Jacky from our Break Isolation Group speaks for International Women* Space at the Internationalist 8th March Demonstration “Our Revolution is Coming!”
Hi Everyone, My name is Jacky, from International Women Space and Break Isolation Group.
Since time immemorial, and across the globe women endure the burdens of society’s broken structures and systems. In a pecking order, women rank at the bottom of the social barrel. Choked by gender roles and expectations, robbed of their autonomy to choose. Our bodies are not our own. Groped, raped, left for dead, being the walking dead, the hashtag dead! Many names we acquire, those of us who rebel Bitch. Whore. Crazy, dramatic men haters! Gender separatist! And my favourites? Angry Black Woman. Bitter Feminist.
Life feels like a constant run. Fleeing from families, religious shackles, abusive partners, societal standards, systemic inequality, horrific sexual violence, psychological trauma… Like human pawns of racial capitalism, we are shuffled on the chessboard of humanity. Decisions over our bodies, reproduction and lives remotely made without us. Inhumane ways invented to keep women in their place multiply. From corrective rape to Female Genital Mutilation, domestic violence to marital rape, sexual violence to financial violence, incest to femicide, street to cyber harassment. We are endangered!!
Yet our security and protection remains culturally and systemically tied to a man, how fucked up is that!
So yes we are fucking angry! Furious even! Just the audacity to ask us to settle for torture, dehumanisation, injustice, death! To be silent as militarised borders wipe us out? In the Mediterranean and within Fortress Europe Through racist systems and poisons of capitalism, from accelerated asylum processes to illegal deportations. We are fed up.
Hell No!
Today we reclaim our voices and power! With vows to break these chains of oppression and burn all patriarchal, racist, imperialist systems to the ground.
Woman. Goddess. Empress. Mother Earth. Fearless Warrior. I am all that and more. Trans. Queer. Religious. Childless. Married. I come in many shapes, bodies, forms. I am a survivor, i am diversity, beauty and life itself. All I have is my person, my body, my talents, my beauty, intelligence…my identity, my sanity and I reclaim it!
Your underestimation of me is the ace up my sleeve. It’s your weakness and my strength. Strength with which we kick forth our revolution. And soon we shall attain a world that does not patronise or tokenise, but embraces inclusivity and equality.
Our revolution is coming! We are coming!
IW*S
International Women* Space is a feminist, anti-racist political group in Berlin with refugee and migrant women* and non-migrant women* as members.