#78 FiLiA meets: Rahila Gupta

Sally Jackson from FiLiA in conversation with writer, journalist and activist Rahila Gupta.

Sally: Hi, it's Sally Jackson here volunteer at FiLiA and I'm really pleased to be joined by Rahila Gupta. She's a writer, an activist, was nominated for the True Honour Awards and recipient of the Flame Award from the UK Asian Film Festival. Thanks for talking to us at here at FiLiA. 

Rahila: Thank you.

Sally: As I say, in preparation for this, I thought, where do I start? Because there's such a volume of work, around a variety of different types of activism, but it seems sensible perhaps to start with the most recent thing. And I was really sad to miss last night, the performance of ‘Don't Wake Me: The Ballad of Nihal Armstrong’, which I believe Jaye Griffiths was reading at an event yesterday.

Rahila: That's right. Yes, she was performing it. 

Sally: And listeners may know Jaye as Dr Elle from Casualty, might be more familiar for them, but brilliant actress. 

Rahila: She is, absolutely. She does an amazing job. 

Sally: So, tell us a little bit about how you came to write that, and what the ballad is about.

Rahila: It's a dramatic monologue in verse, and it's about life with my disabled son who died at the age of 17, more than 17 years ago now. And it was really a way of, I suppose, coming to terms with his death and this desire that you have, particularly in the early years of grieving, to remain connected with the world that you've lost, because death has a way of wrenching you out of a particular set of circumstances.

I spent the first year after he died, just writing the ballad really. And in fact, didn't get very far because it's actually a very slow process, because you set yourself certain constraints. And this was the ballad form has a particular rhyme scheme and a particular rhythm. You’ve got to make sure your lines are of certain length in terms of syllables.

And so it's very slow, but the advantage of that is that you turn a moment around and around and find new things in it. Because if I had written in prose, I think I would've galloped through our life together and not discovered some of the buried things that I didn't even realise I thought about particular events and incidents in our life.

So the ballad itself is about our struggle for inclusion in mainstream society, in schools; this is an ongoing battle for disabled children. And although there have been victories since the time that I fought these battles, we've also gone backwards because of austerity. And disability activists say now that in some ways we are no further forward in terms of the right to be included. So legally there is a right, if the parent and the child would like a mainstream placement, you have the right to demand it, which we didn't have in my time. Because at that time it was simply… there was some criteria that you had to fulfil, and then it was at the discretion of the local authority.

You spend many years feeling diminished and ridiculed and mocked for your aspirations. That a child of Nihal's level of severity, because he had no verbal communication and mainstream schools were really frightened of admitting children who had other, less orthodox means of communication.

So it was a very big and long battle. Plus, you know, the prejudice is in mainstream society around disability. So, all of that, I kind of chart in this ballad. And then of course, there's the final section on his death, which… I find it difficult to talk about. 

Sally: It must be really hard. And as you say that the process by which you, yourself, as closely as you lived with him, get to see things in a different light and look at things perhaps, and see something underneath what you'd first seen. And there must be comfort in that, but also pain in that. 

Rahila: Yes. And by confronting the pain, you kind of get over it or you come to terms with it, but it also ambushes you in unexpected ways and unexpected moments.

So in the final section, I actually let go of the ballad form, because I just feel it's like a corset around your emotions and you just have to let go, as it were. And so, it's kind of a mixture of prose and free verse in the last section as a way of indicating that there's no way you can hold onto restrictions and constraints because it's just too much.

So that's the ballad. It's had about 60 productions. It went to various theatres in London, then Edinburgh for the Fringe, then to New York and then to India. That was all between 2012 and 2014. And then suddenly out of the blue last year, a woman academic from Goldsmiths got in touch with me and said that she would like to recommend it for the Edexcel reading list on Asian literature.

And she couldn't recommend it unless there was a hard copy available, and it had gone out of print. So she championed my work, Deidre Osborne, and she got it republished, by Oberon. And then we had the launch last night, and she chaired a panel of the people who were involved in the production, and Richard Rieser, who's a long-time disability activist. And then two young women who have cerebral palsy were also part of the panel. So yes, it was a really good discussion that took place after a 15-minute extract that was performed by Jaye Griffiths, and she's always a treat to watch. 

