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The Greatest Gift Is Being a Woman, Above All, a Black Woman

2018; Indiana University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15366936-6955208

1547-8424

Altagracia Jean Joseph, Michelle Joffroy,

Education Systems and Policy

For as long as I can remember, I’ve heard my mother say that we women are responsible for the home, for the children and, above all, for the care of husbands. And for as long as I can recall, outside my home, in my godmother’s house and in church I’ve also heard that it is women who are the guilty ones, responsible for any misfortune, so much so that as a child I tried as hard as I could to be a boy and not a girl. I wouldn’t play with dolls, I didn’t play house with kitchen sets, I was better than boys my own age in everything we called “boys’ games.” This was my way of proving I was different from other girls who, apparently, were so fragile and had so little freedom.What good was it to be a girl?I learned everything I could about being a boy from my male friends, to the point that I even became a better fighter than them. I learned to be a better boy: stronger, crueler, more ruthless. But I didn’t realize that I’d grow up and that, as time passed, I’d have to accept what I was. Whatever liberty I had was granted because, according to my mother, there weren’t yet any dangers. Then all of a sudden, I grew up. My breasts, along with other womanly things, developed, and my mother started limiting my contact with boys. She’d say that fire and gasoline should not mix. I had to face reality: yes, I was a girl. Girdles would not restrain my breasts or prevent my first period. The period that earned me a beating for trying to hide it. From that moment on I started living this difficult thing of being a woman, with all its obligations. It wouldn’t be the same anymore, because now my breasts made me vulnerable. My mother would tell me how I could be killed now by a forceful blow to those breasts. She’d constantly say that now I could get pregnant, though she never actually explained how that might happen.Ultimately, hoping to fill the time that used to be for playing children’s games, I started reading the Harlequins, the Biancas, the Azucenas, and all the other romance novels and books I could get a hold of, including the Bible. I learned that a woman needed a man’s support in order to be worthy and to have a decent last name. What’s more, some women just created problems. Consider the case of Adam, who had to learn to labor and survive by the sweat of his brow because Eve had disobeyed God and sinned. As time passed I wanted to be different from that one-dimensional woman described in the few books I could read. The thing I feared more than becoming one of the women from those books was being like the women I saw around me. The submissive one, the dependent one, the migrant, the housewife whose only role was taking care of her husband and children.In my quest to be different from the women around me, from the only examples my surroundings offered, the batey women, dependent women, I just kept studying. I made a habit of my studies, a daily necessity, to the point that the threat “If you disobey you will not go to school!” was the worst imaginable punishment. The point is, I had different dreams, emphasized different things, fought for other causes and other interests. Even the way I talked was different from those around me because I spoke like the books I read. After many springs and rainy seasons, I ended up a teenage mom. All the same, I kept fighting, believing that it was possible to be a different kind of woman. And I achieved that. Time itself taught me that the woman I so feared becoming took a variety of forms, and I was just one of them. I learned through a twist of fate that I would have to get to know this woman, study her, perhaps improve her, but never turn my back on or abandon her.Yes, I understood. Mother, woman, negra, bateyana, penniless—that was definitely me. I had to live with that woman even as I managed to keep on dreaming. In that quest, I discovered that it wasn’t only in my country and on my continent that women are abused. I learned of other places where being a woman is so much worse than it is here. What nobody could predict, not even the books in which I so believed, is what women experience, in the many versions and ages that I had come to know. Not only could the life I’ve known be divided into distinct paragraphs, subheadings, and categories of Dominican women and Dominican women of Haitian descent, but the value of those lives themselves, for everyone, had been diminished. And among these, only some, not all, would be noticed.So, in that moment I start asking questions: What does it mean to be a Woman? What does it mean to be a woman in the Dominican Republic today? What does it mean to be Haitian-descended or a Haitian migrant in the current Dominican context?To be a woman, as I learned it, is to be reasonable, to be persistent, to be willing to give everything to a society that criticizes you for everything you do, good or bad. To be a woman is to be strong, despite being stigmatized as fragile; to do it all and be recognized for nothing. To be a woman is to be a silent heroine, capable of scaling ladders, facing challenges that only your deepest self can know and staying steadfast, not for yourself as a person but for your children, your family, society, the church, and decency.Today, here, in my country, being a woman means being a martyr, not once or twice but as many times as you can stand. It means being the necessary evil in “X” situation, such that you become guilty of your own assault, your own rape, and even your own murder. That is to say, we live in a state of vulnerability in the Dominican Republic where even something as appalling as your own murder gives cause for listening to the man who murdered you and justifies blaming you, the murdered woman, for provoking it. In fact, being a barrio woman from a poor neighborhood, with no high-society title is a mortal sin in this country. In this country, your life and death have meaning insomuch as they satisfy some morbid curiosity or serve some commercial interest, like Émely Peguero, who died in a forced home abortion, performed by her boyfriend because she didn’t belong to the same social class as him and his family. Her life rang louder after her death because she was a teenager, because her family wasn’t quite so poor and because her murderers traveled in government circles. That’s what popularized her death. The conditions under which her body was discovered and the questions about what happened to the fetus she had been carrying were morbid details that granted her death political significance. But