tegan & Sara. Ars longa, vita brevis. But by now you get the idea. “The second sex” has become the first sex in music. And about time too.
Mark Beech is Bloomberg’s rock critic. A frequent commentator on U.K. TV, he is also the London-based Europe and Asian team leader for Muse, Bloomberg’s arts and culture section. His books include “The Dictionary of Rock & Pop Names” and he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. More information: mark@markbeech.net http://www.bloomberg.com/muse/mark-beech http://twitter.com/Mark_beech
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FILM
Jamie Chung in Eden courtyard
Eden:
A Film Journey into Human Bondage
By Patrick Janeway
There are more individuals enslaved today than there were at the height of the transatlantic slave trade. This includes humans trafficked for sex and for different forms of labour. It is estimated that in the US alone some 100,000 children are trafficked in the sex trade in any given year. Hundreds of thousands of people are enslaved in the US and, it is estimated, almost 21 million women, children, and men are trafficked around the world. And yet, it remains mostly an invisible phenomenon, perceived as taking place in remote, dark corners of the globe. Director Megan Griffith’s new film Eden – based loosely on the true story of American trafficking survivor Chong Kim – brings light to those dark corners that are very, very close to home. DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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E
Eden is a deliberately ironic title choice for a stark, new independent American film, set inside the underground human trafficking and sex slavery industry. This global criminal enterprise, according to the United Nations latest report on the subject, claims more than twenty million victims worldwide from 136 nations, held captive and submitted to forced sexual and other labour in 118 countries. A majority of the victims are women; just as grimly, at least 27 percent of human trafficking victims are children.
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Scenes from Eden
Jamie Chung Eden breathes life into these shocking statistics. The film takes us to hell in one of the unseen gulags where the modern day slave trade flourishes, primarily from the viewpoint of a young woman, Hyun Jae. She endures its routine dehumanisation and degradation and is re-christened Eden by her captors. African war zones, impoverished corners of the Balkans, the smuggling routes of Asia – all of them prime hunting grounds and hidden highways for wretched human contraband – do not figure in Eden. Nor do the opulent sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf, the deluxe market and one of the prime consumers of traded human lives, appear except by name. Instead Eden takes place in the Nevada desert. It depicts the sordid pipeline that feeds enslaved women into a decidedly unglamorous Las Vegas underworld of forced prostitution. The chief protagonist and namesake DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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of the film, is a Korean-American teenager who, during her two year ordeal as a prisoner, undergoes a profound transformation from a naïve, young, braces-wearing girl into a hardened, self-reliant and worldly woman, able to do what is necessary to survive and ultimately escape her circumstances. But Eden is no ordinary fictional victimised ingénue; she is drawn from bona fide experience – based on the odyssey of Chong Kim, the living KoreanAmerican woman whose life story as a survivor of human trafficking inspired the screenplay. That Eden begins in humdrum Las Cruces, New Mexico – as ordinary a town as one will find in the American Southwest – where Hyun Jae is snatched and disappears from her equally ordinary existence living in a trailer park and helping in her hard-working immigrant parents’ shop, speaks to the sadly common-place nature of human trafficking. The genuine, contemporary slave trade is a far-reaching reality and seldom just the province of exotic fictional cinema thrillers like Taken where modelbeautiful trafficked women are sold for princely sums to evil, billionaire potentates against a backdrop of luxury yachts and Monte Carlo hotels, with the whole affair never entirely losing an aesthetic appeal or even titillation for the viewer, despite the topic’s harshness.
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Beau Bridges
Jamie Chung
Tantoo Cardinal The truth away from Hollywood is much dirtier, more brutal and quotidian. Eden is decidedly non-Tinseltown. At times its treatment of human trafficking has an almost-documentary feel. Rather than the tastefully appointed lairs of the super-rich, the film takes us instead to a dingy, corrugated metal warehouse in the desert that is, to all intents and purposes, a concentration camp for kidnapped young women destined for the sex trade. Hyun Jae, like her fellow inmates, is processed not unlike a prisoner of war, made to adhere to a strict code of discipline enforced by violence, where the penalty for escape is retribution against her family. Both drugged
and terrorised into submission, she is then routinely forced to perform as a sex worker, in sado-masochist porn films and as a prostitute for hire – always with an enforcer nearby. The venues for her degradation vary and they include such seemingly innocuous settings as the heart of suburbia or college fraternity parties - a further reminder that sex trafficking is a far closer presence in our seemingly civilised existence than anyone would wish to consider. In time, Hyun Jae’s administrative skills, learned in her parents’ shop, allow her to gain a position of trust and responsibility within the criminal syndicate, which director Megan Griffiths portrays as a nexus between an organised crime gang and corrupt law enforcement. Veteran actor Beau Bridges puts in an excellent turn onscreen as the dirty and murderous US Marshal, leading a double existence as a lawman and Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 55
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Matt O’Leary
slaver kingpin. It is an understated performance that addresses the banality of evil in an accessible and terrifying way. On the surface Bridges’ Marshal Bob is a stock character, an expert criminologist, ironically enough an authority on smuggling, who is a devoted family man, an animal lover and enjoys the simple pleasures to be had going fishing. He is as common a Western man with a badge as the cowboy hat he wears, more a BowlingAlley Joe than Wyatt Earp. Nevertheless a deep cruelty and a propensity for easy violence run through him. Here too, Eden is a portrait in grey, conveying another uncomfortable truth about the sordid trade in human beings. No matter how loathsome a business, it is – cold-bloodedly – just that: a lucrative business, where the temptations for predators and the otherwise morally flexible are too great and which, like all arms and narco-trafficking networks they are also often a part of, could not function as effectively without the direct participation of the police and other co-opted players on the take. At no point do we perceive Hyun Jae’s complicity in working for the gang as going over to the dark side. Her spare portrayal by actress Jamie Chung DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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transmits a visceral humanity. We understand Hyun Jae is merely doing what is required for her survival, waiting for her window to escape when the circumstances permit. In this respect Eden is not just a film about captivity, it joins a long line of films about surviving and escaping horror against seemingly impossible odds. And Hyun Jae does make her getaway, overcoming her constant overseer, a junkie crackhead and former soldier called Vaughn (played capably by Matt O’Leary), whose nature is differently but as equally deformed as that of his mentor, Bob. Vaughn, like all the other criminals depicted in this film, is an odious figure, utterly lacking in compassion. He is not a charismatic rogue. He is a fractured human being who breaks the spirit and joy of others for a living. When Hyun Jae is finally able to liberate herself and free her closest companion, we do not mourn Vaughn or Bob, or the gangster who had originally kidnapped Hyun Jae. They are not worthy of our empathy when we have witnessed their many cruelties. The film’s conclusion comes as a relief. Hyun Jae has broken free of such inhumane bondage, but hers is a quiet victory, not an ecstatic cin-
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Jamie Chung
Matt O’Leary
ematic triumph. It is made more poignant by the knowledge that her tale is authentic. And this knowledge weighs on the mind long after the film – the certainty that Hyun Jae in the true-life story of Kim Chong, is but one that got away. So many other real women remain in the darkness with little hope of escape, leading a bestial and torturous existence in soul and body which no human being should have to endure. In having portrayed a glimpse of the terror, atrocity and injustice of human trafficking and the clandestine sex slavery of women with compassion, realism and the
Beau Bridges absence of sensationalism, Eden is an important film. Its importance lies in its being not just a feminist story, but a human one, which calls for far greater awareness and action to end what constitutes one of For more information about human the most despicable aspects of trafficking and action you can take to help human behaviour in a so-called victims and fight for a world without slavery, go to www.polarisproject.org civilised world.
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DESIGN
Charles and Ray Eames
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DESIGN
Closing the Gap: Women and Furniture Design By Salli-Ann Mathews
Furniture design has been a particularly male-dominated corner of the field of design – strangely so, since the market for furniture is mainly female. Yet, there have been glimmers here and there of women’s talents and inspiration over the years, and the climate is changing. A current young designer assesses the state of things.
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In an industry that is saturated with testosterone, the subject of female stature within the furniture and design world has historically caused controversy, along with an element of cliché. As long as the perception of women as the weaker sex pervades, the gender gap and the battle of the creative sexes will continue within many peoples’ working lives. As a female student studying this sector of the design industry, it is impossible to ignore the fact that success stories in this field are primarily those of men. Historically, the importance of women as artists and crafters has been widely acknowledged, but furniture has been deemed very different. Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 61
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Women have been largely excluded from furniture design because furniture is considered to be a microcosm within the macrocosm of twentieth-century architecture – and men have largely dominated that profession. The definite separation between male and female was hugely apparent in crafts production, especially in England in the late 19th century, wherein architecture and furniture were clearly men’s domain. Against this trend, female influences have sprouted from a variety of design roots throughout the world. Shaker women, for example, are now deemed to be an important link between women as designers and women as makers. They not only worked as design directors on a range of projects, alongside the traditional craftsmen, but they also worked directly on the lathe. With DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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heavy influence from the Christian faith and biblical reference to the relationship between Adam and Eve, they designed their furniture with care, believing that making something well was in itself ‘an act of prayer.’ In the twentieth century, females slowly began to be taken seriously as furniture makers in the Western world. Design heroines such as Eileen Gray (producing products ahead of her time), and Florence Knoll and Ray Eames, who worked alongside their husbands, created influential designs, such as the famous Eames Lounge Chair, which have shaped the industry of today. Although the history of the field is filled with stories of struggle for female furniture
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Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman
designer-makers, the development of human rights and equality between the sexes has sparked a huge desire for young women to embrace their ambition and rebel against the strictures of this isolating design culture. As a young designer, I feel that the distinct lack of females within this industry is not just a boundary, but also a gap, which the industry must move to cross. In many modern circumstances, it is still apparent that women are perceived as less competent in a workshop environment. Studying Product & Furniture Design at university and breaking into the field as a novice, led me to take a step back, look around and see the industry in a new way. Yes, the ratio of men to women is almost laughable, but why should I feel that I am inferior to my competition because of my gender? I most defiantly
should not. My skill-set is such that I am much more capable using Makita power tools than a needle and thread; and I can assemble a three-tier, flat-pack storage unit in far less time than it would take me to create the equivalent cake formation in a kitchen. In the current academic climate, specialised courses for women have been set up at establishments to accommodate those who wish to gain qualifications and diplomas in the field. Sheffield City College, for example, offers a Women’s Furniture Making Workshop. Lecturer Sue Clark explains that the course was set up ‘to encourage more girls and women to go into construction and the furniture- making industry’. ‘We run classes that give women the opportunity to develop their confiIssue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 63
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Panton Chair
Knoll sofa
dence and skills in an environment where they don’t feel they are the only woman in a group’, she says. I find this controversial in itself; surely creating a design course aimed specifically at women is isolating the students further, rather than working alongside males who are equally capable. Despite the rarity of influential female designers, many historical pieces and much of the success of design has been inspired by the physical female form. Well-respected and recognised designs, such as Verner Panton’s classic chair, are based on the female form with many artists and sculptors introducing forniphilia into their work in order to show perspective and beauty through design. This leads me to question the way in which male artists and designers express themselves. Does this objectifying phenomenon have a direct impact on the way females’ work is judged by comparison? It may be fair to say that the objectification of women in design has led to their own work not being taken as seriously as when females themselves are merely influencing – and that, passively – the design aesthetics of men. DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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When talking to influential businesswomen within the industry, the subject of women in design is often seen as a cliché and almost irrelevant. This conventional wisdom, however, leads me to question the obvious: does it make sense that a consumer base of 94% female continues to be served by a nearly all-male designer/producer class? The industry, the media, as well as academia have ignored the question and there is no hard data documenting the state of the industry. Although the number of female graduates from manufacturing-based design courses is on the rise, the number of women in the industry is still minimal. The backbone of all the main manufacturers and dealers seems to be made up of almost exclusively male vertebra. It is becoming more and more obvious, especially in the current climate, that it is not what you know, it is who you know that is important. No employer will take a look at your first-class honours degree unless you have your foot outside of the small university pond and into the dangerous ocean of reality – that is in the industry, where the key is competition
DESIGN Eileen Gray portrait
Young female carpenter
and ambition and drive are in full force. It is all well and good that female students ‘push social boundaries’ when enrolling in manufacturing courses, but the missing link comes when universities don’t provide sufficient resources, knowledge and, more importantly, advice on how students can expect to use their talent in the real world. ‘Cotton-wooling’ students into thinking that their life decision to be a sole trader or freelance designer will be an easy ride leads to graduates finding their encounters with the real world to be a blow – resulting, in many cases, in a loss of passion. In my own transition, I became absorbed in the business side of the industry and the culture that comes with it. I used my initiative (and persistence) to gain various placements in well-respected companies throughout the industry. This was the most sensible decision I have ever made. Although many people find my passion and knowledge for manufacturing ‘refreshing’ for such a young girl – I envisage this as a stepping-stone. Young people my age, yet to graduate, are grasping opportunities which could lead them to higher places. This fresh ambition and drive are what companies
desire. The industry is swamped with young professionals in their late twenties, all reporting to ‘wise owls’ in their late fifties, few of whom are women. This is where the gap should come to light and make young females realise that the competition is healthy and not a boundary – women should no longer be seen as inferior and/or a novelty in this industry. It is time to embrace the passion and seize opportunities. In the current economic climate there is no time to waste. It seems employers sometimes may not know what they are looking for unless you show them. The key message, exemplified by the likes of Eileen Gray, proves that gender is insignificant as long as you have enough ambition and talent to prove yourself as an individual.
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Luck LONDON
www.think-positive.co.uk
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A Woman’s Place is on the Front Line: The Evolution of Female Combat Soldiers By Chris Kline There is nothing new under the sun. This includes the phenomenon of women taking part in combat. It is only in our short-sighted, modern view that we see this as something strange, something innovative, even something of an anathema. War – like most impersonal forces – does not discriminate particularly. It rains on men and women alike and always has. The story of women at war is an ancient and honourable one that cries out to be told. DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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Female soldiers on patrol
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The field of battle after Waterloo was a scene of such terrible carnage that Lord Wellington, breaking from his usual, legendary sangfroid, reflected that ‘Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won’. Few battles in history have been so closely scrutinised as the bloody contest that ended Napoleon Bonaparte’s ambitions once and for all. Yet there is an anomaly recorded in the aftermath of the battle that still baffles military historians. Two British soldiers, seeking to identify wounded survivors, came upon the body of a strikingly beautiful woman dressed in the full uniform, helmet and breastplate armour of the Cuirassiers, the French heavy cavalry. She lay dead alongside her male comrades, who had been decimated in Marshal Ney’s impetuous, last-ditch attempt to reverse the fortunes of the day in a doomed mounted attack against the stout British infantry squares that mauled them.
