Beyond Trauma

The Russell Tribunal on Palestine - Part II

2012-01-19T14:56:00.000-08:00

The Organizers and Volunteers
The South African organizers came mostly from the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC), Cosatu and some group allied to Desmond Tutu. The volunteers seemed to be young members of the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement in Cosatu or various student left wing groups allied to BDS or PSC. Quite a few people asked me what organisation I hailed from. After the first uncomfortable meeting in which I interrupted some derogatory anti-Jewish comments, my stock reply to these questions was "I am the Zionist spy." It raised the odd surprised laugh. Of-course, they were concerned about protests, hecklers and the like. Security was tight and some old struggle fantasies about whites and the police were projected onto Jews. At one meeting, someone suggested the Jewish Defence League might turn up with their guns. It was laughable. "In your dreams", I thought, because of-course, that improbable event would recognise the Tribunal as a threat to Israel.
Attendance
The organisers were also worried about attendance. 600 people had been invited including the State President.
Winnie Mandela was supposed to be one of the witnesses. The District Six Museum could seat 202 inside which would have to include Media and the Witnesses as well as the legal team advising the jurists. There would be 2 overflow areas with screens. Readers you should know that the museum was never completely full - which means that at most there were never more than about 160 guests and probably usually less. The overflows were empty. Experts travelled thousands of miles to give precious and painful information. This information disturbed me and forced me to change my thinking about what could be a just solution in the Israel/Palestine conflict.In my view it was a great shame that so few people heard this powerful evidence.

Theatrics

Haneen Zoabi

There were a few protesters to provide a bit of entertainment on Sunday morning and to keep the security detail on their toes. However, by the end, there seemed to be a need for some drama. It came from the right wing in Israel. A member of a small right-wing party in the Knesset called for the Israeli citizenship of Haneen Zoabi to be revoked. She is a Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset who had given evidence earlier that day and this threat served to prove one of her points that for Arab-Israelis citizenship is conditional.

Michael Mansfield, the radical English lawyer and one of the jurists was the bearer of this dramatic news. He certainly knows how to galvanise an audience and made it sound like a serious threat from the Israeli government. Zwelinzima Vavi (General Secretary of Cosatu) then got up and as the most senior politician present immediately invited Haneen Zoabi to remain in South Africa assuring her that he personally would make representations on her behalf. If that wasn't enough to get us all fired up, the next announcement, again by Mansfield, fired a rocket when he reported that "The Tribunal's website has been hacked and exterminated!" I kid you not - his exact words.

Needless to say - Haneen Zoabi got home, and the website, although apparently hacked by professionals, is up and running. The links in this post and the previous Part I are to the videos on the website, of participants giving evidence.

How does a Diaspora Jew Get to Feel OK?

2012-01-19T14:47:00.000-08:00

With great difficulty I would say. Although many of us may lead comfortable lives, the life of a Diaspora Jew is mostly uncomfortable. Being part of any minority group requires constant questioning as you try to keep thinking, educate your children, preserve your culture and not fall into victim or oppressor roles. Furthermore, how one expresses one's identity is forever changing depending on where one lives and the changing contexts of a particular country. For instance, I would wear a Star of David in England because it states that I am proud to be a Jew and I will not be rendered invisible as a Jew. If I wore a Star of David in South Africa, it would mean to most Muslims and possibly others, that I am a Zionist and that I support the actions of the state of Israel.

Jewish Oppression
As I say in my article about the Russell Tribunal, I used to be an anti-Zionist. That was until I met Harvey Jackins, the leader of Re-evaluation Counselling (RC), who understood the nature of Jewish oppression and who, together with Jews belonging to the RC Communities developed a draft policy on Jewish Liberation. He had observed during his radical youth, that Jews tended to take up two positions: 1) we joined left-wing organisations and fought for everyone else's liberation except our own or 2) we tended towards ghettoisation within our own communities. The key distress we carry is one of isolation and we do not expect to have allies.
We have played a role historically, in which we sought to be of use to the ruling class, thereby gaining some short-lived security until that class became threatened and then proceeded to use us as scapegoats so they could maintain their position. This centuries-old pattern continues to this day - in the relationship Israel maintains with the United States.

National Liberation and Israel
Harvey Jackins insisted that the establishment of Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people was the culmination of our struggle for national liberation. And that as such, it had a right to exist. Unfortunately, it was done at the expense of the indigenous people who, at the time, emerging from colonialism, were just beginning to forge a national identity of their own. It seemed possible then, in the early 70's, that the occupation of the West Bank would not last long and that both national liberation movements might come to some agreement and co-exist.

My Journey
With the alliance of Harvey Jackins whose thinking I respected, and a very diverse community backing the Jews within RC, I slowly changed my attitude though it wasn't easy. It involved owning my Jewish identity and starting to feel that I had a right to exist. This was complicated by my also being a white South African, (another kind of interloper on already occupied land), albeit living in England.

Anti-Semitism exists in almost every country - even in those where there are hardly any Jews. However I don't know of any Jewish communities that are currently facing severe repression or are threatened with annihilation. The last major Jewish community confronting ongoing state oppression was in the Soviet Union in the late 80's and early 90's. Maybe it's time for a reassessment of the Law of Return which gives every Jew the right to live in Israel? This is one of the questions the Russell Tribunal raised for me.

In August 2011 I heard Benjamin Pogrund (a famous South African news editor and journalist, now living in Israel) give a talk on whether Israel is an apartheid state. He made a clear distinction between the democratic state of Israel which he supports, and the occupation of the West Bank which he opposes and considers at least as oppressive as apartheid South Africa. I was very taken by this argument until I heard the evidence at the Russell Tribunal. The rights and privileges which are not accessible to the Palestinians living inside Israel are more severely depriving than Benjamin Pogrund was willing to acknowledge. In addition, it does seem that large swathes of Israeli society do not intend for the occupation to end.

So, once again as a Diaspora Jew, I have to rethink my position on Israel - the two-state solution and the law of return etc. It won't be decided by me, but a Diaspora Jew has to declare a viewpoint on these perplexing issues. Even considering questioning the existence of Israel as a Jewish state feels life-threatening to me as a Jew. How much more so for a Jew who lives in Israel?

Enduring Impressions of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine - Part I

2012-01-19T14:37:00.000-08:00

It is a while since the third session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine was held in Cape Town at the District Six Museum. I needed time to reflect on the impact it had on me. I volunteered to help on the weekend of the 5th and 6th November 2011 with some trepidation. I was pretty sure there would not be many Jews there other than the diehard anti-Zionist variety like Ronnie Kasrils (a former South African Government Minister and one of the jurists) or Max Ozinsky (an ANC stalwart and invited guest). However, there were some Israelis on the witness list, and in any case, once I'd Googled it, it seemed more interesting to go than not to. I'd been asked by a former colleague, so I wondered if the organisers thought they needed trauma counsellors. To be there in my professional role felt easier than being there as a Jew.

I need to explain myself - years ago, in my more radical youth, I used to be a staunch anti-Zionist. but I had changed my position over the years. (see post above). Now, after 44 years of Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, I thought it might be an idea to reassess the situation.

Terry Crawford-Browne

When I said I was interested in being involved Terry Crawford-Browne, a member of the organising committee, wrote to me , as follows:

" Let me assure you, this is not an “Israel-bashing” occasion, nor anti-Semitic, nor anti-Jewish. Sober-minded people are concerned about the situation in Israel-Palestine, and in the cause of peace are endeavouring to find a way forward, and out of the disastrous situation that presently pertains. Indeed, Stephane Hessel who heads the Tribunal is a 94 year old Jewish survivor of Buchenwald concentration camp. He was born in Germany, fled to France, fought in the French Resistance against the Nazis"

Terry included exactly the same paragraph when he invited Judge Dennis Davis to be one of the jurists. Dennis Davis refused. He had Googled his potential fellow jurists only to learn that they had all already made up their minds about Israel being an apartheid state. In a talk he gave at a Jewish community meeting just before the start of the Tribunal, Judge Davis described what he understood to be the underlying agenda of the Tribunal. There would be no debate, the intention was to promote a one state solution to the problem of Israel/Palestine, and to fuel the boycott movement against Israel. All true. But after listening to two days of evidence I saw it all in a very different light.

