For the girls!
Note: This essay is published in two parts. This post contains the first part; the second part will follow in a subsequent post. The complete bibliography is available at the end of this text.
Dr. Irena Kuzmina
Darba, darba tai mātei, Ar dēliem, ar meitām: Meitas prasa lielu pūru, Dēli lielu novadiņu.
[Much hard work for that mother, With daughters and sons to raise: Daughters ask for a rich dowry, Sons for a big farmland.]
— Latvian folk song
Since the times of the epic Egyptian queen Cleopatra (41), women have been ruling the world while facing, at the same time, prejudice, discrimination and violence, both institutional and domestic. Cleopatra’s sorority club, i.e. women in position of power, has a multimillennial tradition from ancient times until nowadays, and history of Feminism includes many a brave woman and their various (mis)adventures like the Suffragettes’ fight for equal rights, Indira Gandhi’s tragedy, Thatcher’s difficulties, the US Hillary’s and Kamala’s failure in running for president, as well as the growing visibility and activism of America’s First Ladies Michelle and Melania, on a global scale. The sisterhood also includes the EU iconic female leaders Angela and Ursula but, at the same time, the far-right representatives Giorgia and Marine ferociously fighting immigration on the European continent. Kristalina Georgieva’s exceptional promotion to the position of senior global financial leadership can but cause awe.
Although the example of the happy few women in position of power and leadership does not mean the Utopia of equal rights for all and the end of patriarchy, there are good examples of female audacity and perseverance in the domain of equality for promotion to senior positions.
Absence of female prime ministers and presidents, in particular, remains an issue everywhere. While the world is watching, the unanswered question still endures: is the US ready for a female president? Can, for example, AOC become a new Cleopatra ruling over people’s minds and hearts?
Latvia’s strategic position as a geopolitical crossroads between the East and the West provides the global leaders and ordinary people with the audacity of hope. Latvia’s model is an amazing contribution to that sorority’s club table.
With elements of Paganism (34), Christian values and Western liberal stance, its pragmatism, down-to-earth attitudes, Protestant work ethics and profound belief in supernatural forces (21,30, 33, 34), in parallel, Latvian society has turned science fiction into reality making the wildest dreams come true. Reality can still be harsh, in certain respects, but the impossible did happen: Latvia has had a female president who reigned over this former Soviet bloc republic for 8 years.
This presidency introduced change in society equal to Barack Obama’s reforms in the domain of representation pushing away the phenomenon of under-representation, as for the often-neglected communities and groups of people. Thus, in the 19th century, the Baltic nations could but dream about the institution of Presidency of their own. But it has been created while many a society still can but dream of promoting a woman to a position of political leadership even in the 21st century. The former president of Latvia has learned from Martin Luther King’s lessons and has made an equal contribution to the political development in the country avoiding the traps of prejudice based on gender. As highlighted in the biopic on Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s career as a lawyer up to the Supreme Court of the United States, promotion to power within the legal system used to be often closed to women, as a consequence of “many of the gender-based laws” (10). In the US, Bader Ginsburg was trying to promote “radical social change” through a legal, in particular, judicial, system, a path taken later by Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Kamala Harris. In her rebuttal to the judges, Bader Ginsburg states that societal roles that existed one hundred years ago, or even twenty years ago, no longer apply. She does not ask the court to change society, but to keep the law up with social change that has already taken place (10).
The case of Vaira Vike-Freiberga (born in 1937) who, as a female Head of State, also contributed to Latvia’s soft power in Europe using her femininity, female charm and the terrific sense of style in clothing (following the example of the most powerful women in this world like Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain) seems to be the ultimate answer to this question: the promotion of the female-centered cultures and societies is possible.
Thanks to Vaira, the Republic of Latvia has become a well-established brand, internationally recognizable at the ball of equal European partners. While a lot of people across various walks of life still prefer to see a female as a desperate housewife rather than an equal (or even stronger) business partner or a political opponent, the former refugee child and a global nomad has proven that change is happening also in the domain of representation of women in positions of highest decision-making. Because of her personal endeavor, the small Baltic State has acquired the prestigious status of an EU and a NATO member state sealing the position of Latvia as a part of Western cultural space and thus increasing its international visibility and security.