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Czech Air Force fighter pilot
Pakistani Air Force fighter pilot
Her identity remains a mystery. Legend has it that her lover was in the same regiment and she followed him into the fray. We will never know the full truth, but at the very least it seems clear that she met her end riding in the last great cavalry charge of the Napoleonic Wars. She died as a combatant, together with some of the most feared horsemen of the Imperial Grande Armée. In today’s parlance she was a frontline soldier killed in action; her appearance then seemed an apparition, perhaps a romantic literary invention of Sir Walter Scott or James Fenimore Cooper. Her sacrifice in battle, though, was entirely real. Nearly two centuries later, in an age of digital warfare, smart bombs and drone strikes, where horsed cavalry has all but gone the way of the dodo, DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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this year the most powerful armed forces in the world, those of the United States, officially rescinded the regulations that barred women serving in the military from combat roles. NATO ally Norway has also broken new ground in being the first country in history making military service obligatory for men and women. Both of these measures, as well as changing attitudes in many other armies towards female combat soldiers, herald a new era that will redefine women’s role in warfare and the manner in which society regards them as defenders of the nation. Of course, women – like men – have always known war and not merely as its victims or the bereaved. Across the centuries women have actively served in combat. They have fought as both soldiers of the state and as
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Female US Marines
Australian soldier
Kenyan female soldiers
Norwegian soldiers
guerrilla insurgents, not infrequently displaying great valour. They have sometimes led the way, commanding entire armies. Upon closer scrutiny, what seems new today in the context of military culture is merely the logical progression of an ongoing fight for equality faced by women in every other societal realm. It has been a long march, however, for women at arms. There were other women at Waterloo too: wives of officers and ordinary soldiers who had accompanied their men to care for them when they weren’t in the line, who were accustomed to life on the march – often with children in tow – ministering to their men’s wounds and burying them when they died. As long as armies have campaigned there have been
Italian Folgore paratrooper
willing female camp followers of all kinds. Inevitably some were itinerant prostitutes (many of them destitute refugees, orphans and widows born of war, poverty and hunger with no other means and few more palatable choices for survival), for where there are armies, there is vice and much worse. But the vast majority, in the age of the flintlock and sword, were devoted wives and sweethearts, while others were sutlers who sold provisions to the soldiers that augmented their monotonous (and often meagre) issue rations. They too, having formed close emotional ties through shared experience, also often married the soldiers to whom they provided the indispensable foodstuffs, tobacco and wine. When the common soldiers’ lot on campaign meant a strong probability of Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 71
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Fat Convertible - 2001/2005 130 x 469 x 239 cm | Material: car, styrofoam, polyester Photo Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels, Belgium Courtesy Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels, Belgium
Eritrean female soldiers
maiming (usually followed by destitution and beggary if they survived) or death by violence or disease, in today’s military argot, the women with the column were ‘force multipliers’ that played a vital role in ‘unit cohesion’. Women helped to bind and unite the social and psychological fabric of armies and preserved their fighting spirit in every encampment, reinforcing regimental loyalties and soldierly camaraderie by expanding a sense of familial community and normality as close to civilian life as was possible. They took their duty seriously and they reminded the men of theirs. The French armies of the late eighteenth century and subsequent Napoleonic era were more forward-thinking in their attitudes to this reality than others. They formally recognised the presence of women in the ranks by creating uniformed corps of female Cantinières, a model soon copied throughout Europe and across the Atlantic on both sides of the American Civil War, later in the nineteenth century. They may not have been dashing Cuirassiers on cavalry steeds, but tales of Cantinières shouldering muskets in the heat of battle appear too often in soldier’s diaries to be discounted. Cantinières sometimes DID fight and die for the regiments they loved and belonged to just as men did, but their auxiliary role has overshadowed their every-day heroism in historical memory. In an era when army medical care was at best lethally primitive and inadequate to the task, Cantinières were invaluable aiding the wounded and the sick and would today be regarded as de facto battlefield medics and frontline nurses. Well before Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale revolutionised military medicine, the Cantinières were ably tending to the men who fell in battle in circumstances that would make modern corpsmen blanch. Slowly, however, Cantinières would fade from the battlefield, as armies reverted to all male enclaves. The last Cantinières to see service were in the DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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Royal Spanish Army during the first ‘Rif ’ campaigns of the early twentieth century in what is today the disputed, former Spanish Sahara. If we turn back to antiquity we can readily summon British warrior Queen Boudicca leading her Welsh Iceni tribe in a fierce uprising against Roman occupation as an example far and exceeding the Cantinière – not a woman following armies, but rather a woman masterminding military leadership, in warfare of the highest order, against the dominant martial power of her time. Catholic mystic Jeanne d’Arc and noblewoman Caterina Sforza both ably led armies later in the fifteenth century in France and Renaissance Italy. And Jeanne and Caterina not only led armies, they trained them and indoctrinated them personally. But arguably it is in East Africa on the eve of the twentieth century that a woman leading sizeable forces in the field first-hand achieves the greatest modern distinction to date, in her direct contribution to a larger, collective, unparalleled military success. On March 1, 1896 at the battle of Adwa, Taytu Betul, Empress Consort of the Ethiopian Empire, wife of Emperor Menelik II, led, alongside her husband, a division of imperial troops against the invading Italian army headed by General Oreste Baratieri. Empress Betul commanded the Ethiopian artillery batteries which proved so critical in smashing the tactically inept Italians, who were overwhelmed and easily outmanoeuvered by the more agile Ethiopian infantry and cavalry led by Menelik’s other subordinates. The Italians were further hampered by their disorganisation, poor morale and their hapless commander who was later judged by military tribunal as ‘unfit to command’, but the outcome is no less remarkable for the lack of Italian military prowess shown that day. The battle resulted in the virtual annihilation of the Italian force, leav-
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Serbian female soldiers
ing some 8500 dead and wounded enemy Italian and colonial troops and yielding 3000 more prisoners and vast quantities of captured arms and materiel. Adwa, also remembered as ‘Adua’ in Italy, constituted the most catastrophic and complete defeat of a large, colonial Western army ever inflicted by a “native” army in the entire history of Africa’s colonial wars. The victory preserved the independence of Ethiopia, which was, together with tiny Liberia, then the sole sovereign nation in Africa. It shattered the myth of European invincibility and inspired anti-colonialists everywhere for generations to come. Not long after Adwa, the intensified bloodletting of the Boer and RussoJapanese wars did not see women take a prominent frontline role in uniform, although reportedly a lone woman Cossack officer served in the Russian ranks at the Battle of Mukden in Manchuria, the largest land battle to take place in Asia until the Second World War. On the whole, during the Great War, while civilian women at home played a massive role sustaining the collective war effort, women served the rival armies primarily as nurses, not in combat – though they were sometimes dangerously close to the trenches in forward aid stations. As the Russian Civil War, however, spread its ideological struggle to neighbouring, newly independent Finland, some two thousand workingclass, Finnish women flocked to join the Red Guards (a move not mirrored within their opponents’ ranks) and fought, many of them dying in battle or routinely summarily executed upon capture by the ultimately victorious Whites led by Marshal Mannerheim. The response of the Finnish women was later echoed in far larger numbers by the voluntary enlistment of numerous Spanish women in the Republican militias who stood against Franco’s Fascist soldiers in the early stages of the Civil War there in 1936. The apogee of this development prior to the post-colonial era was reached in Nazi-held Yugoslavia, where no less than an estimated 100,000 female partisans fought alongside their male comrades in the only irregular guerrilla force in the whole of occupied Europe to evolve into a standing army – one which tied down a large, conventional Axis force, something no other resistance fighters achieved. We can thus consider the many female Viet Cong, Eritrean, Kurdish, Tamil and Chechen guerrillas of the post-war and contemporary periods as inheritors of the tradition forged in the Balkans. In parallel to the women resistance fighters that were present in every underground movement in the Second World War, the official secret operatives of the Allied Forces from organisations such as Britain’s famed
Special Operations Executive created a new arena for women to excel in the most rarified and difficult dimension of war, clandestine operations. Deep cover infiltration, ambushes and raids, sabotage of high value infrastructure, prison breaks, covert intelligence gathering and deception far inside enemy held territory as well as every other imaginable secret activity, including the rescue of downed airmen and the creation of escape corridors and communications networks, were the stock and trade of these elite women warriors. Trained as commandos, fluent in the languages spoken where they operated, often inserted alone via night parachute drops to their assignments and functioning independently or in tandem with partisans, scores of Allied female agents fought their shadow war superbly; they achieved results far beyond their numbers for the larger war effort, not least in delivering critical intelligence and sowing chaos in the key German rear areas in advance of the final assault on D-Day. Many, like the spectacular Noor Inayat Khan, a legendary SOE operator, were eventually captured, tortured and executed, or died in concentration camps. But there was never a shortage of female volunteers for this most hazardous and lonely underground war duty. The real life models for James Bond, that Royal Navy Officer created by author Ian Fleming, himself a clandestine wartime operator on His Majesty’s Service, wasn’t always a man. All told, millions of women wore the uniform of the Allied armies most, admittedly, with more mundane but no less essential roles than their cloak-and-dagger sisters in the SOE. But these duties did not entail simply reasonably safe administrative tasks. From the aircraft plotters of the Royal Air Force that scrambled fighter planes to help defeat the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, to anti-aircraft gun crews, to frontline field hospitals and supply convoys, to military police, many women faced the guns and the bombs. Others took on an even more aggressive role, especially on the Russian Front. For example, the 2000 female snipers of the Soviet Army saw action in every major battle in the East, where the greatest carnage was wrought in the whole of the conflict, including the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad, the worst sieges of the war alongside Nanjing. Only 500 of them would survive, among them Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the top sharpshooter of them all with 309 confirmed German kills. It does baffle imagination given Lyudmila’s and her comrades’ war record how detractors of women in combat rationalise that female soldiers lack both the fortitude to endure battle and the cold-blooded will to kill the enemy Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 73
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Chilean Cantiniere 19th Century
Ethiopian Empres Taitou
so intrinsic to the frontline soldier’s elemental métier. Soviet women also distinguished themselves as combat aviators, most notably as night bomber pilots, flying rickety, slow, outmoded biplanes that nonetheless allowed them to rain down destruction on the occupiers of their country with marked skill. Their casualties were also extremely high and as a matter of fearful respect the Germans would dub them the ‘Nightwitches’. There were also countless other decorated women on the Western Front, in the Pacific Theatre and North Africa – too many of them to list them here. But history has not lionised and remembered them evenly. If just one is chosen to symbolise their courage and tenacity then it is difficult not to mention Englishwoman Susan Travers, the only woman to ever serve as a full-fledged member of the immortal French Foreign Legion. Travers saw active duty for the whole of the war – in Finland, the Middle East, including the Free French battles in Syria and Libya and notably at the battle of Bir Hakim, in the gruelling mountain fighting of the Italian campaign, the liberation of France and the invasion of Germany. She won both the Legion of Honour and the Croix de Guerre for driving a general’s staff car, a field ambulance and a self-propelled anti-tank gun at different junctures under heavy fire. Women incontestably played a vital role in helping to secure Allied victory in the most destructive and far-reaching war humanity has ever known. Yet in most of the nearly seventy years since, the tired prejudices which kept women from taking their place in the vanguard of armies have held sway. Since the early 1990s, however, women started breaking the barriers again as combat roles opened up in naval and air forces in various armies, particularly in NATO countries. But the obstacles for an equal role for women remained in ground forces. Women were judged as undesirable and DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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Female Viet Cong 1960’s
unsuitable for the close combat of infantry fighting because of assumed inferior physical strength, an inadequate emotional temperament, and the folly of the supposed negative impact that female combat casualties would have on their male fellow soldiers morale – a direct inference that women on the front line would cause combat units to disintegrate psychologically and thus militarily. But warfare is a fluid beast and it evolves and transforms to reflect and absorb and adapt to the larger changes of civilisation. This is so not just in technology, but also in society’s cultural norms and geopolitical upheavals. The New World Order that US President George H.W. Bush said would ensue in the wake of the Cold War’s conclusion has turned out to be anything but. Instead the world is undergoing seismic changes in international relations and although some conventional wars will likely be fought in the future, unconventional warfare will remain the natural extension of the new world disorder that prevails from the counter-insurgencies, guerrilla and terror campaigns and ongoing revolutions (including those yet to come) of the Middle East, Central and South Asia and Africa, to the narco-wars of Latin America. What armed conflict will be sparked by a potentially looming, deeper global financial collapse is anybody’s guess. But things didn’t turn out so well after the last Great Depression. In this vein, military women find the door to equal service under arms is opening wider. Above all, the nature of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan has forced a change in perspective from the outmoded, unimaginative, sexist and rigid thinking that has kept women as second-class soldiers. The conventional and clear-cut frontline of the past has blurred into an opaque prism in the contemporary era, where what we now label asymmetrical warfare predominates as the most common form of non-linear war fight-
Susan Travers Foreign Legionaire WW2
ing. There is no such thing as a safe rear area in the battlefields of Hindu Kush and bullets and improvised explosive devices do not discriminate according to gender. Women soldiers in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, serving in supposedly non-combatant roles have repeatedly found themselves in heavy combat. They’ve been killed and wounded, just like other soldiers. They’ve also proven their mettle and won battlefield medals for bravery while their male comrades have managed to not lose their will to fight when their female comrades have fallen – not that they ever did in any war. GI Jane is not a coward, not a wallflower nor a weakling. She is a soldier holding the line like any other and the weight of history is in her favor. At a glance Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, New Zealand, Finland, Norway, Ireland, Poland, Sweden, Eritrea, and now the United States all allow women to serve as combat soldiers. Overcoming the enormous barrier of entrenched, hyper-conservative, Islamic sexism, even Pakistan and Afghanistan have their first female combat pilots and, somewhat surprisingly, have women soldiers serving in Special Forces units, the last bastion of male exclusivity in armies that otherwise have opened most combat categories to women (and presumably have never read about SOE’s exploits). Within NATO, women serve in Croatia’s crack Special Forces and British female soldiers also serve in the elite Special Reconnaissance Regiment, though they remain exempt from the better-known Special Air Service commandos. American women are still angling for a spot in Special Forces and inclusion in US Air Force Special Operations Squadrons may soon be a test case. Much has changed, more will change, and at the very least women in the military have earned a new respect and standing within armed forces around the world. This long-overdue recognition should have been granted
Soviet Sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko WW2
long ago, because time and again they have made the ultimate sacrifice, paying in blood for the terrible equality of a soldier’s wounds and death. One can only hope that their demonstrable courage, dedication and professionalism will also help effect societal change as moral currency for the liberation of women, full stop. But there’s far more to achieve yet. In the American military alone, the epidemic of institutional sexual abuse of women who serve is surrounded by far too much silence and impunity. There is an enduring adage of frontline soldiering that the true test is all about the ‘man next to you’; that an inviolable bond exists between you and the closest comrade with whom you share the sting of battle. It is a sacred trust from an ancient warrior ethos that has bound all armies from the Phalanx to the Korengal Valley. It demands that each do his utmost to defend the other – if need be, unflinchingly, with one’s very life. It is a code all combat soldiers swear by, a martial mystique that steels them and keeps them moving headlong to close with the enemy in their most fearsome moments of utter terror, when inherent primeval survival instincts would otherwise counsel retreat or worse, surrender. It is the thing that defines a fighting soldier, the core essence and repository of martial honour, élan and identity in the profession of arms. It is the moral antithesis of the egotism so prevalent in post-industrial society. It is what made French paratroopers volunteer to jump at Dien Bien Phu to die with their fellows, when the battle was clearly lost to the Viet Minh and it is what made those left behind, unable to find a place on those transports, weeping on the runway. The substance of that ethos is not vainglory, but unconditional love. There is now a difference: the comrade willing to fight to the end for you may not be another man, but rather a woman, not a brother but a sister in arms. She will not let you down. She never has.
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Muslim Women in Transition
by Rosalie Rivett In the West it has become almost a truism that Muslim women, especially those in the Arab world, are oppressed, voiceless and – to put it bluntly – miserable. As with most such viewpoints in the current clash of cultures, it is one-dimensional, stereotypical, and no doubt convenient for propaganda purposes. It also serves in and of itself to rob Muslim women of their full humanity. The real picture is of course, more complex. And while it cannot be denied that there are great struggles for women in Muslim cultures in the present day, the women themselves are more active agents in their own stories than Western narratives allow. This is true especially in the area of government and diplomacy – among the last bastions of male privilege and prerogatives. DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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The position of women in Arab countries has changed greatly in the last few decades. Access to education, birth control, and the work place has intensified women’s search for independence. However, each advance is resisted and challenged. Attitudes, entrenched in culture and tradition, are harder to change than legislation. The elders are culture-bound and, often, breaking barriers in government and society is the most difficult hurdle of all for women.
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Across Arab countries, women – secular, liberal and Muslim, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups or organisations – are challenging traditions, demanding greater rights, reinterpreting the Koran and Muslim history. A religion that originally offered women greater freedom than was known in other traditional societies has come to be associated with their repression. Muslim feminists are reclaiming the independence and respect that were accorded to them during the early centuries of Islam. Professional Muslim women have different aspirations embedded in the ideal of equality. They seek equal opportunity and status to their male counterparts. Many of them have been exposed to overseas cultures, and international education and this further opens up their minds to their potential. Notwithstanding the major leaps forward in the development and liberation of women, a lot still needs to be done. On the whole, government and politics, especially in the Arab world, are still predominantly male-dominated. In this environment, the role of Muslim women in diplomacy is transitional. In London, in July 2013, more than ten percent of diplomats are Muslim feDANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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males. The Ambassadors of Bahrain, Lebanon and Morocco are women and until recently there was a female Jordanian Ambassador, while the number of women in the diplomatic corps is steadily rising. The gains that have been achieved by Muslim women in diplomacy include not only the fact that there are numerous Muslim women in ambassadorial positions but that there are also many diplomats in senior diplomatic posts in international organisations, such as the United Nations and the Commonwealth. There are women who hold ministerial office within their own governments and others who have senior positions in industry. They are part of the diplomatic and government decision-making process and the presence of women in these roles is poised to continue to grow in the years to come. For example, in Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah has instituted a huge scholarship project, which sponsors about 100,000 students for overseas studies. Many of these scholarships have been won by women. Earlier this year thirty professional women were appointed to the Shura Council where their role includes offering advice to the king. It is not difficult to see that these positions will lead to future diplomatic posts. In addition, some of
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the young, modern princes are promoting women in the workplace. Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a very energetic, enthusiastic and entrepreneurial young royal has been proactive, with about 65% of his workforce being female, including the first Saudi female pilot. In 2015, Saudi women will be able to vote in and to contest municipal elections. In my opinion, these are the embryonic stages of considerable progress in promoting Muslim women in government and diplomacy. In patriarchal societies such as those found in the Arab world, the difficulties women have to overcome in order to achieve positions of power, which traditionally are controlled by men, are monumental. This is the case in most spheres, but none more so than in the diplomatic arena. Muslim women try, like other women who move in a typical male environment, to use persuasion, knowledge and wisdom to counteract prejudice. Where this does not work, then they may have to resort to national, and in some cases international, law. The main obstacles in breaking the mould created by male domination in the Arabic world are based on different, and some say convenient, interpretations of Koranic law.
