For the first time in a long time, I am going to rant. If my objectivity wanes, forgive me and just keep on reading.
Sun, rain, curving sky
Mountain, oceans, leaf and stone
Star shine, moon glow
You're all that I can call my own.
Isn’t it true? Of all the things that I possess, can I actually call anything my own? Produced by so many who are hardly compensated for their effort, what is mine? Of all the things in me, what is mine? Is my womb mine? Wasn’t it bartered to that guy who promised me food and a roof, cloths and safety?
Fall gently, snowflakes
Cover me with white
Cold icy kisses and
Let me rest tonight.
So, yes, I am bothering you with questions. I am so tired for working for him. He who is the master of my soul apparently. I am told I must satisfy him, for he will protect me against those lustful eyes that wander on my body when I venture out. Maybe I shouldn’t venture out. Maybe I should stay here, inside these walls. I am comfortable. I can bring up my children like this. I do agree sometimes I want to smell the fresh roses of sunshine or the alluring bouquet of morning dews splattered on the new spider web. But I am not allowed to. My body aches from losing my child last week. But I don’t have time to pause. Time for me is more than a luxury. I tell my husband it pains. He says we must do it till we have a child. An empty home is no home, he says. My in – laws tell me I am no good if I don’t reproduce. Am I no good? Maybe I should have been just a womb and not I.
Storm, blow me from here
With your fiercest wind
Let me float across the sky
'Til I can rest again.
I long for freedom. But I don’t know from what. There is this feeling of perpetual fear. There is no truth in this home. Only contracts. Contracts of private property, status, reputation and conformity. I am supposed to love this falsehood. I am supposed to believe in love when the man who is supposed to love me wants only my womb, not caring for how my heart beats for him or how it is torn every time I lose a baby. Isn’t he supposed to protect me? Aren’t they supposed to treat me as their daughter? Isn’t that what the contract says?
Shine on me, sunshine
Rain on me, rain
Fall softly, dewdrops
And cool my brow again.
What do they mean by empowerment? I have a job. I earn. Isn’t that enough? They tell me I have to be more, that I have to be I, that I have to be free of every chain that binds me. But I am not chained. If I weren’t I, why am I using the word ‘I’ so much? Doesn’t that make me aware? Maybe that’s not the awareness they talk about. They tell me I shouldn’t bring up my kids to such ‘chauvinism’. What is chauvinism? As far as I see, everything has a place in this society. Maybe that place isn’t absolute or the ultimate right. Maybe I have an existence away from my reproductive system. Maybe I do have a say in those choices. Does that mean I can stop bleeding just because I am asked to? But, now that I think about it, I am ordered, not asked. Nobody bothers what happens to me in reality. I am just a machine. When did I become a tool? Everybody has a use for me, except myself.
I've got the children to tend
The clothes to mend
The floor to mop
The food to shop
Then the chicken to fry
The baby to dry
I got company to feed
The garden to weed
I've got shirts to press
The tots to dress
The can to be cut
I gotta clean up this hut
Then see about the sick
And the cotton to pick.
What am I? Who am I? I don’t understand. I don’t understand why I have to be all this that I don’t want to be. Why can’t I just be me? My choices. My life. Me.
Now, let us go to the epi-ranting part. The verses are from Woman Work by Maya Angelou. No, I didn’t write them. What I have done is to take a bottom- top approach. The last stanza here is actually the first. Don’t ask me why I chose this poem. It just came to mind. The question naturally arises though as to the provocation behind this extremely unusual rant of mine. I have always tried to keep objectivity when it comes to writing. But, yes, I lost it today and I am not sure you understand my incoherently concrete work. Coming to the provocation part, it was when one of my close friends had her third miscarriage and is admitted to the hospital. Three strikes in almost 18 months. There are medical reasons why they had to hurry. But there is no vaguely moral justice in this atrocity of pushing a woman so hard to have a child that she bleeds and bleeds and takes all sorts of hormonal treatments, just to survive in this highly unfair world. Medically there is a mandatory 3 month refractory period (crude of me, i know), before the couple can even try. And this society makes sure they don’t have the luxury. If the man doesn’t impregnate the woman, he is not virile. If she cannot conceive, she should be replaced. Why is the womb the only thing that matters now? It’s beyond propagation of species. Look around, there are not even viruses that exceed our population. We have come all these millennia for what? To not embrace civilization even in its most basic form? This pantomime is the murkiest one the world will ever come across.
Like Evita Peron said famously ‘I am my own woman’, we all need to think ‘whose’ we are.
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