FSB Author Article
Imagining Ourselves
Global Voices from a New Generation of Women
Edited by Paula Goldman
Published by New World Library
March 2006;$26.95US; 1-57731-524-3
What defines your generation of women?
A few years ago, Paula Goldman emailed this question to women aged twenty to forty around the world. At the time, she was fresh out of graduate school and not entirely sure how to launch her career, but she knew she wanted to make a difference in the world, and she was deeply inspired by the amazing and diverse accomplishments of women she knew across the globe. She felt this book could showcase the power and talent of these women to a wider audience.
She wrote a short call for submissions, asking women to submit artwork and writings responding to the above question, and with the help of a few organizations working internationally, she sent it out. Thousands of responses later, the result is this book, comprising entries by more than one hundred women from fifty-seven countries and virtually every populated region of the globe.
The works in these pages are inspiring, challenging, enlightening, funny, and sometimes shocking. The contributors emphasize that the world they inhabit is different from the world of their mothers and grandmothers. Many have lived in more than one country, many are biracial or multiracial, and most have had access to more education than any women in their families before them. They come from myriad geographic, ethnic, spiritual, economic, and educational backgrounds. They celebrate their differences, but they also find strength in their commonalities.
Meet Lada Karitskaya, a Russian woman who turns down the opportunity to become a mail-order bride; Israeli singer, Achinoam Nini (aka Noa), whose life changed dramatically when she became a mother; slam poet Aya DeLeón of the United States, who fantasizes about what it would be like if women ran the hip-hop industry; and Toyin Sokefun of Nigeria, who uses photography to explore the boundaries between society's ideals of beauty and women's self-images.
These brave women boldly address the challenges they and their cultures face, expressing themselves freely through art and writing, wielding their power to create positive political and social change. Imagining Ourselves has a power and reach far greater than Paula Goldman dreamed possible when she first conceived of it. This book builds bridges, demonstrating not only the potential of each individual life but also the awesome power of today's generation of women as a whole.
Author
Paula Goldman's
professional life has been driven by the quest to work with groups in
conflict and to increase opportunities for underserved populations. In
postwar Bosnia she worked on reconciliation and reconstruction
projects, in India she worked with educational groups to create
professional paths for rural high school graduates, and she worked with
human rights organizations in Kenya and Guatemala. She has also helped
develop programming with WorldLink Television and led a film project to
promote community-building efforts between Jewish and Muslim groups in
San Francisco.
Paula was born in Singapore in 1975. She and her family lived in Jakarta, Indonesia, before moving to Southern California. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997 and went on to receive a master's degree in public affairs from Princeton University. She is currently working toward a PhD in social anthropology at Harvard University. When she isn't traveling for her projects, Paula divides her time between Boston and San Francisco.
Hafsat Abiola, associate editor of this book, is the founder and director of the Kudirat Initiative for Democracy (KIND), A human rights and democracy activist from Nigeria, she earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard University and has received many honors. Hafsat is a Fetzer Fellow and serves on the boards of Youth Employment Summit, Educate Girls Globally, Women's Learning Partnership, Hewlett-Packard's World e-Inclusion Project, and the Global Security Institute. She lives in Lagos, Nigeria.
Isabel Allende was born in Lima, Peru, in 1942 and raised in Chile, Bolivia, Europe, and the Middle East. She worked as a journalist in Chile until the 1973 military coup. Upon the rise of the Pinochet dictatorship she was exiled to Venezuela, where she wrote the bestselling novel The House of the Spirits. Since then she has authored fifteen other books, which have been translated into twenty-seven languages. Isabel was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004, and she resides in San Rafael, California.
Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from the book Imagining Ourselves: Global
Voices from a New Generation of Women
Edited by Paula Goldman
Published by New World Library; March
2006;$26.95US; 1-57731-524-3
Copyright © 2006 by the International Museum of
Women
JOLIVETTE MECENAS • USA
After working as a photo editor, a PR lackey for Big Oil, and a pixel pusher during that historical capitalist romp known as the dot-com boom, Jolivette Mecenas has accepted -- happily -- a life of teaching and writing. She is teaching at the University of Hawaii while pursuing her PhD in English, after which she plans to return to her native land, California.
One Is Not the Loneliest Number
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined
well.”
