­­08/29/2017

My Marriage to Science

In A Lusaka Market

  1. I was seventeen, a freshman at the University of Zambia, and really, just a very sweet and happy girl. I often spent weekends at home, and would catch public transport from the Lusaka market. On this particular evening, the market was noisy and crowded as I waited in a long queue for a minibus to get me home. Two boys that I knew vaguely approached me and invited me to leave the market with them. They were on their way home in a taxi and offered me a lift – they could drop me off at my Mom and Dad’s house, and they’d pay for the trip. I followed the boys without a second’s hesitation. But as we settled into the taxi an old woman shouted at the boys, ‘You’ve done well! Get her away from here, they were going to strip her naked.’ I hadn’t noticed, that the whistling and jeering in the market was not good natured market cacophony. It was violence, directed at my girl’s body. But the boys who escorted me to safety had noticed the men in the market were inciting a mob to sexually assault me. The offer of a taxi ride was a ruse to rescue me.
  1. This incident in the Lusaka market is far from the first time that I felt outraged or just plain demoralized by gender inequality – but it works, as the preface to my research and teaching philosophy. I used the vignette from the Lusaka market in the opening pages of my PhD dissertation. I used it to signify the moment when the girl child began to dedicate her intellectual labor to understanding and advocating against gender based violence and other forms discrimination.
  1. My PhD dissertation matured into a book: “Sex and International Tribunals: The Erasure of Gender from the War Narrative. The book provides a gender critique of international criminal courts and the paternalistic at best, and at worst, patriarchal and racist, narratives they are creating about women’s experience of gender based violence in armed conflict.
  1. It’s a good book. It’s been four years since it was published, but I still get a kick out of googling my name and seeing that a scholar in Pretoria or Rio de Janeiro, has cited the book in their footnotes or course syllabus. Having said that, my findings weren’t groundbreaking: You don’t have to be an expert in the laws of war or to have read the feminist canon to know that the, judiciary lawmakers, the police, social workers, societies – you, me everybody – we hold fast to sexist and racist myths about sexual violence, that draw a thick black line between ‘real rape’ and ‘fake rape.’ As we know, these harmful myths operate in national courts to derail the course of justice. And surprise surprise, rape myths operate in a similar fashion in international criminal tribunals.
  1. Everyday Gender
  1. I haven’t researched or written about war time sexual violence since I defended my PhD in 2010 at a Dutch research institute. What happened is that in the build-up to my public defense I applied for well over 100 jobs. I was indifferent to geography, the only criteria a job vacancy had to meet was that it had ‘human rights,’ ‘gender’ or ‘violence’ in its title. I applied for only three teaching positions, with human rights centers at Georgetown, Wesleyan and The City University of New York. But the bulk of my applications were for humanitarian and development work in Afghanistan, the Congo, Ethiopia, Guinea-Conakry, Kenya, Liberia, Rwanda – everywhere. I took the job with CUNY because they were the only ones that offered me a job. I left Utrecht University to teach international human rights law to undergraduate students in a political science department at a Hispanic Serving Institute in the Bronx. My biggest ask of my students was that they pay attention to the spectacular human rights crises of their day, like Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Rikers Island, even more importantly to everyday, persistent and dull inequalities in their (Lusaka) markets, their commutes between home and classroom and, to think about why and how these should color their critique and their defense of justice and freedoms.
  1. Outside of teaching, I volunteered as an Advocate and Rape Trauma Counselor with a Sexual Assault Response Team serving Emergency Rooms of Public Hospitals in The Bronx. I would receive a phone call, usually at 1AM, ‘we have a victim, can you please come?’
  1. The longer I stayed in my classroom and in the ER, the greater the distance between me and my community of international feminist jurists grew. Instead of preparing a travel grant application for a field visit to Sierra Leone or Cambodia to observe war crimes trials, I began to write: a weekly love letter to my sisters. These emails were snapshots of my performance of gender, race/ethnicity and sexuality in my quotidian life. These 500 word missives grew into 7000 word essays, and finally into what could pass for a book chapter. In 2015 I was awarded a grant by the Bronx Council of the Arts to support my creative nonfiction book project. And I discovered that what I was doing, using personal narrative to trouble established tropes about gender, violence and justice, was a method and a discipline. Auto-ethnography.
  1. But why does auto-ethnographic study need my body, when the bodies I encountered in the ER were colorful enough for ethnographic research on survivors and the violence they experienced chiefly because they were poor and of color. The ‘black sex worker,’ ‘the Hispanic school boy,’ or ‘the middle aged Dominican man with an intellectual disability.’ I told them that I was their friend in the ER. They gave me their rape stories -– as you can imagine, it was tempting to take on the vanity project of being that Somebody that ‘gives the voiceless a voice.’
  1. How does a Somebody write about people who are Nobodies in the hierarchies of violence and the right to justice? Auto-ethnographic writing led me to the fact that I’m both a Somebody and a Nobody. On the one hand: Less than 4% of tenured faculty are black women in this country and yet there I was, a green card holder, a home owner, on the tenure track, by all accounts a good immigrant coasting toward model citizenship. A Somebody.
  1. On the other hand, I live another life in which, people of color have to walk with their hands up, on our commute from home to work – we have to deescalate the fear or loathing we arouse when we encounter gatekeepers in white spaces, such as the Academy. And finally, there is the reality that women cannot keep the church, the media, the state and other gender vigilantes from sticking their hands up our skirts.

III. Spectacle & Solidarity

1­­­­1. Auto-ethnography is a critical observation of my participation as a gendered and raced subject navigating political and cultural sites of oppression and protest in order to create Knowledge.

