Amnesty International Group 22 Pasadena/Caltech News
Volume XIX Number 1, January 2011
UPCOMING EVENTS
Thursday, January 27, 7:30 PM. Monthly
Meeting. Caltech Y is located off San Pasqual
between Hill and Holliston, south side. You will
see two curving walls forming a gate to a path--
our building is just beyond. Help us plan future
actions on Sudan, the 'War on Terror', death
penalty and more.
Tuesday February 8, 7:30 PM. Letter writing
meeting at Caltech Athenaeum, corner of Hill
and California in Pasadena. This informal
gathering is a great way for newcomers to get
acquainted with Amnesty!
Sunday, February 20, 6:30 PM. Rights
Readers Human Rights Book Discussion group.
This month we read "A Mercy" by Toni Morrison.
COORDINATOR'S CORNER
Hi everyone
Happy New Year!
This year has gone so fast ...it'll be summer before
we know it...glad that we are having a reprieve
from the cold weather this week.
In December, Group 22 held our 6th annual letter
writing marathon for Human Rights Day at one of
our favorite spots to hang out - Cafe' Culture in
Pasadena. 105 letters and cards were produced
by participants, plus we received enough in the
donations can to almost cover the postage! A
highlight of the event was visiting with Kala
Mendoza, our Western Regional Field Organizer
and visits from la familia Romans! (Long time no
see). Many thanks to all who came, especially to
Joyce and Stevi who set up in the morning. There
are some photos of the event on Facebook - to
find them, search for amnesty international group
22.
A few Saturdays ago, my husband and I were
listening to Wait Wait Don't Tell Me on NPR (our
Saturday routine), when the announcer broke in
with the news of the shooting in Tucson. What a
shocking thing to have happened in the beautiful,
liberal town where I attended college (University
of Arizona, BSN, 1977).
What can I say that hasn't been said already,
especially by President Obama (in his moving
speech paying tribute to the victims and calling
for an end to hatred and violence), but we pray
for the recovery of Ms. Gifford and the others
who were injured that day.
Con carino,
Kathy
RIGHTS READERS
Human Rights Book Discussion Group
Keep up with Rights Readers at
http://rightsreaders.blogspot.com
Next Rights Readers meeting:
Sunday, February 20, 6:30 PM
Vroman's Bookstore
695 E. Colorado Boulevard
In Pasadena
About the Author
Born Chloe Anthony Wofford, in 1931 in Lorain
(Ohio), the second of four children in a black
working-class family. Displayed an early interest
in literature. Studied humanities at Howard and
Cornell Universities, followed by an academic
career at Texas Southern University, Howard
University, Yale, and since 1989, a chair at
Princeton University. She has also worked as an
editor for Random House, a critic, and given
numerous public lectures, specializing in African-
American literature. She made her debut as a
novelist in 1970, soon gaining the attention of
both critics and a wider audience for her epic
power, unerring ear for dialogue, and her
poetically-charged and richly-expressive
depictions of Black America. A member since
1981 of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, she has been awarded a number of
literary distinctions, among them the Pulitzer
Prize in 1988.
From NobelPrize.org
Book Review by John Updike November 3,
2008 The New Yorker Magazine
Dreamy Wilderness: Umastered Women in
Colonial Virginia
Morrison's novels have an epic sense of place and
time.
Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to
the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of
plunging into the narrative before the reader has
a clue to what is going on. Her newest novel, "A
Mercy" (Knopf; $23.95), begins with some kind of
confession from an unnamed voice, which
reassures the reader:
Don't be afraid. My telling can't hurt you in spite
of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in
the dark - weeping perhaps or occasionally
seeing the blood once more - but I will never
again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth.
We are not totally reassured. What blood? What
have you (there in the dark) done? The darkness
does not quickly lift: "You can think what I tell
you a confession, if you like, but one full of
curiosities familiar only in dreams and during
those moments when a dog's profile plays in the
steam of a kettle." A dog's profile does what?
"That night" - what night? - "I see a minha mae
standing hand in hand with her little boy, my
shoes jamming the pocket of her apron. Other
signs need more time to understand."
