We have been kept in too many cages for too long.
We orientate ourselves after men, their freedom,
Power and achievements. What are we made of?
Why don’t we keep women in mind, ancient high-ranking models?
Bringing us back to our roots, to our spirituality, sexuality, liberated,
Unfestering, undecorated or demonised. Being aligned to what we truly are.
Resonating with everything life-affirming, creative and expressionistic.
We bear the masculine and the feminine, we are women and have lost the meaning.
What does it mean to be a woman?
What does it mean to be a girl?
Nowadays? Or for centuries?
Caged, marketed with fake wings or given two feathers to flutter slightly?
Have we been fictionalised?
Emptied of meaning?
Made male and rancourous, vindictive even? Threatening. How?
Have we acted out prescribed identities?
Have we really been ourselves and do we know who we are,
What we need, what we want, what we desire and what we want to do?
With ourselves? As women? I don’t want to copy men.
Yes, I want control over my body, all the rights to my own body,
They were given to me as I was born, that’s how it should be and it is, by nature,
Human demise and decay of ethics excluded. I’m not doing lists. I want to discover who
I am without all of these models leading nowhere, I can feel it, it’s not me, nothing extreme.
To even declare that my body is mine feels ridiculous and self-evident.
I want to get a sense of what my feminism is about, where it leads me.
I want to feel my feet. Reclaim my hands. Strengthen my spine and use my speech
As I see fit. The achievements of feminism are needed, the groundworks, respect
Is a two-way street. I want it to go deeper, further, into women themselves,
Their texture, their mannerisms, behavioural codes, values and bodies,
Ideals, minds, patterns, psyches, nature, their substance and intellect.
Have we lost sight of our roots as girls and women?
I want to step into my own footsteps connected to the ever-feminine.
I belong and I want to belong.
We need to return and find each other again, sanctuary and togetherness.
To say that my intent is not to imitate men is not an affront, nor is it an insult,
I claim my girlhood, my womanhood, untethered and consolidated.
But it can be quite unfathomable at times, making me cry and feel frustrated.
It seems invisible, felt, yet portrayed nowhere, not the way it is or should have been.
There is too much darkness still, where there has been so much light.
I want a female body unabused, undiscriminated, unformed by unlawful hands, uninvited.
I want a sexuality that is purely mine, unblemished by indoctrinating images.
I want an appearance that doesn’t show a million doubts and questions and fears.
I want to walk without succumbing to anxieties and scenarios that cripple me.
I want to be naked without inheriting internal gazes and criticism and monsters of perfectionism.
I want a mind with my own voices, sounds that do not want to tear me apart.
I want to reconnect to a self-love afire in my blood and heartbeat from the moment
My mother held me in her arms. I want to look into my face and smile without
Compulsion or prosecution. I want a face that is mine and bears my name.
“Portrait of a Lady” by Vittorio Matteo Corcos (1859-1933)
Croque-Melpomene 