Contrary to popular belief, many Muslim women in past Islamic societies did not live a segregated life, such as that seen in some strict contemporary regimes. Life in traditional Islam had a certain amount of tolerance between men and women, who mingled easily, even in public. In current times, however, there is widespread disparity in the treatment of men and women. Muslim women are striving to re-establish the enhanced tolerance that was prevalent in the so-called ‘original Islam’. Unfortunately, there are historical facts that document the submission, cruelty and distress women have endured and are still suffering. In certain regimes, the social inequality between men and women is still very starkly evident. It is often thought that these situations are mainly due to a religion that encourages male predominance over women or a purely masculine interpretation of religion. Personally, I think the problem is less of a religious nature and more of a cultural one. The ambiguity lies in the flexibility of Koranic law and the absolute freedom of interpretation. Over the centuries the Koranic text has been used both in a conservative and intolerant way and also in a more intellectual and open dialogue with a predisposition to tolerance and forgiveness. This is what Muslim women are struggling to regain. Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 79
POLITCS Discussing women’s empowerment seems strange when there are governments that do not allow women the right to drive, to vote or even hold a passport. Naturally, women-friendly laws will take a while to implement, but let’s not forget, that even in the United Kingdom, universal suffrage was only granted in 1928 and it was certainly unthinkable that there could be a female prime minister just half a century later. In our modern, instant, ‘now’, society, there is a tendency to forget these stories and people hope they can change attitudes very quickly. A process of cultural change needs its gestation period to mature. It is only in those countries where Sharia law is practised as the only Koranic law that these differences stand out more. But even these governments are showing signs of readiness to change. These issues provoke continuous disputes between modernisers and conservatives. Iran established the right of equality in the case of inheritance and in Algeria, the attempt to introduce a new family code has led to the protests never before seen by women’s associations. Other protests have taken place in countries such as Morocco, where the government had to withdraw a law that restricted the rights of women. The Turkish parliament had extended equal parental rights to women. However, things have gone several steps backwards in Turkey and women’s rights are in danger; the image of ‘the woman in red’ (being targeted by tear gas) has become a symbol of antigovernment protest and has drawn attention to the treatment of women in Muslim countries. In Turkey, women are fighting against repression by the state, which they see as controlling their minds, bodies and their freedom. Modern technology enables their protests to break through any parochial isolation as situations are instantly ‘tweeted’ worldwide. On the other hand, these are new and dangerous times in Egypt as much of the progress that women had made in recent years has been reversed. Women protested with their menfolk during the Arab Spring, calling for democracy and freedom. But two years later their rights seem to have been eroded. There is much more uncontrolled sexual harassment and the new constitution has removed recognition of women’s equality. Mubarak seemed to have been a defender of women’s issues but the backlash against his dictatorship also had repercussions for women – they lost the right to initiate divorce, protection against child marriage, and the ban on female genital mutilation. Violence and gang rape are very much on the increase and it seems as though these are practically condoned by the authorities in order to transmit the message to men to keep their women at home. When these atrocities occur they often go unreported as those in power see to it they are beyond editorial reach. The media have to please whoever is in power as non-compliance is met by violence. In other countries like Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates and, beyond the Middle East, in countries like Azerbaijan and others in Central Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia there are tangible signs that even more radical Islamist parties are implementing a modernisation process. But Rome was not built in a day. At an international, and professional, level there does not seem to be much difference between the Muslim woman and the Western woman, especially with the new generation of Muslim women who are much more determined in achieving their goals. I think we should look beyond the clash of cultures
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POLITCS and believe more in coexistence with mutual respect for different rules. There are many examples that show women are taking more control of their lives. We see younger Arab women participating in causes such as promoting family planning centres, fighting sexual discrimination, demanding parental responsibility, creating centres for single mothers, protesting against rights that protect men for certain crimes such as rape, as we have seen in recent, horrific examples in India. In Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, Algeria, Turkey and Indonesia women have the right to access education and have
become part of the professional fabric in the political, and public sector. This is directly related to the need to build more democratic societies in the Muslim world. Does this evolution clash with the fact that many Muslim women choose to wear the hijab? In some views it is an Islamic statement of radicalism rather than emancipation. This is a question of freedom and of personal choice. I do not believe that it is a symbol of radicalism. A protest against the hijab is seen as a protest against Islam and not against patriarchy, thus alienating those who seek their rights within a Muslim context. Many Muslim women fear that some aspects of their faith are being eroded and, as a result, wearing the veil is a statement of their rights to uphold loyalty to their traditions. Others fight for their independence in a different way by protesting in the public square and demanding more responsibility and emancipation in the appropriate forums. Islamic feminists like Professor Leila Ahmed, Professor of Women’s studies and Religion at the Harvard Divinity School, in her seminal work, Women and Gender in Islam (1992), argues that the oppressive practices to which women in the Middle East are subjected are due to the prevalence of patriarchal interpretations of Islam rather than Islam itself. Dr Fatema Mernissi, a lecturer at the Mohammed V University of Rabat and a research scholar at the University Institute for Scientific Research in that city, echoes the same sentiments in The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Islam, a quasihistorical study of the role of the wives of Muhammad. And Dr Shirin Ebadi, 2003 Nobel Peace Laureate, an Iranian lawyer, former judge and human rights activist and founder of Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her significant and pioneering efforts for democracy and human rights, especially women’s, children’s, and refugee rights. She was the first ever Iranian to receive the prize. These highly acclaimed women have been major critics of the anti-female power structures. Their protests are a result of decades of intellectual debates and research by Muslim women and therefore, their arguments are grounded in historical, academic fact. Just as it is desirable that Muslim women have the liberty and independence they crave for, ultimately the choice of how to exercise that right lies with the individual woman herself. Sisterhood can only support their claim to freedom from restraints. Women speak with a new voice in order to stand up for their rights - it does not really matter how they do it whether it is in a tradional way or a modern way – the most important thing is that they win the prerogative of freedom of choice and freedom from oppression.
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The Most Powerful Woman in Italy Has Got Your Number A client is a client and without faults, but I am a professional and if he doesn’t like my findings it’s his problem. I am not here to please or to bolster anybody’s ego, but to analyse numbers and get practical results from my research. - Italian Pollster Alessandra Ghisleri
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By Massimo Gava
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Alessandra Ghisleri
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How does one readily summarise Alessandra Ghisleri? Her incisive intelligence and her eclectic intellectual background would make her a player to reckon with in probably any arena that she would choose. Dual degrees in oceanography and palaeontology are not the usual prerequisites for a number-crunching analyst and trend spotter. And yet Ghisleri is – bar none – the most successful opinion pollster in Italy. And her range goes well beyond just Italy or Europe; her reputation is such that her clientele is broadly international. This includes the United States, which is an arena notoriously reluctant to accept opinions from foreigners. Of course, she excels on her home turf and when the complexities of the Italian market can be bewildering to outsiders, discerning clients turn to her firm, Euromedia Research, as the definitive tool to better understand both Italy and Europe as a whole. Ghisleri is Italian, European and global in outlook. Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 85
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Alessandra Ghisleri and Alfonso Lupo “Euromedia Research” founders
I must confess her assertiveness and sharp speech are in contrast to the gentle image of her public persona when you first meet Alessandra Ghisleri. I could not help noticing the gigantic, old-style green receiver she has attached to her mobile phone. She is very attentive and has anticipated my questions. ‘I spend so much time on the phone I started to develop some kind of headache, so I chose this gadget to prevent me from getting more of them.’ She relayed this detail with a captivating smile that lit up her equally striking visage. She is a beautiful woman, no doubt, but her external appearance also reveals a sharpness of mind in her countenance. She is always switched on, and you see that clearly in her eyes. She rarely gives interviews and readily admits she is not very trusting of the media. This is perhaps ironic, but because of her prominence on the Italian political scene, she feels she has been targeted and misquoted too often by some less-than-scrupulous journalists at home. So she now screens them carefully and not every reporter may gain access. Her favourite topic is her work and she avoids discussion of her personal life. And in this particular instance, as Dante unveils its first annual edition focused exclusively on Beatrice, I am pleased Ghisleri has agreed to collaborate with us. In keeping with her objective-oriented philosophy, she responds with enthusiasm to my assertion that ‘actions speak louder than words’. I wanted DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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to show in tangible way what she is so good at, so I asked a straightforward question. ‘How about rating the leaders of the world, as if we are a political rating agency?’ I ask her. ‘How much time do you think you need to come up with an acceptable result?’ She smiles, takes her receiver and dials a number. ‘How much time do we need to come up with result based on…?’ Over a span of ten minutes she has outlined all the variables to a colleague, including how many people will be sampled, and gives me her verdict. ‘How about mid-August?’ I am almost speechless. All of Italy is on vacation in August and even less inclined than usual to face toil, in light of the recession, during this sacrosanct time-off. So she has broken another stereotype. La Ghisleri, as she has been dubbed by the Italian press, fits into few moulds but her own. She explains that her polls would be based on a variety of factors: • interviews based on thirty opinion leaders • data analysis based on political polls made in the country of the leader
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Alessandra with her inseparable phone
• data analysis based on articles of the local and international press • manual analysis via monitoring web 2.0, realised with method SIR – Social Intelligence Research But before we delve into the results of the findings, I can’t resist a few more questions as part of me is sceptical. All too often we read contemporary polls and accept them as inviolate when we very seldom grasp the methodology behind them. We know some are not credible and the data can be skewed and manipulated, especially in secret polls. Ghisleri agrees with me, unleashes one more of those devastating smiles, and explains that sites that publish secret results are hilarious. She pokes fun at some of the material she constantly reads in the press: ‘We see findings from dog and horse races, or even the cycling tour of the Conclave, you name it, and suddenly you discover that this party is on the rise or a rival party is suddenly losing ground.’ She admits this is not serious work but rather a tease for the reader, trying to divert public opinion. And can they do that?
‘Of course not” she says, laughing. ‘We’re not magicians here. We analyse real numbers and we base our findings on that, not on putting a spell on people with magic potions.’ It’s kind of charming notion, but since we are laughing at some of the secret findings how about talking seriously about human individuality? In a world where people seem incapable of doing anything without consulting opinion polls, is there still space for individuality and independence of thought and behaviour, I wonder? Ghisleri thinks that society is often dazzled by fashion, constant new trends, and mob conduct, and that precisely because of this, individuality and originality emerge to counter the conformity. ‘These are isolated personalities in comparison to the people that we analyse with our polls, but if it wasn’t like this we wouldn’t be able to analyse consumer behaviour. There will always be space for the individual even if the variables are different to the ones we had ten or twenty years ago. Statistics or opinion polls do not create anything. It is important to say this. We are not the sibyl or the oracle, as I like to say, of humanity’s inner self. We only register and study the behaviour. If, in a society we lose identity, the fault belongs to the behaviour of society itself.’ But what about the politicians who seem to live for polling and consensus-building? ‘It is true’, Ghisleri replies, ‘that the majority of politicians are easily influenced and subject to direction of the opinion polls. It is like that all over the world. The difference Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 87
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Euromedia Reasearch Team
is in the quality of the politician. The superficial one follows the numbers literally whilst the man of substance turns it into his own advantage for his own objectives. Therefore, space for a leader’s originality still exists, as long as the political leader has it within him. We cannot create substance if there is nothing there. Without a good product the campaign does not sell, and we cannot do a hard sell if it’s without merit.’ I remark that it is a bit pathetic that politicians and business enterprises alike have adopted this methodology to grasp their failings and then use it as a smokescreen to justify their actions. ‘In reality the opinion poll and the statistics should be used as a comprehensive measurement, not as predictions. We are not shamans; we are researchers, people that study numbers. Therefore the market research and opinion polls should be the intermediate process before the final decision. We provide tools for the politician to create consensus or for the business to become more viable financially and commercially.’
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Have you ever been surprised by some findings? ‘The opinion polls are instruments that capture a picture of key factors in society to determine the reaction to a myriad of questions at a specific moment in time. Therefore in many instances correlating the findings with respect to political results or economic trends has to be done with a balanced perspective which considers a multitude of variables that are often fluid. Failing to make the correct interpretation of the findings could lead to a different result. However, yes, I was surprised to see in a study we made for a prominent French political figure, that the French are quite attentive to the physical posture of their leader, literally how one carries oneself. And odd as it may seem, this can swing opinion dramatically. This may be culturally idiosyncratic to the French, but overall in the current worldwide political turmoil even a small percentage-point shift can determine victory or defeat in an election.’ And yet I cannot help but ponder... could our very own Leonardo da Vinci, the ultimate Renaissance man, exist today in a world where key decisions
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Marisa Belisario Awards 2007
seem to be directed excessively by opinion polls and statistics? In response, Ghisleri poses her own question. ‘Are we really sure that opinion polls have this power? Manipulating and directing our behaviours? We saw in our recent elections that Prime Minister Monti hired Obama’s campaign guru and failed miserably at the polls. The same opinion poll used by Leonardo or Napoleon – would it truly be utilised in the same way? Would we share the same aim? I have serious doubts about it! The polls by themselves do not create anything. The same result given and analysed by different analysts in a different way does not produce the same results. Did Napoleon, before the final battle in Wagram, study the combativeness of his adversary (desk research), consult with his lieutenants for the best ideas (focus group), and analyse the whole structure for the best actions (reading of the data)? Napoleon displayed great tactics in problem-solving as to how best to deploy his artillery to overcome the enemy; he took to the field and won.’
powerful woman in Italy, perhaps a sample of her polls – exclusively commissioned for Dante – will do the trick. Her polling figures for incumbent German Chancellor Angela Merkel give Merkel a triple AAA rating, so as we go to press the election results will confirm their accuracy or not. Ghisleri is not daunted by the prospect. ‘I’m not afraid to face a battlefield myself; taking risks is part of my daily routine. You can publish my findings without any reservations or problems. You’ll see.’ Given her fearlessness, unflinching confidence and enviable, proven track record as one of the most accurate prognosticators in the business, the talented, beautiful and uncompromising Alessandra Ghisleri is a self-made woman, navigating Italian and European politics on her own terms. Dante will watch her progress closely and we expect you will too.
