On Butterfly Stitching

It has been a while since Aristotle at Afternoon Tea featured women changing the world. This week, a post published on Womanscape about Shermin Kruse: Lawyer, changemaker, storyteller.

© Copyright Shermin Kruse

A random day may find Shermin Kruse somewhere along the border between Turkey and Syria, advocating for refugee rights. She could just as easily be in Chicago, defending a case in court, or advising women small-business owners, or mentoring younger lawyers. She could be on the radio, discussing foreign policy, or writing her second novel, or spending the day with her four children, or giving a Ted Talk.

Shermin fled Iran and its bombs as a child with her family and little else. Her journey took her overseas, to a new life, career, identity. Today, she fights for equal rights, professional development, and peace. A global changemaker and outstanding storyteller, she shares hers with me:

You were eleven years old when you and your family landed in Canada. What was it like moving from one world to a radically different other?

Moving meant no more rocket attacks, or ladies with guns stopping you in the street to adjust your headscarf. But it also meant losing my home, my dolls, my Amoo Mostafa who always came over with a box of fruit, my Amoo Mamad who gave me cheese puffs every time he saw me. It meant I would never again see Samaneh, my favorite cousin and partner in crime, or get wet kisses from my Khaleh Shamsi.

Gone were my best friends, neighbors, rugs, and our black-market record collection. I would never again be packed with other family members like sardines into the rooms of my uncle’s villa near the Caspian Sea, or hike the Alborz mountains with my dad. These were real losses, and recovery from them was enormously challenging, despite the fact that our immigration was the best thing to happen to me and my family.

Did you know what to expect?

I had a child’s conception of what freedom would look like, mostly drawn from a bootleg VHS we had of “The Sound of Music,” dubbed in Persian. I imagined blond girls singing and dancing in the streets! A promised land of Nutella, gorgeous clothes I could actually wear outside, and schools where the teachers were nice.

Is that what the new world was like?

There were many surprises. The “new world,” in many ways, was not as anxious to receive us as we were to arrive. I spoke no English, and no one at my school spoke Persian, which made the first period very challenging. I spent my days day-dreaming. Lunch hours were very lonely.

But there were also many luxuries. Since Iran was in the midst of war when we left, water shortages were common. That meant baths instead of showers and almost no green spaces in the city. Here, in this new world, there was always hot water, and green grass even on our own lawn!

While these everyday comforts were minor miracles to my young self, the most important change was the realization, lingering now in the back of my mind, that here I can be and do anything. Really, the future felt limitless, and still does.

‘I can be and do anything.’

You became a lawyer, novelist, motivational speaker, mother of four, and human rights advocate. What do all these identities have in common?

A desire to change the world.

Do you believe it possible?

Not only possible, but an obligation.

You say this even though you have witnessed horrific abuses of human rights and violations of fundamental freedoms.

There is a quote often attributed to the Talmud:

‘Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now. Love mercy now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.’

I made this discovery about freedom when I came to Canada: It is not unlimited. We are morally and ethically constrained by our responsibilities to ourselves, our families, our communities, and our globe.

We may not cure all ails, but as members of a shared humanity, we must be committed to bettering the world. Whether by teaching a young child about empathy or working on conflict resolution in a war zone, we can have a real impact. And perhaps more significantly, it is from the doing of this imperative work, and not its conclusion, that internal peace springs.

You have committed your life to this goal of bettering the world. What has been your most challenging role?

Motherhood; it has been the greatest introspective exercise of my life. It has distilled for me that core of life’s ethics that I should instill within my children.

And what are those ethics?

Kindness, Gratitude, Curiosity, Resilience, and Hard Work.

While these are all achievable goals, every day presents a barrage of failures. At times I find it difficult to be grateful, times when exhaustion gives way to procrastination. Sometimes I lose patience with my kids, or temporarily overlook an issue that is important to my partner.

Such defeats are fleeting, however; they are lessons that help me improve. To find and strengthen the core pillars of my beliefs is a mindful and ongoing exercise.

You are engaged in so many projects, but let’s talk about just one. Perhaps your most personal: your novel, Butterfly Stitching. Why did you choose to write it?

I wanted to tell the story of Iranians, in particular Iranian women. I wanted to reveal Iranian women for the strong activists they are, both in their political and in their domestic lives, rather than the meek subjects of oppression they are sometimes perceived to be.

What does the title, Butterfly Stitching, mean?

The book explores the revolution of a country, a people, and particular individuals, and the consequences of those transformations. Change is frequently represented by the meta-morphing butterfly in imagery and poetry. In the case of my book, both the positive and the negative changes at play are interwoven, or inter-stitched. Actual butterfly stitching upon the fabric of a headscarf is also a personal matter to the characters in the book.

The two main characters are a mother and daughter living in a war-torn country. How much of your story is in theirs?

