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Minister
Essop Pahad
Address:
Celebrations of the 197th independence of Mexico
14 September 2007
Ambassador de Maria y Campos
Your Excellencies Ambassadors and High Commissioners accredited to South Africa
Members of the Diplomatic Community
Distinguished guests
Ladies and gentlemen
On behalf of the Government of South Africa and President Thabo Mbeki, I bring greetings to you on the occasion of the 197th anniversary of the independence of Mexico. South Africa and Mexico have much in common and we have demonstrated an important capacity to work together in the international arena. One of our most notable recent achievements was working closely to ensure that the International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its Optional Protocol was adopted at the 61st Session of the United Nations General Assembly. I note with pride that both our countries signed the Convention and the Optional Protocol and that South Africa has also ratified both.
Your Excellencies, last month was Women's Month in South Africa and in continuing the spirit of women's month, and as Minister in the Presidency who has responsibility of the Office on the Status of Women, I would like to reflect on the contribution to the socio-political and intellectual liberation of women made by one of the most fascinating female literary figures to have ever emerged out of Mexico Juana Inés de la Cruz, also known as Sor Juana.
A child prodigy and genius, Sor Juana was a proto-feminist and slave-owner, philosopher and musicologist, court favourite and, eventually, nun. She was also the last great poet of the Spanish Empire and arguably the world's greatest writer at the time of her death in 1695. At the age of three Juana taught herself to read by following her elder sister to school and looking on through the window. By the age of eleven she had read all the books in her grandfather's great library. At thirteen, she was summoned to the viceroy's court, where a number of sages (some say forty) from the Royal University grilled her for hours to determine if the astonishing rumours of her learning were true.
Even in her own lifetime her status was mythic: throughout the Spanish Empire, she was variously known as the "Tenth Muse," "Phoenix of America," "Sum of the Ten Sibyls," "Pythoness of Delphi." She died in 1695, but for twenty-five years she had championed a woman's right to engage in intellectual pursuits on par with men. Defying her confessor, the Chief Censor for the Holy Inquisition, she also defended a nun's right to compose exquisitely sensuous and lucid poetry.
But how could this woman who towered above her male contemporaries in talent and intellect, a genius to whom the same inquisitors who threatened and persecuted her would often bring their theological essays for correction, a poet who from a convent in ultra-conservative Mexico could begin her famous poem, "Fools, you men – so very adept at wrongly faulting womankind." How could she suddenly surrender and sign a pitiful statement of contrition in blood, then fall silent till the day she died?
The answer of course lies in the very tradition of resistance and assertion of identity and commitment to equality that mark her poetry, her music, letters and her plays. Sor Juana challenged the reigning orthodoxy. When the power of that orthodoxy was turned on her and she found herself isolated she retreated into her shell, her convent. Nobel-laureate Octavio Paz described her as a political prisoner of the Church, and likened the startling self-denunciations at the end of her career to those of the Moscow Show Trials of the 1930s. Paz has called her the greatest versifier of the Spanish language.
But we can and must understand her retreat. Sor Juana found herself in 17th Century colonial Mexico which was a highly autocratic society, ruled by viceroys sent from Spain and rotated in practice every seven or eight years. The Archbishop held great power, and the Santo Oficio, or Holy Inquisition, was greatly feared. The University founded in 1551 was only open to men. And Mexico City was the seat of the Viceregal Court, rivalled in importance only by the court of the Viceroyalty of Peru in Lima. To understand Sor Juana, therefore, is to understand the political and ideological forces at work in that autocratic, theocratic, male-dominated society, in which the subjugation of women was absolute.
Octavio Paz says that, of the three central institutions of the country, the University, the Church, and the Court, the Court represented an aesthetic and vital way of life, a "dramatic ballet whose characters were the human passions, from the sensual to the ambitious, dancing to a strict yet elegant geometry" (in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, o, las trampas de la fe).
Sor Juana found herself trapped in a world in which power, knowledge and intellect was the preserve of men. For culture in this environment was almost entirely a masculine culture. Its writers were men and its readers were men. The doors of the educational institutions were entirely locked for women. This is why it is so extraordinary that the greatest writer to emerge from Nueva España, the first great poet of Spanish America, should have been a woman.
One of the major themes of Sor Juana's work is knowledge, and in particular the right of women to have access to learning. In "Hombres necios" (Stubborn men) she criticises the sexism of the society of her time, and pokes fun at men who publicly condemn prostitutes but privately hire them. She also had a philosophical approach to the relative immorality of prostitution, exemplified by a question she poses in the poem: 'Who sins more, she who sins for pay or he who pays for sin?' This question is for her not about morality but is about the pursuit of liberty and knowledge.
But it is her logical and sterling defence of women and the education and liberation of women that has most caught and captured my attention. Sor Juana's insatiable desire to understand everything around her, coupled with her studies in classical and medieval philosophy and her fierce assertion of a woman's right to fully participate in scholastic inquiry mark her as a philosopher of repute.
Juana strictly avoided theology until 1690 when she criticised a Jesuit priest in a private letter to the Bishop of Pedula who then published it without her permission. In the cover letter, the Bishop admonished and attacked Sor Juana and signed himself Sor Philothea de la Cruz. Her Reply to Sor Philothea was an encomium defending women's biblical and theological rights to an education and the advantages which accrue to society when women are educated. Unfortunately, the Archbishop was too powerful and she was forced to sell all her books, an extensive library of some 4 000 volumes, as well as her musical and scientific instruments. She wrote no more works for public consumption.
As was customary for her time, Sor Juana began her reply to the Archbishop by discounting her own abilities and her "limited education" as well as the hurdles she had to overcome to attain her education. She stresses the need for educated women so that new generations of women can have teachers of their own sex. She concludes by noting the accomplishments of educated, secular women, demonstrating once again the advantages of educating women. In her reply to the Bishop posing as Sor Philothea she writes:
"Oh, how much harm would be avoided in our country if older women were as learned as Laeta and knew how to teach in the way Saint Paul and my Father Saint Jerome direct? Instead of which, if fathers wish to educate their daughters beyond what is customary, for want of trained older women and on account of the extreme negligence which has become women's sad lit, since well educated older women are unavailable, they are obliged to bring in men teachers to give instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic, playing musical instruments, and other skills. No little harm is done by this, as we witness every day in the pitiful examples of ill-assorted unions; from the ease of contact and the close company kept over a period of time, there easily comes about something not thought possible. As a result of this, many fathers prefer leaving their daughters in a barbaric, uncivilised state to exposing them to an evident danger such as familiarity with men breeds. All of which would be eliminated if there were older women of learning, as Saint Paul desires, and instruction were passed down from one group to another, as in the case with needlework and other traditional activities".
Hers was a coherent world view, a richly textured defence of the rights of women. After this public expose, enormous pressure was brought to bear on this genius to turn from the intellectual and the philosophical. And thus she repents for "having lived so long without religion in a religious community." She is silenced but her words live on. This is the tradition of over 400 years that the women of Mexico have given to us in the rest of the world.
So Ambassador, on this day when we celebrate with you and the people of Mexico the 197th anniversary of your independence, let us toast the women of Mexico who in their courage, conviction and wisdom challenged power. And in conclusion, please accept my sincere appreciation for the invitation to this celebration. Allow me say to all present "Mexicanos, viva México", "Long live the Heroes of the Mexican Revolution and Long Live the Women of Mexico".
I thank you.
Issued by: The Presidency
14 September 2007
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