Colours, physicality, laughs, this women are the bright side of  Pakistan. Their bodies are telling stories that go beyond sorrow, pain, uncertainty. As always life is something that cannot fit into a single frame. It is like looking at a mosaic, recognising the pattern that link one piece to another and  while the big scene is getting shaped, understanding how rich is the texture.

The shadow has fallen this morning reviling the energy of doing while thinking and re-thinking the  canvas, scanning each and everything to understand the continuous repetition of the tales. Looking at them is like mirroring hundreds, thousand, millions of women that go on with their lives, with their choices, with their voices.

Listening to them sisterhood come back clean and meaningful, feminist return to be the practise of solidarity, the bond of speaking about ourselves instead of talking about the others. In this circle where imaginary get forged, computers are our modern weaving machine. We weave words, sounds and images. It is an individual as much as a collective process, it is existential and it is political. It is a challenge and an opportunity. It is a crossroad and a turning point.

For me, yesterday meant the full-stop to the endless and tiring discussions around freedom and the veil. The continuous questioning if women should or should not wear it. The symmetric escalation of self-proclaimed secular statement against self-proclaimed religious statements. Waves of strict regulations that in a way or another intend to norm, to contain, promising protection, claiming  justice, equality or culture.

The continuous and unspoken us/them that the mainstream world try to infiltrate everywhere, pushing for taking sides, was infecting me. The poison of the etno-religious-nationalism spread in each and every discourse in bosnia herzegovina was contributing to my defeat. I was tired, I was almost ready to surrender, to take side, to enter the arena of the yes/no.

Three days in Pakistan and I am cured. I left, thinking how to make my body neutral, meaning make it invisible, conform to the hosting country. Now, while here, I see how women personalities shapes the veils and the long covering dresses. An alive human, an independent resistant one, cannot be hidden or reduced by a piece of textile. I feel released from the exasperating taking sides of pro and contra. The veil is just an elusive subject for draining energy from women of the diverse and distant resistances.

We have our lives to live, our stories to tell, our sisters, mothers, daughters and the entire male world to confront, conform and comfort. My eyes are well opened and happy for having seen again and again and again.

h-vale