An Interview With Human Rights Activist Sandra Guimarães

Sandra Guimarães is a Brazilian activist for human and animal rights. She has lived and worked in many parts of the world, including Palestine, Lebanon, and Aubervilliers, on the outskirts of Paris. In 2010, she joined a group of Palestinian women from Aida refugee camp who created the Noor Women’s Empowerment Group, which aimed to generate income for the mothers of disabled children in the camp and build a school that is adapted to their needs. In 2018, she helped to create the Vegan Union of Activism in Brazil, a network of 17 movements aligned with a popular veganism agenda. Now she is a part of the Baladi project, a series of stories of Palestinians resisting Israeli occupation, and the “popular solidarity brigades,” an autonomous movement, of antifa and anarchist tradition, that organize the popular solidarity such as helping immigrant women in the outskirts of Paris.

At 26 years old, you left Paris to live in Palestine. Why did you decide to go and what work did you do there?

I always wanted to visit Palestine, but not as a tourist. I really wanted to know the reality there. I went there to stay for three weeks and ended up living for five years, from 2008 to 2013. When I got there, I went to live in Aida, a refugee camp in the city of Bethlehem, where there was a community center in which I worked for two years doing educational and playful activities with children after school, because there aren’t many things to do in a refugee camp. But I always wanted to work with women. In Palestine, the refugee camps are run by the United Nations (U.N.) and provide basic assistance. But the U.N. schools don’t accept disabled children, and there are many of them in the camps. The mothers of these children have to stay with them all day, and they basically are unable to do anything at all, so they became very isolated.

One day I met this incredible woman, Islam Abu-Aouda, who has a son with cerebral palsy, and we got along right away. We started a “mothers’ club” in which we invited all mothers of disabled children in the camp to get together every week to discuss their problems and necessities. But we realized that without money we wouldn’t be able to do almost anything. As I had already changed my profession and had become a cook, I got the idea that we could give Palestinian cooking classes at their homes. At first, they were a little shocked with the idea of charging people to come to their houses, because hospitality is a very important thing to Palestinians. But then they changed their mind and got used to the idea, so we created the Noor project. After living in Palestine for five years, I left the country, but keep going back every year, for periods of three months, to organize political-vegan-feminist tours for Brazilians.

What has the Noor project achieved?

When we first started, I worked just as a translator, but the idea was to create a source of income for these women and fulfill their dream of building a school for children with disabilities. The goal was also that the project was all Palestinian and made by these women. Now, they finally managed to open the school. Islam has even become a leader within the community. Thanks to her, and other women who work at the Noor project, many people in the camp changed and have become more tolerant of disabled children. The mothers are not ashamed of this anymore. This was a very profound change in the community.

Did you notice any change in the way women were treated in the Aida camp?

Yes, both positive and negative. People have not only started to accept children with disabilities, but also to admire and respect the work of these women. But we also had a negative reaction from many men who think that a woman’s place is just in the kitchen. Islam even received threats. Palestinian society is very patriarchal, but luckily her husband supports her and that is why she is also able to develop her leadership work there. When you're a Palestinian woman, having the support of your husband makes a lot of difference if you want to engage in political activities in your community.

How do you see the impact of Israeli occupation in Palestinian territories on the lives of women in the Aida camp?

Although the impact of occupation affects everyone, in women's lives, it is always harder. Although most of those who are arbitrarily arrested by the Israeli occupation forces are men, it is the women who stay at home and have to look after the children, the house, and bear the expenses. I would say then that many of these children's disabilities are a consequence of the Israeli occupation. One of the women at the Noor project saw her husband being murdered in front of her when she was six months pregnant and, because of the shock, the babe was born premature and suffered with the lack of oxygen. There was also a report that showed that Aida is the most exposed place to tear gas in the world. I have two friends who had miscarriages because of the tear gas thrown inside their houses. So it has this direct impact on women's health.

Another thing is that in such a violent context of military occupation it is much more difficult to make progress on feminist issues. When there’s a bomb falling on one’s head, people will prioritize national liberation, and only after this issue is resolved will they think about the liberation of women. Another impact on women's lives, more than that of men, is in relation to education. The Palestinian economy is very strangled; many families live on very little money. But to Palestinians education is a very important matter; they have one of the highest illiteracy rates in the world. Since there isn’t a Palestine state, there isn’t a public system for college education. So, when they have a daughter and a son, and the family only has money to pay a monthly fee, the one who goes to university is the man.

There is also the fact that women prisoners can be victims of sexual violence, besides the physical and mental torture, and this is horrible because Palestinian society is very patriarchal and women have to marry as a virgin, so when they return home they don’t have the courage to report it.

But are women also resisting occupation?

