Hi all,
This is my first official post at docudharma. Exciting. 🙂
I wrote this post which combined a quick note of thanks I wrote as a self introduction to OOIBC, images I posted for Wordless Wednesday and an older post I wrote about being a privileged north amerikkkan homebirther who can reasonably expect to birth children that are not irradiated and howling in pain, birthing in peace and quiet not amid the sounds of bombs and the screams of the traumatized, dominated and dying.
I just want to offer a quick thank you to Edger for turning me in the direction of this group blogsite. I appreciate the words of encouragement, Edger.
darkdaughta
originally posted onWednesday, March 26, 2008
Greetings from darkdaughta…
Hi,
I'm darkdaughta. My other blog is here.
I'm new here. I was invited over the weekend but I waited. I wanted to bring something useful to the conversation. I wanted to bring something that locates me not just as a war resister, but also as a mama, as a flesh being who is attempting to deal with her lived reality as someone who benefits from the war in Iraq.
So, I thought every day since the first invitation about what would do this space justice and about what I could come bearing that would help to expose what our warlords have brought to the people of Iraq.
Hi all,
This is my first official post at docudharma. Exciting. 🙂
I wrote this post which combined a quick note of thanks I wrote as a self introduction to OOIBC, images I posted for Wordless Wednesday and an older post I wrote about being a privileged north amerikkkan homebirther who can reasonably expect to birth children that are not irradiated and howling in pain, birthing in peace and quiet not amid the sounds of bombs and the screams of the traumatized, dominated and dying.
I just want to offer a quick thank you to Edger for turning me in the direction of this group blogsite. I appreciate the words of encouragement, Edger.
darkdaughta
originally posted onWednesday, March 26, 2008
Hi,
I'm darkdaughta. My other blog is here.I'm new here. I was invited over the weekend but I waited. I wanted to bring something useful to the conversation. I wanted to bring something that locates me not just as a war resister, but also as a mama, as a flesh being who is attempting to deal with her lived reality as someone who benefits from the war in Iraq.
So, I thought every day since the first invitation about what would do this space justice and about what I could come bearing that would help to expose what our warlords have brought to the people of Iraq.
Before I begin, I just want to say that I'm thankful for the invitation. I haven't been invited to join a group of bloggers before. So this is a treat…no, that's too surface…this was something I couldn't have hoped for having ruffled the amount of feathers I've ruffled over the two years I've been in the blogosphere. My chest hurts with the terrible happiness I feel.
Nuff said.Moving on…
This is something I posted today over at my main blog. It's for Wordless Wednesday. I try to post pics that galvanize and disturb whenever I possibly can.These fit the bill. I have pictures. Once you check them I think you'll agree the contrast is clear. The creeping horror of it all is even clearer.
After the images, I've included a post I wrote a while back about what it means to be a homebirther living in north amerikkka as babies are born in Iraq bearing the signs of having been irradiated.
I can't say “enjoy“, obviously. But I can, once more, just say thanks for the invitation to be present and to blog for this worthy cause. I will try to bring on the noise, filled with rampant complications and contradictions as best as I can, as often as I can.
darkdaughta
Iraqi babies
We're raised to turn away from sights that discomfit.
Don't. Don't do it.
For more information about the effects of depleted uranium on Iraqi children please, please go here and here and here.
originally posted on Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Depleted uranium, wonderfully helpful warlords and complicating birth…
North amerikkkan, western, urban, oil greedy, resource hoarding, consumerist, capitalist, privileged, protected, fairly certain of “wonderful” outcomes and “whole”, “normal”, “healthy” babies…
Clean and comfortable homebirthing, spiritual, grounded, powerFULL experiences maintained with helpful assistance from imperialist, capitalist, patriarchal, upper class, white colonizing war mongering governments who dominate, bomb, poison, irradiate whole families, mothers and babies in other parts of the world…(resist denial that allows for ignorance of same story played out closer to home, insert more right…here)…and at “home” on the behalf of those who dominate.
We – the new, feminist, radical, conscious, politicized, stay at home parenting, nurturing wave of mamas joyfully post pics of free birthing, homebirthing, natural birthing, cesarean birthing labours, rebel against or embrace allopathic medicine and share the names of solid midwives and OBs all the while maintaining a sense of blissful obliviousness DENIAL that allows for the perpetuation of genocide and oppression on the behalf of us and our bouncing healthy babies.
[cue the cheesy video featuring the rosy cheeked new mama, amazed and stunned father and breastfeeding, vernix covered baby bonding moment after intensely powerFULL birth…make sure the picture is hazy with the smoke of bombs exploding nearby, that the air is filled with the sounds of extended family members crying out in rage and rebellion as they give up the ghost and pass over…but most importantly make sure that the glowing mama gets to bathe in colourful cut flowers spiked with depleted uranium and that the ground water used for her post birth bath is suitably perfumed and toxified with mercury…do this right after baby is born and repeat until desired effects are achieved.]
From the bottom of my attachment parenting, homeschooling, homebirthing, midwife and doula loving, extended breastfeeding, kkkanadianized, amerikkkanized, north amerikkkanized, oil craving, resource hoarding, food wasting, gmo consuming, walmart shopping heart I say to the white, suited, male, upper class warlords, to their multi-cultural, gay, lesbian, closeted, female, or otherwise oppressed administrative idiot minions (who really should know better) and to their disposable pawns in camo whose violence supports my lifestyle:
“Thank you. I really appreciate what you do and how you do it.”
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Out of the many horrors this war has brought, this is one of the worst.
