I marvel at the simplicity of happiness and the complexity of love. How meaningful and significant.
(Source: expose-the-light, via rumagin)
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so many fools.
(via wordboner)
Here’s Looking At You, George W. Bush
(click)
I really don’t have a snarky comment here. This woman is going to jail for stealing her child an education.
When I tell people in other countries that school districts in America are allocated money based on local real estate taxes, they think I’m joking. Except it’s not a fucking joke, it’s a blatantly classist (and racist) way of making sure that the people given opportunities to make money are the children of the people who already have money.
She ( Nanny) put herself on a boat to the New World to come free her people. She was the leader of her tribe. She was an African queen who put herself into captivity to come to the West in order to be with her people so that she could free them. She didn’t come as a slave; it was her own plan. — Folk Historian Naakaa Cush via Karla Gottleib
Nanny, Queen of the Maroons, born into the Akan ethnic group in Ghana in the 1680’s ,lived to become one of the greatest freedom fighters of the New World.
Grandy Nanny was a chieftaness, a leader of Jamaica’s Windward Maroons, who successfully waged war with and held off the greatest military power on earth from 1724 to 1739 suffering only one majour defeat in 1734 at Nanny Town when the British, having managed to surprise the Maroons as they slept, fired upon them with portable swivel guns.
Historians acknowledge her as a master military strategist who developed and excelled at guerilla warfare. She perfected the art of camouflage and created a system of long- distance communication using the Abeng, a cow horn with a hole drilled at one end. Sophisticated Maroon communications put British troops at helpless disadvantage in the hills of Jamaica.
In the 1730’s, the war’s period of the most-intense fighting, the Maroons suffered only about 100 casualties while the British losses numbered in the thousands.
Nanny was named a National Hero for Jamaica in 1976.
for that sacred personal space that is your mind. Yours. Yours alone. For all the fears, and upsets, bad mind, love lived and unrequited, memories that you’ve felt and digested, happy and sad moments; all that and more lodged in those cracks and crevices of grey matter, easily accessible only to you. Be thankful for that space. It’s most likely as honest as you’ll get.
Photograph by Janique ka John
A moment of interaction between water and human caught a split second before it actually occurs. Taken in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
Via National Geographic
Oh my Gosh…. THATS ME!!!
this made me proud. this is awesome Jan! :) beautiful photography..
BIG UPPP!!!!!!
Tricia Elam imagined a legal career that would allow for her fashion flourishes.
Then reality set in. The reality of jurist (fashion) prudence.
Photo by Marvin Joseph (The Washington Post)
Fashion is but one of the ways in which you see this rife phlegmatic attitude. I’m no fashionista but I can definitely relate. I feel this on so may levels and for so many reasons. The one that describes it most succinctly, “There was no being me and being a lawyer.” Hm.
Dear Tile-It,
Perhaps this is a minority view, but the obvious nexus between tiles and a woman’s breasts eludes me. As such, I was more than slightly perplexed, more like repulsed, by the graphic visual of what seems to be a naked woman, hands bound above her shoulders, with tiles carefully photoshopped over her breasts, and the words TILE IT emblazoned in bold red across the tiles.
Where to begin. Maybe it was the come hither gaze, the porn star smokey eye, or the sheer fact that there was A NAKED WOMAN WITH TILE PASTIES ON A BILLBOARD. Ultimately, I suppose it was the powers of the image combined which made what ought to have been the typical traffic-ridden commute, far far more incensing.
Picture it. Obliquely opposite a mammoth national flag, flying proudly in the 7:30 breeze, there stood this monument. Now fading and weather-beaten, it stands subtly, an ironic juxtaposition of what is the accepted representation of women in the media and wider national consciousness.
To be fair to you Tile-it, you are by no means the first offender and unlikely to be the last, in fact, no entity can boast an ad campaign as sexist as that of STAG, the self-proclaimed man’s beer. I tread lightly in discussing the marketing strategy of this brand because as they emphatically maintain, I wouldn’t understand. Kindly permit any ignorant or misconstrued sentiments I may convey O Great Stag. I’m sure you take no offence though, understanding so comprehensively the limits of my female condition.
Proceeding past Tile-it’s vulgar excuse of an ad, with the national flag fleeting in the rearview mirror and you approach another symbolic institution, the St. Augustine Campus of the University of the West Indies. What graces your view as you approach the turn-off to this learned institution is Stag’s ode to female achievement.
The image is laughable but startling - a group of women standing behind their male counterparts, brows furrowed and arms flailing, evidently dumbfounded by the fierce Playstation battle of the men. The cherry on top is Stag’s ubiquitous synopsis of the scene - ‘It’s a man’s world, you wouldn’t understand!’ At this point in time it seems all my puny female brain could compute is why I have never and will never, buy a Stag.
Stag and Tile-it aside, the reality is that citizens of this country are bombarded by these deeply offensive and dangerous images of women (and messages about them) on a daily basis. They have become an accepted part of our national culture, they inhere in our subconscious, they are the representations that our children are raised on. Sigh. I cannot tell you how long I have wondered why every single Yuasa/AC Delco/Rocket billlboard hadda have a sexy woman lying down next to a car battery on it?! Why all flour ad only have woman and young girls in it?! Why you can’t so much as open a papers without once coming across a sexualised or stereotypical image of a woman.
So Tile-it, with all due respect (and let’s be fair not much is due), I implore you, for Christ sake, ORGANIZE YUHSELF. Surely the dignity and self-respect of the women of this nation, your fellow human beings, are worth more than $10 a square inch.
Here are some of the top stories in Caribbean feminist and gender news:
The Good
Guyana to begin vaccinating girls against HPV this week! This month is Cervical Cancer Awareness month. What a great way to begin the month! Time for the other Caribbean countries to follow Guyana’s lead!
A Chile-based advertising agency has created “You Are the Key,” a campaign focusing on raising funds for children in need. Anthropomorphic cages hold children inside, showing them locked within their dark social situations. (via Designboom)
