| |  Illustration by Ellis van der Does | I’m sitting in Flappers, the unfortunately named comedy club, fidgeting with my notebook. It’s a weeknight, dinnertime, and I nervously shift my weight on the leather bench that runs the length of the club’s dark main room. I pull a pen from my bag and turn the palm of my hand into a sweaty cheat-sheet. Slurping a Coke, I wait for the host — a bubbly blonde whose bit revolves around not being pretty, even though she essentially embodies the Western beauty standard — to call my name. Beside me, a friend calmly munches some buffalo wings that will soon give her food poisoning. The host calls her name — Ali Liebegott! — and she shuffles to the stage, grabs the mic, and settles down on a leather couch, relaxed as if she’s home watching a Mets game. Ali has done this before, and I take notes. She seems totally at ease in her skin, isn’t shooting desperate “like me” energy at the crowd. I can do that — act like I don’t give a shit when really my stomach is full of lurch and gurgle. Other resources in my aspiring-comedian tool kit include a strange immunity to shame and a willingness to expose my thoughts and behavior to utter strangers. I feel confident. But can I tell a joke? Ali can. She’s the one who’d suggested I try stand-up in the first place a few days before as we commiserated over the state of our creative souls. Having been working in Hollywood for years now, Ali juggles the strange challenge of enabling other people’s visions while trying to remain true to her own artistic impulses. “That’s why I like stand-up,” Ali said, and elaborated: The pressure is off. While you don’t want to bomb, there isn’t a producer standing in the wings, toying with your future health insurance. You can be deeply, weirdly yourself. “And,” she said, “it’s just exciting to do something new.” The thought of standing before a room full of strangers, daring to think I might make them laugh, gave me the tiniest burst of adrenaline. Imagine how terrifying/exciting it would be to actually do it. I was in. Now the chirpy host is bringing me up onstage, where the lights are reassuringly bright, blinding me to all the eyes upon me. I briefly worry that I won’t be able to see the smaller light set that will flash at me when I’ve hit my time. I worry that I’m going to go blank, trip over the mic cord, develop a new and embarrassing nervous tic. Then I fire up my mental Zamboni and smooth the chatter till my mind is slick as ice. I launch into my set, a three-minute thing that begins awkwardly with the absurd grossness of anti-abortion billboards. “You knit me together in my mother’s womb? Barf.” I hear a chuckle or two. “What about ‘Thanks for not aborting me?’ Is that what my mother is waiting for?” I query the audience. “Is that what this vibe is between us? Is she waiting for me to thank her for not aborting me?” The audience likes this, and I feel jazzed from their laughter. It pushes me deeper into my set. I recount for them my birth story, told in my mother’s charming, outside-of-Boston accent, like the Kennedys but trashy. I liken the “big, Irish nurse” to Brienne of Tarth, eliciting loud laughs from those who get the joke. I express sympathy for those who don’t get the joke and maintain my boundary around translating pop culture to them. More laughs. I feel like the audience and I are pals, and I grow looser, my body language taking on a type of dance. I pace a bit, toss my hair. It all feels natural. My piece ends with a comparison of my parenting style with my mother’s. My mother will get defensive about her choices, sniping, “Well, you turned out all right.” I question whether or not I, with my drug addiction and alcoholism, my slutty lesbianism and TMI literary career, my forays into the sex industry and my trusty bottle of Lexapro, truly can be said to have turned out “all right.” I end my set to applause and leave the stage embarrassed at how triumphant I feel. The bro sitting in front of me gives me a fist bump as I slide past him back into my seat. “Good set,” he says. Ali smiles and nods, patting my shoulder. “You did great, Famig.” It’s short for Famiglia, our longtime nickname for one another. The open mics at Flappers function as de facto auditions for the club’s curated shows, and soon enough, an invitation to perform at a women’s comedy show called “Cookies and Sweatpants” arrives in my inbox. My first booking! It’s really happening. Like seemingly every other female in the city of Los Angeles, I’m officially a stand-up comedian. *** Before I did stand-up, I got my start onstage during the “confessional”-poetry craze of the early ’90s. (It was a precursor to the poetry slam, which eventually got so big it imploded.) In 1993, in San Francisco, the Mission District teemed with open mics, as did the Tenderloin and the Haight. Poetry Above Paradise, run by Manic D Press publisher Jennifer Joseph, was the place to be featured. But you had to earn it, leaving a good impression on the tender yet cynical Joseph, who shared her commentary in a wry, Daria-esque tone. When I finally got my coveted invitation to feature, it was alongside Ali. We both felt like we’d arrived, our names listed in the ad in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. We spoke our very personal poetry into the mic, detailing