Amazing Liberian Women--a film/ a story!!

This story from Bill Moyers Journal is about the documentary film made about the women of Liberia and how they got the Civil War to stop in Liberia in 2003 and helped elect a women President was just amazing to add to our reading of The House on Sugar Beach. Enjoy another "chapter" of the possibility of women changing the world!!

Obama's Cairo Speech--Equality and Tolerance

"I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal. But I do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality." (Barack Obama--Cairo--June 2009)

President Barack Obama gave a speech in Cairo, Egypt on June 5th, 2009. He stressed that there should be a new understanding and cooperation among all nations to solve problems of inequality, religious intolerance, and the overall health and well-being of all people. He specifically addresses the differences with Islam countries and hopes to build bridges of understanding across the differences of the past era. You can listen to the speech on the White House Blog.

Annotated Bibliography on Iran for Gendered Voices

Shirin Ebadi--2003 Nobel Peace Prize Winner--Iran Awakening
Update--Iran Election and what Ebadi said on Thursday, June 18th

SHIRIN EBADI, Iranian Nobel Peace Prize-Winner (through translator): "I think that if new elections are organized, but if there are no international observers, no matter what the outcome of these new elections would be, it could be protested and rejected by one or the other parties." (The News Hour with Jim Lehrer)

For our last book, we are reading the memoir of Shirin Ebadi, who lives in Iran and has defended the rights of many people against oppression in Iran. She has particularly worked for the rights of women and defended them in her role as an attorney. This interview with her is from 2006 posted on the website for New American Media. She made a speech that you can read or listen to at the Nobel Peace Prize location. She also spoke at Berkeley in California on "The Struggle for Human Rights."
The women of Iran are waging a campaign to get One Million signatures for their rights--to change ten laws. Listen to another Iranian women activist speak about this campaign.

Arundhati Roy--The God of Small Things & Power Politics

Arundhati Roy is unique. She has written one novel--over ten years ago and it received the high honor of a Booker Prize and the readership of many who find it lyrical, moving, evocative of India. She is an activist--this is a page to explore about her work and words-- who has written and spoken about the environment--the cause of simple people to preserve their land; their way of life; their connection to water, earth, and place. She is political and has put her life on the line. She writes, still, and is interviewed often--such as this interview at Salon magazine 12 years ago when she had just recently published her only book of fiction, The God of Small Things. We are reading from Power Politics and the literature class is reading her novel. She said in a recent interview that she is writing/working on another novel.

Helene Cooper--her memoir & an editorial

Helene Cooper grew up in Liberia and came to the US as a refugee from the civil war that started there in 1980. She has stayed in the US although she has travelled back to Africa and to many other places in her work as a journalist. She is currrently the White House Correspondent for The New York Times and gets to ask President Obama questions--he called on her at his first Press Conference of his Administration.
Here is an opinion/editorial that she wrote when she went back to African in 2006. The memoir, The House on Sugar Beach which she published in 2008 is about the years from 1973-2003. Here is a link to two videos of her being interviewed about this book by Steve Clemons. In this article she gives you more background about herself and this book.

TsiTsi Dangarembga is an author from Zimbabwe who wrote the classic of African literature that we are reading, Nervous Conditions. She is now a filmmaker who studied in Germany--made a difficult film about AIDS orphans called Everyone's Child. She spoke at the Pen Global Writers conference and has written other articles and a sequel--The Book of Not-a Novel-- to Nervous Conditions since 2000.

Iran and Satrapi's Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi (read an interview) in her graphic novel, Persepolis, takes us to the Iran of the late 1970s through the eyes of a young girl there. She conveys in the story and through the pictures her experience of that important time in this nation's history. See a Chronology of Iranian History here.

Satrapi was the invited author in the Spring of 2006 to Seattle when her book was the featured book for Seattle Reads. Karen and I took some students to hear her library readings and presentations. She was engaging, outspoken about her experiences, and warm to students who talked with her afterward.