Hannah Holt

“Featherweight by Suzy Kassem


One evening,
I sat by the ocean and questioned the moon about my destiny.
I revealed to it that I was beginning to feel smaller compared to others,
Because the more secrets of the universe I would unlock,
The smaller in size I became.

I didn't understand why I wasn't feeling larger instead of smaller.
I thought that seeking Truth was what was required of us all –
To show us the way, not to make us feel lost,
Up against the odds,
In a devilish game partitioned by
An invisible wall.

Then the next morning,
A bird appeared at my window, just as the sun began
Spreading its yolk over the horizon.
It remained perched for a long time,
Gazing at me intently, to make sure I knew I wasn’t dreaming.
Then its words gently echoed throughout my mind,
Telling me:

'The world you are in –
Is the true hell.
The journey to Truth itself
Is what quickens the heart to become lighter.
The lighter the heart, the purer it is.
The purer the heart, the closer to light it becomes.
And the heavier the heart,
The more chained to this hell
It will remain.'

And just like that, it flew off towards the sun,
Leaving behind a tiny feather.
So I picked it up,
And fastened it to a toothpick,
To dip into ink
And write my name.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“I’ve read Hamlet, I know men suffer.”
― Andrea Dworkin

“She will try to find the nice way to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike. Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligene abhors sentimentality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman could not bribe her way with smiles through a day. Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized. Any vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers; but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis or Clark of the female mind.”
― Andrea Dworkin

“Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin or
circles under the eyes. It is not a superficial flaw in an otherwise
perfect picture. It is not a minor irritation, nor is it a trivial
inconvenience, an occasional aggravation, or a regrettable but
(frankly) harmless lapse in manners. It is not a “point of view”
that some people with soft skins find “ offensive. ” It is the deep
and destructive devaluing of a person in life, a shredding of dignity and self-respect, an imposed exile from human worth
and human recognition, the forced alienation of a person from
even the possibility of wholeness or internal integrity. Inferiority
puts rightful self-love beyond reach, a dream fragmented by
insult into a perpetually recurring nightmare; inferiority creates
a person broken and humiliated inside. The fragments—
scattered pieces and sharp slivers of someone who can never
be made whole—are then taken to be the standard of what is
normal in her kind: women are like that. The insult that hurt
her—inferiority as an assault, ongoing since birth—is seen as a
consequence, not a cause, of her so-called nature, an inferior nature. In English, a graceful language, she is even called a
piece. It is likely to be her personal experience that she is insufficiently
loved. Her subjectivity itself is second-class, her experiences
and perceptions inferior in the world as she is inferior
in the world. Her experience is recast into a psychologically
pejorative judgment: she is never loved enough because she is
needy, neurotic, the insufficiency of love she feels being in and
of itself evidence of a deep-seated and natural dependency. Her
personal experiences or perceptions are never credited as having
a hard core of reality to them. She is, however, never loved
enough. In truth; in point of fact; objectively: she is never loved
enough. As Konrad Lorenz wrote: “ I doubt if it is possible to
feel real affection for anybody who is in every respect one’s inferior.
” 1 There are so many dirty names for her that one rarely
learns them all, even in one’s native language.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse