Arriving at Dubai airport you are first met by a huge red sign WELCOME TO TOMORROW. If this is the future, maybe I should bow out right now! Everything here is huge - the airport - the duty free shop, the immigration hall - endless free ways, glass skyscrapers reaching to the sky, and more cranes per sq meter than any other city (well it seems that way). I woke up the next day to find I had no voice. Lost and speechless in this material world I was taken to another Dubai phenomena, the Gigantic mall - what else do you do in Dubai? The Ibn Battutu Mall named after the famous explorer. The mall is divided into six sectors, China, India and Egypt, Tunisia, Persia and Turkey. My first thought was what happened to Morocco were Ibn Battutu was born? We entered at the India section, avoiding Starbucks on the way we sat and had very expensive but cosy chocolate cakes and skinny lattes - besides a huge elephant that looks like its made of paper mache and the top of which is encased in a wooden canopy that reaches up to the ceiling.

I am in a huge gated estate where every single house is exactly the same design and colour the only difference is the size. There are artificial lakes with ducks and beautiful flowers on the side, swimming pools for every block and private ones for those who can afford it. Each house has at least one huge silver grey 4X4 parked in the driveway and Hummers are everywhere. My hosts are saying they intend to buy one. I must have looked horrified as they made the excuse that driving was so dangerous only a Hummer would protect them from death and destruction on the road!

My throat got the better of me and I have not been out since but my voice is slowly returning. Enough for me to have a long conversation with Maria (not her real name) the maid who is from the Philippines. Maria has been in Dubai for three months. Before that she spent just over 2 years in Saudi Arabia, one of 25 maids for a high official. The whole time she was there she never went out on her own and whatever she needed to buy was bought by the driver. She worked 7 days a week sometimes up to 16 hours a day. She got the job through an agent in Manila and had to hand her passport over to her employers on arrival. Maria was lucky in that her employers were “good” people and she used to get extra tips from the family relatives but the other maids were beaten. She was spoken to in Arabic from the first day which she did not understand. But her madam would not speak to her in English so she spent the first few weeks in fear, trying to figure out what she was supposed to be doing until she eventually learned the language. There are many cases of employers and family members raping maids and of course there is nothing they can do as they would get beaten and end up being deported. Apparently less and less Filipino women are going to Saudi Arabia to work.
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A mixture of too much travel, personal issues, life changes, relocating and just plain old tiredness equals Blogger purgatory - that place you find yourself when you cannot think, read or write. Not only have I hardly written anything I have hardly read any blogs for weeks so today in the hope of finding some inspiration I checked out a few. I ended up feeling worse. All my daily and weekly reads full of pages of posts and still no inspiration. I did find one post that linked to a series of photos of the Burmese Buddhist monks protesting in Rangoon.

But seriously, these peaceful Burmese monks marching in their thousands for 7 days now in defiance of a repressive military regime - have given me my greatest inspiration this year.

I spent a long time staring at this photo hoping again to be inspired. I saw a young man with faith and courage standing in the rain for something he truly believed in. It should have inspired me but it just made me feel sad and humble as the drops of rain turned into the tears of thousands and thousands of people who just couldn’t take it any more.

Burma

The masquerade is central to Kalabari culture, dance and music. The masquerade transforms man into a spirit being born from the water that surrounds our land - the ocean, rivers, creeks and swamps - the water spirits are every where and their origins are the stories of dusk like the one below.

