heliopausa

It's Vietnam Women's Day today (International Women's Day is also celebrated, but in March, as everywhere else.)  So to mark the day, here’s something about one of the many notable women in Vietnam's history.

Nguyễn Thị Duệ was born in the late sixteenth century, under the Mạc dynasty.  I don't know her parentage, but her name suggests that she was from an undistinguished family - Thị Duệ  (pronounced, roughly, tea zway) means more or less "ordinary worker's daughter".  (It's possible, though, that this was a name given to deflect unwelcome attention - a name to go unnoticed by?) 

At the age of about twenty, she adopted another name, Nguyễn Thị Du, in order to sit the mandarin entrance examination, disguised as a young man.  The name Thị still has something of a female ring to it, but the history definitely says she was disguised when so called, and women did not at that time enter the exams or serve as mandarins.  Anyway, back to the story: 

Of her poetry, I have struggled with the translation of just two lines.  I like it very much, but I can't say it neatly enough in English.  Here, in fourteen words, she gives a picture of a young girl (nữ nhi) straining to just barely touch the strings (lề) used to bind together the books of her time, and predicts with certainty that the girl who can do so much will advance, first to the humble copy-card used to learn characters (thiếp), and then to take her doctorate (trạng nguyên).

Nữ nhi dù đặng có lề
Ắt là tay thiếp kém gì trạng nguyên

She who uses all means possible to just touch the book's binding
Advances to spell out the words, and to win her doctorate. 

The stuff that's happening in the US - I don't know what to say.  There are so many things happening so fast - and as twistedchick  posted some days back, behind the smokescreen of the more publicly outrageous things, other very damaging things might be happening, like the proposed sell-off of public land, where according to the Guardian, "the sale does not [even] have to make money for the federal government".  (I added the "even" because I think it's a staggering aspect.)

editing to add:  this link spells out the scenarios, much more informedly than I could, what might be behind the "smokescreen" I was talking about.

All honour to those who are making a stand against unethical, illegal or immoral acts, especially the former Acting Attorney-General, who is one of those described in last Sunday's psalm, about those who can't be moved or shaken, who stand by their undertakings, (as she, Sally Yates, stood by her oath to uphold justice) and don't sell out the innocent - for money or a career move or for anything else.  
I said especially her, but I suppose there are others not in the public eye, in humbler positions who dare not go public, but are quietly not selling out the innocent.  All honour to them, and may they one day get their due as people who upheld humanity when the system around them went the other way.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to trawl through mainstream media for good news on a daily basis, following megpie71 's lead.  Not always easy to find things, but I find it useful, to keep afloat.

February means that halfamoon has opened - fourteen days of celebrating women in fandom.  


I'm not feeling any fiction nudging to be written by me, but I'll be contributing by posting about some women characters, anyway, and maybe about a TV series which is crammed with women characters.

Warm greetings to you all, this International Women's Day. Celebrating awesome women,but also proclaiming the right of all women to a fair go, to freedom, and to decent, safe working conditions.

Time has got away from me (what, again?) and I have no long learned post about admirable women to offer, nor especially useful comments to make.

Short notes on five women, anyway.

marmota_b told me here, in the comments, about pioneering aviatrix Božena Laglerová, who ran a brief but exciting barnstorming career from Europe to the Caribbean and back,

and asakiyume told me about Rowena Simmons, who runs a non-profit helping women to start their lives after imprisonment.

and I found by accident just a short while back about the Lady Anne of Brittany, who held firm her entire life in the struggle to keep Brittany independent from France. She was a queen of France as well, twice over, but as sovereign lady of Brittany it is the title Lady which prevails.  (Her court in Brittany nurtured the most brilliant music and poetry of the time.)

Oh, time has run out!  tomorrow, I promise, two more - a poet and a prisoner!

So much is happening!  For starters, the wonderful rthstewart  is running a three sentence ficathon, which is bubbling like crazy, in  a ferment of creativity ranging across more fandoms than you can poke a stick at.  (Moominland!  I'll have to find out about Moominland!)



It's loads of fun, and you don't have to be a member of Dreamwidth to join in, so... :)  now's the time!  
(I've so far posted prompts for Swallows and Amazons, and Wimseyworld, and Hercule Poirot> - any takers?)

And simultaneously there is the halfamoon: 14 days of celebrating women festival happening, with fics nd vids and .... all sorts of fannish female-focussed activity.  In celebration of which, I've just posted a story relating to today's theme, Transformations.  :) 

And as well, there's the Once Upon a Fic Exchange, which is still open for nominations!  I'm not too late!  Hurry, helio, hurry!

This first is very, very sad, but it is also a true story, of a woman who died as part of the struggle against Nazism.  I'm putting it up not that I've anything much to say except how hideously sad war is, and how amazing this woman was.  And that her story needs to be more widely known. (But seriously, not a post to be reading if you're not feeling robust.  It can wait.)

