Human Rights Activists

"There is wisdom in the everyday beauty of fragile complex beings grappling with contradiction"

"I want to incite insubordination against this in each of us. Like you, I have felt the fear and hate of subordination land on my skin, course through my blood, unsettle my nerves… its paralysis, impotent rage and helplessness"

"We can reclaim ourselves by recognising that love is intrinsic to our being. From it we can invoke the courage to dance with our fear"

"This is where depression regularly ends in suicide and there is no place to run for women, girls, transgendered and gender non-conforming people"

"God is male – male is god’ is deeply embedded in the human psyche. Those taught to be subordinate are female and those taught to expect subordination are male. The world order mirrors apartheid and has deepened inequality and poverty. Economic, military and religious fundamentalism have increased vulnerability to misogyny, and rape and sexual abuse will affect an estimated one billion women and girls over their lifetimes"

"The impending destruction of humanity and our planet, presented by climate scientists, does not penetrate the thick wall of denial and inaction, with devastating consequences for people who are poor, especially women"

"Some people said that apartheid disappeared after removing the signs that said ‘non-Europeans’ … but the structural institutional roots of it remained. When we begin to get insubordinate, we begin to get to the roots of things. Oppressive systems thrive in our subordination"

"Power Systems work to fragment us. They fragment us as individual beings. And they set up these hierarchies – the hierarchy of the body, mind, heart, spirit; hierarchies of race, colour, and gender, and they set up these divisions within and between us"

"It’s really people who exploit the earth and humanity with fairly little consequence and then set themselves up as the people with the solution or who will fund the solutions"

"That’s how Power Systems work. They set up divisions between us. One of the most powerful things is reclaiming that connection"

"My father used to say the person who writes the story shapes our consciousness. So it’s not just about whose stories get told, but it’s about if you are writing the story yourself, if it’s your story, if it’s your experience, the power of that is enormous. Because our stories have been written for us and they’ve been re-written. And many times we’ve been written out."

"When I wrote Love and Courage, the Story of Insubordination, I was not just telling the story of some isolated individual operating in a bubble. It was really about my learning about the power of love and how to connect, to draw courage and be insubordinate, to injustice and to systems of injustice"

"When we were fighting against apartheid, we recognised it wasn’t just a racist state. It was a racist, capitalist and patriarchal state. And we have to understand that. So how do we actually fight against that? How do we change that"

"Share [your] personal intergenerational stories of [your] forebears who had defied race, culture, gender and power"

"In our country, as in all others, rape and sexual assault have been interwoven into wars of patriarchal conquest and colonisation, genocide, slavery, apartheid and capitalism. Religious texts justify violence against women and children"

"Everyone’s talent should be exercised for the good of the whole of society, because [w]hat we cannot buy is the spirit of originality and endeavour which makes a people dynamic and creative."

"The Drama Studio came as a sudden answer to a problem I had been having, starting the theatre programme."

"I shared Nkrumah’s belief in and vision for the integration of different ethnic groups on the continent, I stated in my play Foriwa (1967) through the character Labaran, “Who is a stranger anywhere in these times in whose veins the blood of this land flows?”"

"Suddenly in 1951 I started…creative writing seriously."

"I suddenly saw …[w]e needed a programme to develop playwriting and…that led to… the Ghana Experimental Theatre."

"I want to be able to look up as I walk and see dignity in the place of my birth. All of us should want that."

"records of the military standard have not been completely told in light of the fact that individuals were occupied with working without archiving."

"You will have a way which you would need to design the thing, you get to a climax and you need to stay up there and let people go home with that feeling of patriotism and so on."

"Into us a child is born."

"Thank you for meeting with me today so that we can discuss the development of literary broadcasting in Ghana and your experiences of it. I am glad that you asked for us to meet here, in the home of my mother Efua Sutherland, as it was home, of course, not only for me but also for you. So we should be able to look at the trajectory of our lives since we were young around this place and how literature has shaped our lives in so many different ways. Welcome."

"We don’t work around it; we work through it. We don’t deny our feelings when they arrive or even attack us."

"Be honest about who you are and where you’re standing at the moment. Don’t rush, and have fun without focusing on the end goal."

"“There can be no equal future without the full participation of all women and girls everywhere and this is the generation to accomplish that.”"

"“Forcibly displaced women are agents of change, challenging the status quo and fighting for girls’ rights, and using their voices to demand equality.”"

""Together we are much better, collaboration is key.”"

