This Is Not A Feminist Poem – Wana Udobang (a.k.a. Wana Wana)

This is not a feminist poem

This is not a feminist poem
This is not contorted metaphors with neither
punch line nor chorus
This is not a feminist poem
It is a woman learning to trade possessions before
her lover takes his last breath.
She will never get the chance to say goodbye
because those final hours are one match-point
away from the backstroke of ravenous relatives.
You see where we come from, widows learn to bid
their dead farewell even before they are lowered
into the ground.
Because grief requires time and time is a luxury
she cannot afford.
But I don’t want to talk about funeral rites or a
daughter’s non-inheritance
Because this is not a feminist poem
It is a thirteen-year-old leaking between her legs.
She cannot will her waste to stop because culture
demands that babies must birth babies even before
they are whole.
This is Mercy, waiting to be fully formed before the
doctors can fix her. We exchange broken smiles but
mine is crackling with questions and I want to ask,
how does a six year old ask to be gang raped for
lunch after school?
As she fiddles with the beads of a rosary that crawl
around her neck, my lips are too drowsy to ask
God why?
But I am not trying to not be feminist about this
because
This is not a feminist poem
It is the landlord who pays off your father to clench
his teeth over choking tears for what his son
had done to you.
And your daddy knows that homelessness is too
close to home so he washes of your shame with a
sponge, dabs your wounds with scripture hoping
those words will in turn douse the stench of the
breath, erase the handprints that form maps
across your skin, and glue together all that is
broken of you.
But instead memory has an interesting way of
refusing to disappear, so this is how you exist with
a tape loop in your head playing over and over
again.
I am not here to talk about the kidnap of justice in
my country or whom, how and why we have
refused to pay her ransom
Because this is not a feminist poem
It is piercing screams of gaping mouths choking as
hands stifle their lungs of ambition
It is men in uniform with bellies swollen from
bribe, sworn to protect you but tell you that
domestic matters are family matters.
So you drink up your pain till you are full, your
throat is parched and yet again you begin to thirst
for it yet again.
It is walking around with a womb too hollow to
bear an heir that you take in the seeds of betrayal
wanting it to pull together the remnants of
matrimony. This is what it means to be a real
woman.
It is the girls who are sent to school only to come
back home knowing that their future is dangling
between their bodies and their silence, yet deciding
which to betray first.
It is those 2am text messages from your boss’
phone that leaves you reminded that you will
always lose so you grin, dust it off a shoulder and
bear it
You return to your job because this meager wage
pays for your little brother’s tuition and your
mother’s heart medicine.
But this is not a feminist poem
It is acquainting your self with the normalcy that
your body is a minefield, trampled upon by the
politics of culture
It is a reminder that you are click, you are bait, you
are currency and by virtue of your existence you
are only half human never equal, never the same.
It is learning that the heavy medals of your success
are meaningless until they are smelted into a ring
on your finger
But I told you at the beginning that this is not a
feminist poem
It is not a rant or a call to action
It is not a call for your attention
It is not a checklist of everything you already know
This is not a feminist poem
This is a poem about life, about rights, for my
sisters who struggle and continue to fight

 

 

Republished courtesy of AfroWomen Poetry https://afrowomenpoetry.net/en/2019/04/15/wana-udobang-wana-wana/

For more information about the poet, see, special guest page  linked above. For the whole project, see  https://afrowomenpoetry.net/en/

 

Wana Udobang, also known as Wana Wana, is a Nigeria-based poet,  journalist, documentary filmmaker, radio presenter and tv personality, whose production is at the intersection of women’s rights, social justice, healthcare, climate change, culture and the arts.