A return to that purely philosophical enquiry is now needed. The current trajectory of increased instrumentalist positioning around women’s rights will not result in a feminist epiphany from economically driven stakeholders for whom women’s rights have been tangential at best and irrelevant at worst in relation to their own goals. Having to convince people that furthering equality is good because it can also further an economic bottom line somewhere is not where we should be in the twenty-first century. A mushrooming of interventions on the back of this are not signifiers of success in themselves. Without the ethical underpinnings of rights and justice that fundamentally challenge core beliefs and patriarchal systems, the battle for a feminist future will continue to not only be piecemeal but arguably deeply compromised.
Rosamond S. King
A creative and critical writer and performer living in Brooklyn, New York, with family from Trinidad and The Gambia, she creates work that is deeply informed by her cultures and communities, by history, and by a sense of play. Her poems are collected in the Lambda-award-winning Rock | Salt | Stone (2017), and appear in more than three dozen journals, blogs, and anthologies. Her performance art has been curated in venues including the NY Metropolitan Museum, the Encuentro Festival (Canada), and the African Performance Art Biennial (Zimbabwe). Her scholarly book Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination received the 2015 Caribbean Studies Association best book award. She is Creative Editor of sx salon, President of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa, and Associate Professor at Brooklyn College.
This is for the women1
Holds a gun like a claw
It would tear out your humanity if
it thought you had any
Holds a badge like a claw
to make your dignity bleed
to make you gag
this claw digs its blunt
into you—swallow it
or else
the badge tells you to get
naked and like it
flashlight pricks your belly
then asphalt grinds your knees
gun tells you to like it
so you like it better than prison
better than more flashlights
more badges more guns
laughter, like a claw
that never leaves you never removes
its pointy end from your
throat now stretched wide
a claw to suck the flesh off of
and your whole body
is your throat stretched
wide are you still screaming why
are you still screaming a receptacle
doesn’t scream a waste bin doesn’t
scream a throat filled with a claw
shouldn’t be able to
a throat that is a whole body
resonates at an other frequency
sometimes in your everyday you feel
the earth thrumming with
the scream of a throat that is
a body that a claw tried to fill
and failed tried to fill and failed
the throat that is a body pierced
by the thing like a claw screams
and bleeds and the blood dries
but the scream goes on forever.
It does not become a song
But there is a song. The pierced hole
Is a second throat a doubled
sound scream is thrumming ground
song is ringing ears hear
? hear! here
!
(the hotbox and the flood)
The average human temperature is 98.6 degrees
; her normal is 101.3, radiating
heat through walls and her skin
, the woman who is not yet your
lover but wants to be
. This poem is aware
that hotbox might also refer to torture
devices in which humans are
first warmed, then cooked. There is
little of that here since the only
latch is internal
. She is the flood, her desire
crashing waves across your
modesty. They say a flood like
hers once drowned the world
— This poem does not know
the future, but it imagines
you two together
, the hiss and boil
that will ensue
Untitled Poems
each clump of grass or stone holds heat
(like) every imprint of my wide foot
smiling broadly at no one
look up; look up the view
from there is vast
and you do not know more than any stone.
very clean is the slate of your face
not smirking, your face not mean
this is my favorite; a photograph of water
propped on pillows before me
what were you thinking, you
* * *
scrub dark and soiled areas. scrub clean, scrub glee. pat dry.
sterility guaranteed if package has been opened or tampered
(tampon,
tamper away!). otherwise all openings orifices are productive and procreative.
child safe droppers, usually on the head. height and impact surface vary, though velocity is constant (provide velocity equation, using gravity).
our thick, elegant, nongreasy formulation will be absorbed by poors. you’ll never have to wash again.
* * *
I do not want to be a monster.
I do not want to be a cat.
If I want to be a sexy nurse or valet,
It will not be in public, where
My mask is used daily.
When it’s off, the gaze
Sees caricature
In my skin.
Tell me,
What is it like to want
To be a monster?
for Isatou for Haddy for Adama for Elle
someone came looking for your kind and you looked at her
considered how much she is not from here
Asia all over her face and hair
her English worse than yours
and you opened your mouth
whispering in your own compound
afraid still
but fear is as common as your own hair
you wash it and comb it and
plait it in rows
I am looking for you
I am looking for our kind
will you open your mouth to me?
we can scratch and oil each
other’s scalp
if we only open our mouths
if we plait and unplait each
other’s heads
we don’t even have to speak
it may never
happen
you and I are dangerous
to each other
one whisper causes bush fire here—
you and I
may even be cousins
if we never meet
if we never get to whisper together
it is enough that
you opened your mouth
it is enough
knowing
that you exist
my other
in the long hours of doing
and undoing your hair
listen to the whispers
you will know
it is me
you will recognize
your own silent scream
Beatrice Lamwaka
A Ugandan-born writer who was recognised for her literary contribution by the Uganda Registration Service Bureau in 2018, she was also a recipient of the 2011 Young Achievers Award, was shortlisted for the 2015 Morland Writing Scholarship and the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing, and was a finalist for the 2009 South African PEN/Studzinski Literary Award. The anthology of short stories Queer Africa, to which she contributed, won the 26th Lambda Literary Award in 2014. Her children’s novel
la, Anena’s Victory (2005), is a supplementary reader in primary schools. Her stories have been translated into Spanish and Italian. She is working on her first novel, NyapaRosa.
Missing Letter in the Alphabet
I am not supposed to be sitting in an empty bed, weeping onto a piece of paper on my wedding night. This has never been part of my dream. I have been waiting for this moment all my life. Michael is the person, my mind, my soul and my body wants to be with. I would have said “and my clitoris”, I mean what is left after circumcision.
Maybe I should, maybe I shouldn’t understand why he left. He wasn’t supposed to leave. Not now. Not ever. He is my husband now. He promised. He promised to be with me, no matter what. But he should have known that I am a Sabiny and that I may not be whole in some places like Acoli woman.
My relatives and Michael’s are still at the hotel singing and dancing. I can hear people speaking in Kup Sabiny and Leb Acoli. My mother winked as we came to the room. I know she loves Michael; she has been doting over him ever since she met him. She has often said, “Marry another tribe, so that your children will not be circumcised.”
I am happy the wedding is now over. We have done it. It seemed hard in the beginning, but we did it. We got the orchids we wanted. The colours were perfect. The dim light in the evening made Serena Hotel perfect.
I am happy to say that my wedding was as I dreamt it would be. I worried about my gown, the food, the dancers and the musicians, but never did Michael cross my mind.
I almost want to believe my friend who said Sabiny and Acoli marriage can never work. “Chesha, my friend, don’t get married to that Acoli man,” she often said. I never listened. Of course, she knew I would not listen. I never listen to her, anyway.
I was hoping for a memorable wedding night that I would write about in my novel. I had never thought my wedding night would become something I can hardly recognize. I can still feel Michael’s fingers sliding on my thighs. His lips warm against mine. I had imagined this scene in my head so many times that when it started to happen differently, I was too shocked to know what to do. “Baby,” I murmured. Something I would never have allowed him before we were married.
I felt his finger go limp as he touched where my clitoris should have been. Yes, many years ago the word “circumcision” meant my husband would stay with me and trust me, but today I am not sure what the word means anymore. It never meant he would leave me in bed.
I don’t know what I did wrong. All I know is I did what every girl in Kapchorwa did, and was proud of it. My parents never forced me but everyone was doing it. I wanted to be a woman just like my age mates.
I did get my clitoris cut, the source of evil. I had been prepared all my life. We didn’t even listen to what the women from the NGOs were saying. How could they say circumcision wasn’t good for us? It’s what our ancestors have always done. It was much later that I realized that the women were right. My clitoris was already gone and I had to live with it.
But Michael should have known; did he think I wouldn’t have done it since I was marrying him? I didn’t know that when I was twelve. I wanted to belong so much. I would have sisters for life. I would be respected by everyone. Why wouldn’t I get circumcised? There were too many promises for me to not consider getting circumcised. After I sniffed the herb, there was no stopping for me, I had to get circumcised. We danced. We sang about the glory of becoming a woman.
Circumcision was meant to keep me away from danger. With my friends, we said the word, but never imagined the pain we would undergo. Every time I think about the pain, I want to keep my legs together and never open them. Why didn’t anyone mention pain? Why didn’t anyone mention husbands walking away on wedding nights? Are they afraid of something?
I talked about it with my friends. We were excited. Teachers talked about it. We would be sisters forever with the people we were circumcised with.
It never occurred to me that when the day arrived, I would feel a tingle in my panties, or that it would be a near-death experience. My mother always brushed it off as something every woman has to experience. It was like childbirth: you celebrate soon after. I could see the lie in her eyes. So, every time I saw an older woman, I knew she had been circumcised. That something was missing, and it was already buried somewhere.
We were the alphabet and the C was missing. Our clitorises were the missing letter in the alphabet of the world. It’s not a part of our bodies that we mourn. We celebrate its loss. The circumciser keeps it, bewitches us when we misbehave. That fear has always bonded me with the woman who caused me so much pain.
Everybody knows what happened to us as young girls. We walk around, and people from other tribes don’t need to ask about clitorises. They know they are long gone.
I am an alphabet. My C is missing, and my husband is missing. Not my fault, but may be my fault. It is amazing how the husband quickly slides off the paper. When my friends teased me that Michael was my husband, before we got married, I often quickly corrected them. “He is my boyfriend,” I said with a smile. Now I am calling him my husband, and he is nowhere to be seen.
I don’t feel whole, not because I have a missing clitoris but because Michael has left me. I want to shout out: “I am whole,” but I wonder who cares. And who cares that my clitoris is missing? I am whole. I am a woman. I am Michael’s wife. I am me. I am Chesha.
I now sound drunk. Maybe I should have drunk a little bit of the white wine at the reception. My shoes kept squeezing my feet. I didn’t want to deal with the consequences of the wine and the shoes as well. Then I didn’t know there was a lot more I would have to deal with. I wish I could push back the time. Back to the time when I had a choice whether to drink the wine or not, but not whether Michael will ever come back to me or if our marriage was actually a marriage or something else.
Circumcision, the word is familiar to me now. Maybe it is actually mutilation. I remember the ordeal clearly. But it is the pain that will never leave. My wound healed fast, but the pain remained. I can still feel it, dream about it and it is so real. I don’t know why my clitoris was cut, but I know that maybe I will have to deal with the pain of Michael walking away from me on our wedding night.
I remember the day Michael and I met for the first time. A month later, he sent me a friend request on Facebook. Soon afterwards, he said, “One day, I will marry you,” and I thought, “Stupid man.” And now I am the stupid one. I am waiting for a man who may or may not return and writing in my journal sober, maybe I should have been drunk—then I would feel less pain and sound more sensible.
He loves me. I love him. And what makes this wrong? Love plus love should be more love.
It is Michael who finds the weight I am trying to fight sexy, and my lips that I think are a little too big, good for kissing. He is the man I find easy to love. I can’t get angry with him. He smiles, and I forgive him everything. I love that I love him.
I can’t stop thinking about him. I should think about something else. The moon for instance, it’s so bright. It makes me miss Michael more. He is my sugarcane. My fene. He is my everything.
I think, during one of our late-night chats on Facebook, I hinted to Michael that my clitoris was no longer there. But tonight shows that the words didn’t hit home. It may have lingered on messenger and just reached him today. He has failed to be the Casanova he wanted to be, tonight.
I don’t know how long I have been writing. I feel as if I am in a trance. I am hearing footsteps in the corridors. It sounds as if the person’s shoes are pressing him. The steps are not the kokokoko you hear when a woman is walking on high heels. The person must be a man. I can hear the beating of my heart. If it is Michael, I will stop writing and will have to tell him I will be the best woman he will ever find.
The door opens, and there is my husband, holding his jacket in his hands. He looks very handsome. He smiles. I know he is willing to give it a try.
“Honey, I am back,” he says.
Of course, I can see him. I have been
waiting for him. I don’t want to scream from happiness. Maybe, I should sweep the ground he is walking on. I can’t let him know how happy I am. I feel a tear drop on my cheek. I will let it flow.
Lebogang Mashile
The daughter of exiled South African parents, she was born in the US and returned to South Africa in the mid-1990s after the end of apartheid. An actor, writer and performance poet, she appeared in the film Hotel Rwanda (2004) and has performed in several theatre productions, including Threads, and recorded a live performance album incorporating music and poetry, Lebo Mashile Live. In 2005, she published her first poetry collection, In a Ribbon of Rhythm, for which she received the Noma Award. She was named one of South Africa’s Awesome Women of 2005 by Cosmopolitan and was named Woman of the Year for 2010 in the category of Arts and Culture by Glamour magazine. She was cited as one of the Top 100 Africans by New African magazine in 2011, and in 2012 she won the Art Ambassador award at the inaugural Mbokodo Awards for South African Women in the Arts.
Requiem for Winnie
Rip off the string
That keeps this fragile country
In its form
55 million petals separate
Serrated blades guarding your bursting heart
At the centre
What did your father know
When he raised you like a boy?
Which part of your face’s perfection
Broke your mother and every mother
Howling behind mouths
No one dares listen to?
The little girl who holds a stick
And beats a man’s world into submission
Is the woman who lays diamonds
On a murderous nation’s neck
New Daughters of Africa Page 76