8 March: I Am On Strike

It is International Women’s Day, and we are apparently all on strike here today in Italy. Happy Our Day!

Women and our allies are on strike to end patriarchy, and a bunch of Italian workers’ unions declared that they are on strike, too: health care staff, teachers, train drivers, and firefighters. So we are all on a strike (uno sciopero) together.

Since being on strike adds to one’s day quite a bit of free time, I decided to join the official march in Rome for women’s rights and an end to femicide and violence, with either 30,000 people cascading through the streets of Rome according to the event organizers, or 10,000 according to the police. Which is still a lot of people.

The organizers wanted a highly visible Fuchsia Wave to happen, so many of the marchers were decked out in pink clothes, scarves, ribbons, hats, banners, bandanas, or had pink messages and symbols drawn on their face or body.

Having missed that memo completely, I was all in black with nothing written on me.

Had I received that memo, I would still have been all in black, as I have always hated wearing anything pink.

These people are all much better revolutionaries than I am.

As we marched, I chatted with some Italian women wearing fuchsia shirts, about the significance to them of pink, and they said it was a strong, unifying color, and one that worked well symbolically for Women’s Day, making pink represent not just femininity but also feminism.

I explained that a march as pink as this one, if held in the USA, would be about the fight against breast cancer. The Italian women said they preferred their use of pink, and I said I was absolutely fine with that and that it made a lot of sense.

International Women’s Day is celebrated in different ways in different places, but across Europe it is generally a day of political protest, ear-splitting protest noise, and fearsome slogans. A sort of raw power is unleashed on these occasions, by people who are fed up with the status quo, joined by people who are fed up with being fed up.

In contrast, Philadelphia’s official event for this day is a seminar called “Inspire Inclusivity,” which is not in itself a bad idea, just an extremely tame one. Speakers, a Keynote Address, lunch, display tables, maybe some corporate swag to take home, and the next day, business as usual.

But a massive noisy traffic-stopping march does seem to suggest much more forcefully that the will to change is already here, spanning all generations. The start was at the Circus Maximus/ Circo Massimo, overlooking a site of Roman chariot races. Thousands of people were there already when I arrived and locked my bike to a bike rack.

The assembling took a long time, although there was music and dancing while we waited, but eventually the march began to move, heading very slowly down wide avenues, through neighborhoods, across the River Tiber / Tevere, and eventually to Trastevere, led by a truck blasting music, and a huge banner announcing that this was a “Strike Against Patriarchal Violence.”

I decided to march close to the samba band somewhere near the middle. You can’t really go wrong marching with the samba band.

Because with a samba band nearby, it’s more of a marching dance party.

Your Guide To Marching

Some of you reading this are old hands at political protest marches, and probably have your Political Protest March Kit waiting near your door for the next call to show up for a cause: cardboard for a sign, fat markers, comfortable walking shoes, throat lozenges so you can keep yelling the whole time, and most importantly, some snacks.

But if you have yet to embark on a march, the following pieces of sensory information will give you a good idea of just what you can expect.

What does a Political Protest March look like?

If you are my size, it pretty much looks like this:

Lots of backs of heads, lots of backpacks, not much else. And no clue what is up ahead.

If you can manage to find a wall to climb up on to perch and take a picture, it might instead look like this:

And good luck getting down gracefully from that wall in front of 30,000 people.

What does a Political Protest March sound like?

A little shouting.

A little samba.

Some more shouting.

Some more samba.

Hit all 4 of those play buttons above at the same time, repeat on LOUD for at least 2 hours, and you will start to get the gist of it.

What does a Political Protest March smell like?

Patchouli oil, cigarette smoke, and weed. In that exact order.

What does a Political Protest March taste like?

A Political Protest March does not taste like flippin’ anything, especially if one has stupidly neglected to bring along any flippin’ snacks.

After 3 hours of bringing an end to patriarchal violence, we were still about an hour from the planned destination and I was starving. And I badly needed a coffee. So I peeled away and wandered off to find a cafe for an appropriately revolutionary lunch.

This is a Feminist Sandwich, and a Political Activist’s Coffee:

And a chair to sit down in for a while.

There is also an actual flavor to International Women’s Day in Italy, because there is an International Women’s Day traditional cake: Mimosa Cake. There is also an International Women’s Day traditional flower: the Mimosa Flower. Mimosas, growing wild in the 1940s, were given by women as gifts to each other to mark their special day of the year.

After I walked back to the start of the march and retrieved my bicycle and pedaled home, I went across the street to the local florists and bought myself a bunch of Mimosa Flowers. Next I headed down the street to the really nice local pastry shop, which I had correctly intuited would have Mimosa Cakes, and I bought some of those.

I went for the full Italian International Women’s Day Experience:

That’s two small Mimosa Cakes, and a bunch of yellow Mimosa Flowers, right there in my Garbatella kitchen.

Can we hang with this cake for a minute?

I looked up the recipe, and it is phenomenally complicated to make. There is a cake part, and a sugary syrup with Grand Marnier or other orange liqueur part, and a cream part, and I believe some zest is involved somewhere along the production line.

Then, and this is frankly nuts (but not literally nuts), to achieve the coating of fluffy yellow flakes which approximate the fluffy yellow petals of the Mimosa Flower, one bakes an entirely separate cake and chops it up to dump over the top of the first cake.

And Voila! You have the official cake of International Women’s Day in Italy.

Which is also the messiest cake I have ever encountered, because with the “petal” crumbs sliding off everywhere, this is a cake which absolutely requires you to clean up after it.

How incredibly fitting. Ours is a cake of irony.

The Mimosa Flowers will also shed into little piles of yellow on your table and floor, leaving you with more cleaning up to do and, because you paid for all this stuff, Capitalism / il Capitalismo with yet another win.

And finally, what does a Political Protest March feel like?

Foremost, a Political Protest March feels like incredible power and pride, mixed together with some sensory overload, a slight din in one’s head from all the noise, and two very tired feet. But it feels much better after some cold seltzer water and a hot shower. Then it feels great.

Happy Our Day to Everyone.