Letters To Anne Frandi-Coory

The following two letters were written by Anne Albert to her niece, Anne Frandi-Coory, following the death of her mother, Doreen Marie Frandi.  Anne Albert died shortly after writing the second of the letters to her niece, but if she had not met her niece at Doreen’s funeral. the two would not have known each other and there is so much about Doreen’s life that her daughter would never have discovered.

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To my niece, Anne Frandi-Coory [1995 & 1996]

Dear Anne

I just wanted to tell you how much it has meant to me to meet you at this time. It has taken some of the bitterness out of your mother’s death, for me.

Knowing you, I now realise that her life was not all tragedy, for if she was responsible for giving life to someone as warm & caring, & beautiful as you are, it was instead, a triumph.

I intend to type the story of her life as I know it, and will send it to you.

Your mother was a gentle woman. The mental illness took away the potential she had, to be all that she was capable of being. That was the tragedy of her life.

Try to think of her each day for a minute or two; of her life, and your love for her. That way I am sure her spirit will begin to live with you.

Many loving thoughts, Auntie Anne.

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As promised, Anne, here is your mother’s story:

Doreen was such a beautiful child that on the ship which brought her, her brother and parents to New Zealand, a genuine childless couple offered her parents money to allow them to adopt her.  Doreen had a cloud of bright red curls that framed her pretty face.  How different Doreen’s life would have been had the adoption gone ahead.  Life within the Alfredo Frandi family was an uneasy one, so inclined was he to uncontrollable bouts of violent rage, during which he would throw furniture around the room and punch holes in doors.  Often it was his wife, Maria, a pale and nervous woman,  who felt the force of his fists.  Maria was in a perpetual state of acute anxiety and her concern about their lack of money exacerbated this state.  Alfredo was a labourer and work was hard to come by.  They had four children they could barely feed and clothe so any subsequent  pregnancies were aborted  with a knitting needle.  Unfortunately, as the oldest daughter, Doreen was needed to assist with the cleaning up after these procedures.  Maria had no conception of the trauma this was causing her daughter, and which was to haunt Doreen for the rest of her life.

When Doreen was sixteen years old, I was born, but I have never quite known why I was not aborted.  I can only suppose that my mother may have been experiencing symptoms of the menopause and may have been unaware of the pregnancy in  time.  So unexpected was my birth, that an apple crate was all that my parents had to lay me in.  Doreen was thrilled about the new baby and set about lining the crate with material and making it look pretty for me.  This was the beginning of Doreen’s devotion to me which was to last all her life.

Doreen was a very gentle girl and she was a help to her mother in caring for  the younger children, but she loathed house work of any kind.  She was adept at shopping for bargains and was a very good sewer.  Catholicism began to influence her life early on, as it brought her a peace and beauty so missing from her home environment.  Significantly, the nuns at the convent school she attended, recognized her potential for a vocation and one nun, Sister Anne, encouraged Doreen all she could to think about entering the convent.  As Doreen approached womanhood she exhibited no interest in boys or other worldly things, so firmly were her sights set of becoming a Catholic nun.  Alfredo was dead against his eldest daughter becoming a nun and turned the house upside down to show how much he detested the very idea.  This turmoil only made her more determined, and after a short time working in a department store and following her debut at the annual charity ball, for which she made her own stunning gown,  Doreen entered the convent.

Initially Doreen loved her life as a nun, but after almost a year of doing nothing but housework, she asked if she could train as a nurse.  Her wish was to care for severely handicapped children.  However, her request was greeted with profound disapproval because to actually ask to be able to do what one wanted, was against the very  strict rules of the convent  as well as a denial of the vow of absolute obedience.  Doreen was severely reprimanded and as a result sunk into a deep depression.  The nuns could not understand Doreen’s depression;  they believed that if you had a true vocation faith was enough to protect you from such things.  They then put pressure on Doreen constantly questioning her commitment to her vocation.  Doreen became hysterical which appalled the nuns, and they subsequently demanded that her mother remove her from the convent.  They could not know that bi polar disorder was manifesting itself in Doreen and would consequently ruin her life.