  1. An example from my writing might sound like this: “I was walking down the street, feeling very beautiful and womanly, in a clingy sun, dress, Ethiopian silver and massive $4 sunglasses. I crossed the street by the Kingsbridge public library and an old white man called out from his convertible, ‘Yeah! Shake that fat ass!’ In Harlem a man, ruined by hard living, asked me to give him a smile. I didn’t smile, I’m afraid of black American men in Harlem. He screamed after me, ‘Fuck you you think your pussy hot!’
  1. This could be taken as an act of solidarity. This confessional portrait that states, that my body is not valued and that I anticipate sexual abuse in the most commonplace activities (just like you do black girl, gay youth, trans woman). But this is not enough. Because actually, although my stories display my body I maintain some control over your response to this exposure. I am not going to fall victim to the spectacle of public shaming by my intellectual peers, nor reduce myself to another exhibit demonstrating the most base and reductionist stories about the coital and conjugal tragedies of African women.
  1. I recently came across a poem Memoirs of a Slave and Queer Person by Putuma Keleka. It has helped me to think beyond glossy solidarity, and to realize, as an auto-ethnographer, my responsibilities to my body and other cheap bodies that I study. She writes:

 I don’t want to die with my

hands up

or

legs open.

  1. So, I, Chiseche, have to want to write with my hands up and with my legs open. This means that I can’t stop at presenting my own victimhood, but I must also clearly own up to the multiple and intentional ways in which my human rights practice and advocacy implicate me in violence, particularly against the most marginal members of our society. What does this look like? So, I wrote about a girl, that I served in the sexual assault emergency room.
  1. I have two strong recollections from my night in the ER with the little crazy girl as I privately referred to her. One: As the Advocate I accompanied the little crazy girl from the sexual assault room to the Psyche ward where a male nurse recognized her and gave her a stern lecture, ‘ You’re back again, this is not good. Is your baby with your sister? And all the time, this same story. Two times, three times now. You must change, you must behave like a lady now. They asked her if she wanted to hurt herself or someone else, and then they watched me walk out of the hospital with her. My other memory is: standing outside the hospital on the black street with the little crazy girl. Very briefly, I thought I could rescue her, take her home, sleep with her in my bed, feed her, fix her. Instead I asked the little crazy girl if I could drop her off somewhere with my taxi, and she said, Just give me a dollar for a cigarette.
  1. I’m really sorry that I’m not a hero in my creative writing about my work around gender and violence. We, I, gave a mentally ill, homeless, child prostitute, the morning after pill, a phony psychiatric evaluation, and a dollar for a cigarette. On another occasion, I colluded with forensic nurses to convey to a survivor that she shouldn’t report her rape because justice is blind unless you are a white homeless junkie that fell asleep outside of a methadone clinic. And as a faculty member I was sexually harassed by a colleague, and then by another colleague and then by a student, and then denied justice by my employer. I handed Kleenex to my sobbing students who were sexually harassed by peers, and then harassed into submission by University Administrators. I conveyed to them that the Universe/University is too racist, too powerful and too sexist for us to fight.
  1. Conclusion
  1. In 2010 my family, including ten children, flew in from the UK, Zambia and the US to attend my public defense. The children described the grand event in this way ‘Mommy Chiseche is getting married to Science.’ I was a single woman, but my family at this academic rite of passage in the Academiegebouw of Utrecht University, treated me with the reverence and admiration usually reserved for a woman in a wedding gown. I struggle with my vows to Science and to victims of human rights abuse, but I have taken them seriously. Creative writing and auto-ethnography do not make me feel or even look like a bride, but at this stage it is this approach to writing that keeps me intimate with and faithful to human rights advocacy through education and research.

08/13/2017

Chiseche Mibenge (2238 words)

