Property

Property - a spoken word by Ker Engede

“The most asked question to the youth globally is ‘What do you want to be?’”

In Unbound Voices: A Documentary, there is a scene quoting a San Francisco Chronicle item: small foot wives are the property of their husbands, ‘entombed for life’.

Property: something owned or possessed. Specifically: the exclusive right to possess, enjoy, and dispose of a thing when a person is considered to be someone’s property, and therefore can be forced to work for and obey their owner.

Now a person cannot be born owned, even if they were born from property themselves. So the question becomes: how do we make a person a slave? How do we teach a person to be owned?

First, we weaken them so they can obey, so they can accept without expecting, so they can be taken without anticipating. It is easier when you put a man in handcuffs behind his back, where he cannot see nor reach the constraints.

You teach a person to be prey. You put predators on male clothes, like lions and gators, and prey on female clothes, like bunnies and cats. You give the girls simpler toys with simpler dreams. You write words like sweet and cute on a little girl's top, but strong and brave on her brother's shirt.

You teach a teenage girl to love being hunted. You don’t just make her wear the prey; you make her become it. And when he chases her, you make her affirm it. You tell her that when a boy tugs on her hair, it means he likes her. When he pokes, hits, and tugs, and chooses her name as the butt of every joke, it’s for her attention. You teach her to accept violence as a request for regard, that aggression is how men articulate love.

Then, you question and batter the girls who say, “He hits me because he loves me.” She cannot decipher the difference between anger and hatred against love and adoration. She says it’s all the same shade of red. A coincidence? You tell her the secret to love is to play hard to get. You tell her if she pretends not to be interested, he’ll chase her. And you cover it in honey and lime so it doesn’t sound like you are saying that the less she wants it, the more he will.

With time, you teach boys to be owners, to hunt for their property.

Property: something owned or possessed. Specifically: the exclusive right to possess, enjoy, and dispose of a thing.

In turn, you teach the boys to never take things that come easy, but here, easy is a sweeter word for consensually. Then you defend your sons when they take a body forcefully, and he says, “She was just playing hard to get.” Yet you teach women to run and men to run after them.

What is a slave but a planet we have abused and mistreated, because we name nature feminine, and femininity is the only noun that comes with constraints and handcuffs? I am a slave to the system and its harsh words. I am a slave to a classroom that expects of me marriage over academia and arts. I am a slave to the gaping mouths that fall to the ground when I say I will not work 6 to 9 for a job, then a man and his household.

I am a slave to the tears of a Tigrayan woman crying because she has borne a female child. I am kneeling and grappling with the soil where she has bled. I am working with no pay for reform to make her forgive herself for what she has bred. I am aching for a womb that she believes has punished her, rewriting the world so that she can believe that her daughter is a gift, not the next testimony.

Who are we, women, in a world where woman is a dirty word? Who are you?

“I am a slave” is what Oprah Winfrey would have said when she was abused by her uncle, her cousin, and a family friend starting at 9.

“I am a slave”... Jaycee Lee Dugard, abused, raped, and forced to bear one child then another conceived from abuse.

“I am a slave”... Nawal El Saadawi, abused and mutilated, forced into female genital mutilation.

“I am a slave”... Joy Fridah Munani, her husband was arrested carrying her dismembered remains in a backpack.

Tell me the distinct difference between an African man in bondage on the deck of a ship and a woman's pieces, the parts of her body that cost her her youth, for anatomy spun the wheel and set her on the wrong side of favor.

When a person dies, we call it a body. When a woman dies, when a slave is killed, we plaster her story on a black and white magazine, and with no remorse, we say remains. Like what was left of her is all he let her be.

Slaves are desirable because they are easy to dispose of. A slave is detached from their humanity; they are a laborer in existence and a laborer in death.

The slave machine makes its products easy: packaged, sweet, wrapped, and fearful. Its gears are the concept of scrutinizing a product instead of investigating its buyers. In forced labor: ~6.3 million are in forced commercial sexual exploitation; women and young girls account for virtually all of these victims.

But you spit out jokes from your uncleansed mouths about the unfairness of a society where a woman's body can buy her freedom and shoes. You call the slave evil and ignore the thirsty monster beside her. No practice exists without a consumer. Don’t ever forget it.

I cannot defend the seducer, but I cannot stand the seduced. Your presidents, CEOs, your finance employees, the people you place in the center of your systems to execute and control, cannot say no. Perhaps no is such a foreign concept to a predator because they have never been able to execute the concept themselves.

And then, with full audacity, they ask me, “What do you want to be?”

When they ask me, "What do you want to be?" Be. Be.

Isn’t who we become composed of who we are not?

Is it not...

That I know.

I know who I do not want to be. I do not want to be a slave. As a woman, you learn to hold on to the bar and never stoop too low.

And curtsy. Bow. Bow.

I don’t want to hear any more gunshots. Bow, bow, bow. Bullets just for saying no. Bow.

To my skull. "You cannot have empathy for shooting something with no content," is what I was told, while they aimed for the center of my head.

All I could do was duck. Bow. I don’t want to settle, because this is as good as it gets. I do not want to be a slave.

She called me blessed because I could create. But what I did was give my bones, my blood, and shift organs to make space. An occupied womb was the only time I was permitted not to bow.

What is modern slavery but a society in which women are conditioned to be property and then called free?

So when you ask me who I do not want to be, close your gaping mouth when I say: I just want to be a woman.