Understandably, Dennis Davis was concentrating on the jurists and their lack of impartiality. That was perhaps important in the public domain, but to my mind they mostly provided a platform for the evidence that was presented, and for asking certain key questions. I don't think its terribly important to prove that Israel is an apartheid state, although perhaps this has propaganda value for the Palestine solidarity movement. Surely there must already be ample instruments within international law to charge Israel's military occupation on any number of counts? The apartheid issue seemed to provide the excuse to have the Tribunal in South Africa. I'm not sure why. This may have to do with the role some South Africans would like to play in a future peace process; or to give the boycott movement here a bit of a boost or....?. What do you think the motives were?

It seemed to me that the main purpose of the Tribunal was to express solidarity with the Palestinian cause and for Palestinians and their allies to have an international hearing. Nobody said it, but it is notoriously difficult for Palestinians from the different territories to meet, and also for them to meet with supportive Israelis. The Tribunal made this possible. Having sympathetic jurists and a specially invited audience as listeners, created a safe space for Palestinians so that , mostly on Day Two, they could describe the conditions under which they live, without having to be on the defensive i.e. to have to explain their views on Hamas or on suicide bombings, etc. I found this testimony harrowing, moving and often shocking. Much of it came from Israelis themselves. I'll give just a few examples:

In the Occupied territories, there are separate legal systems and courts for Jewish settlers and Palestinians. Jewish settlers are under the jurisdiction of Israeli civil courts. Palestinians are subject to military courts. Depending on nationality, the same crime will result in very different punishments.
Lea Tsemel
Lea Tsemel, an Israeli lawyer provided the most damning evidence with regard to Palestinians living in Israel (so-called Israeli Arabs). They are permitted to become Israeli citizens but there are many laws relating to their rights to this citizenship. In terms of the recent Loyalty Act their citizenship can be revoked for any acts of resistance e.g. characterizing the Israeli Day of Independence as a Day of Mourning or being involved in an organisation that promotes boycotting Israel. She mentioned that a bill was tabled in August 2011 preventing any spouses and children of Arab-Israelis who live in the Occupied Territories, from joining their families in Israel. The bill goes on to explicitly declare its racist purpose - to prevent the immigration of a hostile Arab population which would shift the demographics thus endangering Israel as a Jewish state.
Jeff Halper

Jeff Halper, an American who made aliyah to Israel in the early 70's, works with the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions. Although demolitions are common throughout the country, it is in the Occupied Territories that these seem to me to be most shocking. Using various laws relating back to the British mandate, Israel doesn't recognise Palestinian ownership of land in the Occupied Territories and so very few permits to build are awarded. People sometimes risk building homes on the land they legally own. They are then subject to demolitions by the military administration because these homes are "illegal". The terrible injustice of this is not only that people's homes are destroyed just as they were in District Six, but that this happens on land adjacent to equally illegal Jewish settlements where homes are being built apace.
Many speakers demonstrated convincingly that Israeli policy is no longer about security issues so much as being about how the demographics of "Greater Israel" will impact on the survival of a Jewish state. Both explicitly and implicitly, a policy of ethnic displacement is being pursued with the intention to induce voluntary emigration of Palestinians to other countries.

Continued in Part II (above)

Preparing to Land

2011-12-28T07:19:00.000-08:00

Imagine this: It's five days before Xmas. Nineteen people, mostly Capetonians, arrive at Bloemfontein airport to catch a plane back to Cape Town. They all know each other in a very specific context - they dance together. They have been dancing with 120 others for 5 days. Its not your ordinary kind of gyrate on the dance floor to rock or fast stepping twirls like salsa or even the erotic engagement of the tango, although it can encompass any of these. Its Biodanza - a way of freely expressing oneself to music and it includes contact and sensuality.

We are in the departure lounge. Our departure time comes and goes - we are not called. Eventually we discover that if only our plane had not switched its engines off, we could have taken off. But since they did switch off, we can't. There is a defective part for which we will have to wait. We begin to get to know each other in ways we never have before - about our lives and work. We have quite a bit of fun. At about the time we should have arrived in Cape Town, SAA finally decides to put us up at a hotel for the night and we will have to fly to Johannesburg (JHB) on the morrow to get to Cape Town - a route which is counter-intuitive to any normal modes of thinking other than that of airlines. This is devastating news for one or two (like some Italians who have to make their connection to Rome for Xmas) but not really for most of us - it being the holiday season.
We arrive for dinner at about 9 pm. Quite a few items on the menu are not available but it takes about an hour for the staff to tell us this. Meantime alcohol is provided - compliments of SAA. Wine is flowing and most of us are taking this as an opportunity for much enjoyment. The crew of our plane is also grounded and getting quite merry. We have to be ready to leave at 7.30 am for our flight to JHB. So eventually we wander off to bed after a completely unforgettable evening filled with much hilarity.

Breakfast next morning, is better provisioned than dinner, and we are all taxi'd back to the airport without mishap. Overnight the airline has got its act together and we are issued with 2 boarding passes and luggage directed straight through to Cape Town.

So why am I telling you this story? Because, as we approach Cape Town round about 2 o'clock that following day, the voice on the intercom announces: "We are preparing the captain for landing."
Good gracious! Are they all drunk up there in the cockpit? We know he meant to say "cabin" or did he? At least 30 different movie scenarios go through the various minds around me. The one that sticks with me seems to involve a dead captain (perhaps even a murdered one!) that has to appear to be landing the plane so that the authorities won't cotton on to the crime. But many other possibilities are being riffed by the more imaginative among us. Some involve a sudden loss of confidence on the part of the captain and him needing various forms of encouragement like "I know you've done this before," or a more impatient, "Just fake it!" or an air hostess whispering in his ear, " Darling, I think I'd better get off your lap now."

Five minutes later, the announcement goes: "Cabin crew, prepare the cap..bin for landing. Make sure your seats are in the upright position etc." At this point we are rolling in the aisles - obviously the guys in the cockpit weren't up to the task of 'preparing the captain'. Now they need the help of the cabin crew! Will we ever land in Cape Town?

How would you "prepare the captain for landing"?

Sometimes it can get Crowded in the Consulting Room

2011-10-30T06:11:00.000-07:00

Painting by Ken -Artist Kim Noble's alter

I was catapulted into the then-uncharted territory of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) - previously multiple personality disorder - one day in the early 70's, when a woman client I had been seeing for almost 2 years, came for her regular session and remarked that I had painted my walls a different colour and wasn't there someone who played the piano in one of the other rooms of the flat? I was a bit taken aback - I hadn't had any painting done recently and no-one lived in that room any more. In those days, I was a recently qualified psychotherapist and much as it pains me to admit it, I took notes in sessions. On this particular day it stood me in good stead. Writing down her observations helped me to think. I'd seen and read "The Three Faces of Eve", I'd seen "Sybil". Was I sitting with such a person? "When were you last here?" I asked - as of-course anyone would, who was certain they'd seen their client for their usual session the previous week! "I came once when She was drunk," came the immediate insouciant reply.
And thus began a 20-year on-off relationship with a few extremely riveting, sometimes troublesome "personalities", who had different accents, different dreams, different world-views, different histories and different parents but each of whom mysteriously inhabited the same body and who had to give way to each other in order to communicate with me. They fought bitterly with each other over this issue in the early years, but later were able to be extremely co-operative - not only in sessions, but in taking on different tasks e.g. when writing exams, decorating rooms and taking on professional activities. As Valerie Sinason said about DID when she was recently interviewed in the U.K. about her artist client, Kim Noble, "its a brilliantly creative survival device".
I also thought so - especially after one instance when my client cancelled a session in order to go to the women's tennis at Wimbledon and nevertheless turned up at the usual time! I hadn't realised that I should've checked that the cancellation had been agreed on by the Others. Luckily for me there was mainly only one Other - I'm not sure if I could've handled a whole lot more! After that I often thought how convenient it would be to call on this capacity. For example: I could be lying in bed while another part of me was going for an early morning run - something I always felt I should be able to do, but never could.

But what is the self defending against in these instances? Its usually the unbearable pain and confusion of childhood abuse - often sexual abuse - perpetrated by someone the child does or is supposed to trust. Unfortunately, until the 80's very few psychoanalysts actually believed in the reality of childhood sexual abuse and incest. The real experiences of women patients were seen as incestuous Oedipal fantasies, and trusted analysts re-enacted the silencing of their patients in ways that echoed their silencing by perpetrators. In parallel with this cultural blindness, multiple personality disorder was frequently misdiagnosed, or went unrecognised - largely because (according to Sinason) there is at least one really high-functioning personality present, who even if not aware of all the Others, is able to keep things together. Useful supervision was hard to come by.

