How She Wears It
Beautifully well.
Regally.
With a smile
Of course, you are never fully dressed without a smile
So she wears her pain beautifully well, with a smile.
Simply because she has the unfortunate identity ‘she’
With a sad smile you’ll never see
A sad smile on a happy face
’cause she’s got to smile for the camera
With society behind the camera
Judging her every step
Criticising her actions and inactions
She wears it bent
Bent in subservience
Bent in forceful obeisance
Bent in neo-enslavement
She wears her society termed inferior self
Painfully well
She wears it first as a daughter
When father refuses to enter the maternal ward
On discovering that his first child is female
When father says a girl’s education is a waste
And contributes zilch to her formal training
While eagerly awaiting her bride price
She wears it next as a 29 year old single lady
When mother hounds her to bring home just any suitor
When society calls her an old maid
When society has no place for her in its fold
When society begins to malign her name
She wears this ridicule behind the most beautiful smile you’ll ever see
When she becomes a wife,
When in-laws whisper at her back for being barren only two years in marriage
When in-laws already have a long list of names for her male child
While she is only 4 weeks along and is yet to go for pre-natal scan
When in-laws admonish her for presenting the food late while she is 6 months pregnant
She still wears her pain in beautiful silence
She wears it in complete subservience
When honey tells her to leave her well-paying job
Simply because she earns higher than he does
She wears her sub humanness in total submission
When honey loses his job, takes to drinking
And makes her his punching bag
She wears her pain selflessly well
When her children call her mother of sorrows
Because she still calls their father a good man
After seeing all the bruises he has inflicted on her
When she calls Honey ‘Olowoorimi’
While limping from the beating he just gave her
She endures all these in painful silence
Simply because society has termed woman
‘sub human’.
She must wear her pain regally
While dying gradually,
Slowly on the inside
And this is how she wears her feminine identity.
I'm passionate about a world where gender is not an algorithm for anything except pregnancy, that's why I write, to spur fellow women to fight for equality.