Before the Abstract

  1. A Preface: In A Lusaka Market
  1. I studied Law at the University of Zambia. Law is an undergraduate degree program in Zambia. On this particular moment of my recall, I was seventeen, a freshman at the University of Zambia, and really, a very sweet and happy girl. I often spent weekends at home, and would catch public transport from the Lusaka city market. On this particular evening, the market was noisy and crowded as I waited in a long queue for a minibus to get me home. Two boys that I knew vaguely approached me and invited me to leave the market with them. They were on their way home in a taxi and offered me a lift – they could drop me off at my Mom and Dad’s house, and they’d pay for the trip. I followed the boys without a second’s hesitation. And as we settled into the taxi an old woman shouted at the boys, ‘You’ve done well! Get her away from here, they were going to strip her naked.’ I hadn’t noticed, that the whistling and jeering in the market was not good natured market cacophony, it was violence, directed at my girl’s body. But the boys who escorted me from the market had noticed. They had noticed some boys and men in the market inciting a mob to sexually assault me and the offer of a taxi ride was a ruse to rescue me.
  1. This incident in the Lusaka market is far from the first time that I felt outraged or just plain sad and demoralized by gender inequality – but it works, as the preface to my research and teaching philosophy. I used the vignette from the Lusaka market in the opening pages of my PhD dissertation. I used it to signify the moment when the girl child began to dedicate her intellectual labor to understanding and advocating against gender based violence and other manifestations of sex inequality and discrimination.
  1. My PhD dissertation matured into a book titled” Sex and International Tribunals: The Erasure of Gender from the War Narrative. The book provides a gender critique of international criminal tribunals and the paternalistic at best, and at worst, patriarchal and racist, narratives they are creating about women’s experience of gender based violence, specifically rape and other forms of sexual violence.
  1. It’s a good book. It’s been four years since it was published, but I still get a kick out of googling my name and seeing that a scholar in Pretoria, Leiden, Nuremberg or Rio de Janeiro, has cited the book in their footnotes. Having said that, my findings weren’t groundbreaking: You don’t have to be an expert in the laws of war or to have read the feminist canon to know that lawmakers, the judiciary, police, social workers, societies – you, me everybody – we hold fast to sexist and racist myths about sexual violence, that draw a thick black line between ‘real rape’ as opposed to something called ‘fake rape.’ As we know, these harmful myths operate in national courts to derail the course of justice. And surprise surprise, rape myths operate in a similar fashion in international criminal tribunals.
  1. Everyday Gender
  1. I haven’t researched or written about war time sexual violence since I defended my PhD in 2010 at a European research institute. What happened is that I left Utrecht University in The Netherlands, to teach in the United States of America. I taught myself how to teach international human rights law to undergraduate students in a political science department at a Hispanic serving institute in the Bronx.
  1. Sometimes I brought ‘the girl in the floral dress in the Lusaka market’ into my classroom, when I would ask the students to pay attention and think about spectacular human rights crises as well as everyday inequalities in their lives and, and why and how these should color their intellectual and even professional journeys. I learned that for many of my students: the twin towers, firemen, health and wealth disparities, the war against terror, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, colored their early engagement and critique of rights and freedoms. So I worked hard to bring these political markers of transition from NY Millennial childhood into young adulthood, into the class forum as sites from which to study human rights law, culture and ­politics.
  1. One of my favorite moments on campus came when I brought New York Post journalist Gina Otis, the author of a stellar history of the Fire Department of the City of New York as a guest lecturer into my classroom. Her book Firefight: The Century Long Battle to Integrate New York’s Bravest was required reading for my human rights students. Ginger Otis brought representatives of the Vulcans, the association of black firefighters with her, into my classroom, to join her in describing with students the mechanisms of workplace racism and sexism and the arguments in a Title VII civil-rights lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice against the New York City Fire department. I often had guest speakers in my classroom, from the UN International Tribunals, from Princeton, Cornell, Columbia and other illustrious institutions, but this was the first time that I saw my students buy the book, line up, and request autographs, from the author and the Vulcans.
  1. Outside of teaching, I volunteered as an Advocate and rape trauma counselor with a Sexual Assault Response Team serving Emergency Rooms at Jacobi Hospital, North Central Bronx Hospital and Lincoln Hospital in The Bronx. I would receive a phone call, usually at 1AM, and I would be informed that ‘they had a victim’ and ‘could I come in?’
  1. The longer I stayed in my classroom and with the Sexual Assault Response Team, the greater the distance between me and my community of international feminist jurists assessing the work of tribunals in The Hague and beyond grew. But losing my intimacy with the tribunals and legal community showed me that my research interest wasn’t the international prosecution of atrocity, but gender, race/ethnicity and sexuality as social and political categories. In the classroom, in the ER I began to imagine a project that would allow me to document inequality/discrimination by openly inhabiting, experiencing and negotiating it, through an auto-ethnographic approach.
  1. But why an auto-ethnographic study, when the bodies I encountered in the ER were colorful enough for ethnographic research on survivors and the violence they experienced chiefly because they were poor and of color. The ‘black sex worker,’ ‘the Hispanic middle school boy,’ or ‘the homeless, white woman addict.’ These are great stories waiting to be told by a good writer/researcher – it was tempting to take on the vanity project of ‘giving the voiceless a voice.’
  1. There’s a helpful anecdote that explains how and why I took a different direction: In the early days of my life in the Bronx, a young man flirting with me on the 1 train asked me if I was a social worker. I told him I was a teacher, and he said ‘I knew it! I just knew you’re a Somebody.’ The guy in the train correctly read class and privilege in tangible and intangible signals in my bearing and presentation.
  1. How does a Somebody write about people who in the hierarchies of violence, and the right to justice and dignity are Nobodies? I find answer in the fact that I’m both a Somebody and a Nobody. On the one hand: When I began my creative writing project titled ‘That Lady is a Stranger’, I was a unicorn: Less than 4% of tenured faculty are black women in this country, and yet there I was, on the tenure track, a home owner, a green card holder, a good immigrant, coasting toward citizenship.
  1. On the other hand, I also live a secret life in which, people of color have to walk with their hands up, figuratively bit often literally, in shopping malls, when walking down the street, in encounters with the police, in the workplace, in our homes – we have to deescalate the fear or loathing we arouse when we encounter gatekeepers in white institutions; and finally, there is the reality that women, neither important (the Somebodies) nor insignificant women (the Nobodies), can keep the state, the church, the media, and other paternal or patriarchal warders from sticking their hands up our skirts.

III. More than Solidarity: Spectacle & Hands Up and Legs Open

1­­­­4. Auto-ethnography as qualitative research requires that I out myself as a gendered and raced subject navigating political and cultural sites of oppression and protest. I started with short stories, 1000 word snapshots of my quotidian life in NYC.

  1. An example might sound like this: “I was walking down the street, feeling very beautiful and womanly, clingy sun, dress, Ethiopian silver and massive $4 sunglasses. I crossed the street by the Kingsbridge public library and an old white man called out from his convertible, ‘Yeah! Shake that fat ass!’ In Harlem a man, ruined by hard living, asked me to give him a smile. I didn’t smile, I’m afraid of black American men in Harlem. He screamed after me, ‘Fuck you you think your pussy hot!’
  1. This is an act of solidarity, right? This autobiography that states, that my body is not valued, that I anticipate abuse in the most commonplace activities, just like you do (gay youth, trans woman, black girl). But this is not enough. Because actually, although my stories display my body I maintain some control over your responses to this exposure. I do not have to fall victim to the spectacle of public shaming by my intellectual peers, nor reduce myself to another exhibit demonstrating the most base and reductionist stories about the coital and conjugal tragedies of African women.
  1. I recently came across Putuma Keleka’s poem Memoirs of a Slave and Queer Person. It has helped me to think through just how difficult my research and writing project has to be. She writes:

 I don’t want to die with my

hands up

or

legs open.

  1. This informs my responsibilities to my body and the bodies of others who experience violence. I make this demand of myself: I have to write with my hands up and with my legs open. This means that I can’t stop at presenting my own victimhood in solidarity with the victim, but I must also clearly own up to the multiple and intentional ways in which my human rights practice and advocacy implicate me in violence, particularly against the most marginal members of our society. What does this look like? I wrote about a girl, that I served in the sexual assault emergency room.
  1. I have two strong recollections from my night in the ER with the little crazy girl as I privately referred to her. One: As the Advocate I accompanied the little crazy girl from the sexual assault room to the Psyche ward where a male nurse recognized her and gave her a stern lecture, ‘ You’re back again, this is not good. Is your baby with your sister? And all the time, this same story. Two times, three times now. You must change, you must behave like a lady now.. And two: I remember standing outside the hospital on the black street with the little crazy girl. Very briefly, I thought I could rescue her, take her home, sleep with her in my bed, feed her, fix her. Instead I asked the little crazy girl if I could drop her off somewhere with my taxi, and she said, Just give me a dollar for a cigarette. I gave her a dollar and I left her.
  1. I’m really sorry that I’m not a hero in my creative writing about work around gender and violence. What can you do with a mentally ill, homeless, child prostitute except give her the morning after pill, a perfunctory psychiatric evaluation, and a dollar for a cigarette? I have colluded with forensic nurses to convey to a white homeless junkie that she shouldn’t report her rape because she is not the type of victim that justice is intended for. As a faculty member who was sexually harassed by a colleague and then by a student, and then denied justice by my employer, I conveyed to students who were sexually harassed by peers, and by faculty that the University is too powerful, too sexist and too racist for us to fight.
  1. Conclusion
  1. In 2010 my family, including ten children, flew in from the UK, Zambia and the US to attend my public defense. The children described the grand event in this way ‘Mommy Chiseche is getting married to Science.’ I was a single woman up until that point, but my family at this academic rite of passage in the Academiegebouw of Utrecht University, treated me with the reverence and admiration usually reserved for a woman in a wedding gown. I have taken my vows seriously, to Science, to research and to victims of human rights denial. Creative writing and auto-ethnography do not make me feel or even look like a bride but at this stage it is what keeps me intimate with and faithful to human rights advocacy through education and research.

07/20/2017

Before the Abstract

My Marriage to Science

  1. I started my academic career in a Dutch research institute in 2000. In 2010 my family, including eight nieces and nephews, at the time all under the age of nine, attended my public defence. The children described the illustrious event in this way ‘Mommy Chiseche is getting married to Science.’ I was a single woman up until that point, but my parents, siblings and the children flew in from Zambia, the UK and the US and treated me, at this academic wedding in the Academiegebouw of Utrecht, with the reverence and admiration usually reserved for a woman in a wedding gown.
  1. I wrote my PhD within a research institute The Netherlands Institute for Human Right’ affiliated with Utrecht University’s School of Law. I had a very generous grant from the Dutch government of about $200,000 and it supported over a six year period, my living costs, the costs of my academic research, including conference grants, field visits to Rwanda, Tanzania and Sierra Leone, and residency as a visiting scholar with human rights centers in Bradford, Washington DC and Kigali.
  1. My PhD matured into a book, and sometime I hold up this book ‘Sex and International Tribunals: The Erasure of Gender from the War Narrative’ and tell my students, this book cost $200,000.
  1. The book provides a gender critique of international criminal tribunals and the prosecution of gender based violence, specifically rape and other forms of sexual violence. ‘Sex and International Tribunals’ is very much a conversation between legal practitioners – international criminal law is a brand new area of international law. Sure, the international community criminalized genocide seventy or so years ago in the wake of the Holocaust, but until the 1990s with the armed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, genocide prosecutions in criminal or even military tribunals were almost unheard of. So, the decision by the UN to prosecute allegations of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia saw a new field of international law emerge as we, the international lawyers, had to figure out how to collect and weigh evidence, how to prosecute and how to sentence mass atrocity.
  1. It’s a good book, it’s been four years but I still get a kick out of googling myself and seeing that another scholar in Capetown, Leiden or New Haven, and recently someone in Rio de Janeiro, has cited the book in their footnotes and is in conversation with Mibenge. Having said that, my findings weren’t groundbreaking: You don’t have to be a feminist or to have read feminist literature to know that throughout the twentieth century of sexist and racist courtroom tropes are demanded of women victims, patriarchal policing that protected husbands and not violated wives in domestic violence house calls, rape myths, and anti-women laws that create categories such as ‘real’ as opposed to ‘fake rape’, ‘good’ as opposed to ‘bad victims’, ‘forced violent brutal rape’ as opposed to ‘consensual rape.’
  1. As a young researcher I saw myself and my research lifting from early feminist critique and contemporary women of color feminism and critical race analyses in order to critique supranational courtrooms and the narratives we (international lawyers) were creating about women in war. I concluded, as did other scholars that weighed in at the time that these tribunals were inadequately prepared to address the fact that women experience war in multiple ways. Just like men they experience political violence such as rape, sexual humiliation, torture, mutilation, displacement, beatings, forced disappearance, summary execution. And that women’s experience of war trauma, bereavement, violence deserved a careful and meticulous reading as well as a gender analysis.
  1. I haven’t researched or written about international criminal tribunals since I defended my PhD in 2010. What happened is that in the build-up to my public defense in Utrecht in 2010 I applied for over 100 jobs. I was indifferent to geography, the only criteria a job vacancy had to meet was that it had ‘human rights,’ ‘women’, ‘gender’ or ‘violence’ in its title. I applied for human rights and humanitarian work in Liberia, Afghanistan, the Congo, Guinea-Conakry, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya – everywhere. I applied for only three teaching positions, with human rights centers at Georgetown, Wesleyan and CUNY. I was invited for only three interviews for positions: an NGO based in Liberia, the UN in the Congo and with the City University of New York. I didn’t get the Liberia job, I was offered and took the job in Kivu, Eastern Congo and then quit it after six weeks, and within six months of my public defence I was offered and took up the tenure track position at Lehman College.
  1. I taught myself how to teach human rights and international law to undergraduate students in a political science department at a Hispanic serving institute in the Bronx. I brought the Vulcans, NY black firemen into my classroom to explain workplace racism and sexism and the Supreme Court decision in Ricci v. DeStefano to my students, Joan Wallach Scott a Princeton Professor to elaborate on the headscarf controversy in Europe and her book ‘Politics of the Veil, required reading for my students.
  1. One of the most memorable moments with my students ended with a phone call to my Dad, a retired General, in Zambia. It was 21 May, 2011 and he had spent almost two full days watching Al Jazeerah news reporting of Americans chanting USA USA as they celebrated Obama’s assassination of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. My father said I’m sure your students were very happy with the news that Osama is dead.’ I told him the truth which was that my students’ reactions were more muted than the Americans captured by the international news. Muted but also pissed off, incredulous, cynical and disappointed. One student asked ‘Why didn’t they capture him and bring him back here? We should have tried him in our courts.’ My father, a retired Army General and Commander of the Zambia Defence Forces admonished us, ‘My daughter, your students are bad Americans’, and I replied, ‘No Daddy my students are the good Americans.’
  1. In New York City, I felt far removed from the community of scholars researching the Hague based tribunals or tribunals in Cambodia and Lebanon. But losing my intimacy with the tribunals didn’t bother me. What remained at the core of my interest wasn’t the international prosecution of atrocity, but gender, race/ethnicity and sexuality as categories for exploration of the human rights enjoyment, abuse and enforcement.
  1. Outside of teaching I volunteered as an Advocate and rape trauma counselor on a Sexual Assault Response Team serving Jacobi Hospital, North Central Bronx Hospital and Lincoln Hospital in The Bronx. As an Advocate I was, between 8PM and 8AM the friend of the man, woman or child that was admitted to specially designated sexual assault Emergency Rooms. I kept the survivor company and when necessary mediated between the survivor and the Special Victims Division, beat cops, forensic examiner, nurses, doctors, spouses, and parents.
  1. In 2013 or so, I started to send a newsletter to about ten women I love, six of them are sisters. The loveletters were snapshots about quotidian life in New York City.

And the girls and boys, men and women from the sexual assault Emergency room started to sneak into my writing. And the NYPD, and the woman from Mali who plaited my hair, and Moshe and his family and their kosher bakery. These loveletters began to mature into seeds of a book project.

  1. In 2015 I was awarded a grant by the Bronx Council for the Arts to support my book project titled ‘That Lady is a Stranger’ – a memoir that captures my post-doc years in New York City: on the tenure track and the owner of a mortgage and a green card, coasting toward citizenship. And in Spring 2017 I won an award for my story ‘The Protected Party’. The title is taken from an Order of Protection I received from a Judge against a man who stalked me. I recall in this short story that the Judge at the Bronx Family Court looks like Kenny G. and he smiles when he makes me the Protected Party.
  1. The transition from publishing with a University Press to publishing creative nonfiction with the Columbia Journal, a literary journal hasn’t felt like crossing a bridge, rather it feels like I’m reinforcing an existing bridge. The project That Lady Is a Stranger continues Sex and International Tribunals’ gendered critique of human rights discourse. I’m writing about the same themes, gender, race, sexuality and violence. What changes is that I am more forceful about identifying myself as the gender, race and sexed object navigating political and cultural sites of oppression and resistance.

It’s not always winter. I was walking down the street, feeling very beautiful and womanly, in a clingy sun, dress, Ethiopian silver and massive $4 sunglasses. I crossed the street by the public library and an old white man called out from his convertible, ‘Yeah! Shake that fat ass!’

I was on Broadway and 239th, opposite Staples, buying veggies and a man of indeterminate race and class, walking by shouted ‘Slut!’ I looked around to see who he was talking to, but the entire street had turned to look at me.

In Harlem a man, ruined by hard living, asked me to give him a smile. I didn’t smile, I’m afraid of black American men in Harlem. He screamed after me, ‘Fuck you you think your pussy hot!’

And that’s it, that’s the best the street has given me.