These achievements are anchored in Latvia’s historical background and political traditions that can be integrated into both European and global history and culture. Thus, Latvia’s 1905 Revolutionary movement coincided with the British suffragette movement, masterfully depicted by Sarah Gavron in Suffragette (7), in so many aspects. Vote for women legalized in Latvia in 1918 along with the UK, Germany and the Soviet Union, by contrast to the belated accession to vote in France (1944), shows that Latvia has a certain tradition of democracy and equal rights, as well as a certain advantage compared to its European counterparts, e.g. France.
Domestic traditions also played an important role as a source of future president’s inspiration: just like another legendary Latvian literary personality and feminist icon, Aspazija (1887-1943), whose work and life were focused on women's rights, freedom, and fighting against social prejudice and injustice (1), Vike-Freiberga has been leading by example the Latvian community at home and abroad, in particular, women.
The recent heated debate in Latvian society around the Istanbul Convention reflecting that legal protection for women and girls against domestic violence insisted, once again, on the importance of the written word of the law; by the way, for all and not only for the happy few, kings and queens.
Vaira’s personal achievement as a strong woman and a Latvian Iron Lady were anchored, in its turn, deep in the events of her biography and her country’s dramatic, and often tragic, experience in the middle of the 20th century, e.g. the double Occupation: the small Baltic state was invaded by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War Two (8, 25, 31, 38, 39).
While in exile and isolated from her land and community of origin, she managed to avoid the dangers of le déracinement studying and analyzing her ancestors’ cultural heritage and concepts (dainas) making a significant contribution to the cause of Indo-European comparative studies (solar cycle), as well as clinical psychology (19-37).
But it was in the West where she experienced institutional sexism and misogyny as a young researcher: “Our dear professor at one point in a seminar said, ‘Yes, well, we actually have three married women here in this PhD program, it’s such a waste, because they’re going to get married and they’re going to have children, and they’re actually taking up a place that a boy could have taken who will become a real scientist.’” (38).
This episode seems to echo the misadventures of Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day (1919) character Katharine Hilbery (17), as depicted in Tina Gharavi’s recently released eponymous film, projected also on Latvian cinema screens. There is a world unseen aspect in this release: the elegant Edwardian novel exploring love, identity and the changing role of women in the early twentieth century reminds us of la condition féminine in other parts of the world nowadays (11), where women have no legal access to their rights. Since Wollstonecraft’s proclamation of women’s social equality in the late 18th century (16) not much progress has been carried out in British society in terms of equal rights and representation, e.g. in academia, including Cambridge, as shows Gharavi’s version of Woolf’s novel.
Like Miss Hilbery, unable to break the glass ceiling of the British Academia being born a female, Vaira was looking up to the sky in order to explore solar myths, per aspera ad astra, the source of life energy, creative and poetic inspiration, analyzing the image of the Sun in dainas (36, 37), only to become later in her life a kind of a Sun Queen herself: ancient dainas, the traditional folksongs from the Baltics, guided her throughout the 50 years of exile and isolation from the native land of her ancestors (2, 49).The privileged Englishwoman Katharine Hilbery was obliged, by tradition, to get married: the British conservative society imposed its rules of the game not only in academia leaving little space for personal choices and ambitions to young ladies. The British-Iranian film director Tina Gharavi draws an astonishing parallel between the women’s legal status, close to zero, in Great Britain at the beginning of the 20th century and in the nowadays Iran, en filigrane, depicting the universal difficulties females face as truly international (11, 17, 38). It is difficult to believe that the young Vaira barely escaped child bride destiny herself when her refugee family moved to the then French-ruled Morocco where one of her father’s Arab co-workers said she was ready to be married off, though she was just a child, in exchange of 15,000 francs dowry, two donkeys and cattle. Her father said she had to go to school. Her parents laughed at that, but Vaira was alarmed (38). She met her future husband Imants at the University of Toronto, another Latvian exile. Like Pierre and Marie Curie, Vaira and Imants worked together as a team of scientific researchers in the domain of folklore and Latvian national identity, as well as psychology (35, 38, 48).
Constantly experiencing the “border state between two different cultural spaces—World War II breaks European cultural space into two zones—the capitalist West and the Soviet East” (38), just like the Estonian expatriates based in Paris (40, 45), Vaira’s family can but dream about the restoration of independence and, meanwhile, like the Curies, work hard on conservation of cultural legacy, in particular, dainas: text analysis, scientific publications, promotion of the unique cultural heritage and tradition. In a similar way to the well-known fictional characters Ifemelu and Obinze in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (12), together, they are contributing to the construction, development and transformation of their cultural space and State, in the post-colonial, yet highly multicultural context.