Sally: I can imagine. As I say, I was really sorry to miss it. I understand there's a passage that you'd be able to share with us today.

Rahila: Yes, sure. 

Sally: That would be wonderful. Thank you. 

Rahila: So, this is from section one, which is about the birth and even women who've had able-bodied children will recognise some of the chaos and loss of agency that takes place during childbirth. I feel it speaks to a wider group of women. This is when they suddenly discover that actually things are not going right. They cannot find the foetal heartbeat and I'm being taken in for an emergency caesarean. 

Oh my darling, my little love.

Tying and untying our bond

Has been the metre of our lives

From cradle to beyond.

People, machines, voices, shadows

Blubbering light and dark.

Shaving hair, shoving paper in 

My face. Sign! Make a mark!

My bed floats towards hypnotic,

white angels playing Bach.

Dark eons later…

White light mellowed to yellow arc

That couldn’t touch the gloom.

Clock’s midnight hands salute the night

Cradled in the hollow room,

Desolate, manforsaken – like

The wasteland of my womb.

At last your father came. He said,

We have a boy, subdued.

And here’s a photo – one hour old.

My blurry eyes refused

To refashion the image

Which my mind’s eye had viewed.

Then the photo swam into view

Despite my trembling hand.

Your forehead crinkled with a frown,

Thick hair so very grand,

Eyes – washed black stones in a face of

Bluish-black furrowed land.

Oh my darling, my little love,

I hadn’t planned such a welcome.

If only to absolve myself,

I’ll say this ad infinitum.

Sally: Wow, that was beautiful. Thank you. It brought to mind for me, as well, something that's never discussed enough. Just your experience there of childbirth and the research or I suppose the awakening of recognising of the ordeal often that Black and Asian women in childbirth go through. How there are much more likely to be complications and the treatment of Black and Asian women, when they're giving birth, not being listened to when they say they're in pain or that something's wrong et cetera. Does that resonate with you? Is that something that reminds you of that time? 

[00:10:30] Rahila: Yes, I think that's absolutely true because in fact there were warning signs in the month or so to the build-up of the date of delivery when the foetus was considered to be a little too small for dates. And when I went to see the consultant – in fact, for the first time throughout the whole of my antenatal check-ups – I saw the consultant for the first time. And I was anxious. I said, ‘What are the results of the scan?’ And he said, ‘Oh, well, Asian babies can be a little bit small. And so there's nothing to worry about.’ 

But in fact, it may be true because Asian populations generally live in greater poverty. But he didn't have the nuance or the sophistication to pick up the fact that I was middle class, I was of a certain build. I would be expected to have a baby that was within the normal range. So, all the factors that you might take into account when you're looking at a white mother, I feel were not picked up in my case. And I was just kind of lumped into the category of Asian mothers and therefore small babies.

And part of the issue with Nehal was what they call IUGR, which is intrauterine growth retardation, and they don't know what the reason for that is. So, the baby is less able to deal with the trauma of delivery and you have to be more careful in the way in which you deliver them. 

Sally: So, again, it's something I think doesn't get anywhere near enough coverage. We hear a story every now and then, but it's clearly an ongoing issue, both here in the UK and across in the States, we hear about it as well. Those prejudices coming first before thinking about who is this mother in front of me? What are her needs and her issues and her background, and how might that affect her pregnancy?

So, moving forward, as I said, at the beginning, your writing covers a variety of topics. And one of the books I was really impressed with was Enslaved: The New British Slavery. And I think the way in which people don't necessarily understand ‘modern slavery’ as really happening in 2019 in Britain. But the fact that you took stories of survivors and talked about their individual journeys, I think was a really strong way of bringing some of the issues home. 

Rahila: Yes. I had for years been dismayed by the way in which the debate around migration took place in the British media. And because I was also actively involved with Southall Black Sisters since 1989, and we would see women who had come to Britain under a variety of circumstances, none of which fitted the media model of migrants coming to this country, to drain us of our resources, to take our jobs, et cetera, et cetera.

I felt that it was really important to present the alternative picture, which was to look at the factors which pushed women, and men actually, to displace them from their homes. And I think one of the incidents which remained as a major trigger to me embarking on this, was a story of two young men from Punjab, two Sikh brothers who climbed into the wheel compartment of a plane and flew to England.

