Refuser

By Eve Ensler

From the Lebanese mountains
To the Kenyan village of El Doret
We are practicing self-defense
Versed in Karate, Tai Chi, Judo, and Kung Foo
We are no longer surrendering to our fate.

Now, we are the ones who walk our girl friends home from school.
And we don’t do it with macho. We do it with cool.

Our mothers are the Pink Sari Gang
Fighting off the drunken men
With rose pointed fingers and sticks in
Uttar Pradesh.
The Peshmerga women
in the Kurdish mountains
with barrettes in their hair
and AK47s instead of pocket books.

We are not waiting anymore to be taken and retaken. We are the Liberian women sitting in the Africa sun blockading the exits til the men figure it out. We are the Nigerian women babies strapped to out backs occupying the oil terminals of Chevron. We are the women of Kerala who refused to let Coca Cola privatize our water. We are Cindy Sheehan showing up in Crawford without a plan.

We are all those who forfeited husbands boyfriends and dates Cause we were married to our mission. We know love comes from all directions and in many forms.

We are Malalai who spoke back to the Afghan Loya Jurga And told them they were “raping warlords” and She kept speaking even when they kept trying to blow up her house.

And we are Zoya whose radical mother was shot dead when Zoya was only a child so she was fed on revolution which was stronger than milk

And we are the ones who kept and loved our babies even though they have the faces of our rapists.

We are the girls who stopped cutting ourselves to release the pain And we are the girls who refused to have our clitoris cut And give up our pleasure.

We are: Rachel Corrie who wouldn’t couldn’t move away from the Israeli tank. Aung San Suu Kyi who still smiles after years of not being able to leave her room. Anne Frank who survives now cause she wrote down her story. We are Neda Soltani gunned down by a sniper in the streets of Tehran as she voiced a new freedom and way And we are Asmaa Mahfouz from the April 6th movement in Egypt Who twittered an uprising.

We are the women riding the high seas to offer Needy women abortions on ships. We are women documenting the atrocities in stadiums with video cameras underneath our Burqas. We are seventeen and living for a year in a tree And laying down in the forests to protect wild oaks. We are out at sea interrupting the whale murders. We are freegans, vegans, trannies But mainly we are refusers. We don’t accept your world Your rules your wars We don’t accept your cruelty and unkindness. We don’t believe some need to suffer for others to survive Or that there isn’t enough to go around Or that corporations are the only and best economic arrangement And we don’t hate boys, okay? That’s another bullshit story.

We are refusers But we crave kissing. We don’t want to do anything before we’re ready but it could be sooner than you think and we get to decide and we are not afraid of what is pulsing through us. It makes us alive.

Don’t deny us, criticize us or infantilize us. We don’t accept checkpoints, blockades or air raids We are obsessed with learning. On the barren Tsunamied beaches of Sri Lanka In the desolate and smelly remains Of the lower ninth We want school. We want school. We want school.

We know if you plan too long Nothing happens and things get worse and that Most everything is found in the action and instinctively we get that the scariest thing isn’t dying, but not trying at all.

And when we finally have our voice and come together when we let ourselves gather the knowledge when we stop turning on each other but direct our energy towards what matters when we stop worrying about our skinny ass stomachs or too frizzy hair or fat thighs when we stop caring about pleasing and making everyone so incredibly happy- We got the Power.

If Janis Joplin was nominated the ugliest man on her campus And they sent Angela Davis to jail If Simone Weil had manly virtues And Joan of Arc was hysterical If Bella Abzug was eminently obnoxious And Ellen Sirleaf Johnson is considered scary If Arundhati Roy is totally intimidating and Rigoberta Menchu is pathologically intense And Julia Butterfly Hill is an extremist freak Call us hysterical then Fanatical Eccentric Delusional Intimidating Eminently obnoxious Militant Bitch Freak Tattoo me Witch Give us our broomsticks And potions on the stove We are the girls who are aren’t afraid to cook.

“Refuser” is published in Eve’s newest work - I AM AN EMOTIONAL CREATURE: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World