Much of Part I is based on my own life, experiences, memories and feelings. While writing it, I would lose myself in the past, a fascinating and sometimes harrowing journey. Part II is based on the story of my grandmother, bless her soul. I took some dramatic liberties, however, which is why the book is classified as fiction.

If, in real life, you ever had to flee again – and I hope you never have to – what would you take with you?

My loved ones, whatever food and water we could carry, valuable items like silver and jewelry. Also, a handful of printed photos and tons of digital ones, as well as phones, laptops, iPads, and educational degrees (How else can you prove what you are qualified to do?). I would also pack a really good pair of walking shoes and a poncho, and some keepsakes from my children’s earlier years (I have none of my own pre-immigration writings or drawings). Finally, a copy of my own book, and as many other books as I can carry!

On my Plate

‘At some point in life, the world’s beauty becomes enough.’

-Toni Morrison

Photo by Jordan Arnold on Unsplash

Thank you for having us.

Thank you for coming! That bag looks heavy. Allow me.

A grateful sigh as the weight is lifted.

Come on in! You must be cold!

A little, and tired, but happy to be here. Another deep hug or two to make up for those that fell through the cracks since the last time we gathered.

Hungry?

Ravenous. Just the right degree to be before a Thanksgiving feast. A glance at the dining room table:

Look at all of this!

Colours and smells and textures flow in and out of one another, competing for my senses’ attention. Dried herbs, paprika, red wine, cinnamon? Oranges and greens and the creamy, swirly, white of whipped potatoes. Roast potatoes. Perfect cubes of butternut squash, crisp and golden at the edges.

Saucy, juicy, crimson cranberries by hot bread to soak up the gravy. Grandmother’s plates, blue paint on white porcelain, and her embroidered, starched tablecloth. And my name, handwritten, has its place as well, on a card by my glass, reflecting light.

There are just as many colours, smells, textures around the table as on it. An atheist, a Christian, two Objectivists, a baby, two dogs, a cat, an existentialist. A friendship that has outlasted time, time zones, fiery debates. Simple, unquestioned, unspoken loyalty. The kind one sees in some families.

Thank you so much for preparing this!

Our pleasure!

And I believe it. Some laughs, some toasts, then

Shall we eat?

Yes. Yes! ‘Let us be together; let us eat together.’ The Upanishads. These Sanskrit texts are millennia old. Their name means, literally, ‘to sit down near.’

We do sit down, as the Hindus did, and the Buddhists, Jains, Christians and Jews. Pilgrims and native Americans. Paleolithic homo sapiens. From ancient times, through mourning and celebration, on feasts and weekdays after school, people have been gathering to give thanks and share food.

The latter is piled in abundant piles, precariously high on my plate.

Thank you, but that is far too much!

My protest is ignored, cheerfully.

A pause, when every plate and wine glass facing every guest has been filled. Awareness of ‘a broader, richer radius’ extending beyond the table. To those who grew and harvested, ground, baked, delivered, bought, served, gathered. To the food itself, to being alive and present. Some pray. Some rejoice. Some just say: Thanks.

Grace is consciousness of the beauty in a specific moment. The universe on my plate and in my life. That I have received, and am grateful,

For food, for raiment,

For life, for opportunities,

For friendship and fellowship,

for turkey feasts or toast and salt. I take the first bite and savour.

On his Toes

I had my first dance, my feet on his toes, my body held up by the lift of his hands under my shoulders. Charcoal suit. Crisp white shirt and gold cufflinks.

Photo by Radek Skrzypczak on Unsplash

Neck craned up as he twirled us around and around, my dress following, half a beat later, the folds of navy blue and little white dots trailing. Princesse: the name of the shop in Brussels where he bought such dresses for me – by the suitcase. Also, the name he gave me; one every granddaughter should hear.

I probably had my first dance to a Sinatra or Aznavour. I cannot recall; other dances followed, not all on my grandfather’s toes. I had some, my feet gliding on air, my arms around my father’s neck, spinning so fast I was sure I would fly. My shrieks and laughs trailed us then. Others I had, perched on his shoulders, making a mess of his hair. The back of his neck, clean fold of his collar. The freckle above it. Pine scent.

Others were quieter, asleep in his arms, my legs wrapped around his waist. Warmth through his soft sweater. Cashmere. His moustache prickly on my cheek.

A little later, he danced me to Armstrong, Ellington, Coltrane, and Cole. Tulle dresses. Montand, Brassens, Brel, Dassin. My first heels. Dalida, Piaf, and Greco. My feet were firm on the floor by then, my chin rising slowly to his, my knowledge of the words good enough to know he made them up as he went.

And the steps too. Not that I cared. He led, I followed, lucky girl. The luckiest, I still think, in the world. Polished brown leather Oxfords.