In Kim Noble's case the perpetrators were her babysitters. However horrific the sexual abuse was, and this is graphically represented (as is the dissociation), in the paintings of Ria Pratt, (one of Kim's more than 100 alters), she has emerged, having used dissociation as a way to survive, as a celebrated artist who has managed to express her pain and terror in an extraordinarily creative way. Thirteen of her alters paint - here are some more examples showing a great diversity of styles.

Ria Pratt's - "Training in Progress"

Key's iconic painting with symbols

Abi's lone figure

There are many people who don't believe that dissociation actually happens - and psychoanalysts and psychologists are among them. If you are one of the doubters, I welcome your comments.

Community Organisation Prioritises Individual Counselling

2011-10-13T05:39:00.000-07:00

CASE (Community Action towards a Safer Environment) is a unique NGO located in the Hanover Park community on the Cape Flats. This is an area ridden with gang violence. In the short time that I have been marginally involved with this organisation, (since August 2010) there have been two major outbreaks of violence. Unfortunately, it is often young children who get caught in the crossfire. But the whole situation used to be much worse. The improvement could well be due to the existence of this organisation, which is housed in a few cream-coloured containers in the grounds of Mountview High School. The person who provides the firing passion behind this community-development-engine is Lane Benjamin, a clinical psychologist, mother of two, currently completing her Ph.D. She started CASE about 10 years ago while still working at the Trauma Centre.

End of year graduation party of the Literacy Group

On 28th September 2011, CASE went public. They launched a series of Training Manuals and Workshops hoping to spread their development model to other community organisations.

So what makes them special?
I think what distinguishes this organisation is 1) they start with individuals and their personal development, 2) they incorporate an understanding of the impact of trauma on learning and 3) expertise develops and remains within the community.

I would guess that their premise - that to break the cycle of violence you have to start with individuals and their personal development - might not be very popular currently with government or with funders. The theory that informs this is that most South African communities are traumatised firstly by the degradations of the past, which have been passed on to later generations through intergenerational transmission of trauma, and secondly, by the continuous violence in the present. The major ways in which this is manifest in each family is through dissociation, addictions, family violence and learning difficulties
At the launch, there were about 20 women and 1 man, who came into CASE from the community as clients and who have progressed through training to become counsellors themselves - a new version of the "barefoot psychoanalyst". All the volunteers at CASE for their various community programs are required to go through a short personal development training.

Lane's guide for educators: "The Impact of Trauma on Learning", should be a reading requirement in every teacher training course in the country. Here is just a snippet:
A learner that is in a state of persistent fear will find it difficult to learn complex cognitive information. In other words, if the cortex is not active, it will not store information. The learner will be focusing on non-verbal cues of the teacher. The teacher's body movements, facial expressions and tone of voice become significant information to be processed. The learner will be searching for threat and storing that information, not the words which accompany this. Only when the brain is in a significantly 'calmed' state will these children be able to learn and take in verbal information.
Using current brain research to show why traumatised children behave the way they do in the classroom and why they have difficulty learning, she also provides a number of helpful tools teachers can use to enhance the capacities of their learners.

Expertise develops and remains within the community. There is very little of the colonial idea that counselling requires professionals, which inevitably means bringing in people from the outside. And there is nothing grandiose in their philosophy - they know that the kind of change they want to effect, happens family by family, generation by generation. In a society riddled with hopes of a 'quick fix ', CASE is in for the long haul if they can survive financially.

Libyan Psychoanalyst Tries to go to Shul

2011-10-08T10:05:00.000-07:00

Libyan Jewish exile David Gerbi breaks the sealed entrance to Dar Bishi synagogue.

David Gerbi, who hit the headlines this week, is a psychoanalyst. He is also a consummate performer, a refugee peace envoy and a Libyan Jew. This week he also turned out to be a canny activist in the views of some, or an ill-timed opportunist in the views of others.
In the week that Libya's National Transitional Council (NTC) was preparing their final onslaught on Sirte, Gerbi, who had entered Tripoli with the rebels in August, decided to take brooms, rakes, buckets and cleaning materials to start restoring Tripoli's crumbling main synagogue which has been unused for decades. He started the clean-up on Sunday. By Wednesday the building was padlocked but Gerbi had made his stand. Probably knowing that revolutions provide only a short-lived window of opportunity for openness, he had decided to test the NTC for its democratic intent. Would Jews be welcome in the new Libya? Some say his test came too early - that's certainly the line of the NTC. Only time will tell. Maybe he wanted to be able to pray there on Yom Kippur - the Jewish day of Atonement - the holiest day of the year. In fact, I wonder where he has spent Yom Kippur today?
I first encountered David Gerbi, who seems to be well-known around Cape Town, when he performed his one man, one act play, "Making Peace with Qaddafi" at a conference in Cape Town held to mark the 10th anniversary of the TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) in 2006. In addition to evoking the pain of dislocation which was Gerbi's teenage experience, it told an extraordinary story: Gerbi's family sought refuge in Italy when most Jews left Libya in 1967 after anti-Semitic riots killed 18. In 2001 Gerbi discovered he had an elderly aunt still living in Tripoli - the last Jew. She had stayed to guard the family treasures. She had been hospitalised and her house and possessions confiscated. Gerbi eventually managed to get a visa to rescue her in 2002. Qaddafi wanted something in return. He wanted Gerbi to approach the USA on his behalf and so began the Western rapprochement with the Libyan dictator.

Dr. David Gerbi offers his hand to Colonel Qaddafi in a traditional Libyan gesture of friendship.

In a talk given some months ago to the Cape Town Interfaith Initiative, Gerbi outlined his wish to go to Benghazi to help the traumatised survivors of the rebellion:
“I want to go to Benghazi to treat traumatised victims in hospital to help the process of reconciliation”, he told the startled group. He was determined to work as a Jewish volunteer in a psychiatric hospital with refugees and victims of war, as an example of reconciliation. Stuck at the border, he then appealed to the CTII for a letter of recommendation to help him cross and a little later managed to achieve his aims, teaching his colleagues at the Benghazi Psychiatric Hospital, the techniques of healing post-traumatic stress disorder.
Later reports say he only spent a week there. Nevertheless, it appears that he spent the summer in Libya, allying himself with the revolution. The current news reports do not say in what way, but you can be sure of one thing with this compact dynamo of a man, the story will not be boring!

Postscript
By Sunday, according to the Jerusalem Post, there were demonstrations outside his hotel telling him he was not wanted in Libya. I quote his response:
“what happened reveals the extent of Gaddafi’s anti-Semitic conditioning of an entire generation, those in their forties and fifties. Forty-two years of lies, of hate propaganda falsely accusing Jews of having been paid off to abandon the country in 1967, of having robbed Palestinians of their homes and of planning to colonize Libya. Fortunately, the older generation still recalls warm friendships with former Jewish neighbors,” Gerbi said, “and I will continue to work to restore a 2,300-year-old coexistence and advocate active roles in the NTC for Libyan Jews, for the Libyan Amazigh population, for women and all ethnic and religious minorities.”

On Sunday, after a personal meeting with Libyan and Italian diplomatic representatives, he agreed to return to Rome on Tuesday by military plane in order to ease the tension.

Is this the End of the "Butch Dyke"?

2011-09-13T16:08:00.000-07:00

"Anne Lister, (1791-1840) the First Modern Lesbian"

This is uncharted territory for me – possibly even a minefield, given my heading. Nevertheless I want to speak my mind – or at least write what happened in my attempt to think, after I heard two speakers talk on transgender issues at the conference I attended in New York. I'm writing this post to try to make sense of an issue that puzzled and confused me. Why would I do this - especially since it includes labelling, stereotyping, generalising and probably being politically incorrect....? I'd love to know what this article evokes for you. So I invite you to comment.

