Day 8: Stand in Solidarity or Sit in Silence! Poetry Reading

Images  by: Selvaraj 

On the 8th day of the 2022 Prajnya 16 Days Campaign Against Gender Violence, we partnered with Mockingbirds and InKo Centre and organised a poetry reading. This year, we had Srilata K, Kutti Revathi, Aaliyah Banu, Manushi Bharathi and Amrin Khalil reading their poetry.

The poetry reading covered a wide range of themes like body politics, domestic violence, religious identities and rights of transgender persons, to name a few. A few of the poets were also of the firm view that their work does fundamentally stay rooted in the idea that "personal is political".

“You see, Women must fight to be alive

The world isn't a nice place

For a woman, even the air she breathes is luxury

Something that is given to her

Something she will be held accountable for” 

- excerpt from Aaliyah's work, "The Angry Poem"

Kutti Revathi, in her conversation with Saradha U, for the TNM piece noted that, the performers provided the audience with a holistic perspective on the voices of women, with each poetry providing a different perspective, and acknowledging that the efforts made by the poets to put their voices out there is not easy (Saradha, 2022, as cited in The News Minute, 2022)

You may read the elaborate coverage of our event by Saradha U for The News Minute here.