Tag Archives: social justice

Fierce Girl, Margaret Atwood, and Me

I love Fierce Girl.

As soon as I saw her, hands on hips, and her chin jutting out toward that bull, I loved her. Yes, I know she is white girl and that’s not intersectional enough for me. Yes, I know she was put there by Big Money and that means they have their own corporate interests at the center.

I love her anyway.

And yes, I know she is called Fearless Girl but I am renaming her.  I am never going to tell my daughter that she should fear less. I am going to tell her to be fierce. I am going to tell myself to be fierce.

These days I often feel small and fragile and powerless, almost like a little girl. Who wouldn’t? We are facing a cabal of rich, powerful, racist, sexist white men, who have their fingers in every pot and their hands grasping at every pussy. They plan to make us sick and poor and weak so they can take everything for themselves.

But Fierce Girl puts her hands on her hips. Fierce Girl juts out her chin. Fierce Girl has no more fucks to give.

When I saw this photo of a white guy in a suit pretending to rape Fierce Girl, I went rage-y.  The woman who took the picture nailed it when she wrote: “Douchebags like this are why we need feminism.”

This week I’ve been working on a series of blog posts for the #SJYALit project (Social Justice YA Literature) at Teen Librarian Tool box. In April, authors Elana K. Arnold, Mindy McGinnis, Isabel Quintero, and  I will be featured in a series about feminism.  I’ve been thinking a lot about why and how I wrote POINTE, CLAW, and why I think it is the book I needed to release at exactly this time in history.

Way before I started writing POINTE, CLAW, I was jotting down nuggets that might find their way into its pages. Things like: men staring at young ballet dancers, vaginal plastic surgery, men’s responses to menstruation, girls kissing each other, friendships that turn into more than friendship, removing dry tampons,  men following girls into the lingerie department, the ways that women can help or hurt each other, the ways in which fathers avoid daughters… The douchebag pretend to rape Fierce girl would have gone on my list.

In a recent article about the upsurge in interest in her 1985 book THE HANDMAID’S TALE, Margaret Atwood discusses a question that she is often asked about the book: Is it a “feminist” novel?

Here’s her answer:

If you mean an ideological tract in which all women are angels and/or so victimized they are incapable of moral choice, no. If you mean a novel in which women are human beings — with all the variety of character and behavior that implies — and are also interesting and important, and what happens to them is crucial to the theme, structure and plot of the book, then yes. In that sense, many books are “feminist.” Why interesting and important? Because women are interesting and important in real life. They are not an afterthought of nature, they are not secondary players in human destiny, and every society has always known that. 

I keep thinking about that first line. Ideological tract. Angels. Victimized to the point of no moral choice. It’s a little weird. Why would I assume that “feminist novel” means any of those things?

Any kind of ideological tract would be a shitty novel from a craft perspective. A novel that presents all women as perfect is, in fact, a reflection of a sexist system that either demonizes women or puts them on a pedestal. A novel with such an oppressive system against women that they can do nothing turns women into mere plot points.

Instead, Atwood goes on to say that novels should present women as human beings. Let that sink in. Sounds a lot like Hillary Clinton saying that women’s rights are human rights. Atwood takes the next step to say that any book which depicts fully-fleshed, complicated, complex female characters with agency could be considered feminist. She goes on to imply (though I wish she had stated it explicitly) that the other necessity of a feminist novel is to explore how these characters push against a system designed for the benefit of men.

I have no doubt that POINTE, CLAW is a feminist novel. The vast majority of the characters, both animal and human, are female. They are mothers and daughters and wives. They are dancers and strippers and home-based business owners and doctors and teachers and students. They are angry and content and complicit and miserable. My goal was to show all the different ways girls and women get boxed in by the expectations of a patriarchal society that has very narrow ideas about what defines a woman.

It’s a rage-y book. It’s a Fierce Girl book. I’d like to take a copy and bludgeon the Douchebag with it. Because I have no more fucks to give.

 

A New World View

I remember with great clarity the moment when I really “got” evolution. Before that I could have given you a vague explanation for evolution, but that was book learning. The moment I’m talking about was a revelation, an awakening, an eye-opening realization: THIS IS HOW THE WORLD WORKS! Suddenly I grasped that given a few fundamental principles, the inevitable conclusion was that the diversity of life on this planet is explained by descent with modification. It was a fireworks moment.