After talking to several people after the conference, I conclude that I am probably not the only one who might be confused. Other than possibly a few science fiction writers and their readers, mutability of gender confounds most of us. Not that I hadn’t heard about the ‘T’ of LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered) before. I just ignored it as a really minority issue that I would never have to take on board.
If confronted with it in some way, I supposed that I’d have to try to understand the particular issues for that person, and that was as far as I got. It seemed a bit on the lunatic fringe of gender troubles – making something concrete out of what is an emotional and socially constructed difficulty. I was all for changing society, not flesh – and deep down I thought the changers of flesh were both self-indulgent and self-destructive. I figured that you might need an awful lot of time and money to undergo gender reassignment surgery, and that it would require a level of crazy desperation to subject the most sensitive parts of your anatomy to the skills or lack thereof of plastic surgeons. You might end up with being incapable of enjoying sexual pleasure. To me it sounded like the horrors of genital mutilation, albeit voluntary, and the thought of that makes me angry.
So it’s a Sunday morning in May and I’m listening to Griffin Hansbury who tells us he’s a transgender male analyst and that he’s been given short shrift in the psychoanalytic community and, because he sees trans patients, he knows that they also, have had similar experiences as psychoanalytic patients. My mind goes to wondering how this prickly-faced guy could ever have been female, and can there really be enough trans patients to fill his practice, even if it is in New York?
Then Virginia Goldner, a brilliant theorist and writer from the Relational School of psychoanalysis does a presentation in the role of a spokesperson/ally. (I don't know at the time that they have both written papers in a recent issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 21(2):153-238, 2011. I will say more about that in my next post.) Her main point seems to be that if we think gender enhancement surgery is OK, why not gender reassignment? She talks about people using their bodies as a canvas. Interesting viewpoint I think, dazzled by her articulateness. Given that the day before I had moved from thinking that the USA deserved 9/11 to consciously valuing every human being (see previous post: “Becoming a Witness”), I am listening with my liberal hat on. I forget that I don’t really think gender enhancement surgery is OK. Also, I'm feeling a bit like a country bumpkin from South Africa – why is trans such an issue all of a sudden?

So I began to ask. I dined out on the questions in my mind. What did people think about transgender issues? Was gender reassignment happening a lot? Most of the people I asked were even more impassioned about the issue than I was. In Boston some dinner guests remarked that there’d been a demonstration at Harvard. Students were demanding more gender-neutral toilets. “How many are there?” I asked. “Sixty-eight”, was the reply. My mouth opened, I laughed – “isn’t that enough?” No, apparently not. There are hundreds of buildings at Harvard, I was told. Later in London, I discussed this with a friend. This could be a good thing, we decided – as long as individuals with penises became adequately toilet-trained. I remembered that in the TV series “Ally McBeal” there had been gender-neutral loos. That was more than 10 years ago! We felt we would welcome the end of those long female queues in public places.

My research continued. I spoke to quite a few women leaders who I’ve known since the turbulent 70’s. One even mentioned this issue without my asking. They were all being pressured by the transgender community to come up with some kind of response. (Remember that trans women have mostly been brought up as male.) Their wish to be included feels to many feminists like an invasion of womenspace. Clearly these women (originally boys) are not of the generation of feminist men we tried to train in the 70’s, who knew when to shut up! Some of these friends also talked with horror about castration and mutilation. I thought about my beloved Women’s Pond on Hampstead Heath – the saving grace of a beach-loving Capetonian during many a hot London summer's day – how would they be dealing with trans women there, and how would I feel if they were around?
Of course through all of this I believe that if a person wants to mess with their body it’s their choice, just so long as they don’t come to me for therapy, or expect taxpayers to pay for their operations. I feel similarly about gender enhancement surgery too.

While I am still away, Professor Jack Drescher sends an e-mail to a listserv to which I subscribe. I always read his e-mails – they are informative about LGBT issues and respectful of colleagues both in the USA and Europe. This one is about transgender citizens suing NYC for what they allege is dangerous mistreatment.
A trans woman felt humiliated when she went to the motor vehicle department to apply for a new license and a clerk kept calling her "sir" because her legal birth certificate listed her as "male", and a trans male, whose birth certificate says "female," applied for new health insurance and endured a disapproving, shaming gaze from the company's employee. The article goes on to explain why this kind of official behaviour could be dangerous. But honestly! what else could you expect? If I try to think about the shame and humiliation these two must've experienced growing up, how pathetic is this legal action? I'm not able to muster one ounce of compassion and I'm even cross with Jack Drescher for bringing this to my attention! I find that I have reached my limit with regard to political correctness - this is beyond ridiculous!

Then a co-counsellor asks me in my session what has all this got to do with me? Good question!
I must’ve been very young – nevertheless I can remember wondering why I had to be a girl. I’m sure it was in response to something behavioural - not biological. I was probably being told I couldn’t do something a particular way because I was a girl and the-little-girl-that-I-was, rebelled against the restriction. Why couldn’t I be both? I wondered. Later, I felt that I didn’t really want to grow up – if being grown up meant bras, girdles, stockings, high heels, make-up and a boring life. All far too constricting for me! I don't think I wanted to be a man (in fact I can remember the shame of having body hair and worrying about the maleness of it), but I certainly didn’t want to be the kind of female I was expected to be. Is this why I'm getting so riled up? I don't think so.

Fast forward to London in the early 70’s. The Women’s Liberation Movement. We could now try to be the kind of females we wanted to be. And it also meant accepting the imperfect bodies we had and fighting against objectification and the pressures to be a certain size and shape. We fought for diversity in the way women were portrayed. The fight included being out as lesbians ( if that was one's sexual orientation) and not having to dress a certain way in order to be recognized as one. If one wanted to present oneself as “butch”, that was fine but it didn’t necessarily mean one wanted to be a man, which is how the straight world perceived it. We fought to have lesbianism understood to be even more varied in expression than heterosexuality. There could be a fluidity in sexual fantasies, role playing and power dynamics in relationships between women. We were against self-hatred. Patriarchy had spent centuries getting us to feel bad about ourselves.Trying to unpack this for ourselves and to support other women, many of us became therapists. OK, so this is why I'm outraged - I feel that I'm being asked by transgender people to be aware of a level of self hatred I would rather not know about and to condone it being acted on instead of worked through.
Fast forward again. I’m at a recent meeting of psychologists. Someone mentions she is seeing a trans male (Female to Male) patient. (Oh! So not as rare an issue in South Africa as I had thought.) Later, when I go to ask her more about what she said, another woman approaches her too. I have no idea who this woman is, but she reminds me of “butch dykes” I have known (forgive me for stereotyping). She thanks the psychologist effusively for raising the issue without saying why she's so grateful. I look at her in disbelief. My head starts to spin. Does she mean that she’s always wanted to be a man and given the opportunity she’d undergo gender reassignment??? Maybe the straight world was right after all – perhaps those “butch dykes” of the past did actually want to be men all along. Now that they can become trans men, will this be the end of the “butch dyke”?

Some great movies!

2011-08-23T15:31:00.000-07:00

There are two really lovely Korean films about childhood separation and attachment, both made by women: So Yong Kim's "Treeless Mountain" and Lee Jeong-Hyang's "The Way Home". I saw the latter on SABC a couple of week's ago. These make quite good alternatives to the famous Robertson documentaries which were made at the Tavistock Institute and were quite expensive to acquire when I last tried about 10 years ago. "The Way Home" also tackles how shocking the differences between urban and rural life could be for a child, spoilt by the consumerism of the city.

A film that manages to eschew the usual good/bad polarities in its main protagonist and at the same time gives a sobering picture of the plight of illegal immigrants in France is "Welcome" by Philippe Lioret.

Finally, a really fascinating documentary made by Chris Rock called "Good Hair" about the billion dollar hair industry servicing Afro-Americans in the USA.

This was an eye opener for a whitey like myself. I just listened to Yanga Zembe and some others on SAFm tonight talking about Transactional Sex. Her Ph.D. research has uncovered the incidence of this form of transaction among young women. For the first time I heard a South African mentioning 'weaves'. Maybe it happened before but I didn't know what it was. Thanks to Chris Rock, now I do. To obtain a weave, some young black women will have sex with a man who can buy one for her. Whatever happened to Steve Biko and "Black is Beautiful"? I hope young women somewhere are still talking about internalised oppression - I recognise its hard with Noeleen and Oprah as models, but there is Lira - she may be being used to sell deodorant, but at least she shows her own hair - or does she? You tell me. (I have to admit lest I sound judgemental, that I dye mine. I do this to avoid gogo oppression!)

The American Psychological Association's Complicity in Torture

2011-08-05T05:31:00.000-07:00

During the Bystanders No More conference, we were privileged to hear a presentation by Steven Reisner. Together with colleagues, who formed the Coalition for an Ethical APA, he has tirelessly fought over the past 5 years to expose the complicity of psychologists and other health professionals in the torture of detainees in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and centres within the USA. He talked about the shift from bystander to witness and ultimately activist - roles with which some of us in South Africa are familiar in our own personal histories.

