Seeing Malalai Joya

I went into Toronto a few nights ago for Malalai Joya's stop on her book tour for A Woman Among the Warlords. Because of the crowd I had to sit in the upper-level of the beautiful Trinity-St. Paul's Anglican Church. Unfortunately, the acoustics upstairs aren't as good as they are downstairs apparently. Because while the people downstairs were able to laugh, gasp, at or express support for what the speakers were saying, I was often struggling to understand.

It started late because there was a huge traffic snarl caused by a construction accident over the Yonge Street subway line and people were hours late getting to the event. Then the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War spoke and introduced Malalai to thunderous applause. Before Joya spoke, the Minister of Trinity-St. Paul's said a few brief words. Next was a charming young woman, an Afghan-Canadian woman who is an undergraduate student at York University. She sounded very much like an mainstream North American young woman, peppering her speech with many "You knows" and "like"'s and such. But because of her connection to Afghanistan, she's become active. The good thing was that, as an activist, she actually demonstrated some very clear, concise, and coherent thinking. She got to the point very well and she made connections about government policy, public apathy and illusion, and mainstream lies. They then brought out a US war-resister trying to stay in Canada. This was a short young woman who spoke very softly (though, again, it appeared the people downstairs could hear her better). She spoke of a conventional upbringing and of having conventional views of what the US military was all about. Then, as near as I could figure it, she talked about going on pointless house-raids in Baghdad that shook her up, including one where a two-year old girl was deeply traumatized, which affected her as a mother. I really couldn't make out much of the rest. She went back to the States for two weeks and then made the difficult decision to go to Canada before being sent back. Then Olivia Chow was introduced. Chow spoke clearly about Joya's presence at the last NDP convention, about how the NDP is the only party trying to end the combat mission in Afghanistan, and concluded with some depressing statistics from Canadian state sources and a recent Oxfam report.

Then Malalai got to speak. She has an accent (obviously) and she spoke very fast and loudly into the microphone. I could hear her better than the war-resister but only with difficulty. She talked of how she'd become famous for criticizing the warlords in the Afghan parliament. How she didn't think the book should be about her but the publishers told her the book would sell better it is was (proceeds from the book are going to RAWA-supported causes in Afghanistan). She provided anecdotes about the sufferings of individual Afghan women. She talked about how poverty makes parents sell their young daughters as "brides" to wealthy older men. She said that their elections are shams and that most decent people do not offer themselves as candidates because they'll be attacked, perhaps killed, but more importantly, because they don't want to dignify these empty charades with their participation. She said the families of Canadian soldiers should go after Canadian governments that put them there to die in a lost cause. She said that if we foreigners take our troops out, then the people of Afghanistan will have one less enemy to fight. She appeared to be very moved by the war-resister's story and became very emotional when speaking of her, hugging her, and thanking her for her brave decision. She, too quoted from the Oxfam report saying that one-in-five Afghans report having been tortured in their lifetimes. She said that people in Canada and elsewhere ask her sometimes not to go back, but she insists she's not afraid to die. Essentially, she'd rather die fighting for Afghanistan than to exist in safety knowing her country is suffering. She concluded by linking the struggle in Afghanistan to the struggles in Iran, Iraq and Palestine.

Again, I didn't hear it all very clearly. For that I was disappointed. On the other hand, I didn't go expecting to hear very much that I didn't already know. I really went to see a great heroine firsthand. I wanted to see what the courage to stand up to male warlords and gangsters, the courage to educate her sisters under the threat of death, the courage to keep going after five assassination attempts, looks like. She looks like a very ordinary human being. But that's all that most of us are. (I'm sure there are some heroes and heroines with grandly commanding presences, but most of us can't fill up a room with their physicality.) It's the convictions inside of some people. It's the belief that making the world a better place is more important than keeping the body alive at the expense of one's reason for living.

I'm happy that I went to see a person making world history. And by that I mean the history of human progress, not the depressing histories of wars and empty, elite power-struggles. We are living through a dramatic moment as Canadians. Our Liberal and Conservative governments have dragged us into a military, political and moral quagmire, and the atrocities we are complicit in will be regarded with the same shame among decent people as were the Residential Schools and the Internment of Japanese Canadians. Malalai Joya will be remembered by her people as someone who stood up to the forces of torture, barbarism, gangsterism and hate. Let's make ourselves those people in history who pulled Canada out of this quagmire. Let's take this opportunity to take the forces of militarism, greed, imperialism and arrogance, and shove them down into the trash-can where they belong.