MALOLA diary

Monday, 30
I am happy that I've learned to be strong as an individual, like working, going out, traveling and living for my own. Not being afraid when I am confronted with several people, with a peer I am not part of at once. Some people are present only when they appear as a group or couple. Anyway, everybody in his or her way, single or whatever doesn't matter finally.

Sunday, 29
Susan Sontag in her journal (1970)
Intellectuel skills, except those involving development of sensibility, are not encouraged in girls. Executive or administrative force is disparaged as "aggressive", castrating, unbecoming, unfeminine. Women are encouraged to work, not only in Catholic countries but everywhere, only in situations where they take orders - or perform thoroughly routine tasks (as in housework). To be creative or to direct an enterprise, in a woman, is by cultural definition, aggressive. For a woman to function as an autonomous, independent, decisionmaking being is, by cultural definition, unfeminine - even though the culture allows and even flatters, a small number of exceptional women who defy the prohibition and function this way anyway.
I used to work with men often, but it happened that when I became stronger than those male associates that I got punished by society and not at all approved. (threats like, when you do so you will lose your man, for example, keeping your man judged as more important than my own creative work respectively my own work always related to that man)

Friday, 27
SS in her diary 1970
I have such strong tendencies to abondon myself to someone with whom I'm in love - to want to give up everything, to be possessed totally as well as to poseess totally. What I envisage as perhaps possible with Carlotta is the contradiction of my symbiotic, Siamese-twin marriages in the past. I might have learned to love fully (as I really never have done) and to remain autonomous and be able to be alone without anguish - at the same time. That would be a tremendous victory, a great change in what C. would call my "nature" (but which I stubbornly insist on believing is less than that).

Thursday, 26
good news: Yaya Jammeh, president of The Gambia, has given in and prohibited female genital cutting.
===============================================================
interesting, there are certain things I definitely only can say, but not write. Because written they would appear much too simple. (For example comparing people - this one behaves so and so, the other one so and so). By using oral language it is in time that things lose their importance and are likely to change into something different as a result of all participants' comments. Talking is sharing a feeling whereas writing mostly is done by only one person.

Wednesday, 25
I am about to get a feeling of independency and self determination like abandoning an inner request of trying to be all things for everyone. Doing what I need to do without displaying a submissive behaviour.
-------------------------------
Wall or cave painters and dancers and singers all in trance seeing fire and beasts and all other kind visions in geometric trance MJ

Tuesday, 24
Cairo Biennale - www.somethingelse-off.com
It is our aim to facilitate the reinfusion of some spirituality in our modern times. By spirituality, we do not mean religion, but emotion, reflection and sharing. We are going to try to establish a new relationship between the society and the artists, and work in the fabric of new social relations: «When working on the history of the working class’ emancipation, I realized that it did absolutely only translate the passage from an ignorance to a knowledge, nor the expression of some identity or a given culture, but rather as a way as crossing the borders that define identities. All my work has been focused on that question that I have named “sharing of the sensitive”: how, within a given space, is organized the perception of one’s world, how want relates a sensitive experience to intelligible modes of expression.»

Saturday, 21
Bye Bye Basel - Hello Gambia - let me celebrate my paradigm shift of my existence with all of you.

Friday, 20
a dream: my exhibition had been almost bulit, but the curators couldn't accept my pictures like that. They wanted to add some furniture next to it. After, when i came back my picture was all covered with plastic and some parts were removed. When I got closer to the romoved parts I saw that they were broken, some in pieces. They had dismantled it. (i think that is a typical artist's nightmare, connected to my opening tomorrow)

Thursday, 19
For the call of application Biennale Dak’Art 2016, which he has titled The City in the Blue Day, Simon Njami selected an excerpt from a poem by Léopold Sédar Senghor Your voice speaks to us of the Republic, saying we shall build the City in the blue day: In the equality of fraternal peoples. And we shall answer: “Present, oh Guélowar!” Further, Njami stated:
The ones who answer ‘present’ are the ones who, without shame or modesty, dare to call themselves Africans before the world, brushing aside all prejudices and all glances at the continent. Rather, they stake claim to the scars, the mistakes, the fumbling efforts and are not afraid of asserting the spirit of their territory in the face of professional skeptics’ mocking laughter. Because, at the risk of seeming scandalous, I content that we aren’t born African, we become it. Becoming means being born into the world and discovering ourselves. It means making existential decisions that determine the direction of our lives. The only way to comprehend the Africa whose definition everyone pretends to know is to put together the scattered pieces of this several-thousand-year-old puzzle. Becoming means returning to express a viewpoint to the world. And it’s not expression without language. If we understand artists that are called African, we will be able to decode the original language in which everyone, in their own way, tells the world where they belong. Because in belonging to a territory and in attempting to define its outline, we shall not lose sight of the fact that all territory is foremost a metaphor that is difficult to pin down.