our traumas and tragedies, our heartaches, our political gripes, the small ways we got our revenge. Estrogen Junkies, Ali had named the night, making a flyer of clip-art Victorian women flinging fruit and vegetables at one another. After the show, she sold copies of her chapbook, No Pink Bows, and I sold copies of mine, Oppress Me Before I Kill Again. We were young and queer and legitimately wounded, but there was humor in our work, even back then, at our most humorless. From writing confessional poetry, I shifted to writing short vignettes about my life, pieces created to be read aloud at open mics such as Sister Spit, the all-girl event I co-hosted with the filmmaker (then-poet) Sini Anderson. These pieces would go on to make up my first memoirs, but at the time, publication seemed far too wild of a thing to hope for. People like me — broke, queer, angry, unschooled — didn’t get books, I thought. And that was fine. I mainly felt compelled to express myself to my immediate community of writers and queers, trading my chapbooks for beer. And that was enough. I asked them to bear witness to my stepfather’s sexual misconduct, my screwed-up attempts at heterosexuality, the terrifying night my friends and I tried to help a prostitute who’d been beaten by some men. My own forays, both frightening and revelatory, into the sex industry. These were heavy topics, and I didn’t shy away from their weight. But woven through the pain, almost subconsciously, was humor. And that, I quickly learned, was everything. Humor made my most strident political proclamations more palatable, because they took the piss out of my righteousness just the tiniest bit. Enough to make the drunken boors in the audience (of which there were many) tilt their head and listen to me, the little “feminazi,” with surprisingly opened ears. Humor signaled out to my people, the fellow queers in the audience, that they were seen; the strange quirks and glitches of our young community, I saw them too, and look, we could share a laugh about it. This was no small relief. Queer culture in the ’90s was under siege everywhere, helping to affirm the stereotype of the “humorless lesbian” as we responded, unsmiling, to the laughs America had at our expense. What an affirming relief to see that we weren’t humorless, we could laugh — laugh at the idiocy of culture, of jerks persecuting us. As a teenager, I was part of yet another subculture not known for their funny bone — goth. But my spooky friends and I spent most of our time looking for things to laugh at: The dark humor put forth by John Waters in his earliest, filthiest films obsessed us; we would constantly repeat lines spit from the lips of Divine and Edith Massey. We would mimic Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest with queenie flair; we would find humor in obscure bits of dialogue from films like Desperately Seeking Susan and Times Square. We would make fun of our families and other tormentors, building a vast repertoire of in-jokes and imitations. In my early 20s, moving to San Francisco, finding a community of both wild, TMI queers and wild, TMI poets broke me out of a certain dour spell, reconnecting me to the joys of connection. And more than sex, even, human’s number one mode of connection is humor. *** Recently I was asked to do a set at Weirdo Night, my favorite art-comedy-performance event, curated by the artist Jibz Cameron in the guise of her performance ego, Dynasty Handbag. I was a fan of watching Jibz do her own crazy thing as Weirdo Night’s host, a sort of stand-up breakdown involving spandex and lingerie, disturbing makeup, and stream-of-consciousness ruminations that bring to mind the accidentally lucid ramblings of a schizophrenic. I’d seen John Early rhapsodize on Britney Spears’s vocal fry, seen Ali enact a bizarre, depression-themed game show called Sad-Sacks. Comic Atsuko Okatsuka somehow made comedy about the unfunny experience of living undocumented in a garage, then brought out her charming, elderly grandmother for a dance routine. I was scared to perform in front of this audience. Doing comedy in Burbank, where just being the kind of gay I am can bring some shocked giggles, is one thing; Weirdo Night people are sophisticated. When Jibz called my name, I clambered onto the stage in a pair of platform heels and a thrifted Calvin Klein dress. The lights weren’t quite as bright as the bulbs at Flappers, and I could see the faces of the people sprawled on carpets on the floor, seated in plastic chairs, lining the risers against the back wall. I recognized all of them as the community I’d been sharing my stories with for decades, offering our shared trauma for mutual validation, resting in relieving moments of laughter before setting off to war again. It struck me that with comedy, I’d reversed the order of things. Rather than centering the pain and giving it an edge of humor, I, like most all the female comics, queer comics, and comics of color I’ve become inspired by, have centered the humor against a subtle backbeat of survived trauma. The laughs, I realized, are hard-won. The triumph I feel as I crack my jokes is a pride at having overcome a certain amount of bullshit that at one point had threatened to take over my life. I launched into my bit, and they responded with laughter. Michelle Tea is