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'Transversal politics' is a term that does
not have wide currency in English. It has reached us from Italian women
peace activists, networking with women in other countries, who talk about
their practice of politica trasversale. But, among the projects described
in this thematic section of Soundings, its use has been growing. It seems
as if it has fallen, clunk, upon a meaning that has been waiting for a
signifier. It answers to a need to conceptualise a democratic practice
of a particular kind, a process can on the one hand look for commonalities
without being arrogantly universalist, and on the other affirm difference
without being transfixed by it. Transversal politics is the practice of
creatively crossing (and re-drawing) the borders that mark significant
politicised differences. It means empathy without sameness, shifting without
tearing up your roots. Nira Yuval-Davis has more to say about this in
'What is "transversal politics"?' (p94).
These pages bring together writings invoked by two consecutive conferences
held at Gresham College, London, on 29-30 January 1999. The first day
was called 'Doing Transversal Politics' and the second 'Translating Words',
'Translating Practices'. The link between the two days was of itself something
of a conceptual boundary crossing, a sideways leap in the dark.
The 'Doing Transversal Politics' conference marked the conclusion of research
by Cynthia Cockburn, begun in 1995. The title of the research was Women
Building Bridges, and it involved studying how certain women's projects,
in countries where there was war, created and sustained their alliances
across difficult ethno-national differences.1
The three projects sent representatives to the Gresham conferences. The
first, Medica Women's Association in Bosnia-Hercegovina, is a therapy
centre that responds with medical and psycho-social care to women and
children traumatised by war and post-war violence. In Medica the Bosnian
Muslim majority have worked throughout the war and the ensuing uneasy
peace alongside a remaining minority of women who are of Bosnian Serb,
Bosnian Croat and mixed backgrounds. From Medica, Ajli Bajramovic and
Rada Stakic-Domuz attended the seminars.
The second project is Bat Shalom, a group of Israeli Jewish and Israeli
Palestinian Arab women living in northern Israel, who campaign together
for justice and peace in the region. Bat Shalom was represented by Samira
Khouri and Sonia Zarchi, accompanied by Vera Jordan.
The third project of Women Building Bridges is the Women's Support Network,
Belfast, represented by May McCann and Maura McCrory, accompanied by Marie
Mulholland, the former coordinator. The Network is a cross-community alliance
of women's centres and other women's organisations that have come together
to get working-class women's needs voiced in the political system and
the peace process of Northern Ireland.2
During 1998 the three projects made a further transversal move, exchanging
visits across state boundaries to see what could be learned from each
other's experience.3 It was the findings of this series of transnational
visits (we called this continuation of the project Bridge Between Bridges)
that were presented at the 'Doing Transversal Politics' conference. Representing
the workings of an ethnically mixed project is difficult. But representing
a prolonged interaction between such complex unities is more challenging
yet. So we tried to do this at the conference by showing analytical videos
of the exchange visits, each one framed by a panel discussion with some
of the women involved (see 'Crossing Borders' (p99)).
This however does not exhaust the transversal steps we were into here.
The first day was in fact a partnership between Women Building Bridges
and Southall Black Sisters. SBS was founded twenty years ago by Asian
and African-Caribbean women and has become well-known for practical and
campaigning work on issues of domestic violence and racism. They are today
effectively an alliance of women of Hindu, Moslem, Sikh and other cultural
backgrounds. Their transversal moves, explored by Pragna Patel in her
article 'Difficult Alliances' (p115), involve handling conflictual ethnic
differences constituted in the Indian sub-continent and reformulated in
Britain. They describe the tactical alliances they have to make with,
among others, conservative community leaders and an often misogynist anti-racist
movement.
In stepping into partnership for a day, Southall Black Sisters and Women
Building Bridges were attempting to share experiences of holding together
alliances in different violent contexts. For Medica, Bat Shalom and the
Women's Support Network the situation is one of war or its aftermath.
Southall Black Sisters are surviving situations in Britain of diasporic
tension and urban racism that sometimes seem like war. Both fields of
violence are of course gendered.
The art of transversal politics is a perennial scepticism about 'community'.
It means knowing that when community is invoked it is often to plaster
over cracks and deny differences within. At the same time it also means
refusing to let go of the idea that constructive dialogue and shared actions
are possible. It is a tolerance of distinctiveness which is at the same
time an intolerance of non-communication. Metaphorically and actually
this means multi-lingualism. It is about foregoing the dream of finding
a common tongue (because, given power relations, that is bound to be an
imperialism) and instead taking up the challenge of learning each other's
languages.