"Minha mae," research reveals, is Portuguese for
"my mother," and in time we come to comprehend that
it is 1690 in Virginia, and that the narrator is a
sixteen-year-old black girl called Florens, who
was, at her mother's plea, impulsively adopted,
eight years ago, by a white proprietor ("Sir" to
Florens), in partial settlement of a debt owed
him by an insolvent slave owner from Portugal
called "Senhor." This adoption constitutes the
"mercy" of the novel's title. It landed Florens
in a tobacco-growing homestead populated by Sir,
known to the wider world as Jacob Vaark; his wife,
Rebekka, a hardy and good-natured London native
the servants call Mistress; Lina, short for
Messalina, a Native American whose people have
been decimated by a plague, and who was sold to
Jacob by the Presbyterians who rescued her; and
Sorrow, a "mongrelized" young woman, possibly a
sea captain's daughter, who survived a shipwreck
and was named Sorrow by a sawyer's wife who cared
for her until passing her on to the hospitable
Sir and Mistress.
When Sir dies, this household becomes a typical
Toni Morrison collection of "unmastered
women," each spinning "her own web of
thoughts unavailable to anyone else." Their
vulnerable isolation is mitigated but not wholly
relieved by the presence of Scully and Willard,
two indentured laborers, homosexual and white,
whom Sir hired to work on his quixotically
ambitious mansion. After Sir's death, they
continue to work for the widow's pay. With
amiable competence, the two men deliver a child
that Sorrow, who watched Lina drown her
firstborn, has conceived. The infant safely born,
Sorrow, long addled in the head by her shipboard
traumas and her illusion of an advisory
companion called Twin, regains focus and, to cap
this saga of freighted names, renames herself:
She had looked into her daughter's eyes; saw in
them the gray glisten of a winter sea while a ship
sailed by-the-lee. "I am your mother," she said.
"My name is Complete."
From her first novel, "The Bluest Eye" (1970),
Morrison has worked, in line with the celebrated
Faulknerian dictum that the past is not past, in a
historical vein. "The Bluest Eye," bristling with
sixties literary trickiness and protest, takes place
in 1940-41, and includes an impressionistic map
of black flight from the South during the
Depression; stepping momentarily into the
present, the author offers a retrospective history
of the structure "on the southeast corner of
Broadway and Thirty-fifth Street in Lorain, Ohio,"
which for the time of the narrative was occupied
by the doomed and desperate family of the
thorough loser Cholly Breedlove. "Sula" (1974)
opens with an elegiac sketch of a black
neighborhood called the Bottom and dates its
chapters from 1919 to 1965. "Song of Solomon"
(1977) begins four years after Lindbergh's
transatlantic flight, in 1927, and "Beloved"
(1987) takes place a few years after the Civil
War. The shorter novels that have followed -
"Jazz" (1992), "Paradise" (1997), and "Love"
(2003) - share a reminiscing narrator and a sense
of the bygone as reverie, a dream that it is a
struggle to remember and piece together.
"A Mercy" takes us deeper into the bygone than
any of Morrison's previous novels, into a
Southern seaboard still up for grabs: "1682 and
Virginia was still a mess." Indian tribes haunt the
endless forest; the colonial claims of the Swedes
and the Dutch have been recently repelled, and
"from one year to another any stretch might be
claimed by a church, controlled by a Company or
become the private property of a royal's gift to a
son or a favorite." Jacob Vaark, coming from
England to take possession of a hundred and
twenty acres bequeathed to him by an uncle he
never met, rides from Chesapeake Bay into
"Mary's land which, at the moment, belonged to
the king. Entirely." The advantage of this private
ownership is that the province allows trade with
foreign markets, and Vaark is more trader than
farmer at heart. The disadvantage is that "the
palatinate was Romish to the core. Priests strode
openly in its towns; their temples menaced its
squares; their sinister missions cropped up at the
edge of native villages." His claim lies in
Protestant Virginia, "seven miles from a hamlet
founded by Separatists" who "had bolted from
their brethren over the question of the Chosen
versus the universal nature of salvation."