I’ve just had another one, and this time I have the Cheeto President to thank for it.

I believed/assumed that our democratic system of government was unassailable. Some people chose to get involved and run for office or work for campaigns, while others, like me, voted and donated money. Sometimes my candidates won. Sometimes they lost. Sometimes I liked policy changes. Sometimes I didn’t. Ho-hum. Politics as usual.

What I did not know until now is that democracy, even one as lauded as ours, is constantly in flux. It must constantly be defended lest it fall away from the delicate balance of powers that defines it. Like a house by the sea, we must reinforce the foundation and re-shingle the roof. Voting is no longer enough. Speaking out and insisting that each branch of government does its job without overreaching its bounds is an absolute necessity.

The democratic experiment that is America is on the knife-edge of an autocracy. Without us, the people, raising our voices and our fists, it will crumble. We must write a new narrative.

And you know what? I am made for that. I am Jew. I know history. That means I recognize the beginnings of fascism. It also means that means I know how to wrestle with the story we are telling ourselves. I know that we must constantly re-interpret and re-vision the story that we are living. I am a writer. I am made for telling the story that I want to fight into existence.

Join me.

Download and read the INDIVISIBLE GUIDE. Find a local activist group. Make your voice heard.

We must rise.

An unstoppable, rising tide…

This awesome art is by Calef Brown at http://www.calefbooks.com
This awesome art is by Calef Brown at http://www.calefbooks.com

The poet, David Whyte wrote: Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us.

I am paying attention—

To the singularly self-absorbed, little man who has revealed the bigoted underbelly of this country.

To the acts of hate and intolerance that have galvanized so many.

To the 64.6 million people, the majority, who voted for the progressive agenda of Hillary Clinton.

To the 3.8 million people sharing their stories in Pantsuit Nation.

To each of you who has written about transcending the hurdles of your past, about finding your voice, about standing up for yourself, about standing up for others, about building your true family, and about living an authentic life.

I am paying attention—

On one side, I see a thin-skinned man surrounded by hoodlums and supported by a mere 31.2% of registered voters, who willfully abandoned both critical-thinking and compassion.

On the other, I see survivors. I have read your stories. I have heard your voices. I know your strength. You are survivors of abuse, assault, and oppression, of illness, loss, and trauma. You have endured a thousand other indignities large and small, and still you shine.

You are light and fire and strength.

I am paying attention, and I am grateful. More than that, I am hopeful. I know that might be hard to believe, but it’s true. Dick and Jeanne Roy of the Northwest Earth Institute define hope this way: Hope is our highest vision of the possible.

YOU are my highest vision of the possible—an unstoppable, rising tide of humans united to take care of each other and the planet.

As for tantrum-throwing toddler man and his cronies who are determined to take it all for themselves, they have already lost. They don’t know it yet, and you might not be quite ready to believe me, but that’s okay.

The momentum in this country is toward a browner, queerer, greener, gentler, smarter future. We, the survivors, the highest vision of the possible, are using the power of the stories we share to take control of the narrative. We are the future.

*Feel free to copy and paste in order to share this post on your own feeds.
© Amber J. Keyser

In the storm

Photo credit: Wayne Lynch
Photo credit: Wayne Lynch

Fourteen years ago I was on a canoe trip in the Canadian backcountry with my grandmother, my parents, my husband, and our infant son.

*Note: This is not as weird as it seems. My grandmother was Ontario’s first licensed female canoe guide. My father practically grew up in a canoe, and so did I. All of us trekking out into the wilderness is just what we do.

Anyway…

We’d set up camp and pitched a tarp when a huge storm rolled in. I put our son in his bright yellow rain suit onesie (yes, they make these), and the rest of us pulled on our rain gear. As the storm intensified, we gathered under the tarp. The campsite began to flood and we huddled together with my son in the middle of our circle. Rain sluiced down our backs and puddled around the high patch of ground we were gathered upon.

