Organizing for America | Interview4Obama: Do You Speak Matriarch? 2 Films By Women about Women

Do You Speak Matriarch? 2 Films By Women about Women

By Madama Ambi - Sep 10th, 2009 at 12:47 pm EDT

Also listed in: 10 groups

Comments | Mail to a Friend | Report Objectionable Content

Tags: Abigail Disney, Aviva Kempner, congress, film, health care reform, I Love Lucy, Obama, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, women, Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg

Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg, film about the life and work of Gertrude Berg, who spoke Matriarch to a nation before the advent of I Love Lucy.
Pray the Devil Back to Hell, film about the women's peace movement in Liberia, led by Leymah Gbowee, who remembered her mother-tongue and used it.

This morning, during my usual twirl around the femisphere, I got news of Mark Dorlester's HuffingtonPost piece about the 31st article of the Iraqi Constitution. Says Dorlester, the George W. Bush administration hammered universal health care, single payer, into the Iraqi Constitution. Yes, he says, American government was assertive in placing universal single-payer health care into Iraq's new democracy, while here in the U.S.A. the idea of such a system has pushed the alarm buttons of right-wingers with rifles, young women comparing Obama to Hitler, older women wanting their country back, older people up in arms about death panels, and if you've tuned into the asylum only one time in the last month, you took the temperature of blowhards whipping up a firestorm. It's hard to put out a fire in a group brain if you don't have leaders with integrity.

On my way to the fact-check, I realized I had already entered matriarchal mode, fired up and fearless about calling out the bullshit. Somebody needs to do some 'splainin here! Tonight is the big deal speech President Obama is giving on his vision for health care reform and already I'm under-impressed. I'm not holding Barack Obama alone responsible for the lies and the bullshit and powerful people making themselves rich at the expense of nameless, faceless sick people like those Wendell Potter met at a "health fair" he stumbled upon. He got shocked into shame-with-his-name on it. Deserved shame. Shame. Shame. Good for Mr. Potter that he owned up and that he's speaking out. But what will the President do tonight? What can he do?

This is where he needs to call in Molly Goldberg to teach him to put his hands on his hips (maybe that's the problem? he ain't got none?) and stand his ground, aiming a double-beam taser gun of motherly "What the hell were you thinking? Were you thinking? Do you even have a thought process?" President Obama and Congress need to tag along behind General Leymah Gwobee, who led a women's peace movement in Liberia. They need to apprentice themselves to a woman drawing on ancient mother-right, down in the veins of necessity, down deep in the geo-sphere of universal human resources.

Why do we not see more women with hands on their wide hips, planted in the paths of tyrants, liars, thieves and war criminals? Go see Pray the Devil Back to Hell and you will understand why not. Women in too many parts of this world are running for cover every day, every day from out-of-control warlords and warlord-wanna-be's who have scorched the earth so massively a mother can't give her child the illusion of a meal. She has nothing. She cowers in her shack or her tent in terror of being raped or worse. And yes, there is worse in Liberia. No road is safe. No one is safe. Children are conscripted into war at young ages; the air is violent.

Why did Gertrude Berg (aka Molly Goldberg in her TV show), empress of a media empire, mother-figure to a nation, disappear from TV, film, and the American mantle of desperately loved stars keeping it together for everybody? When you watch Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg, you'll learn that it was the Lucy-wife who knocked the Molly-mother off the mantle. Unless you grew up in the 1950's watching I Love Lucy every day, you may not remember the scene (scenes?) of Ricky turning Lucy over his knee, administering a fatherly spanking. Lucy off the set was known to be a brilliant comedian, a tough negotiator and a creative genius, but Lucy in the show was uncorked, ungrounded, childish as well as childlike, impulsive, compulsive, and if she wasn't on the trail looking for trouble, was just too much the space-cadet to size up a stampede.

It's comedy, right? Somebody's got to play the fool, and that was Lucy's gift. Sure, sure, sure. Just go see Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg (it's in theatres now, and the New York Times gives it a star, so go!), and tell me if you can even imagine Mr. Goldberg turning Molly tush-side up and whacking her a few "bad girls" while Molly flutters her legs, bleating like a goat sold at market. Don't get me wrong--if consenting adults want to spank each other (do it in private, huh?...it's great that you're cool with your bondage thing, but I don't want to parade down Castro Street next to whole contingents of people getting spanked and whipped...I mean, you know, I didn't consent to that violence, so keep it to yourself...), I don't care as long as it's safe. NU?

Pray the Devil Back to Hell is a powerful film, but I was disappointed not to see the one scene I was waiting for, the moment when Leymah (that's General Gwobee to you), can only convey the force of her outrage and her uncontainable fury by standing on the tracks to stop the train. We learn by her narration, after-the-fact, that she broke through the madness when she warned the soldiers and bureaucrats ringing her, that she was ready to take it on Liberia-style. She would show them the inversion of morality they'd caused. Leymah, herself, in her naked body, was ready to render visible the shame, the sorrow and the pity, created by war-crazed soldiers and insurgents.

In Liberia, it's a shaman's curse for a mother to remove her clothes in repudiation of men who deserve the lashing of her mother-scorn. She calls down a power that is understood and that holds up the earth. When she announces her intention to rip off her dress, warning them of the imminent, inevitable ripping she is powerless to prevent--by her own hand stripping off her dress, shoulders back, holding her brazen pelvis out for war-boys and war-men to behold--the curtain of shame drops. It's over. Nobody doubts that she will do it. Nobody doubts that a curse will ensue. Nobody shrugs off the meaning of mother-shame. Nobody misunderstands that tone of voice. Nobody can escape the flashback to complete dependence on his mother and the memory of owing her your life.

The appropriate use of shame, incarnated in the universal mother who gives life and protects life, began a women's peace movement, led by General Leymah Gwobee of Liberia. There was much more to the successful waging of peace--many other tactics, many other brave women. Without the standoff between the lost war-boys and the protectress of life, what was at stake could not have been made visible. General Leymah called on her mother-tongue.

Go see these two films and, if you can arrange it, see them back-to-back. You will see two very different, equally inspiring women, one rich, one poor, one Jewish-American, one Liberian, one white, one black. I see them side-by-side, glorious glints of a lost language.

Reader Comments

No comments have been written yet.

Content on blogs in My.BarackObama represents the opinions of community members and in no way should be interpreted as endorsed or approved by the campaign.