In "A Mercy," Morrison's epic sense of place and
time overshadows her depiction of people; she
she does better at finding poetry in this raw,
scrappy colonial world than in populating
another installment of her noble and necessary
fictional project of exposing the infamies of
slavery and the hardships of being African-
American. The white characters in "A Mercy"
come to life more readily than the black, and they
less ambiguously dramatize America's discovery
and settlement. When Vaark strides ashore
through the Chesapeake surf, he is Adam treading
the edge of an immense Eden:
Fog, Atlantic and reeking of plant life, blanketed
the bay and slowed him. ... Unlike the English
fogs he had known since he could walk ... this
one was sun fired, turning the world into thick,
hot gold. Penetrating it was like struggling through
a dream.
When Rebekka sails to join him, the indignities of
steerage are made vivid - she says, "I shat among
strangers for six weeks to get to this land" - as
are the squalor and the gory public executions of
the London she is escaping:
The intermittent skirmishes of men against men,
arrows against powder, fire against hatchet that
she heard of could not match the gore of what she
had seen since childhood. The pile of frisky, still
living entrails held before the felon's eyes then
thrown into a bucket and tossed into the Thames;
fingers trembling for a lost torso; the hair of a
woman guilty of mayhem bright with flame.
When she disembarks in the New World, "the
absence of city and shipboard stench rocked her
into a kind of drunkenness that it took years to
sober up from and take sweet air for granted.
Rain itself became a brand-new thing: clean,
sootless water falling from the sky."
In so keenly relished a near-virgin environment,
the diverse "unmastered women" blend into the
moonlit trees like guilty phantoms in Hawthorne.
Rebekka, who had disembarked as a "plump,
comely and capable" young woman, becomes
Mistress, and, after gamely coping with the
wilderness, the deaths of three infant children
and of a five-year-old daughter, and her
husband's untimely dying, takes to her bed in
despair: "The wide untrammeled space that once
thrilled her became vacancy. A commanding and
oppressive absence." She falls ill, and orders
Florens to find a free black man she thinks might
cure her, a blacksmith once hired by Jacob to help
build "the grandest house in the whole region" -
an unfinished mansion that becomes haunted by
its dead master. Florens, travelling alone through
the forest primeval, finds the blacksmith living in
a cabin, where he has taken in a small male
foundling. He returns to Mistress, and effects a
talking cure: he is asked, "Am I dying?" and
answers, "No. The sickness is dead, not you."
Back in the cabin, Florens proves to be a poor
babysitter for the foundling and injures his arm.
The blacksmith, who had been her lover, is
displeased.
Much has been made of Florens's love for the
blacksmith:
The shine of water runs down your spine and I
have shock at myself for wanting to lick there. I
run away into the cowshed to stop this thing from
happening inside me. Nothing stops it. There is
only you. Nothing outside of you. My eyes not my
stomach are the hungry parts of me. There will
never be enough time to look at how you move.
Alternating chapters take up her stream of
consciousness during the hazardous journey to
deliver Mistress's message and reunite with the
blacksmith. Morrison has invented for her feverish
mind a compressed, anti-grammatical diction
unlike any recorded patois: "Both times are full of
danger and I am expel. ... With you my body is
pleasure is safe is belonging. I can never not have
you have me. ... I dream a dream that dreams
back at me." But the blacksmith rebuffs her love
in his own firm diction: "Own yourself, woman,
and leave us be. ... You are nothing but
wilderness. No constraint. No mind." This
rejection and her subsequent violence are the
bitter fruit, then, of the mercy that Jacob Vaark
showed her when she was eight years old.