"“If you believe in something, be headstrong in something. Whoever is going to come into your life must be able to match that.”"

"“I have to learn to take failure in my stride, failure in work, and failure in relationships.”"

"“My end goal has always been to strive to become a better me.”"

"Rejection is absolutely fantastic because it is a moment of pause, evaluate and growth all at once and it's the biggest motivation your self can ever intake spiritual."

"“Do not compare your step 2 to someone else’s step 10. Because immediately when you see somebody way ahead, perhaps maybe your age or not even your age, you immediately feel like you're not doing enough.”"

"We had suffered enough - 30 years. It was a huge challenge. There was something in it for everyone, but there was pain in it for everyone."

"Leadership needs to have a good value set and it needs to recognize the humanity in the other person; it needs to be pragmatic, but over the years I've discovered chemistry, the personality and if the personalities can work together on opposite sides then you've got the real ingredients of making the proposals work."

"Every time I go to Bangladesh—and I go regularly— I find the country still in the midst of war. The guns of 1971 have stopped long ago but conflicts and tensions have not. The society remains divided from top to bottom. People of Bangladesh can be categorised into two groups: pro-liberation and anti-liberation. The first claims to represent the forces which fought against Pakistan to create an independent country. It mostly favours Sheikh Hasina, daughter of Sheikla Mujib-ur-Rahman, the founder of Bangladesh. The second group supports Prime Minister Khaleda Zia. Her husband, Zia-ur-Rahman, headed free Bangladesh through a coup. ...After 30 years of Independence, who did what during the liberation struggle is getting hazier, but not the prejudices. Some impressions about people—a few may well be true—remain implacable. The worst part is that there is no mood of forgetting and forgiving. The liberation or the anti-liberation label has become such a prized possession that the fakes and failures use it to settle scores politically and, worse, violently. The cleavage, really speaking, is like India's caste system, with its prejudices and biases. Appointments, transfers and even allocations of funds are made on the basis of who was on which side."

"Bangladesh had emerged as a secular state on the grave of Pakistani religious ideals [but] pro-Pakistanis captured power after the 1975 assassination of Bangladesh's founding father Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman [and inserted] discriminatory clause(s) between Muslim and non-Muslim [that were not included] in the original constitution of Bangladesh. ...After the assassination of Bangabandhu, two military rulers. General Ziaur Rahman and General H.M. Ershad removed the roots of the country's secular, non-communal and humane ideals. They changed the constitution to serve a vested quarter and thus eliminated the clause of equal rights for the Hindus, Christians and Buddhists along with Indigenous ethnic communities like Chakma, Marma, Tripura, Maug, Hajong, etc. In the original constitution, which was written in 1972, Article 12 in Part II enshrined 'secularism and freedom of Religion' in the section called Fundamental Principle of State Policy. General Ziaur Rahman's military government totally erased this part of the constitution and that was how the religious and ethnic minority groups became second- class citizens to suffer state discrimination.’"

"The fierce persecution against the religious minorities that started soon after the October, 2001, general elections still continues even after the lapse of one year. The main opposition Awami League and a large section of Bangladesh's civil society have opined that the election was 'unacceptable' to them as the voting was influenced in many ways, including intimidation of opposition supporters and religious minorities. ....The issue of communal torture has many dimensions in Bangladesh. If we take the recent incidents of communal atrocities in Bangladesh and link them only to elections or politics then it will not be fair or accurate. We need to know the historical, political, geographical, economical, cultural and psychological aspects of communal problems of Bangladesh to understand it in its entirety."

"Among the academicians manipulatively shaping Dalit Studies, Gail Omvedt occupies a very important place. She is a sociologist from the University of California at Berkeley, and became an Indian citizen in 1983. She combines nineteenth-century colonial categories with Marxist subaltern constructions, seeing Indian culture as a creation by the upper castes to subjugate the lower castes for thousands of years. Anything that united Indians in their fight against colonialism is merely ‘high-caste symbols’. She attributes the attitudes of Aryan supremacy to even Mahatma Gandhi, saying that he ‘saw Aryans as his ancestors. As against what he saw as the evils of industrialism, he wanted to go back to an idealised, harmonious village society in which tradition ruled. This he called Ram Rajya’... While she argues against the Indian state and criticizes Indian industrialists, she favors globalization of the Indian economy in ways that would make India subservient to the West. Her former leftist colleagues analyzing her stand on globalization, find a striking continuity in her writings. They point out how she puts into the mouths of Dalits words of appreciation for British rule."