Questioning a woman’s role in society while women “will stay home and take care of the husband and children” (41) remains problematic even in wealthy Western democracies. Explanation can be found in Pierre Bourdieu’s Domination masculine (5) if we wish to analyze and understand the profound reasons of Hillary Clinton’s and Kamala Harris’s non-election to US presidency. When we talk about the candidate’s set of skills making him or her eligible for the job we often prefer to ignore that “masculine domination is so anchored in our social practices and our unconscious that we hardly perceive it; it is so much in line with our expectations that we find it difficult to call into question”, as expressed in Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of Mediterranean societies, the relations between the sexes in our societies and the bonds of the tradition (5). Indeed, women are tolerated, rather than welcomed, in so many workplaces. It is true that a housewife and personal assistant roles are still preferable and predominant for a woman: many a man still has that inner Taliban on their mind. Violence against women remains well represented in the statistical data of reports on human rights abuse being a truly international phenomenon. In particular, questioning the achievements of the Istanbul Convention in Latvian society is but a confirmation of this fact: the social mechanisms and institutions—family, school, church, and state—turn out to be riddled with sexism.
In fact, women as senior leaders, in position of power, are still extremely rare. Prominent females are more visible as models, entrepreneurs, academics, MPs or TV presenters, for example, in Oprah’s case or in Devina Gupta’s show.
Before becoming a president, Vike-Freiberga became a strong woman, author of books on poetics, literature, folklore; book reviews, critiques, essays, articles in periodicals, short stories, reviews, reports carrying out comparative analysis and promoting Latvianness (23): refined Latvian language, precious literary Latvian somehow following the tradition of refined female writing, Pillow Book style. She eventually got into a palace herself, the Riga Castle, founded in 1330, where she resided in 1999-2007, the official residence of the Latvian government.
She also became famous as a gold standard of beauty, elegance and style for women in Latvia: everyone wished to wear similar stylish hats and suits, bright in color and exquisite, but not many could compete with her elegance and femininity.
The possible reason of this successful Herstory is that Vaira dared to be herself. This success grew out of the trauma of her childhood, her hyphenated life as an immigrant and a refugee, for instance, attending a refugee school in Lübeck, Germany: like the Lithuanian Marija Gimbutas, her family fled war-torn Latvia to search for a better life on the American continent. Like so many characters, fictional and non-fictional, she turned her experience to her own advantage.
Before moving back to Latvia after 50 years abroad, she was a prominent Westerner like the pop star Katie Melua or the fictional character Rachel Chu, Professor of economics at the NYU (9). Vaira spent 33 years at the University of Montreal. She became fluent in five languages and wrote 10 books.
In 1998, aged 60, she was elected professor emeritus. Her research, and she was passionate about it together with her husband and colleague Imants, was focused on dainas: short poems, two to four liners reflecting the Baltic region’s ancient history. “They are over a thousand years old and were first passed down by voice.” (2, 19) so that UNESCO included dainas, national treasure of Latvia and Lithuania, into the Memory of the World Program. More than 1.2 million dainas are recorded nowadays, a source of Latvian wit and wisdom. The leading translator Ieva Auziņa-Szentivanyi published multiple volumes of dainas in English like The Cabinet of Folk Songs (2), who called her work a “transformation” because ancient Latvian ideas are hard to match word-for-word in English.
By contrast, Vaira was going back to a transformed post-Communist state: Communism left its trace on people’s minds and Latvia’s messy post-Soviet economy. While contributing to new pro-Western political power and to the soft power of Latvia and that of women, Vike-Freiberga faced harsh criticism, hate speech and contempt from the Latvians who did not or could not leave for the West often facing the impossible choice between jail or exile (8, 38). “And there was great enthusiasm amongst certain newspapers to find things to criticize, for instance, that I was a great spendthrift, having lived a life of luxury in the West. Complete fabrications,” she says. “I discovered that if you couldn’t trust the media, you have to go directly and speak to the people.” (38). Does this sound like Lady Diana Spencer’s special relationship with the Royal family and the media empire?
