Welcome to the reality of funeral programs turned into a national currency, where we print more obituaries than birth certificates, where the ink never dries on the eulogies before we’re writing new ones. Listen when I tell you another woman has passed on, I need you to understand I’m not speaking metaphorically, I’m not being poetic, I’m giving you the news before it becomes old enough to ignore. This is a roll call of the disappeared and the violated, this is a census of the silenced, this is the geography lesson they don’t teach in schools: here is where she was last seen, here is where they found what was left, here is the growing map of places we can no longer walk without remembering who we lost there. Listen to the sound of a mother identifying her daughter’s body, listen to the specific pitch of a scream when recognition and denial collide because her past survival did not guarantee her offspring safety, listen to the way silence sounds different after violence, how it has weight, how it settles into rooms and refuses to leave. This is not a poem, this is a testimony, this is evidence, this is the documentation of an ongoing massacre that everyone keeps calling something softer because femicide only counts when we decide to call it that. Listen:
They keep telling us to be careful, as if caution were a bulletproof vest, as if we haven’t already spent our entire lives being careful, as if careful ever saved anyone when the danger lives in your own home, sits across from you at dinner, says I love you with the same mouth that will later say I had to. What if we are careful and still die, what if we scream and still die, what if we whisper and still die, what if we fight back and still die, what if we don’t fight back and still die, what if every single choice we make is the wrong one because the game was rigged from the beginning, because survival was never actually an option, just a temporary reprieve, just borrowed time, just luck running out in increments? What if she was ‘loved’ and still died, found where her body was left like an apology too late to mean anything, dumped like garbage, disposed of like evidence, erased like a problem solved. And hey, they will call it a crime of passion, as if rage ever looked like devotion, as if femicide was just love gone wrong instead of hatred gone exactly as planned.
Another woman whose laughter used to fill a room now fills a coffin and we keep saying rest in peace as if peace ever rested in the bodies of women alive, as if we knew what peace tasted like, as if it wasn’t a foreign language we’ve been trying to learn our whole lives but the lessons keep getting interrupted by funerals, by vigils, by the constant low hum of grief that has become our national anthem..
This is war. This is violence baptized as love, this is murder dressed in apologies, this is a country building its monuments out of our bones and calling it romance, calling it tradition, calling it a private matter, calling it anything but what it is: a genocide in motion, an extermination so normalized we’ve started measuring our survival in days instead of years, an apocalypse in slow motion that we’ve normalized into background noise.
They say “not all men” but enough of them that I cannot walk home at night without rehearsing my obituary in my head, without wondering which photograph they’ll use when I become a hashtag or maybe my case also will not make the headlines, without composing a eulogy for just another funeral where we hold each other and pretend this is shocking when we all knew, we’ve always known, we were born knowing. We are before pictures waiting to become breaking news, we are missing posters in the making, we are bodies that haven’t been found yet, and someone is going to say we should have known better, should have seen the signs, should have left, should have stayed, should have been quieter, should have been louder, should have existed differently, should have somehow managed to survive the unsurvivable.
Listen: this is not isolated, this is not random, this is not a series of unfortunate events, this is a pattern, this is a system, this is infrastructure built on our bodies and maintained by our silence.
We are not safe in the arms that swear they love us, we are not safe in the streets that claim to protect us, We light candles that melt faster than justice moves, we hold vigils that multiply faster than trials, we say her name and her name and her name until our throats are raw and still there are more names, still there are more bodies, still there are more mothers collapsing at morgues, more children asking when mommy’s coming home, more sisters cleaning out closets full of clothes that smell like someone who should still be here.
How do you tell a child that their mother’s silence was not consent but the sound of her dying, how do you explain that the world killed her softly, quietly, privately, in the intimate spaces where screaming doesn’t carry, where neighbours hear and do nothing, where we all become complicit in our collective deafness?
Girls learn fear before they learn freedom, we inherit trauma like heirlooms, we are born knowing that our bodies are battlegrounds, that our existence is a provocation, that we will spend our lives apologizing for taking up space, for having opinions, for saying no, for saying yes, for breathing too loudly in a world that prefers us silent.
My greatest fear is not death itself but that my life will be reduced to a headline that no one reads past the first paragraph, that my mother will have to hear my name mispronounced on the news, that my story will be dissected for warning signs as if I was a mystery to be solved instead of a person who deserved to live, that I will become a statistic cited in a speech by someone who will do nothing, a data point, a moment of silence that lasts exactly sixty seconds before everyone goes back to their lives, before I am forgotten, before I become just another woman who should have known better.
But here is what I know: I know that we are not dying because we are careless, we are dying because we are women in a world that has never forgiven us for it. This is not love, this is execution, this is systematic elimination, this is cleansing, this is war, and I am tired of calling it anything softer.
We are tired of the euphemisms, tired of the think pieces, tired of the awareness campaigns that raise everything except the dead, tired of the moments of silence when what we need is noise, cacophony, a roar so loud it drowns out every excuse, every justification, every “she should have” that tries to make sense of the senseless.
Listen: I am not asking for your thoughts and prayers, I am demanding your rage, I am demanding that you feel the full weight of this, that you let it crush you the way it crushes us every single day. We should be tsunamis of fury, we should be avalanches of refusal, we should burn down every system that built itself on our bodies and then had the audacity to tell us to smile while it did.
They want us to grieve quietly, to protest politely, to die conveniently, but we are done being convenient. Another woman is dead, raped, violated… and we are furious, we are incandescent with anger, we are a forest fire of rage, and they will call us emotional, they will call us hysterical, they will use all the words designed to dismiss women who refuse to disappear quietly, but we will not be careful with our anger, we will not moderate our grief, we will not make our survival palatable for an audience that has already decided we are disposable.
This is a world that keeps building monuments to fallen heroes while using our bones as the foundation. This is a society that loves dead women more than living ones, that turns our murders into daily news, our trauma into passing content, our bodies into lessons about what not to do, where not to go, who not to trust, how not to die, as if dying was a choice we made poorly. We are not disposable, we are not collateral damage, we are not acceptable losses in someone else’s entitlement, and if this world cannot figure out how to let us live; truly live, not just survive, not just exist in a state of constant vigilance, then we will haunt it, we will haunt every man who looked away, every system that failed us, every society that shrugged and moved on. We will be the ghosts in every mirror, the names you cannot forget, the debt you can never repay, and our blood will stain every hand that stayed clean by staying silent.
Listen, there is new statistic today, and tomorrow there will be another, and the day after that another, and we will keep counting until you finally understand that this is not normal, this should never have been normal, and every single one of us who dies is a failure of everyone who lived and did nothing. This is not a poem. This is a reckoning. This is the sound of women refusing to die quietly anymore.
Hobane hee, re khathetse!
Dorky Perky Writes 