I asked for a receipt for the far-too-expensive visit to the small Ethiopian farmstead. The men just stared blankly at me. Was I getting ripped off? I sounded like my mother and realized that her way of dealing with things had shaped me. I tried to smooth things over with wit and charm, and without drawing attention to my womanhood. After all, women certainly don’t have much say in matters here. Secretly, I thought the guide was arrogant before realizing that he came from the line of clan leaders. And eventually, I sat in a young wife’s hut and listened to her singing, as beautiful as the savanna wind at 5 p.m.
Transformation begins underneath our garments of customs, habits, conditioning, culture, and biography. They are our protection and also our tools; they divide or unite us. But only beneath them can what has become be set free. With light. And as it increasingly takes hold of matter, light must eventually become love. Where I am aware of my identities, where I am simply myself, behind my outer garments, there I encounter my human raiment.
Translation Laura Liska
Image Farmstead in southern Ethiopia, 2023, Photo: Gilda Bartel
Is there anywhere that a woman is given the same respect as a man? In Sweden women are paid 20% less than men on the average in ordinary jobs and 25% less for jobs requiring an academic degree. In both cases she will pay more for her car insurance and for car repairs, among other things. Of course one can be moved by beautiful song, but how long can the woman who is singing expect to live? In Sweden women can expect to live 85 years, and they can expect to be given medicines with more harmful side effects and fewer or no medical treatments compared with how men are cared for in their final years. How romantic is it to listen to singing in a hut while day dreaming about transformation? Of course I may just be attached to my own materialism. A scientologist would tell me that I chose my own karma and can’t complain. I’m not convinced.
only when in the heart’s of men, their is recognition that gender is only a physical variation of human life .. whilst men live predominantly in the physical/material realm women continue to be ‘objects’ whilst men go hunting for objects that women desire ..