Suede and Sunshade

  • Venusian Metamorphosis

    Many women who announce themselves as feminists often start with surface-level reasonings for claiming the title. Perhaps as a response to a breakup or thinking that women upholding signs that say “We are the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn!” look kick-ass and engaging. I think mainstream feminism enters girls and younger women into a status of festering hunger. A student sitting in her 12th grade English class would most likely not grasp how essential the protagonist in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is to womanhood, but may notice certain details, such as how the protagonist remains childless, has her story followed into middle-age, and seems to reject what was expected from women at the time the novel was written. If encouraged properly by teachers, said student might be engaged to learn more about who the author was as a creative and a human, and how her novel was one of many that inspired new feminist theories.

    How much have I grown? Soon, legally, I will be twenty-four. Yet, I still feel like I am going on fourteen. If others feel like me, then I wish I could know their names. Maybe we could start a support group. Well, I guess I would have to rent out the entire world as a facility. This has been a very trying year to say the least. Some days, there are traces of meaning, others, death becomes her. If God’s humor is as dark as mine, well then touché, my friend.

    If I wanted to become an English teacher, then it would have to be the 12th grade. More mellowed out students who simply just want to pass. Well some of them, by what my mother tells me. But if you can get one student engaged, you have done your job as an educator. Teenage girls are an underserved population. What really caters to them nowadays? The best time to prepare a girl to be a woman is in those unbalanced years.

    Life is a metamorphosis and it starts at puberty. When I read Their Eyes Were Watching God for the first time I felt engaged with the text, not only because the story is good, but also because we read the book as a class, a community. That is what I think is missing now, community education. A lack of community education is why we are all so wayward now. Why we experience metamorphosis so violently. If I had a great mentor back in my teenage years, I probably wouldn’t of made half of the bad decisions I made in high school. But that English teacher, the young student that was fresh out of collage ready to teach, sewed the seeds in me that are present now.

    Today has been one of my death becomes her days. And when I write, they are almost always on days like this.

    Written on August 4th, 2024

    There’s no sunshine without rain.

  • The War On Women Part 1: The Problem With Forgivness Ideology.


    This post became wildly different
    (and darker) than what it was intended to be. The truth tends to be dark more
    often than light, but I hope my final two sentences bring a roundabout declaration.

    (TW: I disscus abuse and sexual violence.)

    I finally realized why I challenge the notion of forgiveness. Simply being, I can’t be who I am today, the poet, the writer, the advocate, the daughter, the woman…without a vital vindictiveness supporting my cause. If I was to absolve my marks with certain trespasses, my voice would definitely cease to exist. God gave me a voice for a reason, I won’t shut up now.

    God’s love is conditional, human love is conditional. Conditions enforce respect on all sides. Folks are afraid to say love is conditional because it goes against the dogma of reparability. Challenging the notion of divine, indefinite absolvent. “Change”, “Growth”, and/or “Improvement” are categorized differently between woman and men. A man’s growth is prioritized by other men, and is expected to be praised by women. A promiscuous man’s past becomes censorable when he decides to “settle down”. While a woman of the same nature is irreparably damaged. Women who experience personal growth cannot be credited without undergoing scrutiny and distrust. This isn’t about putting woman on a higher standard, but to uphold the female savior-complex. Puritans who save themselves for men-to-be, while also, saving said men from themselves. Women are more Christ-like than what is accredited to us.

    Forgiveness in itself is an absolute. When you forgive someone, you cannot go back on those feelings, you can no longer ruminate over them without feeling stifled, and most alarming, your self-respect is undermined. Woman and girls who were abused, or sexually assaulted tend to be misplaced under murder. Abuse and rape don’t escalate into wider societies’ first-class reprimand until ends with victims being slain. (Femicide is a topic for another post). The domestic relations with these crimes concur with the statues of limitation. In most cases of sexual violence, the victim knows the predator on some level. How many of you all have been told not to go over certain family member who’s house? Or heard statements such as “she was fast”, “he was just being a boy”, and “its only because I love you”. Unfortunately, many communities still rely on views on which abuse is not absolute like a murder. An abuse situation is something communities’ surmise can be “healed” with forgiveness. In reality, it is meant to be forgotten. Absolving the predator of wrong-doing, while also negating the victim’s feelings and self-regard. Women and girls have to bear the brunt of forgiveness ideology, whenever it is from religious, patriarchal, or residential pressures.

    I am forgiveness-critical. I cannot see myself advising a woman or girl to forgive her abuser. Not only because it is not my or anybody’s place, but because the fundamental act of forgiveness I can only see reserved for relationships where the love is mutual, that has a continuation.

    Forgiveness is only granted for those who you continue to love and only who continue to love you. Abuse is the abruption of love, and indefinitely, the end.

    Written on August 1st, 2024

    ⁺₊⋆ ☀︎ ⋆⁺₊

1 Corinthians 11:12

12 For although the first woman came from man, every other man was born from a woman, and everything comes from God.

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