This is the event of the month for me. Definitely. Not Christmas, not Hannukah, not the celebration of the Fourth Republic after the botched referendum and the botched coup that wasn’t (a must see side splitting picture of Andry Rajoelina and Mialy Rajoelina, aka Heidi of the Banana Republic, with her little girl braids, being escorted out of the Queen’s Palace, no less).
If you have never been to a TED event, like me, attending the conference was a revelation. TEDWomen was “Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world”. It was riveting, not only because of the speakers who were all outstanding and funny and sarcastic and knowledgeable and surprisingly good and never bad and make me cry and laugh and shrug sometimes, but I was never bored and this is quite a feat considering how many people spoke and that the event lasted two days !
It was riveting because of the audience as well. I met very inspiring women in the audience, young ones who put together Tedx-es in their countries and older ones, like some accomplished executives whom I shared meals and conversations with. Riveting because one tends to make friends and acquaintances leading similar lives and fretting about similar concerns in small circles, even in these days of globalization and in an internationally diverse city like Washington DC. So it is funny but I was happy to discover among the audience and the speakers all the simple possibilities of living one’s life differently.
They warned us at the beginning of the conference that we would be awed, but most probably by an unknown person, a stranger. And it was true, although there was a Nobel Prize winner, 2 Secretaries of State (Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright), one Speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi, and three very prominent African ladies were featured, my favorites were women I had never heard of before.
Quotes from speakers I liked :
My favorite of all was the slam poet, singer and songwriter, TED Fellow Iyeoka Ivie Okoawo explores the potential of human creativity. she simply exuded charisma ! She blew my mind.
“She does not know her beauty
She thinks her brown skin has too many flaws
If she could see her image in the Unogbo River where her mother was born
She would know
But the city holds no clear streams
West side streetlights shade the sunset’s miracles
And the concrete covers the soft memory of the earth’s unborn seed
Black is the color of her press and burned hair
She thinks her curls are too tight and short
If she could feel her natural birth locks blow in Arimogija’s fresh breeze
On the hill her father once stood
She would know
But the girl does not know her own beauty
She thinks her lips are too thick
If she could hear Benin men whisper thoughts across the Atlantic ocean
Praying to touch her heart to win her for just one kiss
She would know…but
She thinks her eyes are dark and troubled
No one told her ebony was the color of the universe’s wings
She thinks her nose is too flat
Her breasts too small
Her legs too long
She never learned how to dance you know…
Never learned how to run naked on the bank of a golden pond
Embracing her existence guided by the light of a tropical dawn”
Hanna Rosen, journalist, author of “The End of Men” :”Men are the new ball and chain”
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the Iron Lady of Africa, President of Liberia : “I am a victor of circumstances”
Liza Donnelly, New Yorker cartoonist, who manages to pack humor and wit in very concise phrases : “In one day I went from tweeting my oatmeal to tweeting a revolution”. You can see said cartoon here.
Hans Rosling. You have to see his talk. He makes data fun. He also likes washing machines.
Elizabeth Lindsay, explorer : “The planet is our canoe. We are the voyagers”. Chanted marvelously upstage, I was entranced. Also because her topic was the lost Polynesian art of navigation, and I remembered reading a spell binding obituary in the Economist (my favorite section of the Economist really is the Obituary page.) of Polynesian seafarer Maui Piailug, made me imagine how some of Malagasy ancestors came to our island.
Mona Eltahawy, who disturbs stereotypes we may have about Muslim women, and makes it a mission to “confuse” : “Headscarf and feminism are not mutually exclusive”
Eve Ensler of the Vagina Monologues, which I participated in translating into Malagasy, a fun experience.
Some the citizen journalism sisters of worldpulse.com from Nepal, Bolivia and Philippines. My Filipina sister said Filipina women were not LBFM, as the GIs of American military bases call them, they are not servants of the world. It deeply resonated with me. Malagasy women too are now gaining similar reputation of LBFM. They are also working as maids in Lebanon, in slave conditions. I found the following talk by Ariana Huffington a little too incongruous and light after that heart felt cry, but I suppose it was a hard act to follow.
I like that they are inclusive of non Western women power stories, but in some ways, they have to find better ways to include these stories. I find patronizing, or maybe in this context, matronizing, the way they brought on stage the 14 year old Masaii girl with her father. The intent was good but I simply did not like it. I do not think it was right for the audience, no matter how worldly, well traveled and well informed of the world’s problems and their own privileged status they were, I believe it was simply too far out of the realm of their every day lives, and I feel they made a spectacle of the poor girl. I may be wrong.
I am now a TED addict. And I am so grateful to Solana Larsen of Global Voices for allowing me to attend.
PS : I saw a Christy Turlington look alike at the table near me but did not think too much about it. It turns out that yes it was really Christy Turlington, looking beautifully unassuming. She blogs about TEDWomen.
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