It’s November 25th, which means it’s the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and the start of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence campaign.
Now my original intention was to support the campaign by posting something relating to violence against women and girls every day for the next 16 days; a kind of 16 days of blogging against gender violence campaign if you like. But as some of you may know, I’ve got some personal stuff going on at the moment, so I’m not sure how much I’m going to be around during the next couple of weeks. (In fact truth be told, I’m not around now, I’m away visiting my mum who’s due to have major surgery on Monday, but such is the awesomeness of WordPress I’ve been able to schedule this piece to be posted in my absence. I know! It’s amazing!)
Obviously if I’d been more organised I would have already written my 16 posts and they’d be all lined up and set to go, but I haven’t been, and so they’re not. What I will do though is post as often as I can, and pledge that over the next 16 days anything that does get posted here will be related in some way to violence against women and girls.
So anyway, now without any further ado, here’s post number one. It’s the amazing Pat Parker, reciting her poem Womanslaughter*:
Unfortunately I can’t provide the complete text of the poem because of copyright laws, but here’s the last bit again:
“I have gained many sisters.
And if one is beaten,
or raped, or killed,
I will not come in mourning black.
I will not pick the right flowers.
I will not celebrate her death
and it will matter not
if she’s Black or white
if she loves women or men.
I will come with my many sisters
and decorate the streets
with the innards of those
brothers in womanslaughter.
No more can I dull my rage
in alcohol and deference
to men’s courts.
I will come to my sisters,
not dutiful.
I will come strong.”
*Incidentally, if you Google ‘womanslaughter’ you get this:
For my previous November 25th posts see:
It’s the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women
Too Much To Say For Myself 
That is such a powerful poem. I’m absolutely speechless now.
Incidentally, Cath, if you put ‘womanslaughter’ into Google inside double quotes you get the correct set of links, with a link to the poem in top slot.
The results that you got are just a quirk of the way search engines try to cope with bad/uncertain spelling in a ‘helpful’ way and a feature that’s easily overridden by putting your search term in double quotes, which tells the software to look specifically for that word/spelling before it looks at any variants or alternative terms.
Hah, thanks for that Unity. Bloody search engines.
Hi Emily. Yes it is a very powerful poem. All the more powerful when you realise that it is actually about Pat Parker’s older sister, who was murdered by her husband shortly after she’d separated from him.
Hey you posted the audio I uploaded to youtube 😀 It always makes me happy to see that the stuff I put up gets around to feminists all over the place. Every time I hear that poem I can’t help but be overcome by how raw it is. How much it rips you into pieces.
I hadn’t realised it was you that uploaded it. Thank you so much for doing that! x
I got the feeling it was a true story, which only makes it more powerful, and infinitely more tragic.