These personal stories and relationships echo global patterns of class, race, gender. Vike-Freiberga is a classic example of an Americanah (2013) travelling back and forth between cultural codes, spaces, languages, mentalities. As brilliantly highlights Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her novel, “Nigeria at the time is under military dictatorship, and people are seeking to leave the country. Ifemelu departs for the United States to study. Through her experiences in relationships and studies, she chronicles her experience of race in American culture” (12). Following a similar pattern of the exiled Latvians, years later, Obinze returns to Nigeria and becomes a wealthy man as a property developer in the newly democratic country. Ifemelu gains success in the United States. When Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, the two consider the viability of reviving a relationship in light of their diverging experiences during their many years apart. In a similar way, the representatives of the Baltic diasporas were trying to rebuild the broken republics in the post-colonial context and Vike-Freiberga was of them.
In terms of class, Vaira has undergone transformation from a child refugee residing in a number of countries speaking various languages, from Latvian and Arabic to English and French, towards a classy Western upper-middle class scholar, an elite intellectual and an academic lecturing at top universities of the New World close to Ifemelu’s parcours. At the same time, the future president remained faithful to the Eastern tradition of Eastern upper classes, a promising Mandarin, to use her academic colleague Simone de Beauvoir’s terminology (3,4). When this lady in elegant dresses moved to the post-Soviet Latvia, the locals found her a foreigner who will never be enough, nor theirs (9).
She also became a prominent right-wing politician promoting traditional family values (21) despite her liberal stance. She found herself as competition to Soviet leaders and an example to Western ones, for instance, to the United States, a superpower with no female presidents, so far.
However, taking into consideration Latvia’s strategic position as a geopolitical crossroads between the East and the West, Latvia is still fighting for that prosperity after joining the EU and euro zone. Nowadays, the Latvians are still building up that middle class in the effort to catch up with the Nordic and Western European neighbors fighting for prosperity and the legality of wealth and wealth distribution. Integrating Vike-Freiberga’s experience into the global cultural space, we can draw multiple parallels with international communities, diasporas, cultural and political models.
Another parallel is definitely the above mentioned Mandarins (1954) by Simone de Beauvoir depicting the personal lives of a group of French intellectuals from the end of World War II to the mid-1950s. Whereas the term refers to the scholars and bureaucrats of imperial China, the Freibergs were a highly representative couple of the newly created class of local Baltic intellectuals many of whom returned home from the exile in West enriched with Western values, manners and education, along with the newly coined class of Eurocrats based in Brussels: translators, interpreters, IT and finance workers, politicians and the members of the European Parliament. Not many remember now that it was thanks to the personal insight and effort of one exceptional and courageous woman that the doors to the European future opened to a small Baltic society.
Like the characters of Les Mandarins, Baltic and other Eastern European intellectuals will play a crucial role in influencing the political landscape of the world after World War II, including European construction based on the concept of human rights, and women’s rights.
However, political cross-dressing is not always welcome even in the Western cultural space. The most paradoxical situation with the acceptance and promotion of a female candidate to Presidency seems to take place in the United States. While it was Canada that formed the future Latvian president and sent her back to Europe, the US produced several wonderful female candidates for presidency who, however, failed each time to win the electorate’s hearts.
The classic example of American female career success up to the upper echelon, as well as the most frustrating failure to win in 2008 and 2016 presidential race, is Hillary Clinton. The Clintons used to be a highly trusted and inspirational figures in Baltics during their visit to the region in the 1990s. However, Latvia could but not the US.
Mrs. Clinton has been climbing up the political ladder for many years: politician, lawyer, and diplomat, she was the 67th United States Secretary of State in the administration of Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, holding a tenure as a Senator representing New York from 2001 to 2009, and the First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001 as the wife of Bill Clinton. She ran for president in 2008 and was defeated by Obama in the Democratic primaries. The First Lady who decided to run for president herself: it was a brave and unprecedented decision breaking the glass ceiling trying to equalize the gender roles (6, 14, 42).
Society was not ready, as explained in Bourdieu’s works (5). Was it her professional decisions in regard to international politics (Iran, the Arab Spring, Asia) that sank her project, finally, or was it more about the inherent misogyny at home? We can only guess. Her second presidential run on November 8 in 2016 turned out equally unsuccessful, with near-equal outcome to Donald Trump, according to the US voters’ preferences.