such was not the case for three other girls, also teenagers, whose murdered bodies were discovered in the search for Émely Peguero’s. They were mentioned by the press, but because none of the three adolescent corpses was emely’s, their discovery only served to highlight the abyss that separates certain social classes.The Dominican woman is the mirror that reveals that dark abyss of socioeconomic differences that also pose a threat to society in general. To that effect, in this essay I’ll repeat and make reference to the backwardness and daily decline that we experience in the Dominican Republic where, fully situated in the twenty-first century, and while the rest of the world talks about globalization, we are still debating the most basic rights, among them women’s rights to make decisions about their own bodies or the value of a woman’s life as a subject of rights, a person, a human being. Today, not only is a woman’s dead body meaningless, she herself as a full-fledged person is insignificant. Women are so marginalized that even a government official, as in the case of a representative of the Modern Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Moderno), standing in full legislative session and defending her rights and those of the other women she represents, because she is a woman, was handed a leash as a sign that she should submit to the rules and decisions of men!There is talk of a legal quota for women’s social and political participation. In reality, nevertheless, if we survey both civil society and government organizations we see that there is no real women’s participation. Instead, women are given purely symbolic responsibilities that they can’t fulfill without male supervision, even within civil society organizations that should act as critics of the State in their implementation and guarantee of rights. Rather, we have the very same situation or worse, given that a large number of directors of these organizations use their position or the power they wield to force women to submit to their whims, threatening to deny women advancement or salary increases even when they are qualified to receive them. In cases where there might be opportunities for grants, travel, or other benefits, women who refuse any number of sexist conditions—such as sleeping with the boss or being his mistress—are simply shut out. And in cases of administrative positions or important departmental responsibilities, these are controlled by men or women who agree to specific conditions. I should note that I write about this from personal knowledge and with appropriate restraint, but I do not cite specific names because my observations only serve to illustrate a particular reality for Dominican women today. My reflections in this article are not intended to expose the specific details of conflicts which sooner or later will emerge on their own.This same context shapes the lives of single mothers who have no access to decent employment, nor decent housing, much less to a dignified life for themselves and their children. Statistically, between 15 and 25 percent of adolescent girls here become pregnant. They are consistently blamed for this “phenomenon,” even as they are excluded from education and any other opportunities that might in fact support their growth and development as social beings. We single mothers who do manage to create something for ourselves are nevertheless stigmatized and derided with cruel taunts like “You were really itching for it” or “You sure gave it away fast.” The funny thing is, in the fifteen years that my son has been alive, nobody—not from any organization, not from the State, not from the Church—has ever approached me to say “Good job! You’re doing really well for yourself” or “How’s it going? Can I do anything to help you with your son?” or “What about his dad? Has he supported you in any way?” or even “It must have been pretty tough to be a teenage mom.” Ironically, my son’s father is two years older than me and yet, from the day I got pregnant until today, as I write these lines, every time the subject comes up somebody who knows him steps in to explain to me how hard it must have been for him, poor guy, so young to be facing such a big responsibility. It’s a given that his suggestion that I have an abortion was a significant step for him, one that I should have accepted since, of course, I had to understand that he simply could not become a father at such a young age. In short, men will kill and women will be found guilty in the Dominican Republic.Up to this point I’ve described the experience of being a woman in the Dominican Republic in broad terms. I’ll turn now to a specific “subheading” of being a woman in the Dominican Republic that I consider more tragic still, that is, to be a woman of Haitian descent and/or a Haitian migrant. That dark alley, as I call it, is the excuse that the government and the pseudo-nationalists use to justify their crimes and neglect. For example, when pressured about the case of a murdered woman they will simply note that she was Haitian, thus lowering everyone’s anxiety. If their goal is to consign these crimes to oblivion, to circumvent any reaction whatsoever from any sector of civil society or from the legal class, they simply point out that she was Haitian. For example, in the cases previously mentioned, the vast majority of women murdered in the same period as Émely Peguero had obtained restraining orders from a court. Such was not the case for Haitian women or their descendants born and raised in Santo Domingo. Since they don’t possess official identity documents, in the majority of cases these women are prohibited from filing a formal legal case. In fact, for about ten years the State itself has restricted their access to the basic claim to exist as a legal subject with rights.I will never forget the rape of a three-year-old girl, committed by a forty-year-old man on September 12, 2013, in the province of Puerto Plata in the Municipio Monte Llano. A neighbor reported the crime and the man spent twenty-four hours in detention, but he was eventually released because the child’s parents were of Haitian descent. Her mother did not have the documentation required to make a formal complaint. Not even the attorney general could enforce that child’s right to protection guaranteed by the legal code on children and adolescents. Because her mother is a poor Dominican woman and a descendant of Haitian immigrants the crime remains unpunished—neither the pedophile rapist nor the damage done to that child’s life has been addressed by the legal system. And there have been other landmark cases, like the case in Dajabón province in early 2014: a young dark-skinned girl was discovered in some underbrush, raped and murdered. The