Other times, however, the defiance is a by-product of the often difficult task of survival, or even the quest to being true to oneself. Despite the many judgements, prejudices and multiple violations they face, women continue to work, live and strive to love according to their own design. This, the fifth highly successful annual POWA Breaking the Silence collection, contains the three categories of poetry, short stories and personal essays. They describe the experience of living a life that defies prescribed boundaries, a life that, deliberately or as a consequence of survival, transgresses society’s defined norms.
Stories from the Other(ed) Woman
Women who defy traditional norms are often subjected to discrimination, violence and exclusion. Sometimes, as in the case of activists, sex workers and artists, and just about any woman who resists the prescribed mould of what it means to be a woman, the defiance is intentional.
Breaking the Silence Stories from the Other(ed) Woman
POWA VISION To create a safe society that does not tolerate violence against women, and where women are powerful, self-reliant, equal and respected.
To be a powerful, specialised and multi-skilled service provider that contributes towards the complete eradication of violence against women in society, in order to enhance women’s quality of life. POWA provides counselling, legal advice, court support and shelter to women survivors of domestic and sexual violence. POWA also engages in research, training, lobbying and advocacy. Contact POWA on: 011 642 4345 or visit our website: www.powa.co.za ISBN 978-1-920196-27-1
POWA Women’s Writing Project
POWA MISSION
2009
POWA Women’s Writing Project 2009
Introduction With 2010 Soccer World Cup almost upon us and with the eyes of the world upon South Africa, debates around safety, violence and crime are being spoken about everywhere. International donor aid is streaming into the country to counter the anticipated rise in rights violations – much of it directed towards programmes dealing with migration, trafficking and sexual exploitation. Over the issue of sex work the debate is particularly fierce. On the one side organisations call for the full decriminalisation of adult sex work, premising this on the need for greater protection against rights violations against sex workers. Countering this argument are the abolitionists who view all sex work as sexual exploitation and oppression. In between these positions are the city officials who have called for harsher policing of sex work – resulting in clean-up operations. In Durban, the city mayor has publically called for a temporary legalisation during the soccer tournament. It was thinking through this need to hear from women themselves – women sex workers and other women who are all too frequently silenced or just not heard – that led to the selection of this year’s theme Untamed, unruly and immoral: Stories from the Other(ed) Woman. The absence of women’s voices speaking for themselves in order to highlight issues that affect them directly is a problem – which for the most part has been the preoccupation of feminists and gender activists, who over the years have worked tirelessly to create a body of work that gives voice to these concerns. Yet even within this body of work, there still remain some voices that exist only as a whisper – the voices of those women who, in the way they live their lives, present an out and out rejection of heteronormative insistence of prescribed forms of femininity. Among these women are lesbian women, sex workers and often the activists themselves, whose concerns often do not find a neat fit within some of the now formulated categories, making them an ‘othered’ other in a group of already maligned people. Breaking the Silence
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Yet it is mostly in the ways of these othered others that we can see a radical demonstration of the repudiation of the patriarchal construct of femininity, which Andrea Dworkin defines as “the apparent acceptance of sex on male terms with goodwill and demonstrable good faith, in the form of ritualised obsequiousness�. It is to the lived experiences of these women, contained in the stories they tell, that we must look should we feel ourselves lapse into positions of comfort. It is these stories that nudge us into a place of reflection, as we re-examine our own notions of what it means to be a woman. The stories force us to acknowledge the richness and diversity of experience – the many different forms womanhood takes. Written with honesty and read without fear, we can begin to see the similarities between the stories and our own lives. We are the others, the others are us. The stories pose the question of whether it is better to slowly chip away at the construction of femininity, or if a more radical approach is required, and if this be the case, to ask, as we have before, how such a revolution can be stimulated, carried out and sustained? The answers, some of them in any event, lie in the stories contained in this anthology, characterised as they are by narrators and characters bent on deotherising themselves, by expressing, in their own words, and putting forward their views, their thoughts, and their innermost feelings, as a starting point on a journey to redefining themselves. In the words of one of the writers:
Everything is relevant. A smile, a sigh, a shout can be a revolt.
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Introduction
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Poetry
Breaking the Silence
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I Have So Little of Yours by Ingrid Andersen
Your South African Communist Party tie-pin from the turn of the century; (Did you wear that while you sold The Guardian to passers-by in Durban?) your brass cigarillo case; a few much-loved books on politics and philosophy bought from work at the bookshop and a cracked photograph of you, striking: waves of long dark hair and a wry smile. Perhaps you were remembering my favourite story of my great-grandmother: the Union Jack dress you made to flaunt during the controversy over the national flag.
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I Have So Little of Yours
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Broken Child by Inge Potgieter
I walk through the streets of this dark town every day with my heart broken, my soul in shreds, with my dreams smashed to pieces … I walk with scars so deep they will never heal … As I look into the dirty windows of closed, worn-out shops and see the darkness and despair within, I know that, that is what my heart looks like … Just like those broken-down houses lying in the dust, my hopes and dreams are lying crushed and broken in the dirt. I am a broken child, scorned by all, hated by most …
Breaking the Silence
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my dreams smashed to pieces …
I am a rejected child, full of pain and suffering. Full of misunderstood emotions … I have been shoved aside without a second glance, just like an old, broken, forgotten toy. I sit in the dust With tears staining my dirty, bruised face. People look at me but don’t see, they listen to me but don’t hear, they wonder but cannot understand my pain … I am so scared … Scared of living and scared of dying … I am rejected and unwanted, damned to be an outcast …
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Broken Child
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Emancipate by Desiree Higa
The war is over, the battle rages on! They have freed our bodies but our minds keep us enslaved. This new freedom flows with words, DISCRIMINATION, HARRASSMENT, HATE … RAPE! Our protectors’ hands are dripping with blood, their ears ringing from our blood-curdling screams! THEY, perpetrate these crimes. THEY, ridicule our pain. Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika!
They have freed our bodies but our minds keep us enslaved. Breaking the Silence
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