The defiance of a feminist
The story of people who inspire me often seems unreal or hard to believe. How did they survive that? How did they succeed? Specifically, when I read or listen about stories of women and girls who overcame their conditions, their abuse and discrimination, I feel as if they were trapped in a box and with the shear strength of their whole self they break it into a million pieces.
This is the story of a woman who broke a million boxes.
From a young age she learned how to cook and take care of her brothers who were violent and abusive. She once was so scared from her parents that she climbed over an old house, until she fainted and broke her arm.
On the 4th grade the teachers at her school begged her parents not to take her out of school, ‘the girl is so smart, she has great prospects’.
‘She needs to take her of her brothers’ her father said.
She grew accustomed to beating and being mistreated, but never accepted that she should be treated different from her brothers. This led to more beating.
At a young age she had abortions with the hook of a hanger and remembers seeing the bloody foetuses on the floor. She almost died and still remembers the pain and the amount of blood.
By the age of 16 her mother and one of her brothers had beaten her so violently they opened her skull, and she was taken to the hospital. Doctors considered the scene so gruesome they called the authorities, and she was given emancipation at the young age of 16.
She lived from house to house and some of her older sisters employed her and gave her jobs. Her career in fashion started in a button factory, until she owned her own store and several times participated in the organization of Fashion Week.
One of her siblings was ill and her family convinced her to accompany them to France where they lived in poor neighbourhoods. Her brother survived, but her own mother attempted several times to prostitute her beautiful daughter for extra money.
Some of her partners were also abusive and violent but emboldened by her new-found independence through work and resilience to strive, she fought back, but also preferred to live alone and keep men at a safe distance.
Her feminism spirit was there in survival from her abusive household, when she learned how to drive, when she opened her first store, when she had her first apartment with a simple mattress as furniture, as she aided women cross borders to access abortion when it was still illegal to make sure they did not use a hanger as she had, when she stole the clothes of some annoying boys at the beach, when she had her own daughter to whom she never lifted a hand and who went on to have a full education as far as her mind and heart desired.
Feminism goes beyond books of theories and vague political promises, it is in the fighting spirit of believing that you will live and strive and that tomorrow you will be free and unshackled from the steel of patriarchy towards an existence that is unapologetic and deeply your own.
This is not a story of fiction, stories like this are part of our pain, our struggles and part of the narrative that will leads us into a future where we will be free.