Doreen recovered very slowly from her first breakdown but she was devastated that her vocation was at an end and that she had broken her vow to God.  Doreen did  finally find acceptance and there followed a succession of jobs, which began a pattern set for the rest of her life;  employment interspersed with breakdowns.  In the 1940’s not much was known about bi polar disorder nor were there any satisfactory drugs available at the time.  Doreen was then subjected to countless ECT treatments without anaesthetic which really amounted to torture.  Around this time Doreen’s Aunt Italia, Alfredo’s only sister who was then 70 years of age, decided to take more of an interest in her niece. Italia  regaled Doreen with stories of the privileged   life the Frandi family lived in Italy before they arrived in New Zealand [Italia was born in Pisa, Italy in 1869]. Aristodemo, Italia’s father, had to flee Italy because he was a political agitator alongside Garibaldi, and Italia showed Doreen the fine silver and linen they had brought over with them.  Italia also dazzled Doreen with stories about the family riding in a grand carriage and people bowed with respect for them. Whenever  Doreen  was in the manic phase of her illness, she had illusions of grandeur, and would repeat all that her aunt had told her about their previous  life in Italy.  In these early stages of her illness, Doreen would spend money she did not have and would charge up accounts to her Aunt Italia and sometimes even stay in expensive hotels, all charged against her aunt’s name.  Following these episodes Doreen would then sink into the depths of depression. 

Shortly before the end of the war Doreen joined the Air Force.  It was while she was in  the Force that Doreen met the father of her first child, Kevin. Phillip Coory  neglected  to mention that he was already married with a young  son, Vas, until Doreen informed him  that she was pregnant.  Phillip Coory  believed at the time that that was the end of the matter and he had rid himself of her, but then his brother Joseph came on the scene.  Joseph was a kind and simple man, who did his best to make Doreen happy.  Sadly, his family conspired  against Doreen from the outset; perhaps they did not approve of her good looks or the way the marriage came about.  The marriage ended in disaster;  Joseph was not her intellectual equal and her illness would have been extremely difficult to live with. About three years after their marriage Anne was born and eighteen months later, came Anthony.  Following a severe bout of  bi polar disorder, the children were taken from her and placed in an Orphanage for the Poor in South Dunedin.

The permanent loss of  her children caused Doreen great anguish from which she never really recovered.  In later years she had contact with her daughter Anne, but Doreen was never able to accept that the child did not blame her mother for her abandonment.  Years later, her youngest son, Anthony moved to Wellington to live, but that feeling of guilt never left her and obviously prevented her from having an emotional relationship with her son, although he did make a futile attempt at it.  Doreen and Kevin lived a life of great hardship and near poverty, with Doreen frequently suffering nervous breakdowns, which culminated in her being  admitted to Porirua Psychiatric Hospital.  Kevin had to learn to deal with his mother’s extreme mood swings from a very early age which made his young life intolerable at times.  I have no idea how she coped during those years but I am sure that sometimes  she must have prayed for death, yet through it all her faith in God  never wavered and carried her through until the day she died.

At the peak of her loneliness, Doreen met a man, Edward Stringer, and spent a night with him.  Of course, given her luck, or lack thereof, it ended in pregnancy.  During the weeks after the birth of her daughter, Florence, and suffering from depression, Doreen signed adoption papers for her daughter.  Sometime later, Edward and Doreen met up again, and with the sole intention of getting her daughter back, she married Edward.  Heartbreakingly for Doreen, it was much too late; the adoption was quite legal and binding. Once again life had defeated Doreen and during a severe bout of mania, Edward left, unable to cope with his new wife’s disorder.  From this, there followed a period of dreariness, when Doreen and Kevin lived in a state house at 56 Hewer Crescent Naenae, Lower Hutt in Wellington, and she obtained a reasonably stable job in a factory close by.  At least the disorder left Doreen in peace for an extended period, in which Doreen developed a love of cats, and she had up to six at one time or another.

Kevin started up a very successful restaurant, Bacchus, in Courtney Place in Wellington.  Doreen was employed by Kevin in the kitchen of the restaurant, and she appeared to enjoy her time there.  Sadly her mother died on 10 March 1980, which caused Doreen to have another nervous breakdown.  Following her recovery, Doreen retired from work and moved into a council flat in Daniell Street, Newtown in Wellington.  During this time, she appeared to me to be doing no more than going through the motions of living.  My heart ached to see her like that, with no apparent interest in anything.  Kevin’s bankruptcy and his consequent  permanent move to Sydney, took the utmost toll on her spiritual well being.  Doreen then lapsed into a serious bout of her  disorder, suffering yet another complete nervous breakdown, and she was admitted once again to Porirua Hospital for a considerable time.

