Rise E-Book

Maliha Abidi

• Herausgeber: Saqi Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 174

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Rise celebrates the inspiring stories of 100 remarkable women of colour. From the entrepreneur with a homemade marmalade business who went on to found Women's World Banking, to the educator who built the first university in the world; and from the athlete who fled civil war on a sinking boat and then swam in the Olympics, to the first Black female astronaut, these trailblazers have risen above challenges to reach dizzying heights. These scientists, entertainers, sportswomen, artists and activists hail from more than forty countries. Past and present, famous and forgotten, they have worked both behind the scenes and under public scrutiny to make our world a better place. Featuring stunning portrait illustrations by noted artist Maliha Abidi, Rise reveals the creativity and courage of these pioneers, and is essential for all.

Leseprobe

Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I'll rise.

From ‘Still I Rise’ by Maya Angelou

To Papa and Aski

Contents

Preface

AishopanNurgaiv

AlexandriaOcasio-Cortez

AmaAta Aidoo

AmalClooney

AmandaGorman

AmnaAl Qubaisi

AngelaDavis

ArethaFranklin

AsimaChatterjee

AutumnPeltier

AvaDuvernay

BenazirBhutto

BertaCáceres

BeyoncéKnowles-Carter

CalypsoRose

ClaudiaJones

ClemantineWamariya

DeepikaPadukone

ElifSafak

Esra’aAl Shafei

EstherAfua Ocloo

EstherMahlangu

Fairuz

FatemaMernissi

Fatimaal-Fihri

FayeSimanjuntak

FelicitasMendez

FridaKahlo

FunmilayoRansome Kuti

GermaineAcogny

GuoJianmei

HananAshrawi

HayatSindi

HeidyQuah

IbtihajMuhammad

IsabelAllende

JahaDukureh

JameelaJamil

JosephineBaker

JunkoTabei

KatherineJohnson

LeaT

LeeTai Young

LeymahGbowee

LindaSarsour

LoujainAl Hathloul

MaeC Jemison

MalalaYousafzai

MargaretBusby

MariaDa Penha

MariaWalanda Maramis

MarjaneSatrapi

MaryGolda Ross

MaryJane Seacole

MaryKom

MayaAngelou

MayaLin

MazlanOthman

MercedesSosa

MichaelaCoel

MichelleObama

MindyKaling

MirabalSisters

MiriamMakeba

MistyCopeland

NaHye-sok

NadiaMurad

NaomiOsaka

NawalEl Saadawi

NeginKhpalwak

NoorJehan

OprahWinfrey

OumouSangare

ParveenaAhanger

PrudenceMabele

RaziaSultan

RigobertaMenchú

RosaParks

Sanmao

SerenaWilliams

ShirinEbadi

ShirinNeshat

ShirleyColeen

SimoneBiles

SoniaSotomayor

SophiaDuleep Singh

SylviaTamale

TawakkolKarman

TaytuBetul

TebelloNyokong

TereraiTrent

TheresaKachindamoto

TuYouyou

UmmKulthum

WangariMaathai

WangechiMutu

WilmaMankiller

YayoiKusama

YusraMardini

ZahaHadid

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Preface

Rise introduces 100 extraordinary women of colour from around the globe, whose lives have spanned millennia, and more than thirty countries. These women are an inspiration to me, as I hope that they will be to you, too.

Growing up, I rarely came across positive stories of women who looked like me or who I could identify with, culturally or otherwise. I wanted to create Rise so that other women of colour could find themselves, and empowerment, in a book. I wanted to honour these incredible female scientists, activists, leaders and artists who have worked both behind the scenes and under public scrutiny to make the world a better place.

Women from all walks of life are included here. Despite challenges, they rose to dizzying heights in a wide range of fields. From Esther Afua Ocloo, the entrepreneur with a homemade marmalade business who went on to found Women’s World Banking, and Yusra Mardini, the athlete who fled civil war on a sinking boat, then swam in the Olympics; to Mae C. Jemison, an astronaut chosen from thousands of other candidates; these women prove that we can reach for the stars.

While some of the women included in Rise – Rosa Parks, Michelle Obama, Frida Kahlo, for example – are household names around the world; many others are still not well known, sometimes not even in their own countries. Though these iconic women’s contributions are vitally important, it can sometimes feel like the same few are celebrated over and over again. There seems to be little space for more women of colour in mainstream media, resulting in a mis- or under-representation of Black, Arab, Indigenous, Asian, Brown or Mixed women. This feeds into the erroneous narrative that there are only a handful of role models who are women of colour. I hope that Rise shows how these remarkable women are, and always have been, on the frontline of change and creativity.