As stated in her 2014 autobiography Hard Choices, America was not ready for Hillary. Like the Mother, the main character in one of the ancient Latvian dainas, the American woman was facing really difficult choices juggling family, budget and international relations while the gender hierarchy was still in the air.
After all, what do voters vote for? Just like in Latvia, raising middle class incomes, establishing universal preschool, making college more affordable and improving the Affordable Care Act were the highest and absolute priorities for the domestic electorate. When income inequality, American style, was but looming in the Baltics, Vike-Freiberga caught momentum: Hillary did not have the advantage of Western exotism in a post-Soviet republic after the collapse of the Communist system and could not attract the voters thanks to this perspective, despite the elaborate PR machine and highly developed electoral infrastructure.
One evening Vaira’s phone rang. It was the Prime Minister of Latvia. And Vaira got the offer to head a new Latvian Institute. She was told they wanted “somebody actually from the diaspora who is multilingual, understands Western mentality, but also with good understanding of Latvian culture”. (38) Almost immediately she found herself caught up in Latvia’s presidential race to be elected by the local Saeima (Parliament) to the top role. Her political rating rose up to 85%: unprecedented result in global history for a woman.
She played a decisive role in Latvia joining both NATO and the European Union in 2004. “Being a woman was an advantage. I remember at the Istanbul NATO summit, President [George W] Bush took me by the elbow, because I had high heels and it was a gravel path, and we walked slowly along. I did all I could to tell him how important it was to enlarge NATO and to make sure that Latvia was included and how much progress we had made and how full of goodwill we were.” (38).
Vaira’s second term ended in 2008, a few months before her 70th birthday. She co-founded the Club de Madrid, an organization of former leaders, with a mandate to promote democratic leadership and governance. She also has a particular focus on “women's empowerment. Still haunted by that Professor in Canada, she knows the battle is far from won”. (38)
Bibliography
General
1. Aspazija. Aspazija: A Latvian Writer 1865–1943. Her Lyrical Prose – Translated by Astrida B. Stahnke. Jūrmala: Jūrmalas vēstures un mākslas biedrība, 2015.
2. Auziņa-Szentivanyi, Ieva. The Cabinet of Folk Songs. iBook. 2021.
3. Beauvoir de, Simone. Le deuxième sexe. Paris: Gallimard, 1949.
4. Beauvoir de, Simone. Les Mandarins. Paris: Gallimard, 1954.
5. Bourdieu, Pierre. La Domination masculine. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1998.
6. Bouyer, René-Jean. Hillary & Bill. Documentary. 1996.
7. Gavron, Sarah. Suffragette. Film. 2015.
8. Kairiss, Viesturs. Melānijas hronika. Film. 2016.
9. Kwan, Kevin. Crazy Rich Asians. New York: Doubleday, 2013.
10. Leder, Miriam. On the Basis of Sex. Movie. 2018.
11. Nafisi, Azar. Lire Lolita à Téhéran. Paris: Plon, 2004.
12. Ngozi Adichie, Chimamanda. Americanah. Nigeria: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.
13. Parker, Oliver, Thompson, Barnaby. St. Trinian’s. Film. 2007.
14. Peterson, Alan. Hillary. Movie. 2008.
15. Pizan de, Christine. Cité des Dames. Paris: Stock/Moyen Age, 1986 [1405].
16. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. London: Penguin, 2004 [1792].
17. Woolf, Virginia. Night and Day. Penguin Classics: 2006 [1919].
18. Zhao, Chloé. Nomadland. Movie. 2020.
Vaira Vike-Freiberga’s Publications
1. Database of Latvian Dainas. A computer-accessible transcription of A. Švābe, K. Staubergs, & E. Hauzenberga-Šturma (Eds), Latviešu tautas dziesmas. Copenhagen: Imanta, 1952-1956. 12 vols. Transcribed by Imants Freibergs un Vike-Freiberga, Vaira.
2. Vike-Freiberga, Vaira. Dzintara kalnā [On the Amber Mountain]. Montreal: Helios, 1989.
3. Vike-Freiberga, Vaira. Ģimene un ģimenes godi latviešu tradīcijās [Family and Family Gods in Latvian Tradition], Baltica-91. 3 pp, 1991.
4. Vike-Freiberga, Vaira. Jāņos [The Midsummer Festival]. Laiks (New York), June 23, p.1, 1993.
5. Vike-Freiberga, Vaira. Kultūra un latvietība [Culture and Latvian Identity]. Rīga: Karogs, 2010.
6. Vike-Freiberga, Vaira. Linguistics and Poetics of Latvian Folk Songs. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989.