I have no doubt whatsoever, that it was not only Doreen’s manic depressive illness that had such a destructive effect on her life.  I sincerely believe that she carried guilt feelings from her experiences as a young girl,  witnessing  her mother’s self inflicted abortions, made worse by Doreen’s Catholic beliefs.       I realized this to be true, with great clarity, when I visited her at the hospital during her final stay there in 1995. She led me out into the hospital gardens, and pointed to a bed of purple pansies in bloom.  “There you see” she told me with infinite sadness, “there are all the little babies”

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The very least Doreen's children could do for her.

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See ‘Pansies’  [for my mother]

More:  ‘Whatever Happened To Ishtar? – A Passionate Quest To Find Answers For Generations Of Defeated Mothers’

Pansies

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PANSIES
Worry no more about those pansies
Dora dear
That row of sweet little faces;
No, they’re not those unborn babies,
just a place where cuckoos nest.
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Sometimes it’s best not to flower.
Dora dear
Life can take away so much
At any time, at any hour.
You found out just as much.
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Better even, not to germinate
Dora dear
Or even to remain a seed.
To bloom is to be given away,
To wither, dry out, or bleed.
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Even when left to flower
Dora dear
In a garden full of dreams,
Their beauty can intoxicate.
But not all’s whatever it seems.
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Too many obnoxious weeds
Dora dear
Stealing all they can seize.
No place for a beauty like you,
They brought you to your knees.
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They hung you on your rosary beads,
Dora dear
For you there was no escape.
Now the colours are all mixed up,
Painting a different landscape.

Pansies © To Anne Frandi-Coory – 16 April 2010 – All Rights Reserved

Painting by afcoory

Photograph

For my father, who was, but shouldn’t have been

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PHOTOGRAPH
A fleeting encounter
like an unopened rose,
remains eternally
inside a withered heart.
Never to blossom
on a summer day,
never to slowly fade.
Time mellows into memory
His face, his voice,
Cushioning past intensity.
Once a storm,
Now a photograph.

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Photograph © To Anne Frandi-Coory – 7 February 2012 – All Rights Reserved

Bipolar Disorder: Broken Lives

Whatever Happened To Ishtar?           (Excerpt 8)

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Doreen Marie Frandi. (Painting by AFCoory)

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Several times I had offered my mother the airfare to come and visit for Christmas, or at some other time, but she always refused. She was always in my thoughts, as I knew she would be missing Kevin dreadfully; this son who’d been everything to her for most of her adult life.

I visited her  a couple of times, as I longed to talk to her and ask her about her life, but she barely spoke. By then, her bipolar disorder, the drugs and the electro-convulsive treatment (ECT), had taken their toll on her mental faculties. For, as any person with experience or knowledge of this disorder will tell you, the cure can be worse than the disease; vitality and creativity are sucked dry and emotions are flattened – their whole personality, the person they are, is suppressed.

Once when my daughter Gina and I visited my mother in her little council flat in Newtown, we just sat quietly with her. In an attempt to extract some response, I asked her mundane things like what she was eating, what pills she was taking, anything to make conversation with her, but it was very difficult. She did explain, however, that the pills she was taking ‘stop me feeling anxious all the time’. Her emotionless voice filled me with sadness; her response was to please me, a rehearsed phrase. My heart ached to just take her in my arms and cuddle her, but whenever I had tried to do so, it was like cuddling a piece of wood. Gina and I had planned to spend the day with her, but Gina left for about two hours to visit a friend nearby. My mother and I were left sitting in her pint-sized sitting/dining room, she chain-smoking all the while. I tried again.

‘Do you have any photographs we could look at?’

‘No’ was the soft reply, ‘I sent them all to my sister Betty in America’.

Whenever I think back to that day and her answer, I feel like weeping. She answered my question as though I was a stranger of whom she felt apprehensive. I always got the impression she was anxious I would suddenly confront her about her abandonment of me, so I tread very gently. As we sat on her couch, waiting for Gina’s return, she suddenly turned to me in a cloud of smoke and said in an unusually confident tone, ‘You have a lovely daughter, Anne’. That was it. She turned away again and reverted to her state of narcosis; her fallback position, puffing away while gazing fixedly at nothing in particular.