It was amazing that both of them didn't die of hypothermia because of the temperatures that you would face there. But one of them then fell, I don't know exactly where, but in some part of London and then he has apparently survived and I thought what would push people to take those sorts of shocking life-threatening measures in order to escape what they were living with and that that picture needed to be put forward to the British readership. Also, what I think I was trying to do was that I wanted it to be told in their voices. So, it's all in first person, I've tried to retain their particular use of English.

One of the most desperate cases was this young woman from Sierra Leone, who couldn't read and I've maintained her use of language, which has its own syntax. And it was just so disempowering, because when she was running away from a family that enslaved her and made her work all hours of the day, she didn't even know what bus to take and where it should go, because she was trying to get back to a place where she had been treated better. And she gets into the bus and she says to the bus conductor, ‘Does this go into town? Which bit of town?’ When she's waiting to hear from the home office for her future, she can't read the envelopes that come through the letterbox to know whether it's addressed to her. And then she learns to recognise the first letter of her name. And so she knows, ah, that letter might be for me. So the ways in which you get disempowered and cannot exercise agency, even if you want to, because you haven't been given the resources.

So, I hoped that people would see that, through these personal human interest stories, that actually none of these people, and by extension most of the others, do not come here because they think they're going to be able to live a life of Riley on benefits here. And then, towards the end of it, I have quite a long polemical section in which I argue the economic case for why migration is good for the West and also to make the point that all of these people who find themselves in situations of intense exploitation in this country would not be in that position if we had open borders. 

Now, I know open borders is a very controversial issue. So I tried to make the point that…because the book was published in 2007, 2008, when we were firmly ensconced in Europe, and when the free movement of peoples across Europe was actually seen as a positive, as opposed to where we are today. So today, I don't know how I would have argued the case, perhaps not so brazenly as I did in 2007. But I made the case for open borders and, at the very least, if not open borders for a human rights-based system of immigration, which would have meant the abolition of detention centres for a start, because that is in breach of various articles of the human rights legislation, like freedom from degradation and torture and so on. I don't remember the exact wording, but there are many aspects of our immigration legislation, which are absolutely horrific for a so-called civilised, wealthy country. 

So, I wanted to do both things and one of the most important things – I wanted to do a follow up book, but I never got down to it – one of the most important things around the issue of migration, which is even to this day, not really looked at, is about how it is western – British, in this case – ventures out in the world – whether it is corporate, profit making, whether it's war, et cetera – how that displaces people, and then those people turn up at our borders. And they are seen as individuals who are out to rob us of our resources without seeing how they are the consequences of British policy. 

So, I just want to give you a little example that I quote in the book, which was to do with the Ogoni people from Nigeria and with the activities of Shell Oil in that particular Niger Delta, where what happened was that they wanted to exploit the area for its oil reserves. In the process, they ended up polluting the waters and making the lives of farmers impossible, because they had no clean water with which to irrigate their lands. 

Now, two things, if those farmers had left Nigeria at that point in time, because their ability to carry on farming had been totally destroyed, they would have been seen as economic migrants, which was a totally dirty word – people just out here to make a better life for themselves. But many of the Ogoni people were represented by political activists, Ken Saro-Wiwa being the most famous of them. And when he was executed, because of his activism, by the Nigerian dictator, at that point they became political refugees and therefore more likely to enter Britain.

Now, I'm not an accountant by profession and background, but I looked at the number of people Shell employed in Britain and therefore gave employment. It was 9,000 people, if I remember correctly at that point in time in the mid-90s. And the year that Ken Saro-Wiwa was killed in 1994, there were [around] 4,000 Nigerians – and we don't know if they were all Ogoni people anyway – who had applied for asylum status, refugee status in this country, and not a single one of them had been successful in 1994. And I argued that even if all 4,000 people that year had been given the right to remain – and even let's say all of them remained on benefits and didn't work, and by the way, Nigerians are one of the most educated, most employable groups of people, migrants, who come to this country, but even let's suppose none of them had got work – the cost benefit analysis, would've been the amount of profit that Shell was repatriating to Britain against those 4,000 people. And the number of jobs that were being given to British people, the amount of tax (even with tax evasion) that they were paying to the treasury, all of that would put Britain in a more positive financial place. 

