فاطمه احمد ابراهيم تقول الجندرة هدفها الشذوذ الجنسي فقط...؟

Quote: Dear DA Friends, It is true what some of you have implied--that I long ago decided not to respond to any of Fatima's attacks on me. We all know why she is attacking me in this way: it is because this is the way she responds to all her critics. Perhaps I should feell very complimented that I am being slandered because I am being slandered in very good company in terms of the people she has attacked: Fatima Babiker, Suad Ibrahim Ahmed, Amal Gabralla, etc. etc. I am not quite sure why Fatima is so threatened by me or by western feminism (and by the way, no one I know is more critical of aspects of western feminism than I am). I am not sure why she seems so threatened by me. I would think that she has far more important issues with which to contend, e.g., getting the Sudanese Women's Union back on its feet after so many years. I am a very small matter in all this. I am just a university professor. I have, in fact, said very little about Fatima in my writings. I have only done it in the context of analyzing the relationship between women's groups and progressive parties to which they are affiliated. I have also made some statements about measuring the success of particular organizations by whether or not their leaders have trained people to take their places or if the leaders hold onto power. I believe it is this point that has inflamed her. Some of you have asked that I tell the story of the money and the story of how Fatima happened to visit UCLA, my university, for a year. I was hoping to leave it to others to talk about these events, but apparently none of the early members of DA are still on the list, that is the California members who planned the Intifada celebration here in southern California where I live. I tell about these events very reluctantly because some people may use this information to fan the fires of Fatima's crusade against me. I want this matter to die down because it is just distracting us from important work. I am willing to struggle, to argue, to disagree, but I am not willing to debate someone who reduces everything to some sort of strange morality that is misplaced in the contemporary world--in Sudan or anywhere. Or, reduces everything to gossip and innuendo. It is simply not becoming to engage in discussions at the level Fatima would want to engage in. In the 1990s Abdel Magid Ali Bob called me and suggested that we could submit Fatima's name and credentials for a visiting scholar to the University of California, Los Angeles. The African Studies Center had received some money from the Rockefeller fund to bring 2 African women to our campus each year for a couple of years. This person was supposed to interact with our students, attend and give lectures, and generally be part of the academic communities here. Ali Bob and I constructed the materials that had to be submitted and I was on the selection committee that invited Fatima to visit UCLA for a year. I had met Fatima only once before, in 1988 when I interviewed her for my project. She and I did fine as colleagues when she was here (or, so I thought at the time). My husband, Gerry Hale, and I tried to make her feel at home. I was truly excited to have her here with us, to learn from her, and I was hoping that she would manage to acquire some new ideas that would contribute to her leadership in the arena of women's rights. I had no idea at the time that she was so set in her ideas, that she was so stereotyping of western feminism and was not willing to learn anything different. I managed to get her invited to a few conferences and panels, but that part was not going well because she insisted on going out of her way to attack the morality of western feminists at each event. It was frankly embarrassing. She never engaged any of us in any true exchanges. She had her mind made up and I do not believe that she learned anything while she was here because her mind was closed. She decided, oddly, that all American feminists are lesbians, or something of that sort. I understand the same process had happened in Toronto a few years earlier, i.e., that she had launched an attack on feminists based on very little knowledge, really, of the different forms of feminism in north America. She and I were on some panels together and those went fairly well, except that on two of them she referred to southern women as "backward" and referred to them as running around naked. I could not help but take up the challenge. The poster in my office that she keeps referring to, by the way, was not my poster. At that time I had an office that was part of a 2-office unit with an entry hall outside. The entry hall was controlled by a professor who was senior to me. He had hung a poster that was an AIDS education poster. It was trying to show that AIDS was not spread through kissing. So, there were 3 pictures of people kissing. As Fatima says, a man kissing a man, a woman kissing a woman, and a man kissing a woman. Below these images there was something like the words "This is not how AIDS is spread." I could not believe it when I first read what Fatima said about the poster, developing an entire ideology around it. In another account she talked about how I had closed to swimming pool at the University of Khartoum and made it women only. She was suspicious about that. I think that anyone who knows the history of the U. of Khartoum in the 1960 knows that men and women could not swim in the pool on the same day. I was giving swimming lessons to Sudanese women. But let me return to the events at our university during Fatima's visiting year. Part of the agreement for Fatima's stay at the university was to meet the terms that she, herself, set out in her application/proposal. She stated that she was working on a book on Sudanese women. She and I discussed this book, and I tried to help. Fatima left the university at the end of the year without finishing anything, but no one said anything. The director of the center tried to get me to nag Fatima to turn in her work, to meet the terms of her contract. I was not willing to do that. When Fatima left here she went to England. Her sister died shortly after and Fatima broke her arm. I called her in London to see how she was feeling and to give her my condolences. It was a good talk. That is the last time I talked with her. I was so shocked when she began to engage in her attacks on me, saying things that were untrue about me and my character, picking up the worst that Sudan has to offer--gossip--and then magnifying and distorting everything. I felt very hurt by all of this because I know that one of the primary virtues in Sudanese culture is hospitality. I also know that this works both ways: one is responsible to one's guest, and the guest is responsible to her host. My husband and I had tried to show Fatima our U.S. hospitality. I was shocked that she would turn against her hosts the