No Celebration

By Caterina Zanardi

“It’s no celebration”. That was Frida’s call at 7 in the morning on the 8th of March 2018. On the brown carpet of our Bucharest apartment, the usual mess of socks, coloured pencils, and empty rakja glasses gave a curious backdrop to that statement. Frida’s even face, suddenly hardened by a calm but steady rage, felt alien to such a light setting.

We were a handful of international students, working in Bucharest for a local organization offering after-school services. We normally spent our mornings in an exhilarated panic, trying to come up with activities that would hold past our non-existent Romanian. While it was not unusual for us to chat over the origami patterns and the English quizzes, I am pretty sure that the conversation on Women’s Day had been going on for a while, possibly from the night before. So when Frida, the Mexican schoolmate a year above me, pronounced those words, I first overlooked them; took them more as a point in her argument than as a stand-alone statement.

I would find myself thinking more and more on what she had said as the day progressed. Events like Women’s Day, celebrations that had been present in my life since I could remember, had started morphing from the familiar to the political ever since I moved from my hometown, Bologna, to Duino. This north-Italian seaside village was the unexpected setting for the international school that thought it a good idea to send their pupils on volunteering weeks in Romania. The change had been mostly brought about by conversations with people like Frida, who possessed a knowledge and a will to share it I had never seen before. What she referred to that day, as faithfully as I can report it two years later, was that Women’s Day was not born as the festivity we have grown to know, but also that there wasn’t anything to celebrate

I hadn’t lived in a vacuum for 17 years. I knew about feminicides and rape culture. I somewhat knew about the gender pay gap. I certainly had learned a thing or two about gender roles, but the notion of things like “the patriarchy” still felt like an exaggeration. There was almost an expectation of gracefulness from my part: I did realize that getting mimosa flowers (the traditional gift on women’s day in Italy) was at very best a reductive form of appreciation directed at the literal half of humanity. Yet I thought that despite the rising feminicide statistics, despite the victim blaming in the media, we still ought to be nice and grateful for the thoughts of relatives and friends wishing us a happy day of being born the other gender. I also knew only half of the story, because I had been born in a place and within a skin that had protected me from experiencing most of those things in first person.

The type of reaction that I would have gotten at home for questioning a day like the 8th had always prevented me to move on from my assumptions. My parents stayed carefully away from the extremist jargon of those feminist collectives that stuck leaflets on the streetlights in the city centre. The idea that gender disparity was part of a bigger system shed worrying shadows over our own private lives. After all, recognizing that a system encompasses all of society means recognizing that you are to some extent complicit. Even the reassuring conception of the developed west, the first world of rights as opposed to the “rest”, on which my family’s left leaning discourse laid its foundations, shook at the notion that gender equality was not yet another victory of the societal and economic growth we had narrated for ourselves. I don’t think I would have ever moved past that perspective without Frida’s statement: it is no celebration.

The 8th of March is not a day of celebration but rather of commemoration. In the year of the conversation over the carpet between Frida and I, Mexico would see 891 feminicides and Italy 133. Of course these statistics only account for violent deaths and not those caused by other gender-related factors, such as deadly abortions, unsafe work conditions, and different access to healthcare. Not only must we acknowledge these deaths, but also the constant labour that watching over women’s rights requires – an effort easily nullified by governments and threatened by the ever-present guardians of the traditional family

There is an argument for celebration. Something that goes along the lines of “a day to recognize those who work every day to make it better”. It is true, to a certain extent, that Women’s Day gives visibility to stories and figures normally overlooked. But this take on the eighth of March neglects the power that rage and sorrow can have. In stating over and over the numbers of victims that pile up, in continuing to denounce assault and continuing to talk about it, we are not faulty of reiteration, nor of showing only the grim side: we are showing that first of all that this fight is still going, and we are giving that fight ground to take root in. There is action in remembrance, change in sorrow.

R

Dear S,

I don’t even know where to begin. I have not seen you in a month, since we decided that it was a good idea to stop talking. I don’t think about you everyday anymore. We have changed so much. Remember when you used to draw trees without flowers?

I had always been so scared of falling out of love. But the weirdest part of all is that it felt so natural. We have talked about this before, but I remember exactly the moment I fell in love with you, under that warm crimson sunset on the Portuguese coast. And I cannot explain how it went away.

As the tide came, the tide left, softly and unexpectedly. We stopped sharing songs before going to bed. I stopped asking you about your day, and you did not pay attention to my political arguments at dinner. Holding each other felt like a mechanical motion, void of any real need of our skins to touch. But I still wanted you to hold me. I wanted you to hold me and whisper memories. I wanted you to make me laugh by dancing in the kitchen, and yet I knew that I’d have to force up the corner of my lip. How can I move on when I don’t want to let go? I tried. I tried, as if letting go was the result of looking forward, of forgetting the past. But I didn't really want to forget. I wanted to remember the first times we looked at each other differently, the nights when we moved to the music and your hair looked silver under blue neon lights. The way you only started drawing flowers in trees after you met me. Will you always draw them now?

I wonder what role we will play in each others’ lives from now on. Being friends has not really worked out, and it probably never will. Will you call me the day you graduate? Will I send you a picture if I finally travel to New Zealand? As you change, I will too, but not together. I can’t believe that my new friends haven’t met you. It is hard to imagine that to them, your name will simply be one of many in my stories. But there’s no other way forward. I keep trying, slowly starting to notice other people - terribly afraid. The fear of realizing that I am moving on makes me unable to let go of you. It means that I have to redefine myself, that I have to let go, somehow, of this part of me that will always be with you, that I have to stop involving you in all the decisions I make. What if I want to move on but I don’t want to let go? I live caged in purgatory.

We become individuals again. It all seems so natural, yet I’ll always remember that first moment I realized I was in love. That time when you ran towards the sea and the horizon seemed to come closer. The pink and orange intertwined in the sky and reflected onto the ocean, moving with it, as the waves went back and forward. And as the shadow of your body approached me, in those slow tired movements from having battled the forces of nature, I knew it. I suddenly just knew. On that evening of June, on the Portuguese coast with the sun completing its cycle, leaving behind the beauty of the day, the smell of seaweed, and the warmth of bodies that had not danced together, I realized that I did. When I am older, on warm June nights, I promise you that I will walk along the sea, and regardless of where you are and who I am, you will always cross my mind.