The years of ECT and powerful mood-control drugs had eliminated every shred of my mother’s vibrancy that I remembered as a child. That bright red hair, that dazzling smile that had once propelled me to obsessively search for her everywhere among the crowds was gone.

ECT was introduced into Porirua Psychiatric Hospital in 1944, where it was used without anaesthetic on patients suffering from acute depression or ‘over-excitability’. My mother was admitted there again and again from the late 1950s onwards, sometimes in the throes of psychotic delusions. Towards the end of her life she would admit herself, looking for comfort and safe haven from the relentless demons which never allowed her any solace in her life, not even at the end of it. When Gina returned from visiting her friend, my mother decided to make us a cup of tea, and as she pottered in her cupboard of a kitchen, Gina said to me gently, ‘Mum, she is never going to love you’. My heart broke again. I didn’t want to hear that, not even as a woman fast approaching middle age. But I knew in my heart that she was too terrified to love me, or anyone else for that matter, except Kevin. She knew the terrible cost and she’d lived her life with the overwhelming guilt of it all.

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I loved my mother dearly, and if not her physical being, which, sadly no photographs of her and her children together can bear witness, and without remembered mother and daughter cuddles, then certainly, through a deep primal memory of her, which is still with me today and often overwhelms me. I emotionally clutch my childhood memories, of fleeting visits with her in Dunedin that my father secretly instigated, and the ones when she would creep somewhere to snatch a moment with me, no matter how fleeting. What haunts me is that radiant smile that had a way of spreading over her face and crinkling up her eyes, all framed in wild red hair. I wonder, how did she manage that smile while living in her hell? Those must have been the only fleeting joyful moments in a lifetime for her.

Understanding the Arab Mind

The price you pay for a book bears no relation at all to the value of the stories and lessons held within!  I found The Arab Mind by Raphael Patai, [a prolific cultural anthropologist] marked down at a sale in a favourite NZ book shop.  I believe that, like cats, books find you, you don’t find them.  In all my travels I have never seen this book anywhere else.  And I found it while writing the final manuscript for Ishtar?

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One of the most enlightening books (for me) I have ever bought

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I grew up without knowing my Italian mother as a person.  She suffered from severe bipolar disorder with psychotic episodes. So, at ten months old, I was placed in a Catholic  Orphanage for the poor, and was visited only by my devoted Lebanese father.  His extended family could not find any room in their hearts to love me.

My father often took me to visit his extended family, in the futile hope that  their frozen hearts might thaw, but the quiet, prayerful ways of a nun-studded convent does not prepare a young girl well for the noisy and multi-generational home of  Middle Eastern immigrants.  In their view I was “of another breed”.  I escaped Catholicism and “Little Lebanon” as a teenager and never returned.  However, you can take the girl out of her Lebanese extended family but you can’t take the Lebanese influence out of the girl, as the familiar cliché goes.  I picked up the Aramaic language they spoke and many positive aspects of their lives; great cooks, devotion to family (if you didn’t have a foreign mother that is) but those positives  were buried deep in my soul for many years, under all the negatives.

From The Arab Mind by Albert H. Hourani: To be a  Levantine is to live in two worlds or more at once, without belonging to either; to be able to go through the external forms which indicate the possession of a certain nationality, religion or culture, without actually possessing it. It is no longer to have a standard of values of one’s own, not to be able to create but only able to imitate; and not even to imitate correctly, since that also needs a certain originality. It is to belong to no community and to possess nothing of one’s own. It reveals itself in lostness, pretentiousness, cynicism and despair.

Arab Mind was such a help in the final stages of writing   Whatever Happened To Ishtar? A Passionate Quest to Find Answers for Generations of Defeated Mothers.  Many of my Lebanese family’s behaviours suddenly took on new meaning; the hatred they exhibited toward my mother and by association, to me, was the result of thousands of years of cultural prejudice.  Necessary in desert and mountain life in sectarian communities where brutal invasion and massacre were a common way of life.

To the Arab, saving face and honour are everything and when your beloved eldest son marries a sharmuta (Aramaic for prostitute-every woman who did not live up to the family’s cultural values was labelled sharmuta) then what can you do but exile from the family the issue of that union!  Being the only girl child made it easy for them to make me the scapegoat of all the family’s ills in a foreign country.