Being a woman of colour will mean something different to each one of us. What we do have in common, however, is an experience of discrimination both because of our gender and on account of our race. This is why intersectional feminism, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, was so close to my heart while creating Rise and why, although this book is predominantly a celebration, I chose not to diminish the hardships or traumas the women endured on their way to becoming incredible pioneers. To write only of their achievements would be doing a disservice to these women, and to my readers.

As I brought together these women’s stories and portraits, I realised that there were many similarities between them. One pattern I noticed again and again was that they never gave up. This is true regardless of whether the woman was an athlete going for gold, a lawyer arguing for her client or one of the countless women fighting for recognition of their communities. And these trailblazing women not only stood up for themselves; they paved the way for so many others, too.

AisholpanNurguiv

Eagle Hunter

Born May 2001

Mongolia

For over a thousand years, the nomads of the Altai Mountains in Central Asia have hunted with eagles for food and fur during the harsh winters. The role of the hunter among Mongolian tribes has generally been a male preserve, and this tradition is typically passed on from father to son. But Aisholpan Nurguiv, a Mongolian Kazakh girl, had been fascinated by eagles since early childhood. She aspired to study medicine, but not before becoming an eagle hunter like her father.

Men in the community objected on the basis of their conviction that women are constitutionally unsuited to eagle hunting. Although Nurguiv was not the first female eagle hunter, women in this role are rare. Nurguiv’s family, however, encouraged her. She and her father set out to acquire an eagle of her own. After scouting the mountains and finding a nest, Nurguiv descended the steep mountain face and captured an eaglet – a very difficult task.

‘You were as brave as any man,’ her father told her.

Nurguiv began training to compete in the annual Golden Eagle Festival in Ölgii, Mongolia – something no woman had ever done. Her father taught her how to summon her eagle, how to strengthen her bond with it and how to hunt with it.

On the day of the festival, more than seventy eagle hunters from several regions came to compete. Each was scored over several rounds. The first phase of the competition focused on equipment and horsemanship; the second, on summoning the eagle. In both rounds, Nurguiv scored highly. The third round judged the speed with which an eagle responds to the hunter’s command. Nurguiv set a record time of five seconds.

Thirteen-year-old Nurguiv placed first, winning against older men with more experience. Her story was captured in an acclaimed 2016 documentary and she became renowned in Mongolia and beyond. She has continued to hunt with her father and still aims to become a doctor.

AlexandriaOcasio-Cortez

Congresswoman

Born 13 October 1989

United States of America

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born and raised in New York City’s Bronx borough. When she was five, her family moved to the suburb of Westchester, using all their funds plus borrowed money: her parents hoped to provide young Alexandria and her brother with better schooling and quality of life.

When Ocasio-Cortez was sixteen, her father was diagnosed with lung cancer. Times became difficult for the family, emotionally and financially, and they nearly lost their home. Ocasio-Cortez’s mother cleaned houses, sometimes in exchange for university-preparation classes for her daughter.

Ocasio-Cortez gained admission to Boston University. Just before her sophomore year, during the financial crisis of 2008, her father died, and the family’s situation worsened. They moved back to the Bronx, where Ocasio-Cortez joined them after graduating. She began working for an educational non-profit organisation, helping undocumented Latinx youths. She also worked as a bartender, taking extra shifts in order to support her family, recognising that their struggles were mirrored in the stories of many other local people.

In 2016, a political action committee called Brand New Congress approached Ocasio-Cortez to run for a seat in the US House of Representatives in 2018. (Her brother had nominated her; she was selected from 10,000 possible candidates.)

‘Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office,’ she said in her campaign video. Ocasio-Cortez was widely underestimated: her opponent in the primary election had run unopposed for fourteen years. Her campaign was entirely grassroots-funded. She spoke about the adversity her community faced, including financial hardship, lack of healthcare and housing issues. Having confronted such problems while growing up, she was persuasive; voters realised that she would fight for them in government.

Ocasio-Cortez became the youngest congresswoman in US history and has earned a reputation for vigorously holding politicians and business interests to account.

AmaAta Aidoo

Writer

Born 23 March 1940

Ghana

Ama Ata Aidoo has worked hard to further the progress of African women writers and is an internationally renowned writer herself. She grew up in a Ghanaian village steeped in local traditions. Her father, a Fante chief, established a school where Aidoo studied before attending high school in Cape Coast.

Vivid storytellers and artisans abounded in Aidoo’s village. One storyteller who made a lasting impression on young Ama was her mother, whose Ghanaian folktales inspired much of Aidoo’s work. Aidoo wanted to be a writer from an early age. When she was asked by a schoolteacher what she aspired to be when she was older, she replied, ‘poet’, without knowing quite why. The teacher was dubious, but gifted Aidoo an old typewriter to encourage her. Aidoo later earned a degree in English from the University of Ghana and wrote her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, in 1964.