the author of a dozen books, most recently the essay collection Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions and Criticisms. | | | | |  Illustration by Celia Jacobs | In order to picture my mother before she had me, I have to go back in time. It’s 1947, and she has newly arrived in New York from Steubenville, Ohio. She’s living at the Barbizon, a hotel for single women on the Upper East Side. Her next-door neighbor is a young acting student, Grace Kelly. The two women become close friends. While Grace goes to acting classes, my mother looks for work as a model. She signs with Eileen Ford, and soon enough, her face is on the cover of magazines. Growing up, the mother I knew wasn’t glamorous or social. By the time I was born in 1959, she had left Manhattan, her social life and her career behind her. My advertising-executive father had insisted my mother and two older sisters move to a remote corner of Long Island by the water, far away from her beloved Upper East Side. As a child, I remember running my fingers over the beautiful furs and gowns in her closet, including the pale-yellow chiffon dress she had worn as a bridesmaid to Princess Grace at her wedding in Monaco. My mother never wore her pretty dresses anymore, and she didn’t see her friend Grace. But they still wrote to one another, the letters from Monaco arriving in creamy envelopes with a red-and-gold wax seal.  One of my mother's modeling images. Photo by George Barkentin |
During my childhood, I was just as isolated as my mother. While other children boarded the school bus in the mornings, I mostly stayed at home. My days were filled with watching TV in my bed or playing on the small inlet beach at the back of our house. My mother, the person who was supposed to protect me, raise me, and encourage me, instead kept me home from school for the majority of my childhood. She was convinced I was sick, taking me to doctor after doctor. She told me I had rheumatic fever, anemia, a weak heart, or internal bleeding. The reality was that I was fine, but my mother was not. She was so distant and sad, completely closed off from the world. My father did nothing to help. He was almost always absent, consumed with his work and social life in Manhattan. He remained oblivious to his wife and children, except for those times when he showed his frustration by yelling at us. I left home when I was 14, moving in with my older sister in New York, finally going to school and getting the education I knew I deserved. Not long after I left home, my parents divorced. In the years to come, my mother struggled financially and with her fragile mental health. In 1979, my sister Robin died in a car accident. Three years later, Grace also died in a car accident. These two events in quick succession devastated my mother. After many years of trying and failing to stay in stable housing, she gave up on her attempts to live a “normal” life. She began living at a homeless shelter on the Upper East Side, only a few blocks from the Barbizon Hotel, where she had first met Grace and where she spent her happiest years. During this time, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Finally, I had some explanation for why she had behaved the way she did, why she’d kept me home from school all those years. She was sick, suffering from delusions. Her diagnosis brought me insight, but it didn’t bring much peace. We tried to get help for my mother, to find her a place to live, to get her treatment. She refused all offers. In the coming years, she continued to live at the shelter. She spent her days sitting in Central Park or going to Bergdorf Goodman, where she used the basins in the ladies’ lounge to wash.  My mother with my sisters and I. Courtesy Nyna Giles |
By then, I was married, with my own children. Each month, my husband and I paid my mother’s bills at a local diner, so she would never go hungry. I accepted her collect calls. I went to visit her whenever I could. Often, we’d meet at the little square on 58th Street that she used to go to each day to pray. My mother believed if she sat there and prayed long enough, the square would be elevated to a shrine for humanity and that miracles would come to pass. After a decade living at the shelter, my mother developed a heart problem and could no longer legally stay there. We found her a place at an adult home on Long Island. But she wasn’t happy. She missed the city, her corner of the Upper East Side, the little square where she used to go to pray. When she died in 2007, at the age of 78, her passing left me with a profound and unshakable sorrow. I was grieving not only for the loss of my mother but for the woman I never knew. There were so many questions I couldn’t answer. I began collecting photographs of my mother from her modeling days, poring over old issues of the magazines where she had been featured. I looked through family photographs. In the pictures before my birth, my mother is always smiling; she seems to radiate happiness. But in the photos taken after I was born, something in her has shut down — her eyes are filled with quiet despair; it was as if she’d become a different person. Was it possible my mother started showing symptoms of her mental illness only after my birth? Most people with schizophrenia experience their first symptoms in