Showing posts with label Aaliyah Banu. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aaliyah Banu. Show all posts

Saturday, December 3, 2022

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.

Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Day 3 || It's Not Okay: A Poetry Reading


On Saturday, November 27, 2021, Mockingbirds brought to the 2021 Campaign four stunning poetic talents. Aarthi Ashokkumar, Hima Mouli, Aaliyah Banu and Vasanthi Swetha performed their verse for us, moving us from tears to rage and back, leaving us speechless as they tore through the silences that surround every kind of violence. Their poetry spoke of both the violence you can see and the violence you can't--the home that is not a refuge, the fear that holds you back, the words that cut and the transactional relationships that reduce us to commodities. 

Watch "It's Not Okay" here.