General
CLOSE YOUR EYES, AND SAY THESE WORDS: NI UNA MUJER MENOS, NI UNA MUERTE MáS
24 November 2022
I sat down at my desk, and picked up my notebook and pencil as I always do so that I could sum up the story of the Non Una di Meno movement and lead you toward the national protest on 26 November in Rome.
“Ni una mujer menos, ni una muerte más”. I wrote it. And I felt the need to stop as I often do these times. To slow down, to go inside things, into words, to inhale them and exhale the emotions they bring. I have learnt this over the years, to overcome those moments when it feels like I have to do anything as if I were missing a train. I moved from my desk, and went to sit in front of the warm fire. I closed my eyes, to stop for a moment an image that I too often put in the background compared to a sentence that is both simple and heartbreaking, that has become our global shout against all violence against women. Ni una mujer menos, ni una muerte mas.
I thought of a mother placing in the hands of her dead daughter a paper with this poem, which her own daughter had written for a woman who had died in Ciudad Juarez:
Sangre mía,
de alba,
de luna partida,
del silencio.
de roca muerta,
de mujer en cama,
saltando al vacío,
Abierta a la locura.
Sangre clara y definida,
fértil y semilla,
Sangre incomprensible gira,
Sangre liberación de sí misma,
Sangre río de mis cantos,
Mar de mis abismos.
Sangre instante donde nazco adolorida,
Nutrida de mi última presencia.
It is 12 January 2011: that daughter in the coffin is Susana Chavez, and she is 36 years old when someone decides that her life deserves to end because she has chosen to dedicate it to fighting violence against women since she was 11 years old.
Is 11 years too early to choose to become an activist? What is an 11-year-old girl supposed to think about?
Everything is relative: if that girl lives in a place where every day at least two women are brutally murdered and dumped in the streets, or never found, after being raped on their way to work, or when they go out to live their lives, choosing to do something means choosing to want to live. There is very little choice, if you live in the place that carries all the weight of the birth of a new term, femicide, which has been singled out precisely to define a crime that is neither more nor less than a slaughter of women solely because they are women. We die because we are women. Susana was born in Ciudad Juarez Chihuahua, where she has always lived. She chose to do everything to fight the injustices against women that are at the root of femicides. She became a poet, and a teacher, and collaborated on short films about violence, and she was the one who first wrote that cry that we all carry in the streets and in our hearts: ‘Ni una mujer menos, ni una muerte más’. These few words managed to move a tide of women as big as the world, powerful and unstoppable, not giving up and not afraid to fight. Susana was not afraid either, and certainly, her mother knew it, our mothers know it, and the mothers of every activist know it, in some places in the world this lack of fear causes more than one concern.
And I stop to think about the moment when that mother had to bury a daughter that a violent system at every level wanted to brutally silence, just and only because she was a woman with the aggravating circumstance of wanting to claim her freedom to exist.
Susana was killed, and her body was found partially naked in the street. On her head she had a black bag taped around her neck. Her left hand was cut off. Susana was a writer. And in the last few times, she wrote about how powerless she felt in the face of the violence that characterised her daily life: 446 women had been killed in Ciudad Juarez only in 2010.
Five were the days her mother had to wait to get her body, and the lies about her death were bleak. The authorities have found every possible cause and motivation, trying to deny that her death was linked to her activism. None of the femicide cases in Chihuahua had been solved. No perpetrators. In Susana’s case, alleged perpetrators were arrested who gave different versions of events, all of which had to do with something like ‘she instigated’.
Amnesty International called for a thorough investigation
The National Human Rights Commission opened an investigation
Women around the world raised their voices:
Close your eyes: Ni una mujer menos, ni una muerte más
My eyes remained closed for quite a while, perhaps so that I could chase back a few tears along with that pressure in my chest that I very clearly identify as the symptoms of anger that I carry inside me, that I do not want to deny, that I need to claim, and that I do not in any way have to justify to the world that wants us dead.
This is the story of the global feminist movement of our times: Susana’s story is that of millions of women who have been killed simply because they are women.
Ni una menos was the shout with which, in 2015, Argentine women gave birth to the collective that brought together the different expressions of feminism and the different battles on women’s rights. It is the collective that also identifies with the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the revolutionary women who were their daughters, the LGBTQI movements, those who organized themselves into trade unions and piqueteras, migrant, indigenous, and Afro-descendant women, and the long history of struggles for the extension of rights. It is a motto and a social movement, naming every dimension of violence against women, also linked to social inequalities. It fearlessly speaks of state violence, exercised through the health, justice, and education systems, media narratives, and work. It is a kind of transformation of the pain of mourning into a driving force and power, freedom, and growth.
In 2016, with the same characteristics, responding to the same need to invade the streets and squares with our bodies, the NonUnadiMeno movement was born in Italy.
The struggle has become common and without borders. And it is driven by that pain that turns into anger and that we have every right to claim, it is resistance that we have a duty to engage in. These are building paths that start from afar, that cross history, and that we carry with us at every step, in every action, in every relationship.
Being 11 years old is not too early to be an activist, it is all relative. If you are a woman.
Being 11 is not too early to realise that you can be judged, harassed, raped, mocked, marginalised, silenced. If you are a woman.
Being 11 is not too early to understand that the world’s solidarity with women is worth nothing if the next day we go back to being bitches if unmarried or separated, immature if we don’t have children, murderers if we choose to have abortions, arrogant if assertive, provokers if raped, guilty if murdered.
At 11, it is not too early to understand the meaning of ‘feminicide’ and get to know Diana Russell who, using it for the first time, shoved in the face of the world that we today end up murdered at the hands of patriarchy and sexism
Being 11 is not too early to learn about sisterhood and to feel part of that feminist tide that becomes a safe haven against all violence.
This weekend, everywhere in the world, we will be tide. In Italy, we will meet in Rome, on Saturday 26 November. We will be able to recognize each other, even if we don’t know each other, and we will know exactly what to do.
Close your eyes: Ni una mujer menos, ni una muerte más