their teens or early twenties, but my mother was 31 when she had me. When I was born, she underwent a C-section and an emergency hysterectomy. Could that have contributed to the onset of her mental illness? During my quest to find out what had happened to my mother, I met with the world’s leading expert on schizophrenia, Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, chair of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center. I told Dr. Lieberman as much as I could about my mother’s story and her symptoms. He listened to me intently, then he explained to me that my mother had been misdiagnosed. She didn’t have schizophrenia. Instead, she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, a rare, devastating condition affecting mothers in the first few weeks after birth. Symptoms of PPP can be extreme; delusions are common. In my mother’s case, she was convinced that I was sick and she needed to keep me home to protect me. For so many years, I had been looking for the reason: “Why?” It turned out the reason was me — my birth had been the moment that my mother’s life changed forever. I reached out to another mental-health professional, Dr. Diana Barnes, a specialist in maternal mental health. She confirmed Dr. Lieberman’s diagnosis. From Dr. Barnes, I learned that PPP is highly treatable, especially if caught early. The tragedy is this: had my mother been diagnosed and treated in the months after my birth, she likely would have recovered. Since learning the truth about my mother, I’ve spent countless hours wishing I could go back in time and help her get the treatment she desperately needed after my birth; our lives might have been so different as a result. While I know it’s too late to change her story, maybe I can help others by sharing what happened to her, and to me. And perhaps the miracle she used to pray for at her little square will finally come to pass. Nyna Giles is an author, advocate, and marketing professional. | | | | |  2014-2017 Photo by Georgie Wileman | Georgie Wileman, an England-born, New York–based photographer, is tearing the façade off endometriosis. Her severe pain began when she was thirteen, but Georgie wasn’t diagnosed until she was 26. Her case isn’t unique; from onset of symptoms, endometriosis takes on average eight to ten years to diagnose. One in ten women and trans men endure this crippling, misunderstood disease. In the past three years, Georgie’s life has been consumed by six operations — her body reeling from unrelenting pain. But she refuses to suffer in silence. Often dubbed the “invisible disease,” endometriosis is a gynecological disorder where lesions similar to the lining of the uterus grow elsewhere in the body, repeatedly bleeding, scarring, and fusing internal organs. Symptoms are usually worse during one’s period, often causing pain and contractions similar to labor. Cruelly, this disease is also a leading cause of infertility, something Lenny’s co-founder Lena Dunham has written about poignantly. And yet, the vast majority of people haven’t heard of endometriosis, or think it’s just painful periods, sometimes restricting pregnancy. “That’s not true,” Wileman clarifies: “There’s just so much to this disease that goes unseen and misunderstood, and we need to address that because this is a disease that can completely disable someone — it can take parts of your bowel, it can mess up your reproductive system, it can grow in your lungs. I’ve met women who have collapsed lungs during their period. I’ve met a woman who had lesions in her nose and had nosebleeds during her period. This is rare. But none of this seems to be known by a vast amount of doctors. You’ll see people visiting their doctors repeatedly for classic endometriosis symptoms: pelvic pain, abdominal swelling, bowel problems, bladder problems, lower back pain. They still go undiagnosed. There is so little understanding of things like the health impact of not being able to eat or digest food properly; they don’t realize the effect it can have on the immune system, often causing repeated infections. The fatigue can sometimes restricting people to a wheelchair; there can be issues with adhesions that cause pain. I’ve had strangers bless me in the street or ask to pray for me. My neighbor thought I was terminally ill. This disease is madness.” Presently, this madness is portrayed online by makeup-clad models with slightly squinted eyes, holding their gut as if they have mild indigestion. Wileman knows that’s bullshit. Using photography, she’s on a mission to reinvent endometriosis representation. Her series ENDOMETRIOSIS uses cuttingly honest images to expose what this illness looks like. Given her recent immobility, this series primarily documents Wileman’s own experience — though she says she prefers “to be behind the lens, not in front of it.” She’s presently expanding the series into a book to document the extent of this disease’s impact. It’s often believed to predominantly affect childless white women in their 30s; solely because this demographic often has the wealth, resources, and privilege to pursue their diagnoses. “Endometriosis affects one in ten born with a uterus, across race and gender identity. I want my work to represent that.” Wileman’s full series is available online. In the captions below, she unpacks the vision behind nine of her most iconic photographs. I had the circular tattoo done my arm after my fourth surgery (top image). I was struggling emotionally, and to me, the circle represented continuation, and the continuation of life. What followed were two more operations within a year, adding three more scars to my abdomen. Unfortunately, this is often the way with endometriosis — it’s a ruthless, unrelenting, exhausting disease.  Photo by Georgie Wileman |