Aidoo knew Ghana before and after it won independence from Britain in 1957 and witnessed the impact of social change, especially on women. Frequent themes in her writing include colonialism, the slave trade, polygamy, marital rape and the damage done to women through lack of rights.

A proud feminist, she has always taught works by African female writers as a professor in Ghana, and at Brown University in the US. In 2000 she founded Mbaasem (‘Women’s Words/Issues’), an organisation providing support to the next generation of African women writers. In 1982 she was appointed Ghana’s Minister of Education, but resigned eighteen months later, realising that the male-dominated administration was not prepared to hear her ideas, which included access to education for all.

Aidoo’s work consists of essays, plays, poetry, stories, novels and children’s books. Her novels include Our Sister Killjoy (1977) and Changes: A Love Story, which won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. A prize-winner across literary forms, her accolades also include the 1987 Nelson Mandela Award for Poetry.

AmalClooney

Human Rights Lawyer

Born 3 February 1978

United Kingdom

Amal Clooney was only two years old when her family was forced to flee civil war in Lebanon. They made their new home in Britain. A gifted student, Amal obtained a scholarship to study Law at Oxford University, then moved to New York to earn an MA from New York University.

While working as a defence attorney for a prominent New York firm, she took on pro bono cases and became increasingly invested in their outcomes. Soon she quit her well-paying corporate job and applied for a clerkship at the International Court of Justice at The Hague. She also took on work in Beirut – her birthplace – before returning to the UK, where she joined the renowned Doughty Street Chambers in London to specialise in public international law, international criminal law and human rights.

Clooney’s clients have included Mohamed Nasheed, the first democratically elected president of the Maldives, wrongfully charged with terrorism by the opposition; Khadija Ismayilova, a courageous investigative journalist from Azerbaijan imprisoned by her government; and Nadia Murad, survivor of the ISIS genocide of the Yazidis in Iraq. Clooney has also represented other Yazidi women and addressed the UN on this matter, urging it to prosecute ISIS militants. If the world took no action, she argued, the genocide would be forgotten by history; no proof would exist and the perpetrators would simply shave their beards and go on with their lives, while the victims will bear their trauma forever.

In 2017, UN Resolution 2379 was passed unanimously. Investigators were sent to Iraq to gather evidence against ISIS, exhuming mass graves to identify murdered Yazidis. Clooney’s advocacy played a huge role in the passing of this resolution. It was the first step towards justice for many Yazidi families.

Amal Clooney has continued to speak up against human rights violations in different parts of the world, fiercely representing the victims of these crimes.

AmandaGorman

Activist and Poet

Born 7 March 1998

United States of America

Poet and activist Amanda Gorman is a symbol of hope across the United States and beyond. Known for her work on issues of oppression, feminism and race, she delivered her poem ‘The Hill We Climb’ at the inauguration of US President Joe Biden in 2021. She hasn’t looked back since.

In fact, Gorman climbed many hills before stepping up to the podium at Biden’s inauguration. From childhood, Gorman had a speech impediment and an auditory processing disorder. Far from shying away from such obstacles, Gorman realised her impediment was also her strength and wrote into poems the words she struggled to share aloud. At just sixteen years of age, Gorman became the youngest inaugural poet in US history. Then, following a college scholarship, she went on to study Sociology at Harvard University.

In addition to studying, Gorman became a youth delegate for the United Nations and in 2016, founded the non-profit One Pen One Page, a youth writing and leadership programme. She uses her position to speak openly about the difficult realities that Black women and girls face.

The month after delivering ‘The Hill We Climb’, Gorman was racially profiled by a security guard. In response to the incident, she tweeted ‘In a sense, he [the security guard] was right. I AM A THREAT: a threat to injustice, to inequality, to ignorance ... A threat and proud.’

On several occasions, Gorman has said that she intends to run for US president, and that, through political office, she hopes to turn her words into realities and actions. It is clear that Gorman’s journey is only just starting. In an interview with Michelle Obama for TIME magazine, she spoke about how girls of colour are treated as ‘lightning or gold in the pan’, not as legacies. But Gorman is here to stay. ‘I’m learning that I am not lightning that strikes once. I am the hurricane that comes every single year, and you can expect to see me again soon.’

AmnaAl Qubaisi

Racing Car Driver

Born 28 March 2000

United Arab Emirates

Amna Al Qubaisi became a rising motorsports star in 2011, amid tensions surrounding women’s rights in the region. Her chosen profession, and her clear talent for it, both inspired and intimidated many in the Middle East.

