One society that we often forget and rarely think of, mainly because, by its very nature it is isolated from our day-to-day association and interaction, is the prison. The conditions in prisons are therefore usually understated unless being narrated by a prisoner.

Recently I met a lady in her fifties carrying a basket of food and a lunch box. She hesitantly approached me and asked, “Son, do you know how I can get to the remand prison near Newlands?”

“Oh yes mama let me show you”, I answered.

She must have realized that I was a bit interested in talking further with her, because she waited a moment longer after I had shown her directions. This was a chance I could not let go. I asked why she was going to the prison at that time of the day carrying such luggage as food. Her face suddenly changed, she turned and spoke slowly with gasps of sighs in between her words. I could see tiny drips of tears making their way along the wrinkles around her eyes. To avoid direct eye contact, she looked down and started to narrate the story of her son who was arrested and sentenced to three months in prison. She said her son was at Matapi in Mbare, and when she got there with the food this morning she heard that he was taken to the Remand Prison. Where he will be taken to after Remand, she is not sure but what she is sure of is that he was sentenced to serve three months and that she was supposed to look for his food daily for that long. She was not sure if she could sustain the three months of moving about every morning, where would she get the money for transport let alone the food itself? It seems the son was the breadwinner of the family and the old lady had to pay for his sins; the whole family behind, so to speak.

The food supply in prisons is reprehensible; families are struggling to feed their imprisoned. A one-year sentence means the family suffers for a year as well. That led me to ask a policeman what happens to those whose relatives are far from the prisons or those who cannot afford to bring food. He chose to use the phrase “survival of the fittest” and didn’t divulge much detail. He was only at liberty to disclose that cigarettes are in demand in prisons. If one has a pack of cigarettes, then he is assured of food as he can trade it with food with those whose relatives can supply it daily.

Zimbabwean prisoners might never face a worse hell than the present. The punishment ripples out to innocent family members who have to supply for food on daily basis. If one member is arrested, practically every family member is in prison. What a horrible state.

Here’s a really interesting article from Radio France Internationale on the subject of burqas:

Burqa fashion show by Majida Khattari

By Zeenat Hansrod

Morrocan artist Majida Khattari has been working for some time on the theme of the veil worn by some Muslim women. Khattari uses her artistic perspective to take a refreshing, provocative look at why this piece of cloth fuels so much passion in this country.

Majida Khattari doesn’t look like a feminist who’ll readily burn her bra. Born and raised in Morocco, but currently living in France, she is petite, with large, deep, black eyes and soft-spoken. And she loves to laugh. She, Majida, defies stereotypes. So does her work.

Her work is interesting not only because it is sometimes a political statement but also accomplished by a consummate artist, liberated from the history of art and free to play with it.

The Martine and Thibault de la Châtre art gallery  is showing a selection of her photographs and an installation called The Houris until 19 June.

One of the photographs at the gallery revolves around the issue of the burqa. On 19 May, a bill calling for a ban of the burka in public places will be reviewed by the French Council of Ministers. The burka has been at the centre of much-heated debate here in France.

The burka refers to the veil worn from head to toe by some Muslim women and which completely hides their body.

As an artist, Khattari wonders about the world around her and wants to make people think through an artistic process. “Art is provocation. And we need provocation to move forward. I’m trying to highlight the ambiguity and the complexity of the situation,” she says.

Her capacity to lay bare ambiguity is one of the reason gallery owner Thibault de la Châtre is currently showing Khattari’s work. He also values her ability to fuse her own Moroccan cultural heritage with a thorough knowledge of Western art.

That’s apparent in the collection of photographs inspired by the Orientalists. De la Châtre insists that Khattari was not selected because of the prevailing acrimonious socio-political context in France around the burqa. One of the photographs at the gallery, Partage (Sharing), shows two women facing each other, one naked and one veiled.

For de la Châtre, Partage is not provocative: “In art you can do everything. Picasso used to make the head on the bottom and the bottom on the head. Everybody was shocked to see the human body destroyed like that. But he showed what was going to happen. [And as for Khattari], she sees what is going to happen tomorrow. So, you know naked people and veiled people are going to live together, they must, they have no choice.”

Khattari’s most impressive work on the theme of the veil was a fashion show last April at the Cité Internationale couched as performance art. She says it is her fourth and most radical show. Heavily veiled women and men walked down the catwalk while nude white women wearing large turbans and high heels walked up on the opposite side. This meant that the two models faced each other at one point.

The pace was slow, the nude models all looked alike, and the all-body veils were like sculptures, each one different from the other. One model would discard the layers of veils as if peeling off its skin, while another veiled model moved in an erratic pace, struggling to get out of the garment.

“These are extreme situations. I voluntarily worked on those two extreme images to extract the issue of the burqa and that of captivity outside the religious realm,” says Khattari. “Because women are not subdued because of religion only. We also have to comply and conform to aesthetic norms to look young and beautiful, always,” she added.

Art critic Pascale Le Thorel has followed the work of  Khattari for the last 10 years. She says the originality of Khattari’s work around the veil resides in her ability to link performance art and body art.

“It’s important to say that Majida is the first one to approach this issue. She has really broadened the issue within the context of the study of the body itself, on nudity, obviously on women but not only as she’s used men in her shows. She’s very much part of this ongoing discourse which goes on between one artist to another, which is a very good definition of what history of art is itself,” says Le Thorel.

Khattari doesn’t understand why, in France, laws must be passed to decide how people should be dressed. “It’s absurd to create laws to tell us that veils need to be banned in public places. After all, we are in France because it protects our freedom.”

