This ‘Brazen: Reflections’ series was born out of a desire to continue the conversations springing out of the ‘Too Early For Birds: Brazen’ theatre performance in Nairobi in July 2018. TEFB-Brazen was a mix of straight-up scripted theatre, narration, poetry, music and dance that featured the little-known stories of six fearless women in Kenya’s history – freedom fighters like Field Marshall Muthoni wa Kirima, Mekatilili wa Menza and Wangu wa Makeri; democracy activists Philomena Chelagat Mutai and Zarina Patel and even one iconoclastic yet nameless woman warrior who brought down Lwanda Magere, the legendary ‘Man of Stone’ in Kenyan folklore. The story of each hero was narrated by a corresponding mirror character on stage. The ‘Brazen: Reflections’ series seeks to explore the idea of brazenness, what it means in our daily lives, whom the idea of brazenness privileges or erases, and the place that brazenness has in imagining freedom.
Help me unpatriarchize myself
For I know no better.
Help me to see myself deeper than they see me.
Help me break boundaries,
Because these chains,
Are MAN made.
Help me see myself as more
Than a bearer of children
And cooker of food.
Help me see myself as more than an extract of a rib
Just a helper?
Help me Liberate myself,
Price myself high.
But they call me a whore because I ask for money,
Knowing they can’t afford me
Yet they?
Have sex for free.
Help me re-tell and re-sing and re-live
Help me re-write his-tory to her-story
Drink deep from the breasts of my Ancestors
Knowing that I,
Am but a reincarnation of Her.
Aren’t we all?
Help me see my kinks and wide nose
and full hips and thick lips and dark skin,
As beauty.
Help me not change my genetic make up for other types of make up.
Help me see my clitoris,
As a gift,
8000 nerve endings,
Solely for pleasure,
They don’t want me to feel good,
So they cut it off.
Help me be a force,
A movement.
A bringer of change and a breaker of norms.
Help me,
To be at the forefront,
To contest for that seat,
To amend those laws,
To be the first
Among many more to come.
Unpartriarchize me,
Oh Matriarchy,
Before you we stand,
Sinful and Stained
Unto you,
We cry.