  1. Why give that type of violence against me a platform? And I do this because in researching sexual violence in transitional societies, and generally, in developing countries, there are histories and recent histories of fixating only on the most base and reductionist stories about the coital and conjugal tragedies of African women. How to make the Bosniak, the Muslim, the Hutu, the Serb, girl combatant, the Tutsi a whole and complex human and not just a victim of rape or other form of sexual violence?
  1. I detected some well-founded alarm when I opened Sex and International Tribunals with a memory of my body at seventeen years of age. My body has changed a lot since then. Last year I was in Zambia at a shopping mall having breakfast with my mother. A man approached us and we embraced warmly. It was Mr. Banda, he was our house servant more than twenty years ago when I was in my first year of Law School at the University of Zambia. As we embraced he exclaimed ‘where’s your body!’ My seventeen year old body was lush and very juicy, especially my thighs and breasts. And the book that University of Pennsylvania Press published opens with a group of young men in a crowded market, mobilizing a mob, to sexually assault me.

One antidote I have applied when writing about the victim is to clearly show how I am implicated in sexual violence, particularly against the most marginal members of our society. I wrote about a girl, mentally ill, that I served in the sexual assault emergency room.

I once left a little crazy girl on the street outside the hospital after sitting with her throughout her forensic and Psyche exam. She had a sweet smile, like a baby, watching to see if she did it right, if it would make an adult exclaim with pleasure. Everybody knew her, even the hospital cops. A nurse sidled up to me as I followed the little crazy girl in a procession and asked me, Where’s her baby? What happened to her baby? She sat in a wheelchair pushed by a nurse escorted by two police officers. The Ghanaian nurse in Psyche recognized her and he admonished her as gently as he would his own baby sister. You’re back again, this is not good. Is your baby with your sister? And all the time, this same story. Two times, three times now. You must change, you must behave like a lady now. I reproached him, She’s not here to talk about that Sir! She’s here for a psychiatric evaluation before they discharge her.

The doctor asked her if she wanted to hurt herself or another person, and if she was taking her meds. And then they watched me walk out with her. I thought I could take care of her, sleep with her in my bed, make her breakfast, fix her. Outside the hospital on the black street, I asked the little crazy girl if I could drop her off with my taxi, and she said, Just give me a dollar for a cigarette. I gave her a dollar and I left her. Three days later my supervisor called and told me that my little crazy girl was back in the Emergency Room, and how did I feel about my work in that case. I decide I have to get the German girl closer to home.

  1. In taking this approach for the opening paragraphs of my academic book, I was guided by a vow made by Justice Albie Sachs, an iconic victim of South African Apartheid. Sachs vowed that he would not make himself an exhibit, even when asked to speak subjectively of his victimization by the apartheid state (Sachs 1997: 20). And more recently, I came across Putuma Keleka’s poem ‘Memoirs of a Slave and Queer Person’

‘I don’t want to die with my

hands up

or

legs open.’

  1. How to display one’s body without falling victim to the spectacle in the Lusaka market or reducing oneself to an exhibit? The body possesses knowledge – creative writing, memoir has allowed me to hear its narrative. At the same time, as an expert in gender and violence, I’m conscious of the hostility and aggression that naked bodies evoke. And aggressors are arbitrary about what a naked body is. Think of the rape threats made against women politicians in the US and beyond – being a woman in a public space is a type of nudity. Being a voluptuous girl, a freshman in a floral summer dress I was sized up by a mob as naked and a sexual provocation that demanded punishment.
  1. The last project that I’ll share is an editorial project with Palgrave MacMillan. Irene Hadiprayitno of Leiden University and I are co-editing a human rights series under Palgrave’s International Relations and Security Studies. We call the series Human Rights Intervention. We have a full advisory board that bring interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral professional experience. Our first book

My own research proposal on gender and violence in the workplace.

I conducted research 98% of the time in Utrecht, at CUNY I taught 98% of the time. At Stanford, I neither teach nor do research. I’m an  Administrative 98% of the time.

