A few years ago I wrote a “joke” for my co-workers, as a celebration of International Women’s Day. Some of them, with varied tessituras, put the mirror of machismo in front of me. To me!, who “without being” a macho, made jokes of that nature (delicate trap of the patriarchy). I understood that there is nothing more political than a joke.
I believed myself, then, outside of those hard and pure, strident and constant norms of being macho. After that and other experiences, after making critical readings (understanding the origin and manifestations) of my being a man, I assume myself as a chauvinist aware of his disease, fighting against this condition. At times, painful struggle. I understood that the battle against machismo is a political option.
Such a statement is not rhetorical, a swagger suggesting seductive masculinity of a “new kind.” It is an identity that I should not forget in any drawer because patriarchy is a structure that far exceeds individual decisions. No personal behavior will stop being macho until the relationships that generate it are broken in their ability to structure the material and spiritual life of this sloppy world.
This includes—and let’s not underestimate it—understanding that intimate combat is an unrestricted condition for achieving emotional maturity. The one that will not be possible in conditions of oppression, whatever the self-help books in vogue say (happiness without society).
I understood that if I get tired, I can return to the place of privilege. But women cannot get tired, because they would only be oppressed. Patriarchy or freedom. There are no half measures for them. By releasing, they release; that is our enormous historical debt, the basis of respect and unconditional accompaniment to that fight.
I discovered on this path, not without astonishment and some shame, the twisted nature of that ritual of buying flowers (read buy), and to bring the compañeras’ plate of food, as a holiday, as a circumstantial apology, a performance insubstantial of equality. The courtesy of the chair and the hand that supports (or grabs?), among many other “gestures”, made me understand that everyday life is freehanded politics.
March 8 is a day of combat, yes or yes. And all legitimate combat takes denunciation, awareness, uniting forces. All combat also carries the historical shame of those of us who, consciously or not, reproduce, in some ways, the privilege that oppression always leaves behind. Privilege to judge, prevail, justify, benefit/us.
Do not forget that it is a day to celebrate the rebellion of women. They do not arrive on the date groomed for the occasion, nor anxious to hear what nice things we will say to them, nor happy about the tiny rest that we can give them, nor expectant of the ruinous discourse that brandishes its historical conquests but does not speak of its present and latent battles. .
They are there to remember their vital imperative: Enough! Enough of making employment precarious (less pay for equal work in the private world); of the burdens that emigration leaves on top of others (the care of those who stay behind); of violence in private and public spaces (dying in a police station at the hands of a murderer, for example); of mercantilist degradation (mulatto, young and beautiful, a payable object); of increased poverty (increasingly feminized); of the music? degrading, insulting, vulgar to the marrow (unpronounceable).
I understood that this day in March is the celebration of the political dignity of women. Even so that we stir the conscience of those who still do not know, of those who reproduce in the nature of each day the bases of domination, submission, hierarchization, the denial of rights.
Not obvious, although it may seem like a side note, that the struggle of women also produces knowledge, accumulates a historiographical dimension, categorical body, subversion of language. It produces novel methods of analysis of reality, pedagogy to share it, and essential updates on power, politics, ethics, aesthetics, social order, and affections.
I recently read that it is likely that many of the texts that are said to be anonymous, from many eras, are the generic name for the exclusion of women. That is also what this day is about; to dust off the anonymities imposed by the patriarchy.
It is a day so that women are not described only as flower, wonder of pain, unfading beauty, endless tenderness, sigh of hope, virtuous pollen, husband’s heart, lamp that does not go out at night, smile in the morning, watchman of his house, industrious. “Beauties” that should be in quotes when they are written out of history, when they hide the devious coup. How many love poems have not been written after a beating?
I understood that politics also knows about poetry and that no word is neutral, without context. There is beauty when, historically correct, the adjectives disobedient, rebellious, outraged, revolutionary, courageous, dignified, self-loving, insolent, warrior are placed next to women. There is poetry in the act of assuming the body as political territory. Individual body, collective body in the process of liberation.
On this day, as they should be every day, we must publicly ask for forgiveness “for all the women whose names, their achievements, their faith, their lineage, their heritage from many of the sacred and historical books were taken away. . Naming them and seeing them today heals me,” I say with Suzy Landa.
Let us also apologize to the women of the house, of work, of life, of the road. To those mirror-women who, with a clear voice, or patient silence, have told us: Enough!
Today is the day to celebrate, to recognize, to compensate, to raise awareness, yes. But equally grateful for the political, moral and affective demands that they, with their limitless combat, with their unwavering determination, with their heroic creation, make so that our relationships are individually free and socially equal, paraphrasing the Red Rose.
I have learned along the way that women wield poetry and politics as the ultimate instrument against dehumanization. They are, when they fight with full conscience, the rebellion of tenderness. They are the dimension of freedom that swears the sovereignty of love on the path of equality. Freedom that stop a thousand times in the bowels of history.
