I Will Not Bear You Sons

A poem can glisten like a fresh wound. Usha Akella pays tribute to her own life and to that of other women. Writing from her Niyogi Brahmin sensibility with which she grew up, her poems are the medium for the unsilenced voice both of her own story and those of women across various cultures. She calls for a united womanhood in her poems dedicated to women violated through rape, caste, FGM, foot binding, mysticism, politics, terrorism, and other patriarchal abuses to the women who have triumphed against subjugation building new ways of being. Rage has not caste, needs no algorithm, light a pyre with it of chopped thumbs and scripted dreams.