#WhereIsMyName

Last Friday, with the news of increase in covid-19 cases in both Sydney and Melbourne and no hope of?ending to the sixth lockdown, stories of misery and despair coming from Afghanistan, a phone call from my home country that my cousin’s daughter is sick with delta variant of covid-19 and is now on ventilator fighting for her life, I just couldn't cope with anymore negativity. After my lecture ended around 4pm, I immediately left for a walk outside to get some fresh air. Aimlessly walking for 4km I came across the local graveyard. The gate was open and without clearly thinking, I stepped inside. It was extremely peaceful and quiet, the silence and tranquillity was tangible. No conflicts, no opinions, not a single worry in the world. Just the dead.

Most of them died long before I was born. I was thinking none of them had to see covid-19 or the harsh realities of being in lockdown alone, separation from loved ones, and the struggle to motivate yourself every morning and keep the hope alive when everything is uncertain. Out of habit, I Googled one of the names just to see if my imaginations about her being a writer, or a teacher or an artist were right, I only found one result and that was of the cemetery itself. The record telling me that she died in 60s, so she had seen the first and second world war, and the great depression. Yes, we easily forget the hardships of our previous generations and that life was not an easy ride for them too.

Moving around between the graves the first thing that was very unusual for me was, there were many women buried there with their actual names on their tombstones. Growing up, in my part of the world, culture dictated that women were not allowed or encourage to visit the graveyard. Hence, I don’t have many memories of visiting graveyards to begin with. Only seen from distance or from the gates only to quickly say the prayers. Although once as a kid I remember my father did take me inside the family graveyard, up in the north of the country in the mountains where the graves of my great grand parents are. I got all confused to see my great grand father’s name on two graves thinking that he was buried twice. My father explained that it was my great grand mother in one of those graves, there was in very small letters a word written on the top right corner of tombstone “Zoeja” means “wife of”. Basically all the women in that graveyard were either “wife of” or “dokhtar / daughter of” or “Umme / mother of” a man. Not a single name of a woman on any of the tombstones.

I never questioned that (as it was normal and acceptable in that strong patriarchal culture) and I knew the reason as in that culture?“using a woman’s name in public is frowned upon and can be considered an insult” ?but I got a flashback of seeing a backlash type hashtag few years back?#WhereIsMyName. ?I didn’t go into the details of what that was about back then but briefly checked on it when I was working on the issue of ‘gender data gaps’ in training data sets for AI Algorithms. With no data (name, image or identity), for a data oriented society, those women simply do not exist at all. We can easily refer to this phenomenon as “digital genocide”.

I am always amazed to see the shock of some women here in Australia when they read or watch the dystopian?The Handmaid’s Tale , I have not lived it myself, but I have seen it from very close; from all those trips long ago as a child to the border of Afghanistan.?

The dead were helpful after all, they made me reflect on the value of life, why we struggle to survive, the silence that we need sometimes to focus and see things differently. Everything has an end, the inevitable, and covid-19 will have its end too, maybe not today, not this month, not this year, but eventually. Life will continue nonetheless. We will make sure, our names are there for the history and the coming generations to show them that we did everything to survive including this pandemic.