World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 182

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lowed by a United Nations Conference attended by dignitaries and a limited number of NGOs (5,000 of the 30-40,000 thousand present). The contrasts between the two events were marked in many different ways. China played the role of an uncertain host to women's passions, passions different to that initially envisioned by the hosts. The facilities for the NGO conference were meager and the conditions somewhat sparse. Much has been written about the attempts by the organizers to come to terms with the presence of a group who symbolized so much change. Thus visas were withheld, material confiscated, accommodations were sometimes hours away, the disabled manhandled, etc. These difficulties seemed to draw the best from the women determined to be present at the event. Thus it seemed that the grassroots were positioned as the Native informants, empowered with knowledge, and the organizers as the restrictive container of this passion for difference at the NGO conference. As women found the ways to say what they had come to say, a unique flow of information between participants and the audience occurred. Somewhat like Shakti herself disseminating and flowing between the swirls of Chinese silk that participants had purchased, in spite of the rain, bog and mud, a spirit undaunted arose from the collective assembly. An ecstatic high, a shamanic trance, lifted us all from the mundane concerns of funding, right-left politics, treachery of aid organization speak, U.N.-W.T.O.G.A.T.T.-I.M.F imbroglios, etc. This feeling gave solace to the bunch of weary warhorse feminists that have toiled for gender justice and equity. Perhaps this was the gift of the universe: the descent of transcendence onto the assembled group. A shamanic moment in history, like the gift of Prometheus, of fire-here the gift of knowledge of Saraswati herself became immanent. No Bacchus of wine flowers and sentiment, but an elevation based on the role of women and the construction of sociopolitical equity. Let me not glorify the moment too much, but just allude to this other element the conference, rarely spoken of.
This sentiment came into its own fullness at the shrine of the Feminine and the Women's wall of art. In the Tent City that much of the conference was housed, a small corner had been set aside for the shrine. Impromptu assemblies of materials were provided, such as crayons and colored pens. The women gathered items of sentiment and value. Stones were provided from Ontario; sand from the pyramids of Mexico, a crystal pyramid from the shrine of the virgin of Guadalupe. Votive offerings were left from the travelers who had assembled, like wise women of the east and west, for the birth of the feminine in the next millennium. I remember stumbling into this space by chance, fleeing the rain and exhaustion of the conference and what had preceded it. Our panels on migration and south Asian feminism were over and as organizer I was free to wander. Driven by the rain, wet to the skin, this space opened up to me and left an impression that, now after some years, as we are poised on this symbolic marker of time-a new millenniumthis experience returns to be given voice. The tent was busy, yet contained a
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