And I feel that that book, to look at, let's say, ten countries, and to look at that cost benefit analysis would be a really powerful thing to do. But I need a forensic accountant to support me in that. I've never gone down that route, but I've thought about it. 

Sally: So if any are listening, get in touch! As you say, it's so obvious really, and particularly when you frame it from a human rights framework. But, sadly, that doesn't necessarily seem to mean that things change, certainly not at the rate that we would wish them to change in the country.

Moving on to one of your other books, which I have to admit when I first saw it, I wasn't sure if the title was a question or a request, Why Doesn't Patriarchy Die? 

Rahila: Well, yes. I think that book, it's a huge project. It's very ambitious. It's the only one of my titles that raises a titter in the audience when my biography is read out. It's bound to get a little laugh because people recognise that dual edged thing that you've just referred to. It's sort of a rhetorical question, but we do set out to answer it as seriously as possible. 

So this is a collaboration with Bea [Beatrice] Campbell. It's been a desperately slow project, partly because both of us never seem to clear our desks at the same time. The idea really of the book is to look at how patriarchy and why patriarchy seems to be an important prop, no matter what kind of political system there is in place. So, whether it's a democracy, whether it's a theocracy, whether it is capitalism, whether it is communism, all of these systems to greater or lesser degrees seem to rely – need – patriarchy and a patriarchal system in place for its own success.

So we wanted to look at that. We wanted also, apart from looking at how patriarchy weaves in with these other systems, to see what are the circumstances in which feminist activism is at a higher level than in other circumstances – what are the circumstances that encourage feminist activism and what are the circumstances that suppress it. To see whether there are any commonalities that might, in future, be some sort of a guide to action. So, it's a really massive project because, apart from anything else, just to know which countries to visit requires a huge amount of research. Which democracy do you look at? Do you look at America or do you look at India or do you look at the Scandinavian countries? All of which are so different. And where despite being democracies, where you might expect that because they're democracies and because there are so-called greater freedoms, there might be better rights for women. Not necessarily the case! Particularly America is always a constant disappointment because you expect women's rights to be in a better place than they actually are. So, that in itself requires a lot of research. 

I came across, while I was attending a conference, a young man actually, who spoke so favourably of women's equality, of the need to fight patriarchy, et cetera, and then went on to say that there was actually such a society, in Syria of all places. I think it was 2015 when he was talking about this. And Syria was in the middle of this horrific civil war, which it still is. And all we knew was death and devastation and destruction.

I almost didn't believe him. And he said that there is a society in northern Syria and that it is based on notions of total equality. And there are women in co-presidentship roles in every institution that you can think of, whether it's schools or hospitals or the army.

So I thought, my goodness, here's a place which sounds like the most progressive place in the world. And yet we are so used to, myself included, thinking of the Middle East as a place which is very oppressive towards women's rights and freedoms that it seemed incredible.

I thought, well, I need to visit this place for myself. This place is called Rojava, and indeed there is a women's revolution going on there. And what I find shocking is the extent of silence, the extent of the lack of knowledge of this place and this revolution within politically active circles. And I can only conclude, and it's nothing to do with the ignorance of individuals, but absolutely to do with what, to me, seems like a media conspiracy, because when I went there in 2016 and I was at the border, a lot of the journalists were going to the frontline. They were interested in the battle with ISIS.

They were not interested in the society that lay behind the forces that went into battle with ISIS. And so, some people in Britain would have noticed that there were women in this army, in these defence forces, with their colourful scarves and military fatigues, but would be, if they thought about it, a bit confused about how come there are women, in the Middle East, in an army?

And because there is, behind this, a whole society which is anti-patriarchal, which is setting up this direct democracy experiment right from the ground up. So that every neighbourhood is a commune where everyone can elect their leadership. And there has to be one man and a woman who represent that particular commune.

And then there are committees, which will be formed around the issues that the people in that neighbourhood think are important. And usually they would be health, education, conflict resolution, economy and the services. And so, for example, under conflict resolution, you’ve often got issues of domestic violence.

And each of these committees would again be represented by one man and a woman, and they would have 40:40 representation by either sex. And the 20% would be up for grabs depending on who was available and who had the right interest in serving on that committee. And then they would elect people to the next level: the city level and then the regional level and then right up to the national level. And, apart from this structure, where democratic decisions were sort of fed upwards from ground up, there was a women-only structure with exactly the same neighbourhood city, regional – that kind of vertical structure –that was women only, and they had the right to veto any of the policies that the mixed sex structures had come up with, if they felt that it was anti-women or damaged women's prospects in any shape or form. 

