Art and Disease

Jacqueline Firkins, at University of British Columbia is involved in an interdepartmental research project "Fashioning Cancer: The Correlation between Destruction and Beauty". She designed a series of dresses that use images of growing cancer cells as the base for her fabric design. The project culminated in an auction during which the dresses were sold to raise funds for cancer research.

This is another example of using the arts to raise awareness and shift perceptions.

Community

I just left Umoja and Unity, two women-only villages in the Samburu district of Kenya. The average temperature in this arid part of the country during the past five days ranged from 41 - 47 degrees celsius. Although hot, it was not highly oppressive, as the humidity is low and, when standing along the edge of the Ewasa Nyiere river, a breeze cools your skin. However, the heat does make the lives of these women more difficult as their huts are structures made of wood and mud or newspaper. The interiors consist of three rooms. One is for sitting and eating together, another larger rooms is where the children sleep and, next to where the cooking is done, is a goat-hide upon which the mother sleeps.

Unlike most Kenyans, the Samburu and Maasai have maintained the old way of life, choosing to come together in villages rather than purchasing their own "shamba" - a plot of about an acre of personally owned land that they farm individually. The importance to people living within the villages in working together is palpable. The Samburu also have large families of 7 to 15 children making it difficult to gather enough money for food, clothing and education.

The reason why this is important to the notion of community is when people stop working together, toward the benefit of all, life can be much harder. Most of these women have come to these villages to escape arranged marriages, female genital mutilation (FGM), or they have been sent away form their husbands because they have been raped. Although performing FGM is viewed internationally as a violation of human rights, shifting cultural practice is something completely different. The grandmothers still push for female circumcision as they fear the young women who are not circumcised will not be able to marry.

 
In these villages women are truly working together and the collaboration is what is making all of their lives easier. It appears to me that they heal their community and re-story their lives through collectively working towards financial independence and building new lives for their children, other women in nearby villages, and for themselves.

transforming rituals

 

Women play an important role in ritual and in community healing. In fact last evening one of my professors told me about a village in the north of Kenya in which the women didn't want the men in their village to travel to the next village and fight. In order to encourage them not to fight, the wives told their husbands that if they came home and had been fighting, they wouldn't have sex with them. The men stopped fighting and the communities began to get aong better!

This past week I have been researching and thinking a lot about ritual and the significance ritual plays in healing community. I am using the word ritual to refer to a ceremony, rite, or custom that has a performed set of actions in an ordered way. All cultures have traditional rituals that link community, limit violence and solve conflict. Some rituals are based in religion others are secular in nature; some have a long historic tradition while others are more spontaneous and improvised. While there may be formal or informal elements ritual is generally used to transform a community and are social in nature. Rituals are symbolic actions that are used to communicate and usually have a space associated with them.

Most recently I’ve been reading the book Critical Aspects of Gender in Conflict Resolution, Peacebuilding, and Social Movements edited by Anna Snyder and Stephanie Stobbe. She takes a look at many rituals within the global south. For instances Maasai women sing for peace. In conflict situations these women will walk into battles to separate warring people. In Judaism, the women kindles the Sabbath candles and says a prayer over them.  Lao women perform the soukhaoun - a ritual that brings together members of the community. The soukhaoun is apparently akin to the Lebanese suhla during which a pardon ritual is performed in the home of an injured person to reconcile and re-establish friendship.

Of course men play a role in rituals and in community healing, but it seems that there is more reliance on women to do so at a community level. When I was working with orphans and women in Sri Lanka I witnessed many acts of healing led by Tamil women post-tsunami. These women also performed rituals, driven by the community,  to make reparations to villagers divided during the civil conflict. Some of the rituals involved food - as so many rituals do - and some offered the community hope or closure to those left living through washing and burying bodies of the victims. 

Much of the ritual that promote community healing that women are involved relies heavily shared experience and stories.

Here's something to think about:

• Ritual is a unique space set apart from everyday patterns of life

• Ritual is a symbolic way of communicating that puts emphasis on emotion, symbols and sense rather than on a more patriarchal verbal communication

• Ritual affects relationships