The Mira Project

The Mira Collective

[themiraproject]

I am Dailt woman from India. I start by writing this because my identity is always considered first before my humanity. We have been oppressed for years and even now the violence against us continues on a daily basis. I was scared to walk outside my neighborhood when I was growing up because boys belong to upper caste would fling slurs at me, call me names and even tried chasing me out of their locality. This all happened in Delhi, which is an Indian metro and also the capital of the country. People watched and did nothing to stop them. These boys were just a little more older than me. I imagine these boys growing up and never being corrected for how they treated people from community. Especially women. Dalit women worked in their households as cooks and maids and they thought they “owned” us and our bodies. I remember feeling the same way when I finally got to a good “upscale” college. The same casteism mixed with sexism was prevalent there also. When a lot of people in India talk about #metoo movement etcetera, they don’t stop and think of how they themselves treat Dalit women and their bodies. How much entitlement exists in people when they feel that molesting a maid or a helper is just a “small matter”. These issues are always suppressed and it is tiring. Now at least we are organizing our own people to speak up agains these atrocities but for so long this has gone unchallenged. Still at my workplace or in social gatherings with other upper caste people, if I bring up this up I am shamed or silenced. We need to end our silence completely. Caste is a huge enabler for street harassment in India and we need to recognize this horrible reality.

(Submitted via email by Revathy N, India)

You can share your story/art/poem/rant/opinion/fragment/listicle and everything else that stands to dismantle gendered violence and street harassment by email us : [email protected]

[themiraproject]

I am scared of 'positive spaces.' I have not found them to be safe places to grieve. I don't want people to tell me to 'take back my power' by pretending I have it where I materially do not. I am a communist. I am tired. I lost friends to medical violence. I thought for a minute I could go to a peer respite (u.s.a.) so I could work on some things, but the women there want to cut me open so they can see themselves in me. I am afraid of things I need to work on not being 'important enough'. (sal)

We are sorry to hear this and we want to hold space for you at least in a way where you can feel like you can express yourself. Positive and positivity are now used in ways that are quite cliched and ignorant most of the times. However, you are important. Your experiences are important. Your voice is important and even your tiredness and the care you should be afforded are important. Sometimes the grief of this world can be overwhelming but the very fact that you have written in and spoken up about something so pivotal yet seemingly invisible in all our cultures, is evidence enough of your tender power. In solidarity. (The Mira Project)

[thetalkingcompass]

Write to us if you wish to speak to a therapist : [email protected]

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[viperslang]

Young girls are shamed for binaried responses they learn by way of social coding. If an adolescent girl experiences early onset panic or depressive phases and responds with crying, she is labeled “emotional”, asked if she has started her periods till the point where she starts to perceive crying as a kind of slur. If the same girl responds with aggression or anger, the label shifts to “uncontrollable” or “mental”.

Scherezade Siobhan, Patriarchy and the Patient (via viperslang)

[themiraproject]

We are now accepting writing/art that deals with gendered violence & street harassment.  

You can send us your work at [email protected]

[themiraproject]

The City and Me

I’m 13, barely growing into my body, and I don’t know the city enough. Home to school to back home, my relationship with the city’s roads are defined in bus rides and sweltering Sundays spent in Connaught Place, surrounded by café-hoppers and chewing tobacco lovers. The only place I can recognize like the soles of my feet is the round bookstore near the place where my mother buys her jhumkas and kurtas. People only look at me to sell me things, as I navigate the city on my mother’s terms.

I’m 15, and we trace footsteps to the mall and back. We make space for ourselves in movie theatres and coffee shops. My friends learn to be loud in groups while I follow them with feathery footsteps and a pair of lips permanently stitched together with shyness. I chalk it up to the fact that I’m just the girl we’re all supposed to learn to be anyway – my silence is a head-start as we all grow into the gender the billboards teach us to become.

