For The Bravest Women I Know
By: Rumi N
Activist + Student
How does it feel to be brave? How does one come into it? True bravery, not just the courage accompanying living. How does one go beyond what it already takes to face the plight with strong eye contact, ensuring there is no confusion in how their bravery is intended to be received? Bravery is whole, bravery is consuming, and bravery is necessary.
Bravery is not selfish. Bravery is not monolithic. Bravery is intersectional, all-encompassing, all considering. Bravery takes strength, unwilling, and unknown of the majority. Bravery is a necessity, an action. An extension of the theoretical. The embodiment of courage. While courage is instantaneous, bravery is perpetual. A state of mind, a state of being, a state of necessity, a state of power. Bravery showcases the oppressor’s worst nightmare: contestation to the binary, created out of insecurity, out of unsatiated power, out of the perceived requirement for control.
How is bravery measured? Bravery is not measured in lives lost, wounds had, or shouted words. Bravery is measured in starving children. In religious dogmas. In dissolved human rights. In men in power, men who know the time of their unchecked control is no longer at a supposed concentrated rate. In how sufferable life has become before it is finally too much. Bravery is not a privilege. Bravery is a necessity.
When I look at the multitude of people around the world fighting for their rights, their basic human rights, their freedom of expression, of bodily autonomy, to love who they love, to be themselves, to live a life unencumbered by the systems of colonial modernity, I can’t help but
feel depleted, for I live a life of privilege, and considerably so, based, in part on what my positionality affords me. Why is it that the things I, and so many others, take for granted are the things of revolutions, imprisonment, rape, murder, poisoning, grief…
Every day, we see the beautiful women and people of Iran fighting for the recognition of their basic human rights, personhood, integrity, autonomy, and permanence. We are shown images of brutalities beyond imagination, beyond consideration for many of our courageous minds. I see these atrocities, the pain, and the suffering, and the devastation in my family’s voices each time we speak. I think of my privilege. The privileges accorded by my mere positionality. Because I can go to school without the fear of being killed just for being there…right? I have the power and agency to decide what happens to my own body…right? As a woman, people take my word as the truth. I am never second-guessed, never denigrated, never objectified, never diminished, never raped, never beaten, never subject to the whims of religious fanaticism, and always able to be exactly who I want to be; however, I want to be, in the land of the free, the home of the brave. Liberty and justice for all.
Right…? Or is the gap so perceivably large between them and us, are the deflections of white and Western supremacy so intensely glaring commonalities are no longer realized to an extent never established? The tricks of the mind are tricks of the system. Tricks of the system are tricks of systemic trade. Tricks of this magnitude are tricks of life. We have all been tricked and are constantly being tricked. The courageous point fingers, blame the other, deflect and wonder how this could happen in the freest nation on Earth. The brave? Well, the brave fight even when they know it means no tomorrow. For the collective. For those who have the privilege of watching bravery from the outside. Iranian women are the bravest women I know. See their bravery, hear their cries, see the intrinsic link.
For the bravest women I know: thank you for fighting for what everyone should be fighting for. We thank you, we see you, and we are you. Jin Jîan Azadî. Zan Zendegi Azadi.