So, it was clearly making the point that in order for women to achieve equality, you've got to tilt it in their favour. And women who had had very little education came up from nowhere, as it were, from having been at home and sometimes in forced marriages and with many children, being illiterate and all of that. After the revolution, they were encouraged to go for education classes to raise awareness, not just for them, but also for the men, what patriarchy means and how it's damaged both men and women's mentality and distorted their relationships.

It was just an amazing eyeopener. It is certainly the best place in the Middle East to be a woman. But it's quite a socially conservative place, so the starting point was much lower. So there are still restrictions around women's freedoms in the sense that I didn't see a single woman driving a car; they'd never been taught that, not that it's a big deal, but it's what place you have in the public sphere.

I didn't see many women running shops, but yet you had women leading the country, women leading the army. None of us, despite the European and Western concern about how to destroy ISIS… when the liberation of Raqqa took place, it was led by a woman. Did we hear about that in the West? No. Not that I'm saying that a military role for women is a very big deal, but a lot of the women in Rojava did say that the fact that women have been carrying guns has made a big difference to how men view women and are almost, maybe a bit fearful of exploiting them or discriminating against.

Sally: And I can imagine, as you say, it's a subtle truth that it's a lot more difficult to bully or harass somebody who's armed and knows how to use weapons. And of course, the other area where we're really not hearing about Rojava and the reality of what's happening on the ground, is since the invasion by Turkey. And I don't it's really much of a coincidence that a place that is destroying the patriarchy so well is somewhere that's been targeted by the likes of Erdoğan, and the other forces, the US forces, the UN forces, sort of standing back and enabling this invasion to move forward and to continue. And we're just not hearing about it on the news, are we.

Rahila: We're hearing more about it now. In the sense that the line that is being taken by the news and by media is that we are betraying our Kurdish allies who are such stalwart allies, reliable boots on the ground who fought ISIS, and we shouldn't actually now be betraying them. Which is fine to take as a line and absolutely to exert moral pressure on the likes of Trump. But what we don't hear is what else is going on within this Kurdish-led society, which is women's rights and real democracy.

And it's anti-capitalist. I haven't even gone into the whole the way the cooperatives have been set up and it's anti-profit, it's pro ecological sustainability. So, it's really that other world that we've all been aspiring to and fighting for. Even in 2016, when I came back from there and I wrote a number of pieces, this was exactly what we feared. The Kurds have been very strategic in the way in which they have maintained a kind of balance between all the superpowers that are interested in that area. In fact, not even the superpowers, I can't even begin to list the number of countries that are present in that part of Syria, because first of all, it's got 80% of Syria's oil and gas reserves. So that's one reason why everybody's got an interest in it. But they have fought, they have balanced the American interest versus the Russian interests versus Saudi versus Turkey and so on, in order to progress their own agenda. 

But what's happened now is a kind of a convergence of those interests. And therefore it's been difficult to know how to fight it. So from the beginning, it was obvious that Americans were there only with one purpose and that was, they needed somebody to help them in the fight against ISIS. And at the moment ISIS were considered to be vanquished, that would be the end of their support for Rojava.

And it was a question of then, would it be Assad who would destroy them or would it be Erdoğan? And what's happened is Erdoğan's invasion has sort of also supported Assad because, if Turkey does the dirty work for him, then he can at some point push Turkey out of his country on the basis that it's breached his territorial integrity. But then he's got, back the whole of Syria and Rojava has been destroyed, and has been destroyed not by him but by Erdoğan. And because Turkey is a member of NATO, they've had a free run, in ways that would be unimaginable if it was any other country; we continue to sell arms to Turkey.

And so a lot of people who've been active around Rojava – there are ‘Women Defend Rojava’ committees that are being set up all over the place – are asking for Europeans to desist from Turkish tourism. And to mount a boycott of Turkish goods, because all the profits from that go into the arms that are then used to oppress the Kurdish people.