My grandmother joked about us being like a herd of musk ox, who gather their young into the middle of the herd for protection, and indeed we were just like musk ox weathering a storm or the threat of predators.

This is us now. In the storm. The biggest, worst storm I have seen in my years on this planet. I won’t lie—I’m scared. I have never felt this vulnerable or this disappointed in humanity. My belief that most people are fundamentally good is shaken, deeply. But I keep thinking about that storm and about my herd.

Moving forward, we must be musk ox—big, powerful, badass, and working in unison. We must gather together with the most vulnerable in the center. Our future is the young people of today—the queer kids, the Jewish kids, the kids of color, the kids new to this country, the girls who don’t want to be groped, the boys who want to be kind. We have to keep them safe and also teach them how to deal with this kind of fundamental threat to our humanity.

So shake the snow off your shoulders, people, and circle up.

 

 

On Yom Kippur, let us not despair

The Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur concluded at sunset yesterday. It’s the most serious, the most intense, and the most challenging of the Jewish holidays. The services are long and the liturgy is one that is often hard to fit inside the norms of modernity. We are asked to meditate on the possibility of death, on sin, and on all the ways we have failed to live up to our ideals.

Like I said, a tough holiday.

This year during the Kol Nidre service two lines stood out to me. No, more than that, they grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me hard.

When the wrongs and injustices of others wound us, may our hearts not despair of human good. May no trial, however severe, embitter our souls and destroy our trust.

Let us not despair of human good.
Of human good.
Human good.

My son at his bar mitzvah
My son at his bar mitzvah

As I thought about these lines, I noticed my son, sitting close and wearing his late grandfather’s tallit (a prayer shawl). Now my father-in-law was an opinionated, curmudgeonly pain-in-the-ass. (I’m sure I won’t get any disagreements from those who knew him!) I am pretty sure he didn’t share my views on plenty of social issues. But I am also sure of this–he was a good man. Not a perfect man. Certainly not a champion of social justice. But a good man to his friends and family. A man who would go down fighting for those close to him.

I’m also pretty sure he would have been a Trump supporter.

I can tell you’re starting to protest. Wait a second, Amber. If he was a Trump supporter, how can you say he was a good man. Bear with me here.

My father-in-law was a defender of many American values–country, military, family, community–what he lacked was not a good heart but a widened circle of empathy. Let me explain. Each of us has our own specific set of circumstances. It’s easy to empathize with those exactly like us, same religion, same upbringing, same gender, same sexuality, redheads, whatever. Most of us expand the boundaries to include others, more like us than not, but still different. How many of us can claim a truly encompassing embrace that takes in even those we can barely comprehend? Not many, I expect.

Last night I read this article, which looks like a silly clickbait piece (you should read it), but is saying something very important about why people have flocked to Trump. It dissects the urban/rural divide in a way that opened my eyes to the perspective of people very different from me. Here I sit, a member of what the article calls the liberal elite. How easy for me to judge. For me to call them racists because they are not heeding the clarion call of Black Lives Matter (which is really, really important in this widening circle of national empathy) is in itself a failure of empathy.

For us to put this country back together after this election cycle (When the wrongs and injustices of others wound us…), we must continue the fight for social justice and we must also widen the circle of empathy to disenfranchised white people living in struggling communities outside of the urban/liberal bubble.

But I digress into political solutions…

This year on Yom Kippur, I meditated on empathy. My mission as a writer, a parent, and a human being to expand the circle of empathy, wider and wider at every turning. And this is why I am proud every time I see my son in my father-in-law’s tallit.

This is why I will not despair of human good.