Racing was a huge part of Al Qubaisi’s world from the beginning. She was born in Abu Dhabi, where her father, Khaled – a professional race car driver himself – noticed that Amna had a talent for racing. Amna and her sister grew up learning, talking and listening about racing, and attending races to cheer for their dad. At fourteen, Amna began her own career in motorsports with karting, supported by Khaled. Many of her contemporaries in the sport had begun more structured training than Amna had from an earlier age – some since they were five – and so she had to work hard to catch up. Fortunately catching up, and overtaking, is something Al Qubaisi is famously good at.

The other drivers competing against Al Qubaisi, who were predominantly male, underestimated her. They behaved in an unprofessionally aggressive manner towards her in races, attempting to push her out of the grid when she began an overtake. A competitive nature comes with being a racer, and no race car driver likes being overtaken; but the fact that a girl was speeding by these men struck a particular nerve. Al Qubaisi pushed back and proved herself to be a big name on the circuit.

Al Qubaisi competed nationally and internationally, making history on many occasions. At only seventeen, she became the first Arab woman to win the Rotax Max Challenge Championship for karting. At eighteen, she was the first Arab woman to test a Formula E car. At nineteen she became the first Arab woman to win the UAE Formula 4 race in the single-seater category.

Amna represents women in a male-dominated sport, and hopes she can inspire Arab women, in particular, to follow their motorsport racing instincts – and go for it.

AngelaDavis

Scholar, Author and Activist

Born 26 January 1944

United States of America

Angela Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in a neighbourhood called ‘Dynamite Hill’ because of notorious attacks by Ku Klux Klan racists. While studying in France as a teenager in 1963, she heard of the Birmingham church bombing in her home city that killed four girls, three of whom she knew.

Davis wanted to fight the daily injustices African Americans in the US faced. She became involved in the Civil Rights Movement, joining the Black Panther Party and the Communist Party – for which she was fired from her teaching position at University of California, Los Angeles. She challenged the wrongful termination in court and regained her post, along with numerous death threats. Concerned for her safety, she bought guns, and security escorted her everywhere.

Davis supported a campaign to release three African American prison inmates who had been charged with killing a guard in retaliation for the murder of three Black prisoners. Jonathan Jackson, part of Davis’s security detail, was the brother of one of the accused men. During a courtroom hearing, he and three other men – using Davis’s guns – held the judge and some jurors hostage, demanding the inmates’ release. Police shot Jonathan, two other abductors and the judge. Investigators traced the guns back to Davis but, recognising a stitch-up, she went into hiding. She was apprehended by the police and realised that she was facing the death penalty.

While Davis awaited trial as the US’s most famous political prisoner, thousands of people rallied to her side. While Aretha Franklin offered to pay her bail and John Lennon and Yoko Ono wrote a song about her; President Richard Nixon commended law enforcement for capturing this ‘dangerous terrorist’. Then, in 1972, she won her case and her freedom.

Davis resumed her academic career as a distinguished professor and lecturer at several universities and continued her political activism. A feminist and progressive political icon, she has authored numerous books on racism, classism, sexism and prison abolition.

ArethaFranklin

Singer and Pianist

25 March 1942 – 16 August 2018

United States of America

‘The Queen of Soul’ was much more than a show-business nickname for Aretha Franklin. Her powerful charisma, passion and the intention with which she performed all lent her a mythical persona. She is inarguably one of the greatest American singers of all time.

Franklin was raised in Detroit. Her father, Reverend CL Franklin, was the pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church. New Bethel Baptist Church was at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement in that city and had a large African American congregation. Rev. Franklin’s sermons inspired a community that often struggled to summon confidence.

The Franklin family contained many talented singers and musicians, but Aretha’s genius stood out. At seven, she could play major chords on the piano and duplicate every note in a song after listening to it just once.

In 1952, her mother, a gospel singer, died, and Franklin, ten, found strength in singing. She gave her first solo performance at New Bethel, standing on a chair and marking the hearts of the thousands in attendance.

Success was inevitable. At twelve, Franklin toured with her father’s gospel group; at fourteen, she recorded her first album. She soared naturally between jazz, gospel, R&B, rock and pop, releasing records across multiple genres. Her biggest hits came in the mid-1960s, with songs that stayed at the top of the charts. She toured widely, thrilling fans in the US, Europe and Latin America. One of her most famous hits, ‘Respect’ – a rendition of Otis Redding’s original – became an anthem for the civil rights and women’s rights movements alike. Franklin turned the patriarchal language of the song into a feminist declaration, though it struck a universal chord.

The first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame; Franklin’s career spanned decades. She sold millions of records and won eighteen Grammy awards.

AsimaChatterjee

Chemist

23 September 1917 – 24 November 2006

India