In this current era of the ‘Arab Spring’, I recommend you find a copy and read Arab Mind to gain an understanding of how differently we westerners from such very young countries, like Australia and New Zealand, view everyday life.  I think the half of my book that dealt with my father’s family was a much kinder book in the end because I read Arab Mind before I sent my re-written manuscript off to the publishers.  So many of the events that played out in my childhood took on very different meanings, while suppressed memories re-surfaced.  I understood better, what it must have been like for my naive, fifteen year old Lebanese grandmother, from the hills of Bcharre in Lebanon, to marry and follow my grandfather to the other side of the world.

How relevant to the lives of my Lebanese extended family, and by the same token, to the current Arab Spring,  are the following quotes in the book:

From author Hisham Sharabi: …There is no turning away from Europe. This generation’s psychological duality, its bilingual, bicultural character are clear manifestations of this fact. It has to judge itself, to choose, and to act in terms of concepts and values rooted not in its own tradition but in a tradition that it has still not fully appropriated.

From Author Halim Barakėt:…We are a people who have lost their identity and their sense of  manhood. Each of us is suffering from a split personality, especially in Lebanon. We are Arab and yet our education is in some cases French [my grandfather's second language was French], in some cases Anglo-Saxon and in others Eastern Mystic. A very strange mixture. We need to go back and search out our roots. We’re all schizophrenic…

I have lived a life in two halves, so I know what Barakėt means about being schizophrenic. Writing Ishtar? helped me to become one person and to discover the wonderful Italian and Lebanese genetic talents buried within me. The young Arabs of today have so many tools to use in ther search for who they are; Facebook, Google, Twitter, blogging, mobile pnones, etc etc.  Let’s hope their search for an identity wont take as long as it did my generation.

Photos of Bcharre  -breathtaking!

Where Are The Mothers’ Names?

Renoir: 'On The Terrace' 1879. In Memory of Missing Mothers

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One of the saddest things for me that has come out of research for my book  Whatever Happened To Ishtar?  is the fact that some historical birth and marriage certificates only record the names of fathers and paternal grandparents.  It was indicative of an era when only males were considered important in the scheme of life.  Although I have built up an extensive family tree of both my Lebanese and Italian ancestors, there are many gaps where a mother’s name should be. And each gap represents not just a missing name but links to whole lineages.  As  examples: when, after many years of searching,  I located an ancient document of my maternal great grandmother’s birth,  her mother’s name was omitted;  a marriage certificate where both the mother of the bridegroom and of the bride were omitted.  In some other cases I was able to find the information in a baptism confirmation certificate or in immigration archives, but my family trees have several names missing.  My hope is that descendants of those families I have written about, will  read my book and help fill in some of the missing gaps for our descendents.

Bipolar Disorder – Letter To Francine

Doreen Frandi during WWll. Photo: afcoory

Dear *Francine

I finished reading *Virginia’s story last night.  Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read it in the first place – I feel it was meant to be, like a chance encounter!

While taking in Virginia’s words, I had a little cry, because so much of what she is crying out for – dignity, personhood – is what I so wanted for my mother, Doreen.  She never did receive much of that respect in her life; not from hospitals, men, or from family.  This was my chief motivation for writing ‘Whatever Happened To Ishtar? – A Passionate Quest To Find Answers For Generations of Defeated Mothers’.

By the time I had the chance to really know my mother, it was too late; the drugs and ECT had taken their toll.  Much of what she had experienced in psychiatric wards and throughout the manic, psychotic,  and depressive phases of her life, was passed on to me by my brother, Kevin, who lived with her until he was married.  After that, he spent time with her either at his home or at her council flat in Wellington, otherwise he spoke to her daily by phone.  I tried to obtain her records from Porirua Psychiatric Hospital, but they would not release them to me because I was not listed as her next of kin.  However, as I reveal in ‘Whatever Happened To Ishtar?‘, Doreen’s psychiatrist did phone me and answered most of the questions I asked of her regarding Doreen’s psychiatric history.  Obviously, she did not volunteer information, so I only have knowledge of a small section of my mother’s official records of the times she was confined at the hospital.