Welcome Dark Daughta. I think you’ll find kindred caring spirits here.
we can’t really believe it
we don’t get it
the horror… is the latest chainsaw chuckie jason thing. it doesn’t happen in real life or to real people that we know.
if it could only be as close as DENIAL, then we’d be getting somewhere. denial means some shred of acknowledgment of it…
your POV has incredible texture and it’s jarring, waking stuff. glad you found us and Edger gets some points for this!
a warm welcome to you and your beautiful child.
and this hits it…
disposable pawns in camo whose violence supports my lifestyle great line.
btw… i didn’t know gays/lesbians were minions of the white suited male warlords. but then, i’m always the last to find these things out. i thought they were oppressed along with the rest of us, no?????
and other scientists are finding DU links to far more common ailments such as diabetes. The long life of this atomized radioactive dust leave no one not affected. You may already know yet I bring up this name to aide in your quest against this insane evil. Yes, it will come to those in the fucking suits and I did get a reply from a guy in New York after I posted a story about a DU production area he lived nearby.
This cannot be said long and loud enough.
Being real rude and crude would be sending these pictures along with care packages for “our troops”.
I had pictures of DU armored tanks, shot up and lying out in the open on flatbed railcars in Kansas, I love it, of all places Kansas.
Anyway use what I have said here to your advantage. Know that I am a 52 year old born here, raised here trapped in suburbia “American” who knows all about the evils of elite asshole parasites. Not all of us are brainwashed zombinals.
a crime against humanity. DU is a forever kind of gift, it will serve to kill and maim thousands of Iraqis for generations to come. Forever, because Depleted Uranium (Uranium 238) has a half life of 4.5 BILLION years.
Author
From the sounds of it, it’s ubitquitousness (not sure if that’s a word), it’s everyday applications…airliners and paint(?) we’re all poisoned by it. The Iraqis just seem to be getting a wonderfully concentrated dose of the pain and suffering purposefully directed their way. But then of course, as has been pointed out here on this site, the Navajo have been poisoned by uranium mining and it’s side effects for quite some time. I did a search for images of their children, not wanting to get all sanctimonious and in denial about what happens over here in north amerikkka. But I guess no one is photographically documenting what happened to their children. For that to happen us differently located settler folk would have to see it as a horrific issue…the Navojo being poisoned on their own lands by doing things like unwittingly drinking from irradiated tailings ponds.
We’re definitely not in Kansas anymore, Toto. But from the sounds of it, Kansas has it’s own problems if damaged tanks spewing radiation are just being paraded around for all to reap the benefits of such close contact.
I think we are definitely in denial about the ongoing use of DU. We protest the war, yes. But we aren’t collectively protesting the use of DU which, it’s true, is all our problem because radiation knows no international boundaries and we can count on a shared atmosphere to give all of us and our children a whopping big dose of the stuff.
I’ve gotten into some serious non-battles with the homebirthing mothers who don’t define birth in north amerikkka as a politically significant act of the privileged settler classes, definitely not having anything to do with Iraq besides the fact that they teach their children that war is wrong, not that they are able to lay back and breathe because of what the warlords do. I think most of the wimmin like my birth photos, but they have difficulties with the ways I attempt to implicate them, to implicate me and my children.
People who wage war, whether they wage it for imperialist or liberational reasons keep images of their young firmly in mind. They fight to get more resources for their children and for their children’s children. We fight to save the world for our children and for their children’s children…for somebody’s children…somewhere…some part of us has got to survive…
That’s the procreational urge…
So, birthing is hugely important and I’ve been trying to engage the homebirthers in conversation so as to help them, especially those who have more privilege, realize how important their uteruses are to the warlords, how important their children are to the warlords and, as in the case of Native children who were starved, evicted, force marched, mutilated, murdered so that amerikkka could come into being, for enslaved African children who were force worked, whipped, badly fed, murdered so that amerikkka could prosper, for children around the world who have been exploited in factories so that amerikkka could consume more cheaply and abundantly, for children who murdered over the course of the 20th century so it could remain powerful and expand, for Iraqi children whose bodies are burning…
I want to highlight the fact that no matter how we balk at the images, it’s clear that our ruling bodies, our governments, don’t see these children as important at all.
These children are like ants to the george bushes and tony blairs of the world. This realization is a hugely important, very intimate one that is every bit as important as whether I’m going to use a midwife and a doula, whether I will use homeopathics or naturopathic herbs, whether I will rest in bed for thirty or forty days after birth…
I’m forty and I’m still coming into a consciousness of how all this fits together…
I just know it does.
I appreciate the comments and the additional information offered which is helping to fill out my picture.
Thanks to all of you for the welcome.
and a scene from “Children of Men” that moved me beyond words.
It’s not that I don’t want to know about this. I do. But word pictures would do it for me. I cannot take graphic illustrations such as these.
I applaud your writing here about these horrors. Guess I just need to be more careful.
Author
I didn’t mean to traumatize.
Truthfully, I realize that I didn’t traumatize. The reality of what is happening to these children crashing in traumatized. I’m bound to share it, sharing knowledge of what amerikkkans insist on turning away from.
These children are living the graphic reality portrayed in these images. They were not supposed to take those experiences. They weren’t destined for the pain, for the stench, for the stigma.
Babies can’t take it. But they have to so that north amerikkkans can turn away and ask for a gentler version of the truth.
So difficult. If you are more careful you may miss the rest of what is happening. Do you really want to be more careful?
Again…
My intent was not to harm you. My intent was to rip the blinders off eyes. I apologize if you experienced this as harm.
Get OUT NOW!
Don’t vote for war criminals Obama, Clinton or McCain…they aren’t going to stop in….they want to keep troops there…and that means more of this…