I’m 17, body growing in places I don’t understand the meaning of, and no one bothers to explain. We look at the women in Swarovski and Chanel posters and try to figure out where our bodies fit. We become more acquainted in the mall and corners where it’s safe for boys to touch us. We become more acquainted with “safety”: don’t stay out past 8, don’t step into an autorickshaw without calling your mother first, don’t invite boys at home, don’t, don’t, don’t. I am taught to spell “woman” before I am taught to spell “freedom” but I am told I’m allowed to experience both equally. “Equality” is reduced to a set of syllables like the murmuring of my mother praying each morning, and I wonder what do these words mean – if this is meant for me, why is it that I’m still taught how to use pepper spray before I am taught how to drive? “Equality” is an auto-ride into cognitive dissonance. “Freedom” is a trip to the mall. My reality is a world apart from the white women in all the advertisements. Sometimes I feel like a consumer, but mostly I too feel like a product, and the city is moulding me to become both at the same time.

I’m 19 and freedom tastes different: it tastes like wet earth in parks we were always forbidden to visit, passive smoke and cheap chicken rolls. Freedom looks like the walls of forts and monuments and history I’m just beginning to discover. Freedom looks like a city I’ve lived in all my life and am only now experiencing. The city teaches me to revel in it, to brave the crowds and the staring, the “eveteasing” and the hands trying to grope you on busy metro trains. We shed the word “safety” and “security” and learn the ways of the world as we wear down the broken footpath edges with our busy feet.

I’m 21 and the city is on fire. I become part of the protests in university, I run from the men who chase us with slurs about our bodies in one breath and slogans about the nation in another. Freedom looks more and more like transformation of the city and the self. It is no more centred on my desire to consume. I loiter in parks after dark but only when I am allowed to. The possibilities in the city present itself: public spaces, accessible to all, that can change the nature of how we mingle with each other. Finding friendship on sweltering afternoons at Arts Fac, or at chai stalls in CR Park, I finally understand this is what it means to be part of a city, and for the city to be part of me.

Shirin Choudhary is a poet, activist and enthusiast of hugs from New Delhi, India. They love to talk/write about human rights, poetry, literature, love and the pleasures of holding your friend's hands.

[themiraproject]

You Want Me White

You Want Me White

  You’d like me to be white as dawn,

You’d like me to be made of foam,

You wish I were mother of pearl,

A lily

Chaste above all others.

A delicate perfume.

A closed bud.

  Not one ray of the moon

Should have filtered me,

Not one daisy

Should have called me sister.

You want me to be snowy,

You want me to be white,

You want me to be like dawn.

  You who have held all the wineglasses

In your hand,

Your lips stained purple

With fruit and honey

You who in the banquet

Crowned with young vines

Made toasts with your flesh to Bacchus.

You who in the gardens

Black with Deceit

Dressed in red

Ran to your Ruin.

  You who keep your skeleton

Well preserved, intact,

I don’t know yet

Through what miracles

You want to make me white

(God forgive you),

You want to make me chaste

(God forgive you),

You want to make me like dawn!

  Run away to the woods;

Go to the mountain;

Wash your mouth;

Get to know the wet earth

With your hands;

Feed your body

With bitter roots;

Drink from the rocks;

Sleep on the white frost;

Renew your tissue

With the salt of rocks and water;

Talk to the birds

And get up at dawn.

And when your flesh

Has returned to you,

And when you have put

Your soul back into it,

Your soul which was left entangled

In all the bedrooms,

Then, my good man,

Ask me to be white,

Ask me to be snowy,

Ask me to be chaste.

  Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938)

    Storni, Alfonsina. “You Want Me White” [Tú me quieres blanca], Alfonsina Storni: Selected Poems, translated from the Spanish by Marion Freeman, Mary Crow, Jim Normington and Kay Short, Fredonia, New York: White Pine Press, 1987. The poem “You Want Me White” comes from her second collection of poetry titled El dulce daño (1918).  

  During her lifetime Alfonsina Storni was considered one of the most important poets in Latin America. A persistent theme throughout all her writings is the struggle of women in a male-centered, machismo-driven society, that does not grant women equality. 

[themiraproject]

IF YOU TEACH A GIRL WHAT POWER MEANS

After If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

If you go to an all-girls school, you learn several adjectives to describe women, or les femmes: belles, jolies, jeunes, grandes, petites. Girls aren’t just girls but women of women of action, learning, empowerment. You learn that women have a say. Women are women of power but more than that, women are power: la puissance. The noun is feminine.