Even though I was never admitted to a psychiatric ward, I came close to a mental breakdown when I was a young woman and my marriage was failing.  I can well understand, therefore, Virginia’s desire to leave her marriage, which was draining her physical and mental strength.   I also experienced what it was like to be denied personhood and dignity, when I was a child and teenager. I was branded and often humiliated by my Lebanese extended family because of who my mother was; her bipolar disorder and her Italian descent.  What I hated most was the way they branded her a “sharmuta” (prostitute) when she was nothing of the sort and could not defend herself.  There are many parallels in my, Doreen’s,  and Virginia’s stories.  I regret so much that Doreen only took Kevin with her when she left Dunedin for Wellington,  and abandoned me.  I believe that as her daughter, I may have been able to empathise more with her, and given support to my brother.  Sadly, I will never know for sure what the outcome would have been in that scenario.  Thank goodness Virginia at least had a loving daughter to look after her welfare.

I was very interested in what you had to say in your article about biographies vs autobiographies; about creativity and whether or not bipolar disorder is actually a mental illness.  Many brilliant artists as you know, exhibit facets of the disorder.  I read a medical paper recently which suggested that bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are symptoms brought about through the brain evolving, which of course it has been doing for thousands of years.  An interesting theory.

I intend to contact Bipolar networks in Australia, and perhaps give talks about my and my brother’s experiences with Doreen and her disorder.  If you have any contacts here, I would be grateful if you could pass their name or names on to me.  Alternatively, members of bipolar networks can contact me via this blog and request a copy of the book .

At your suggestion, I called at the  office of the  Bipolar Network after our meeting and donated a copy of ‘Ishtar?‘ which they were very pleased to receive. I told them they could purchase more copies at  University Book Shops. Although the Public Library acquisitions officer requested to buy copies directly from me when I met with her to promote my book, I told her the normal process was that the library purchase copies through  University Book Shops.

Thank you once again for taking the time to meet with me, and for buying copies of my book.

Kind regards

Anne Frandi-Coory

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Bipolar Disorder Blog   (The Crazy Rambler)

Bipolar Disorder; The Little We Know

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*Names have been changed

Is Multiculturalism …Dead?

Angela Merkel has just announced in Germany that “German multiculturalism is dead”.  I wonder if that is the way Australia is heading.  Perhaps we are kidding ourselves that Australia is a successful multicultural society.   Every now and then racism rears its ugly head somewhere in Australia and it seems that no matter how much the government says otherwise,  many Australians are xenophobic. History has shown us that it is very rare for different ethnic groups to be totally accepting of each other.   It can take many,  many generations for refugees and immigrants to be assimilated  into an established community and sometimes it just doesn’t happen.  If jobs or food become scarce,   suspicions immediately focus on  immigrants or refugees and  assimilation does not always act in their favour.

There is currently much heated debate going on in Australia regarding the settlement of refugees.  It appears that Australians do not want refugees living in their midst nor do they want refugee children going to their schools.  At one town hall meeting, which overflowed into the car park, residents shouted down government officials who were there to promote their plans to immediately house women and children in a nearby dis-used Defence Base.  Residents were upset that the refugees were going to be given access to a medical centre in their  compound when residents’ children had to be driven several kilometres out of town for medical attention and often had to wait up to eight hours for emergency treatment.  They also decried the plan to send  refugee children to local schools which were already “bursting at the seams”.

But this xenophobic attitude is not limited to refugees.  In private, Australians make racist comments which they would never repeat in public.    What worries me is that when the general public cannot articulate  their fears and prejudices  because of anti-racist laws, their hostility towards other ethnic groups will erupt at various times, such as with the problem of finding acceptance of, and suitable accommodation for, refugees.   We humans don’t always have to like each other, but hate is another matter.

In my book ‘Whatever Happened to Ishtar?’ a chapter is devoted to my Italian ancestors who emigrated to New Zealand from Florence in the 1870s to escape hardships caused by religious and political upheavals in Europe.  Along with other Italians, Poles, Germans, and British immigrants, they took advantage of the NZ government’s offer of ten acres of free land in the Okuru  ‘Special Settlement’ on the West Coast of the south island.  Part of the reason the settlement failed was because the different ethnic groups did not get on with each other or with government officials.  There was too much mistrust amongst them.   The decision to ‘settle’ that part of the West Coast with immigrants was ill-fated from the beginning, but even so, where-ever these Europeans were eventually settled in New Zealand, it has taken several  generations for them to find acceptance, not just with residents within settled communities, but also with each other and with other nationalities looking for refuge in a new country.  I know that my parents and their families never talked about where they came from because of the alienation they felt from the rest of NZ society.

