I need to let off steam so I'm going to blog a bit - in the hope that it helps by externalising my anger...am just going to puke up onto this page thus a) it is likely to be illegible b) there will be more faults than in the bible and c) it may well be negative...hopefully not too negative though - if one has nothing good to say better to say nothing at all and all that...
So a particularly hard week this week with regards to the gorgeous women who are obliged to prostitute themselves here in the streets of Poitiers. The weekend was spent translating a horribly depressing life story of one of the women, on a weirdly positive note though, doing this translation for the first time with others showed me how very touched they all were too - all three of them cried - it might sound sick but that helped me enormously...normally it's only me who cries like a baby about their plight (or that's how it feels) - I almost felt normal (yuk!). Then there was Monday and a trip to the lawyer..fascinating that she can't speak English - she works as an immigration lawyer...enough said...wonderful woman, really kind and clearly touched by my friend's situation - what's more she has great ideas for how to finally get papers for this friend AND it was thanks to her that I asked my friend if she had been excised (the only time she finally understood was when I asked did someone cut your clitoris? - oh yes I was cut she said). We go to the hospital next Monday for a certificate which just might be the final piece of the puzzle enabling her to stay in France. France has rejected her demande d'asile (asylum claim) saying that there is not enough evidence to prove her story...well this certificate might just be enough to prove to them that she comes from a village that practices dangerous rituals - having had her clitoris removed might just be what saves her life!!!
Then onto the court, via a lawyer with a second friend, this time the eighth wife of the leader of Boko Haram (an arranged marriage organised to settle a debt - she is Christian - he is not) when she made it clear that everything had been against her will he killed their two children - she fled. Then as I hear all the time somebody took pity on this poor defenceless and of course beautiful woman and suggested she save herself by fleeing to Europe and coming to work as a hairdresser or such like. She fled indeed, straight into the arms of a prostitution gang who forced her to prostitute herself and repay 62,000 euros - she managed one year and repaid 22,000 euros before realising that she could not continue like that - bad enough to have to sell one's body but also to have to give nearly all the money away each time was just unbearable - she once again managed to escape and hide down here in Poitiers...and guess what without papers, without any aid whatsoever from us - the french - the middle classes - the any fecking class you god damn like she gets nowt, zero, rien, fuck all at all...how is someone supposed to eat? Pay their rent? Buy shampoo - I mean for fuck's sake! We don't want people to commit crimes but if you're not a woman and you are not capable of selling your body (many less female clients here) what else can you do oh yes of course, something else illegal (prostitution isn't even illegal here...) - sell fucking drugs...but what other choice do they have? So yes from time to time she stands on the street and tries to earn enough to pay her rent of 370 euros and earn enough to eat throughout the month - always having to do something she hates, something she totally believes is a sin...something she believes she will go to hell for but hey better to live now and go to hell than to already be dead - or is it? She apparently asks herself that question a lot. Suicide is highest amongst prostitutes than amongst any other group of people. Anyway this lovely woman got attacked by a client - he attacked her and stole her money - I can't be bothered to go into the details as it is all just too sordid and horrible but the good news is that for the crimes he was accused of (the police didn't take into her account the fact that he raped her - or perhaps they didn't understand properly) he was found guilty and got 17 months...
Then finally this morning and the reason why I don't even feel like dancing and have cancelled my afternoon and am in bed writing this...a prostitute who needs an abortion...the lack of sympathy of the hospital staff (not all of them of course) the fact that there were pregnant women EVERYWHERE looking happy and smiling and shouting without opening their mouths 'look at us, how lucky we are, we're white, we were born in rich countries' that's how she felt...then in the waiting room with the women who don't want to be pregnant - the bad women - one side of the maternity centre is for the good women keeping their babies and the other side for the bad ones - no obviously it's not set out to mean this. It was apparently very well thought through - they didn't want to create a ghetto - after-all it's just life - some women are at a time where they can keep their baby and others not...the ones that don't want to one day will become those that do...oh really sorry I didn't realise that, is that obligatory? How long until the change will take place? How long until I won't feel so fucking angry with the world that I might just believe it deserves one of my offspring? How long until I won't feel so fucking guilty just for living - every breath being paid for by the poisoning of the planet? Do I need to stay here a few days? Weeks? Months? Years? I'll stay indefinitely if you can guarantee me one of those googoo gaga fake smiles.
At one point one of the nurses looked through my friends' papers and looked up after having read the page that very clearly highlights that she is unemployed and said in a very judgemental and condescending manner 'So what do you do for work?' I'm afraid I didn't even manage to translate this for my friend instead I said 'I'm sorry but I think maybe now is a good time for me to explain to you that my friend was adopted and at 21, whilst studying to be (funnily enough) a nurse was raped by her father - yes that's right the man who had bought her up and fathered her her whole life - he raped her. When she told her mother her mother exploded into a rage and slapped her and threw her out of the house and guess what? There she was a beautiful, lost soul, walking the streets wondering what to do next when a man comes up to her and asks her why she is crying? And of course, predictably (although sadly she was blissfully unaware of this predictability), explains that he can help her get to Europe where she can work as a shop assistant and earn really good money and that way she won't need her parents - she'll be able to pay her own studies. Great! Just fucking marvellous. Raped at 21 by your own fucking father and then just as you think your prayers have been answered WHAM off we go to be raped several times a day (the clients might not be rapists but I assure you these women are living rapes almost day in day out and we are doing FUCK ALL)...the nurse looked dumbfounded and funnily enough her manner became a lot more gentle.
On a good note the psychologist was wonderful - what a woman. From the outset she knew (ok without doubt she'd read the notes) the gravity of the situation, that this was a woman suffering on nearly all levels. Not only did she ask kind questions to get to the reality of why my friend wanted an abortion: her boyfriend (who pays her rent whenever he can so that she doesn't have to prostitute herself) told her he wanted a baby with her, that he loved her and wanted to marry her, that she should remove her implant and make a baby. He had always complained about using a condom and refused to wear one. So they had unprotected sex, she felt somewhat obliged, she needed his help, she fell pregnant. I remember the first day she told me, she was so happy, so convinced that this would be the answer to all her prayers, that now she would be sure to get papers, she would be the mother of a French baby. But...sorry but I feel the overwhelming need to say FUCKING BASTARD...when my friend told her boyfriend that she was pregnant he freaked, called her all sorts of names...how could I have a baby with a prostitute etc etc do you think I'm fucking stupid...my Dad hates niggers (I never usually use that word) and he pulled out his gun and told her that if she didn't have an abortion he would kill her. Well jesus fucking christ are you kidding me?
I remember waking up one day after a string of pretty horrible relationships (nothing in comparison to my friend) and realising that it could well be that because I thought I was a bad person, that I had put myself in a dangerous situation and was therefore in some way responsible for being raped, that I had accepted the advances of a man much older than me that I had killed a baby at 17 that I deserved to be punished, that I was bad...I was working through detaching myself from all this guilty when I finally made the connection - those of us that think we are bad attract bad things into our life.
My beautiful friend is doing the same. She is convinced god is punishing her for being a prostitute...amazingly the psychologist had enough common sense, intelligence and poetic beauty to explain to my friend that god is not into punishment - that is a man made concept to control us - God is into forgiveness and anyway you didn't chose to be a prostitute and even if you did you did so because you had no choice. She told her that god had clearly given her a mission, that people don't suffer such terrible things for nothing, that clearly she had been put on this earth in order to explain something to others and I was able to point out how she had made that previous nurse question her judgement, how perhaps the next time that there is a black woman (or anyone else for that matter) who doesn't work in-front of her that she might just treat them as a human being, perhaps experiencing some difficulties, instead of immediately judging her as a scrounger. My friend told us how she can't sleep at night because she believes she is going to kill an innocent child (oh how I remember feeling that at 17 - how desperately I wanted to kill myself) how she is sure that god will punish her forever. The gorgeous psychologist said that she was wrong to think like that - that babies die sometimes without the help of medicines, babies die after they have been born that babies are souls and that sometimes those souls come to us merely to highlight to us where we are at and where we might be going. To help us to ask ourselves important questions and we all agreed that any god that we wish to believe in most certainly only wants a woman to give herself up to bringing a child into this world if that is truly what she wants. My friend, of course, has the added difficulty that her own mother did not abort her but went through with the pregnancy in order to give my friend life. Again the psychologist's remarks were simply wonderful when she pointed out that every woman is different, every situation is different and that perhaps if my friend was in Nigeria she would not be making this decision, perhaps my friend's mother died after birth and so there was no choice but for her to be adopted (my friend know nothing about the circumstances of her birth) perhaps if she had got pregnant by a different man she would be able to consider keeping her baby. By the time we left my friend was smiling again and talking about how she was going to take her mission of changing the prostitution situation even more seriously in order to make up for killing her baby. The psychologist certainly helped but 15 minutes could never be enough to remove the weight of religion from around my friend's neck.
Finally, because I really need to get this out of me, can someone please explain to me why we have to always talk about the oldest profession? Didn't we eat first? Fish first? Teach first??? How some women just like sex - so what? Oh FUCK OFF. Yes of course there are tonnes of women who like sex - thank fuck - but there are not tonnes of women enjoying the luxury of getting to chose who they sleep with for money. The image of an exorbitantly high paid call girl who only has to have sex with sexy footballers or minted and respectful politicians is so far removed from reality it's not even funny. In my experience most women do it because they desperately need money; they need to feed their kids since their husband has abandoned them, they need to feed themselves, they are forced into it etc etc - one could say all married women who earn less than there husbands are prostitutes..if they want a new dishwasher they are going to have to keep their husband sweet and suck his cock if that's what he wants...they will be obliged to continue having sex that often gives them no pleasure whatsoever (he completely misses the point - in all senses possible of the term) if they want the atmosphere in the house to be tenable... Does anyone truly believe that these beautiful women standing on the streets, often freezing cold for endless hours at a time actually want to have sex with the rejects of our society? Do you think they like being penetrated without any preparation? Being called a pig and having their hair pulled (apparently often fairly amusing when the wig comes off)? Having to be fucked by drunk men? Drugged up men? Filthy, dirty men? Men older than their fathers? Younger than their sons? Men that instead of learning to be decent individuals in order to be physicality satisfied know that they can simply control another person through the use of their revolting wads of cash.