And I watched recently a fictional story- the film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (UK, 1943) which I had seen praised as giving a sympathetic picture of honourable Germans in wartime.  I found it not impressive on that score - how inept and foolish would it be to portray all the members of the other side in war as irredeemably evil, especially when there's been a long history of social and cultural crossover between combatants?  In fact, I found it very straight-down-the-line in terms of what I'd think a wartime propaganda film would be - it's targeted at British (especially the middle class?) with qualms about actions like the destruction of the French navy, or worse.  And I won't go into that here. 

Instead, I was interested in the film as historical document.  It opens in 1902, and thus shows the London and Berlin of that time as reconstructed by people who had actual memory of those locations then.  So the hansom cab bit is how calling up a hansom cab worked, the 'Turkish bath' (ie for gentlemen, in London) is how a 'Turkish bath' was, the German gymnasium is how the German gymnasium looked, and the duel is how the duels worked.  There's plenty of written documentation of those things, of course, but there's so many incidental details that are second nature to those who've lived through something but which are never actually written down - like where the seconds stand in the duel, or the costume of the bath attendant.  The whole movie a classist propagandist fantasy, pretty much, but still based on the real memories of real locations.  So... interesting.  :)

So, as I was saying, I saw the film The Sapphires. It's not a great movie, but it is a likeable, good movie. Especially I liked... well, the thing I liked first was recognising things in it -- the shower-block with corrugated iron walls and the big shower rose felt really familiar, and I guess the light, and the layout of the country town. It looked so much like rural Australia, or the bottom right-hand quadrant of rural Australia, anyway. But that was just a personal response, the warmth of recognition and I guess identification, to some extent.

The film itself - yes, I liked that, too. I liked its warmth and good-heartedness, and of course its recognition of Aboriginal women's history, and the Cummeragunja community (yes, he's a bloke, not a woman, but it's his mother's country he's singing about. This old-timey singer died last year, the same year the film was released, and is ...ah me! much missed, including by people like me who never met him). I love Deborah Mailman, who plays the group member with the least impressive voice (you know the film's about an Aboriginal girl singing group who head off to Viet Nam in 1968, don't you?) and she gives a sterling performance in this. And I really like the actresses whose names I don't know, who play the older women in the community; they give a really terrific feel for life in an ex-mission community (and also in the city, a bit) in the 1950s and 1960s. It's not hyper historically accurate, the language is more 1990s than 1960s, the Viet Nam aspects aren't really well evoked, but... it's heartening, it's got gumption, it's upbeat, it's smart as a tack (Deborah Mailman!) if not true in every particular, it's true enough in the broad sweep of things, and it's just great to see a movie about (okay, a bit fictionalised) four real and gutsy women. :)

And then there's the other stuff I mentioned in the heading. In order:

1. My, but it's hard to restart a story that has been interrupted. :( Not that I've managed to restart it. Then there's the horrible part when I read things I wrote not all that long ago, and think despairingly "I wish I could write as well as that now". Does that happen to anyone else?
2. Did you see the story about prairie dog language? We are so close to recognising that animals think and feel. And when we do - oh, there should be huge changes!
3. Some months after beginning to use "being human" as a tag, meaning things I was writing about just people being people,and the human condition and .. that sort of thing...I discover there's a television series (two! UK and US) of that name. Apologies to anyone who was misled by the tag. :)

Well, I think my Doctor Who catch-up marathon is nearly at an end.  Last night I watched Season 6, Episode 10, The Girl Who Waited, and was totally, totally outraged and Fed Up.

It's been building for a while, what with all the "Do I have your permission to give your wife a hug?" business, and "Ask my parents, if you want to marry me" and "She's a woman" (line tossed off by the Doctor somewhere, to explain irrationality).  But that episode... that took me over the edge.

And so I have written my second, and I think last-ever, Doctor Who fanfic, to fix things once and for all.   It's here.  (Ummm.. and it's violent.)

(The first was also to fix things, and like this one, written in a rush of fury.  :)   That time, it was for Donna and Mercy Hartigan, both of whom got a rough deal, and one of whom needed all the help that the other could give.  And it isn't violent.)

Yes, a day early for International Women's Day, but I am off tomorrow at about six a.m. for a two-day IWD celebration, and expect to be offline for the duration, so... International Women's Day greetings to everyone out there! :)   ( Tried to make that all come out in colour, but it doesn't seem to be.  Bother! )
Okay, continuing the greetings... I am very grateful for all the women-positive stories that I read by you all; I believe strenuously in the power of literature to shape culture*, and I think all your stories are terrific shapers!  Thank you!

And, not unconnected! -- I know I am often reading things (or watching things!) miles after everyone else, so I expect everyone else has seen this, but I only recently came across this article relevant to women-positive writing -- Seanan's McGuire's post about "Things I will not do to my characters. Ever." (trigger for discussion of use of rape trope in fiction.)

*I also believe in political action, hence the music choice.  :)