Member-only story
Strong Women
When I was a little girl and my teachers sent notes home complaining
that I was as loud as the boys, that it wasn’t ladylike for a girl to be this outspoken, this raucous, instead of forcing me to tone it down
to the timber of a stage whisper, just a few notes above a whimper
you took me by the hand to the hilltop by our house,
told me to use my voice by shouting to my heart’s content, told me never to forget that I was a girl not a mouse
and if I believed I had to change myself to suit anyone else I shouldn’t,
that no matter what they said my voice was so important.
You then visited my school, called a meeting with my teachers
sat them all down and said that you were raising a rebel girl
to be a warrior woman, and if she could not speak,
the same way boys are allowed to, if she had to turn her voice into sighs
then how will she utter the battle cries that were needed when her warrior sisters called upon her to help them defend the daughters of this world.
~ Nikita Gill, Thank You, Papa
*
In southern India, the humanizing of women, and of eros, seems to be ahead of the West. There…