“It’s as if you’re saying that women not capable of making their own decisions and you’ll decide for them. Or that they must have chosen to wear the veil because they are completely dominated, that there could be no other reason for such a choice. I’m sorry, there are many women who wear the veil out of their own free will,” says Khattari.

One would imagine, now that fatwas are so readily thrown at artists, that Khattari may have been threatened by radical groups. But that’s not the case. The only objection came a few years ago from a French women’s rights group, Ni putes ni soumises, who thought she had an agenda.

As far as Khattari is concerned, all the commotion around the burka goes beyond that piece of cloth. It’s far more complex and she successfully brings the audience to look at her interpretation.

Did you know that there aren’t any post women in Zimbabwe? I know that does not sound right but I was talking to a manager of a post office and she said that when they advertise for postal delivery people women do not come up to bring their applications. I was at least relieved when I spoke to a lady manager. Why is that women are not coming up for postman jobs. Is it because they are afraid of the bicycle or the long distances you need to cycle delivering mail. Or is it that the postman title is a way to make women scared of trying out for the job?

A couple of female artists are taking a more serious look at the arts industry – me included. We are realizing and appreciating that there is more to being a performer, let alone a female one in this man’s world. All thanks to the Flame Project by Pamberi Trust, we have been getting lessons on branding, pricing, marketing and related subjects that make what we do not just entertaining and enjoyable on stage but that it is a serious career and we ourselves much treat it as such.

For anybody outside yourself to realize your worth, you first need to realize it yourself. That is just the essence of what we have been learning. We had such an amazing session last week and it was a different meeting all together. I guess with a lot of artists in the same room, no meeting is the same as the last one! We have become sort of a family; there is a sisterhood going on with us and it has been growing since we began our first module. However we did not do the typical artists in one place act but we did accounts. Yes we did accounts and we had the most fun! Our facilitator was Virginia Phiri. That lady does not walk on ice skates – she is the most down to earth person. She made it all seem so easy and by the end of day two of our workshop we were accounting and it was making sense. Accounting for me was just demystified. You know how it is that when you hear accounts you are thinking mathematics but it is just simple algebra. If there is one thing that I think all of the ladies that were there came away with is that basic understanding of business will make things easier especially in the arts industry.

Above all, for me I realized that anything is possible if you set your mind to it.

You realize you men out there, that this question is not directed to you, but to all my mothers, sisters and female human beings. The Vagina Warriors have an agenda; to show women and men alike that there is an issue here and as long as it is not discussed they are going to come right out and ask if the vagina had a mouth what would you hear it say? To be a bit precise these are called The Vagina Monologues.

If you did not attend a function by the Young Women’s Leadership Initiative (YOWLI) that was themed reclaiming our bodies, demystifying sex and sexuality, let me then tell you it was about dissecting issues relating to young women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights.

Yes, you read right; this is not from foreign lands but stories of young Zimbabwean women in our communities subjected to a whole lot of different experiences. I was shocked at what other people think and feel about sex. From the monologues that were there, issues ranged from having sex without using condoms to shoving some liquids down your privates so that you are relatively tight for him.

After that function I read somewhere that these mentalities are the ones causing HIV and AIDS to be on the rise in Southern Africa – that is creepy and scary. The article said that if a woman shoves ice into her vagina she is bound to experience pain and bruising, making her body vulnerable to a lot of infections.

African as I am there is a lot of things that I would have loved to say about this whole subject but my culture prevents it. I can only encourage you to go to these functions and get enlightened. Who knows maybe we are the generation to kill these mentalities and restore our bodies, male and female to God’s original intent. To be adored, cherished and treated fearfully and wonderfully just the way we were made.

What are main issues for the new Constitution? Who determines what is petty and trivial at this point in Zimbabwe? Which issue is supposed to take more weight than the other in forming our new Constitution? I have just read a blog from someone saying that homosexual and gender issues are trivial and should not be magnified as they do not have anything to do with the governance of this country.

I am not for homosexuality but I am a Christian who has been instructed to love the next person as I love myself. I do not hate homosexuals, I just do not agree with what they do and what they believe in. But I am a woman, and gender issues involve me whether I like it or not. The blogger continues to say that Constitutional campaigns have magnified these issues. My question is what campaigns are these? If you have a burning issue and you want it put under the microscope I suggest you have your own campaigns just as those people campaigning for gender are having theirs.

I will talk about what affects me here. It is very important that we deal with gender issues once and for all. Why should I keep quiet when I know that if this issue is left behind, my daughter will face the same challenges that I am facing as a woman? This is an opportunity to make a difference and I am going to grab it by the horns.

To educate you a bit my fellow blogger, gender refers to widely held beliefs, expectations, customs and practices within a society that define masculine and feminine attributes, behavior, roles and responsibilities. Now if anyone is going to be of a governing body which is going to be governing a society, don’t you think they need to have their own individual beliefs and expectations in check?

My point is this; good governance is not going to come about when people in governing spaces do not know their social standing, be they male or female. In fact good governance has got to do with gender issues for a government to work. Every person needs to know who they are, what their roles are and what they are entitled to as human beings. So I say viva to anyone who wants to magnify any issue that they feel is important to them and these issues should be dealt with, and included in the Constitution. If people want to lobby for homosexuality and gender issues let them go ahead. Better yet if there are others who want to have anti homosexual and anti gender campaigns they should also go ahead. What better way to exercise our hoped for democracy and freedom to choose who we are and what we want to be?