Krakrama River, Kalabari

One of the leading masquerades societies is from Ekine ( becoming a society, group) - Sekiapu / Sekibo. One day many many years ago in the days of Elem Kalabari, before oil pollution, before slavery, when the waters were clear with sparkling blue and silver fish - a beautiful young woman named Ekineba (daughter of Ekine) was playing by the river when she was abducted by water spirits and carried away into the mangrove swamps. The spirit mother was angry and ordered her son spirits to return the young woman to her family. Before they did so, they taught Ekineba many different spirit plays. Ekineba performed these plays entertaining the people, drumming, singing and dancing. Their bodies danced like the waves of the ocean spray from whence the people came. The dancing and plays continued but all was not well for Ekineba and the Elem Kalabari. The water spirits became angry because the men did not follow the rituals of the plays and eventually they took Ekineba away for good. The people wept and became so very sad as they missed their dancing daughter. The only solution was to make her live forever so Ekineba became a goddess and a spirit of the Kalabari people and that is how Ekine - Sekiapu was founded and the spirits continue to dance up to today.*

That was in the old days. Now things are different. The fish are gone, the rivers and creeks polluted with oil waste, the mangroves dried and dead. Development came in the form of oil rigs, pipelines, flow stations. Leaders from far off places who never knew of Ekineba or the spirits of Kalabari, got rich from the oceans, creeks and land. They were greedy and ignored the laws of trade. They took everything and only gave back poverty and devastation. The spirits became weary, the people became tired and left their homes in search of another life but left behind the protection of the water spirits. Now only the elderly are left to pick the periwinkles from the sandy banks covered in the black sludge of crude oil. Soon the villages and towns may die from oil, die from sadness. Where will the spirits go, what will they do? No one knows. To think of such a time is too fearful a thought because it means it is the end of time. So instead we ask the the spirits to dance for us, to dance long and hard, so that we all may be strong once again.

Idiogbon* kuro wariri, Kalabari - our spirit is strong!

*I have used a phonetic spelling here and written my own version of a Kalabari mythical story.

I just worked out I have been on 9 planes since April 26th that’s almost one a week - up and down all over the place. Night flights, jet lag, a two hour flight takes 7 hours, queues for security - at DC I had to take my jeans off cause I was beeping all over the place. It’s just plain boring and I still have 6 more flights before 1st September and then another 4 in October and that’s it - I refuse to go anywhere for a minimum of 4 months. I am seriously tired, my concentration and motivation are down - I cannot process all the information being thrown at me from all corners. I cant even concentrate on watching TV never mind trying to read a book. I cant sleep properly, am overdosing on coffee to get me through the day and not eating properly because I am too tired to cook.

I know some people have been doing this for years but I am hating it. People keep telling me how tired they are - manifested in all kinds of physical and mental disabilities such as headaches, low immune system resulting in an assortment of infections, depression, chronic fatigue(ME), lack of concentration - attention deficit, anxiety and panic attacks, insomnia , low energy levels because all of the above sap your energy. Although anyone can suffer for any of the above I do believe that women, LGBTIs (see Kym’s post on being called a “dyke bitch” at work) , women on low incomes and particularly women of colour [more likely to be poor] are especially susceptible to these illness because of the additional stresses they face in a white heteronormative world. Add to that those of us who think outside the mainstream dominant hegemony then all of the above are exacerbated.

Whilst I accept the need for security at airports and other public places - you get to realise the number of everyday mechanicisms used to control people - the layout, presence of police and other security personnel, cameras, even road crossing (no jaywalking allowed), passes, guards, fences, borders, controlled spaces for doing this and that - and these are the obvious ones that we all take for granted. What about the ones we don’t see such as monitoring our emails, phone calls, letters (some may recall the incident with my books and papers that never arrived). Profiling of Black and “Arab” looking mainly men but women also, prisons, criminalising of sections of our communities such as the poor and immigrants, attempts to control our bodies such as forced sterilisation, preventing women from accessing abortions and just attacking anyone who is different ie not white fe/male ken and barbie - the list goes on. I am sure there is much more but my thinking is waning and I am getting tired of writing already and not sure where this is going - maybe I need some more coffee to keep me functioning. There is no conclusion here but that’s what happens when you cannot concentrate - things don’t get finished and your mind is all over the place.

Found this quote while searching for books to read.

Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead’ - Gene Fowler

University of KZN Press quote of the day