Ann speaks for International Women* Space at the Rage, Resistance, Revolution! Demo organised by the Alliance of Internationalist Feminists Berlin on 25th November 2022.
—
This is a piece I wrote on behalf of International Women* Space and every woman out there!
I am a woman. Queer. Trans. I conform to no gender. I am a sex worker. Heterosexual. Bisexual! I am deeply Religious, no Heck am a proud atheist. Call me a witch on my magical days, or the moon on a mood swing.
I am a refugee. A migrant. Thoroughly indigenous! I am a Feminist. A warrior. A matriarch. A mother, by choice, or not. Childless, also by choice, or not! A power house! Definitely a goddess! I am who the fuck I say I am.
Carved from the most Superior. Call me Mother Earth, I mean, heck I filled it, didn’t I? I am Nature. I Am Life.
I am black, yellow, white fuck it today I am a smurfet. I am blue.
I am YOU, but I am also ME! I am WE!
I am every person that identifies as a woman in the world. My voice is every woman’s voice.
Guess what? I am also HUMAN!
The kind that is endangered!
So you bet I am furious, fed up! Just fuckin livid!
Utterly irked and inflamed that, like my slain sisters, I would also bare my life so others can be free.
Break every rule you set for me, Fight at every corner with all in me. Kill me you may, but fuck that, it’s a move I intend to play!
I will not drown in the murky waters of patriachy!
But, I am not free until every woman is free, not even when her shackles are different from my own, and her burdens unimaginable to me.
So on this day we reclaim our voices and call you out!
For treating us like less than human!
From the global south we fight and flee, from wars you can’t possibly fathom,
But our lands are apparently not good enough, go figure, yet you robbed them bare! Not good enough to be human.
Your methods, sneaky and covert,
Yet the sadism so palatable
Creating racist systems and structures, asylum procedures governed by red tape
Placing us in Lagers, legal brewing pots for re-traumatization,
Our mental health hanging in the balance,
No freedom of movement or right to self determination
Yet with the great audacity of a saviour’s complex, our appreciation for the bare minimum is demanded of us..
Are we not human enough?
You sanction the pushbacks of migrants and refugees from the Mediterranean
Invest millions in building a detention and deportation center, a buzzing hub of human rights inviolations
All the while welcoming the white Ukranian refugee, “hey, come, live and be free!”
Yet my security and protection remains culturally and systemically tied to a man,
Let’s face it, the choices before women seeking refuge are neither fair nor enviable, not in any capacity
We flee from families, religious shackles, abusive partners, societal standards and expectations, gender roles, systemic inequality, horrific sexual violence, psychological burdens…I could go on and on…
All I have is my person, my body, my talents, my beauty, intelligence, a bit of mania maybe…my identity! I reclaim it!
Non-negotiable, I can tell you now for free, I won’t trade me. Hell no!
I choose who I want to be. I choose me.
I figured, you must fear the warrior in me, ’tis why you throw all this at me! projecting your toxic bullshit on me, try to keep me quiet and hopefully eventually
kill me…
How about the robbery, with and without violence, of my autonomy, the right to my own person? When you just assume my body is yours for the taking
Roles and rules you set for me, micromanaging every smile, my life is not my own.
That makes my blood boil! That you choose what I should wear and who I should bang. You want to handpick my options, and expect me to stay in “my place”
Then taunt, break, maim me, discipline me to get your point across…
Still innovative you are: FGM, domestic violence, sexual harassment, financial violence, infanticide, femicide, marital rape, street and cyber harassment…its just fuckin endless!!
So yes I am an Angry Black woman!
Who wouldn’t be??
When you fetishize me and grope me, harass me, rape me, violate my sexual and reproductive health rights..
Make assumptions and decisions over a reproductive organ you don’t carry
When I deny or “defy you”, your tool is corrective rape or assault, that should teach me!
You fetishize me but then humiliate me, misgender me, inspect and mock my body, gawk at me…
You scream my name in pleasure when you switch to incognito tab, yet you tear and strip me of my very dignity and identity!
Your punches may keep me down sometimes, but they will never knock me out!
See what men fear most about going to prison, is the day to day life of a woman walking down the sidewalk. So take a seat place. You know nothing about being me.
What we can all identify with as women, is that feeling that comes with the chokehold of patriachy, you know, that stifling, suffocating shit that is a literal ticking time bomb?
Don’t we all know too well the feeling of having to fake a phone call, taking a longer route, making conscious steps not to provoke an aggressor?
That sinking feeling, hashtags, another dead woman,
It dawns on you, a sitting duck barely surviving,
Some day, it may be YOU who runs out of luck..
We cannot be afraid or hold back, even when the system fights us, trying to divide and conquer us!
We must dismantle and crush all oppressive systems and structures!
We are more than hashtags, More than our bodies, stories or identities..
Time to call out every person who perpetrates or condones patriachy and gender based violence, even by staying silent in the face of it.
We are under siege, we must fight every system set in place to break us.
Speak up! Let us demand change, justice and equality!
For until all of us are free and safe, none of us are!
As a woman you call me many names, so remember this one,
My kind, is called Patriarchy’s Worst Nightmare!
Break Isolation Group
... is run by refugee women, for refugee women - both those in and out of the German Asylum system. Most of us are living in different accommodation centres (Lagers) in Berlin and Brandenburg. We are a self-organised working group inside of International Women* Space, formed in February 2019 to answer the urgent need for peer to peer organisation for refugee women.