Usha Akella statement from her recent launch

Spinifex Press recently held an online launch for Usha Akella to celebrate the release of her new poetry book, I Will Not Bear You Sons. The launcher, award-winning poet Robyn Rowland, did a remarkable job at reading and celebrating Usha’s poems and we hope to share her launch speech online separately.

Usha had some powerful words for us at her launch and we kindly asked her if we could produce them here on the Spinifex Press blog.

If, as a race, we hope to be fully human, not half, or a quarter, all of us, men and women have to be feminist—before we can aspire to the stature of “humanist”. And women, be sure—whatever your sexual orientation, body type, skin color, economic bracket, education level, caste, religious creed, nationality or race—unless we learn to stand by each other not racked with jealousies, fear, envy, self-centeredness, and cellular perceptions generated by the brainwash of patriarchy, this struggle will not culminate.

Why is there a need for feminist poems or literature? Is the proof not in the news we read daily—a violent world of misogyny expressing itself in rapes, the trafficking of children and women and casting a shadow on every sector of human life? Has not every woman or girl-- except a few lucky ones-- felt the breath of patriarchy in the lenses that cloud her vision or the voices that crowd her soul. In the tiniest crevices of human culture, a stream runs continuously trying to obliterate another stream. In the name of religion, in the name of culture, in the name of family, honor, ethics and good behavior, always, the flame of feminine power is sought to be snuffed or its expression distorted. East and West.—neither is better than the other. A disease so deep, a father can kill a daughter, or a brother betray a sister, or a mother abort a female fetus, a friend turn on a friend or a girl starve herself to a size zero to match a beauty standard. I feel scalded every day feeling the weight of the ages barely lessening. This is why this book came to be--Poetry can tell truths truer than fact with the courage of ownership of one’s story. Women must speak out.

The first section of the book delves into personal responses and in the second I explore various issues from many cultures across history like foot binding, forced breeding, FGM, rape, standards of mysticism or spirituality, witch burning, politics, terrorism, etc.

I hope my poems express a collapse of all boundaries calling for a universal humanity.

The poems read by Usha at the launch included:

• She’s Speaking for Kamala Harris

• Boomerang

Unsought pickings is dedicated to African American slave women subjected to forced breeding. Some things to note is the quote by a slave woman who described the practice as de weddin’ ’tween de cows and de bulls, a reference to Mandeville the supposed author of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a fantasy ridden travel memoir that among other things described a tree on which gourds grew; inside those gourds, delicious baby lambs wriggled.  Kutn is Cotton in arabic

• Unsought Pickings

• Poems I Can’t Write

• Simple Equations in the Niyogi Worldview

• From a brahmin niyogi woman to a white woman

• Lotus Feet

• Bolokoli for Astur

FGM in the Bambara language spoken in Mali means washing your hands, a purifying phrase. Astur, Somalian girl’s name meaning to cover or conceal

Welcome to the world little girl 
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