medical examiner who recovered the body and oversaw the burial proceeded with no investigation regarding the victim’s identity because she wasn’t carrying any identification and was simply presumed to be Haitian. The same thing happens when the news reports statistics on women’s murders: Haitian women are excluded from these figures with the excuse that they are the Haitian government’s responsibility. In this regard, there have been no exhaustive investigations of several extremely violent murders of Haitian-descended, transgender women in the Bávara and Punta Cana region. The most recent case I’m aware of is compañera Rubby, which came to light because of her connection to the organization Diversidad Dominicana (Dominican Diversity) and other civil society groups. If not for these connections her case wouldn’t warrant its two mentions in the news. Which is to say that if the life of a woman who is not Haitian-descended isn’t worth one guanábana, the lives of Dominican women of Haitian descent are worth even less than the husk of a guanábana.It is this social reality, this uncertainty, this fear, and especially this State-sanctioned cruelty that Haitian women and their descendants inhabit in the Dominican Republic. Broadly speaking, if we are to seriously consider national conditions, racism, questions of gender, and transnationalism we also have to address the existence of the internal borders of a diseased and dying society that enacts its rage on women, migrants, and the poor. This moribund society that kills anyone who tries to save themselves, that demonizes women for speaking out, as is their right to do, that crucifies and condemns us as immigrants, including our sons and daughters, for systematically and deliberately claiming our rights. Consider the example of the armed mobs that acted out a lynching, Ku Klux Klan–style in a park in Santiago in February 2015, in the case of young Henry Jean Claude, known as Tulile. Given all the stories I’ve heard and the experiences I’ve lived at the hands of this country, in this society, in these bateyes, I can honestly say that in the Dominican Republic today, being a woman, having faith in other cultures and respecting them, accepting ethnic roots that are not Spanish . . . all make you a crucifiable subject.But the fact is that even if you are not a descendant of migrants and you are not a woman, but decide to speak for their causes and defend their human rights you also become a target because in this country believing in justice, equity, and respect means you will be persecuted by public opinion or in the media, which is manipulated for disinformation and deployed to accuse as traitors anyone defending these basic rights. Using the very public freedoms denied to women and migrants, political groups like the recently formed Tricolor threaten the use of violence in the name of protecting the nation. They use whatever discourse will win them votes, including hate speech against women and Haitian migrants, and specifically Haitian migrants because, despite the wide variety of migrant and guest workers, it is the Haitians who can generate the panic needed to crystallize all the fears created by our twisted and misrepresented history.Another collective entity for whom gender is an intersectional theme are LGBTI groups who are also excluded on the basis of their sexual orientation. They are so excluded, singled out, and labeled that they lose their most basic rights to health, education, and above all housing, when even their own families abandon them because of their sexual orientation. The State, irresponsible and neglectful as usual, turns its back on these groups and takes cover under the Vatican Concordat, claiming that their attitudes and behaviors endanger public morality, family honor, and social propriety.According to an article published in the newspaper Diario Libre, the State’s official figures show that to date 1,789 women have been murdered by their partners, ex-partners, or fiancés and that in the majority of cases, these men then take their own lives. These figures lead me to wonder why it is that 80 percent of these suicide-assailants are members of the army, the police force, or the marines—the country’s three armed forces. What is the mystery here? What are these academies doing to these young men such that they become so possessive? Such that they exhibit such little self-esteem? I have yet to see the statistics on the number of children orphaned by these tragedies, nor am I aware of any work being done to heal them or mitigate their trauma, especially given that many of them are witnesses to the events and are rejected by the families of both parents. Each time I think of them I am filled with uncertainty and overcome by powerlessness. Life is difficult enough, education is lacking and mediocre at best for children with little access to resources; imagine what it must be like for the children abandoned to the custody of a government that has little to no interest in the future of the country.By way of a conclusion I would add that, despite its failed violence prevention policies, our attorney general has launched an online form for victims of violence to file complaints electronically, in a country where for the past thirty or forty years a standard campaign promise has been to fix ongoing, energy-related problems. In a country where dependable Internet access continues to be a luxury even at the nation’s institutions of higher education. It also seems reasonable to add here that living in the Dominican Republic today as a black woman, an activist or a dissident, that being a migrant or having a relationship to Haitian migrants is cause to live in fear: in fear of the police who run you over and then manufacture a false report; in fear of the ultranationalists who threaten you with violence; in fear that rebuffing the person who harasses you in the street is basically like signing your own death sentence and that there is nowhere for you to go to file a complaint because, depending on the issue, or your assailants, you’ll make your way to the public prosecutor’s office and your file’s already been lost and they are waiting there for you, ready to pick you up. I’ll conclude by saying that it’s true, I live in fear, but I can’t let it paralyze me, I have to keep going in order to see if tomorrow my nieces, my sisters, my daughters, and my granddaughters will know true freedom, the one that my ancestras fought for and that I cannot fully enjoy. I’ll keep fighting as long as I am able. Physical death surely couldn’t be worse than the uncertainty of living in constant fear. After so much suffering I’ve learned that the greatest gift is to be a woman, above all a black woman, with so much resistance in so short a life.