The physical pose here is dictated entirely by pain. I can lie only on my left side. Labor-like contractions pull my knees to chest. The pain is blinding, constant. It grits your teeth and twists your hands. Shock and detachment pull you in and out of your reality. You feel as if you understand what it is to die. This image is titled YOU CAN GET DRESSED NOW. Being left alone in a room with blinds drawn to get dressed after an invasive and painful exam becomes almost regular in the treatment of endometriosis. There is a continual breach of your body and boundaries in each appointment and operation, a gradual sense of detachment from the skin you live in.  Photo by Georgie Wileman |
Throughout the relentless treatment of endometriosis, there are times of hesitant hope, of relief. We often have to fight for months or years for the surgical intervention we desperately need. The parallel shown in this picture was important to me. The brutality of the bandaged and glued incisions. Dappled heat-pad burns rising to meet cuts in skin, made to remove disease beneath. Abdomen enlarged, having been filled with air during surgery for better access to my organs. The recent surgery hinted to again by orange antiseptic across my ribs. The almost-peaceful placement of hands and open mouth soften the image, and hint toward the complexity of what endometriosis really means.  Photo by Georgie Wileman |
My experience of the medical community until recently involved raised eyebrows, misdiagnoses, and allegations. I’ve been called a prima donna, a liar, a drug addict. I tried to advocate for my health care, but in every appointment, sitting across from doctors and specialists, I choked at the thought that they didn’t believe me. I downplayed my pain. I smiled through doctor’s appointments while squirming in chairs, abdomen stretched and distended. I joked with ambulance teams while they peeled me off pavements. I still do. I can’t bear anyone believing I am playing into this — that this is what I want.  Photo by Georgie Wileman |
Sometimes it’s effective to remove the subject from the frame and show the space they’ve left behind. This was where I lived for nine months, during this most recent stint of being homebound. As a photographer, I’m drawn to light. Even in the most desperate of times, I can’t help but see the sad beauty in the day-to-day of what I live.  Photo by Georgie Wileman |
Endometriosis is a cruel disease. It swells your stomach, makes you walk, sit, hold yourself as if you’re pregnant. It causes labor contractions, forces you into maternity clothes, and requires regular ultrasounds. And yet it is a leading cause of infertility. I once held my partner’s hand in a room lit by a sonogram screen as it was confirmed I have adenomyosis, the disease that would eventually take my uterus. The parallel of what this moment could have been was bitterly present. I was pushed to get pregnant by gynecologists, who falsely believed pregnancy would cure endometriosis. I later pleaded in words and on paper for the hysterectomy I knew I needed for adenomyosis. I was forced to reiterate to strangers in scrubs that I would adopt children and love them as my flesh and blood — all before I'd been able to say goodbye to those children I was losing.  Photo by Georgie Wileman |
When you begin to document yourself, you start to notice things you would in a subject. Behaviors and habits that reveal a part of themselves they didn’t know they were disclosing. I wanted to show these details in myself that exposed this disease. I have always twisted my hands when in pain, distorted my fingers or pushed fingernails into my palms. Grabbing the sheet on an ER bed was something I felt was important to include. It’s an image I’ve witnessed on repeat.  PAIN RETURNED, FIFTH SURGERY SCHEDULED Photo by Georgie Wileman |
This portrait was taken on the day it was decided I needed a fifth surgery. My fourth was an excision surgery (the "gold standard" treatment for endometriosis), an operation I hoped would be my last. My eyes give up exhaustion, heartbreak. Jaw tight with anger. Skin red from tears. That’s what this day and this disease are to me. Exhaustion, heartbreak, anger, pain. Leah Fessler is a Brooklyn-based journalist and public speaker, covering gender, work, and relationships for Quartz, The Atlantic's sister site. Twitter: @LeahFessler Georgie Wileman is a British photographer based in Brooklyn. Georgie’s work has been exhibited in London and LA and published internationally. Instagram: @georgiewileman | | | | |  Illustration by Louise Reimer | Janaki Rajendran doesn’t remember how many times she and her family were displaced during Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war. She remembers that material possessions were always the first to go: clothes, cooking utensils, and other household goods. And