Complicity of South African Health Professionals during Apartheid
South Africa has a vicious history of torture and also experienced complicity of health professionals - both prison doctors and psychologists.
During the apartheid years of the Nationalist government, torture was being used to "break" detainees so that they would inform on their comrades. In "Red in the Rainbow", Lynn Carneson writes about her father Fred's first months in detention in 1965. Solitary confinement, sleep deprivation and interrogation for days on end were commonplace. Fred was subjected to more than that until he "broke" - which meant in his case that he gave information that he knew the Special Branch already had.

Among black detainees, brutal assaults were frequent and deaths in detention not uncommon. District surgeons were supposed to attend to prisoners regularly and to pronounce on the cause of death. In the case of Steve Biko, who died in detention in 1977, despite all evidence to the contrary, i.e. that he was brutally tortured and sustained a brain injury as a result, the doctor concerned, pronounced that his death resulted from a hunger strike. In the following decade, the security police cover-up story when detainees died of injuries, was that they had somehow "fallen out of windows" of prisons around the country.

It became harder for doctors to be complicit with the police due to the efforts of one courageous young doctor - Wendy Orr. In 1985, while working in the medical examiner's office in Port Elizabeth she became the first and only doctor in government employment to reveal police torture and abuse of political detainees, when she applied to the Supreme Court, detailing a pattern of extensive torture and abuse of detainees, for a restraining order against the police. In a widely publicised outcome, she successfully obtained a court order to protect detainees from police assault.

Torture and the APA
After 9/11, US policy in relation to detention of suspects and interrogation changed, and with it the role of psychologists in US foreign policy. On the evening of September 11th, Col. Morgan Banks, the senior psychologist responsible for all the survival and resistance training of army personnel under severe conditions, was seconded to Central Command to oversee interrogation of detainees. Thus began a new era of psychologists' involvement in interrogation and torture.

As was the case in South Africa, the whistle-blower who exposed the extent of this involvement was a woman. In 2005 Dr Jean Maria Arrigo, a social psychologist, was appointed to an APA presidential task force to investigate the role of psychologists in coercive interrogation after photographs of abuse of detainees in Abu Ghraib went round the world. The committee came to the unusually hasty conclusion that psychologists were playing a "valuable and ethical role" in assisting the military.

She later discovered that six of the nine voting members were working for the Department of Defence or involved in lobbying for funds from the department (something that was never publicly disclosed). After encouragement from human rights activists and members of the Coalition, which included Steven Reisner, she courageously exposed the nature of the task force and its workings in a report to the APA convention in 2007. The APA has a long history of association with the military and many psychologists depend on it for their careers and income. After the extent of this complicity was revealed, Steven decided to stand for election as President of the APA to try to create a different kind of directorate.

I can't really do justice to this story, which reads like a political thriller. It is beautifully laid out in Steven's own account of the events in his chapter - "From resistance to resistance: a narrative of psychoanalytic activism." in "First Do No Harm" eds Adrienne Harris & Steven Botticelli. Chap. 6, Routledge (2010).

Becoming a Witness

2011-07-19T13:45:00.000-07:00

Charles Strozier at the NY Academy of Medicine.

One of the plenary presentations at the Bystanders No More conference was by Charles B. Strozier. He had interviewed survivors and bystanders of 9/11. On the large screen behind the podium he projected images of what happened that day and in the days thereafter - images most people had only seen on their small TV screens. Some were familiar to me, others not - I didn't have a TV in those days. The photograph that stood out for me more than any other, was one taken outside the nearest hospital to the World Trade Centre. It showed a big clutch of green-coated doctors and nurses just waiting. They waited all day apparently - no-one came. There were almost no casualties of 9/11. Only the dead and the survivors. For the first time ever, this became a real event to me -
one involving human beings - some of them sitting in the same auditorium as me! I was in New York and these were largely New Yorkers - remembering the smell, the sights, the sounds, the grey dust. I began to shake. When that happens, I usually know I have to say something.

Firefighters in the rubble - photo by James Nachtwey

The microphones were open. One of the first speakers was angry and upset. She said that we should have been warned about what was going to happen so that people could have chosen whether to stay or not. This was echoed by others accusing Charles of re-traumatizing the audience. (You can read Charles Strozier's account of what happened in his posting "Murderous Photographs"). But something different had happened to me: it had needed a presentation as graphic as his to shift me from a position of thinking "the US deserved 9/11" to realising what had actually happened that day to thousands - perhaps millions - of people and their families. In that hour I changed from a bystander/perpetrator to a witness. I did get up and say something. I also apologised to those particular New Yorkers for how I had related to the event in the past decade. When I sat down I wept. The tears just came and it felt important to just let them happen. Its psychologically easy to stereotype - more work is required to engage with complexity. So don't expect that the transition from bystander to witness/activist only involves your left brain. Quite a few papers at this conference attested to the fact that the transition doesn't happen unless one resists dissociating or being dismissive. It also requires empathic identification, establishing connections and deep emotional engagement.
(Donna Orange, Steven Reisner, Jessica Benjamin, Max Sucharov)

For the rest of the day at odd moments, people came to say things to me, thanked me for what I'd said and over dinner, wanted to tell me their 9/11 stories. They seemed to know I would be receptive, and I surprised myself - I did want to know. In fact I could've listened to dozens more people that day!

Here is a brief quote from Charles Strozier about how he perceived what had happened:
"There is no question in my mind that had I simply talked about my work there would have been polite applause, some discussion, and the next panel would have taken its place. It was the photographs, and the photographs alone, that shocked these educated and sensitive therapists to their core, and unleashed a rather surprising amount of displaced anger and rage at me."

EXTRA
As we approach the 10th anniversary of 9/11, news media are publishing photographs and commentary from that day. Following from what Charles has said above, here is a link to some photographs that The Guardian (UK) has put together in a slideshow .

Why "Bystanders No More"?

2011-07-19T05:31:00.000-07:00

An astonishing story lies behind the conference I attended in New York in May this year. Its a story about a largely hidden genocide of 100 years ago and the effect of its horrors on the silenced and unacknowledged survivors. A story of how this history was put centre stage by a second-generation survivor and what her colleagues then did about it. A story also of healing, generosity of spirit and reconciliation.

So, what happened?
The last International Self Psychology Conference was held in Turkey in October 2010. Present at the previous US conference in 2009, where the next venue was announced, was an analyst, the daughter of a survivor of the Armenian genocide in Turkey in 1915-23.

She was very disturbed by this announcement but was unable to articulate how outraged and upset she felt.
Later that day, she went to a presentation by an ex-South African. This paper was about how being in the role of a bystander as a young person in apartheid South Africa was impacting on her role as a therapist. The analyst

suddenly understood more about what she was feeling. She later described, "I understood that I was experiencing old, retraumatizing fears of being silenced and incredible shame for feeling like a bystander to the rape, torture and murder of my grandparents; my aunt ......and all the victims of the Armenian Genocide." Once this came together, she stood up and with crystal clarity said all she had wanted to say earlier that day. (Jane Lewis: Discussion paper for panel on Dialogue on Genocide)

This was apparently a very emotional moment for everyone - not least a Turkish analyst in the audience. Colleagues introduced them. They approached each other with great trepidation but agreed to meet. A tentative link was made. Over the next year, the colleagues of these two took action. Further links were made with Turkish analysts. There was a long and fruitful correspondence moving towards reconciliation with the two who had originally met. The Armenian analyst was also made aware of a movement in Turkey trying to expose the history of the Armenian Genocide - the members of which risk imprisonment and death. In Turkey its illegal to even talk about these historical facts of almost a century ago! The lack of acknowledgement and memorialisation compounds the trauma that is passed on intergenerationally.

"THOSE WHO FELL BY THE WAYSIDE. Scenes like this were common all over the Armenian provinces, in the spring and summer months of 1915. Death in its several forms---massacre, starvation, exhaustion---destroyed the larger part of the refugees. The Turkish policy was that of extermination under the guise of deportation"(US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Sr.)

The practitioners who witnessed the pain of their colleague were not content to remain as just witnesses - let alone bystanders. They became activists on her behalf, creating a healing environment for her. Apparently this led them to think about the elements that were involved in doing that and how the knowledge they had gained could be extended. Hence the conference: Bystanders No More: Psychoanalytic Dialogues with the Politically Silenced.

Poster by Pablo Gostanian

Back Home!

2011-07-08T02:40:00.000-07:00

Apologies to readers out there for my silence. I had no idea beforehand how important a peaceful Friday is to my blogging career. And there were none of those while I was travelling. Consequently I have many topics to post because it was a very stimulating trip.

