Over and over again, history has been made by those who dared to disrupt it. And some of the biggest disruptors have been women, not simply because of what they set out to challenge but because of the additional obstacles they had to overcome to engage in the challenge simply by virtue of their gender. They suffered ridicule, abuse and death because they did not ‘know their place’, because they refused the societal pigeonhole assigned to them by the patriarchy.
There is an endless roll, still scrolling, of heroes who have struggled for equal rights, dignity and security, for control over their property and their own bodies, and for an equal share of the levers of power. Other women have had the outrageous temerity to dare to challenge unjust social and political systems, all too often created and run by men, which had normalised discrimination, oppression and repression.
One immediately thinks of Rosa Parks, who ignited the civil rights movement in America in 1955 by refusing to give up her seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama because: “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
But there were so many others. In 1798, France was convulsed by the beginning of the French Revolution. The price of bread had surged due to a poor harvest, and in October a number of Parisian women marched in protest to Versailles, where Louis XVI held court. By the time they arrived the crowd numbered thousands, and they forced the king to move the royal family to Paris to be closer to the people. The rest is history.
During the ‘Dirty War’ from 1974 to 1983, the Argentinian dictatorship tortured, killed and disposed of 30,000 political opponents without informing their families. Some of the mothers of these ‘disappeared’ held their first vigil at Plaza de Mayo in 1977, lonely figures with white head scarves to symbolise the nappies of their lost children. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo continued to gather every Thursday afternoon, in spite of threats and abuse. They grew to become the best-known Argentine human rights organisation, and contributed to the return of democracy in their country.
The precious spirit of Occupy Justice is a lighthouse of sanity for many
For Daphne too, like all the other disruptive women that preceded her, the original ‘sin’ was that she did not ‘know her place’. Or rather, she knew very well what her stereotypical place in Maltese society was meant to be. She was an upper middle-class woman of means: her appointed slot was as a fully paid-up member of the chattering classes, who whiled their time grumbling about the system they actively propped and syphoned to sustain their families.
But Daphne could not give a damn about ‘her place’. She beat her own drum, an uncompromising staccato beat against hypocrisy and corruption that she documented – and commented acerbically – whenever and wherever she found it. She knew that by daring to disrupt the transversal Maltese patriarchy that intersected politics, business, criminality and social class, she would face retribution all the more bitter for being misogynistic.
Daphne would have been the first to echo Katharine Hepburn’s dictum: ‘Saint I ain’t’. She did cross the line sometimes. She made mistakes. But her mistakes caused that much more outrage not only because of her impact on national and international public opinion, but because she was a woman. She would not ‘know her place’. And so they moved to delete her space.
She and her loved ones paid a heavy price during her life, and the ultimate price at its horrific ending. But her obstinate integrity overcame threats, abuse, violence, fear. Thanks to this government’s unremitting, and unremittingly clumsy, efforts to vilify and nullify her memory, it has now overcome death. Her cause has been taken up by an international consortium of journalists, the Daphne Project, just as obstinate and inquisitive as she was. Her case has attracted the sombre attention of international institutions, under whose steady gaze our government twitches like a guilty schoolboy who isn’t allowed to pee.
And, most promisingly for Maltese democracy, it has welded together a fierce band of women who carry her torch and have lit a hundred others: Pia Zammit, Clemence Dujardin, Kristina Chetcuti and their fellow Amazons of Occupy Justice. Like the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, they have been few and reviled, and may sometimes feel lonely and disheartened.
But they are far from alone. They have overcome government’s paternalistic attempts to ignore and brush aside their demands for justice, truth and accountability. Last Tuesday’s splendid demonstration in front of Daphne’s makeshift memorial showed that, in the current environment of sordid compromise, ethical disorientation and uninspiring political pygmies, the precious spirit of Occupy Justice is a lighthouse of sanity for many.
In Malta today, the face of unflinching courage and integrity is Woman.
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece