Response to Djamila, 2018
New tag alert! This piece is an ekphrastic poem, and it was written in response to Asad Faulwell’s painting Djamila, 2018 (the featured image and details on the work can be found here) for a free write exercise in the Catalyst Literary Magazine class.
I’m sure you know the saying
Well-behaved women seldom make history.
At what cost? Or, at whose expense?
The price begins with
women being treated as a deviation from men,
and rings all the way up to
r e t a l i a t i o n.
From the mouths of women,
there is iron in our words
and from the hands of women,
all the fight in the world
because
we are forced to
to decolonize
& to re-indigenize
And so I ask,
Would you like to see how the sun rises and sets from a woman’s eyes?