07/17/2017

Before the Abstract

My Marriage to Science

  1. I started my academic career in a Dutch research institute in 2000. This career ended in March 2010 with my marriage. My nieces and nephews, at the time all under the age of eight, attended my public defence, they described the illustrious event in this way ‘Mommy Chiseche is getting married to Science.’ I was a single woman up until that point, but my parents, siblings and the children flew in from Zambia, the UK and the US and treated me, at this academic wedding in the Academiegebouw of Utrecht, with the reverence and admiration usually reserved for a woman in a wedding gown.
  1. I wrote my PhD within a research institute The Netherlands Institute for Human Right’ affiliated with Utrecht University’s School of Law. I had a very generous grant from the Dutch government of about $200,000 and it supported over a six year period, my living costs, the costs of my academic research, including conference grants, field visits to Rwanda, Tanzania and Sierra Leone, and residency as a visiting scholar with human rights centers in Bradford, Washington DC and Kigali.
  1. Sometime I hold my book ‘Sex and International Tribunals: The Erasure of Gender from the War Narrative’ up and tell my students, this book cost $200,000.
  1. The book provides a gender critique of international criminal tribunals and the prosecution of gender based violence, specifically rape and other forms of sexual violence. ‘Sex and International Tribunals’ is very much a conversation between legal practitioners – international criminal law is a brand new area of international law. Sure, the international community criminalized genocide seventy or so years ago in the wake of the Holocaust, but until the 1990s with the armed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, genocide prosecutions in criminal or even military tribunals were almost unheard of. So, the decision by the UN to prosecute allegations of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia saw a new field of international law emerge as we, the international lawyers, had to figure out how to collect and weigh evidence, how to prosecute and how to sentence mass atrocity.
  1. It’s a good book, it’s been four years but I still get a kick out of googling the book and seeing a that a new scholar in Africa, Europe or the US, and recently someone in Brazil, is in conversation with my findings in their footnotes. Having said that, my findings weren’t groundbreaking: Feminists throughout the twentieth century have been critical of sexist and racist courtroom tropes demanded of women victims, patriarchal policing that protected husbands and not violated wives in domestic violence house calls, rape myths, and anti-women laws that create categories such as ‘real’ as opposed to ‘fake rape’, ‘good’ as opposed to ‘bad victims’, ‘forced violent brutal rape’ as opposed to ‘consensual rape.’
  1. As a young researcher I saw myself and my research lifting from early feminist critique and contemporary women of color feminism and critical race analyses in order to critique supranational courtrooms and the narratives we (international lawyers) were creating about women in war. I concluded, as did other scholars that weighed in at the time that these tribunals were inadequately prepared to address the fact that women experience war in multiple ways. Just like men they experience political violence such as rape, sexual humiliation, torture, mutilation, displacement, beatings, forced disappearance, summary execution. And that women’s experience of war trauma, bereavement, violence deserved a careful and meticulous reading as well as a gender analysis.
  1. I haven’t researched or written about international criminal tribunals since I defended my PhD in 2010. I’m blank if you ask me my thoughts on a recent judgment on gender based violence coming out of the Cambodia Tribunal or the International Criminal Court.
  1. What happened is that in the build-up to my public defense in Utrecht in 2010 I applied for over 100 jobs. I was indifferent to geography, the only criteria a job vacancy had to meet was that it had ‘human rights,’ ‘women’, ‘gender’ or ‘violence’ in its title. I applied for human rights and humanitarian work in Liberia, Afghanistan, the Congo, Guinea-Conakry, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya – everywhere. I applied for only three teaching positions, with human rights centers at Georgetown, Wesleyan and CUNY. I was invited for only three interviews for positions: an NGO based in Liberia, the UN in the Congo and with the City University of New York. I didn’t get the Liberia job, I was offered and took the job in Kivu, Eastern Congo and then quit it after six weeks, and then I was offered and took up the tenure track position at Lehman College.
  1. I taught myself how to teach human rights and international law to undergraduate students in a political science department at a Hispanic serving institute in the Bronx. I brought the Vulcans, NY black firemen into my classroom to explain workplace racism and sexism and the Supreme Court decision in Ricci v. DeStefano to my students, Joan Wallach Scott a Princeton Professor to elaborate on the headscarf controversy in Europe, and a Gambian Supreme Court Judge to mentor and describe her career as a public servant, particularly her work with international criminal tribunals in Rwanda, Tanzania and in The Netherlands.
  1. One of the most memorable moments with my students ended with a phone call to my Dad, a retired General, in Zambia. It was 21 may, 2011 and he had spent almost two full days watching Al Jazeerah news which was airing Americans chanting USA USA as they celebrated Obama’s assassination of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. My father said I’m sure your students were very happy with the news.’ I told him the truth which was that my students’ reactions were more muted than the Americans captured by the international news. Muted but also pissed off, incredulous, cynical and disappointed. One student asked ‘Why didn’t they capture him and bring him back here? We should have tried him in our courts.’ My father, from his military vantage point admonished us, ‘My daughter, your students, those are bad Americans’, and I replied, ‘No Daddy my students are the good Americans.’
  1. Outside of teaching I volunteered as an Advocate and rape trauma counselor on a Sexual Assault Response Team serving Jacobi Hospital, North Central Bronx Hospital and Lincoln Hospital in The Bronx. As an Advocate I was, between 8PM and 8AM the friend of the man, woman or child that was admitted to specially designated sexual assault Emergency Rooms. I kept the survivor company and when necessary mediated between the survivor and the Special Victims Division, beat cops, forensic examiner, nurses, doctors, spouses, and parents.
  1. Between a Dutch research institute and an American public university, I moved from spending 97% of my time on research to teaching students 97% of the time. In New York City, I felt far removed from the community of scholars researching the Hague based tribunals or tribunals in Cambodia and Lebanon. But losing my intimacy with the tribunals didn’t bother me. What remained at the core of my interest wasn’t the international prosecution of atrocity, but gender, race/ethnicity and sexuality as categories for exploration of the human rights enjoyment, abuse and enforcement.
  1. In 2013 or so, I started to send a newsletter to about ten women I love, six of them are sisters. The loveletters were snapshots about quotidian life in New York City.

It’s not always winter. I was walking down the street, feeling very beautiful and womanly, in a clingy sun, dress, Ethiopian silver and massive $4 sunglasses. I crossed the street by the public library and an old white man called out from his convertible, ‘Yeah! Shake that fat ass!’

I was on Broadway and 239th, opposite Staples, buying veggies and a man of indeterminate race and class, walking by shouted ‘Slut!’ I looked around to see who he was talking to, but the entire street had turned to look at me.

In Harlem a man, ruined by hard living, asked me to give him a smile. I didn’t smile, I’m afraid of black American men in Harlem. He screamed after me, ‘Fuck you you think your pussy hot!’

And that’s it, that’s the best the street has given me.

And the girls and boys, men and women from the Emergency room started to sneak into my writing.