http://www.contemporaryand.com/exhibition/call-for-candidates-dakar-biennale-2016/
--------------------
Some people, or let's say those people who are not very close to me, but who know me as part of the community, put a tapping hand on my back, when I tell them that I am moving to Gambia. It is like somehow they want to tell me they are already there and waiting for me.

Wednesday, 18
The politicians, they never can fool us.

Tuesday, 17
Tanya Stephens in concert. Cool.
Double Soul
i like that sound when you call my name.
i like it when you say you like the same.
i cannot take my eyes off you, even if you want me to.
The gap between your teeth drives me insane -
Uh, baby you look so sexy when you get vexed with me.
That's the only reason why i sometimes spit on harmony.
No, she is a great artist. Her talks and teachings between the songs that women should get stronger towards their counterpart I liked most.
-----------------------
In search for perfection you always meet up with mistakes, sometimes irreversible ones. Something it happenes out of nothing, like guided by an invisible hand which seems not belonging to you. Nevertheless, i once read a saying by Miles Davis: Do not fear mistakes. there are none. What is on first hand related to playing a musical instrument and performances also means something is going differently from provided aspirations. Don't worry, leave it like that, look at the mistake nonbiasedly, don't fear revealing something you hadn't contrived. Simply continue in search for further perfection insouciantly.

Monday, 16
Last Friday we talked about African art and that artists from Africa don't enjoy being called African artists, but prefer been seen as artists as every artist. They dismiss the expectation of having to represent Africanness. Europeans are not claimed to represent Europeanness. Anyway, the artwork counts. Nonetheless, after a while we concluded that the national attribute is used quite frequently like Chinese artists or Hungarian artist or Italian artist, whatever. However, what I want to say and what I said that I would love being called an African artist.

Sunday, 15
During an Email conversation Siri (Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface, software of Apple) made a mistake that made me laugh and ponder. Instead of writing correctly diktieren (German word for to dictate - in our conversation used related to dictating a text) it spelled that term wrongly dicktieren. My immediate association was about dictators and if their function has something to do with dick? (dick in German means fat and in English slang the male genital)
-------------
territory from the Latin word terra (earth). To stake out their territory some people use terror. From the Latin word terrere (frighten). There is an obvious, etymological context. Very archaically to defend their entitlement on earth they frighten the people by terroristic acts. (IS)

Saturday, 14
something very personal: my stomach has been paining me a lot since some weeks. seeing my doctor she said my stomach feels like a fist. so let me pray that the fist becomes a tender and sensitive hand again.
----------------
Really, I've been looking forward to that concert. I bought the tickets for my girlfriend and me two months ago. I love the Bataclan. My mother used to go there in the early nineties. I adored her stories about. Yellow Man, the smell of ghanja everywhere. Suddenly the club emptied 'cause police showed up. Even the floor seemed covered by a carpet made of hemp. Indeed, that is how she pictured the vibes back in the days. Further, she tried copying the easy movements of her black sisters. They could do, but I tell you, my mom was a dancing queen. You see, we arrived early, ma girlfriend Viviane and me, yesterday evening. We got some drinks, everyone in good mood, peaceful. Now I am dead. Never thought of such a thing could happen. Out of nothing they came shooting like devils. Never imagined a pain so fucked up running through my destroyed body. It didn't take too long till I lost conscience. Viviane made it, I think, haven't seen her since I was shot.

Friday, 13
Coming from Germany is not really relieving, but rather burdening (I have mentioned several times the problematic of the use of the Swiss dialect what draws a notable line between native speakers and semiskilled speakers-High German as a blame or fault). Anyway, here and then, people are trying to make me down, simply by mentioning the era of National Socialism. To obviously evoke guilt in my self even I was born more than a decade after war. I always explain that I was not part of it, but just the fact that I was born and raised there makes it somehow a part my history, if I want or not. Not many are doing so and mostly those who themselves have experienced racism or any kind of suppression or humilation. To embrace their superiority they don't often experience they unveil my soul getting access to something I've tried to bury. You see, in that very moment I cannot do other than accept these mechanisms of humanity.