Of course! Palestinian women are part of the resistance since the bigging of the colonization and occupation of Palestine. They are incredibly active at many levels: community organizing, political and juridical resistance. To give you just one example, Manal Tamimi, who is constantly invited around the world to talk about Israeli occupation and to denounce the human rights violations that happen in Palestine. She has been arrested, her children and husband were also arrested, she’s already been shot, there is a huge political persecution against her and her family in attempt to silence her, but she continues to do her activism.

You’re a vegan — can you tell us how this relates to your activist identity?

Sandra: At first, I didn't associate veganism with other fights. It was only when I started to live in Palestine that I understood how everything was connected. For example, I worked with Palestinian women who belonged to the third generation of refugees. Their grandparents were forced to leave their lands in 1948, when Israel was created. So, these women, who in the past had access to the food their family cultivated, today are living in a refugee camp made with cement, with no possibility of planting. Many raised chickens in very small cages and slaughtered them right there, one in front of the other. So I started to notice that where there was animal oppression, there was human oppression as well. I realized that children mistreated animals a lot and that this was part of a cycle of violence. Almost every man in a refugee camp has already gone to jail as a political prisoner, where they were beaten or tortured. So, when they are released and return to home, they start to beat their wives. The wife beats on her children; the oldest child beats on the youngest; and the youngest beats on their cat or dog.

The connection between veganism and feminism to me is one of the most clear. There is a book called The Sexual Politics of Meat, written in the early ‘90s by Carol Adams, in which she does this connection. There is also a study that evaluated 400 locations where slaughterhouses had been opened and, without exception, in all of these cities, domestic violence increased after the opening of the slaughterhouse. That can be explained by the fact that, when a man is in a slaughterhouse, he needs to lose his empathy to do this kind of job, and empathy is not a button that you turn off every day, when you enter a slaughterhouse, and then turn on when you return home. So, this increases domestic violence against women.

I also realized that, in the animal exploitation industry, females are even more abused than males. There is also a gender issue in nonhuman animals. The female reproductive system is extensively exploited and when they can’t reproduce anymore, they are sent to the slaughterhouse to become a hamburger. Artificial insemination in animals is a very violent process. And every woman at least once has felt like a piece of meat.

So I started to make these connections. I think that it is very hard to call yourself a feminist and not make these connections, to not question these kinds of situations. The fact that we are against the culture of rape, for example, and aren’t able to question something that is made by rape, even if it is a nonhuman animal rape, is an important thing to pay attention to. I’m not saying it is the same thing, but it is a kind of rape, so it needs to be debated. We are very alienated from the production system, from knowing where what we eat comes from.

You also went to live in Lebanon, right? What motivated you to go there?

This was a more personal project. I always dreamed of visiting Beirut, so I took the opportunity to take an Arabic course there, because I speak Arabic, but I can’t write. All I knew about the language I learned with the women of the Noor project. But when I got there I ended up getting involved with the Syrian refugee issue, because Lebanon was the country that received the most Syrian refugees. So I worked at a community center that welcomed transgender, lesbian, and bisexual women refugees. Aside from that, we also started to document the matter of women domestic workers there, because Lebanon is the country that employs the most domestic workers in the world, proportionally speaking, and usually they come from African and Asian countries. It’s like modern slavery, because many of these women sleep on the floor and their employers confiscate their passports so they are trapped there.

As an activist, what other projects have you been developing?

Two years ago I started a project with Anne, my French wife (and my photographer), and two other friends, Craig and Ahmed, called “Baladi,” which in Arabic can mean “from the country,” but also something that is local or organic. We believe that animal exploitation is used as a tool for colonialism; once Israel confiscated Palestinian farmers’ lands and water resources, they replaced them with poultry farms. It is important to say that, proportionally, Israel is the world's largest chicken consumer.

In Brazil, I also am a part of the Vegan Union of Activism (VUA), a network of 17 movements aligned with a popular veganism agenda. This organization was created during the 2018 election in Brazil, because we were very surprised that some vegan people were supporting Jair Bolsonaro. And we understand veganism as a social movement, who has to fight side by side with others, like the LGBT, Black, and feminist movements.

My last project started here in France with the coronavirus pandemic. I live in Aubervilliers, the second poorest city in France, where there is the largest population of Arab and Black immigrants. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we started thinking how these people were going to survive, and we formed “popular solidarity brigades” that first helped immigrants with more urgent actions, such as distribution of personal protective equipment for COVID-19 and food. But we also provide legal advice. There is an immigrant women’s shelter here that is like a prison, in which 40 women are all alone with their children and don’t have the right to receive visits, or even to [have people] bring them food there. They are in the shelter waiting for the government to grant them a visa. So we try to give them assistance and also organize them politically, so that they can claim for their rights.