Democratically elected leader of Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi still languished under house arrest until recently, when she's been transferred to jail, before the election.  Last seen by Glynis Kinnock, else denied all contact, and the only photos we have are years old. Aung has been elected to theElders.org where she has an empty chair. Read more....

So to SBS. The next lunchtime free concert is in the Crush Bar at the opera House on June 29th at 1pm. The other free rush hour concerts (with wine) at St John's Waterloo are on June 25th, July 2nd, July 9th starting at 6pm till 7.15pm. For further details of London concerts around and out of London, even as far as Tuscany, visit their website.

 

Hope to see you there!

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My other woman this month is Sally Hemmings. If ever a woman was invisible.   No known portraits of her exist.  Why is Sally Hemmings important? Because she was invisible; because she adds to our knowledge of history and the history of mankind; because she shows us that we only know half our history.  
Annette Gordon Reed - The Hemmings of Monticello
  
Jefferson was the second president of the United states;Sally Hemmings was slave, and mistress/wife, part of his wife's dowry and bequeathed to him on her deathbed when she made him promise not to remarry.
 
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

 

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What was Jefferson thinking of?   Was he a hypocrite?  Or just a man of his time?

When he sent for his daughter to come to Paris, he asked for Sally Hemmings, a slave formerly owned by his wife, to accompany her.  Before they returned to Monticello she was pregnant, at 14 with his child.  The legal age for matrimony was then 10.  But it would still have been incest as they were related and it was illegal, between black and white, although common practice.   She had the option, being an intelligent educated woman, to stay in Paris and get her freedom, but chose not to.  However her return with him was conditional upon him freeing all their subsequent children.   The intriguing questions:  even for her freedom, how could a young girl stay alone in a foreign country so far from home, and pregnant?  Was she in love with him and he with her?   Was it a marriage in all but name?   Hugely debated and denied in parts of the States, until the DNA and Pulitzer finally settled it once and for all.  Click here for more information.
 
Not only Sally was invisible, but most of the families of that time and social status had slaves, and used them in this way.  Much as many London wealthy families today import Philipino, or other 3rd world workers and, by keeping passports, effectively enslave them.  (Ruth Rendell Simisola)

 

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It is not just women who are invisible: I was very interested when I interviewed Dame Anne Owers, Chief Inspector of Prisons, she said:
 
I think the one that drives me hardest is family and community. I grew up in a coal mining village. Amongst people who 'didn't matter'. My grandfather was a coal miner all his life, except that as a  teenager he fought at Gallipoli and on the Somme. His first time out of the country, and he went straight to Suvla Bay.  So it's about people who didn't matter to the system.  A sense of people easily marginalized and written off.  If you came from the North East, you did not identify much with those 'down South'; in a mining village it was rather like a colonial experience, where you perceived they were the ones doing things to you.
 
Interestingly when she and I worked in Southwark it was the Nationality Act, that determined her career.  We'd had a big focus on race and gender inequalities in those days.   Equality mattered. 
Again in Anne's words: "Around the late seventies the government suddenly re-defined British Nationality in such a way as to remove rights from British Caribbeans, so people in South London who'd thought themselves British had to buy back their nationality. Though I had no legal training, I was giving advice and helping out at the community advice centre, later moving on to the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants."
 
See Archive for more of the interview.

That is the secret of  "The Secret", if you choose what you want and open your eyes, then you see the possibilities as they present themselves to you, or you search them out.  

 

This month's pre-supposition:   society failed to recognize that Sarah Hemmings existed or that she was involved with Jefferson.  As a black woman she was written out of history.
 
       People respond to their map of reality, not reality itself 

 

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