W.I.B. The Sound of Silence Making Noise and Keeping Quiet with Women in Black By Ron Ehmke Every Saturday they stand in silence amidst the cacophony of one of the city’s busiest intersections. They’ve been there, keeping an ongoing noon-hour vigil at the corner of Elmwood Avenue and Bidwell Parkway, weekend after weekend since last October, undeterred by rain, snow, and even the distracting temptations of more agreeable weather. They come together as the Buffalo chapter of Women in Black, one of the latest manifestations of an ongoing international pacifist movement which started fourteen years ago on the other side of the globe. Not a formal organization but a grassroots phenomenon combining political protest with minimalist street theater, Women in Black expresses its opposition to war, violence against women, and human rights abuses through a single visual image of dazzling simplicity and immediacy. In an era saturated with round-the-clock commentary and flashy logos peddling the “Attack on America” as Must-See TV, there’s something both refreshing and subversive about a single-file line of people dressed in mourning, refusing to say another word. It’s as eloquent and elegant a symbol as these apocalyptic times have yet produced. And since its inception by a group of Israeli and Palestinian women in 1988, Women in Black has not only spread throughout Europe and North America, it has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and awarded the Millennium Peace Prize by the United Nations Development Fund for Women. In the U.S. alone, silent vigils have become a weekly occurrence in New York, Washington, DC, Portland, OR, Seattle, and San Francisco, among other cities. For the last decade, representatives from participating communities have gathered for an annual conference, which this year will be held in Rome. The Buffalo “chapter” (the term is a bit misleading, given the loose knit structure of WIB worldwide) grew out of impromptu meetings last fall among local peace activists searching for an effective local response to the September 11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. At one of these meetings, Pat Shelly, a feminist therapist and self-identified “longtime peacenik,” proposed looking to WIB as a model. She had first learned about the group in the early 1990s when she visited a friend in Israel who was a member and accompanied her to vigils in both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The image proved an inspiration on the home front, and by the very next weekend—October 13—a time and location had been agreed upon, placards painted explanatory flyers prepared, and people were out on the street. With the exception of December 29, 2001, when the city was preoccupied with a rather memorable blizzard, an ever-evolving and diversifying contingent of vigil-antes has returned ever since, averaging about twenty-five a week. “We’re a hardy group!” Shelly laughs. Conditions could hardly have been more favorable when I stood with the Women on a beautiful May afternoon: the sun was shining, the air was cool, and the eternal rains of spring had eased up for at least a day or two. (As my attendance should make clear, men are entirely welcome in WIB.) The twenty-five or so individuals joining me seemed to represent a fairly broad cross-section of Western New Yorkers: a trio of girls still in high school; male and female members of the faculty, staff, and student body of various local universities; a Dutch immigrant who witnessed the Nazi occupation of her homeland as a child; and a Tonawanda woman in her sixties or seventies with a long history of activism under her belt who’s been advertising the vigils in suburban newspapers and offering rides to folks from her church. While I’ve taken part in my fair share of public events and political demonstrations over the years, I wasn’t quite prepared for the defining characteristic of WIB’s brand of action: silence. Devoid of chanted slogans and casual conversation (though there's plenty of the latter before and after the vigils as friendships are forged or reinforced), a small part of me felt defenseless, unguarded. Which, I think, is part of the point: in the face of mass-media blather and political rhetoric, WIB offers only stillness. Shelly agrees, and notes a compelling practical reason for the absence of sound in the countries where WIB first emerged: “In Israel and Belgrade, if you're standing in silence, your message does not get lost when there’s a bombing, when there’s fighter jets flying overhead, when there’s loud traffic and people honking or trying to shout you down. Despite all the noise pollution, silence can survive and supersede that.” Once I settled into the rhythm of the event (grateful to be clutching one of many handmade signs up for grabs, thus giving me something to do with my hands), the other thing which took me by surprise was the almost unanimously enthusiastic response of passers-by. Kimberly Beck, a grad student who has been involved since the inception of the group, agrees: “That’s one of the things that really surprised me at first, the number of people who honk their horns, or wave, or cheer us on. It’s always overwhelmingly many more people who support us than who don’t, so it kind of rejuvenates my commitment to what we’re doing.” Even so, there are the occasional rowdies, like the lone man who yelled some variation on “America—love it or leave it!” as he drove past on the day I attended. That's where local media maker and WIB member Vince Mistretta comes in; in the group’s early days, a few hostile reactions (which had for the most part subsided by year’s end) inspired several women to ask him to bring his video camera every week and record what went on. In due time, that impulse led to a documentary project Mistretta is currently preparing for public access TV and screenings at media centers across the country, like the well-attended one he organized at Squeaky Wheel in the aftermath of September 11 late last year. I can’t help thinking that part of what makes WIB so apt for the present moment is its user-friendliness. Retired high school teacher Joyce Bol, like every other participant I spoke with, savors the ability to simply show up for an hour a week and still make a difference: “I didn't want to join an organization which would have fifty meetings a month and a secretary taking minutes and dues you have to pay,”she says. In a city like Buffalo, where it's often hard to galvanize newsworthy swarms of people to attend a one-shot rally, WIB’s more long-range approach makes sense: its persistent reappearance sinks in over time. For Roxanne Amico, the weekly gathering on Elmwood is comparable to “an act of meditat...My whole state of being is transformed after that hour. I’ve only missed two days, and if I don’t go, I notice it for the rest of the week. It's revitalizing, so it reminds me of what happens to other people when they go to church.” As Amico sees it, opposition to militarism is slowly but surely gathering momentum. “And how do you build that? By constant disciplined action and presence, showing people that we’re here, that anti-war sentiment is growing. If people [who share our concerns] want to, they can join us, and if they don’t want to, they can at least know in their hearts that they're not alone.” Newcomers are always welcome to stand with Women in Black, every Saturday from noon to 1 PM at the corner of Elmwood Avenue and Bidwell Parkway. For more information on the Buffalo chapter, contact Pat Shelly at (716) 838-2707. For details about WIB’s international activities, check out their website: http://www.igc.org/balkans/wib/. Ron Ehmke is a Tonawanda-based writer and performer. Back to the Table of Contents Back to Top