then people’s jobs disappeared. Her husband was a daily wage laborer in the construction industry, but when the fighting broke out and continued unabated for decades, no one was building anything of significance. Rajendran, now 52, was first displaced in 1983, when the country’s civil war between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (also known as the Tamil Tigers) and government forces broke out. Tensions between the country’s majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils had been brewing for decades following British colonial rule. In the 1950s, the Sinhalese, resentful of their place and treatment under the British, reasserted their culture, language, and Buddhist religion by taking steps like making Sinhalese the national language, effectively reserving the best jobs for their own people. The predominantly Hindu Tamils, who make up about 10 percent of Sri Lanka’s population, were angry that the new constitution, formed in 1972, formally made Buddhism the country’s primary religion. Civil unrest followed as the Sinhalese imposed discriminatory laws, leading to the proliferation of militant Tamil groups. The Tamil Tigers, which formed in 1975, were fighting to create an independent Tamil state called Tamil Eelam in the north and east of the island. Their goal wasn’t achieved, and the United Nations estimates 150,000 were killed over almost 30 years of war marked by brutal atrocities on both sides. Rajendran wasn’t overly political in those days. But still, she “had to face the consequences of the war,” she says, including giving birth twice while she was displaced. Over the years, her family lived in bombed-out houses of relatives and displacement camps in the northern part of the island, where they had no opportunity to make a living wage. Twice she and her family ended up living in camps in the capital, Colombo, where at least her husband could earn money. “I remember always running with a baby in my arms,” she remembers. “Women were suffering. I know some who had to deliver in underground bunkers. I saw all the women suffering like I did; it wasn’t unique to me.” Although Sri Lanka’s war ended almost a decade ago, its legacy is omnipresent. Bullet-ridden homes line the pot-holed streets in Jaffna, the capital city of the northern province of Sri Lanka. The province’s missing men are another obvious legacy. In a deeply conservative society, many of these women are heads of households; thousands are widowed, while thousands more have injured husbands or husbands who are still missing. Throughout the war, women played pivotal roles: they were fighters with the Tamil Tigers, they were activists. They survived atrocities. And so when the war ended, women, particularly former Tamil Tigers cadres, expected that their newfound freedom and activism outside the home over the previous decades would translate into a progressive society, one with less rigid norms and expectations. But they were wrong. In the postwar era, countless Tamil women have become primary income earners for their families, leaving behind traditional domestic roles. They’ve entered the public realm to engage politically, economically, and socially — something many could never have imagined prior to the war. But while they’ve broken ranks, they are still bound by harsh cultural and social practices. Many women suffered gender-based violence and abuse during the conflict and continue to do so. Domestic abuse, alcohol addiction, and mental-health problems abound. Women, many of whom are widowed, have crippling trauma and face poverty and the stigma of being single. Rajendran never imagined she would be a politician, but she knew she was dedicated to improving women’s lives, especially those who had suffered the most throughout the course of the war and its aftermath. In 2011, she ran for Sri Lanka’s version of local elections in her district just outside Jaffna city, called Thenmarachchi. While Sri Lanka is a middle-income country, Thenmarachchi and the surrounding villages lack any proper roads, electricity, and a constant water supply. “At the time, I had no idea about the governance structure and how it functioned, but that was true of all women,” Rajendran says. While a free education system was introduced in post-independent Sri Lanka, education favored boys over girls, whose roles were confined to the house. “I knew women were suffering because of it: they were being kept out of all the policy decisions,” Rajendran explains. “I thought, I have to break through this so even if I don’t achieve anything, the fact that I’ve made that breakthrough means women can, after me, take it further.” Of the fifteen people who were elected in her district, she was the only woman. But her position wasn’t without its challenges. Not only was she flying blind, with no training and no woman before her to look up to, she faced relentless sexual harassment and hostility from the community, such as men calling her names for leaving the house and commenting on her appearance. “2011 was a very dangerous time,” Rajendran says. It was when Sri Lanka’s largest ethnic Tamil party, the Tamil National Alliance, won two-thirds of local councils in the north and east of the island. The central government was against Tamil politics of all sorts. “Women in the community weren’t