Thursday, 12
Neill Young I like most of the old Rock Legends, nowadays. When I hear him sing I feel exactly the same vibes like back in the days. His style operates as times haven't passed since he wrote Harvest (actually one of my sister's records) -
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-----------------------
Me nothing... I tell you I have never been favoured a lot, but needed to proof that I am a someone. Persistently. I never looked very good, so that men would have chased me. At the same time i didn't like to use a calculating sweetness to get buddy-buddy with any approaching monster. No, that's me - a bête noire. While people next to me were winning all affection nothing was left for me than learning to love myself. When them then, they realised, they angrily said: it's worth nothing, but the recognition of others. A democratic evidence. But, as soon as I gained people's voices, they stole and forced me to share. Nothing you.

Wednesday, 11
My voice seems dark and male. No word outspoken.

Monday, 9
Simon Njami about African Cities in his essay: Spores of the Stamen
The city defines its own dynamic. In the African imagination, it hasn't always represented the El Dorado it would become in industrialised societies, in which the peasants, economically obliged to quit the land, took themselves off to the cities and contributed to the establishment of a new proletariat. in Africa a proletariat doesn't exist. One only finds urban peasants there, to use the artist Koko Komegne's phrase. And even if it is the forceps delivered avatar Monenembo describes, the city has won its autonomous existence. An existence it appears to owe to nobody but itself. It is this insatiable gut that absorbs everything, without any apparent order, without any logic order other than that of life. In these parts of the world, where the future has no value and where only the present seems to have any kind of reality, it's not surprising that a plan counts for nothing. It's in practical terms that things are defined.
Africas, Barcelona, 2001
Since then a lot has changed and probably he would write differently about African life nowadays. But to me Njami's viewpoint applies to my sight on Africa, still now.

Sunday, 8
a memory: 1970. I received my first tape recorder. On our way to my grandparent's weekend residence I was playing one of my first tapes - Janis Joplin on one side, Adriano Celentano, who I knew from my father, on the other, Janis Joplin who I had liked and recorded by chance. I hadn't even known her name. Proudly presenting her sound to my familly my mother scolded she was a drug addict. However, my mother's comment didn't impress me much, because I loved that music, so she couldn't spoil it.

Friday, 6
- the hurly-burly of a silence is different from a ponderous silence -

Thursday, 5
S.S. 6/26/66 Foucault: "Madness is no longer the space of indecision through which it was possible to glimpse the original truth of the work of art, but the decision beyond which this truth ceases irrevocably ... Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art; it draws the exterior edge, the line of dissolution, the contour against the void."

Wednesday, 4
a memory (in fb since some time they have been offering the oppurtunity to post a memory by reposting an old post. I don't know if I've got this memory thing from them, subconsciously.) Anyway. Around my early teens, we had the assignment to make a tooth brush painting in our art lesson. As often I didn't have any strong idea of an image content and strolled through poster shops to find one. Eventually I beheld a print of Joseph Albers (like four nested squares). That one seemed easy to me. So I copied it more or less one to one. Afterwards, proudly presenting it at school our teacher immediately conceived it was not of me and mentioned the name of its creator. Of course I felt ashamed and copped. But I was bold enough to assert that I hadn't seen that picture before and it was just a convenience that they looked the same. I think I had a nice teacher, because she left it at that.

Monday, 2
We should all be Feminists - C.N. Adichie (would like to copy the whole book, but here some excerpts will do - recommend to buy the tiny reader)

So in literal way , men rule the world. This made sense - a thousands years ago- Because human beings lived in a world in which physical strength was the most important attribute for survival. (...) Today we live in a vastly different world. The person more qualified to lead is not the stronger one. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, the more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative, creative. We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.

All over the world, there are so many magazine articles and books telling women what to do, how to be and not be, in order to attract or please men. There are far fewer guides for men about pleasing women.

We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask true selves, because they have to be in Nigerian- speak, a hard man. ( I think there are a lot of Nigerian-speakers in the world who speak the same)

We say to girls, 'You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful but not too successful, otherwise you will threaten the man. If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man, pretend that you are not, especially in public, otherwise you will emasculate him.

We police girls. We praise girls for virginity, but we don't praise boys for virginity (and it makes me wonder how exactly this is supposed to work out, since the loss of virginity is a process that usually involves two people of opposite genders).

The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognising how we are.
Imaginge how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations.

