Gynocentric Women, Androcentric Men: The Liberian Self Divided

After the recent October elections, a self-identified Liberian feminist woman said in an interview, “They say a vote is a secret but I am openly saying here that I voted for every woman that was on the ballot, because I believe that if you say you are a feminist there should be no if and no but. I voted across the line for women.”

Ovaries in political ascendency. I think of Condoleezza Rice. African American woman. Point person and defender of the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld triumvirate: the U.S. regime most analogous to a fascist power structure than any other in American history. At abbreviated speed think heightened surveillance and wiretapping. Stripping civil liberties. Wall Street deregulation.  Torture. Military occupation worldwide. And the original “Iron Lady,” Margaret Thatcher, so dubbed for her steely coldness, her ruthless decimation of economic safety nets, implicated in corruption scandal after scandal enriching the rich, openly defending cruelties of the empire faulted for some of the greatest suffering and domination of majority world peoples from the Americas to the Caribbean to Asia to bloodstained carved Africa.

Vote for women for political office solely on gender? "[N]o if and no but"? Support full gender dominance – when the yes man for nefarious designs is a yes woman? 

The view that women are Übermensch (over-human, above-human, superhuman) is no less extremist than the belief that women are inferior creatures compared to men.

Definitions.

Gynocentrism (gyno, "woman, female"): “a belief system whereby the perceptions, needs and desires of women have primacy.”

Androcentrism (andro-, "man, male"): “the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing male human beings or the masculine point of view at the center of one's view of the world and its culture and history.”

Distinctions.

Womanism (noun); Womanist (adjective): “A black feminist or feminist of color; someone who is committed to the wholeness and well-being of all of humanity, male and female.” To which I must add: and to the wholeness and well-being of the natural world, the environment, and all living creatures.

I remember the roaring abuse when while confronting sexual violence, sexism and misogyny, a handful of us dared to use the word feminism and call ourselves feminists in the 80s. Redefining ourselves as womanists in the 90s, we sought to harmonize womanity and masculinity in political struggle and discourse to articulate our condition and effect social transformation. That movement has since been co-opted, overrun by powerful front women indistinguishable from the powerful “mimic men” they’ve replaced.  This is Haitian writer-scholar Roger Dorsinville’s brilliant term for the elite collusionists with rapacious global power whose “mimicry” produces disastrous effects that permeate throughout the body politic and economy to stain the social consciousness.

PR coup or psych ops (PSYOP), there’s essentially no difference: we are at war within ourselves/against us.

Come to me in a vivid daytime dream, here’s a story I've written derived from a well-known wisdom folktale of the Kwa.

Once upon a time in the wild eastern forests of Liberia, a powerful healer gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. To her children the wise healer patiently passed on the curative knowledge of certain leaves, herbs, roots, bark, grasses, seeds and hidden plants. Their father, too, was a learned man; a master hunter steeped in the ways of the natural world. He taught the children how to read the signs of nature with reverence for earth, sky, water, fire and all living creatures. But the boy was born with the gift of the arrow, the girl with the gift of smoke. The boy could fly soaring through the air over any obstacle to trace the flight of his arrow. So, too, could the girl travel airborne, weightless on a trail of smoke blown from her mouth in any direction of the moving wind. These unearned gifts the children valued highly and delighted in far above their parents’ teachings.

Time came when slave raiders shadowed the land. These soulless, vile zombies stalked the children, who had begun wandering further and further away from familiar territory through the vast green expanse to test their gifts. It was not that the children were craftily hunted for their birthright gifts to be exploited, which the gleaming-eyed slave raiders thought to be no more than acrobatics; it was rather the sheen of their skins, the strength of their limbs that drew the slave raiders. These evildoers sniffed profit and believed that the healthy children could survive the manifold tortures of capture.

The slave raiders’ net was thrown, the children ensnared like wild beasts. Each clutched to their breast the deerskin bags they carried around their waists with their gifts inside. The boy, his bow and arrows. The girl, her smoldering coals.  Also in their bags were calabash gourds of water, strips of dried deer meat from their father’s hunt, and various medicines from their mother’s dispensary.

Beaten into submission, the children were carried inside the net between two poles with a man on each end, like animals for slaughter. The group of six men took turns to fast cover the distance to their camp where other captives were. Then began the long march to the coast and the slavers’ ships.

I will let the reader speculate how this retelling of an age-old story ends. Using their gifts and the knowledge passed down by their parents, do boy and girl together, as in their mother’s womb, find their way home to freedom? Will the boy or the girl or both collaborate with the slavers to save their skins and betray the other(s)? Will the boy or the girl decide that even enslavement is far better than the home and life they were forced to leave behind? There are other endings and other possibilities . . .