I got luckier. I had no débutante’s bal or quinceanera. Instead, I had two younger brothers. Baby shampoo, talcum powder. We danced. Sometimes, but not always, to music. Sometimes to the sound of my voice. We danced to bedtime and through tears of cuts and scrapes. Nutella stains on pyjamas.

This time, the roles were reversed; their feet were the ones floating on air, their heads drooping heavy on my shoulder, their hearts beating on my chest. A little later, they stood on my toes. Feather light little foam shoes. That did not last; soon I had to stand on mine in order to reach their necks. They still stepped on my toes, but with muddy, bulky sneakers by then.

I danced with other boys to other songs. They came and went like perfumes. Then I danced with one whose arms fit just right around my waist. His smell lingered. White and blue fine checker shirt, V-neck sweater. His chin was just the right height. We had our first dance inside a nightclub, hiding under a table.

Our second, outside a bar and in plain sight under a streetlamp. The notes and yellow light spilled onto the street and into the parking lot. We danced on subway platforms, in subways, past subway stops, on subway rides back. Then we danced across oceans and time zones, through security to departure gates.

He danced me to our wedding, where my father danced me down the aisle. We danced under showers of rice and petals. Silver cuff links then. Now I sometimes dance in the kitchen as I wait for the water to boil. Then I make coffee for two, lucky girl. The luckiest girl in the world.

To have been danced for twenty-eight years. To have been loved just as long. To have had the right to step on the toes of such men and be swirled around.

To every one of them: thank you for dancing me from one moment to the next. And thank you for the dances themselves; those moments were my favourite.

On a Jupiter Year

The rain to the wind said,

‘You push and I’ll pelt.’

They so smote the garden bed

That the flowers actually knelt,

And lay lodged – though not dead.

I know how the flowers felt.

– Robert Frost, Lodged

The South Indian state of Kerala is known for its lush greenery, pristine beaches, and the magnificent Western Ghats mountain range. On its misty flanks: tea, coffee, spice plantations, and once in a Jupiter year, a purple burst of Neelakurinji, the rarest flower in the world.

The kurinji blossom here, only here, only once every twelve years. ‘These are flowers so rare they fade from living memory.’ Neelakurinji, which just means blue flower, carpets the hills when it blooms in spectrums of blue that slowly turn to violet between August and November.

A legend among the Muthuvan tribe, who live in the forests of Kerala, tells of the ‘flower of the Blue Mountains’ binding a god to a hunter girl in love. Another tribe of Paliyan nomads calculates a person’s age by the number of Neelakurinji flowerings that they have witnessed.

‘Seeing the Neelakurinji is extremely special, because you think, maybe I won’t be around for the next time.’

– R. Mohan

No one knows, not even nature itself, if there will be a next time; every shrub can reproduce once, only once, after it blooms, then it dies. The species’ survival thus rests on the hope that the seeds it produced will last.

In Kerala, people live by that hope, and in the meantime, they live. Simply, but well; they work on plantations or in luxury hotels As August 2018 drew nearer, they waited for the super bloom and for tens of thousands of tourists, and the economic boom they promised.

Neither came. Instead, rainfall. The monsoon peaked on the 20th of July. On the 8th of August, one week before the bloom, the floods began, then the landslides. The water and mud displaced more than a million people, killed hundreds, and damaged more than 50,000 houses and almost all the major roads and bridges.

Not since 1924 had Kerala seen anything like this. The people, the crops, the tourism industry, the Neelakurinji blossoms stood no chance. By the time the rain stopped, everything was gone. The losses were immense.

But the sun had come out; the flowers would need ten days of it to bloom. So the people counted: Day One, and meanwhile, began working.

Thousands of volunteers launched search and rescue operations, set up relief camps. They shared their food and blankets and clothes, drinking water and plots of land, and when that was not enough, sold their gold and livestock to buy more. People shared skills too; some raised awareness, others raised roofs from the ground. Fishermen offered their boats and children, the contents of their piggy banks.

Ten days later, the past had not been erased and the present was still difficult. But high in the Western Ghats, the flanks were covered with blue flowers.

The rain to the wind said,

‘You push and I’ll pelt.’

But this story is not about them. Nor is it about floods and loss and the fickle impermanence of being.

It is about blue flowers on a mountain, and that such flowers existed. That they bloomed for shepherds and plantation workers who too, ‘knelt, lay lodged,’ but not dead. And who will always have that sight because they know how those flowers felt.

There are still seven days remaining of the bloom this Jupiter year. I will not see it this time but will be ready for it the next. In the meantime, there is good to do and beauty to see, life to live. And the hope that tomorrow there will be sun, and in twelve years, the kurinji.