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Everybody is talking of autumn leaves...

archive > diary > november 15

The Gambia Monday, 30 I am happy that I've learned to be strong as an individual, like working, going out, traveling and living for my own. Not being afraid when I am confronted with several people, with a peer I am not part of at once. Some people are present only when they appear as a group or couple. Anyway, everybody in his or her way, single or whatever doesn't matter finally. Sunday, 29 Susan Sontag in her journal (1970) Intellectuel skills, except those involving development of sensibility, are not encouraged in girls. Executive or administrative force is disparaged as "aggressive", castrating, unbecoming, unfeminine. Women are encouraged to work, not only in Catholic countries but everywhere, only in situations where they take orders - or perform thoroughly routine tasks (as in housework). To be creative or to direct an enterprise, in a woman, is by cultural definition, aggressive. For a woman to function as an autonomous, independent, decisionmaking being is, by cultural definition, unfeminine - even though the culture allows and even flatters, a small number of exceptional women who defy the prohibition and function this way anyway. I used to work with men often, but it happened that when I became stronger than those male associates that I got punished by society and not at all approved. (threats like, when you do so you will lose your man, for example, keeping your man judged as more important than my own creative work respectively my own work always related to that man) Friday, 27 SS in her diary 1970 I have such strong tendencies to abondon myself to someone with whom I'm in love - to want to give up everything, to be possessed totally as well as to poseess totally. What I envisage as perhaps possible with Carlotta is the contradiction of my symbiotic, Siamese-twin marriages in the past. I might have learned to love fully (as I really never have done) and to remain autonomous and be able to be alone without anguish - at the same time. That would be a tremendous victory, a great change in what C. would call my "nature" (but which I stubbornly insist on believing is less than that). Thursday, 26 good news: Yaya Jammeh, president of The Gambia, has given in and prohibited female genital cutting. =============================================================== interesting, there are certain things I definitely only can say, but not write. Because written they would appear much too simple. (For example comparing people - this one behaves so and so, the other one so and so). By using oral language it is in time that things lose their importance and are likely to change into something different as a result of all participants' comments. Talking is sharing a feeling whereas writing mostly is done by only one person. Wednesday, 25 I am about to get a feeling of independency and self determination like abandoning an inner request of trying to be all things for everyone. Doing what I need to do without displaying a submissive behaviour. ------------------------------- Wall or cave painters and dancers and singers all in trance seeing fire and beasts and all other kind visions in geometric trance MJ Tuesday, 24 Cairo Biennale - www.somethingelse-off.com It is our aim to facilitate the reinfusion of some spirituality in our modern times. By spirituality, we do not mean religion, but emotion, reflection and sharing. We are going to try to establish a new relationship between the society and the artists, and work in the fabric of new social relations: «When working on the history of the working class’ emancipation, I realized that it did absolutely only translate the passage from an ignorance to a knowledge, nor the expression of some identity or a given culture, but rather as a way as crossing the borders that define identities. All my work has been focused on that question that I have named “sharing of the sensitive”: how, within a given space, is organized the perception of one’s world, how want relates a sensitive experience to intelligible modes of expression.» Saturday, 21 Bye Bye Basel - Hello Gambia - let me celebrate my paradigm shift of my existence with all of you. Friday, 20 a dream: my exhibition had been almost bulit, but the curators couldn't accept my pictures like that. They wanted to add some furniture next to it. After, when i came back my picture was all covered with plastic and some parts were removed. When I got closer to the romoved parts I saw that they were broken, some in pieces. They had dismantled it. (i think that is a typical artist's nightmare, connected to my opening tomorrow) Thursday, 19 For the call of application Biennale Dak’Art 2016, which he has titled The City in the Blue Day, Simon Njami selected an excerpt from a poem by Léopold Sédar Senghor Your voice speaks to us of the Republic, saying we shall build the City in the blue day: In the equality of fraternal peoples. And we shall answer: “Present, oh Guélowar!” Further, Njami stated: The ones who answer ‘present’ are the ones who, without shame or modesty, dare to call themselves Africans before the world, brushing aside all prejudices and all glances at the continent. Rather, they stake claim to the scars, the mistakes, the fumbling efforts and are not afraid of asserting the spirit of their territory in the face of professional skeptics’ mocking laughter. Because, at the risk of seeming scandalous, I content that we aren’t born African, we become it. Becoming means being born into the world and discovering ourselves. It means making existential decisions that determine the direction of our lives. The only way to comprehend the Africa whose