A poem and places for white people to start fighting racism

People take part in a rally on April 29, 2015 at Union Square in New York, held in solidarity with demonstrators in Baltimore, Maryland demanding justice for an African-American man who died of severe spinal injuries sustained in police custody. AFP PHOTO/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez (Photo credit should read EDUARDO MUNOZ ALVAREZ/AFP/Getty Images)
AFP PHOTO/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez
I’m a writer. I take my pain and shape it into words. So today, in the face of more violence against people of color in this country, I wrote a poem.
Racism is not a black problem. It is a white problem. It is imperative that white people educate themselves about racism, listen and validate the voices of people of color, and that we take an active role in staunching the wounds and lifting the yoke. The recent protesting has been drawing attention to this cause, making more people re-evaluate their opinion on the movement. Many more people are realizing that there is injustice for the black community, and many are looking to help however they can. Whilst attending protests draws national attention, it’s important that more is done until change happens. Thousands of brands and businesses have also been getting involved in the moment recently, with many of them donating huge amounts to fight against racism. Whilst it can be difficult for businesses to know how to go about marketing throughout this uncertain time, there are resources like this article that hopes to explain how businesses can support the movement effectively. There are millions of people looking at some brands and yet they’ve done very little to help the movement. No matter whether the business is small or large, everyone has a part to play in this fight.
After the poem you will find links to start doing the hard work of healing the wounds of this country. Join hands. Put your shoulder into it. We can help write a different future.

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW ABOUT WOUNDS

I am gut-punched, hollowed out.
I am grief-broken and angry.
I could list the dead for hours: Sandy Hook, Orlando, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Dallas-
There is ample pain to share.
Daughter, mother, wife, friend. I am these things.
And I have had my heart ripped from my chest by loss.
I know wounds.

This is what I know about wounds: they do not go away.
I will always be the mother of a dead child.
I share this with:
Sandy Hook
Orlando
Philando Castile
Alton Sterling
Dallas
We know wounds.

The wound of America is domination
gaping, bloody, seeping
It doesn’t go away.
We don’t get over it.
We built a country out of human flesh.
That is a fact.
And now-

A wound does not heal when it is
ignored: you’re okay
demeaned: it’s not that bad
prayed over: this is part of the plan
unshared: not my problem
A wound untended goes into sepsis

and the system-that body with the beating heart-fails.

So hear me:
I see the bodies.
I see the guns.
I see our flesh-country seething, suffering, dying-
And also trying to live.

This wound:
It is not okay.
It is worse than you imagine.
No good God planned this.
It is my problem.

It is my problem.
It is my wound.
Our wound.

This is what I know about wounds: they do not go away.
But they can be carried.
If we
see
listen
struggle
claim
If we do these things-
the living flesh can bear the scar.

Here is the homework:
Advice for White Folks in the Wake of the Police Murder of a Black Person
Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person
30+ Resources to Help White Americans Learn About Race and Racism
Six ways white people can help end the War on Black People
It’s My Job to Raise Children Who Are Not Only Not Racist But Actively Anti-Racist
Black Lives Matter – A Reading List

Speaking Up

Voice.

Voice is connection.
Voice is speaking our own truth.
Voice is the driver of our narratives.

silenced terror large

After being raped, Maya Angelou didn’t speak for years. In an interview with Terry Gross, she told how she found her voice so she could love poetry.

The #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign blew up the internet because stories are the most profound way for us to connect across differences. We need to hear the voices of those who experience life outside of our own private bubbles.

My son overheard a friend making a comment, presumably in jest, about killing himself. He could have brushed off the throwaway comment, but instead he came to his parents. And we went to the boy’s parents. And the boy is still mad.

The recent attack in California and its anti-woman underpinnings have prompted many women to speak out about the sexism they face every day.

Voice.

The imperative is to find it and use it.
Use it big and use it small.
Never go mute.

I wish…

Yesterday, a writer friend and I were leaving a restaurant and our very young male server said, “Thanks, Girls.”

We paused at the door, looking at each other. “Did he just call us girls?”

We laughed and walked out. The easy thing. But I wish I’d turned around and gently, very gently, reminded him about respect. It would have been a small thing. A small response for a small ignorance.

But I would have used my voice.
And he might have faced the world differently from then on.

 

 

#WeNeedDiverseBooks

WeNeedDiverseBooks.001Today is the start of a three-day  social media campaign to highlight the need for diversity in books for kids and teens.

All the details are right here. Post your own picture or reshare mine. Let’s plaster the internet with a call to action.

Thanks to the Diversity in YA bloggers Cindy Pon and Malinda Lo as well as Oregon author Chelsea Pitcher for us fired up.

Books should be windows into lives different from our own and also mirrors where we find ourselves reflected.

#WeNeedDiverseBooks