Sometimes, on a gloomy day when things fall short of a good feeling, I find myself wondering about the long generation of women that have existed before me. And not much to my surprise, I am more taken aback confronting the reality than healing from the gloominess. The women before me have lived in me through tales that are never remembered enough and through a quench to know them better that will possibly never occur. All I know is that, the women in this very patrilineal clan that I belong to had stories to tell, numerous untold stories that went away with them, and lots of others that still live in their hearts but will never burst out in an ugly impression.
In recent years, I’ve discovered more value and worth in being a woman than anything I have achieved as a bare minimum. Maybe it is the vulnerabilities I have peeked through in just one glance, or the readings of their palms that have now been replaced by continuous juggle between who they are and who they wanted to be. Maybe it is the brunt of never unloading the vicious ways of how they were supposed to be or the way we’ve been marching ahead in recent times as opposed to it.
Every single woman before us carried her own story irrespective of the hold over the narrative. But these stories are far less fetched and almost negligible in existence because it is not untrue that with generations of women – has gone away a generation of heritage that nobody cared enough about. So why are some stories sung around merrily, and why do some never deserve enough room? Why is the ontical and ontological actuality of our women never a good enough reason to celebrate or remember them?
Preserving the emergence of each woman’s womanhood is pretty much, what I believe, a way of grasping a firm hold of ourselves. If only we barely cared about the precious treasure or the baggage of history that our women have carried and passed on to us for such a long time, I reckon, we’d have a great time rediscovering our way of existence. It looks unfair to me that on one hand I have celebrated almost everything that has got to do with the pater’s lineage whereas on the other, I can barely trace a few generations of mothers.
Even then, despite this cruel structural and systemic interference, I find myself living through my women’s lenses. I believe, resilience is the heirloom of this generation of women. Most of us did not just wake up one day and decide that we no longer wanted to cater to these patriarchal norms. We had our guts screaming out at us. We had something so strong hit us in the pit of our stomach – pushing us towards all extremes to create stories that shall never dare be forgotten.
We also know that it’s the women before us and the women after us that have embarked our storytelling. And while we work to pave better storyline for the women of the future, we must never not untangle the stories of the women of the past that still live within our core being. We need to get to the roots of this resilience, honor, revitalize, and try passing on their and our stories before they too are washed away with the ashes.
