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Womens Power article by : @Lerato Ngakane ” The Intergalatic Love Movement 528 Hz “
| Creative Direction and Photography by : @diskomodirapula
In 2020, when you think of the word woman, what do we as a society associate it with? The popular rhetoric is an inanimate object, usually used as a projectile when raging tension mounts and the rapture of insurgency ripples across the already fragile fault lines in society. My favourite utilisation for the projectile is in the well-known treacherous affairs of the heart, when another female swoops in for a graceful coup d’état and saunters into the sunset with her newly acquired prisoner of love. It is by and large very effective both figuratively and literally but the trouble with a rock is that it is only expedient, as a function of another. Only when you pick up the rock, only when you fling it in anger, as retaliation, to damage and cause destruction, do you see its raw force.
I’m compelled to talk about the nature of force and the undeniable force of nature that is the women of South Africa. See them in pockets of fabulous, brandishing their glorious and unencumbered wits and tits – weaving effortlessly through the concrete maze of patriarchy seemly impervious to the arrows aimed at their steady strides. See them standing tall in the graves dug for their demise for all the trouble they cause in boardrooms and bedrooms alike. The women of this country are burdened with the brunt of men who don’t know that their destiny is intrinsically fixed in the tears we shed when we consciously uncouple ourselves from them because it hurts to love them. Them…they have somehow drifted so far from our orbit and have become shadows that grow tall as the sun dissolves into darkness. And they own the night, peddling fear and fright under the guise and glaze of nightlife.
It is here that we become victims, in our short skirts and 17-inch Peruvians, gyrating hips and “we are here to party attitude” that they are injured by our audacity to exist in their midst without paying the levy for freedom. How dare this female creature, how dare she turn me on, how dare she drink my money, how dare she expect me to keep her safe when she rolls her imposing behind to the swelling beats of Wizkid like that. Because for men, we have somehow become, unbeknown to us, transactional entities and on their night turf they have all the privileges and liberties to parade their masculinity, to decree the laws of their desires which must be satisfied at whatever cost. So no, the night doesn’t belong to us all. She who dares might die, might get spiked or stealthed, raped or maimed or all of the above. I shudder to think what type of woman it takes to survive these forces. Yet, they live among us, disfigured by culture and religion, in a society that celebrates their brand of cult.
I want to be she who survives but I’m famished, under-fed in my longing to find the balance between the forces of female and male energy. We are in dangerous territory, threatened by each other’s deafening screams. We shout “stop!” and they shout “not all! Not all of us!” And we shout all! And they shout back and we drown in the noise, tearing at each other, blinded by the rage and we begin to weaponize our feminine essence, hurling the stones, the rocks in our own defence. And between us and them stands the glasshouse of our collective sanctity. The place of peace where we all stand to gain if we all for just one second saw through the pain. We need to heal. We need to love. I can’t #menaretrash anymore.
