Book review: South Sudanese women taught poetry to improve their lives

The facilitators included Ayak Chol Deng Alak, Lillian Aujo, Doreen Baingana, Harriet Anena, Mercy Ntangaare and Juliet Kushaba.

“What is the story I must tell?” was the question guiding the rookie writers who responded to this question by writing about their experiences in situations ravaged by armed conflict, displacement and sexual abuse.

Their accounts of these experiences were very touching.

These accounts shaped the contents of an anthology entitled, “No Time To Mourn: An Anthology By South Sudanese Women.”

Eloquently put together, a reader might be excused for thinking that these writers were seasoned instead of emerging voices.

Also, they do not have the angry tones which often color the voices of oppressed women in stark shades of vengeance.

Many accounts in this anthology were obtained during this writing retreat, while others were selected from an open call for submissions.

The result is that 41 women contributed to this anthology and thereby helped express a diversity of experiences of South Sudanese women.

The book cover Pulse

Thankfully, they were not limited by any thematic guidance so their short stories and poems were crafted towards themes of their own choosing.

This helped give the readers a chance to understand the impact of armed conflict on “individual lives, on communities and across generations” in Sothern Sudan.

This book is divided into seven sections, under the section “To Be A Woman” the poem “The Feminine Principle” by Chudier Pelpel sets in train a powerful thread of experiences:

“To be woman

Is often misconstrued with position

Or performance.

Her gender identity

Is bound with her innate contributions

To the community she serves

And the homes she carries.

She is daughter, wife, mother.

Fragmented and shared,

She omits her entirety

She thinks her transformations are not hers.”

The woman in this poem is a woman disempowered by her duties and disembodied by this disempowerment, so she becomes a non-person.

This poem speaks to how her identity is submerged by how she is identified by family and community alike, which excludes how she identifies herself.

In poetry, there is more freedom in word order and word forms than other uses of language.

So “to be woman” instead of “to be a woman” is charged with poetic meaning instead of being restricted by grammatical rules.

In this way, “to be woman” elevates the singular “a woman” to a pluralized expression of the experiences of all or many women.

The poem “Men-struation” by Alith Cyer Mayar Cyerdit is a clever play on words in the title and the poem is also deep:

“You don’t know the history of my pain

I am Jinub

A woman in end-less men-struation

Buying daily your pads to c-over and protect my skirt from stains

I continue to bleed

Afr-aid to speak of my periods.”

The fragmentation of some of the words into syllabic units shows her fear; she is stammering yet speaking truth to ensure her words achieve their effect through rhythm.

Her voice seems strained, but never forced as her pain flows with ordinary speech.

The infinitive “to c-over” may mean to “oversee” (in reverse) as the woman in the poem hopes to protect herself when experiencing her periods by overseeing how she is perceived.

This is because of the perception of menstruation as unclean, which contributes to the restrictions on women and girls during vaginal bleeding.

It is viewed as shameful and some cultural practices prohibit women from handling food or entering religious spaces during their periods.

This infringement of the rights of women because of their periods shows that menstruation is about how men perceive female biological realities, instead of how women experience them: hence, “men-straution.”

This book also has powerful short stories and portraits which exhibit not only the pain of the writers involved, but also showcase their brilliant talents and indomitable spirits.

FEMRITE and Oxfam International have given these South Sudanese women a place to stand and, in the spirit of Archimedes, they may now move the literary world.