Silence Is a Woman

[ismnotwasm]

1. Damn

Gwendolyn Bennett said, “silence is a sounding thing for one who listens hungrily.” Listening hungrily, I hear women’s bodies speaking in and through the silence. Kethi Kilonzo lost her case, and the Butere Girls did not win a prize at the festival, but as have many Kenyan women who have enacted protest and dissent under conditions of political duress, both created a visible and vocal public by the focused performance and non-performance of their bodies. Generations of Kenyan women have used their bodies to create a new collective imagination and to nurture justice in our political community by showing nakedness, by offering bodily truths and by converting corporeality into transformative speech. As I tell you these stories now, my own back is curved over my desk. My eyes are tired and my arms are cramped. I feel the tension in my neck and between my shoulder blades. In the silence, I hear the loud clatter of my fingers on the plastic computer keys. I hear the songs of my mothers and my sisters. I hear my voice.

I'm left without any words that can take the measure of this paragraph