supportive. They were very, very scared to be seen with me,” she recalls. Nonetheless, with publicly available funds from taxes and fines, she managed to help bring electricity into villages that had only dreamed of it, along with water pumps and cemeteries for the communities to bury their loved ones. But she didn’t do enough during her five-year term for women and children, she says, which is why she ran for another term earlier this year. And she was successful. In February, she was reelected as a member of her local government municipal body. “I want to make women economically independent and socially better off from their current position. I have to study what can be done to provide them with livelihood initiatives,” she says. “Last time, I was the only woman in local government. I couldn’t take forward women’s issues. Now, it’s changed.” Two years ago, recognizing that Sri Lanka needed to improve the status of its women in war-affected areas, a local organization, Center for Women & Development, began training Tamil women interested in entering the political sphere. At first, only a handful of women turned up. Now, it is training 300 women across five districts, in no small part because in 2016, Sri Lanka’s parliament introduced a 25 percent mandatory quota for women in local government to increase their participation in politics. Rajendran has been participating in the training, which includes public speaking, engaging the media, and tips on how to figure out the most pressing problems facing particular communities. “In Sri Lanka, people only know men to participate in politics, and they just know women to be in the kitchen,” says S. Vimaleswary, who works at the organization and carries out the training along with other female staff. “Men don’t understand women’s issues,” she says, including a desire for economic independence, job opportunities, and protection from gender-based violence, and the stigma of being widowed. “Now we have more and more women wanting to get into politics. They want to end abuse, drug and liquor use in their communities, and to improve the status of women.” But there’s a long road ahead. For now, Rajendran is hopeful about the progress she and other women involved in politics can make in the future. “There’s still trouble, but at least women are now supporting each other. I’m still learning, but this time … I will talk to women, and I will say, ‘I will do something for you.’” Reporting for this story was supported by a grant from the South Asian Journalists Association. Sophie Cousins is a health journalist based in South Asia. She is currently writing a book on women’s health in the region. | | | | |  | 2016 almost killed me. In an emotional way. A head fog was followed by a depression that felt like I was walking around with weights strapped to both my legs. The weight settled into my bones, and I would often leave class to sit in a bathroom stall and stare at the walls. I felt like a tourist in my own life. I wondered if everyone around me was real. Come 2017, I felt slightly better emotionally, but the New Year greeted me with a sore tailbone. Days later, I hobbled onto a train, got off in Manhattan, and hobbled into an emergency room. Fluid was trapped under my skin, so I got around sixteen injections, gripped a med student’s hand, and a doctor sliced me open. The next few weeks went off without a hitch. But then I caught my first cold of 2017. It was uneventful. I blew boogers into some tissues and took naps. The next one was bad. It was February and cold, and I had an annoying sore throat for over a week. I almost cleared out a dollar store’s cough-drops section. I joked on social media that someone had placed a mal de ojo on me and that I needed a gold-eye necklace and a bunch of bodega saint candles to protect me. Another cold came, and I shared witty bilingual memes on Facebook about Vicks vapor rub, aka Vi-Vaporu, and lighting Jesus candles in hopes of ridding myself of this “evil.” The next one hit me in late March. It felt all kinds of wrong. I walked to the pharmacy that night and had to stop to lean on a gate. On the way back home, I sat down at the curb and tried to breathe. A delivery guy stopped and asked me if I was all right. I said yes and kept walking home. I made it halfway up the stairs to the second floor of my house and lay down for a few minutes. My dad asked if I needed help getting up the stairs. I told him no and just waited to stop feeling dizzy for a little bit. I eventually got up and stumbled into my room. My mom reminded me that I used to catch horrendous colds as a kid. I remembered weeks of coughs that left me listless and sore. My grandmother would nag her about why she had raised us up here in el frío. She used to think the cold in New York was unnatural and always made me wear even more shirts than my mom did. “Mamá saved you once,” my mom told me. “You had this cold that didn’t leave. I had to go out in the snow into Bushwick, where this Puerto Rican lady sold these herbs. I gave you the oil from it, and you got better.” I don’t remember that. I do remember someone putting leaves on my chest at one point and having me inhale the steam from smelly water when I was in elementary school. I remember my dad soaking a lime wedge in warm rum, tea, and honey and making