Association of women of the Mediterranean Region
Ada Donno
It was when Nawal El Sadawi's daughter bought a swimsuit and got lost in the Larnaca Sea, while Zahia Safa and I remained on the beach, waiting for her and chatting on feminism and Islam for hours.
The mayor's wife Agathi had took us to the small open air market to do shopping, but Linda Matar and I found out that we were the only two without even a drachma to spend. Linda was in anguish because she had left a burning Beirut. So the clumsy Agathi offered us a Turkish coffee, made us choose two cloth sacks made in Cyprus and bought three new dresses for herself from a boutique.
I shouldn't spend all this money, but I am the mayor's wife and I must look smart - she justified herself, winking in a funny way.
We all ended up in a restaurant on the Phoenician Sea: the Nawal's daughter, with her cumbersome body and the faraway look of the promising writer, Linda in better spirits, because she had been able to phone home, the funny Agathi, the intelligent Ayse and the other women.
We were all guests of Pogo and Widf, which had got us together in a Mediterranean Women's Meeting for Peace. There was also Yana Mintoff and we talked about that. A brief meeting, but I kept it in my mind. She used to spend most of the year in Texas and had an idea: an association of Mediterranean women.
For a while we sailed following different routes, heading for the same harbour and arriving at different slipways: Yana in her Malta, in 1990. We Italians, more modestly, in Lecce, the next year. Then, in Tunis, our Mediterranean project started to be better outlined. In the meanwhile Nadia Gambilongo, from Cosenza, had launched her magazine Mediterranea and it was evident that we had thought of the same thing. A Mediterranean hypothesis: to sail through the gender, between development and underdevelopment, structural contradictions and cultural differences, among the unequal distribution of rights. By daring the open sea and confronting all these variables we will understand - Nadia used to say - how and where to take political actions and with what women.
At the sailing there was the idea of the being Mediterranean to be defined as a possible place of women who, moving from different experiences and belonging and weaving thoughts and actions, become the creators of a common political project: to sail in the Mediterranean Souths trying to recognize each other and build strong relations, overtaking prohibitions as old as our stories; also to find a definition of our antagonism, moving from what our exchange of experiences can produce, as regards the powers that discriminate, exclude, wipe off, oppress us.
So, the being Mediterranean as a political place of women. But how to be the subject who builds this place? And, even before, how to represent this dimension, the dimension of "consanguinity" or "common human life" - a story of a millennial everyday life of women supported by the attempt of our political story? We were able to find only fragments of answers.
Anyway, we celebrated the founding act of the Mediterranean Wo-men Association (AWMR) in Malta in September 1992, at the end of a conference in which we discussed - among women coming from nine countries of the two shores - of Women's Rights, National and Regional Rights. It wasn't a painless act, for several reasons. I think the first was that the context - the world - had lived a big confusion in the last two years and the Mediterranean Region had just been crossed by the Gulf War, which had deeply marked all of us.
It wasn't easy to measure how much these events and their consequences - the imperialist New World Order - were influencing and interfering. The truth is that among us there were moments of acute tension and there had been tears, never healed again, with the Tunisian and Libyan women who were also in the founding group. This was the price paid for the admission of the Israeli women, I think, and we all weakened from it.
In the three following years we met, in the summer as always, in Mar-saxlokk. From time to time we fixed a theme - Colonialism and Patriarchy, Militarism, Health - following the thread of a close and sometimes harsh discussion , because we never avoided the necessity to confront the conflicts that crossed us and often hanged over us - the wars in the ex-Yugoslavia, Palestine, Cyprus, Algeria - severely trying our proposal to be internationally among women, as a place that can be hard but not ambiguous. We cannot assert that we have always been able to.
The fact of having given us a site - Malta, where the stone Great Goddess watches over - a statute, a logo and an organization chart was very important for our being identifiable, but even more important was the fact of having defined four words that we chose as being supportive of our relations: rights, self-determination, equality, peace.
It is certainly a feat in itself - as Yana, who takes the most work on her, says - the fact that women from war-torn areas and from thousands of miles away meet in the little tuff island in the heart of the Mediterranean. Unimaginable are the obstacles in the way. It is sometimes impossible to communicate: once Marjana's speech from Bosnia didn't arrive in time to be published with the papers; another time we couldn't contact Shadia, who edits our six-monthly news-letter, in Gaza. Then there are the difficulties for the Visas and the border blocks, the sudden restrictions from the Authorities, thus Fifi Benaboud from Algeria, for instance, was held at Lisbon airport for days. Finally, luggage mysteriously "disappeared" and so on. Without mentioning the problem of finding the funds for our annual conference!
Last year, talking of Health in the Mediterranean, we tried to visualize the iceberg, trying to investigate not only the emerging tip of the uneasiness - the alarming increase of illness like cancer, TB, cholera, arthritis and emotional shocks - but also the submerged part, where there are the wars, pollution, poverty, the numerous forms of violence, the distorted forms of capitalistic development, linked with the perpetuating patriarchal oppressive patterns in the relation between the genders.
As already said, this year AWMR meeting will be held in Limassol, Cyprus, from the 26 to 30 June. We will discuss of Immigrant and Refugee Women in the Mediterranean.
Every woman who is interested is welcome.
POST SCRIPTUM: The papers of the four previous conferences are available
in English and partially in Italian. If you wish to receive them you can
apply the following addresses:
AWMR, c/o WILPF-Italia - c.p.46, 73100 Lecce, Italy. Tel/Fax 0832 348552
AWMR, 1 Marsamxett Rd, Valletta, Malta. Fax +356 237456
For information and registration to the next conference you can apply the
same addresses or: Cyprus Organizing Committee, P.O.Box 320 - Limassol
3603, Cyprus. Tel. +357 5372497, Fax 368457.
