AIN’T I A WOMEN? -SOJOURNER TRUTH

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AIN’T I A WOMEN?

                                                                                    SOJOURNER TRUTH

When I was grouping for new poem
for the poetry festival,
poems danced all over the house:
in nooks and corners, in bed,
in boxes, in walls and curtains,
in windows and doors
poems beckoned with their hands.
They simmered on the stove
in the rasam pot, got flattened
under the rolling pins
on the chapati stone
and diced on the knife-stand
they boiled in the cooker
with salt and spices,
sautéed, smelling fragrant.


In the hall they were lying about begging to be picked up.
If I swept them, they asked to be
mopped; if I mopped them,
they wanted to be dressed,
stubborn pests, thorns
in my flesh.
Curtains where little hands
had wiped themselves,
torn books, sandal dropped,
chairs and tables pulled here and there,
cloths strewn on the floor
took on the shapes of poems
and dazzled my eyes.

When I cleared the mess
and sat down to rest,
one of them pestered me
asking me now to wash it,
now to give it a drink,
now to come play with it.

When at last I sat down to write
not one letter got written
and my brain was in a fog.
Late at night, when a sleepy hand
groped and hugged me
'to hell with the poem' I said
and fell asleep.
But it tickled me in a dream,
made me laugh and charmed me.

When I read that
in the poetry festival,
it ran out, refused to come back,
went inside the listeners and sat there.

I let it sit there
and returned home alone.

In her brief but powerful speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” delivered at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention of 1851, Black abolitionist and feminist activist Sojourner Truth urgently describes the need for equal rights for women in the United States. Truth’s speech was one of the first to highlight the need for intersectional rights for Black men and women. Throughout “Ain’t I a Woman?” Truth uses raw, urgent language to describe the pain and suffering she endured as a formerly enslaved woman in order to point out the grave injustices being perpetrated against Black men and women all over the country.

Truth’s speech was revolutionary for its time: it spoke unapologetically about the horrors of slavery, the corruption of the Christian religious establishment in the U.S., and the hypocrisy of those who would confer the rights to suffrage and property ownership unto white women, but not Black women. While only a few paragraphs long, Truth’s speech managed to pointedly address many of the most urgent issues in American society at the time.

Truth urges her audience to look at her carefully. “Look at my arm!” she says, urging them to see that as a formerly enslaved person, she has ploughed and planted and raised barns. No man, she says, can compete with her. She asks again, “ain’t I a woman?” While enslaved, she could work as much as a man and eat as much as one, too—and she could “bear the lash as well” as a man could. Again, Truth repeats, “And ain’t I a woman?”

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