Tag: socialissues
VERSE | WEIGHT WHAT?
(This piece is about body image issues that so many women face especially as they get older. It takes a lot of character and guts to not let the negativity get to you. Again, this objectification is a product of our chauvinistic environments).
You’ve put on weight, wait!
Does this mean that you’re eating too many sweets
Or could it be that you’re finally getting old
Old, rolled, holed into the box
That’s been built for you, no u-turns
Nothing you can fox your fading way out of
You’re done. Stay in the shadows, woman
Know your place
Face the truth of tradition
Perdition
Hard-wired into your being, your biology
Know your place
Or we’ll remind you
Laughingly, ribbing along the line
Where we can jest or malign
I’m caught off guard, but I’ve also been
Wrought, fraught, taught
To feel bad for feeling bad
To smile wide
Wide enough to swallow his sin and my own hurt
My eyes scrunch up, almost close
Those windows to my soul
Beclouded, beclogged, becloaked
Lest the world see the state of my heart
He feels bad for an instant, he reneges
Laughingly, now ribbing across the line
I feel worse that he feels bad
My smile widens until I can feel it cut into my skin
His sin and my guilt doubled
Lancing at my face, etching unnatural lines
Into furrows that make me look
Comic, demonic, they take their pick
On the day they feel a rage
Righteous, man-ifold and brave
That they then spill into the ruts
Of my shame-shambled face.
VERSE | COME DOWN-SING-DRUMS PLAY
But you have to wed
There is no other way
Unless of course I’m dead
He’s family, my sister’s son
Your cousin
You’ve known each other
Since forever
Yes, he used to be my brother!
LIKE a brother when you were little
He’s not your brother
Don’t say these bizarre things
‘Bhai hai! Khair hai, chai bana lo’
That wasn’t said so long ago
By you mother, ammi, ammini, enemy
That was then and this is now
I have a child
Sing, drums play for you
A son is born, sing!
My child, so beautiful
Come down sing drums play for you
Sing drums play, come
Down-sing-drums
Play for you, come
Down-Syn-Drums
Play for you, come
Down-syn-drome
Pain for you, come, come down….
This is now and how it shall remain
My child, golden
Beautiful, so beautiful
So angry, so tearful
And also so dry-eyed, so agonized
So angry all the time
He screams again
I close my ears sometimes
I disappear now and then
I look away from his little head
Swollen with tears, angry, unshed
But I had to wed
There was no other way
He was family, her sister’s son
Now my son my son, my beautiful, broken son
There was no other way
I had to become the bride
Unless of course I had died.
VERSE | THREE-PART TRAGEDY
This is about all the women who are killed in the name of honour or privilege or archaic customs. Women like Mukhtaran Mai who was gang raped as per the ruling of the local jirga or court of the elders of the community. And Qandeel Baloch who dared to be bigger than the box she was born in and paid for it when her brother whom she financially supported, killed her in cold blood.
PART ONE:
Pin me, skin me
Kick me in my shins please
Bring me buckling, crashing down
Then grin as you haul me up
Dust me down, make an act of freeing me
When I’ve lost all my will to be me
Churn me, burn me
Laugh in my face, spurn me
Then adulate, adore me
But airily, lightly
Politically-correctly
When I can’t feel your torment or love
Or anything else inside me
PART TWO:
Juice me, use me
Mangle and abuse me
Then write up columns flush with
New found awakening
A social issues deciphering
All the while computing,
Measuring, forecasting
Your own index of hero-worship
For calling out brutality
Other demons, other sins
Out of your realm of reality
But you orate and preachify
Because it is your deliverance
From mundaneness, insignificance
Roar out, be devout
Let your new found arousal
Wash over everyone
“Not all of us are like that”
Shout it out, don’t hold back
Declare it with panache
You are righteous no one can forget
Everyone else’s moral compass
Is a fickle sickle, directionless
You’re guilt free with that homily
With your ringing voice and sacchrine smile
You present it proudly to me
When all I can see are lips and eyes
A Leviathan dripping honeyed lines
Onto a transfixed audience
They watch and gently chew the cud
Of the weed that they are fed
By evangelical heroes of prime time
PART THREE:
Boot me, loot me
Strangle me, shoot me
Then have a ball in my name
Found a charity, earn some fame
Let the posthumous heroine
With her tomb-tough shoulders
Become your newest Taj Mahal
Let her catapult you to the top
Always from her deadest parts
A pillaged body, a spirit crushed
A tragedy censored and hushed
From her countless cuts and gashes
She now hides under her eyelashes
While YOU and YOU and YOU and YOU
Rise like a phoenix from her ashes.
