Womanifesto

*This is the Womanifesto I wrote (and posted around town) for my friend Ash's Experimental Feminism class last year.  I am not as angry today, but I remember that anger vividly.

1: Letters

They say: You are angry.

Write a letter; send it; feel your anger evaporate.

So here it is, laid bare: My anger.

I am angry that every 5 minutes, 4 Congolese women are raped.  They are raped with sticks, their vaginas shot through with guns.  War goes on after peace treaties are signed.

I am angry that 100 million baby girls are missing—killed or aborted or abandoned when their parents, locked into patriarchal cultures, found out they were female.

I am angry that this week an 11-year-old girl was gang-raped by 18 men in Texas, making her one of the 1 in 4 American women who will be victims of rape or sexual assault.

I am telling you that the anger is in me, an exposed nerve, a deep deep wound.

I am angry about domestic violence, honor killings, maternal mortality, genital mutilation, human trafficking, sex slavery, femicide, bride burning, child abuse, neglect, forced pregnancy, forced sterilization, sex-selective abortion and infanticide, the income gap, the education gap, and all the permutations of sexual violence that disdain and sadism have designed.

I am angry that behind these words—these technical terms—there are faces and hands and bellies and breasts and wombs and vaginas and empty, empty, empty arms.

I am angry that there is only one explanation for these things, and it is: woman-hate. 

Hate of all things smaller, softer, riper, Other.

And in this woman-hating world dwells my daughter, who is one of the luckiest ones, who by force of geography and social class will probably not have acid tossed in her face or be tortured and dismembered in the desert.

But still this woman-hating world will do its work on her.

It will try to shrink her, silence her, nip her, tuck her, beat her, bash her, terrify her, exploit her, objectify her, starve her, hate her.

It will try to make her hate herself.

It will try to whittle her down

until she is trim as a bone

and hollow as a reed.

And even then.

Even then.

*

I write letter after letter,

never knowing to whom

I should send them.

2: Womanifesto

I am not my culture.

I am filled clear up with it, of course,

and when I move I feel it sloshing inside me,

licking at my ribs

and spilling over my brims.

What I learned about being a woman

might be different than what you learned about being a woman,

but I am sure we had a few lessons in common:

Be so small you are barely visible; shrink, shrink, shrink.

Sacrifice, sacrifice.  Self-efface, then some more.

Whatever you do, don’t stop sacrificing.  Give that up.  Give it up.  Give up.

But the roots of these lessons are weakening in me, and

there are a some things I will not place on that sacrificial altar:

My voice, my volume, my words.

I can say I’m angry when I am.

I can choose where I go, what I do.

I am not bound to your ideas of what womanhood means.

I am the only mother to my children.

I know what love means to me.

Since my mind has been colonized

(the last great frontier),

I can shake off any oppressors I find there.

I can be an abolitionist,

freeing—first—my own heart and mind.

In a world where women wish they were darker, lighter, thinner, fatter, shorter, taller, bigger, smaller: I will not buy products from companies that perpetuate and profit off of my self-hate.

In a world where so many women’s bodies are mutilated: I will not allow cosmetic knives to slice my skin.

In a world where women are viewed as objects for consumption: I will assert my personhood, honoring the fact that each day I can return to my true self—more generous, more honest, more authentic.

In a world where women’s voices are taken from them: I will not sit down.  I will not shut up.  I will not remain silent about suffering for fear of offending someone’s sensibilities.

*

In a world where I have a voice, I will use it.