“With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?” –Oscar Wilde

i read the Times piece on Malala Yousafzai yesterday and couldn’t get through the first paragraph without doing some gross crying. Stop. Check email. Keep reading. Stop again. Screw around on Facebook. Email some photos to myself. The more vapid the distraction the better, i think, but it isn’t helping. Try to keep reading. Finish the article. Look for more. Get through about half of the documentary on the Times website and get up and sweep the floor. Wash the dishes. Make Joni’s lunch for tomorrow. Decide against eating his crusts. Refresh the Times story, again, to make sure there were no updates. She still seems to be on the mend, but the article’s original title, “Teenage School Activist Survives Attack” is now “Taliban Gun Down Girl Who Spoke Up for Rights.”

In general, i dislike manipulative admonishments like, “Children are starving in Africa,” or, “It’s not Vietnam,”–a wordsmith ex of mine was fond of throwing the second deflective jolt at me when i was pouting on his behalf. The problem with this strategy is that, no matter how many times i clear my plate, children are still starving in Africa. In fact, the mindless clearing of plates could actually be exacerbating the situation. Similarly, for someone in my subject position, “it” is never, ever, Vietnam. i was never baptized, and i guess that is relevant. Pseudo-morality scaffolding was simply not a tool in my own parents’ arsenal. i was raised to understand horror as neither transferable, inspirational, nor vacantly rhetorical. Oblique, gentle, long term compassion can’t be taught through pithy guilt trips.

Today is the first international ‘Day of the Girl,’ and while i support this global attempt to draw attention to the continuation of practices around the world that violently circumscribe the possibility of “freedom” and equality for girls and women, i would also like, in the spirit of this blog, to remind you that ‘plain prose cheats’. The very real preponderance of violence against girls and women is dependent upon foundational fantasies of female “nature” and of the obviousness of gender. i am good at making something out of nothing; i have a lower success rate with making something out of something, but the argument of performativity is that the transformation of narratives of the “real” is both possible and necessary.