On the book's last pages, Florens's mother
somehow returns, as a disembodied voice, and
recounts her enslavement in Africa ("The men
guarding we and selling we are black"), the
middle passage in "a house made to float on the
sea," her arrival in the hot sun and cane fields of
Barbados, and her "breaking in" - her rape - by
white men who apologize and give her an orange
as consolation. Florens and her brother resulted,
and the moment of Vaark's mercy is recalled, but,
in view of the dismal outcome, to sadly little
point. Of the other characters, Lina remains a
stoic source of domestic order and a nurturing
substitute mother to Florens when she is docile,
before love turns her feral. Sorrow/Complete is,
in this household of orphans, the hardest to
picture. By her own account, she had always
lived on a ship and was brought to land by
"mermaids. I mean whales." The insemination
that produced her two pregnancies is mysterious,
at least to me. She seems less a participant in the
action than a visitor from the Land of Allegory, a
"curly-haired goose girl" whose only human skills
are sewing, acquired on shipboard, and,
eventually, motherhood.
In the dark stew of seventeenth-century America,
procreation seems the one intelligible process
available to slave, servant, and mistress, and love
and disease threaten to make martyrs of them all.
Motherhood is so powerful a force in Morrison's
universe as to be partly malevolent; its untidy
agents, menstruation and sex and birth, come
with a menacing difficulty. This author's early
novels were breakthroughs into the experience of
black Americans as refracted in the poetic and
indignant perceptions of a black woman from
Lorain, Ohio; as Morrison moves deeper into a
more visionary realism, a betranced pessimism
saps her plots of the urgency that hope imparts to
human adventures. "A Mercy" begins where it
ends, with a white man casually answering a
slave mother's plea, but he dies, and she fades
into slavery's myriads, and the child goes mad
with love. Varied and authoritative and
frequently beautiful though the language is, it
circles around a vision, both turgid and static, of
a new world turning old, and poisoned from the
start.
Books, "Dreamy Wilderness," The New Yorker,
November 3, 2008, p. 112
Read more
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books
/2008/11/03/081103crbo_books_updike#ixzz1
BtsAlznT
STOP VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
By Cheri Dellelo
Maternal Mortality
Every 90 seconds, a woman dies in childbirth.
What's most shocking about this tragic statistic?
That these deaths are almost entirely preventable.
Federal legislation such as the Global MOMS Act
and the MOMS for the 21st Century Act can
protect the health of mothers both globally and
here at home if the issue of maternal mortality
makes it onto the legislative agenda. Please tell
the leaders of Congress, Speaker of the House
John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry
Reid, that 1,000 deaths a day from pregnancy
complications is a human rights emergency, and
that we must do what it takes to save lives now:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/
index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&template=x.ascx
&action=15132
Haiti: Sexual Violence Against Women Increasing
Women and girls living in Haiti's makeshift
camps face an increasing risk of rape and sexual
violence, AI said in a new report released January
6, Aftershocks: Women Speak Out Against
Sexual Violence in Haiti's Camps. Those
responsible are predominately armed men who
roam the camps after dark. More than 250 cases
of rape in several camps were reported in the first
150 days after January's earthquake, according to
data cited in the AI report. (See a short YouTube
video that offers personal accounts from Haitian
women -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8xb94sfIEQ.)
AI's report highlights how the lack of security
and policing in and around the camps is a major
factor in the increase in attacks over the past
year. The response by police officers to survivors
of rape is described as inadequate. Many
survivors of rape recollected how when they
sought police help they were told officers could
do nothing. AI is calling for the new government
to urgently take immediate steps to improve
security in the camps, ensure police are able to
respond effectively, and guarantee that those
responsible are prosecuted.
Mass Rapes Continue in the DRC
On January 19, the BBC reported that a
Congolese army commander led an attack that
saw up to 50 women raped over the new year in
Fizi, Democratic Republic of the Congo. This
devastating report comes on the heels of another
account of mass rape in the DRC last summer.
The Congolese authorities must ensure that those
responsible for these violations are held
accountable through thorough investigations and
free and fair trials. AI recommends taking action
by using the online letter they have drafted to
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. I recommend
doing this, but, before sending, please be sure to
edit the portions which they have not updated
since the e-mail was first created (i.e., references
to an upcoming meeting in December 2010). Here
is the link:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/
index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&template=x.ascx
&action=14975
"Corrective" Rape in South Africa
In South Africa men are raping lesbian women to
"turn" them straight or "cure" them of their
sexual orientation. A small group of lesbian
activists called Luleki Sizwe, most survivors of
corrective rape, is fighting back. Recently,
Change.org created a petition asking the Minister
of Justice to declare corrective rape a hate crime.
