This Is My Body Campaign

I'm not usually one for melo-dramatic or artsy understated videos, campaign posters and adverts about Womanhood, Feminism or "girl power". Many that were born in the 80's, that stomped and charted in the 90's and stumbled around in the 00's are twee, outdated, over-sexualised and are echos of throwback memes and slogans from an aggressive man-bashing era. It so happens that they became rooted in societal discourse and debate around women's rights but are often twisted and turned against women to justify some men's sexist behaviour. It manifests in name calling - "dyke, frigid, bitch, man-hater, lezzzzzbian!(said viciously). Women have been scorned for their failure to build on the Feminist movement from previous eras of suffragette-ism but someone who is really paying attention will know there are many who are struggling to be heard building on the shoulders of women who have gone before. More on that in a later post.

Slogans, declarations and declamations pro-women have their rightful place in the history of Women's Struggle for equality and they draw attention to women's issues in the west, and since the US Republican Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" comment, I am seeing the war the on women's bodies though my Amplified-Goggles. I can hear it LOUD and clear.

Women's bodies have so much clout. They are heavyweight pieces in the

As Property Protests - A Poem to the Voice of Shifting Unrest

They thrashed her within an inch of her life
Told her it would make her a wise woman, a better wife
For this Life was never about her skin that bled woman in the dust
She’d have to wait for the next

There were no floodgates; no bastion could hold her tongue
It sat ripe, ripe for bursting

Marinating in the velvet, thorny seat of her will

She had to snare her trembling agitation

With prayers and bitten lips

She herself, had to hobble her insurgent instinct to express, break it  at the knees

Forcing her Self to kneel at every clock tick,

In every sunbeam

And every crack of light she could find

She’d pray

And she’d pray and pray

The tremor were felt all over the house

The neighbours complained of pictures jumping like lemmings off the walls

And china plates edging themselves off shelves when she prayed

But no one saw it coming

Summoned, the air rushed to where she knelt

The windows got sucked out

The furniture, that clock and the kitchen pots

Flew around the room

How the cheap chandeliers and wall lamps clung

The force of this wind fingered the nails from the floorboards and flung them

Plaster from the walls stripped in great clumps

And the hinges on all the doors strained, creaked then broke

The noise was a thunder of bewildered wildebeest hoof

The roaring crash of water on rock from a 500-foot drop

The sonic boom of silence mercilessly inverted

And the acrid smell of gas and fresh ash woke in her nostril (oesophagus)

The scream incubating all her 21 years

She had seen enough to know that

If her jaw dropped and lower

If her throat opened any wider

If her lungs drew the breath that would complete their involuntary mission

She knew her reflex

Would be fearless evolution.

As Property Protests
©Zena Edwards

THIS BRIDGE POEM by Donna Kate Rushin

Fighting For Airtime - Travelling Light Extract

Fighting For Airtime

written by Zena Edwards May 2010©

I have been a woman that has
looked out of windows, stood on street corners,

cleaned floors on my knees,  borne children

on my knees and  chased rainbows
wrote my name out loud in a cloud
from a deep sigh on the glass

a silent gale force
that could huff and puff and blow

the houses of patriarch down

The space that my voice was to occupy

my part in the harmony, my heart on the melody

my life woven in the song of life’s symphony

was constricted, my voice,

hollow chest,  shallow depth, suffocating

See when it was my turn to talk
which wasn't very often (because I am a woman)

a child’s voice squeezed out, 

my voice on this tongue, hadn’t a chance to grow

this was lesson one

speaking my mind is a minefield

 trip wires every where,

in the court, where I must have wanted it dressed like that

at work after the sexual harassment case,

at war, after the 17^th rape

disgraced there was no returning

at home, he walked in the door, high, pissed and late,

full of misplaced hate, number 2million and 8 on the jobless list

and still punctuated his demands for dinner with a fist

but I found when it was my turn to talk

(which was not very often)
being black,  my tongue had the weight

of a continent wrapped in chains

fixed to a concrete slab (tied to it)
and a whip crack was all that came out

when I opened my mouth

when it was my turn to talk

 they told me I was to old, that I was too fat ,

that I was too skinny, that I was too fat

 they told me my skin was too dark, that I had to fix the attitude

 that came with it

 the one that asked “why not?”

 the one that said no and meant it

They asked me to tell that voice to behave,

to bury it, in this here conscripted government grave

Where it will be logged and forgotten about  for the next millennium

my input would only upset the equilibrium

you trade my voice, trick it, trap it,

 force it then beat it if it refuses

to sleep with man number 13 at this hour of the morning

stack it up as dirty money, stained. moss green –

bottle fly blue, purple aubergine, mucky yellow mottle

the colour of bruises, the colour of lust,

 the colour of  my  dreams

that stand in the corner stunned

turned, facing the wall

they cannot look at this me,

this scene of my dignity’s carnage

When it was my turn to talk

 It was made perfectly clear that there

was no space for me to talk here

 amongst the men, amongst the testosterone

 because the hysteria that sits below my navel,
it raises the risk of instability

in a system that is evidently working so fucking well

war running smoothly, lining the pockets

of  arms and oil traders

might scupper the race to evacuate this planet made dump,

by fantasy space invaders

the plot the rule the world

 is working thank you very much

to protect herself,  a woman has to know

when to make her presence felt and when to shut up

and stay skinny, stay fat, stay uneducated,

stay at home, stay on your back, stay in the kitchen,

stay under cover of broken wings,

while they sing with tenor, alto and bass

 sonic booms that crack the face of this earth

till she bleeds lava, tsunami whips her hair,

floods the land with her tears

and I am here,

looking out of the window of this body

displaced in my own skin

trapped between brick walls and the corrugated

 sheets of a run down shanty town

called life where I’m barely existing