I am not free while any woman is unfree.

THIS PIECE HAS BEEN FEATURED ON DJELI JOURNAL’S FIRST ISSUE.

She was ten when her mother started ironing her chest.

She thought it was just warmth at first, a strange kind of mother’s touch. Until the pestle, pulled from the fire, kissed her budding breasts and her skin peeled like bark from a tree. Every morning, before the sun could bear witness, her mother would press it down again. Again. Again. Praying that if the breasts didn’t grow, the men wouldn’t come. That if she looked like a child, she’d be spared from becoming a bride.

But they came anyway.

Another girl, across mountains, sewn shut between her legs, because they told her pain is purity. Told her the blood that gushes from her when she walks is better than the pleasure she might feel if they left her whole. They told her she’d be a wife now, even if she still played with dolls. They told her it’s tradition. That her scream was part of becoming a woman.

And I? I am supposed to write pretty words about freedom?

I can’t. I won’t. I’m not free. I’m not free and I won’t pretend to be while my sisters are being butchered in the name of culture, buried under bombs, or forced to smile through shattered teeth.

I’m not free if I still smell blood in Sudan, in Palestine, in Congo — where girls hold their dolls tighter than their mothers because sometimes, only one of them comes back from the rubble.

I am not free because every woman I meet has a story. A story where they felt robbed of their humanness, where they felt betrayed by God.

How do I dare to breathe like freedom while others are suffocating? How do I dare to write if a girl somewhere doesn’t even know what letters are? What is a voice to me if my sisters are forbidden to speak?

I’m tired.
Tired of seeing girls turned into wives before they even understand their own names.
Tired of being told we are too loud, too soft, too angry, too emotional, too “too”.
Tired of watching women be strong because no one ever let them be safe.

I am haunted by every woman I’ve never met,
the ones who walk with ashes in their throats,
the ones who carry dead babies on their backs and still keep walking,
the ones who wipe their tears with hands that are still washing dishes for their ungrateful husbands,
the ones who never got the chance to become anything but someone’s daughter, someone’s wife, someone’s possession.

We are hunted, haunted, handled, hidden.
And still, we rise.

I am a woman, and that alone makes the earth tremble.

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