definition everyone pretends to know is to put together the scattered pieces of this several-thousand-year-old puzzle. Becoming means returning to express a viewpoint to the world. And it’s not expression without language. If we understand artists that are called African, we will be able to decode the original language in which everyone, in their own way, tells the world where they belong. Because in belonging to a territory and in attempting to define its outline, we shall not lose sight of the fact that all territory is foremost a metaphor that is difficult to pin down. http://www.contemporaryand.com/exhibition/call-for-candidates-dakar-biennale-2016/ -------------------- Some people, or let's say those people who are not very close to me, but who know me as part of the community, put a tapping hand on my back, when I tell them that I am moving to Gambia. It is like somehow they want to tell me they are already there and waiting for me. Wednesday, 18 The politicians, they never can fool us. Tuesday, 17 Tanya Stephens in concert. Cool. Double Soul i like that sound when you call my name. i like it when you say you like the same. i cannot take my eyes off you, even if you want me to. The gap between your teeth drives me insane - Uh, baby you look so sexy when you get vexed with me. That's the only reason why i sometimes spit on harmony. No, she is a great artist. Her talks and teachings between the songs that women should get stronger towards their counterpart I liked most. ----------------------- In search for perfection you always meet up with mistakes, sometimes irreversible ones. Something it happenes out of nothing, like guided by an invisible hand which seems not belonging to you. Nevertheless, i once read a saying by Miles Davis: Do not fear mistakes. there are none. What is on first hand related to playing a musical instrument and performances also means something is going differently from provided aspirations. Don't worry, leave it like that, look at the mistake nonbiasedly, don't fear revealing something you hadn't contrived. Simply continue in search for further perfection insouciantly. Monday, 16 Last Friday we talked about African art and that artists from Africa don't enjoy being called African artists, but prefer been seen as artists as every artist. They dismiss the expectation of having to represent Africanness. Europeans are not claimed to represent Europeanness. Anyway, the artwork counts. Nonetheless, after a while we concluded that the national attribute is used quite frequently like Chinese artists or Hungarian artist or Italian artist, whatever. However, what I want to say and what I said that I would love being called an African artist. Sunday, 15 During an Email conversation Siri (Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface, software of Apple) made a mistake that made me laugh and ponder. Instead of writing correctly diktieren (German word for to dictate - in our conversation used related to dictating a text) it spelled that term wrongly dicktieren. My immediate association was about dictators and if their function has something to do with dick? (dick in German means fat and in English slang the male genital) ------------- territory from the Latin word terra (earth). To stake out their territory some people use terror. From the Latin word terrere (frighten). There is an obvious, etymological context. Very archaically to defend their entitlement on earth they frighten the people by terroristic acts. (IS) Saturday, 14 something very personal: my stomach has been paining me a lot since some weeks. seeing my doctor she said my stomach feels like a fist. so let me pray that the fist becomes a tender and sensitive hand again. ---------------- Really, I've been looking forward to that concert. I bought the tickets for my girlfriend and me two months ago. I love the Bataclan. My mother used to go there in the early nineties. I adored her stories about. Yellow Man, the smell of ghanja everywhere. Suddenly the club emptied 'cause police showed up. Even the floor seemed covered by a carpet made of hemp. Indeed, that is how she pictured the vibes back in the days. Further, she tried copying the easy movements of her black sisters. They could do, but I tell you, my mom was a dancing queen. You see, we arrived early, ma girlfriend Viviane and me, yesterday evening. We got some drinks, everyone in good mood, peaceful. Now I am dead. Never thought of such a thing could happen. Out of nothing they came shooting like devils. Never imagined a pain so fucked up running through my destroyed body. It didn't take too long till I lost conscience. Viviane made it, I think, haven't seen her since I was shot. Friday, 13 Coming from Germany is not really relieving, but rather burdening (I have mentioned several times the problematic of the use of the Swiss dialect what draws a notable line between native speakers and semiskilled speakers-High German as a blame or fault). Anyway, here and then, people are trying to make me down, simply by mentioning the era of National Socialism. To obviously evoke guilt in my self even I was born more than a decade after war. I always explain that I was not part of it, but just the fact that I was born and raised there makes it somehow a part my history, if I want or not. Not many are doing so and mostly those who themselves have experienced racism or any kind of suppression or humilation. To embrace their superiority they don't often experience they unveil my soul getting access to something I've tried to bury. You see, in that very moment I cannot do other than accept these mechanisms of humanity. Thursday, 12 Neill Young I like most of the old Rock Legends, nowadays. When I hear him sing I feel exactly