Womanhood is a prayer
BY MALAK SOUAMA
My grandmother, hung by the strings of nourishing wheat, shrinks in plea, “bless my daughters, shield my daughters, let them be more than I have ever been.”
A tear splits her cheeks like War,
“let them be a meadow, even when I’m sore from cleaning the dirt off of their edges,
If only I could make enough bread before school.”
Her hands play an ancestral memorial each time she querns,
her time, an oxygen pedestal.
She kneads the dough until it is filled with air, until it’s heavy,
until my grandfather cannot lift it,
until he’s afraid of her,
And what she becomes for her daughters,
her wrists, broken bones, become time ticking,
if only she could plant living,
if she could ready the skin of her daughters for the shaft,
it comes of her as a carnivorous plea,
“My daughters, the wheat, let them pray with me before they open.”
When I tell my mother about her mother, how I do not understand her sacrifice,
how I do not understand how she can grow from agony loving,
how she warms bread like the first time she spoke Arabic—
amateur and diligent—
those veiled shambles she hides from her daughters,
the maiden whose fingertips are full of attempts yet she does not hide behind her men,
she speaks in single verses,
stretches of attached consonants,
Kesra, Kesra, Kesra, Kesra
her bread, a heritage,
violence against colonized hearts.
The first time I’ve learned that womanhood is a beast
was the first time I learned it is also a desperate answered prayer
and my mother tells me
that my grandmother is a time machine that grows durum wheat and turns it into bread out of fear,
that no one but God listens to her mother,
that no one but her mother knows what my mother is.
Malak Abir Souama is a 22-year-old Algerian slam poet and blogger. Some of her works are self-published and some are published in Ethmed Magazine.