Virginia Woolf
There are several life skills my mother taught me before I set off into the world: how to properly separate my laundry; how to balance my checkbook; how to prepare red meat in an assortment of quick-and-easy ways. Other skills I picked up as a sink-or-swim necessity: how to negotiate rent; how to negotiate salary increases; how to negotiate failed relationships, hopeless heartache, the metaphysical realization that we die; and how to negotiate reasonable rates with the psychotherapist. There are certain skills, however, that are often left out of public discourse, usually owing to our general squeamishness about anxiety-arousing issues such as mental illness, poverty, sexual dysfunction, and -- what I would like to expound upon in this essay -- being single. Or more specifically, being a single diner.
To walk into a restaurant by yourself on a Friday night, request a table for one, savor a full-course meal complete with wine, and linger over your espresso while surrounded by tables of raucous friends or (even worse) affectionate lovers spooning gelato into each other’s mouths -- to dine alone in supreme grace and dignity is a life skill akin to high art. Your mother never taught you this. Probably because she never spelled it out for you that at certain points of your life, you will be alone. If you are not now or have not already been alone, you will be one day. And if you already are, welcome. The purpose of this essay is to reclaim the state of dining alone and to overthrow cultural assumptions that cow us into spending another desolate evening eating microwaved burritos while watching The Jeffersons on TV.
I admit, there are few things I enjoy more than sharing a meal with friends, either at home or at a restaurant; the conversation and laughter flow, we reminisce about old times, the palates are soothed and happy. Dining with a lover is usually a notch higher on the Richter scale of pleasant evenings, adding the element of being pampered and serviced by the wait staff, leaving us to concentrate on l’affaire d’amour in between bites of mu shu pork. But there are times in my life when I find myself far away from friends and even further away from having a lover. At these moments, I stubbornly refuse to give up the one epicurean pleasure I can truly satisfy by myself: eating. Why not go to a restaurant by myself? I don’t remember the first time I did, but I have many times since, and my experiences lead me to believe that the lone diner strikes an assortment of anxious emotions within people’s hearts. Whether it is fear (“Will I be her one day?”) or pity (“That poor girl!”) or relief (“Thank God I’m engaged to Bobby!”), most people would rather the single young woman dine alone in the privacy of her home, and not in public. However, I refuse to compromise my life to soothe the anxieties of others. In order to subvert the subtle discrimination against solo diners, we must first learn to identify it.
To begin, there are certain recurring reactions that happen whenever I dine alone, designed, I’m sure, to discourage the act. Most of these reactions fall under what I term single-phobia, or the irrational fear of independent people engaging in social activities by themselves. A dining experience in which I am harassed by single-phobia usually unfolds in the following manner:
Host: Table for . . . ?
Me: One, please.
Host: (Arching a skeptical eyebrow) Okaaay . . . this way, please.
(The host then leads me past bright empty booths at the front of the
restaurant to a shaky miniscule table in a dark corner next to the
kitchen.)
Me: Couldn’t I have one of those front tables? I’d rather not sit in
the dark.
Host: I’m sorry, but those tables are reserved for parties of two or
more. (What he really means to say is that the front tables are
reserved for people with friends and social lives, and that people dine
at restaurants to have a good time in the company of others. To
maintain the festive atmosphere, they relegate me to the dark corner.)
Me: Fine.
(I am seated. The waiter takes my order nearly twenty minutes later. He
only returns twice more, to bring food and to bring my check. He easily
ignores my frantic hand gestures for more water, my polite yet
assertive yelps of “Excuse me!” and focuses on any other place in the
room when hustling past my table in and out of the kitchen. I know what
he’s thinking, having been in the restaurant business myself: single
diner equals small tip.)
Why does single-phobia permeate our culture? Perhaps we can blame the usual suspects: magazines, MTV, Top 40 boy-bands crooning their everlasting love to pubescent girls, urban bar culture (straight and gay), romantic comedies with trite endings, advertisements with ludicrous claims. But whatever the reasons, the object of the game is to not be alone. People spend lots of cash to be in a couple. Couples spend lots of cash being in couples. Call it a capitalist theory of modern love or just call me bitter, but whatever the explanation, this cultural phenomenon of anti-aloneness prevails wherever I attempt to enjoy a meal in a restaurant by myself.