the same vibes like back in the days. His style operates as times haven't passed since he wrote Harvest (actually one of my sister's records) - xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ----------------------- Me nothing... I tell you I have never been favoured a lot, but needed to proof that I am a someone. Persistently. I never looked very good, so that men would have chased me. At the same time i didn't like to use a calculating sweetness to get buddy-buddy with any approaching monster. No, that's me - a bête noire. While people next to me were winning all affection nothing was left for me than learning to love myself. When them then, they realised, they angrily said: it's worth nothing, but the recognition of others. A democratic evidence. But, as soon as I gained people's voices, they stole and forced me to share. Nothing you. Wednesday, 11 My voice seems dark and male. No word outspoken. Monday, 9 Simon Njami about African Cities in his essay: Spores of the Stamen The city defines its own dynamic. In the African imagination, it hasn't always represented the El Dorado it would become in industrialised societies, in which the peasants, economically obliged to quit the land, took themselves off to the cities and contributed to the establishment of a new proletariat. in Africa a proletariat doesn't exist. One only finds urban peasants there, to use the artist Koko Komegne's phrase. And even if it is the forceps delivered avatar Monenembo describes, the city has won its autonomous existence. An existence it appears to owe to nobody but itself. It is this insatiable gut that absorbs everything, without any apparent order, without any logic order other than that of life. In these parts of the world, where the future has no value and where only the present seems to have any kind of reality, it's not surprising that a plan counts for nothing. It's in practical terms that things are defined. Africas, Barcelona, 2001 Since then a lot has changed and probably he would write differently about African life nowadays. But to me Njami's viewpoint applies to my sight on Africa, still now. Sunday, 8 a memory: 1970. I received my first tape recorder. On our way to my grandparent's weekend residence I was playing one of my first tapes - Janis Joplin on one side, Adriano Celentano, who I knew from my father, on the other, Janis Joplin who I had liked and recorded by chance. I hadn't even known her name. Proudly presenting her sound to my familly my mother scolded she was a drug addict. However, my mother's comment didn't impress me much, because I loved that music, so she couldn't spoil it. Friday, 6 - the hurly-burly of a silence is different from a ponderous silence - Thursday, 5 S.S. 6/26/66 Foucault: "Madness is no longer the space of indecision through which it was possible to glimpse the original truth of the work of art, but the decision beyond which this truth ceases irrevocably ... Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art; it draws the exterior edge, the line of dissolution, the contour against the void." Wednesday, 4 a memory (in fb since some time they have been offering the oppurtunity to post a memory by reposting an old post. I don't know if I've got this memory thing from them, subconsciously.) Anyway. Around my early teens, we had the assignment to make a tooth brush painting in our art lesson. As often I didn't have any strong idea of an image content and strolled through poster shops to find one. Eventually I beheld a print of Joseph Albers (like four nested squares). That one seemed easy to me. So I copied it more or less one to one. Afterwards, proudly presenting it at school our teacher immediately conceived it was not of me and mentioned the name of its creator. Of course I felt ashamed and copped. But I was bold enough to assert that I hadn't seen that picture before and it was just a convenience that they looked the same. I think I had a nice teacher, because she left it at that. Monday, 2 We should all be Feminists - C.N. Adichie (would like to copy the whole book, but here some excerpts will do - recommend to buy the tiny reader) So in literal way , men rule the world. This made sense - a thousands years ago- Because human beings lived in a world in which physical strength was the most important attribute for survival. (...) Today we live in a vastly different world. The person more qualified to lead is not the stronger one. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, the more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative, creative. We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much. All over the world, there are so many magazine articles and books telling women what to do, how to be and not be, in order to attract or please men. There are far fewer guides for men about pleasing women. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask true selves, because they have to be in Nigerian- speak, a hard man. ( I think there are a lot of Nigerian-speakers in the world who speak the same) We say to girls, 'You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful but not too successful, otherwise you will threaten the man. If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man, pretend that you are not, especially in public, otherwise you will emasculate him. We police girls. We praise girls for virginity, but we don't praise boys for virginity (and it makes me wonder how exactly this is supposed to work out, since the loss of virginity is a process that usually involves two people of opposite genders). The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognising how we are. Imaginge how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Everybody is talking of autumn leaves...