Hiwot Adilow: My Name
01/28/2013
“You shouldn’t treat a breath as carelessly as this.”
— Hiwot Adilow*
*
IF GOD WAS A WOMAN
in my home, in between the 2nd and 4th worlds,
where women seem to be most obviously oppressed,
we congregate.when our husbands leave to be men without us
we cry to allah/elshaday/ yesus-cristos/ and the sky
and pull our veils and our hair and we pray.we inquire…then we scream
like only circumcised/abused/raped/ beaten/and living
women can do,
“why are you he?”
“why does everyone forget sarah and mary and sheba
and penelope and nefertiti?”
“why were they hidden from every woman who cannot
read?”
“why can’t every woman read?”
“why must we pretend to not know them…”
“why are you he?!”
where is the respect for she?
we cry.from beneath the pile of broken women and damp
cheekbones
a young girl rises and asks,
“what if god were a woman?”
“if god were a woman i’m sure she’d have a clitoris.”
“if god were a woman my husband would not be
teaching my daughter to hate herself.”
“if god were a woman they’d call her a whore. she’d
be beaten –”
“for what?”
“for whatever you were flogged for.”for walking in the dark alone
for having her ankles show
for loving a man her family didn’t choose
for loving a woman
for saying no
for saying anything
for saying everything“if god was a woman she would be married to the sun;
though she is greater than him
he is the one that shines…
she made the sky he lives in
everything he has, she gives him.
but the sun is the one that the world appreciates.
think of all the times we’ve forgotten god.”we count them.
ten times for each of our sons and the way they will
forget that they first loved a woman.the second time our sons break a woman open
instead of looking to her for life
they’ll end up consuming it from her
slowly
burning away her being with the way they see fit to shine.
god is a woman, she is among us, and she is crying.*
Hiwot Adilow is the 16-year-old Philadelphia-born daughter of Ethiopian immigrants. She is involved in the Scribe Video Center’s Documentary History Program for Youth and is the founder and a coach of her school’s slam poetry team, and has preformed countless times with the Philly Youth Poetry Movement since first becoming involved with them in 2010. She uses her work to help her navigate through her identities and her environment. She hopes her work will help her better understand the communities she belongs to and her relationships to them while also helping others do the same.