Bernadette

“I looked the word up in the dictionary, it said: Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes. My great-grandmother, from stories I’ve heard, was a feminist. She ran away from the house of the man she did not want to marry and married the man of her choice. She refused, protested, spoke up when she felt she was being deprived of land and access because she was female. She did not know that word feminist. But it doesn’t mean she wasn’t one. More of us should reclaim that word. The best feminist I know is my brother Kene, who is also a kind, good-looking, and very masculine young man. My own definition is a feminist is a man or a woman who says, yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better. All of us, women and men, must do better.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“SEASONS OF LIFE

Sometimes I fall
And feel myself slowly wilt and die,
But then I suddenly spring back on my feet
To go play in the sun outside.
I am no different than the weather,
The planets or the trees;
For there do not always have to be reasons
For the seasons turning inside of me.
The magnetism that swirls
In the sky, land, and sea
Are the exact same currents found twirling
In the electric ocean within me.
I am a moving vessel of energy.
And if my emotions do not
Flow up, down,
Within and around,
Then I am not alive.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“the politics behind witch hunts concerns a new vision of the world, where women who insisted on their rights to value land, to their freedom to common, had no place.14 It was in their defense of commoning that women were killed as witches.”
― Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy

“The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.”
― Harlan Ellison, Strange Wine