Do I represent you woman?
Am I the femme fatale, temptress Eve
or just the girl next door?
Which is the real me?
What do I stand for?
My hips, my lips, my buttocks,
my buxom bosom or my silk smooth neck?
The hair that I unconsciously wind and unwind, nervous
of your smacking lips and drooling mouth?
The back that your eyes skin?
Seven Blind men once groped an elephant
to conceive a part as a whole.
I am not hips, cheeks, lips and buttocks
that your greedy hands grope for.
I am not just the angry girl
burning my bra on the high street
asking for suffrage and my rights.
I am whole – a mind and a heart –
living and throbbing, refusing
to be designed as you please.
The burden of representation you have yoked on me –
from a coy bride to slut, exciting your wanton sheets.
Now, I am the angel holding you upon my breast
feeding you the elixir of life;
now, I am the one you beat and bleed;
now, I retreat into thick black drapes,
now I hide in caves.
I am your Laxmi, your strength,
your Khadija, your Mary Magdalene!
How long can I bear the burden
of being a fragment?
How long shall I speak a language
That is not my own? How long
will you clip my wings and cut my tongue
and hold a broken mirror to my truthful visage?
How long shall I have to wait
until I am finally free.
Photo Credit
Photo is Wikimedia creative commons
Guest Author Bio
Dr Shruti Das
Dr Shruti Das is Associate professor English in Berhampur University in Odisha, India. She is a creative writer with poetry published Nationally and Internationally and also a literary critic, writing bilingually in English and her native tongue Odia. She has published two collection of poems named “A Daughter Speaks (2013)” and “Lidless Eyes(2015)” has been published in Anthologies like “Inspired Heart 2″, “Inspired Heart 3”, “Scaling Heights” and “Colours of Refuge” to name a few. She has participated in many Seminars on English language and literature in India and Europe. She is sensitive to social issues, loves to travel and to dream. She loves animals.
Follow Shruti Das: Facebook
The truth of a woman…… Mam…. No comments… Only a salute to the phenomenal woman…….. A real woman and it’s identity as well as her demands are beautifully portrayed….. ?…….
The poem is a tribute to countless women on recently celebrated International Women’s Day. The powerful lines , laden with fire and anger despise the predatory men who denigrate women and reduce their being to a commodity for consumption. Every inch of their anatomy is devoured and perceived with sexual connotations.
This recollected a train of thought that was percolating in my mind concerning women like Rosalind Franklin whose original contributions to human knowledge have been subsumed by a dominant male and warped in the process. The non-canonical gospel of James, which ascribes to to Mary the mother of Jesus of Nazareth a thorough knowledge of the Hebrew scriptures and a much more active role in the development of her son’s prophetic genius, was quite influential in the Middle Ages. Mohamed seems to have used a similar but not identical source for the New Testament exegesis in the Koran which also ascribes a more active role to Mary. Was there a distinct woman’s voice in Jesus’ original teachings, only a small fraction of which have survived? I think this is a viable hypothesis.
Beautifully woven and very well articulated!
Keep writing shruti, waiting for more!
Very well composed. One can feel the vibrations of a pained heart that is laden with the primordial woes of millions and tempered with one’s own, at the same time the assertions of the strong woman the embodiment of Shakti that defines and synthesises the multiple facets of an undying and eternal energy that is woman finally seeking wings to set oneself free from the fetters that traditionally hold her down …. liberating, inspiring and rebellious at the same time. Cheers.
Wonderful representation. Complexities and contradictions are not chosen by a woman but somehow defines her.
Madam,
Namaskar.Thank you, for this poem that voices the concerns of women. The poem is an anguished expression of denial of subjectivity to women. For long a women has been the object of man’s lust. Her hips, lips, buttocks, bosom etc have been “exciting” man’s “wanton sheets”. Even the idolization as angel has been another ploy to deny subjectivity to women as Ibsen’s Nora found in The Doll’s House. The cultural representation of women has been a yoke. While the Christs have monopolised all the credit for saving mankind, the Mary Magdalene’s have shed silent tears around the graves preferring obscurity to prominence in public life. She has been denied a voice, her tongue has been clipped as in the nightingale myth. Even the virtual image of a complete self is denied women as the dominating patriarchan system has held a broken mirror to them. Her subjectivity has been fragmented, the “real me” has retreated into ” thick black drapes” of a burkha. The burning of bras on the high street are desperate stunts that have not helped raise the status of women in a phallocentric university. But the last stanza, in it’s protest holds out a hope, the hopevof “consciousness raising” that W.E.B. Du Bois in his The Souls of Black Folk (1903) offers as the slow but only answer to long-standing violence perpetuated against self-hood.
With regards
Samita Mishra