way she did, speaking about something in my office, spreading lies about me to the world. I asked myself how any amount of intellectual or political disagreement could lead to that kind of behavior. It is so much unlike the best of Sudanese culture. It is still rather unbelievable to me. But when the first attack came in her newspaper column in London, some of the DA members told me about it and said that Fatima was demanding that DA reprint the remarks. I was asked how I felt about that. I said that I did not think it was proper to print something on DA that was a personal attack. Well, DA leaders bent to Fatima's demand and so the remarks were printed on this list. I had been on the Executive Committee and resigned from the committee (but not from the list) at that time. I was so disappointed that the DA leaders would not stand up to Fatima. She had done her damage. In all of these attacks I have been quiet, although Sudanese called me from all over the world, apologizing for what Fatima has said when they knew I had been her host here for a year and that Gerry and I had taken her into our home and tried to make her feel comfortable. I cannot believe that Fatima has mentioned something that is private among DA members. The money issue is not something I have talked about OUTSIDE of DA. The money issue is something that some of you remember. I want to begin by saying something that one should not have to say in a semi-public setting, that I have never hesitated to give sums of money to Sudanese personally and to the causes that we all stand for on this list. Money is not the question. But a promise is a promise, and an agreement is an agreement. A loan is a loan. When the organizers of the west coast U.S. intifada celebration put an announcement on the DA list that money was needed to afford the rental of the hall for the celebration and that it would be paid back as soon as the tickets were sold, I offered to use my credit card to rent the hall. Then I was asked if I would pay for the transportation of some of the singers and musicians from around the country and I agreed to lend my credit card to the travel agent (Sudanese) who was arranging the travel. All of this added up to nearly $6000, not an amount that most of us can afford to lend, and it is certainly a lot of money to me. University professors are not wealthy, as you know. However, I was assured that the money would be repaid in 2-3 weeks, as soon as the accounts were settled. The money was going to be repaid from ticket sales. Well, as some of you remember, for whatever reason, very few tickets were sold and the event was not very successful. Members began to accuse one another of not organizing well and all sorts of things. I was not really a part of these discussions. Also, as it was told to me, Werdi wanted more money than the organizers claimed they had originally agreed, so much of the money went to Werdi. Considering that he had big medical expenses at that time, no one should have been upset about that. At any rate, when the weeks went on and I was not repaid the money, I inquired and was told that the money did not exist. I was willing to wait. I thought that the 2-3 organizers who had been behind the borrowing of the money would probably take care of the matter by collecting money among them or by taking a collection of various DA members and others throughout the country. Believe me, if the DA people had asked me to give them a large sum of money as a contribution to the event, I would have done it. But they said it was a loan and that it would be repaid. I thought we were all in it together. I wrote that I would contribute $1000 of that money, but that I was hoping that the rest would be repaid. The person who had directly borrowed the money disappeared and was totally silent during all of this. Months and years passed and Mohamed El-Gadi found out about all this and tried to raise the money. I have been very, very uncomfortable about all this fundraising among people, most of whom were not part of the original loan. It is wonderful that he felt responsible to do this, and I think that something over $2000 was repaid (sorry for not looking up any of these exact amounts). I know that, among friends, money is not to be discussed. I was very surprised to hear that Fatima has said that I humiliated people. I think that the borrowers probably embarrassed themselves and, if they reported back to Fatima that I had humiliated them, I am truly sorry to hear that they have done that. Probably they could not deal with their own embarrassment. The whole thing was handled very badly. I have given up on the debt and have learned a lesson about lending money that I cannot afford to lend. It was the last thing on my mind to take money from Sudanese, many of whom might be having a hard time making it financially in exile. I thank all of you, especially Mohamed El-Gadi, for trying to help. I thought the matter was closed. I will not respond to Fatima, but I realize that this time she also insulted the DA list by suggesting that I had paid people to support feminism and then had asked for the money to be returned. It is rather laughable if it were not for the fact that reputable people (including myself) are implicated in all sorts of things that Fatima has said. I do feel very sad that we are all having to take our energy to deal with the spreading of non-truths and distortions when there is an evil government in power in both of our countries and we should be using our energies in this direction. As an anti-war and now anti-occupation activist, as a civil rights activist, and as a women's rights activist, I have more important things to do with my energy and time. I am hoping that the Sudanese women's movement(s), and the various organizations that have been fighting valiantly for decades will prevail and will not be distracted by the spread of gossip, slander, and libel. I hope we can form coalitions and move forward with the progressive struggle. As a socialist committed to socialism and as a leftist committed to the progressive organizations in Sudan (including the Sudanese Communist Party and the Sudanese Women's Union and other progressive women's organizations such as the Sudanese Women's Rights Group in London), I am hoping that Fatima Babiker, Amal Gabralla, Suad Ibrahim Ahmed, and Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim, among many other leaders, and the new generation of leaders and potential leaders will move forward hand-in-hand. I hope that these hands will be extended to socialists like me working in my own country on behalf of Sudan and on behalf of other people of the "Third World" (Global South) and on behalf of working class people and people of color here. We have to do this together. We cannot tolerate divisions among us. Let's unite in the struggle and not get distracted. Insolidarity, SondraHale,Professor AnthropologyandWomen'sStudies UCLA