This non-acceptance of other ethnic groups reminds me of the harshness of nature.  Most animals in the wild are very territorial and often defend their territory and young to the death.  They have to; resources are limited and their survival depends on the success of the defence of their ‘patch’.  Humans are no different really.  Hundreds of territorial,  ethnic and religious wars have been fought by humans since we have been on this earth.  As the global population continues to grow and the earth’s resources diminish,  some scientists and world leaders warn that instead of peace prevailing, human discontent around the globe will increase.

Below is an article by Pino Migliorino  22/10/10:

Image by Andrew Dyson

In the past few days, critics of cultural diversity have been celebrating German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s proclamation that Multiculturalism in Germany Has Failed. Now we have commentators in Australia who are using this to announce the funeral of multiculturalism.

Authors such as Pallavi Jain have gone as far to suggest that it is the responsibility of all immigrants to assimilate.

In Australia, we thought that we had arrived in a place far, far away from policies such as assimilation which, as we well know, created such a lot of angst in our history. The notion of assimilation tainted our history of interaction with the First Australians as well as with our early immigrants.

In this country, I believe that we do not want to walk backwards towards a history for which we have already apologised.

Paedophilia in Italy

I feel vindicated in writing about the generational sexual abuse in Catholic Lebanese and Italian families which I uncovered during the research for my book ‘Whatever Happened to Ishtar?’ . If  paedophile priests were sexually abusing children why would we be surprised when we find fathers and uncles doing the same thing?  At last the abused can speak out about what has been covered up by the Catholic Church, not for decades, but for centuries!

The woman’s testimony below reminds me how complicit nuns were, if not in the sexual abuse, then certainly in the physical and emotional abuse, of children in Catholic orphanages and schools.    My brother wrote a story in his early teens (see Kevin Coory’s  Story) about the time he and our mother were starving,  yet they were  turned away by a fat priest who was on his way to his roast dinner which the pair could smell wafting from the kitchen of the presbytery.

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Ex – Italian victim & priest,  Domolo speaks out. Caption above: “We are victims of paedophile priests”

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The Vatican, under global pressure,  has just raised the statute of limitations for reporting sexual abuse, to twenty years from the time the victim turns eighteen.  However, most human rights activists agree there should be no statute of  limitation as occurs in most western countries.

Excerpts from Associated Press:

VERONA, Italy – Italian victims of a paedophiliac clergy want such sexual abuse declared a crime against humanity, and they launched an international appeal on Saturday during the first public gathering of such victims in Italy.

Organizer Salvatore Domolo, a former victim and an ex-priest, said the group is looking abroad for solidarity because justice for pedophile victims is hard to come by in Italy with a statute of limitations of 10 years.

“Here there is no hope. By the time a victim arrives at the awareness of having been a victim, legal intervention is not possible,”  Domolo said in a country that has long been reluctant to confront the Vatican in its own backyard.

“The complicity of the hierarchy, together with the enormity of the numbers and vast geography of these crimes, should lead us to consider that we are facing a crime against humanity carried out by a political-religious organization,” Domolo told a news conference before the victims met, his delivery bearing the cadence of a homily.  “With this gathering, we want to ask civilian justice to do its duty in full freedom and truth, without being intimidated by the clerical culture.”

The meeting was held opposite Verona’s heavily visited Roman colosseum and advertised with placards outside. Passers-by were free to enter, but few did.

Another will be held in Rome at the end of October, but Verona was chosen for the first gathering because it is the home of a school for the deaf where 67 former students have alleged suffering sexual abuse, paedophilia and corporal punishment from the 1950s to early 1980s.  About 40 former victims inquired by e-mail — but many are still reluctant to come forward, organizers said.

The Vatican has been reeling for months as thousands of victims around the globe have spoken out about priests who molested children, bishops who covered up for them and Vatican officials who turned a blind eye to the problem for decades. In the latest admission, hundreds of victims came forward in Belgium with tales of horrific abuse linked to at least 13 suicides.

While Italian bishops have acknowledged 100 sexual abuse cases that warranted church intervention in the last decade, victims believe the true number in Italy is much higher because the reluctance to speak out in Italy is especially strong.  “This gathering is fundamental because we live in a social situation in which the presence of the Catholic church reduces the possibility of talking about the situation,” Domolo said. “They do it all over the world, but in Italy even more. That we are just now having the first gathering of victims indicates that only in the recent months is something exploding in Italy.”

