I am Woman, Hear me Roar!
Thank you Mom for teaching me to Roar! For knowing deep down in your bones That inside you Was embedded A freedom That needed to be let loose And allowed to dance in the wind Thank you Mom For climbing the mountain And standing at its peak And roaring Roaring Roaring into the wind Letting the wind hear your anguish and your sadness and your pain Whilst we children giggled and tumbled and played in the bushes and amongst the rocks And felt bashful about our weird mom roaring at the wind Thank for you for teaching me to roar It is embedded in my spirit And I will never forget The image of you, my mother, roaring into the wind And seeing how the wind received you And roared back (written 09/08/2024 – Woman’s Day, South...
Read MoreWhen you Strike a Woman, You Strike a Rock!
Sixty years ago, 20 000 brave South African women marched on the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest the pass laws. The pass laws insisted that all black South African men under the country’s Population Registration Act had to carry these ‘passports’ when outside their designated areas. Up to this point, black women had been excluded from carrying the ‘dompas’ (literally dumb pass), but the change in this law is what triggered this protest march. Wathint’Abafazi Wathint’imbokodo! (When you strike a woman, You strike a rock!) Was the song that the women chanted after standing in silence for thirty minutes and leaving bundles of 100 000 signatures in the doorways for the then Prime Minister. (He apparently never saw the petition, he was away and the papers were very quickly removed before he could see them). Wathint’Abafazi Wathint’imbokodo! (When you strike a woman, You strike a rock!) These words, first chanted in 1956, have come to symbolise women’s resilience and courage in South Africa. This march and these words made a big impression on me when I first heard about them as a girl and these words often float through my mind when attending a labour and birth and seeing a woman ‘s strength and resilience surface. Women will put up with a lot in life. See them go without, for their families, for their children, for their husbands. But push a woman too far and she will push back with a previously unseen inner strength . There is that point in labour; when a woman has reached that place where she seems to give in and the act of giving birth seems insurmountable. But then it is as if something inside her pushes her to stare Death defiantly in the face with a strength not even she knew she had. And that is why women are scary. Because we all have it. Wathint’Abafazi...
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