Not least the TRISP Conference in New York where I started. Before I get into it - and I think there will probably be about 4 postings on that alone - perhaps travellers to JFK might like to know that the queue at the border was 2 hours long in early May. They fingerprint both hands and take a picture of every entrant. They probably didn't realise that my fingertips are so worn down I don't have any fingerprints left - something I discovered when trying to renew my driver's licence recently. Thus began my life of crime. (Someone should warn the police to watch out for aging criminals!) I took an illegal picture while waiting in the queue on my new Blackberry before an official came to tell me off. I will post it when I figure out how to transfer the photo.

Should Individual Counselling be a Luxury? Re-Evaluation Counselling

2011-04-27T16:50:00.000-07:00

Re-Evaluation Counselling (RC) is a form of peer counselling and is also often called co-counselling. All participants are trained in the theory and techniques so that although co-counsellors may differ in levels of experience, we meet and session together as equals. Its the only practice of human growth and development I know, which places the hurts caused by socio-cultural oppression (starting with the oppression of parents and young people and including racism, classism, sexism etc.), at the core of human distress and imparts a number of methods and group processes to address these.

Re-Evaluation Counselling isn't a luxury. The training is affordable and once you've learnt it, its free.You can have a session in many countries on the planet with another RCer and it will only cost the price of the trip you paid to get there. Workshops cost, but that's your choice.
One of the most important features of co-counselling is the emphasis on emotional release.

The idea that we have all we need to recover from any hurt we may experience sounded revolutionary to me when I first heard it. Equally counter-cultural was the idea that crying, yawning, shaking, storming, laughing and talking are not painful in themselves but are actually the processes we use to recover from hurts. We all do these when we are young but many adults try their best to socialize us out of them. I think people know that laughter and talking release tension and that crying can feel good - although most people will still offer a cup of tea or a stiff drink to try to stop you from going on too long.

But yawning, shaking and storming? Almost no-one except co-counselors and athletes (and now the dozens I have counseled at the Trauma Centre in Cape Town) seem to know that yawning wakes you up, as well as providing many other benefits. And shaking? Well shaking has gone through a renaissance thanks to Dr Berceli and his Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE) designed to get everyone "tremoring". But RCers have known of the benefits of shaking to release fear for over 50 years. Storming, the energetic release of anger, is conventionally considered dangerous, uncontainable, so that children who do it need to be stopped. However it takes so much energy to suppress this in oneself that it literally can cause depression.

Another great advantage of this method is that you can do it for the rest of your life, using it for many goals you wish to achieve. I can vouch for the difference it makes to the sharpness of one's thinking, the vibrancy it adds to ones life and relationships and the boldness with which one feels free to interact. Not all of us regain these qualities we once had, but releasing fear and other tensions makes a huge difference to the thousands of practicing RCers in communities across the world. If you want to know more try this link as a start on the Re-Evaluation Counselling website.

A Cape Town Day

2011-04-15T16:02:00.000-07:00

I didn't see any!

Sometimes one gets far more than one seeks. And in Cape Town this is often true. Take for example the morning traffic jam up Paradise Road, Newlands. There the mountain looms close overhead, every detail etched by the morning sun. It beats Los Angeles or London, doesn't it? So last Friday, there I was having breakfast, preparing to spend the morning writing, when I heard on the radio that there were dolphins chasing fish in Simonstown harbour.
This might happen quite frequently but us landlubbers in Plumstead don't always know about it. I thought I'd go and have a look.
When I got there, I couldn't see anything out at sea, but it was a

glorious day so I wandered. There was a sign saying Mosque, uphill from the Main Road. In the paving of the lane, there was a motif, looking like something one might find in Glasgow by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. As I walked up, I saw that the design was picked up in the stained glass windows of the building at the top - an Art Deco mosque! Built in 1911, with the minaret added in 1925. A shopkeeper told me that the Heritage museum was interesting. This was in a house called Amlay and the signs said 'closed on Friday'. But I could hear someone in the garden so I asked him if it really was closed, because the front door behind the security gate was open. He said "Try ringing the bell." So I did. After a short while a woman came to the door.
I said I saw that the museum wasn't open but the gardener had suggested I ring. She said I'm very busy with washing but if you're a South African and you know about forced removals, you can come in and have a look around by yourself. This very down-to-earth museum curator was Patty Davidson who lives upstairs in what was once her family home before Simonstown was declared a white area in 1967 and the family was forced to move. On the ground floor she has created a folk museum of Cape Town Muslim life. It is packed full of photographs and relics from the homes of people who apartheid classified as Cape Malays but whose ancestors seldom originated in Malaysia. Mostly these artefacts come from the more than 7000 who were forcibly removed from Simonstown, but Patty told me later that on her opening day in 1999, the museum had 1200 visitors! - I'm sure that many people from all over Cape Town wanted to play a role in and be a part of this unique enterprise. I didn't have much time so I only saw the kitchen/dining room, the magnificent bedroom and a lovely front room dedicated to religious matters and the Haj. Because I had virtually travelled with a friend of mine when she went on the pilgrimage I was interested to see old photographs of the early days when everyone went by boat, the kind of gear people wore, a postcard from Mecca dated 1903 etc. Later Patty came to chat and I asked her about what had happened to the fez because I remember all the men wearing them in funeral processions when I was a child. It is such an interesting story. In the late 19th Century, there was a dispute between the 2 Sunni sects in the Cape and the religious leaders asked for mediation. At that time the Ottoman Empire was the great Islamic power and they sent Abu Bakr Effendi to Cape Town and he arrived with a crate of Turkish fezes. I guess there were enough to go around for quite a while and then sometime in the 40's they ran out. She said that later it became fashionable to put a tassle on if one had been on Haj.

Simonstown Heritage Museum - Amlay House 1858

Patty is so knowledgeable and has so many stories to tell - if you're a South African, do go when you can - it's one of our national treasures and you won't regret it. I'm going to go back on an open day!

Women's Bodies (part II)

2011-04-01T06:45:00.000-07:00

Video highlights of Endangered Species gives a taste of what the London summit was like. Why 'Endangered Species'? Susie Orbach says: The young woman who can feel free to explore her interests without being preoccupied by how her body appears or focus on what procedure she should have in the future to change it, is becoming an ‘endangered species’.

Sibongile Khumalo - jazz and classical singer

Here in South Africa we still have a multiplicity of images of women that inspire us, but for young women they are fading fast. The quest for the perfect body is in the ascendancy. As Susie says, Body Hatred is one of the West's most nefarious exports. Look at this ad. for deodorant in which Lira, a hugely popular singer in our country especially among young women, says: The whole world is like a stage and I have to look perfect all the time.....We are being manipulated to use a product which has nothing to do with looks, the inference being that if we perspire less we can be perfect like Lira. What is implied about the natural propensities of our bodies to perspire and for that matter smell, is just another well-known addition to the catalogue of Body Hatred. For a wonderful contrast to all of this take a look at the football grannies, who have also been used in advertisements. However young women are not the target of these.
I wonder if people know of some other South African examples of Body Hatred production that they'd like to share?

Should Individual Counselling Be a Luxury?

2011-03-21T08:31:00.000-07:00

From "The Gift Returned" by Lauraine Vivian

For many years, post-TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission), there has been hardly any funding for individual trauma counselling. The directors and management at the Trauma Centre (and probably other NGO’s) had to be creative in how they could permit counselling programs to continue. No-one on the staff doubted the need for it and many of us were invested in it. By invested, I mean that we had been trained to do individual work and believed in it. Besides, it had taken at least 10 years of mental health education to make trauma counselling into a service that poor and working class people would seek, let alone find accessible. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s the Trauma Centre’s Training Department played a part in this. It offered widely disseminated Trauma Skills programs to front-line workers. But prior to those programs, OASSSA, provided services to ex-detainees and their families even before the Trauma Centre existed.
The imparting of various forms of emotional literacy also happened in workshops provided to many workers during the 90’s. These were intended to fuel the transformational agendas of various sectors, e.g. public service, the army, the police, and other emergency personnel.

These efforts reached their apex in the trauma counselling culture that developed around the TRC. In 1996, when I met with Thulani Granville-Grey who was involved with the Human Rights Violation Committee of the TRC, he showed me his list of victim requests. I was surprised to see that counselling was prominent among them.