If words like la puissance and les femmes become associated with one another, you learn that there are spaces where women matter. There are student council seats that lead to seats in Congress, in government. Female representation matters & so do you.

If you read Adrienne Rich’s poetry in your feminist studies class, you learn that Marie Curie died from the same source as her power. You begin to wonder whether power is something radioactive, a bottle amber. You begin to wonder if power is tangible. A solid, molecules packed tightly together.

Sometimes if you try and express your power, you are silenced. Power is taken from you. You discover that you are wounded from the very same radium you have been purifying. You learn that there are adjectives. Belles, jolies, jeunes, grandes petites. Adjectives that affirm women as powerful, worth respecting. But there are also words that are antitheses. Slut and whore and bitch. Nouns that take your power away.

If you learn what power means, you start to think that maybe it wasn’t the radium, but Marie Curie. Solid, tangible. You start wondering if you can touch it too.

Valerie Wu is a Chinese American student in  California. She was a National Gold Medalist in the 2017 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Her work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times Insider, and more.

[themiraproject]

I am 42 and the devastation of sexual abuse and assault on myself and my siblings continues to this day.  I was molested by a relative when I was young.  My sister was molested by a relative when she was young.  My brother was molested by a babysiter when he was still an infant.  This shouldn't be a common story, but it is.  Despite my parents best efforts to protect us, despite their great love for us and their constant care we were stalked and abused.  My entire family has never recovered from this.  This can't be normal - we cannot let this be normal.  What happened at every step was that no one was held accountable, because at the time it was felt it would do more harm to go through the legal process.  If any one is listening - please please please fix this.  We must change this attitude, this system.  Our entire culture must change.  I cannot do it alone.  My family cannot do it alone.  We need help or this will continue.  This country is like a cancerous patient who refuses to go to the doctor.  The cancer is still there - slowly killing us.  

Lisa, United States

[themiraproject]

No.

My grandma reminded me, every day we talked-

that I was worthy of so much more.

that I was special. 

that when I said “no,” there didn’t need to be a yes.

there didn’t need to be control.

there didn’t need to be abuse. 

there didn’t need to be lonely nights where I-

where I felt like there was no way out,

my legs running faster than my mind.

my breath sucking in less air

and my life flickering before me

because when I mean no, 

there should be no hesitation

no second-guessing

and even though you might think otherwise,

I mean no.

Tomii Eames is a high school student in California who loves to write at the intersection of societal issues. She is a writer, feminist, and based in the Silicon Valley.

[themiraproject]

Consent

Yes means yes 

And no means no

There is no room for adjustment in this decision 

When I say decision I want you to understand that this is mine to make 

I am not some old dress that you found in a small market that you are haggling over

My body is not a bargain and neither is it on sale

At least in the purchase of the dress it is a transaction where you are giving something to receive something in return

When you choose to ignore my consent all you are doing is taking

Taking my body

Taking my soul

Taking my being

Leaving me empty at the end of it

But not completely no, you make sure to leave the memories of what you have done 

To pain me forever

Like a treasure map of marks on my body, except there is no treasure at the end

All there is, is hurt

I am not property that can be bought

My heart is made of gold but I’ve got iron fists that are fighting this patriarchy that you have created 

So, 

Yes means yes

And no means no

Submitted Anonymously.

[themiraproject]

This is Your Space

This is a community-built space for discussions on gender, mental health, street harassment and gender-based violence.

If you have a story about dealing with gender-based violence and/or street-harassment, please send it to us. 500-600 word count is recommended but please feel free to discuss more with us if you need to convey and communicate additional information.

We publish stories both - anonymously and also with people’s names attached to them, depending on what you are comfortable with. The whole idea here is to give you space to process your feelings, share your story and your survival and feel heard.

You can send us your story via the submission box or you can mail us at themiraproject at gmail dot com.

Take Space. Without Apologies.

[themiraproject]

Afghan artist Kubra Khademi’s 8-minute walk in Kabul in armour to highlight male street harassment and abuse of women.

[themiraproject]

Is there a way I can be involved with this project? Love the concept.

Absolutely. Write to us at themiraproject at gmail dot com and we can speak more!

[themiraproject]

The Mira Collective. Take Space. Without Apologies.

[themiraproject]

[themiraproject]

An open poem to sisters