September 14th marked one year since the brutal gang-rape and murder of a Dalit teenager by four ‘upper-caste’ Thakur men in UP’s Hathras. The body of the victim was forcibly cremated by the police and the family still lives in fear from elements of the state, police, and administration (which tried to cover up the whole incident by claiming it never happened) and the upper caste accused. Forget about justice, they have only been subjected to further hardships and humiliation. Ismat Ara’s report in The Wire details the various incidents through the year in connection with the case that have put the family of the victim in a permanent state of fear. A statement by a drunk lawyer inside a courtroom to Seema Khushwaha, the family’s counsel, underlines the prevailing attitude of entitlement, patriarchy and upper caste arrogance that marks the country today - “Seema stay in your seema (boundary)”. Apart from being terrible wordplay (you can almost imagine his compatriots laughing and slapping their stomachs), it is astounding that this perspective is even allowed. In fact this naturalised violence is endorsed, and by the government, no less. People have come out in large numbers in support of the accused including a support rally at a local BJP member’s house in October last year.
The question remains - What does it mean to survive as a Dalit woman in today’s India?
There is despair, but there is also hope. Because try as they might, fascist and uber-nationalist forces will not be able to silence the voices that speak truth. Against this background of violence and injustice, organisation and activism, I share with you today Audre Lorde’s words of power and hope. Before the poem itself, here are a few words from one of her radical essays - ‘Poetry is not a Luxury’, words that know darkness, but use it to birth fires:
“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action…... We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared“. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.”
- excerpted from Audre Lorde’s ‘Poetry is not a Luxury’, in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
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