Our Minds

Photo by Jr Korpa @jrkorpa

“I hope you will not turn her head into a battleground.” Nsuuta talking to Kirabo’s grandmother in The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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“Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.” - Simone de Beauvoir

This representation make the minds of women a battlefield. We must rise up against this injustice and oppression. A poem in honour of women.

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Our Minds

Don’t make our minds a battleground

Where wars of worthiness are to be fought:

There is enough war and destruction.

Don’t make our minds a minefield of the

Cultural-self trying to blow up the true-self.

Don’t scuttle our dreams with your own,

Don’t bombard the city of our choices,

But hear our voices – not as your own –

For you do not exist in the future.

Don’t make our minds a battlefield where

We wage war against our bodies and your

Insecurities. There are no securities – even

banks fail.

Our bodies are beautiful. All of them.

All sexual choices and love is right

and part of the same story.

Don’t make our minds a place where unrest lives.

Our minds are a place to feel safe and sound. There is no

Worse hell than that – an unsound mind.

It is a human rights violation – one the oppressor

Knows well.

Don’t make our minds a place where our worthiness

Comes from the making of a marriage or baby:

There is no value in these shackles of despair.

Shackle nothing, freedom always finds its way.

Let our minds and bodies speak for themselves

In the power of their own decisions, creations and projects.

Don’t make our minds the obstacle that stands

In the way of us finding our beautiful meaning.

Let us break down all barriers and pre conceptions.

Daughters, heed the battlegrounds in your minds

created

By well meaning, yet misguided and damaged, people.

Dear other, your battlefields too have left scars.

Never give us the tools to weaponise our

Minds against ourselves or others, the earth

And all living creatures depend upon this.

May we make up our own minds!

  - By Michael Stolt

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