me suck on it. He said it helped his colds as a kid and that he was trying to numb my throat with that and those pharmacy sprays so I could actually finish a meal. And now I really like mojitos. My grandmother used to claim that she’s the reason I’m alive. Maybe she’s right. She did give us Dominican cough syrups that are hard to find here. I’m not sure if they’re legal here, because the ones my aunt brings over when she visits don’t have ingredients on the label, but they work. Better-known ones that for sale in the United States have ingredients like honey, eucalyptus oil, and propylparaben … whatever the hell that is. She always reminded me of the time I coughed so much I was turning pale. And of the time I had a high fever and only she brought it back down. Before she died, I used to joke with her that I’d compile her remedies and bedtime stories into a novel. The rest of 2017 was filled with stomach pains, chest pains, headaches, and a weird bout of forgetfulness that scared me. I texted my boyfriend in April to ask what we did in February. I made careless errors in my work. I forgot to respond to emails. I’d try to get started on a freelance assignment and then end up randomly napping on the floor, on my bed, or at my desk in my room. The fatigue was like an ugly sweater I couldn’t take off. I got another bad cold and days of headaches in May after getting my hospital bill for January. “I think my immune system gave up,” I told my mom. “No, it’s ’cause you’re always on your damn phone,” she said. “And because you walk around the house barefoot, ponte tus medias.” I started documenting all of her reasons why I was sick on my personal Facebook. My favorite one was that electronics gave out wave thingies that hurt people. I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t how laptops worked. Friends who also happen to be Caribbean and/or Latino have sometimes sided with her. Some have suggested teas; others have asked if I put the Vicks vapor rub on my chest, and back, and forehead, and nose, and stomach. I would have preferred a real mal de ojo to being that sick. I spent a lot of my free time at home in my room. I was lonely. And I was tired of using what little money I had on cough drops. November rolled around. I woke up one morning with the worst throat ache I’d ever had. I could hardly swallow my own spit. I tried coughing to see if it would clear out my throat. I felt like I had swallowed a fish bone. My mother had had enough. She’d quietly put up with seeing me drink name-brand syrups while rejecting her bottles of aceite de bacalao and bitter teas. I remember sitting on the counter of the apartment I grew up in and crying the moment she took the bottle out of the fridge. Cod-liver oil is disgusting. It was worst when it was lumpy and cold and stuck to the back of my tongue with its fishy sludge taste. “Bébetelo,” my mom would say, grilling me if she suspected that I was going to spit it out. This time was slightly different though. I was ready to drink everything and anything to get rid of whatever was making me so sick. She told me to make a list on a Post-it: garlic, limes, lemon, organic honey, ginger, red onions, radishes, and achiote. I went to one of the large Italian grocers in my neighborhood that stocks everything from Middle Eastern snacks to dark chocolates with Polish labels. When I paid for my ingredients, the lady at the register asked me if a cat had my tongue. I pointed to my throat. She nodded sympathetically. I got home, and there was a huge glass jar on the counter. I started chopping. My mom hovered in her usual way and complained that I was doing it all wrong; I couldn’t answer back without feeling like my throat was being scrubbed from the inside, so I just chopped even smaller. I filled the jar with the onions, ginger, radishes, and garlic and poured an entire package of achiote on top. I squeezed in over six lemons and limes and then emptied the bottle of honey. My mom poured the hot water in, mixed, and covered the jar. An hour later, I stirred with a spoon, fished out a radish slice, and ate it. I chugged the murky red water straight from the jar, and it was easier to breathe. It tasted like medicinal, lemony dirt. My mother would sometimes give it to me room temperature, or hand it over in a steaming mug. In a few days, my sore throat was gone. I coughed up chunks of stuff that rattled around inside me, and my chest pains were gone. “Te dije,” she said. “Those cough drops don’t work; mami’s remedies do.” I asked her if she was a witch. She crossed herself and told me to stop talking like that. But I still low-key think she and my grandmother are brujas, but in a Catholic sort of way. Her remedies have gotten rid of my last three colds in record time. Anytime I feel pressure in my chest, I reach for her murky jar waters and eat the contents like a side dish. I’ve learned to like the thinly sliced onions and ginger pickled in honey and lime and salt. Like my mom says, it’s probably the reason why I’m still here, in a functional kind of way. Angely Mercado is a part-time troglodyte who is trying to get her life together and whose work has appeared on The Fix, NPR, Hello Giggles, and more. Follow her on Twitter: @AngelyMercado. | | | | | | | | |
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