Unfortunately, Lulekisizwe has still not heard a
word from the Justice Department. They would
like to meet with the Minister of Justice to discuss
how "corrective rape" victims are treated, the
lack of police response, how long the court cases
take, why so many of the dockets get "lost," and
why the rapists get out on such low bail. Please
help Lulekisizwe keep up the pressure on the
Minister of Justice by signing the petition on
Change.org's website:
http://www.change.org/petitions/view/south_
africa_declare_corrective_rape_a_hate-crime
Rape and Sexual Abuse of Girls in Nicaragua
Two-thirds of all rape cases in Nicaragua involve
girls under the age of 17. Survivors receive little or
no government support. Some face the extra
trauma of becoming pregnant as a result of rape.
Girls who choose to carry the pregnancy to term
find little or no state support to help care for the
baby and rebuild their lives. For those for whom
the pregnancy poses a risk to life or health, or for
whom the idea of giving birth to a child as the
result of rape is unbearable, a law criminalizing
all forms of abortion in all circumstances leaves
them with little choice. Please urge the Nicaraguan
government to fulfill its obligation to prevent
sexual violence against girls and ensure that
survivors receive justice and reparation:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/
index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&template=x.ascx&
action=15019
DEATH PENALTY NEWS
BY STEVI CARROLL
Happy 2011, the first year of the second decade of
the 21st century.
In 2010, we in the United States executed 46
people in 12 states with Texas taking the lead by
executing 16 people. Forty-four of these
executions were via lethal injection while one in
Virginia used the electric chair and one in Utah
the firing squad.
As we've discussed, the drugs to carry out lethal
injections have created a bit of a problem for the
executioners, but one that has been temporarily
solved. A company in the UK shipped 500 grams
of sodium thiopental to the US. British diplomats
were none too pleased about this. According to
an article in The Independent World "Officials from
the British embassy in Washington said they were
'dismayed' and 'very concerned' that UK-sourced
sodium thiopental, a barbiturate injected to
induce unconsciousness, would be used in future
executions." There have been calls for a total ban
on the export of all the drugs we use for
executions.
Here in the US, Hospira, the company that makes
sodium thiopental, has decided that it will not
supply this drug any longer. Human rights
activists encouraged the company to make this
decision since executioners in 34 death penalty
states refused to heed the company's warning that
sodium thiopental was to be used only as an
anesthetic and not to kill people.
Unfortunately, California did score sodium
thiopental from the UK shipment, so we will have
to see if the state's death chamber shifts into
action.
Illinois is poised to ban the death penalty. A bill
for its abolition passed both houses of the
legislature and now it awaits the signature of
Governor Pat Quinn. If you would like to ask
Gov. Quinn to sign the repeal bill, go to
http://criminaljustice.change.org/petitions/view
/put_an_end_to_the_death_penalty_in_illinois.
On January 9, the Los Angeles County Coalition
for Death Penalty Alternatives had its monthly
meeting. Presently, four committees are forming:
resolutions, events, tabling, and lobbying. Both
Lucas and I volunteered to sit on committees so
we will keep you informed about what's going on
and how you can join in the activities.
Since 1976 when the death penalty was reinstated
in the US, 138 innocent persons have been freed
from death row. As I looked at this list, I
wondered about what it would have felt like if
these people had not had the appeals process, and
they had gone to their deaths as innocents. Then I
looked at the number of years that elapsed
between conviction and release. Some of them
served only one, two or three years, but others for
10, 15, 20 and in one case 33 years behind bars.
Every once in a while I get on my pity pot of
'life's not fair' but when I think about 33 years in
prison, during which time I would wonder when
I might lose my life through whatever means of
execution the State was using, I get a sick feeling.
The system is fallible, so why we use it, I don't
understand.