On a Switch – Part III

This essay is the last in a three-week series entitled On a Switch, inspired by the words of former US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power:

‘No matter how small our actions may be, we have to model the principles that we believe in.’

The essays are stories of three dark moments in America’s history in which a few ordinary citizens ‘led principled, effective resistance’ against the dark, and flipped a switch.

Part III – No Heroes are Coming.

The 1980s AIDS Crisis

‘Darling, you see, no heroes are coming for you. Grab your sword, and don your own armor.’

– Emily Palermo

AIDS did not begin in the 1980s or in the United States. This chapter of its story does though, with a report by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in 1981.

It described a strange phenomenon: Twenty-six gay men in New York City and the state of California had contracted the same, unusual form of pneumonia. That same day, the 3rd of July, the New York Times reported forty-one cases of a specific type of cancer; all affected were also gay.

All of them also had AIDS: Acute Immunodeficiency Syndrome, a disease that by then had spread far beyond just sixty-seven individuals. Estimates of those infected range between 100,000 and 300,000 people, on all five continents.

Few in 1981 knew what HIV even stood for – Human Immunodeficiency Virus – let alone what it was. HIV is a virus that attacks the human immune system. With time, it destroys so many cells that the body cannot fight infections. When that happens, HIV becomes AIDS, and with the immune system suppressed, any opportunistic infection, or cancer, or even the flu can be lethal.

HIV is transmitted through body fluids like blood, semen, vaginal secretions, and breast milk. In the US, it was immediately linked to drugs and unprotected sex. In the 1980s, because HIV/AIDS only seemed to infect homosexual communities, the media called it the ‘Gay Plague.’ The public followed, and correspondingly turned up its nose and condemnation.

By 1986, 11,932 deaths had been reported across the country. And the government had said nothing.

Ed Koch, the mayor of New York City, at the center of the epidemic, took two years to publicly acknowledge the existence of the disease. President Ronald Reagan took six, and even when either did, nothing followed. The death toll rose to 20,000.1.5 million more were infected.

When asked about HIV research, former president George Bush senior replied with the observation that he did not approve of ‘that lifestyle.’ President Reagan’s White House press secretary was less tactful when he said that the reporter pressing the issue had to be homosexual himself. And California’s Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee (PANIC), went beyond statements to sponsor a campaign for mandatory testing and mass quarantine of individuals found infected.

The casualties multiplied with the excuses: no budget, no political will, no access to treatment under testing, no health insurance or government support to cover treatment anyway. Polite society did not care; polite society was not gay. Those in it who were, were either ashamed, too weak to protest, or dead.

Until one frigid December morning, when New York City awoke to black posters with pink triangles plastered all over Manhattan.

The Nazis had used inverted pink triangles to mark homosexuals in concentration camps during World War II. But these triangles were upright. Beneath them, two words, in white block letters:

SILENCE = DEATH

It got polite society’s attention. Onto the government.

In March of 1987, playwright and activist Larry Kramer was invited to speak at a meeting in the New York Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center. He asked two-thirds of the audience to stand up, and when they did, declared that within the next five years, the people standing would probably be dead.

He challenged them to ‘organize, mobilize, and demand an effective AIDS policy response’ from their government. No heroes were coming. They had to don their own armour.

The following week, 300 people attended the first ACT UP meeting: the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power. The week after that: 800. The group spread to other cities, where chapters campaigned nonviolently to raise awareness of the disease and improve the quality of medical and social services for those affected by it.

Their demands:

1. Faster approval and release of experimental AIDS drugs

2. Affordable drug prices for all those affected regardless of their class backgrounds

3. Health insurance and Medicaid coverage for experimental drug therapies

4. Alternatives to the highly toxic drug dominating the market.[1]

5. A federal needle-exchange program

6. A federally controlled and funded program of condom distribution

7. A serious sex education and awareness program in schools

Their tactics: Non-violent protests, targeted demands, poster campaigns.

Most importantly, ACT UP established the Treatment and Data Committee: citizens who took it upon themselves to study and understand the science. They read textbooks on immunology, virology, cellular biology, and medical statistics so they could engage scientists in meaningful dialogue.

ACT UP’s advocacy eventually helped lower the price of drugs, change the FDA’s approval process, incorporate more patients into drug trials, diminish social stigma, and educate. Its engagement of the scientific community led to a breakthrough that, in 1996, catalyzed the development of drugs that could prolong lifespans.

Much has changed since that CDC report was released in the early 1980s. Much has not; today, 36.9 million people live with HIV. Since the start of the pandemic, up to 50 million people have died. That number increases by 2 million each year; just those who cannot pay for the drugs.

ACT UP did not eradicate AIDS, but it did bring a loud end to government and societal indifference. It flipped a switch, and to those who are alive today because of it, the light must seem resplendent.

[1] Azidothymidine (AZT)