Now the global economic crunch has relegated individual counselling and therapy to the realm of the luxurious –services a developing society can presumably ill afford to indulge. And yet the need remains. I have recently participated in a worldwide e-mail colloquium of the International Association of Relational Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (IARPP). In it we discussed traumas of history and war. The need for a respectful, patient, nuanced approach to each individual with their own unique history, was so sensitively articulated by many experienced practitioners that I wonder how we can go about effecting the kind of mass scale of recovery that is required in this country. Why should only those who can afford it have the individual attention that most people need? Is everyone else supposed to make do with groups, workshops and “community healing”? I’m not saying those don’t also have their place, but it’s not enough, is it?

In an ironic twist, the SAPS( South African Police Service) through their Victim Empowerment Program does offer free Trauma Counselling to victims. This is done by lay volunteers who have undergone a basic short training. I am sure, the volunteers provide a necessary empathic and containing experience for people recently victimized and suffering from shock or acute stress disorder. But so many of our citizens experience complex and/or multiple trauma. Lane Benjamin has made lay counselling and training of community counsellors a cornerstone of her community organization in Hanover Park. She believes that working family by family, the violence can be reduced. But it is an organization that struggles for funding like everyone else.

Being a trauma counsellor in South Africa really pushed me to seek time-limited and effective skills to assist individuals.1) Re-evaluation co-counselling, a form of peer counselling, I already knew, and had practised for many years. I adapted some of the tools from it in my work with clients. 2) Focusing, a body-oriented practice enabling one to access “a felt sense” is something I have learnt to do in the past 3 years. 3) EMDR or accelerated processing is a powerful tool for working with trauma and finally, 4) I developed a single session protocol for adult onset trauma, because that’s what so many recently traumatized clients appeared to want. Much to my surprise, many did not want to return for further counselling even if it was free.
I will write about each of these practices in further posts.

Human Rights Day and the Under-recognition of Robert Sobukwe

2011-03-17T04:51:00.000-07:00

On March 21st – Human Rights Day – one of the rights we celebrate is the right of every South African citizen to move about freely in the country of their birth.
Fifty-one years ago, this was not the case – most South Africans by birth were not citizens, and the movements of all black South African men were severely restricted by the laws which governed the passes they were obliged to carry.

Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe

On March 21st 1960, nonviolent protests against the pass laws were initiated by a new organization - the Pan Africanist Congress. Thousands of people gathered at police stations to burn their passes and to present themselves for arrest.
At Sharpeville a large gathering of unarmed protestors was fired on by apartheid police. 69 people were killed and many more wounded. This massacre changed the nature of the struggle in South Africa. Within a week the country was mobilized – there were mass protests, demonstrations and strikes.
On March 30th, the government declared a State of Emergency, That same day thirty thousand people marched from Langa and Nyanga along De Waal Drive towards the Houses of Parliament. They were turned back by the PAC leader in order to avoid a bloodbath. Almost eighteen thousand people were arrested in the ensuing days and the PAC and ANC were banned. Leaders who were not arrested began to go into exile and the decision to wage armed struggle was taken. International opposition to apartheid was also mobilized by these events.

Robert Sobukwe, the leader of the PAC and a lecturer at Wits University, walked with a group of protestors on March 21st to Orlando police station. He was arrested and then later tried. He was sentenced to three years imprisonment on Robben Island. This was extended indefinitely through the promulgation of a special clause, so that it was 8 years before he was released to spend the rest of his life under house arrest. His role in these events is seldom acknowledged.

Tutu, Human Rights and the Human Genome Project

2011-03-11T12:57:00.000-08:00

Last week, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu by citing his sequenced genome pointed out how ridiculous racism really is. " I am related to the San people, so I am coloured." he said at UWC, poking fun into the current debate about how jobs should be allocated in different regions of the country. (That is, according to national racial demographics and not taking into account regional population differences)
The Human Genome Project (HGP) has provided us with the kind of information that makes me think differently about us human beings. For one thing, despite all our languages, different cultures and allegiances, we are all Africans! I love that about us. Furthermore, the most ancient genes on our planet are carried right here amongst the San people of the Namib.

The HGP was funded because it was marketed as being able to provide insights about non-communicable diseases and it is doing this more and more rapidly and also more cheaply than it did 10 years ago. This history is well documented and if you read the link, you will probably think like I did, that it'd make a terrific movie.

There are however, human rights implications that interest me just as much as the idea that drugs could be designed to counteract my particular version of Parkinson's or Alzheimer's which is probably where I am headed.

One outcome is that the descendants of former slaves can determine what region of the planet their ancestors came from. Slavery robs people of their language, culture and history especially the trade across oceans like that of the Middle Passage which transported masses of Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas and the Caribbean. Luckily no-one can take away the history contained in our genes so that now, for a price, people are able to reconnect to the geography of their origins.

Another world-changing aspect is the Innocence Project. This is an international network of non-profit organisations investigating wrongful convictions. As of 23 January 2011, 266 people previously convicted of serious crimes in the United States had been exonerated by DNA testing. As a result, a number of states have put a moratorium on the death penalty and this week the state of Illinois abolished it. Isn't that extraordinary?

International Women's Day

2011-03-10T02:55:00.000-08:00

This year it is being said that March 8 was the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day and that is why many organisations are coming together in this month in an international effort to re-examine issues of women's oppression. This is what Susie Orbach had to say about the work that still needs to be done after the London summit of "Endangered Species":
Girls don’t see themselves reflected and so they try to change themselves to mimic what they see. Last Friday in London, young women from all over the country came together to show us what they are doing to combat this tyranny and to create a new visual culture. There was joy in the room as they showed their fight back and dared to love their bodies. We all vowed to stop the trafficking of body hatred throughout the world. It is not an easy struggle. It can be written off as trivial. But it isn’t. We all know it eats away at us. That’s why we are campaigning. Join with us to get our bodies back.

What do women commemorate on March 8th?

Those of us who were involved in the Second Wave of feminism of the late 60's and early 70's in the USA and Western Europe, thought it was a garment workers strike on the Lower East side of Manhattan in NYC.

Women picketing during the Uprising of the 20,000

And there was one that started at the Triangle shirt factory, and spread along the east coast to 20.000 women workers by March 1911. Apparently, according to Wikipedia however, the history of this day is a lot cloudier and may involve some cross-appropriations. It seems it started among revolutionaries in Germany in1908 and by 1911, had spread throughout Europe when it was celebrated by over a million people in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. We can acknowledge this history, but I am grateful that we in South Africa have our own Women's Day which reflects much more of our own struggle for liberation. With regard to women's bodies, it seems we have an even longer journey ahead than women in the UK- body hatred in our country is expressed in such violent ways that it not only eats away at us, it kills us.

Women's Bodies

2011-02-26T03:32:00.000-08:00

An extraordinary event is about to take place in London, Buenos Aires and other cities across the planet – an international summit on how our bodies are shaped and controlled by outside influences - the media, the dietmongers, the passion for makeovers in the entertainment industry, the arts, increasing use of plastic surgery by celebrities, the fashion industry – the list is endless.
Presumably inspired by the song by Dianne Reeves the summit is called "Endangered Species". It has been initiated by former colleagues of mine – Susie Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum - who started The Women’s Therapy Centre in London and the Women’s Therapy Centre Institute in New York City in the late 70’s and early 80’s.

In the more than 40 years since bras were trashed at the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City USA, women are no nearer taking control of their own bodies. In fact the situation has become even more dire and all-pervasive as late capitalism seeks to exploit and denigrate our natural bodies to squeeze as much revenue as it can from us in our search for the perfect body. Even men are now included – something that would’ve seemed unthinkable to the Women’s Liberationists of 1968. To quote the organisers: "Body hatred is becoming one of the West’s hidden exports.” If what I am saying speaks to you then read Susie Orbach’s “Bodies” (2009)a prize-winning exploration of these issues.

Events:
The UK part of the summit, which is being held at the Royal Festival Hall on 4th March in London will hopefully be streamed so that it might be possible to watch some of the events.
In New York, it will be at the New School, March 18th and 19th. Click here for more information.

New Brooms

2011-02-20T12:45:00.000-08:00

At the end of last year Njabulo Ndebele wrote about shake-ups in the ANC in an article in the Mail & Guardian entitled “Toxic politics: diary of a bad year.” He asked how successful societies replicate their success over time? His answer is that, “They provide opportunities for their citizens for seamless cross-generational interactions within the network of private and public institutions that give definition to national effort.”
This hasn't been a feature of recent South African political life: “Consider the sudden and unplanned departure of then-president Thabo Mbeki, when the ANC threw away in an instant years of institutional knowledge. It was more than an individual who left. A body of knowledge and experience did too, regardless of how they may have been understood.” As a result he continues, “younger members of the ANC have little access to an aspect of their organisation’s contemporary history.” He believes, “A deep chasm has emerged in the interactive space between one generation and another, which will take years to rebuild.”

