The Bakura [باكورة] Calendar: Feminist Visual Representations by Women in Lebanon

A gift for the Nyéléni process

We are excited to share with you Bakura [باكورة], a Feminist Calendar created with love and the result of a collective effort by The Flying Aunties Collective – World March of Women Lebanon. Women from different backgrounds worked for a year through a series of public workshops and graphic design collectives, where intersectional feminist thought and feminist visual representation were discussed. During these sessions, participants received training and basic materials to create their own works.

The images in the calendar offer an intersectional interpretation of land, agriculture, seeds, the body, sexual rights, gender roles, ageism, body and menstrual shame, as well as support for Palestinian resistance.

Below, we share the text written by our sisters in Lebanon, who offer their work to the Nyéléni systemic transformation process, hoping that Bakura becomes the beginning of many shared sowings and harvests!

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Our Feminist Calendar, Bakura | Bakura, the first works and creations and their beginnings, such as the first works of a writer, an artist, an inventor and others.This word is also used for the first fruits and vegetables that arrive to the market, or the first fruit seen in the field.

For thousands of years, we celebrated the New Year in our region on the first day of Nisan (April), and the days of the month were an occasion to celebrate “Akito,” the arrival of spring and the time to sow barley and spelt to secure sustenance and life. In various references, the word “Nisan” in our region takes the meaning of the start and the beginning of the movement, in the Akkadian language.

Time has always had a connection with women and nature, with their respective cycles. The first attempt to establish a timeline was women’s creation, who based their calendars on their cycles, thus dividing them into 28 days. Women and nature were also attached to each other through the moon’s tides. And this is the way we want this calendar to be, part of a chain that connects women to the land, and reconnects us with our cultural heritage in this region, with agriculture, with seeds and with life.

This calendar could have been designed by one person, and the project could have ended in less than a month. However, it lasted longer, travelling from hand to hand between women from different experiences, taking into account the trainer’s care work responsibilities, taking care of a family, children and older family members.
We found that the process of producing the calendar itself is part of the challenges women face on a frequent and daily basis. So, the production process became as important as the calendar itself: the debates, discoveries, convergences, moments of speaking out and sharing, were just as valuable as the paper we now have in our hands. The time that Mayda and the participants, Hala, Lama, Leen, Reem, Marie-Rose, Bateel, Lea and Jana had put, along with Mayda cooking for us and receiving us in her home to complete the calendar, were as important as the visuals that we produced.

During six sessions, we discussed what intersectional feminism is and what role it plays in our lives. We also worked to produce visuals for each month of the year, with basic materials and without using digital applications.
We launch our calendar in January, but we’re also proposing Nisan (April) as the real new year of our region, because we simply don’t want to follow a calendar that doesn’t concern us.

As Zionist colonialism kills us and plunders our history and memory in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, we want this initiative to be a greater attachment to the land and memory, and a form of resistance. We hope that this calendar will be the Bakura of beautiful things in your life, the start of a wider, larger and deeper sisterhood-siblinghood, the sowing of your barley and its growth.

May we open up a new space for communication between us, where you can share your experiences with the calendar, your favorite cooking recipes, your thoughts, or even just to update us about you and participate with us in our events that aim at weaving shared tales together year after year. The plan is to collect these small seeds – from recipes, works and thoughts – in a common volume, which we collect and email to you once the content has grown enough to become our collective story, and a meeting point for lovers of the environment, history and sisterhood-siblinghood.

To contact us: theflyingaunties@gmail.com

Read the original Arabic letter below