"Such a position authorizes Omvedt’s recent pro-liberalization stance: neo-colonialism and economic dependency are abstract, academic concepts irrelevant to the lives of the peasant masses. 140"

"Chatterji is also a standard and predictable face at major events supporting Kashmir separatists, having declared herself to be working on ‘self-determination in Indian-administered Kashmir’. At one such conference on Kashmir, organized by the Pakistani Students Association at George Washington University, the Embassy of Pakistan, and Pakistan’s Minister of Kashmir Affairs, she spoke of the ‘growing concern among civil society groups about human rights crises in Indian-occupied Kashmir in the areas of social, political, cultural, religious, and economic rights’. She accused India of ‘continued occupation of [certain areas of] Kashmir’. Muhammed Sadiq... explains how Angana Chatterjee uses human rights concerns in a lopsided way to play in the hands of Islamic terrorists: [Angana Chatterji] announced the formation of the ‘International Peoples’ Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian Administered Kashmir’ on 5 April in Srinagar. Interestingly, this organisation too insists that the focus of HR investigations should be on the Indian side of Kashmir and not in PoK too. Moreover, this is a fault-finding mission. Its only aim is to slam the Indian security forces, further highlight HR issues and vitiate the situation. There is no attempt at reconciliation, offering succour to HR victims or working with the government to ensure that HR violations do not take place. Dr Chatterji, like many before her, are, intent on primarily demonising the Indian security forces and thereby fanning hatred."

"Luzma was very quick in enumerating lessons for the younger generations stemming out of her life experiences. Her advice reflects an open perspective toward life: "You will have moments of glory and moments of pain. You will have many losses-losses of friends, parents, lovers, and teachers. The world revolves more slowly than you wish at times and your mind goes faster than the world. Acquire your own pace. Stay true to what people who loved you the most taught you. Value your culture but be open to learning about other cultures. Value also the acquisition of languages. Don't be afraid to ask if you don't know, nor to say that you do not know something either. Humility is an important path to learning. Admit the value of others in your life and let them know. Discrimination is best fought with excellence if you are a minority or a woman. Don't look for others to grant you your rewards in life-give them to yourself.”"

"At 63, she stories her identity to be that of a Puerto Rican lesbian poet and human rights advocate. "Who am I today is a composite of many aspects; I am a Puerto Rican woman, I am also a lesbian, a woman of color, and a human rights advocate. Excluding one identity in lieu of the other does not tell the whole story. After I met the poet Audre Lorde I realized I had to embrace all this in order to have a holistic view. Audre said: "you can only empower yourself when you join all the parts of your own Self." So I had to join all the pieces of the puzzle so it could be read.""

"Luzma Umpierre is a poet and scholar who has taken a particularly heroic stance on the question of the rights of gays and lesbians, and "minorities" in educational institutions."

"In 1978, she became the first Puerto Rican to receive tenure in the Spanish Department at Rutgers University. In a deep but heartfelt tone she expressed: "My life in exile took me to become the mentor and teacher of other exiled students and that was very rewarding since I had made the decision to stay in the USA to be of service to that group.""

"When we speak of gender taboos in the USA, Latin@, or Latin American culture, or taboos within any one of our cultures in general, let us not, as academicians, assume a lily white and pristine innocence because of an M.A. or Ph.D. after our names. The "P" in Ph.D. may well stand for "prejudice." Let us address the taboos that are "ours" and which are more harmful in real ways and practical ways than those of Jesse Helms. Jesse Helms can be fought openly through ballots, political campaigns, and organized movements of opposition. He is open about his taboos. But the taboos engendered in our men, in our women, as Latin@ or Latin American academicians or scholars of any Minority group do us far more harm on a daily basis as Latina Lesbian writers and academicians."

"So your name isn't María Cristina,/but you forgot to tell me if you understood/she was just one person,/one Borinqueña within our universal identity."

"The last piece of the tapestry revealing her complex identity was woven in place when Luzma realized her alliance with Latina and African American writers gave her an extended identity. She found kinship in women of color who had been left out of the Women and Gay and Lesbian movement. She narrates this kinship poignantly: "We realized we were on our own and started bonding together, Latina women writers like Cherrie Moraga, Jewel Gómez, black writers like Audre Lorde and Ntozake Shange, who wrote For Colored Women, we understood we had to support each other or nobody would.”"