Speakers encourage audience members to bring about change
Those who attended the International Women’s Day luncheon in Truro were blasted by the power of El Jones’s poetry.
Jones, a Halifax educator, activist and poet, was one of the guest speakers for the event hosted by the Central Nova Women’s Resource Centre.
Jones uses poetry to raise awareness about many social, cultural and political issues.
One of the poems she included in her presentation on ursday was “Boxes,” which includes the lines:
“This poor woman has got to box her feelings in.
She’s locked up tight like a strong box with no time to cry into Kleenex boxes.
She’s got to keep on keeping on, to send her kids to those public school boxes, with no food in their lunch boxes, and no computers to do homework on and type in the search boxes, and they come home and beg her for X-boxes and Reebok shoe boxes they see on the TV box.”
Glenn ompson spoke on the importance men hold, as people with a historical advantage, in supporting gender parity.
He compared life to a game of Monopoly, saying, “You take four people and you let three of them start the game rst. ey go around two or three times and then you let the fourth person start. So, from that moment everything is equal. Equal opportunity. And then you ask the question: ‘Is that fair?’”
He said that while teaching Grade 11 English, as a way of getting a message across, he talked to students about bringing in their Disney merchandise and burning it in a big re. He asked them to look at appearance as it relates to good and bad characters in Disney movies, pointing out that, in Aladdin, Jasmine and Aladdin aren’t very dark, and have North American accents, while the dangerous characters are darker and have strong middle eastern accents. He also talked about e Little Mermaid having an attractive main character, while a bad character was fat and ugly.
“In ‘The Little Mermaid’ the narrative is that she will give up her voice to be with man,” he said. “ is stu matters. It’s not just a movie; this stu creates the narrative that our child learn, and this narrative contributes to our systemic issues of racism, classism, sexism. All of the isms.”
He said people are either perpetuating or disrupting the narrative.
“I challenge you to keep this discussion going,” he added. “ ink about some of the subtle things that you say or do that perpetuate or disrupt the narrative.”