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Dante’s Poll Results La Classifica “Social” FOCUS ON INDIVIDUAL LEADERS
La Classifica “Social” Fans
Followers Barak Obama Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
Barak Obama
34.316.841
36.461.450
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
3.173.175
Followers1.874.900 Dilma Rousseff Barak Obama 34.316.841 Francois Hollande 555.673 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan 3.173.175 Mariano Rajoy 441.413 Dilma Rousseff 1.874.900 David Cameron 370.995 Francois Hollande 555.673 Enrico Letta 154.039 Mariano Rajoy 441.413 Aggiornato al 19 Luglio 2013
Francois Hollande
Fans
2.120.226 389.420
Angela Merkel Barak Obama
330.662 36.461.450
David Cameron Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
192.373 2.120.226
Mariano Rajoy Francois Hollande
90.868 389.420
Enrico LettaMerkel Angela
32.629 330.662
Dilma Rousseff David Cameron
14.243 192.373
Aggiornato al 22 Luglio 2013 Mariano Rajoy
90.868
David Cameron
370.995
Enrico Letta
32.629
Enrico Letta
154.039
Dilma Rousseff
14.243
Aggiornato al 19 Luglio 2013
Aggiornato al 22 Luglio 2013
*Angela Merkel does not have twitter account
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8 BARACK OBAMA – USA ANGELA MERKEL – Obama made history as the first GERMANY African American to obtain the highMerkel came to power in 2005 as the est office in 2008 on 52.9% of the first woman to hold the post of Gervote. In 2012, 51% of the American man Chancellor and was re-elected in electorate backed him for a second 2009. Her party, the Christian Demotime. However, as of June 2013, crat Party (CDU), polled 32.6% and some opinion polls show a 54% dissubsequently 32%. Forbes magazine satisfaction with the administration, rated Merkel as ‘the most powerful as well as a sharp drop in his personal woman in the world’. popularity ratings to 45%. Recently With two months to go before dragged into the so-called “Datanational elections, an opinion poll gate” scandal (wholesale personal (FORSA) reveals that 57% expect data surveillance inside the USA and Angela Merkel to remain chancelwithin the EU), Obama has lost credibility with the principal European lor with the CDU actually increasing its share of the vote to 40%, surging leaders, not helped by his lack of progress on matters such as Syria, the onclear of its main rivals. Our general qualitative rating = AAA going talks with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the closure of the prison at Guantanamo. Rating = AA DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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DAVID CAMERON – UNITED KINGDOM Cameron became the youngest British Prime Minister since 1812 on May 11, 2010, succeeding Gordon Brown’s short premiership. He was forced into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats as his party, the Conservatives, did not achieve an outright majority. In the last two years, his party’s poll rating has decreased and now stands, on average, ten percentage points behind the Labour Party. Reacting to a rise in anti-EU feeling, he has promised, if re-elected in 2015, to hold a referendum on staying in the EU. His championing of gay marriage rights has caused huge splits inside his party but, on the other hand, it has enabled him to garner support from the general electorate. Rating = BBB
ENRICO LETTA – ITALY Letta became Prime Minister of Italy on April 28, 2013, at the head of a broad national coalition. A few months on, Italian electors show a good level of trust in their leader’s abilities. He enjoys a satisfaction rating, according to the major opinion poll companies, that hovers around the 50% mark.
FRANÇOIS HOLLANDE – FRANCE Hollande was elected French president on May 6, 2012, gaining 51.6% of the vote in the final runoff against Sarkozy. A year down the road, a TNT survey reveals that 76% of the French people are ‘not at all satisfied’ with the measures his government has taken so far. This feeling of dissatisfaction was even found in 56% of those who previously voted for his socialist party and are now considerably
MARIANO RAJOY – SPAIN Rajoy has been prime minister since December 21, 2011 when his conservative party, Partido Popular, gained a 44.62% share of the vote. He is currently embroiled in a corruption scandal dating back to 2009 which is linked to his party. According to national surveys, the Partido Popular’s poll rating is now half what it was at the 2011 general election. Rajoy had won on the back of a general rejection of the anti-austerity measures the previous Socialist leader Zapatero had pushed through, but which Rajoy then proceeded to adhere to after the vote. Rating = CCC
unhappy with his performance.
Rating = B
DILMA ROUSSEF – BRAZIL Roussef was elected president in 2009; her Workers Party scored 16.9% in the parliamentary elections and 23.1% for the Senate, emerging as the largest party overall. In 2009 Epoca magazine named her one of the most influential women in Brazil. However the recent demonstrations against the Football World Cup in 2014 have caused a drastic drop in her popularity, with one DataFolha poll showing a fall of 27 percentage points, from a high of 57% down to 30% now. What’s more, 25% of Brazilians now believe that the Brazilian government is doing a bad or extremely bad job, whereas before the protests started, this figure had remained stable around 9%. Rating = CC
Rating = BB+
RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN – TURKEY Erdogan became Prime Minister for the first time on March 14, 2003, and subsequently won again in 2007, and triumphed a third time in 2011. His party, the AKP (Justice and Development Party) increased its share of the vote with each election, thus: 34..4% initially, then 46.7% and finally gaining 49.8% the last time around. However, a recent OCR poll showed a slight drop to 41.5% as a direct result of the Taksim Square protests, while another poll (Metropoll) registered a more significant fall to 35.3%. However, despite this decrease, Erdogan’s AKP would still emerge as the leading party in Turkey. Rating = C
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Kem Issara:
Fashion and Business in the 21st Century By Ben Rungsrithong
Designer Kem Issara uses all tools of the trade to build a reputation within Thailand’s increasingly prominent fashion scene.
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BANGKOK – Kem Issara, the boutique, is tucked away in a sleepy neighbourhood inside Ekamai Soi 22, far from the midday traffic scrum of the main road, but then likewise far from the kind of general commercial activity a business needs. Kem Issara, the designer, is a petite and articulate woman, and she meets us at Feast, a ‘fashion café’ that shares the boutique’s deceptively roomy interior. Kem, as she prefers, is not concerned with the utter dearth of foot traffic, because, as she will soon prove to us, this is the twenty-first century, and things are done differently now. DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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‘Instagram and Facebook are really effective,’ she says as Passion Pit and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes blare from robust yet unassuming speakers. ‘When the shop opened, we only invited a few family members, friends and some press. The very next day, we had a customer in just because of an Instagram post.’ She started, as all aspiring fashion designers must, by learning from some of the very best. Her CV includes internships at Jasmine Di Milo, Chloe Paris, Roksana Ilincic and Diane von Furstenburg, in addition to a degree from the London College of Fashion. Kem Issara, the brand, was launched in March 2012, and if the whirlwind that has been the past year is any indication, it’s a label that will be on everyone’s lips, hips and elsewhere before long. As a fresh-faced designer at last year’s Elle Fashion Week in Bangkok, Kem introduced a collection that received much positive press. As a result, she’s been charging forward ever DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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since. She’s completed pop-ups for Central Chit Lom, a collection for Intercontinental Hotel Hua Hin to appear before the New Year, and is working on a similar collection for a pop-up at W Bangkok hotel. The look and feel of the clothing that has garnered such notice in the Thai fashion world is reflected in the boutique itself. The space is warmly lit, impeccably well-kempt, tastefully understated. As for the clothing, Kem describes it thus: ‘The grand idea is timeless feminine. Sophisticated feminine. I’m going for clothing that’s practical for daily wear but that’s also good enough to wear out to dinner. The woman who wears our clothing is a career woman who enjoys going out with her friends. I don’t want my customers to buy my clothes because it’s a trend — I want them to recognise it as a classic piece they can keep in their wardrobe for a while.’
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Social Style For an up-and-coming fashion designer like Kem, who freely admits that the least enjoyable part of trying to get off the ground is the ever-present business aspect, the most logical way to get the word out there is social media, Instagram in particular. ‘Instagram is a really powerful medium right now,’ she says. ‘Thailand has the highest number of Instagram users per capita in Asia and people are really starting to embrace the idea that Instagram is about lifestyle — fashion and food in particular.’ One of the results of Thailand’s love affair with Instagram is that small designers are given substantial leeway in marketing and advertising their products. ‘There are so many designers right now. It’s really booming,’ says Kem. ‘People are really interested in fashion, and a lot of it has to do with social
media like Instagram and fashion blogs.’ And the rise of the Thai fashion designer doesn’t stop at the tens of millions of Thai Instagrammers, either. ‘It’s so easy for Thai designers to promote their brands internationally. Social media makes things available worldwide. Thai people are getting into fashion, and international fashion is starting to notice Thai designers as well. I feel lucky to be part of this generation of designers.’ Kem has already experienced some of the international interest in her product first-hand. She’s been interviewed by a fashion blogger from New York, and Kem Issara clothes can be found in Singapore with Australia on the horizon as well. However, Kem is fully aware of the importance of gaining a foothold in her own backyard. In the case of one recent event, that backyard is quite literal. ‘We just had a flea market at this space,’ she says of the boutique’s spacious Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 95
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interior and verdant back yard. ‘We collaborated with twenty brands. It was a lot of fun.’ The rapid success of her clothing line has inspired Kem to continue to evolve the fashion line which has been such a source of fun for her. ‘I feel really lucky with my timing,’ she says of a confluence of events that has included the recent explosion of social media on the Thai fashion scene and her boutique space itself, which became available when the previous tenDANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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“Sarmede, 1918”. Italy
ant ended a coffee shop venture. And to where does the river of events next flow? ‘I’m doing a collaboration project with a French graphic designer,’ reveals Kem. ‘That project will be done in September. Another project is that I’m also looking to get my stock sent to Australia’.
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Am I a Human? A Look at the War on Women By Caroline Udall “...[T]he books of instruction, written [for women] by men of genius, have had the same tendency as more frivolous productions; and that [is that women]... are only considered as females, and not as a part of the human species, when improvable reason is allowed to be the dignified distinction, which raises men above the brute creation, and puts a natural sceptre in a feeble hand”
- Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1797
“[W]e women, in trying to make our case clear, always have to make as part of our argument, and urge upon men in our audience the fact – a very simple fact – that women are human beings. It is quite evident you do not all realise we are human beings or it would not be necessary to argue with you that women may, suffering from intolerable injustice, be driven to adopt revolutionary methods”
- Emmeline Pankhurst, ‘Freedom or Death’, 1913
“Feminism is the radical notion that women are people”
- Marie Shear, New Directions for Women, 1986
“Life gives us many experiences... I’ve had the experience of delivering calves, dead and alive. Delivering pigs, dead or alive. It breaks our hearts to see those animals not make it” Georgia State Rep. Terry England, speech on the floor of the Georgia State Legislature, 2012 (Arguing in favour of House Bill 954, which imposed a ban on abortions after twenty weeks gestation. England was pushing for a similar law to apply to women carrying stillborn foetuses, or foetuses unlikely to survive, to full term.)
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Stamp printed in USA showing an image of Rosie The Riveter commemoratingt he American women who worked in factories during the World War II.
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In recent years in United States, there has been a not-so-quietly waged internecine conflict that has come to be known as ‘The War on Women’. That is not an inaccurate term on its face, but it is something of a catch-all phrase and easily dismissed by those who are actually making this war. It is nothing less than a frontal attack on the hard-fought gains women have made in the West for their political rights, their social equality, and their very autonomy and authority over their own bodies. It cuts to the heart of women’s very humanity.
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Susan Travers Foreign Legionaire WW2
Of course, there has always been something of a rumble going on over issues of women’s equality – since time immemorial, really. But this latest – and shrillest – contemporary round began to be more noticeable, in particular, during the time of the 2010 mid-term elections when the Tea Party began its rise. It came to power, not only in Congress, but across the country in state legislatures, as a far-right faction of the already hard-right Republican Party. While they had run mainly on a ‘fiscal responsibility’ and job-creation platform, upon taking power they almost immediately began furiously churning out floods of anti-woman legislation. To paraphrase Neil Finn, describing the waves of misogyny happening in the US these days is like trying to ‘catch the deluge in a paper cup’ – it can quickly become overwhelming. However, to evoke a sense of it, I present some of the War On Women’s Greatest Hits, as it were, in the major areas of concern. DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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Soviet Sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko WW2
Reproductive Rights This is the big battlefield, of course, and skirmishing continuously flares up all over the country. Only a small handful of states (mainly in the far West and Northeast) do not restrict abortion significantly. Most other states have been churning out literally thousands of anti-choice bills since the beginning of 2011.1 Not all of these bills have passed, of course, but it seems like the people’s business in many states and in the US Congress has lately been to get all up in women’s business - if you know what I mean. Some representative samples: • In numerous states around the country, ‘personhood’ bills, which give the full rights of citizens to fertilised eggs, have been introduced. Arizona passed a bill – later thwarted by the courts – which started counting gesta-
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tional age from the first day of the mother’s last period, effectively banning abortion at 18 weeks gestation and, in my opinion, basically criminalising menstruation. • In South Dakota, a bill was introduced in 2011 to expand the state’s definition of justifiable homicide to include those who try to harm an unborn child. The bill’s sponsor, a long-time abortion foe, explained the intent of the bill was to protect pregnant women from assault. But such circumstances are already considered in current language. The bill would provide cover, argue opponents, for anyone who murdered an abortion doctor to claim defence of an unborn child - the bill was ultimately tabled. • A number of states adopted ultrasound provisions mandating that women seeking abortions must first have an ultrasound before the procedure. A hotly contested measure in Virginia requiring that the ultrasound be transvaginal, that is, an ultrasound wand must be inserted into the patient’s vagina, was passed in 2012. It is a measure copied in a number of states since. Virginia’s legislation also required that the abortion provider make a copy of the foetal image and include it in the patient’s file.
• Kansas is a particularly harsh state when it comes to abortion restrictions, even going so far as to mandate that doctors to lie to their patients. A March 2012 bill requires, among other things, that doctors tell women abortions are linked to breast cancer – something that has been repeatedly debunked. Violence Against Women The nexus of abortion and violence against women is interesting, if creepy. There seems to be a dark connection in certain minds between fathering a child and the redundant locution of ‘forcible rape.’ It is worth noting here that 32 states give parental rights to rapists for any offspring that might be a result of their crimes. • Both North and South Dakota have attempted over the years to ban abortion with no exception for rape victims, incest victims, or cases where the mother’s health or life are in danger. Their justification is that rape pregnancies are vanishingly ‘rare’. Studies have shown that pregnancy from rape is as common as, or greater, than pregnancy from consensual sex. In the 2012 election cycle, this long discredited canard was brought back Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 103
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to life and would not die – no matter how much the one who spoke it got slapped around. Todd Akin, a Missouri Congressman and candidate for the US Senate, was the first Republican candidate to bring it up. He claimed that victims of ‘legitimate rape’ rarely became pregnant because “the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.’ When the predictable firestorm erupted, Akin clarified by saying that, of course, he meant ‘forcible rape’ (apparently, there is a hitherto unknown distinction between that and ‘consensual rape’). Akin refused to withdraw from the race, which he eventually lost. At least six others, in various states tried riffing on this same theme in their races. They all lost as well. • Sexual assault is rampant in the US military. A 2011 Newsweek report says that women soldiers are more likely to be assaulted by a fellow soldier than killed in a combat zone. The latest figures indicate that last year an estimated 26,000 sexual assaults took place in the military. That is up from 19,000 estimated assaults in 2011. The senior military officials who have DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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testified before Congress on the issue have lamented the problem but have done little. Prosecution of sexual assault lies within the chain of command and so officers have ‘ways to shut that down’ when a soldier wants to press charges. Barack Obama even went so far this year as to bring up the issue in his speech to this year’s graduates of the Naval Academy. • The Violence Against Women Act, an uncontroversial and originally bipartisan piece of legislation, provides for women’s shelters and violence preventions programmes, among other things, has been reauthorised by Congress without fuss twice since its initial passage into law in 1994. Suddenly in 2012, it was ferociously opposed by Republican lawmakers who objected to new provisions that would protect same-sex couples, Native Americans living on reservations, and undocumented immigrants who are victims of domestic violence. They also objected to an amendment which was added to address the needs of human trafficking victims because it mandated offering reproductive health services to victims.
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Gorizia
state’s 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act which permitted victims of wage discrimination or sexual harrassment to sue in state district courts.
The Wage Gap • On average, women in the US are paid only 78% of what men are paid. This despite the passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963 when working women as a whole made 59 cents for every dollar a man made. It took forty-four years for that wage gap to narrow to 19 cents – a rate of less than half a cent a year. And that is with clear legislation in place. It represents a loss of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars to a woman over the course of her working life. But some Republicans are now trying to undermine the protections that women do have. Infamous unionbuster, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, for instance, repealed his
This hardly begins to scratch the surface, but I’m sure you get the point. I think that often the Tea Partier behaviour has been so over-the-top that people couldn’t quite believe these guys were serious. So while there was predictable outrage, a lot of the reaction also tended to be sarcastic and mocking. For instance, two female legislators in Michigan were gavelled down during a legislative session. One of them, Barb Byrum, had tried to introduce an amendment to a bill that would apply the same restrictions to vasectomies that were applied to abortions. The other, Lisa Brown, during debate on the same bill, had said, ‘I’m flattered that you’re all so concerned about my vagina. But no means no.’ The women were told the following day they were banned from speaking that day – presumably because they had used the words vasectomy and vagina! Other women soon wanted in on the laughs. Some began lobbing ‘sarcasm bombs’ at the facebook pages of the more infamously anti-choice politiIssue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 105
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cians. Here are a few particularly precious examples:
To Texas Governor Rick Perry:
To Kansas Governor Sam Brownback:
• ‘Can tampons chafe vaginas? I’m scared to use them. Also, how much menstrual blood can a Diva Cup hold? My flow can get pretty heavy. Thanks, Rick!’
