Fishermen's strike and domestic violence

On Sunday Usha, a 34-year old woman from Trincomalee in Sri Lanka, attempted a water-borne solution to the domestic violence her in-laws were apparently inflicting upon her. She ended up inadvertently precipitating an indefinite strike by over 4,000 fishermen and 800 boats.
The Times of India today reported the event. It seems from early evidence that Usha used the St Antony's feast on the islet of Katchatheevu as a way to get away to India.
She joined the 3,700-odd pilgrims from Tamil Nadu and about from 2,000 Sri Lanka who were ferried there for the day’s celebrations.
Usha and her child Neera were found stranded on the islet after the feast. She told authorities that she was from Rameswaram (India) and that the fishermen who had brought her there had left, unaware that she was not on board, and she needed to get ‘back’ to Rameswaram. A number of people, including naval authorities, believed her story and helped her get on a boat ‘home’.
When she arrived in India marine police arrested her and the men on the boat. Later police in Mandapam found she was a ‘run-away.’ The five fishermen who helped her have been detained, charged with violating the Passport Act.
It is in protest against the accusation that they had assisted illegal entry that the strike has been called. The men see themselves as innocent but duped parties who thought they were simply being helpful.
The point, really, is not that Usha is now regrettably incriminating those who helped her, but that domestic violence is so hard to escape. If the victims of it were more adequately supported they wouldn't have to take such desperate steps.
For more see http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/madurai/5-held-for-ferrying-Lankan-woman-to-Rameswaram/articleshow/12155896.cms

Blogging and talking about the process

This blog is - I'm honoured to say - one of those the British Library has chosen to archive. I like that because it means material on the gendered sea that is not saved in any one place elsewhere will have a long, useful and certain life - and will be easily available to all the people who don't have physical access to specialist libaries.

Today the BL has just uploaded my articles about having my blog archived:
~ UK Web Archiving: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/webarchive/2012/02/index.html
~ BL readers stories: http:// www.bl.uk/yourstories/Readers-stories.aspx?s=5a35389e-67fb-4edf-ad0d-80eb76f06695

In the UKWA article I say:
'In 2011 when staff from the UK Web Archive at BL emailed the news that my blog was one of those selected to be archived for posterity that really gave me a boost.

'And it changed my blogging practices. I write more frequently and more carefully, because of a greater sense of its significance. My entries are now made at least twice a month. I spend hours, no longer minutes, writing each entry as vividly and elegantly as I can; I make more effort to explain significances and acronyms.

'Having your blog harvested feels an oddly alienated experience. It’s like being a rose that knows the gardener is plucking it, but never feels the secateurs nor sees itself finally arranged in the vase with all the other blooms.

'So it really helped when the Head of Web Archiving Helen Hockx-Yu took the time to show me how the process worked. In her office papered with Chinese poems on the Underground I saw the crawler in operation, scuttling round and scooping up other’s blogs and websites like some diligent crab from a William Gibson sci-fi story.

'Finding out the program’s name, Heritrix, seemed to make the process feel more comprehensible. OK, it’s just another clever piece of software, like Photoshop.

'Hearing that I was one of the 10,000 websites owners and bloggers helped me see my in/significance within the UK Web Archive; it’s a bit like looking your house via Google Earth.

'And understanding that my ‘donation’ was collected every six months helped me get a sense that there was someone listening.'

West African seafarers encounter British values 1960-80s.

Palm Oil and Small Chop by ex-seafarer John Goble, is a new autobiography that reveals much about the racialised British attitudes of seafarers sailing the West African coast in the late 20th century.

John Goble was a mate, chief officer, then a relieving master with Elder Dempster, (and later Palm Lines). His ports included Apapa, Takoradi, Dakar, Freetown, Port Gentil, Bathurst, and Pointe Noire. On the cusp of containerisation, he supervised cargoes from palm kernels to calabar beans, pigs’ snouts to missionaries’ generators.

I've just reviewed this funny, erudite, elegantly written book for the International Journal of Transport History. In it I write:

"This is a world where deck officers knew minutely when blind-eyes had to be turned. For example, Goble was pulled up by a smuggled Nigerian seafarer’s lady wearing a ship’s bath towel. ‘Oi, are you in charge ‘ere?… Well, there's no effin’ hot water again down aft’.

"Does he say ‘What are doing on board our ship?’ Not at all. He politely murmurs that he’ll get the engineer to see to it. Nor does he rise to her admonishing final shot: ‘… and dey were all on the 'effin repair list last trip an' all.’

"Ironically, it’s the thing that Goble writes about with most discomfort that will make it particularly important for future generations: race relations. Goble frequently acknowledges and apologises for the way white crew and officers – including himself - talked to and about Kru seamen (tellingly referred to as Krooboys) and disdained ‘nig-nog grub’."

So it is the horse's mouth - and can usefully be read along with Diane Frost’s insights into Kru seafarers' lives: Work and community among West African migrant workers since the nineteenth century, Liverpool University Press, 1999.



Details:Palm Oil and Small Chop is published by Whittles Publishing, Caithness, April 2011, paperback, ISBN978-1-84995 -011-4, 196pp incl 12pp of photos, no index. £16.99.