How an “Imperialist” Schoolgirl Trashed A “Post-Colonial” Academic

Alaina Podmorov is a 13 year old girl from Canada who started a humanitarian campaign for the education of girls and women in Afghanistan.

She wrote this article in response to a masters’ thesis by the University of British Columbia’s Melanie Butler. This is a snippet from Alaina’s article:

No one will ever tell me that Muslim or any women think it’s ok to not be allowed to get educated or to have their daughters sold off at 8 years old or traded off at 4 years old because of cultural beliefs. No one will tell me that women in Afghanistan think it is ok for their daughters to have acid thrown in their faces. It makes me ill to think a 4 year old girl must sleep in a barn and get raped daily by old men. It’s sick and wrong and I don’t care who calls me an Orientalist or whatever I will keep raising money to educate girls and women in Afghanistan and I will keep writing letters and sending them in the back pack of my friend Lauryn Oates as she works so bravely on the ground helping women and girls learn what it is to exercise their rights. I believe in human rights so I believe everyone has the right their own opinion, I just wish that the energy that was used to write that story, that is just not true, could have been used to educate a girl in Afghanistan. That’s what the girls truly want. That’s what the Women in Afghanistan truly want. I have a drawer full of letters from them that says just that.

Terry Glavin calls bullshit on Butler’s thesis, which he says is:

an eruption of “post-colonial feminist theory” that sets out to attack actually-existing feminists who do real work for their real, living sisters in Afghanistan.

Here’s a snippet of Butler’s post-modernist, post-colonial guff, Canadian women and the (re)production of women in Afghanistan:

“In their bid to help Afghan women. . . some feminist groups have failed to distance themselves from the discursive mechanisms that manufacture consent for women’s oppression in the name of Empire. Building on Krista Hunt’s analysis of feminist complicity in the War on Terror (Hunt 2006), this essay draws attention to Canadian feminists’ role in (re)producing neo-imperialist narratives of Afghan women. Focusing specifically on the NGO Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan (CW4WAfghan), it shows how their use of feminist rhetoric and personal first-hand narratives, together with national narratives of Canada as a custodian of human rights, add to the productive power of the Orientalist tropes they invoke.”

Alaina is the cover person for Independent World Report journal this month.

Alaina Podmorow — now thirteen — knew what her choice was. She contacted Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, and asked if she could join the organisation. She was welcomed with open arms. Thus, Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan was born — a humanitarian organisation of young girls in Canada, trying to help the girls in Afghanistan. The organisation raises funds in order to support female education in Afghanistan, with the motto: Education = Peace.

In her own words:

“I am the founder of Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan. I founded this organisation three years ago, when I was nine years old. In the fall of 2006, I found out that the privileges that I have, other girls in our world do not get. I learned about this when I went with my mom to listen to journalist, author and human rights activist, Sally Armstrong speak about Afghanistan. She told stories about the terrible things that happen to little girls in Afghanistan. I was so moved. It was so upsetting to me that these girls were not able to exercise their rights. They were not able to go to school and sometimes they did not go to school because they were afraid they would be hurt or even killed.”

Support Alaina and her campaign here.