• ‘Dear Governor: Do you, by chance, perform pap tests or transvaginal ultrasounds? I hear you are the ‘go-to’ guy when it comes to women’s anatomy and health care’ • ‘How much discharge is too much discharge?’ To Virginia state Senator Ryan McDougle: • ‘Hi Senator McDougle! Just wanted to let you know, since you’re so concerned about women’s health, that my period started today. Color looks good, flow’s not too heavy. Cramps are pretty manageable – but don’t worry, I’ll let you know if that changes! Thanks again for caring so much about women and our bodies!’ DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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• ‘Rick, is there a godly way to eliminate my between-menstruation spotting that stains my underwear and produces cervical contractions that leave me gasping for breath? I could really use some advice on this one’ Still, it’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt; and Tea Party policies were guaranteed to hurt. By the end of 2011 – the first year of the reign of the Tea Party – women (and rational men) had just about had it. One of the earliest national-level, grassroots responses was from a group called UniteWomen, founded in early 2012. In February, two Michigan women, friends Karen Teegarden and Desiree Jordan, were decrying the state of things and wishing someone would DO something already! As they spoke,
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they realised they were the change they were waiting for. Before she went to bed that night, Jordan created a facebook page: Organising Against the War on Women. By morning over 500 people had joined. Soon they were working with women from around the country to organise protest rallies in every state. By April 28, their organisation – now called UniteWomen – had pulled together 55 rallies in 45 states. Considering that the rally had organised in only ten weeks with little money and no media support, it was nothing short of extraordinary to have covered so much of the country. The crowds were not huge in most states, but considering the paucity of media coverage, they were relatively healthy, with organisations reporting crowds of several hundred in most locations – even in population centres like Los Angeles, where about 300 people came. The exception to this, and far and away the biggest crowd, was that of Austin, Texas, where an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 people showed up. Texas politicians might have felt somebody walking over their political graves that day. That state – where some of the worst assaults on women’s rights have been made – would be the place where the first big explosion would come.
In June of this year, during a special session of the Texas legislature, a bill was introduced at the eleventh hour that would severely restrict abortion in the state. It combined several provisions that had failed to advance during the regular session of the legislature. If enacted, the bill would not only criminalise abortion after 20 weeks, it would also impose restrictions on Texas clinics (where basic health care is also offered) which would force 90% of them to close their doors. Enter Wendy Davis and a lot of pissed off women. Davis, a Democratic Senator from Fort Worth, rose to filibuster. She would have to stand and speak – on topic – without stopping, eating, drinking, going to the bathroom, or leaning on anything for as a long as it took to make the clock run out on the bill. That meant midnight of that same day – June 26, 2013. Blond, slight and dressed in a white suit and neon pink running shoes, Davis began to speak. She kept at it for eleven hours despite attempts by Republicans to shut her down on technicalities. Eventually, not long before midnight, they managed to get her removed from the floor, stating that she Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 107
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Female Viet Cong 1960’s
had strayed from the topic by mentioning transvaginal ultrasounds – not part of the bill under consideration. While spectators and Davis’ fellow Democrats erupted in protest, Republicans took advantage of the chaos, trying frantically to force through a vote before the midnight deadline. The vote was completed with an official timestamp of 12:02. The Texas Senate Website, however, reported that the final vote was completed just before midnight and the bill had passed. But with the gallery still packed and an estimated 180,000 people watching a livestream online, the fiction could only last so long. Senate leaders finally admitted that the bill was dead. Republicans brought the bill back, however, in July – and this time some 5000 people showed up, with UniteWomen (which had continued to quietly, steadily organise since its first appearance on the scene) on the front lines. During debate, the gallery was again packed with both pro-choice and anti-abortion activists. The protests in the rotunda were so loud, state police were issued with earplugs. Troopers searched women before they entered the capitol, confiscating tampons. Thousands waited on the capitol grounds as the bill was debated again – and this time passed. Given the make-up of the legislature, it was probably inevitable. But in the meantime, thanks to Wendy Davis and a lot of Texas women and men, the state – and hopefully soon now the nation – had fully woken up. Midterm elections are approaching, and whatever happens next, it promises to be a thrilling ride. .......... On Sinead O’Connor’s 1994 album Universal Mother there is a song called ‘Am I a Human?’ written by O’Connor’s then-10-year-old son, who also DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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performs it. It is about twenty seconds long and consists mainly of the boy quietly singing to himself the question ‘Am I a human?’ and answering himself, ‘Maybe I am.’ As I have contemplated this state of affairs for a while now in the US, that song occasionally comes up on my internal playlist and stays there on a loop. I keep hearing that musing little voice: ‘Am I a human? Maybe I am…’ It is a question that can’t help but insinuate
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itself into your brain. Am I a human? As a female, am I a human? Well… maybe I am. Because we mustn’t kid ourselves. This War on Women is about exactly that. It is about that terrible question men have asked themselves over the course of the ages, and that women have been forced to confront, in all its naked misogyny from the beginnings of Abrahamic culture in the West: are women human? Maybe they are. And if that seems like an overstatement, I would assert that the mere asking of the question, even implicitly (cows and pigs have to carry dead foetuses to term, after all), can change the climate of a culture for the worse.
In evidence, let me just offer a few telling anecdotes. Where George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida, single mother Marissa Alexander was convicted and sentenced there for 20 years for simply discharging a firearm into the air in what she described as ‘warning shots’. The warning shots were to fend off her abusive ex-husband against whom she had a protection order. She invoked Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground’, (which allows those who ‘feel threatened’ to use deadly force against a perceived attacker) but the jury rejected the reasoning, even though no one had been hurt, much less killed. Would she have been so convicted had she not been female, and an African-American female at that? In June of this year, a jury in Bexar County, Texas, acquitted 30-yearold Ezekiel Gilbert of charges that he murdered a Lenora Ivie Frago, a 23-year-old Craigslist escort. Gilbert had admitted to shooting Frago in the neck on Christmas Eve 2009, when she accepted $150 from Gilbert and left his home without having sex with him. Gilbert’s defence argued that Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 109
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Gilbert’s actions were justified, because he believed that sex was included as part of the fee. Texas law allows people ‘to use deadly force to recover property during a nighttime theft.’ The jury agreed with this line of reasoning and set him free. And finally, this summer, an ominous little phenomenon slithered into the light in Texas. In two separate incidents recorded on dash cams, several hundred miles apart, Texas state troopers were caught on video doing vaginal and anal body cavity searches on women who had been stopped for routine traffic violations. The searches were carried out at the side of the road, in full DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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view of passing motorists. In both incidents, the women were eventually let go with no citations of any kind. The victims in these assaults are now suing the state. While this kind of violation – of laws, of bodies, of human decency – has been seen in a number of states in the past few years; in Texas, it appears to be something of a policy, at least, an informal one. These all may seem to be unrelated incidents, but connect the dots. They all intersect at the point where females are routinely and systematically dehumanised. Women are livestock, women are property, women are breeders and ‘baby mamas’. Why shouldn’t they be denied the right to defend themselves? Why shouldn’t they be shot for absconding with their privates
COVER Museum “Cjase Cocèl”
when said privates have been duly purchased? Why shouldn’t the law just stick its fingers up those privates looking for drugs (or whatever), just any old time? Why not, if we’re not even sure those bodies are fully human? The persistence of this question after thousands of years can be a soulcrushing thing when you contemplate it clearly enough. But it can also be looked at in a new, perhaps more hopeful way. We can, of course, look at the current War on Women as a ferocious reassertion of the status quo of misogyny and violence after a few anomalous decades. But we can also look at it as an extinction phenomenon, as the last toxic wheezings and clatterings of patriarchy’s death rattle, as it senses its end approaching. That
is my fervent hope. Either way, though, the course forward is the same. We cannot fail to assert, to demand, to expect our full humanity, including the full autonomy and control of the bodies WE own. It is ours. No matter how it is resisted, we have to claim it. Am I a human? The only possible answer must be to roar back in concert with Mary Wollstonecraft, Emmeline Pankhurst, Marie Shear and countless others, both known and unknown, until the bleatings of the Terry Englands of this world are drowned out and they slink away in shame. The only possible answer to that ancient, insulting, eviscerating question is simply: YES!
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Combining luxury and sophistication while enjoying the astounding views of the Mediterranean Sea, Mövenpick Hotel & Resort Beirut is the ideal retreat for all those seeking excitement and serenity. The hotel offers upscale accommodations and recreational facilities and promotes a wide range of activities and leisure pursuits for business travellers and holiday-seekers alike.
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Mediterranean escape
extensive resort facilities.
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Window of the soul
Beneath the Veil By Ana Belyh
The veil worn by some Muslim women is one of the more contentious and perhaps least understood issues that boil away at the interface between Islamic culture and the cultures of the West. Ana Belyh offers her own ruminations on her experiences, a unique perspective, both from outside the curtain of the veil and from the very intimate space behind it.
Y at the same time.
Years ago, I had my picture taken with a fully-veiled face. Like many photographers, I am shy when it comes to having my own picture being taken. So, when an overly eager friend kept taking pictures of me, I covered my face. This wasn’t my first encounter with veils, but even now that picture reminds me of just how strange they are – functional, decorative, oppressive and liberating, all
Growing up in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, wearing a headscarf casually tied at the back was a normal part of domestic attire for any woman in my neighbourhood. You needed to have your hair tied when you cooked, cleaned the yard DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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or did laundry, when you went to a funeral or a place of worship. The scarf was convenient to keep long hair out of food, laundry, or to be respectful of God or people. In that world, a veil had a function, like an apron or oven gloves; it was something you wore to keep yourself clean, safe, and appropriate. I remember the first time I saw a woman in Osh wearing a full black veil. It was mesmerising. It was something out of Scheherazade and her 1001 nights stories. These women looked like queens floating down the dusty streets of my hometown. I wanted to be a queen too. At that point in my life, I was struggling with the issue of covering. How DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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much is too much to reveal? How much is too much to cover? Seeing these women made me want to cover myself, to be an enigma, something not easily reachable. But to my friends and family, the full veil was a sign of oppression – these women had no space other than that defined by the boundaries of their veil. These women did not exist as entities in the public eye. The presence of these women in the public space of my little hometown made me question myself and my attitude towards clothing. Is it the clothing we wear that makes us virtuous, or is it our attitude that makes the clothing virtuous? As a manifestation of that debate, I had some days when I would wear a skirt that could barely pass for a belt and a top that exposed my back. I also had days when I left only my head uncovered.
Eventually I settled on a compromise: I would cover up, but not my face or head. That decision was a result of me expanding the frame of my search, asking what is appropriate for either men or women to wear if they are to be respected. I settled on jeans and long-sleeved shirts as my dual attempt to be like both the mesmerising queens who chose to keep their bodies private, and like the men who are respected in the community. Years later, I had to wear a veil. I had just arrived in Kabul and put a headscarf on. It wasn’t a tied-behind-your-head scarf; it was a veil that draped from your head, wrapped your shoulders, and concealed your chest. When I put it on, I felt like I had been reduced to something like the paint on the wall, as though that piece of cloth erased me as a person. It wasn’t the act of
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wearing it, it was the fact that I didn’t really have the choice not to wear it. There was no way of escaping the veil in Kabul. It took only a couple of years for me to grow used to the feeling of this cloth draped around my shoulders, resting on my head, and snuggling me into a comforting hug. When I was outside Afghanistan, walking or travelling around somewhere, I would reach for my head in panic, realising that my scarf was draped around my shoulders, but not my head. I was shocked to discover that the veil had become a part of me. The first time I had to cover my face was when I travelled to Jalalabad, Afghanistan. We drove – it is only about two and a half hours – but the road Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 117
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is not very secure for a Western-looking woman, so I covered my face. At first, just as I did when I had landed in Kabul, I felt that I had been erased from the public eye. I did not exist. I blended with the carts and cattle on the road. I felt as though I were not a human being. And then I found freedom in that. I was no longer a spectacle, something that people stopped to look at. I was part of the daily routine – who would notice another black blob sitting in a back of a beaten-up white Toyota Corolla? Since then, I have occasionally worn a full veil cover in Afghanistan. I have done it precisely because it made me a part of the larger grey mass of people. Not that people did not see that I was a foreigner when I covered my face – my eyes were a dead give-away – but I no longer stuck out with my full head of unruly blond hair and fair skin. The veil grounded me. It offered me comfort.
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Walking around with my face covered, I didn’t have to face the fact that I am a stranger living in Kabul. Unlike when I left my face open, people left me alone on the street. The police did not once stop me to ask me for my passport, as they normally would have. I never thought I would voluntarily erase myself from the public eye. It almost felt as though I could walk away from being me, at least for a bit, that I could pretend I was someone else for a little while. It was like a heavy blanket when you have a fever; it took away my shivers and comforted me. It said, “Let the world go by on its own.” Under that veil, I had my own little space to do what I wanted to – take pictures, talk to shopkeepers, walk around and people-watch – and that space would not be desecrated by all the worries of being a foreigner in Kabul. I sometimes wanted to hang on to this strange comfort. Every so often I would keep the veil on, even as I flew out of Kabul. I was sometimes afraid that by removing it I would prematurely expose myself to the elements. I sometimes kept the full face veil on until I arrived at my hotel in Istanbul or Dubai. On those occasions, I would lie on the hotel bed and let the memories of so many veils wash over me: a snug, soft veil in which to cook a meal; the black veil to go to a friend’s funeral; an oversized veil to wrap yourself against the evening chill; and a thin veil to enwrap your head and face to ward off the world while you wait. It was only when I was ready, when the memories had stopped flowing, when the tears of confusion, loss, and longing had stopped rolling down my face, that I would slowly unwind the veil, take off my abaya, peel off my t-shirt, jeans and underwear and lie on my bed, naked, exposed, alone. At those times, I would wait for the moment when I was ready to re-emerge to the world, to take my stance, to deal with the rush of daily life. I would wait for the perfect moment to emerge unveiled.
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Independent news for the the world. DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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Independent news for the the world. www.bikyanews.com
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In Transition: The Resilience of the Women of Tajikistan By Dee King
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Even in the developed world, where feminism has been a significant societal force for over a century, women continue to struggle within their cultures to gain equal power and legal status with men. In societies where feminism’s effects have been muted or non-existent, those struggles are that much more elemental. A case in point is Tajikistan, where women struggle to find their place in a society in turmoil. A civil war, a post-Soviet thaw, and resurgent traditions from the bedrock, patriarchal culture have thrown women back on their innate strength and resilience.
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My recent trip to a lesser known corner of Central Asia revealed a country steeped in centuries of tradition and full of rugged, breathtaking landscapes. Today’s Tajikistan was created in 1924. It is the smallest and poorest central Asian country, with the shortest history as a nation-state. However, it is located in a region of Asia which has a 1000-year-old cultural legacy. Tajikistan’s more recent history involves a period as a republic of the old Soviet Union, followed by independence and a bloody civil war when the Soviet Union collapsed. This desperately poor nation is now rapidly moving into new and unchartered waters in its history as it seeks to make its way as an independent state in a volatile and rapidly shifting regional context. During my short stay, however, it was the women of this extraordinary country that most captured my attention. Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 123
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St Hilarion Castle
Feynan Ecolodge
My first morning in Tajikistan, as I peered through the lens of my camera, I could see that there was no disguising the energy of these Central Asian women. They seemed emboldened in some way as, dressed confidently in vibrant colours, they strode purposefully forward into their day, many with babies swaddled to their bodies, others carrying heavy loads. As I focused in on their facial features, it seemed to me that Tajik women presented a dual face: I wondered how much this was to do with the complex mix of influences resulting from a former Soviet society, previously built on ancient Persian values, and now at the mercy of a new Islamic state. The more I observed, the more fascinated I became and the more anxious to understand their lives. I noticed some were barely visible beneath their veils, while others appeared quite Westernised. As a whole, the women of Tajikistan seemed to be in the midst of some kind of transition.
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I was working with Charity Road Trips in Tajikistan, bringing aid to local children’s charities. During my ten-day trip, I travelled in predominantly male company. One of the few other women, Nizora, naturally became my friend and confidante. It was during one of our many discussions over Tajik lifestyle that Nizora revealed some of the truths behind my suspicions. Nizora herself, in her mid-thirties, goes out of her way to dress in as Western a way as Tajik norms allow. Her work as translator with the NGO Sworde Teppa puts her in the category of ‘women with aspirations’. She would like most of all to travel to the West and start a life in a welldeveloped, affluent society. She sees little future for herself remaining in her country. Still living in her parents’ home, she is subject to the whims of an increasingly patriarchal society, which has been re-emerging as part of a complex system of expected gender roles, based around age old local customs and religious influences.
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Nizora tells me: ‘I am noticing a creeping movement amongst young Tajik girls, as young as ten or twelve years old, to cover their heads with scarves. During my lifetime, I have never felt any compulsion to hide away. I worry that many young girls in Tajikistan today are only concerned about getting married. They have so few aspirations. Our education system has deteriorated since the Soviet collapse. Society has declined and there is extreme poverty in rural areas. People are looking for a new set of values. I am concerned that fundamental Islamic influences are spreading across the border into our country from Afghanistan. There is a feeling amongst young girls that dressing as a submissive Muslim girl will increase their chances of attracting a future husband, and that getting an education will be a passport to nothing.’
In what we like to see as a world which allows increasing opportunities for women, this would certainly seem a pretty dim view to take, but Nizora’s words are borne out by the facts. Since the early 2000s there has been a withdrawal of women from public life and a revival of traditionalism. Since the collapse of the Communist era, there have been significantly diminished levels of state support and an overall drop in the quality of education. As a result, women now predominate in the sphere of social work, especially in childcare and in the care of the elderly. In addition it is very evident that agriculture in Tajikistan is heavily propped up by the use of female manual labour. As we traversed a rugged Tajik terrain in our 4x4, one of the most frequent sights was a field full of women in brightly coloured headscarves, wielding old-fashioned hoes. Salary rates are four to eight times lower in these traditionally womenIssue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 125
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Tajiklistan landscape
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Child with the “talking-watch”
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dominated areas of labour when compared to other sectors such as industrial and construction, and twenty times lower than in banking and commerce, significantly influencing potential earnings. It also often ties women to the domestic scene, and helps to perpetuate the extreme levels of poverty that have become the norm among rural communities since the losses of the civil war of 1992 to 1997.
leaves an enormous burden on the abandoned women or ‘grass widows’, left to fend for themselves and their offspring in a country which still discriminates unfairly against women. There are no state allowances for single mothers and the very fields in which these women often toil for long hours are generally owned by men. Without a male family member, it is hard for women to obtain plots of land from privatised corporate farms.
Tajik society seems unready to accept women in positions of authority, even as migration patterns impose ever greater responsibility on them. Figures for 2003 suggest as many as 347,000 predominantly male migrants left the country in search of work. Annually, around 84% of these go to Russia, often not returning, and entering into civil marriages abroad. This
However, in some corners, these women are fighting back with impressive entrepreneurial efforts. In the last year, these efforts have begun to pay off with a recent contest launched by the NABWT (National Association for Business Women in Tajikistan) to identify the best female entrepreneur in the country. There were several hundred contestants out of the country’s
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few female business owners (less than 15% of businesses are femaleowned). As the women of this country emerge from a background of poverty, they have more reason than most to improve their lot. If you combine their resourcefulness and energy with the basic survival skills learned from an early age, and an ability to find stillness in their every day through innate spiritual values, all the elements for success would seem to be in place. The women I met on my travels, who spend their days sewing and tilling the land, cooking their home-grown produce on open fires, and doing their laundry in streams, are calm and grounded and very wise. They follow a form of folk Islam and, on the whole, seem to have the deep respect of the men and boys around them. In fact, ironically, despite society’s seeming disregard for female power and authority, certainly the older women are revered and respected in many communities as leaders and spiritual heads. Being both female and long past youth, I discovered, from day one, that I, too, was worthy of the typical Tajik greeting from both young and old male passers-by, one reserved for the wisdom and serenity of women: a
reverential hand placed on the heart accompanied by a slight bow of the head. It has to be the reason for this incredible duality of Tajik women. It seems, on the one hand, they are left to do all the work. But, on the other, there is a deep appreciation in many quarters for their innate power. There are certainly some aspects of life in this unique land which I hope will not be lost in the usual crazed haste to become a developed nation. As in all Third World societies, there are lessons to be learned here for the West. These concern deeply-held principles and human values. These are found in the generosity and gentle relationships which typify simple village-living, along with a vibrant community spirit. While staying amongst these soft-hearted people, I witnessed a very pure form of humanity. If only all future progress could be founded on this base of innate and spiritual values, the people of this land, led by their women, might have the rare opportunity to go on appreciating basic human kindness at its best, long after the arrival of technological and industrial progress.
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La Isla Bonita
The Dominican Republic is located on the eastern side of the island of Hispaniola, the second-largest island (after Cuba) in the Antilles. It is here that Latin American got its start – and where some of the most wellknown features of that vast, diverse culture are found in abundance: riotous colour, sensory delights of all kinds, and – most of all – a life lived in music.
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by Neil Geraghty
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It’s 10 p.m. on a Thursday night and a car wash off Santo Domingo’s glitzy seafront boulevard is getting busy. A cool breeze wafts in from the Caribbean and dissipates the last remnants of the sultry afternoon heat. In a ramshackle outdoor bar waitresses in lime-green hot pants rove about carrying trays of ice-cold Presidente beers. A live band strikes up a lilting merengue rhythm and a cool dude in shades and a baseball cap leads his girlfriend onto the dance floor. Although she’s wearing skintight Capri pants and tottering heels, her hips are soon gyrating in perfect synchronicity with his. Car washes are the poor man’s nightclubs in the Dominican Republic where everyone can enjoy good music and a cheap beer. Music is the life blood of Dominicans and whether you’re in a village liquour store or a roadside chicharrón (pork scratchings) shack, the vibrant refrains of merengue and bachata are never far away and become the seductive soundtrack to this happy and welcoming country. Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 131
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Drying tobacco
Santo Domingo is the birthplace of Latin American culture. It was here in 1496 that Christopher Columbus’ brother, Bartolomé, established the first European city in the Americas. Today, Santo Domingo’s beautiful Zona Colonial, a UN World Heritage Site, is a wonderful place to slip into the laidback pace of Dominican life. Grab a seat under the shady Caribbean almond trees outside Café Colón on Colón Square, order a frozen mango juice and sit back to watch the colourful street life. Forget Italians – Dominicans are the bee’s knees at vespa riding. It’s not uncommon to see whole families perched precariously on scooters with mums busily arranging their hair at DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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the back and toddlers standing proudly in front of dad with their hands gripping the handlebars. Colonial Santo Domingo is the school-day-out capital of the Dominican Republic and the hundreds of well-behaved children in their crisply- ironed chinos and immaculately pleated checked skirts could easily take first prize for the smartest school children on the planet. Wandering around the whitewashed lanes of the Zona Colonial is a delight. Bougainvillea tumbles over crumbling walls, graceful church towers flutter with pretty red, white and blue national flags and Dominican dogs resembling giant chihuahuas with pointed ears slumber on shady verandas. It’s a
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Restaurants in the Plaza Espana, Santo Domingo
city of firsts, boasting the first hospital, cathedral, monastery and university in the Americas. The colonial attractions offer a welcome respite from the searing afternoon heat. Don’t miss the Alcázar de Colón built by Diego Columbus, Christopher’s son, in 1511. The cool airy rooms of this elegant stone palace are packed with an Aladdin’s cave of fascinating colonial treasures. At nightfall the pavements outside local grocery stores become makeshift bars where, after work, domino enthusiasts come to pit their skills against fellow aficionados in intensely-fought battles. The graceful colonial mansions lining the Zona Colonial’s streets are also home to some of the city’s most popular restaurants. Meson de Bari (Calle Hostos 302) is a great place to get acquainted with the simple, bursting flavours of Dominican cuisine. Don’t miss the light fluffy empanadas that resemble miniature Cornish pasties. Fish, including the ubiquitous mero (grouper), is invariably good and comes plainly grilled or doused in a tomato, chilli and garlic Creole sauce. If you love prawns, look out for arroz con camarones, a flavourful paella, lightly spiced with soy sauce. Later in the evening, live music clubs spring to life along
the romantic, floodlit streets. Café Teatro (Calle Arzobisco Merino 110) is one of the best and is an essential gig venue for up-and-coming Dominican musicians. A courtyard bar sparkling with bottles of Brugal rum does a brisk trade in cuba libres, while hip students lounge under the stars swaying to the hottest new merengue beats. The Dominican Republic boasts the largest all-inclusive resort industry in the world and it can be hard work tearing yourself away from the sublime, palm-fringed beaches. However, the country is also home to the most diverse scenery in the Caribbean. Just half an hour from Santo Domingo’s sprawling suburbs, the lavender- blue peaks of the Cordillera Central appear on the horizon. Nicknamed the Dominican Alps, you occasionally see dustings of snow on the 3175 metre summit of Pico Duarte. The pace of life in the lush plains surrounding the mountains is wonderfully languid. You’ll always see rocking chairs on verandas of the brightly painted, corrugated iron houses and in late afternoon, when the schools pack up, village greens echo to the thud of sleepy baseball games. The main motorway heading north west across the island takes you to Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 133
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Santo Domingo Cathedral
Santiago, the Dominican Republic’s lively second city. Miguelina’s bakery (Autopista Duarte Km 91, Bonao), halfway along the motorway, is legendary and always has long queues of loyal customers, stocking up on their delicious cakes. There’s a shady cafe next to the shop where, by a refreshing fountain, you can enjoy a morir soñando, a heavenly smoothie made of fresh orange juice, evaporated milk and crushed ice. It goes well with jalao, a sticky banana-and-coconut cake which is moreish beyond belief. Santiago’s wealth grew out of the surrounding tobacco plantations and at the Centro Leon cultural centre you can visit a traditionally- run factory belongStreet in Zona Colonial ing to the renowned Aurora cigar company. Here, nimble-fingered workers handcraft 150 cigars a day, using seven-year old tobacco leaves. The air is filled with the bittersweet aroma of the leaves. How the workers avoid slicing their fingertips off using the see-saw curved cutting blades is a mystery. The cocoa plantations near Santiago offer a similar aromatic experience. DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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At Hacienda La Esmeralda you’re greeted by a heady sweet chocolate aroma drifting on the breeze. This immaculately manicured organic plantation offers a full hands-on chocolate experience. Under cool, shady cocoa trees you can sample seeds straight from the pod. The pith has a refreshing, lemony-peach flavour. The villages surrounding the plantation are famous for their rickety, wooden Victorian houses and brightly coloured murals of flowers, birds and butterflies that give an almost 1960’s Carnaby St feel to the animated street life. As the road winds up the mountains towards Jarabacoa, the weather cools off and the landscape takes on an almost Alpine quality, with slender pine trees dotting lush meadows. Relaxing mountain resorts, set in verdant gardens, line the swiftly- flowing river, where you can enjoy the thrills and spills of white-water rafting or a more leisurely trot by horseback, upstream to the Baiguate waterfall. Don’t forget your swimsuit as a beautiful, shallow, green pool spreads out beneath the cascading waterfall - the refreshing water feels sublime after jolting along
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White Water Rafting, Jarabacoa
threaten to hug you and ruin your clothes if you don’t give them a tip. the hot, dusty mountain tracks. Make sure you take plenty of small change! In amongst the mayhem, you’ll If you’re lucky enough to be in the region in February, you’ll witness one of spot plenty of stunning carnival queens. The Dominican Republic has an the most unique carnivals in the Caribbean. La Vega’s is the most famous illustrious history of beauty pageants. Whether they’re dressed up as devils and each Sunday the streets are thronged with masked revellers dressed as or as Miss World, Dominicans are naturals in front of the camera and adore glittering devils. The diablos cojuelos, as they are called, run amok through the posing for tourists. At night the streets become giant streets and scare bystanders out of their wits by hitting outdoor parties and pulsate to the sounds of merenthem on the backside with hard balloons. There’s more Fact Box For more information on the Dominican than a touch of Halloween about the atmosphere, gue, bachata and reggaeton. Whatever time of year you Republic please visit particularly if you run into some of the more sinister visit the Dominican Republic, it’s this wonderful music www.godominicanrepublic.com characters, such as the semi-naked demons covered that will stay in your memories long after your trip to in black oil, or zombies covered in powdery clay who this vibrant country is over. Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 135
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Serotonin: The Happy Hormone? By Elisa T. Keena
Serotonin and its brother neurotransmitters have been the talk of, well, everywhere at least since the appearance of Prozac, during the 1990s. But the more that is learned about this tiny molecule, the more amazing it seems. It is apparently omnipresent in nature, and it rides a fascinating feedback loop between our brains and our guts that has implications throughout our physical systems
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We’ve all felt that amazingly relaxed feeling after eating a big bowl of pasta, taking a long walk outdoors, cuddling with a mate, parent, child or pet, or just thinking about any of those things. There! There’s that feeling just now! Right, you know what I mean. Just thinking about any of those things can produce a release of serotonin in the body. That calm, serene feeling that lets us know all is well. That’s serotonin! The happy hormone! My favourite neurotransmitter! Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 137
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A neurotransmitter is a chemical that relays messages between the nerves in the body causing a physiological action. Serotonin is also known as 5HT (5 Hydroxytryptanine) – for the science geeks it is a monoamine neurotransmitter. It is one of the four main neurochemicals (the body produces thirty): serotonin, epinephrine, dopamine and endorphins. It is found almost everywhere in nature, controlling different aspects of physiology, including appetite, sexual desire and function, mood, sleep, memory, temperature and social behaviour in everything from worms to humans. Its action is sometimes compared to a volume control, either amplifying or reducing the intensity of messages sent between the synapses of the nerve endings throughout our system. It is found in the brain, the gut and blood platelets. The Skinny on How It Works: An electrical impulse initiates the process and generates the release of serotonin (or any of the neurotransmitters) from the end (axon) of a nerve cell to the synapse (the small space between the nerves). Next, the serotonin is recognised by a receptor site on the dendritic area of the next cell, which then grabs it. In simple terms, this relays a signal for whatever physiological action is desired and that signal is passed from one cell to another, resulting eventually in the signalled action. The serotonin spends a short time in the synapse and then is re-absorbed back into the axon of the original nerve cell with the help of serotonin transport molecules. The cells are ready to start the process again. It might help to understand the process if you visualise a chain of people: the first person wants an apple. He reaches out his hand, touches the next person and whispers, ‘I want to pick an apple.’ He then DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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brings his hand back to his body. The person he touched repeats this action, touching and whispering to the person next to her. This is repeated down the line of people until the last person – the one next to the apple tree – picks an apple. And that’s just the beginning. Serotonin regulates signal intensity and affects how efficiently our nerves communicate with each other. There are over 40 million brain cells and most of them are influenced by serotonin. But wait, there’s more. Over 95 percent of the serotonin in our body is made and stored in the enteric nervous system – ‘The GUT Brain’. The nervous system in your gut is made from the same embryonic tissue as your cerebral brain and produces and utilises the same neurotransmitters. It has over 100 million nerves (more than the spinal cord). It is in constant communication with the brain via the vagus nerve (nine signals are sent from the gut to the brain for every one the brain sends to the gut). It can also act independently of the brain, taking its own measurement, making its own decisions and learning its own lessons. You have those ‘gut feelings’ when you know something is right or wrong or is going to be good or bad. Well that’s your ‘gut brain’ and its buddies, the neurotransmitters, talking to you. Just think how we abuse our gut – eating unhealthy foods and irritants, and allowing stress to give us ulcers! You have felt serotonin working in your gut in response to one of those irritants. There is either too much or too little serotonin produced, which leads you to make too many or too few trips to the loo.