This reminded me of an organization with which I am familiar and in which the staff turnover is high.
Like many NGOs this organisation sheds staff who leave during periodic financial and organisational crises. New managers, who have not come through the ranks, may feel they have to make their mark by changing existing structures, whereas newly-appointed young people use the organisation as a stepping stone in their professional lives. One of the consequences is that the institutional memory of the organization gets lost or isn’t valued. Recently even the new leadership, in attempting to deal both with the toxicity that has developed in the organization in recent years, and the difficulties in obtaining funding, has succumbed to the new broom approach.

Will it turn out the way Njabulo Ndebele fears; that lessons learnt and a culture painstakingly built will not be passed on, or will it be just the shot in the arm that is needed to revive what was once a radical NGO, seeding new organizations on an almost yearly basis?
Do the current staff even know about this history? Is it useful to remember the glory days if one cannot recreate them?

What do you think?

Assimilation in "The Finkler Question"

2011-02-20T12:30:00.000-08:00

This very clever and often hilarious book written by Howard Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize in 2010. It takes a look at the different Jewish identities that exist in Britain today but particularly in intellectual North London. These identities are once again foregrounded and called into question in the wake of the Israeli attack on Gaza.
One of the themes in the book that interested me is that it takes a serious look at assimilationist tendencies in British liberal Jewry by turning assimilation on its head. We have the protagonist, a Gentile who wants to become a Jew. He feeds off what he perceives is the tragedy and suffering of the Jewish people and wants to acquire their knowingness of each other and to somehow make it in the Jewish world.

Much more common of-course, is the Jew who wants to pass in the Gentile world – who becomes a kind of chameleon, a Zelig (reminiscent of the film by Woody Allen).
By turning the tables so to speak, we get to experience the feelings and paranoia from a different angle – one that enabled me as a Jew to identify with Treslove while at the same time appreciating the tragic consequences of an enterprise where someone who has failed to develop an identity of their own, tries to assume one that he perceives as stronger or more fitting to his need. In the end he becomes a pathetic character. I think we are shown that this could be the case for anyone who doesn’t have a sense of identity or who hates the one they have.

Trauma Centre Reunion – October 2010

2011-02-20T12:18:00.000-08:00

After I resigned from the Trauma Centre in May last year, I had the feeling that there was hardly anyone left working there to whom I needed or wanted to say goodbye. All the colleagues I’d been close to had already left years before. Perhaps many people who work in NGOs for more than a few years have had a similar experience?
Anyway, I decided I would construct my own farewell reunion. So finally in early October 2010 – after Eid and the Jewish holidays – 13 of us met on my patio for a Saturday lunch. A big coincidence/surprise was that Potiphar Nkhoma, who started working at the Trauma Centre pretty much at the same time as I did in 2001, just happened to be in the country from the USA and he turned up.


l.to r: Jackie Stewart, Siyabulela Mkabile, Potiphar Nkhoma, Emma Oliver, Kailas Kassan-Newton, Carmen Low-Shang, Haseena Parker, Robyn Rowe, Kerry Magnus. Seated: Lane Benjamin, Sarah Crawford-Browne, Margaret Green

I was sorry that some people who had been very important to me were unable to come – Dr Gordon Isaacs, who introduced me to trauma work (South African style) and supervised me for years, Maria Stacey, the first co-ordinator I had when I joined the Intake team and Eric Harper, who believed in me enough to hand over the work he was doing with Khulumani – an experience from which I learned so much. They had other commitments, as did Wanga Zembe, who was in Oxford ‘defending’ her Ph.D.

We each shared what we were doing now and a highlight of our time at the Trauma Centre. For the 4 of us who had been in the Trauma Response Team in its heyday, our team and our awaydays together were our highlights. Siyabulela Mkabile said that he thought he was the only one of us who had actually taken his highlight with him – he had married Wanga earlier in 2010! Sarah Crawford-Browne reminded us of an extraordinary event during one of the many crisis times at the Centre. Fridays were set aside for staff development and celebration of work. The call went out that we should gather in the Staff room with an improvised musical instrument. So there we were with our pencils, bits of paper, noisy toys and cups circling about and making a terrific racket, when Siya started chanting and we all joined in. As the sound built up we spontaneously snaked out of the room and took the rhythm into every space of the building. It felt like a healing ritual or a kind of exorcism.

It was a pretty amazing gathering of people. Former staff members of the Trauma Centre have gone on to make huge contributions to the academic and organizational life of Cape Town and beyond. Lane Benjamin started her own community organization in Hanover Park; others continued working for NGO’s or have become lecturers or heads of department at universities.

The Archie Mafeje Exhibition

2011-02-20T06:12:00.000-08:00

In October 2010, I was involved in an exhibition which travelled to 3 South African universities and will eventually be housed at Walter Sisulu University. It is an exhibition about Archie Mafeje as a young man. A history professor from UWC, Andrew Bank, in researching the work of South African women anthropologists, became interested in the collaborative relationship that UCT Professor Monica Wilson developed with her student and researcher, Archie Mafeje in the early 60’s. He first interviewed me about him sometime in early 2009. I had written a page about how I’d known Archie and what I valued about him for a special issue of CODESRIA Bulletin, issued after he died, entitled “A giant has moved on: Archie Mafeje (1936-2007)”, honoring his life and scholarship. It was as a result of what I wrote there that Andrew contacted me.

I probably first met Archie in 1958 in the company of other left-wing students.
I hovered around the Modern World Society – the communist front on campus. Archie, aligned with the Unity Movement, was critical of them but he never said exactly where he was coming from politically. In discussions he would engage and interrogate so that I was forced to question my assumptions. I was new to all these ideas and I was fortunate to have a private political education from him because he seemed to like talking and listening to me. He was a political touchstone for many people. I couldn’t fully appreciate the privilege I had in being specially chosen in this way because of the racism I carried, although the obvious envy of some other women on the left helped. I knew he was brilliant but I couldn’t really admit to myself how handsome he was or that I was attracted to him. I did know that he would be an important figure. I teased him that I would keep his letters so that they could be published after the revolution. He was pleased – “How romantic and sweet!” he wrote. And how prescient I was - about his importance – not about the revolution unfortunately! And I did keep them.

Archie is famous for more reasons than I know, not being a sociologist. One of the first is the book on Langa that he co-authored with Monica Wilson in 1963. Another is that he disowned and repudiated the whole field of social anthropology as being a colonialist enterprise engaged in ‘othering’ Africans and African experience. He is also famous at UCT for the controversy about being refused posts for which he applied in the 60s and the 90s. One of these occasions in 1968 led to a student sit-in at the University.
Anyone wanting to know more can start with Francis Wilson’s citation on the occasion of the awarding of a posthumous Honorary doctorate to Professor Mafeje at UCT in 2008. If you want to read an extraordinary article by him, utterly relevant for today and well into the future, you can find it on a Latin-American blog entitled: "Democratic Governance and New Democracy in Africa: Agenda for the Future."

In reflecting on my relationship with Archie as a student in my late teens and early 20’s, the part that is hard to articulate is what it felt like to revere and be educated about the world by a black man, in an atmosphere in which he would be treated with arrogance, contempt and fear by almost everyone who was white. We became friends but we only ever met on campus. We would meet in the alcoves between the stacks of Jagger Library and talk softly. Once we walked in the grounds of Rhodes Memorial and sat on some big stones there. He reminded me that we could be arrested for doing that under the Immorality Act. My mother got to hear that I was being seen around campus with a black man. For her to hear about it would’ve required quite a long grapevine – people noticed such things in those days. And there were spies on campus so Archie’s remark about being arrested was not beyond the realm of possibility, especially if the Special Branch wanted a pretext to silence him for other reasons.

So what’s it like to be interviewed and featured in something that is a historical project about events that happened 50 years ago? A bit sobering because it tells me I must be getting old, but also very enlivening because remembering requires a partial reliving of the events from my youth. To quote David Hare from “Berlin/Wall” - “the young have fantasies about the future but the old have fantasies about the past”.

Aug 1961: Archie(on right) with Welsh Makanda in Cape Town