2006-01-19 - 11:58 a.m.
liberian girrrrrrrl. you know that you came and you changed my world...
they elected a woman as the president of liberia. i pondered what forward thinking that represented. what a great stride for women and africans and descendents of africans in the diaspora. but my mind kept going back to the footage i had seen of their civil war. i remembered a little girl being thrown in a mass grave while her father cried out in despair. i remembered the woman who ran the obscenely overcrowded orphanage as she explained that children in her care had NEVER had to go hungry before and now only the ones who met the governments standard of "excessively malnourished" were allowed to be fed. i remembered the woman who was the leader of the rebel army and how she chanted that she would catch president taylor and put him in a dress. how the biggest insult she repeated of him was that he was a woman. the shame. cause no one would want to be called a woman. would they?
liberian girrrrrrl, you know that you came and you changed my world...
what i noticed was completely left out of the nightly news coverage, even on the beloved bbc, was the treatment and condition of the women there. nobody seemed to know if the soldiers on either side were paid in soft black bodies. if the naked, brown silhouettes had been penetrated before they were left for dead, lining the streets of monrovia. if they had grown cold and stiff from fear long before rigor mortis set in. if their last breaths fell on the small neck of a boy child made man by fucking and killing. i wonder if madame president feared for her own life and virtue as the soldiers played tug of war over the bridge and the u.s. peace-keepers were still "on their way."
liberian girrrrrrl, you know that you came and you changed my world...
they elected a woman as president of liberia. a country founded by emancipated slaves who escaped american oppression, only to create some of their own. and isn't it fitting that after the men fight it out in the streets, leaving the country littered with dead and dying and homeless and hungry, that the woman is called in to help make it right again?