For example, once when I was in New York City, I spent one homeless week in the Lucky Wagon, a pit passing for a hotel on the Chinatown–Little Italy border. At that point, I had only a hulking backpack of possessions, a pseudoglamorous magazine job paying subsistence wages, and a crazed determinism to keep me from ending up in the East River. My five-by-ten whitewashed room had no TV set to quell the voices in my head demanding of me, “How did you end up at this all-time low?” I tried to soothe my worries with dinner on Mulberry Street, the vivacious tourist trap of Italian eateries, where I chose a noisy, crowded little trattoria because it served my favorite dish, penne all’arrabiata -- “angry pasta” for an angry girl.
The waiter sat me at a corner table, of course, me being the only single diner in a room full of birthday parties and groups of Japanese tourists. He was a handsome, young Italian American, his name may have been Anthony, and he laughed and joked with me for a bit. Then, broadcasting over the entire room in a booming voice, he asked me, “What are you doing eating alone?” Flushed from embarrassment and the wine, I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s Saturday night and you’re alone? What’s the matter, your boyfriend doesn’t take you out???” I started to explain that I didn’t have a boyfriend to take me out, that I didn’t even have any friends in New York, that I really was alone, but I realized he wouldn’t believe me. That’s when I began to understand how deeply entrenched in American culture the fear of the single diner is. It didn’t even cross Anthony’s mind that I was an independent, free being, eating dinner by myself.
Don’t be mistaken, I’m not some kind of gourmand misanthrope advocating antisocial behavior. I recognize the basic human need to feel love and affection. But I also believe that a young woman would do well for herself to recognize her relationship to the world and the conditions in the world that cause her to experience what our modernist friends the Existentialists called angst, or the feeling of despair and anguish. Night after night of frozen burritos and TV sitcom reruns is this city-dwelling gal’s version of despair and anguish. But then an epiphany: the realization that in any life of substance during which risks and leaps of faith are taken, there are inevitably moments when there is only me, and that is a good thing, and I will celebrate by taking myself out as my favorite guest to a lovely dinner.
With all self-affirmations out of the way, I’d like to proceed with tips and techniques for interested parties on how to dine alone gracefully and enjoyably.
- First of all, the meal you are eating determines whether or not you may bring reading material to entertain yourself. I’m of the opinion that any brunch or lunch is a good time to bring the paper, a good book, a magazine, et cetera. If you forget to bring something, under no circumstances should you begin to shuffle through your Day Runner organizer, pretending to write notes in the mini-calendar section; it is a telltale sign that you are extremely uncomfortable dining alone and are desperate to look busy. Instead, calmly finish your meal and occupy yourself by staring blankly at people and eavesdropping blatantly on conversations. It’s entertaining, and you’ll seem intriguing, I guarantee.
- If you are eating at a more stylish restaurant, you might consider more sophisticated modes of self-entertainment, like drinking copiously. In restaurants with outdoor seating, I like to smoke. Be careful, though, not to drink or smoke too much before your meal is served, as you may make yourself ill, and that can get messy.
- One game I like to play every now and then when I’m dining at a finer eating establishment is “Food Critic”: Dress to the nines for your meal. At several key points during the meal (after swirling the first taste of wine around in your glass and after the first bite of each dish), pull out a notebook and pen and jot down notes. Make several calls on your cell phone to your answering machine at home, pretending you are making after-dinner plans, and drop the names of chic bars and media personalities whenever possible. If I do a good job, I can usually weasel a free dessert and free alcohol. It’s fun!
Before I conclude, I’d like to point out one very important thing to remember at all times: you are not really alone. Sure, the setting is for one and there is only a fake floral arrangement in a vase to greet you across the table. But who says you can’t converse with the floral arrangement? People talk to their plants and pets all the time -- why is it so strange to speak with inanimate objects? A short conversation I had with my dinner last night went something like this:
Me: Hello, Mr. Pizza! I must eat you now!
A rather flat conversation, I admit, but thoroughly spontaneous and enjoyable nonetheless. Or if you like, solo dinners are good opportunities to resurrect imaginary childhood friends and catch up on old times with them. During my solo meals, I like to replay past arguments I’ve lost to friends or ex-lovers, perfecting the flawless retort I wish I had thought of at the time. However, I have to be careful not to argue out loud, as I tend to get carried away and alarm people at nearby tables. My point is, when dining alone, never underestimate the pleasure of your own company, and enjoy it with pride. And when all else fails, there are always the voices in your head . . .
From the book Imagining
Ourselves. Copyright © 2006 by The International Museum of
Women. Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA.
www.newworldlibrary.com.
For more information, please visit www.imow.org