7. Vike-Freiberga, Vaira. Par maizi, pienu un izdzīvošanu [About bread, milk and survival]. Concluding commentary, 7th volume [Poēmas] of the collected wotks [Raksti] of Imants Ziedonis (pp. 374-389). Riga: Nordik, 1997.
8. Vike-Freiberga, Vaira. Psycholinguistique expérimentale. In: Marc N. Richelle, Jean Requin, and Michèle Robert (Eds.) Traité de psychologie expérimentale (vol. 2, pp. 333-387). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
9. Gamsa, Ann, & Vike-Freiberga, Vaira. Psychological events are both risk factors in, and consequences of, chronic pain. Pain, 44, 271-277.
10. Vike-Freiberga, Vaira & Freibergs, Imants. Saules dainas [Latvian Sun Songs]. Montreal: Helios, 1988.
11. Vike-Freiberga, Vaira. Savai tautai. Citāti no runām un rakstiem [For My People. Quotations from speeches and writings]. Sastādījums [arranged by] Rudīte Kalpiņa. Riga: Jumava, 2008.
12. Vike-Freiberga, Vaira. Senlatviešu reliģija sinkretisma gaisma [Ancient Latvian religion in the light of syncretism]. Jaunā Gaita, Nr. 104, 16-20, 1975.
13. Vike-Freiberga, Vaira. “Sieviete dzintarā”. Review of A Woman in Amber: Healing the trauma of war and exile. New York: Soho, 1995, by Agate Nesaule. Laiks (New York), March 23, pp. 3, 6, 1996.
14. Vike-Freiberga, Vaira. Tautas nacionālā pašapziņa- problēmas un iespējas [Self-esteem and national pride: Problems and opportunities]. Karogs (Riga), 11, 200-215, 1997.
15. Vike-Freiberga, Vaira. The Devil in Latvian Folktales: An Analysis of Character in Relation to Plot. In E.V. Ūygas and P.Voorheis (Eds), Folklorica: Festschrift for Felix J. Oinas. Indiana University Uralic and Altaic Series, Vol 14. (pp. 291-305). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
16. Vike-Freiberga, Vaira. The Major Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Latvian Mythology. In V. Vike-Freiberga (Ed.), Linguistics and Poetics of Latvian Folk Songs (pp. 91-112). Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989.
17. Freibergs, Imants, and Vike-Freiberga, Vaira (Transcribed by). The Montreal Corpus of Latvian Sun Songs. (Over 4000 folk song texts). Montreal: 1976 (updated 1988).
18. Vike-Freiberga, Vaira. Trējādās saules: Kosmoloģiskā saule [The threefold Sun, Vol. I: The Cosmological Sun]. (An analysis of themes of content in Latvian folksongs about the sun). Riga: Karogs, 1997.
19. Vike-Freiberga, Vaira. Trējādās saules: Meteoroloģiskā saule. Gaišā saule [The Threefold Sun: The Meteorological Sun. The Luminous Sun. Rīga: Pētergailis, 2011.
Online Resources
1. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49119077
2. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vaira-Vike-Freiberga
3. https://ewod.ut.ee/k/koidula/
4. http://www.imarabe.org/fr/agenda/expositions-musee/mystere-cleopatre
5. https://radaronline.com/p/bill-clinton-unrecognizable-long-hair-bushy-beard-birthday/
6. https://share.google/CJBiwNfEZ3D5Xoa6c
7. https://share.google/NYSTmvYbEUiuUpvAZ
8. https://share.google/RtNyCSkvEb43fgL5o
9. https://youtu.be/-AphKUK8twg?si=2D6HnD9oTL7cesZl
10. https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/aug/15/will-aoc-run-for-president
11. https://www.vairavikefreiberga.lv/biography/
12. https://www.vairavikefreiberga.lv/publications/
13. https://youtu.be/4zQh99jdyho?si=fWIXZQXx1NlxOoLu
Dr. Irena Kuzmina is a multilingual researcher, teacher, writer, linguist and cultural enthusiast educated in Great Britain, France (La Sorbonne Nouvelle), and the Baltic States. She obtained a PhD in Comparative Literature at Versailles University, France, in 2005.
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