Stays of Executions
January 2011
11 Edmund Zagorski Tennessee
11 Cleve Foster Texas
14 Ricky Ray Malone Oklahoma
31 Ronald Allen Smith Montana
Clemency Granted
January 2011
12 Richard Clay Missouri
Executions
December 2010
16 John Duty Oklahoma
lethal injection
January 2011
6 Billy Alverson Oklahoma
lethal Injection
11 Jeffrey Matthews Oklahoma
lethal Injection
13 Leroy White Alabama
Lethal injection
PRISONER OF CONSCIENCE GAO ZHISHENG
by Joyce Wolf
There is still no information regarding the present
whereabouts of Gao Zhisheng, a Chinese human
rights lawyer who is Group 22's adopted prisoner
of conscience. However, two weeks ago
Associated Press released an April 2010 interview
with Gao. In this interview he recounted horrific
details of his treatment when he disappeared
from February 2009 until March 2010. He had
asked AP not to make the interview public until
he either reached a place of safety or went
missing again. Since he's now been missing for 8
months, AP decided to release the interview.
"The police stripped Gao Zhisheng bare and
pummeled him with handguns in holsters. For
two days and nights, they took turns beating him
and did things he refused to describe. When all
three officers tired, they bound his arms and legs
with plastic bags and threw him to the floor until
they caught their breath to resume the abuse.
'That degree of cruelty, there's no way to recount
it,' the civil rights lawyer said, his normally
commanding voice quavering."
During his disappearance the police kept him in
hostels, farm houses, apartments and prisons in
Beijing, Shaanxi province, and the Xinjiang
region. His tormentors said he must forget that he
was a human and told him he was a beast. "Why
don't you put me in prison?" Gao said he asked
Beijing police at one point. "They said, 'You going
to prison, that's a dream. You're not good enough
for that. Whenever we want you to disappear,
you will disappear.'"
You can read the entire AP interview with Gao by
visiting the Group 22 book blog,
http://rightsreaders.blogspot.com, and clicking
on the new Gao tab, where you will also find
automated links to the latest news articles about
Gao. (Thanks to Martha for setting this up!)
Secretary of State Clinton stressed human rights
and mentioned Gao Zhisheng in her speech of
January 14, titled "Inaugural Richard C.
Holbrooke Lecture on a Broad Vision of U.S.-
China Relations in the 21st Century." She said,
"Now, I know that many in China, not just in the
government, but in the population at large resent
or reject our advocacy of human rights as an
intrusion on sovereignty. But as a founding
member of the United Nations, China has
committed to respecting the rights of all its
citizens. These are universal rights recognized by
the international community. So in our
discussions with Chinese officials, we reiterate
our call for the release of Liu Xiaobo and the
many other political prisoners in China, including
those under house arrest and those enduring
enforced disappearances, such as Gao Zhisheng."
(http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2011/01/154653.htm)
On the Op-Ed page of the January 23 LA Times,
Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch gave an
account of his conversation with China's
ambassador Zhang Yesui at the recent state
dinner for Hu Jintao. Roth concluded, "I thanked
him [Obama] for being more outspoken on
human rights in China and for finding a way to
discuss the issue that was genuine and heartfelt.
But of course, talk is only the beginning.
Ultimately, the test of a dialogue's productiveness
is a change in behavior. Given China's
increasingly tough restrictions on basic freedoms,
there is still a lot of work to be done."
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/
la-oe-roth-china-human-rights-20110123,0,5060045.story
My suggestion for an action is this month is to
thank President Obama for discussing human
rights with Hu Jintao, describe to him the case of
Gao Zhisheng, and call upon him to continue
emphasizing to China that the freedoms of
speech, press, association, and religion are all
recognized in the Chinese constitution. Go to
http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact, or write to
The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
NW, Washington, DC 20500.
MONTHLY LETTER COUNT
DP 1
SOA Watch 1
Other UA's 15
Total 17
To add your letters to the total contact
lwkamp@gmail.com.
Amnesty International Group 22
The Caltech Y
Mail Code 5-62
Pasadena, CA 91125
www.its.caltech.edu/~aigp22/
http://rightsreaders.blogspot.com