  1. In 2015 I was awarded a grant by the Bronx Recognizes its Own Award to support my writing. And in Spring 2017 I won an award for my story ‘The Protected Party’. The title is taken from an Order of Protection I received from a Judge against a stalker. I recall in this story that the Judge looks like Kenny G. and smiles when he makes me the Protected Party at the Bronx Family Court.
  1. For all intents and purposes I wasn’t conducting legal research. What I was doing is – Albie Sachs – making myself the object of gender, race and sex oppression.

Beyond this approach, I am guided by a vow made by Justice Albie Sachs, an iconic victim of apartheid. Sachs vowed that he would not make himself an exhibit, even when asked to speak subjectively of his victimization by the apartheid state (Sachs 1997: 20). The body memoir states that self-objectification is legitimate when it creates a platform for the body to voice its knowledge.

Research is hard. That’s one reason that I loved it so much. People often asked me when I was going to leave school and do some real work. But since I left research in 2010, nothing has compared to the level of discipline and upward climbing that research required of me constantly.

  1. Since my move from Europe and a research institute, I’ve taught, and I’ve served as an Administrator. I taught 98% of the time in Utrecht and dabbled in teaching, at CUNY I taught 98% of the time and dabbled in research. At Stanford, I neither teach nor research in my official duties.
  1. Current projects

Palgrave MacMillan editor with Irene Hadiprayitno.

My own research proposal on gender and violence in the workplace.

The project That Lady Is a Stranger continues Sex and International Tribunals’ gendered critique of women’s rights discourse. The memoir privileges my body’s telling of its quotidian experiences of objectification through invisibility and hypervisibility, exhibitionism and veiling.

­­

The project is a body memoir, in the spirit of queer and feminist approaches that understand that the suspect body can be the artist’s voice and visage. In this regard I am most recently influenced by Christina Crosby and Merritt Tierce. In Crosby’s memoir, A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain, the body’s gender and sexuality is lost and never found in the aftermath of a road accident.

Dedicated to my mother who walked away from her first job because of sexual harassment. I have experienced sexual harassment multiple times, from men and women.  But I have only left one job because of sexual harassment, and that was

No and ass grab, Mom and leaving teaching, Chisala and RCUI, Chisala and Zambia Copper Mines, Chimango and KPMG

Chiseche and CUNY –, student and assault in classroom

07/07/2017

 Before the Abstract

  1. I wrote my PhD with a Dutch University. I had a very generous grant from the Dutch government of about $200,000 and it supported my living costs, the costs of my academic research, including conference grants, field visits to Rwanda, Tanzania and Sierra Leone, and residency as a visiting scholar with human rights centers in Bradford, Washington DC and Kigali.
  1. My book ‘Sex and International Tribunals: The Erasure of Gender from the War Narrative’ is one of the tangible outcomes of my time in the Netherlands as an assitent in opleiding or junior researcher. The book provides a gender critique of international criminal tribunals and the prosecution of sexual violence and other forms of gender based violence.
  1. It was very much a conversation between legal practitioners – international criminal law is a brand new area of international law. Sure, we criminalized genocide seventy or so years ago, but until the 1990s with the armed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, genocide prosecutions in criminal or even military tribunals were almost unheard of. So, the decision by the UN to prosecute allegations of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia saw a new field of international law emerge as we, the international lawyers, had to figure out how to prosecute, how to sentence, how to collect evidence of these international crimes.
  1. My findings were not exactly groundbreaking. Feminists have been critical of sexist courtroom tropes, patriarchal policing and anti-women laws that create categories such as ‘real rape’ as opposed to ‘fake rape’, good victims as opposed to ‘bad victims’, ‘forced rape’ as opposed to ‘consensual rape.’ My research contributed to early feminist critique and assessment of supranational courtrooms that at the time were inadequately prepared to address the fact that women experience war in multiple ways. Like men they experience rape, torture, mutilation, displacement, beatings, summary execution. And that their experience of war trauma, bereavement, with violence deserved a careful and meticulous reading as well as a gender analysis.
  1. Someone asked me whether I would interpret my PhD into Kinyarwanda or Temne or Kreole and share it with the women I met on field research. Absolutely not, it wasn’t that type of book. There was nothing participatory about the research, and my audience was practitioners. And I see that practitioners and scholars are reading it.
  1. I haven’t researched and written about international criminal tribunals since I defended my PhD in 2010. I explain that in the build up to my defence I applied for over 100 jobs. I was indifferent to geography, I applied for human rights and humanitarian work in Liberia, Afghanistan, the Congo, Guinea-Conakry, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya – everywhere. I applied for three teaching positions, at Georgetown, Wesleyan and CUNY. I was invited for three interviews, and one was in New York City with the CUNY.
  1. I jumped into teaching at a Hispanic serving institute in the Bronx, the sole senior college in the Bronx. I felt far removed from the community of scholars researching the Hague based tribunals or tribunals in Cambodia and Lebanon. But I realized that I was losing my intimacy with the tribunals but this didn’t matter, what remained at the core of my interest wasn’t the international prosecutor, the Bench comprised of Zambian, Japanese, Italian and Malian Judges, but gender, race/ethnicity and sexuality as categories for exploration of the judicial process.
  1. My focus on the gender and sexuality and increasing focus on domestic laws and socio-political factors stemmed from two things.
  1. As my alienation from the Tribunals increased, I volunteered with the Sexual Assault Treatment Program at the North Central Bronx Hospital, a ten minute taxi ride from my home in Riverdale in the Bronx.
  1. No and ass grab, Mom and leaving teaching, Chisala and RCUI, Chisala and Zambia Copper Mines, Chimango and KPMG

Chiseche and CUNY –student and assault in classroom

  1. Creative writing as an expression of