Of Women on Marian Day

I was honored to be the guest speaker at the Saint James High School at their Marian Day celebration. I was asked to speak on womanhood in a personal way. The day begun with the reading of an excerpt from a Toronto national newspaper, a piece written by the adventurous and esteemed Kiehlburger brothers in celebration of their mother. But they did not fail to mention the difficulties of women worldwide and their particular vulnerability to rape, war, prostitution, poverty and human trafficking. My own piece was centered around my retelling of the story, Wesepa, an old folktale from Bioko Island, Equatorial Guinea, recounted to me by Justo Bolekia Boleka, a professor of literature. My brief address after the story was focussed on the feminine attributes of nourishment and nurturing, beginning with the inner self and moving outwardly in ever widening circles of connections. The ceremony was a beautiful liturgy honoring Mary the mother of Jesus and all womankind, with a procession, flowers, candles, bible readings and the saying of prayers. My preparation for my presentation included a look at Maya Angelou's famous poem, 'Phenomenal Woman'. It did not speak for me this time, so I searched through my own poems for a sense of my own thoughts on womanhood. I came across one poem that I had written a long time ago, concerning the silencing of women. It had even more meaning for me in a much wider context, as many African countries of today forge through the turbulent politics of thinly masked dictatorships by the practice of highly volatile and divisive demonstrations of elections. Many citizens hold their breath in silence, unsure where the chips will fall and how dangerous life may suddenly become in the face of vindictive leadership. Here is my poem,

The Gender of Words

When the words of women are stopped

Mouths don’t die

They wrap themselves in satin veil

And speech cocoons in layers of tulle

Mood is a screen, purple or wine

And behind it

Precocious copulations without ecstasy

On the surface and only just

Thin vapours rise on a nonchalant breeze

Time sings to the watchful eye

And velvet womb swells

With crossed conversations

In the honeycomb, whispers of agony

Wait to be born at the dawn of light

Then behind the screen, at last

The infant cries the length of a breath

Minimizes the voices of a dozen midwives

Who hush new vocabularies one by one.