So it makes sense that the conference that was twinned with 'Doing Transversal
Politics' was about 'Translating Words' 'Translating Practices'. And our
participants, a healthy mix of activists and academics, seemed to have
confidence in a meaningful connection between the two days, for more than
half of those who came to the first day were also present at the second.4
The 'Translating' conference resulted from a collaboration between Lynette
Hunter and Rebecca O'Rourke. Lynette's focus is new writings in English,
and as a teacher she is concerned with democratic access to communication.
Likewise Rebecca's experience is in community writing and publishing and
in adult education. They share a belief that good communicating is a strong
mode for political agency. Whether in writing or speaking, we use words
to write or speak ourselves into existence. They would ask: what encourages
and enables communication across difficult differences of location, culture
and political belief? How can we communicate to someone differently situated
what it is like to experience war, survive uprooting or torture, or live
in a society of ingrained violence and brutality? Can we translate into
another language or culture, or from the spoken to the written word, without
differences of power between us distorting what we say? They talk about
their work in 'The Values of Community Writing' (p144).
The 'Translating' conference included speakers with experience in devising
verbal strategies for dealing with ethnic, religious, cultural or political
differentiation, division and oppression. There was Theatre and Reconciliation,
an innovatory community theatre project developed in Northern Ireland,
Eritrea and other African countries. Rather than making a speech, Gerri
Moriarty and Jane Plastow involved the participants in a demonstration
of how theatre can be used for empowerment, for gaining a voice. (See
'Theatre and Reconciliation' (p153).
There was MAMA, represented by Amina Souleiman and Saynab Osman. This
is a story telling and writing project from which several books have issued,
involving women who are refugees from Somalia and other East African countries
now living in Sheffield. (See Sharing Stories (p163). Sonia Linden, writer
in residence at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture,
read an account by Nasrin Parveez, who was sitting beside her, of the
brutality inflicted on her during imprisonment in Iran. It seemed that
no-one in the room was able draw a breath as they took in this narrative.
But having found words to tell about the torture, it no longer, Nasrin
said, invades her sleep as nightmare.
Other presentations at the 'Translating' conference included Celia Hunt
and Urmila Sinha, both developing and teaching the therapeutic use of
creative writing, and East Side Arts, a bookshop-based community arts
and people's history project based in Whitechapel, in East London. They
told how they have found working with words can help individuals, small
groups and migrant communities deal with urban racism and domestic violence.
Emily Clark and Fran Duncan came from a Gypsy and Traveller project in
Cleveland and spoke at the conference about how storytelling is used by
women to deal with the discrimination and violence inflicted on the community
by the wider society. They talked about links they have forged between
non-settled peoples in the UK, France, Sweden and Denmark.
The women who came to the 'Translating' conference share a belief that
skills of reading, writing and speaking, which are also part of daily
life, are an important strategy for agency for those who are persistently
muffled and marginalised. The same skills are needed for handling difference.
In the 'Transversal Politics' event the day before, Pragna Patel had told
the story of the moment when inter-communal violence in the Indian subcontinent
had increased tensions between Muslim and Hindu women in Southall Black
Sisters to the point of rupture. The words she found to describe that
crisis were, precisely: 'We were lost for words'.
Notes
1. The Women Building Bridges research project was funded by City University,
the E. and H.N. Boyd and J.E. Morland Charitable Trust, the William A.
Cadbury Charitable Trust, the Community Relations Commission of Northern
Ireland, the Global Fund for Women, the Lipman-Miliband Trust, the Network
for Social Change, the Niwano Peace Foundation, the Scurrah Wainwright
Charity and Womankind Worldwide.
2. Photo-narratives about these three projects were published in Soundings
as 'Different Together', Issue 2, Spring 1996; 'Refusing Ethnic Closure',
Issue 3, Summer 1996; and 'Wrong and wrong again', Issue 5, Spring 1997.
The research is reported in full in Cynthia Cockburn, The Space Between
Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict, Zed Books,
London 1998.
3. For the funding of this second phase of the research we are indebted
to Gresham College, the Global Fund for Women, the Network for Social
Change and the Scurrah Wainwright Charity.
4. Gresham College was both the sponsor and the host of the two conferences
described here. (Lynette Hunter is current holder of the Gresham College
Chair of Rhetoric). They also funded a partnership between Lynette and
Cynthia Cockburn in the context of which the latter carried through the
Bridge Between Bridges exchanges.
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