And there will be Erdoğan's desire to move two million Syrian, mostly Arab, refugees into that area as a form of ethnic cleansing. So that the dominance of the Kurdish people in one geographical area will be destroyed. And we are watching. There's a sense of real powerlessness now as to how one can keep this going, because it's our revolution too. We could learn from it. If this can go on in the middle of war, behind the front lines… from 2012 onwards, the Kurds have been fighting an external war against ISIS. And then behind the front lines, setting up in the most conservative of societies, the most progressive, revolutionary ideas, you know? And you think if they can do it, why can't we? We who live much more secure lives. 

Sally: We were fortunate enough to speak to a wonderful woman, Berivan, from Women Defend Rojava, and one of the things that she was saying was that they were living in that society and maintaining that society, not just for them and for their families and their kin, but for all women, to show women that you could do it.

And that was really powerful for me, that actually we are part of it. We're alongside them in sisterhood and should be now, with them in need, we need to be doing everything, as women across the world, to support them and help where we can at least to raise voices around what's happening and make the world more aware.

Rahila: For example, their level of knowledge of women’s struggles around the world is so impressive. So again, in the middle of war, they were tweeting pictures of themselves holding up placards, A4 sheets of paper, saying ‘Black Lives Matter. We are with you.’ So they knew about Black Lives Matter in the US, but I wonder how many of the Black Lives Matter activists in the US knew about them.

They have been reaching out and trying to connect with activists all over the world. And they always say that the solidarity that they want from us, is for us to set up similar organisations where we have total equality, where we exercise our democratic muscle, as it were, and understand how to organise in our communities along the same lines that they're organising. And that would be for them the greatest solidarity we could show them 

Sally: One of the things I picked up from them was the recognition that, as brilliant as the work that they've done is, and how much they've changed and developed their own society, they were still saying, ‘But it's not perfect. And we're still working.’ For me that resilience, things aren't always great and you will have setbacks, but we just need to keep working on this and not give up and hope that we can get to that place where we are living in a society where the patriarchy has died, where we've moved forward from that.

It's been so wonderful to chat with you, Rahila. With the wide experience that you have, I just wonder before we go, if you were speaking to younger feminists, that were thinking, what can I do? I'm living in a world where it seems we've gone forward one step, back two steps sometimes as far as feminism goes, particularly those more marginalised women. What would you want to say to them to give them that hope to continue working and looking at moving forwards against patriarchy?

Rahila: Well, I think that the Rojava story is a great, hopeful story, the kind of thing that you think if this can be done somewhere else, then certainly in me, it motivates a desire to carry on, because you feel this is an amazing achievement, and if it can be done there, then it could be done anywhere in the world.

So, that's a very specific thing, but in general terms, all struggles, because they are so challenging, and because they go against the status quo, they are bound to be beaten down. Every feminist achievement has had its backlash. Now whether it's one step forward and two steps back, or two steps forward and one step back is a matter of analysis.

I personally think that we are at a point in our lives and in society as a whole, and this is my grand theory, if you like, is that capitalism as a system is no longer working. And by the way, I haven't spoken enough about this, but I feel that true feminist equality cannot be achieved under capitalism.

I think part of the tensions that we see around race and class in the feminist movement in the West is because we live in a capitalist society. Basically, under capitalism, we can only have trickle-down feminism. And as far as I'm concerned, it's not about shattering ceilings, but it's about destroying the whole building.

I think we are on the cusp, I would say maybe 50 years, where capitalism will come to an end because the basic contradiction is that it relies on consumption, and consumption is destroying the Earth. And the knowledge of climate change and human activity contributing to that is a very powerful argument against further consumption.

Sally: That sounds so hopeful. And it reminds me as well, as you say, the example from the women of Rojava that space exists as that crumbling is occurring to take up that space as women and use that opportunity to have a different way of living and a different way of working in society.

Rahila: Yes, absolutely. And then we won't see so many incidents of mental health. I just feel it's the irrationality of our system that causes so much pain and suffering to the people who live in these societies. I think we would begin to see an end to this wide resurgence of mental health problems.

Sally: So much to gain, isn't there. Rahila, it’s been an absolute honour and fascinating to speak with you today. Thank you so much for giving us your time. And, as always, we look forward to welcoming you at FiLiA and being one of our FiLiA family. 

Rahila: Thank you. Thank you very much. I've enjoyed this conversation as well.