Food. Colonialism. Childhood. Ash Wednesday. Lent. Confession. Sacrifice. Ritual.
I rarely consider the implications of Ash Wednesday, as it passes each year, even though it was a Catholic ritual of my early years, with my mama & siblings. But just two days ago, when it passed, I remembered an old poem I wrote in 2007, and wanted to share it here on the blog; mainly, Ash Wednesday allows me to ponder on my history, my ancestors, colonialism, and the beauty of ritual much in the way that food often has me thinking through the same topics.
There's an intersection there, and so i offer unto you, a poem.
I'd like to, also, give the context in which I presented the poem originally. I was part of the Vagina Monologues in 2007, which offers a very "cisgendered white lady" narrative of "vaginas" and sexual herstories. I was performing a monologue about birth and simultaneously learning about the forced sterilizations of black & brown women in the US, which was documented up until the 1980's (and most certainly, still happens today). It got me thinking (back then) about the absolute miracle of my existence, the "wow, i can't believe i was born," and that my ancestors survived decades and decades of erasure and attempts at genocide. As i read the preface & poem now, i see my cisgendered myopic privilege. but so you have it - always growing.
So the following poem, "Ash Wednesday," and the preface, were written with my ancestors in mind, in awe of my survival, and the survival of all brown folks.
By Sofia Rose Smith, 2007
My Vagina Monologue is about birth. I want to give voice to the process of living inside of Eve Ensler’s words.
I came to “I was there in the room” not wanting to reiterate the way that the miracle of birth (which is miraculous) sometimes overrides the violent histories that have fallen on folks of color (namely, women & trans/gnc folks). In the 1970’s and 80’s alone, 25% of Native women were forcibly sterilized in the US. For some small Indian tribes, policies of sterilization have been literally genocidal. Black women’s bodies in the US are also persistently under erasure; many women of color enter into the law as criminal bodies that don’t ‘deserve’ to have children. There were 700,000 sterilizations (often postpartum) recorded between 1970 and ’80. I cannot do enough justice to acknowledging the history of reproductive oppression that has befallen women (& trans folks) of color in this country. It is a knowledge that is painful to recognize, and yet essential to our understanding of this nation, and whose vagina/body/womb is allowed to live, to be, to reproduce. Having babies is a privilege that, it must be said, has historically been over-given to white (cisgendered) women.
I feel it a miracle to have been born into this “difficult, wondrous world” from the bodies of women of color. I will fight endlessly for all women’s freedom to bear children and for the right to gain legal recognition/ownership of our beautifully complex bodies.
I began the following poem on the bus in Santa Cruz, on Ash Wednesday, with my mother in mind, and for the memories that live inside my vagina.
"Ash Wednesday" 2007
One minute ago, my body tremored from the smudged ash
Blessing the foreheads of strangers.
Bodies – brown faces, recall my own and
in an instant
my mother’s face sweeps over me like a flush of cherry light
and I become a secret, yellow glow fish
in the blue speckled seat of this Metro;
A sea turtle in the thick, soft center of a cushioned seat.
A redwood forest.
A white sheet of madrone peeled gently from its home.
Where is the church? The steeple?
Where is the doorway to my childhood? My mother’s spiritual,
Post-colonial history?
My body is a gathering of praying turtles with candles on top their shells.
We balance fire and wax on our backs,
They drip slowly,
But don’t burn,
Because remember, we’re protected by shell.
Underneath sleep the hidden struggles,
Carved into our tender meat.
“Wounds of the flesh” they call them,
The bleeding red violence struck upon
our fractured bodies,
fractured cause they didn’t think
we counted as whole.
Think invasions, explosions of metal,
Churches burnt down and homes gutted.
A radio on with death all around.
Think 80 thousand and one women’s bodies,
Abjected,
Rotting inside of me.
Except,
Then we turned green,
And glowed the way ferns do in the sun.
My body is a church underwater.
Sometimes the sea I’m inside feels like a coffin from which I look upon the sky.
Glass coffin,
That holds the unwritten stories,
Forgetting. Forgetting the incisions,
The markings of time,
The histories written only on our bodies,
Breast milk stolen from out our breasts and babies ripped out, right out our flesh, and rape, yes rape, still on our heads, and sex, forced sex with all white men.
I am not angry.
I just don’t want any more children that aren’t mine.
I refuse to lie down, again, for you.
I resist your attempts to slit us through,
I will hold my rifle in front my breast,
And carry my babies on shoulder, over head.
My past wakes in me and I will not silence its scream.
Name me something new. Plant this root called truth:
Call me Woman and Queer and Colored and Longing
And I will love you in a desert for the rest of the world.
Not just once, they through acid over our many flames.
But the flames, they flicker still
Live still
In our yonis,
Sacred churches that glow,
In spite of war and shattered glass,
Tremble on, fight with fire,
Write and resist.
Come at us with your best hate, and we will pummel you with love.
We will not lie down, we tiger riders.
Spears in our hands, newborn cubs in our wombs,
Wombs you tried to remove but no I won’t let you again.
We grow back stronger.
We serpents shed our radiant skins,
And our mothers, sisters, friends, lovers, teach us,
In flaming poems,
How to work our gleaming swords.
I am a queer, mixed Xicana-Irish poet.
My language was lost to my family, a hundred years of beatings & "white is right".
Sometimes words are painful to come by.
But it’s always beautiful to walk through the fire of remembrance.
Remembering the erasure of my history and birthing it into existence again.
-2012-
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