Domolo, now 45, said he had been a victim of his parish priest from age 8 to 12, and that he was forced to confess “as if I had sinned.   The church has known for 50 years this has been going on but kept it quiet in a disgusting way,” he said.

Domolo was a priest for 15 years. He renounced both the priesthood and his Roman Catholic faith after meeting another victim on a trip to Ireland in 2001. A man named Francesco from Padova, who did not give his surname, told the group he had been abused both by priests and nuns who used punishment as an excuse to touch him inappropriately. “The worst was my family. They refused to believe it was true,” he told the group, adding he has only been able to come to grips with it through therapy.

A 58-year-old deaf woman, who only gave the nickname given to her by the nuns of Verona’s Antonio Provolo Institute for the Deaf, carefully annunciated her words as she told her story. During her 15 years at the institute, she was only alone with priests once a week for confession. Recalling her first confession, she said she asked the nuns what to say, and they asked her what she had done. “I told them I scratched myself everywhere because I had too much wool clothing. The nuns said, ‘Tell them you touched yourself.”‘

At that, she said, the priest asked her to lift her clothing to show him where. And so it continued, she said, “little by little, week after week. We girls didn’t do anything, and we had to confess. The priests, who sinned, did they ever confess, I ask?”

Carla Bruni; The Problem Being Female

Sakineh Ashtiani

Carla Bruni has been branded a ‘prostitute and adulteress’, (both biblical terms to be sure), by the Iranian Hierarchy.  They  also pronounced that Ms Bruni “Deserves to Die!”  This is because Ms Bruni, President Sarkozy’s wife,  had the temerity to suggest that the Iranian woman,  Sakineh Ashtiani,  shouldn’t be stoned to death because, in Carla Bruni’s words:

‘Spill your blood, deprive your children of their mother? Why? ‘Because you have lived, because you have loved, because you are a woman, an Iranian? Every part of me refuses to accept this.’

Because there is global condemnation of the sentence of stoning to death, Sakineh is daily subjected to torture; refused visits by her family, daily paraded out to a gallows, since Sharia Law has decreed that she will be hung instead, and lashed.  Still, The Law procrastinates, but only because  it is under the global spotlight.  Sakineh’s children must bear their mother’s pain and her humiliation.

Why don’t these patriarchal, Islamic countries  move into the 21st Century?  But it is not only Islam that lives in the dark ages.   Catholicism does too, only it calls its equivalent to Sharia Law, ‘Office of the Inquisition’, which still exists today albeit under another name.

In my book ‘Whatever Happened to Ishtar?’ I explore the reasons why members of my father’s Catholic Lebanese family called my mother ‘sharmuta’ (prostitute) constantly when I was a child.  It didn’t seem to matter to them that particular men in that same family fathered her children.  I used to wonder as a teenager how a woman could be good enough to have sex with,  yet not good enough to be treated with respect.  My mother was never a prostitute, but those men,  being from the Middle East, were used to blaming women for all their ills; they brought the culture with them to Australasia.

I despair for the daughters of those women in Islamic countries whose mothers are branded with such degrading labels.  As females, they have no power, not over their lives, not over their own bodies.  But their men are free to murder, rape, torture and humiliate with impunity, so long as the victim is female.

Irshad Manji summarises  the “case” against Sakineh:

Stoning cases themselves tend to be built on a pile of indignities. Consider the allegation against Ms. Ashtiani: adultery. The charge is manifestly trumped up and the investigation has been stacked from the get-go — so much so that a loophole had to be invoked to convict her. That loophole lets judges claim special “knowledge” for which there’s no evidence. How convenient.

In May 2006, a criminal court in East Azerbaijan province found Ashtiani guilty of having had an “illicit relationship” with two men following the death of her husband. But that September, during the trial of a man accused of murdering her husband, another court reopened an adultery case based on events that allegedly took place before her husband died, the BBC reported. …Mohammed Mostafaei, an Iranian lawyer who volunteered to represent Ashtiani when her sentence was announced a few months ago, called the planned stoning “an absolutely illegal sentence.”

“Two of five judges who investigated Sakineh’s case in Tabriz prison concluded that there’s no forensic evidence of adultery,” Mostafaei told the Guardian. “According to the law, death sentence and especially stoning needs explicit evidences and witnesses while in her case, surprisingly, the judge’s knowledge was considered as enough,” he said.