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Sounds simple, right? Maybe not. This process controls and affects so much of our lives and there are many reasons it may not work correctly. Too little serotonin produced, too few receptor sites, too many receptor sites, too few transport molecules, too many transport molecules, our genetics, diet, exercise, our gender, sex lives, weather, sunlight, thought patterns, and stress - all affect the system. There is evidence that women have more serotonin receptors and fewer of the proteins that transport serotonin back into the cells. This initially sounds great. But in reality, research shows that the receptor sites open up when hormone levels are low so they are certain to bind to every last drop of serotonin. In the same manner, the transport proteins are reduced to allow serotonin to stay in the synapse longer (this is how many anti-depressants work – by keeping the serotonin in between the cells longer, by preventing breakdown, or by blocking the signals to the transporter proteins that bring the molecule back to the cell). In addition, variations in sex hormones also affect serotonin production, release and re-absorption. Oestrogen specifically stimulates serotonin receptors in the brain. When the levels of hormones change, the brain’s sensitivity to serotonin also changes, causing an increased need for serotonin to accomplish the same effect. This effect is also cumulative. Over time it may chip away at the ability of the brain and the adrenal gland to regulate mood, sexuality and response to stress. This can cause depression, especially in women. If you add in familial genetics – some people have increased levels of serotonin or receptors inherently – the saga becomes more complex. Men, it appears, make 52% more serotonin then women. They do not have fluctuations in levels of sex hormone until middle age, when amounts decrease
steadily. (Yes, PMS is a real syndrome! Women are wired to be grumpy at that time!) The old saw that the way into a man’s emotions is through his stomach may be quite literally true. Both are modulated by serotonin! As I said, serotonin has been my favourite neurotransmitter and for years I’ve been trying to manipulate it. How do you keep the happy hormone happy? There are ways to do it. Diet: We know that food affects our bodies physically. We can see it on our waistlines and in lab reports. How often do you reach for chocolate or breads or pasta when you’re feeling down? Diet also affects our mental state. Those cravings are the body trying to increase its serotonin level. Diet affects our serotonin production and serotonin levels affect our diet choices. Serotonin is naturally found in many foods. It is also is produced in the body from tryptophan, which is an amino acid, one of the building blocks of complex proteins. Some foods that contain high levels of serotonin: Walnut Plantain Pineapple Banana Kiwi Plum Tomato Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 139
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Date Papaya
correlated to serotonin via the SAMe (US dietary supplement.ed) precursor. When SAMe is low, serotonin is low.
These foods can boost serotonin in the gut, but because serotonin cannot pass the blood-brain barrier you must also consume foods that contain tryptophan, the precursor to serotonin.
Dieting is serotonin’s worst enemy! Calorie restriction decreases serotonin levels in both men and women – so, yes, diets do make you grumpy! Low serotonin levels make you constantly hungry, so it’s a vicious circle.
The following foods contain high levels of tryptophan: Turkey Banana Milk Yogurt Dairy Products Eggs Meat Nuts Beans Chick peas Fish Cheese (especially Swiss and Cheddar) Carbohydrate-based foods – pasta, bread, rice, sweets, crackers
Exercise: Exercise also been shown to increase serotonin levels. Both moderate aerobic exercise and yoga will increase the serotonin levels in the body. Too much exercise or feeling forced to exercise may have the opposite effect. Choosing to exercise creates serotonin; forcing exercise does not. This might be correlated to an ancient fight or flight response – running to hunt and get food vs. running away from being the food. Usually, when you don’t feel like getting up and moving it’s then when you need it the most. Exercise also helps regenerate neurons in the brain, creating feelings of well-being, energy and youth.
The confusing point is that although proteins contain more tryptophan than some other food groups, when you eat high protein foods your level of serotonin may not elevate quickly. There is a biological competition between proteins for entry to the brain. You may not make as much serotonin as you might think. On the other hand, when you eat carbohydrates like pasta, bread or crackers, you secrete insulin, which causes a decrease in the competitive protein metabolism and allows increased tryptophan to enter the brain and increase serotonin. When you are tired, upset, moody, sad or stressed, consume some crackers and cheese or a bowl of pasta to increase your serotonin levels. This will promote feelings of security, safety, confidence and happiness. Eating foods that increase your serotonin levels also decrease anger, aggression, and depression. If you eat two serotonin-containing foods at the same time you may actually do more harm than good – you’ll get the high but you also will get a drop later which may make you feel worse Vitamin B is also very important, especially thiamine and folic acid. Both have been shown to improve moods, decrease depression and stabilise personality swings upon supplementation. Researchers believe that folate is DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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Additionally, the more muscles you have the more serotonin you produce. The muscles use up many of the competing amino acids and allow a greater level of tryptophan to reach the brain. So people who have a regular exercise regimen have higher levels of serotonin to start with. Daylight/Sleep: Historically, we humans spent much of our time outside in the sun during the day and in the dark at night. UV light absorbed through the skin creates vitamin D, which in turn plays a part in serotonin production. Research has demonstrated this so convincingly that major companies are trying to incorporate direct sunlight into their offices to help increase production and decrease stress. Serotonin is also involved in sleep. In the presence of calcium, serotonin is a precursor for melatonin. Light decreases melatonin production and interrupts the sleep patterns. This prevents us from reaching the deeper levels of sleep where healing and complete rest take place. It is during our sleep that we cut away the things that are not important to us, the things we don’t spend much time thinking about or are not attached to, and the time that the neurons of our brain cells begin to regenerate. Lack of sleep desensitises the serotonin pathway. If we don’t sleep we are anxious, cranky, panicky, tired and become sick. Most of us are bombarded by light at night whereas a century ago that was not a problem for most.
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Once again this is a two-way street. Serotonin helps us to sleep, and sleep helps produce serotonin. That’s why our grandmothers used to tell us to have warm milk at night with some cookies or biscuits. Milk has high levels of tryptophan to help you sleep. Happy Thoughts: Researchers have found that even just thinking happy thoughts can initiate serotonin production and thinking sad thoughts can decrease serotonin levels. The more happy thoughts you think the less room for sad thoughts! This is also a two-way street. You can actually see changes in the brain that correlate to serotonin production when you are having pleasurable memories and painful memories were negatively associated with serotonin levels.
Systems: Appetite
Overweight - increases cravings, apathy, energy
Mood
Depression vs. Happiness
Sleep
Deep and regular vs. Insomnia
Addictions
Positive feedback from alcohol, drugs, sex, shopping, etc. cause repetition of action
Happiness
Think positive thoughts
Depression
Can be affected by other hormones, thyroid, estrogen, insulin, etc.
Anxiety, Panic Attacks
Disorders in nerve signalling
Alterations in GI Function/ IBS
Fluctuations in serotonin levels, irritants cause disruptions in motility
Confidence, social order
Feelings of well-being
Migraines
Disruption in neurological patterns
Obsessive compulsion
Malfunction of serotonin signalling, positive, negative feedback
Excessive anger
Lack of serotonin, increase in other neurotransmitters
Decreased sex drive
Apathy, depression
Unhappiness is contagious. Moody or chronically unhappy people often find themselves without social support – lovers, friends and family – which also contributes to a decrease in serotonin levels. Dominant personalities tend to have higher levels of serotonin (confidence). Also, people who have been victims of childhood physical, emotional, or sexual abuse and crime may have lower serotonin levels. Massage: Once again we see the benefits of touch. Massage and pleasurable human contact increase serotonin levels. Serotonin levels jumped 34% in babies of depressed mothers when they were given fifteen-minute massages. In mothers that were depressed, levels increased 30% after bi-weekly massages. Either way, massage improves your mood. Have one – see the results! Yoga and Meditation: Through yoga and meditation, you can change your body’s normal responses to create a better parasympathetic response: more calm and more joy. Massaging the inner organs through flowing movements creates health. It helps the body release stored memories and physical injuries, as well as accruing
all the other benefits that come from exercise. It helps to release the fascia, strengthen the muscles and build body confidence -all of which will increase serotonin levels. Meditating and calm, slow, regular, rhythmic breathing send messages to the body that all is well. Dr. Michael Gershon, in his book on neurogastroenterology, The Second Brain: A Groundbreaking New Understanding of Nervous Disorders of the Stomach and Intestine, states that the gut monitors pressure so when you’re sending soothing signals to it via this calm, rhythmic breathing, you’re telling it: everything’s OK! And your gut brain learns from that and relaxes. In summary, it takes a few minor steps to keep your happy hormone high:
• Eat healthy snacks that contain carbohydrates like crackers, whole grains, cheese and nuts • Think happy thoughts • Rest – eight hours of sleep in a dark room • Exercise • Spend quality time with friends, family and pets • Do yoga – especially restorative – and meditation • Deep rhythmic breathing • Follow your gut feeling! When you are feeling down or tired, listen to your gut! Experiment with different foods and lifestyle options and see if you can change your brain! Find well-being every day or you could just eat biscotti. Either the serotonin or the treat will make you feel better.
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Delight & Function:
The Indispensable Art of Intelligent Snacking It sometimes seems we live on snacks more than meals in our harried lives these days. It is almost impossible to tell where a snack ends and a meal begins. Our mothers used to warn us against snacking, but today it is an omnipresent feature of our food culture. As with anything, though, it can be harmful or it can be healthy. Marco Pernini helps us discern which is which. DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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By Marco Pernini
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Snacking does not have a concrete definition, though it is commonly understood to mean food and drink consumption in between regular meals – most of us know it when we see it! There are five characteristics of healthy snacking. These characteristics are adequacy, balance, calorie control, moderation, and variety. Together, they help to build a nutritious diet. Adequacy consists of consuming the correct amount of essential nutrients, fibre, and energy daily. Having balance in a diet requires not choosing a certain nutrient group more than another nutrient group, but rather requires one to provide enough of all the essential nutrients . Calorie control is the amount of food required to maintain a healthy weight. Having moderation entails limiting intake of fat, sugar, and salt without total self-restraint. Variety in a diet causes an increase in adequacy and helps eating become a more pleasurable experience. Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 143
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eating binge of carbohydrates in which one exceeds the daily allowance. This causes weight gain. Ingesting carbohydrates causes an increase in serotonin production which cancels the production of NPY. The longer the starvation period, the more intense food cravings become, making it difficult to follow the five characteristics of healthy snacking.
Healthy Snacking
A healthy snack is one that leaves a feeling of satiation. Satiation occurs when the brain acknowledges that enough food has been eaten. There are triggers in the body which send these signals to the brain. When the stomach stretches to accommodate a meal, nerve receptors in the stomach fire, sending a signal to the brain to tell it the stomach is full. Healthy snacks are ones that leave the body feeling filled so that it does not continue to signal to the brain that it still wants food. Satiety occurs after a snack, suppressing hunger or regulating how often the body desires food. Choosing snacks that have high water content, are airy and high in fibers and protein causes stronger satiety signals, making the time between meals longer. Fat triggers a hormone that increases satiety as well. Discretion should be used to determine whether one snack is a better choice than another, based on nutrient density . Knowing one snack has more nutrients than another per calorie can help provide the required nutrients without exceeding the discretionary calorie allowance. Snacks which are highly processed and filled with chemicals, fat and sugar are obviously not as ‘nutrient dense’ as snacks consisting of whole grains, nuts, fruits, vegetables, etc. So choosing highly nutrient dense snacks is critical. Otherwise, you are just filling your body with empty calories. Snacking on foods, low in energy density and high in nutrient density helps sustain a high level of satiation. This in turn helps achieve snacking behaviours that demonstrate the characteristics of healthy snacking. It is easier to keep within the caloric discretionary allowance; one must eat a larger variety of foods, while at the same time eating in moderation. All this combines to help one maintain a healthy body weight.
Unhealthy snacking
One form of unhealthy snacking is caused by actually not eating. Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch claim in their book Intuitive Eating that the symptoms of starvation occur when the absence of eating is extended over a period longer than three to six hours. They state that when the body undergoes a period of starvation , metabolism decreases and food cravings increase, causing an eating binge of high-carbohydrate foods. Neuropeptide Y (NPY) is a chemical in the brain produced during periods of starvation that triggers the need for carbohydrates. After a bout of starvation, which, again, can be triggered after periods of three to six hours, NPY causes an DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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Other unhealthy snacking patterns include emotional eating, eating for convenience and food availability. Emotional eating occurs when people use food to cope with emotional triggers including boredom, procrastination, excitement, love , frustration, stress and depression. Eating for convenience occurs when people choose to snack on energy dense food that is readily available. In some areas the only food available is processed food which is energy dense, but low in essential nutrients. A steady diet of such foods can easily lead to obesity and at the same time, paradoxically, malnutrition . These foods are high in calories, fat, salt, and have a very low nutrient density. Instead of the candy bar, make an effort to reach for the healthy option. Healthy snacks can be beneficial, just as empty-calorie snacks can be harmful. One example is my favourite cheese cracker from the Italian baker Doria. In fact, the crackers are called Doriano. I like them because their delicious bready taste comes from natural leavening. This old way of making bread helps to bring out the unmistakable aroma and special taste but also develops antimicrobial agents that mean the products last longer – therefore no need for preservatives. It also retains moisture so the crackers are crispy,light, and digestible. The natural yeast breaks down the more complex molecules into simple carbohydrates and makes them easier to digest. The difference between the Doriano cracker and the other soda crackers produced around the world is that this old process maintains a taste and aroma that are very similar to that of real bread. That is why it is considered exceptional and is often used by Italian families and restaurants as a substitute for bread. The best things in life are simple; the original recipe of the Doriano cracker consists simply of flour, water, salt and oil. It is simply delicious and perfect as an appetiser, maybe adding parmesan cheese on top. Italian cuisine itself takes its influences from Etruscan, ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish and Byzantine cuisines, but there is nothing to stop us from being more adventurous and taking some example from the other side of the world. After all, everyone, regardless of which culture they come from, loves to have a tasty snack from time to time. So if it isn’t a cracker you are craving for, I leave you today with an alternative – a snack recipe based on New World foods that meets all the criteria of healthy snacking.
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Sweetcorn Fritters Ingredients:
- you can use tinned sweetcorn if you’re in a hurry, but I prefer fresh organic corn, about 2-3, cut or grated from the cob - 1/2 chopped onion - white, yellow or red, according to preference - a handful of mixed chopped parsley and coriander - 1 teaspoon of baking powder - 1/2 teaspoon of mixed coriander powder and cumin powder (optional) - about 60-80g of barley or chick pea flour - 2 whole eggs - salt and pepper to season - olive oil to shallow fry METHOD:
Place the corn in a food processor and spin until chopped, add the rest of the ingredients and spin a little longer, but don’t make it too smooth, a little crunch is good. Heat the oil in a frying pan, add a spoonful of mixture and fry gently until crispy on one side, turn and fry the other side. until cooked. Serve immediately with a guacamole, tomato salsa, or a lemony crème fraîche on the side.
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Nonno Panda and... The Gorilla Strike - Part II One day, wandering along life’s path, I got lost in a dark jungle, unable to find the right way...
“No way” was Captain Ttwani’s first reaction to the Gorillas’ requests which I had just presented to him. I could not understand why he was so adamant in refusing their simple demands. It was a no-brainer, really, and honestly the authorities had far more to lose than the Gorillas if the strike went ahead. ‘You see, Captain’, I said, trying to make him understand, ‘it’s not only all the cancelled bookings you should be worried about, but also the attention this strike will attract, the longer it goes on. Once you get the media’s full attention, it’ll be difficult to stop. They’ll scrutinise every tiny move the authorities make and the bigger the story becomes, the more difficult it’ll be to control it. Are you really sure you want that? If you settle the dispute now, everything will get back to normal in no time. After all, some kinds of disputes are straightforward when there are animals involved’, I said, genuinely thinking he would understand. ‘I will not leave the policy of my national park to be dictated to by a bunch of Gorillas’, he replied with hate in his eyes. ‘If they don’t fall back in line soon I’ll have to resort to Plan B –’ ‘And what will that be, if I may ask?’ I knew there was not much room for manoeuvre, even if he was capable of hiring all the resident gorillas of all the zoos in the world. ‘I’ll dress up the chimpanzees to look like small gorillas and put it out that because of lack of food they can’t grow to the same height as before. I’ll then ask for more donations, taking pictures of dying little gorillas and post them on any emails we received in the past from visitors, so that they’re aware of what’s going on. People who live in big cities are always suckers for pictures of a dying animal. I’ve seen it in their adverts’, said the Captain, as if he’d thought long and hard about it all. DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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‘But why make up this long-winded lie when you can solve the problem by just reintroducing the Batwa to their natural habitat and train them to be the Gorilla trackers. They know the forest even better than the Gorillas. They’re happy in the forest and you won’t look like you’re keeping them in a concentration camp. It’s a win-win situation. I’m surprised an intelligent man like you can’t see that.’ I really did not mean that, but I felt that maybe a bit of buttering up was needed to boost his ego a bit. I could not believe that he wanted to dress up chimps like gorillas. It was actually quite hilarious to hear that, and even more so to hear about the pictures of a little dying gorilla being sent to previous visitors in order to get more money out of them. Are city people so stupid that they won’t know the difference between a chimpanzee and a real gorilla? I asked myself. It was all a bit confusing. I wished I could read the Captain better, but it was impossible. ‘…because I simply will not have my policy dictated to by a bunch of savages, and even less by a bunch of animals’, he said, carrying on in that pompous vein. ‘So why are you talking to me then? I’m part of that bunch you know’, I said, getting a bit irritated. ‘Because I was told you can understand me and you might help me in solving this difficult situation’, he replied a bit more amicably. ‘Well, why don’t you take my advice then?’ I asked politely, even though I felt I was wasting my time.
