Written piece
This Won't Be That Story
Zuhura Seng'enge
Tanzania
About this piece
This is a spoken word poem about girls' (and women's) resistance to their experiences being shaped into harmful and control-driven narratives by systems and media. It is a reclaiming of voice and agency to write their own stories in a more honest, caring, and empowering way.
We have heard about the headlines
even before we learned to read them.
Our names are often lost in statistics,
reduced to casual exchanges that people repeat in passing,
and forgotten right after the next breaking news.
When we are remembered, we are known famously as victims,
as fragile things to be protected from everything,
except, we are never safe,
not even from those doing the protecting.
But
even though danger walks beside us,
ours will not be another story
they write in victims books.
You will not learn our names in obituaries.
We refuse to be headlines, or the sum of what happened to us.
We refuse to be trapped in silence or accept
versions of truth
from those self-appointed to speak for us.
We refuse to be powerless or told we are too young
to know what abuse looks like.
We are more than the risk class assigned to us,
we are carriers of legacies;
the breath of the future.
We know what we need. We know where it hurts and where to heal,
where there is a tear, and what makes the best stitch,
what pieces do not fit.
We are girls with light under our feet,
illuminating new paths
beyond those laid out for us.
We are not waiting for permission to care, to speak.
We are not waiting to inherit a broken world.
We are bold, girls who dare to live our dreams.
When next they speak of us, it will not be with pity,
they will speak of possibility.
Because ours
will not be the story you are used to reading;
ours is the beginning
of a new storytelling.