VERSE | WALKING ACROSS THE STREET TO THE PARK
I wish this verse was more wholesome and whimsical like Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, but that it is not. This is about women determinedly forging on across streets, bazaars, workplaces, government offices, neighbourhoods and communities. This verse is also not so much about the woman hopeful of change (God knows that’s going to take its time in our blessed homeland), but the woman who is stoic and steadfast. It is the woman who goes about her day despite the odds that pull at her body, spirit and soul. It is the woman who dares to bare her true self despite and in fact because society expects otherwise. It is the woman who walks in her neighborhood afraid yet brave. May you find your grit and your grace for the rest of the days of your life.
A resolute, meaningful Women’s Day to all my friends and family 🌺
I wear my track pants
And a pink shirt, long
It says “Life is a song”
I wonder if it’s too loud
Stoking thoughts like a gong
A shout
To the world of men that teams about
The streets
Eyes peeled
For glimpses of variously clad
Women that are mad
Enough to sidle into the periphery of their sight
And special leery gazes
Trained like full-throttled tasers
On women who dare
To bare
More than the hand wrist down
Or a smidgeon of a toe around
Which sits an uncomfortable sandal
A Soleful reminder
To walk cautiously
To always look behind her
To shrink as small as she is able
So she might pass
With a warning glance
From the men sitting around
Jenetic Judges of right and wrong
For the women who dare
To bare
There’s a special gaze
For their fall from grace
From the fraternity that mills about
The corners of streets
Superior, upright
Pissing in plain sight
Marking their territories
For the women who dare to bare
More than the eyes
Downcast, demure
Vacuous and pure
For them there’s the death stare
Cutting them down to size
I’m one of those
Who - Dares - To - Bare
The woman within
The whole human being
Self assured, aware
She sits in my eyes
Unfaltering, dignified
Even as her heart drums inside
As she traverses that den
Of wolves, dressed as men.
BOOK READING | VELVET DREAMS
Reading an excerpt from the short story “Velvet Dreams” from my book THE GIRL WITH THE PAISLEY DUPATTA. The anthology of short stories is available across bookstores in Sri Lanka and at Liberty Books and Paramount Books in Pakistan. Do get your copies folk 🌸
The Girl with the Paisley Dupatta is divided into three sections: Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the USA. The last category is an ode to that most ingenious art form – political satire.
Most of the stories in the book revolve around the social, cultural and even faith related challenges that women face in their day to day lives. This particular story however is about family pressure and the main protagonist is a man 🤓
VERSE | HIDDEN AWAY
The rain is falling in sheets upon sheets
Jumping into puddles, skipping over feet
Performing a symphony as it flows
Reaching a crescendo down the street
Where whirlwind eddies and the sidewalk meet
The koi in the pond in the building know
Something is up, they flicker and jump
Out of the water again and again
But the ripples on the surface aren’t enough
To join in the play of the skies above
They don’t feel the glorious downpour
Charge into their silent world thrumming
They swim up and down around and around
Waiting, waiting expecting something
The sensory pleasure of nature dancing
But the koi will float in agitated oblivion
To the playful frolic of the monsoon sky
As it cavorts with all of earth’s creatures
But not with the pond and not with the koi
Our faithful tributes to a world gone awry.
Mahvash Mohtadullah 