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‘Because I can’t give in to what those savages are requesting. It’s as simple as that’, he said, looking away from me. ‘What’s the problem with ‘those savages’? They’ll be happy there. They’re not asking for anything in return – just permission to live in the forest like they used to. They can even help you in exchange by doing the Gorilla-tracking for free. The Gorillas will resume their duties, everything will go back to normal, and all the money will start flowing back into your pocket.’ Maybe I shouldn’t have said that last bit but I did it deliberately because I was getting really irritated by his refusal to compromise. I assumed there was only one reason for it and I wanted him to know I had figured it out. ‘Are you suggesting I’m pocketing money?’ he said, looking me in the eyes. ‘All I’m saying is I don’t understand why you’re behaving like this. It doesn’t make any sense. You’re putting the lives and jobs of your people at risk and those of the people in the area who are benefiting from the gorilla tracking – all for the sake of not giving the land back to those Batwa.’ I was nearly ready to walk out, but the Captain was a step ahead of me. ‘You know, what I don’t understand is how I could have possibly thought an animal was going to be able to solve this problem. I’m sorry but I think you should go now. You’re dismissed’, he said. I was dismissed? I was happy to go. I had better things to do with my time than talking to a lunatic who wanted to turn chimpanzees into gorillas. Still, I could not stop smiling at his silly idea. It was actually really funny and I was on my way to tell the Gorilla when I heard somebody whispering my name from the bushes. ‘NonnoPanda . . . hey over here’, said the voice, trying to help me look in the right direction. I Issue 06 October-November 2013 | DANTEmag 147
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recognised Mbuti. ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘Aren’t you on the picket line with the Gorilla anymore?’ ‘I came to look for you. I’ve got something I think you should see’, said the Batwa girl. I followed her through the forest till we reached a spot where we could see, from a distance, a big camp buzzing with activity right in the middle of the jungle. ‘What on earth is a big compound like that doing in the middle of the forest?’ I asked her. ‘I don’t know, Nonno, but I have the feeling this has got something to do with why we’ve been chased out of this land – it’s not because of the Gorillas. It was hard to believe it, but the assumption of the little Batwa girl was close to the mark. There was far too much activity not to raise any concerns. ‘Let’s get closer and find out what’s happening’, said Mbuti. I followed her and at a closer remove we could see that indeed the activities seemed to have a definite purpose though we still did not know what it was. There was some giant machine that moved in a cyclical rhythm as if a big hammer were trying to nail something into the earth; and there were lots of mechanical monsters ripping apart the surrounding area. What made the whole thing suspicious was that all this was fenced off, and people dressed up like Capitain Ttewani where checking everybody before they entered the site. Was all of this really necessary? What were they trying to protect? The only people in the area were animals, who definitely had no interest in eating those mechanical machines; they did not look that appealing to me. ‘I think they’re looking for oil, and if that’s so, then we’re doomed’, said the Batwa girl DANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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‘What oil?’ I asked, thinking of the fish oil that some bears love so much, not remembering the oil that came from the bowels of the Earth. ‘It’s the oil of the Earth. Men fight over it all the time. And’, said Mbuti, ‘I’ve heard they can destroy entire countries for it. But humans rely on it hugely to live their daily lives. And if that’s what it is, NonnoPanda, there’s no argument Captain Ttewani will ever listen to.’ ‘Ok, forget about the captain. What can we do to stop all this before it goes too far?’ I asked the girl. ‘We should tell the Gorillas and see what ideas we can come up with. We need to act before it’s too late’, suggested Mbuti. After getting over the initial shock of hearing about our discovery, the Gorillas began to discuss almost immediately what action to take. There was a bit of confusion initially, as nobody had ever been in a situation like this. So all sort of suggestions were thrown on the table. The Gorillas wanted to get into the camp and destroy everything, but Mbuti pointed out that the Captain Ttewani look-alikes had rifles and would not hesitate to use them. ‘Besides’, she pointed out, ‘we should avoid as many casualties as possible.’ Whatever way they looked at it, the situation was proving tricky and it seemed there were very few solutions. ‘We’ve no choice but to carry on with the strike’, said Gory the Chief Gorilla. ‘Well! You’ve got to be careful with that, too, because Captain Ttewani has a surprise in store for you’, I said, smiling. ‘What surprise?’ asked the Gorillas, in unison. I explained the Captain’s idea and the Gorillas just burst out laughing.
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‘We know city people are detached from reality, but we didn’t think they could be so stupid as not to see the difference’, said Gory, still laughing. ‘Well, they do think milk comes from a carton’ added Mbuti. ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ said Gory. ‘You’d be surprised’, I joined in. ‘They live in their bubble all the time and our reality is different from theirs.’ ‘Anyway, this isn’t the point’, said Mbuti. ‘But we can use this ridiculous idea of theirs to our own advantage.’ ‘How?’ asked the Gorilla, and Mbuti outlined her plan to him. So the Gorillas stayed out on strike and then Captain Ttewani decided to replace them with the disguised chimps. The Gorilla pretended to be defeated. Then Captain Ttewani sent his bogus information to the people on his database and organised a big press conference to show the extensive damage the Gorilla strike had inflicted on their young. Mbuti and her people stormed into in the middle of the conference and proceeded to show the difference between a chimp and a baby gorilla. The press went mad. Once she got its full attention, she exposed the real motive behind the whole situation, taking the journalists to see what was going on in the middle of the forest. Of course, you can easily imagine the rest of the story: the oil company responsible for the
oil exploration site did not like being portrayed as somebody polluting and wrecking the world’s natural resources and abandoned the project. Captain Ttewani was made the scapegoat for all the mistakes of his superiors and the new captain was forced to accede to the Gorillas’ request to have the Batwa as their trackers so that he could show the world their national park was now a truly ethical place, free from corruption. What that little Batwa girl managed to achieve for her people was extraordinary and when I went to congratulate her in person on her new position. She was now in charge of the gorilla trackers, basically running the whole national park. I asked her, ‘How did you know it was going to turn out like that?” She looked at me and smiled and said, ‘Join, learn, beat.’ I was not sure I fully understood what sounded like her mantra. That must have shown on my face, because she immediately explained further. ‘NonnoPanda, join the system, so you can learn the system, in order to beat the system. That’s all I’ve done.’ Well, I could not add anything to that. But I could see that the gloomy Batwa girl who had hardly been able to speak to me not so long ago, had now a self-confident smile on her face. And that was good enough for me.
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Leviathan
By Chris Kline
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One Man’s Inadequate Meditation in Praise of and in Solidarity with Women
As a man I have never understood the appeal of life lived exclusively or even primarily in the company of other men as the most preferred “Men have hitherto treated women like birds which have and natural order of things. In any circumstance or setting, a life withstrayed down to them from out women would be a barren and bleak existence for the soul. I have the heights; as something never liked segregation of the sexes more delicate, more fragi(any more than I have apartheid le, more savage, stranger, between any human beings for any reason) and I would not do well in a sweeter, soulful – but as monastery nor amongst one of the something which has to be remaining primitive tribal societies, caged up so that it shall not where nomadic male herdsmen, preindustrial farmers or hunter-gatherfly away” ers who have escaped modernity’s encroachment are still taught the -Friedrich Nietzsche most rigid, arcane masculine values and imperatives, little removed from the days of the cave. This dark tradi“I am no bird; and no net tion of man as absolute overlord over woman, has its cultural variaensnares me: I am a free tions, of course, in a geography as human being with an indewide-ranging as the Pan-Sahel region pendent will” to the Amazon Basin, the Anatolian Plain to the mountain ranges of Asia. Yet the most extreme - Charlotte Brontë Central patriarchies of this sort often share a common gospel. It is an unfathomable distortion based on the enduring prejudice that all women are inherently inferior to men in all human endeavours and otherwise should accept their lot as subservient and subjugated beings, fit only as chattel for men, to bear their children, fetch wood and water, tend to ‘women’s work’, give them sexual pleasure and obey unquestioningly, upon ultimate pain of death or banishment. It implies just as clearly that women’s thinking and aspirations are petty and trivial, worthy of little consideration or voice and certainly no education to cultivate their faculties. Little wonder these women are routinely bought and sold in exchange for livestock, as a mere commodity. This oppression is anchored in codes of morality that are usually the construct solely of men, under the equally abominable assumpDANTEmag | Issue 06 October-November 2013
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tion - where sex and eros are concerned - that women are inherently wicked, less virtuous and lacking in sufficient propriety unless this is routinely and strictly policed and harshly enforced by men. Venerable cultural practices and religion strengthen it and violence is its guarantor. Under its false premise, even a promiscuous man is judged virile, whereas a woman is culpable of any rape she suffers, having provoked it as temptress. Any woman who expresses any hint of choosing her own partner freely, in accordance with her own wishes and not those dictated to her and who might presume to be sexually and emotionally liberated, is judged a harlot. It is nothing less than Puritanism and is inherently misogynistic by design, objectifying and denying women their humanity, their will and identity. In an era of political correctness we can be easily dismissive and tolerant of these norms, under the hollow notion of respect for “traditional societies” and cultural preservation, as if we were looking at a museum exhibit instead of human lives, but there is nothing romantically rustic or noble about it. I can think of nothing more stultifying and crushing to both spiritual and intellectual well-being – and not just women’s – than perpetual existence in an all-male enclave or neanderthal patriarchy. Although such a limited human reality and cultural restriction is (perhaps) happily anathema to the first world existence I lead as an inhabitant of a larger global civilisation, I remain astounded at how many facets of such backward thinking and value judgments, which can only be regarded as medieval, still permeate our supposedly more evolved societies. Their insidious presence remains disguised as something else: like the epidemic of sexual violence and bondage of women that has never gone away. Women have become heads of state, generals in armies, CEOs in the boardroom and vaulted to prominence in every possible facet of society and culture from arts and letters to the sciences, indeed any profession or vocation one could name. Yet the restrictions, discrimination, abuse, all manner of bar-
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riers impeding their progress and equality, invisible and overt, still remain, often codified by law and still accepted as the justice of divine will. If we consider the larger Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition alone, women have largely not achieved equality with men as members of the clergy nor in the way holy scripture values them. Just ask Pope Francis, the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church or the Chief Rabbi of Litvak Orthodox Judaism whether women may now lead congregations. A Wahhabi imam would be, if anything, even more scornful of the idea. And, for that matter, how long has it been since a Bodhisattva took female form? At least the descendants of the Incas in the Andean altiplano still revere, Pacha Mama, Mother Earth, as their most sacred deity. Oh, but wait; they’re pagans, alas -what do they know? The Almighty, who cast us all in ‘his’ image, otherwise remains an exclusively male figure with entirely male prerogatives – so not much equality under heaven either. And the morality police is not just present in Iran and Saudi Arabia or the Taliban-controlled mud villages of Pakistan’s tribal territories, not merely confined to the most intransigent strands running through the arch conservative veins of Islam. It cuts across cultures and traditions from India to Russia and indeed America, every single time a woman who falls prey to sexual assault is perceived the instigator and not the victim. ‘She dressed provocatively. She should have known better.’ Not least. it is present in the halls of the US Congress and in state legislatures throughout the country as Senators and Representatives keep trying to legislate away a woman’s right to choose what she may do with the reproductive functions of her own body. Much of the Middle East and North Africa finds itself in the midst of ongoing revolutions for greater democratisation and equality in the whole of society. Women have been at the vanguard of this epic change-in-themaking throughout. Nothing could tarnish the outcry for liberation more than the epidemic of gang rapes taking place in Tahrir Square. And it is not only secularist men in the greater Muslim sphere who take to the streets demanding change; many are religious traditionalists demanding the adoption of Sharia law, hoping the wheel of civilisation will rotate counter-clockwise. They will have no problem with women not being allowed to drive, deprived of higher education, being stoned for adultery, whipped for being rape victims or ritually murdered in honour killings where their offences in shaming their families include simply dancing in the rain. I don’t understand any of it and I never will, no matter which cultural, historical, religious or moral rationale is forced upon women to keep them in their place, to violate them, to deny them all that is rightfully theirs, just as it is mine, namely, to be free human beings in a state of equality. My late mother, Rukmini Sukarno would concur. In the span of my life I have seldom come across a more potent human being and I count myself fortunate to have been her son, despite what I can diplomatically best describe as quite literally her operatic character, as much Madam Butterfly as Aida. She remains in my memory the most indomitable, cultured, artistically gifted giant of a personality in my experience of strong women, who possessed a fierce intelligence, a driving willpower, as vast reserves of moral courage and an ardent independence of mind, as I have ever beheld. At the apex of her career she was one of the premier sopranos to ever grace the stage in the finest opera houses in Europe in the 1960s. She had left Indonesia on her own at age twelve to study at the famed Academia di Santa Cecilia conservatory in Rome. She would go on to win, at the age of 19, the Concorso Nazionale di Bel Canto, Italy’s most prestigious national competition for opera singers. She was above all a live performer, her recordings are sadly few in number but I will never forget seeing her in her many triumphs, the audience roaring its approval with standing ovations, the stage covered
in roses, from the San Carlo in Naples to the Liceu in Barcelona. It was no accident that my mother was compared to Maria Callas. Though barely five feet tall, the fiery-tempered diva, fluent in eight languages, daughter of Indonesia’s founding president, was no mere mortal. One of my favourite stories about her is when a would-be male assailant in Rome had the poor tactical judgment to try to both rob her and molest her, when he judged her a ripe target in a parking lot. He miscalculated terribly, and ended up being led by my mother to the carabinieri station for processing, where she brought him bruised and battered, yelping, by his hair. No man could best my mother, much less win in a dastardly surprise attack. My mother was devoted to my late father, the Hollywood and Broadway actor, Frank Latimore, right to the end, but there was no doubt as to who ruled the roost in my childhood home. My father loved her deeply and was just as much in awe of her. He had fallen in love with her at first sight and never regretted his choice. Their ashes today nurture the same apple tree in a rural corner of New England according to her last wishes. I will admit I am biased in favour of women, not just for their beauty, but for all that is inimitable about them, all that makes them women. Far more eloquent pens than mine have addressed this – from Catullus to John Donne – so I will leave those flowers to them. I will admit too that, where possible, I will seek out the company of women in preference to men. Not that I don’t have male companions who, as an only child, I have come to think of as brothers. But if that analogy holds, I must report I have more adopted sisters than brothers, which the vicissitudes of life have placed in my path for me to befriend and be enriched by. Never have I wished to be their master. I have had two professions in my adult life, as a working cowboy and as a journalist. I do not for a moment forget the men who have made my journey a better one, who have shared my trials, my hardships and my achievements. I love them too. But if I think on my days as a buckaroo, my closest friends were two cowgirls, who worked in the saddle just as the men did and were every bit as tough, each a better horsewoman than any I ever saw sit a horse as a top hand in the corral, or out of it. It also figures that many of my closest colleagues throughout my career in journalism have been women rather than men. My mentor in clandestine war reportage in the Caucasus was a woman. The finest field producer and investigative journalist I’ve ever teamed up with, when in Iraq, became like a sister. Without any equivocation either, the most capable reporter I trained in Afghanistan was a woman. And the most fearless, resourceful, tenacious and human rights investigator in war zones that I’ve ever come across is also an utterly unbowed woman. It’s hard to have pleasant memories of war, but the time I spent talking with a jovial young woman, a US Army GI, in a tiny concrete bomb shelter which could barely contain us both in the midst of a Taliban rocket attack in Afghanistan is such a memory for me. She was possessed as much of all the feminine graces as her bearing was unmistakably military and composed; her girlish laugh and infectious smile was as timeless and beautiful as her M-16 rifle was lethal in her competent and confident soldier’s hands. One of these days more men will see what I readily saw in her, recognise that her dichotomy is nothing strange, her qualities not mutually exclusive, will not feel threatened by her and instead feel proud of her and grant her the respect she is due as a fellow human being. Such recognition may take a while to become widespread. And until it does happen, my place, and I believe every man’s place, if we are men worthy of the name, is to stand next to her, because we are only strong men when we do, and when we don’t, we are invariably weaker for it.
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