Censored by The Word On Wednesday’s Identity Politics Hustlers:
A Poem by A Revolutionary Communist Entitled “The Women of the World”

March 2, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

The following is an op-ed submitted by the Revolution Club, Los Angeles, to the Daily Bruin, campus paper at UCLA.

At the most recent Word on Wednesday [open mike at UCLA], a member of the Revolution Club was interrupted and prevented from reading the poem included below.

The Revolution Club is holding an open-air debate and dialogue on Monday [March 4], on Bruin Walk at 12 pm on the following questions:

** Is it possible for there to be art or movements for fundamental social change if only the people who directly experience a particular form of oppression have a right to speak and lead?

** Intersectionality claims to make the connections between different forms of oppression, but its outlook forbids you from understanding the underlying roots of oppression and how to end it. It has no program for revolution and instead keeps you locked into begging and bargaining for piddly reforms and a seat at the table of a system that is destroying the lives of billions around the world.

These issues being debated matter! Come, take a side and argue your position, or admit you have no argument you can back up.

Here is the poem that was censored.

The Women of the World

In Somalia the rain does not fall
So we must sell our only daughter
In Myanmar police burn my village
Drown my dark-skin baby in the river

In Thailand I’m strapped to a bed
Red light district, buyer’s pleasure
In Jordan my feet burn from blisters
22 millenniums a day we walk for water

In South Sudan I drop to my knees
I’m unseen as I’m dying from hunger
In Lebanon I’m freezing in a shelter
I pray the cold won’t last much longer

In America where skinny is pretty
I’m 12 and if I eat I’ll be ugly
In India blood rolls down my legs
I’m worried nobody will believe me

In Nepal I scream but no one comes
On my period, in a cell, locked away
In Saudi Arabia my face is hidden
Beneath where the burqa is draped

In Malaysia the blade cuts my body
Negation, female genital mutilation
In Mexico the blade cuts my throat
Yet a dahlia is the symbol of a nation?

In England, under no street lights
Fighting him might only make it worse
In Pakistan he threw acid in my eyes
After I said “NO!” and now I’m cursed

In Honduras my children shed tears
We flee in fear to the jaws of the USA
In Libya I stand on an auction block
I’m to be sold as a modern day slave

In Sierra Leone I cannot be a mother
The world’s capital for maternal death
In El Salvador I’m forced to be a mother
Without the right to be free, what is left?

In South Africa it is far more likely
That I will be raped than graduate
In Yemen, skin & bones, I’m nothing
On the brink of collapse lies my fate

In the Congo my insides are torn
Where rape is a weapon of war
In Sweden men cover my mouth
I don’t think i want to live anymore

In the future I could be fully human
With dreams and a heart and a brain
But in the present I am a woman
Rotting away in tradition’s chains