“Surrender” — Poem inspired by “Madras on Rainy Days”
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Poem:
They tell me I must be pure
My body a temple they will destroy
If I succumb to human impulses.
Yet they market me as a commodity
For the taking of the most eligible bachelor
An object to use as he pleases.
They tell me my blood is impure,
My body so vulgar it must be placed in solitary confinement
Until my bodily fluids cease to offend them.
Yet they tell me I must wave a bloody sheet
Documenting my most intimate experience
Without which I am worthless.
I feel my father’s fists on my chest,
Rough knuckles making contact with trembling skin
Beating away my sexuality blow by blow.
I feel the pain of a wounded being
Stirring inside of me
As I kill what they will not accept.
I feel their hands scrubbing,
Cloaking me in scents and oils
So I can please another.
I feel, I feel, I feel
Yet my body is mine only to surrender
My needs, my comfort, my desires are nothing.
Explanation:
The policing of women’s bodies was a consistent theme throughout Madras on Rainy Days. Layla constantly found her body subject to the whims and expectations of others who sought to control it. Whether she is being cast out of her own bedroom and ostracized for menstruating, or threatened with death if she has premarital sex, or forcibly scrubbed and altered in preparation for her wedding, it is clear that Layla has no right to her own body. In such a patriarchal society, women must surrender their bodies completely; they have no ownership to lose because they never had any to begin with.
In this poem, I wanted to encapsulate the injustice of this by highlighting the powerlessness women feel in the face of the double standards, expectations, and physical violations they are subjected to day in and day out. I based the poem off of Layla’s experiences in Madras in Rainy Days, with references to the bloody sheet she is expected to produce after her wedding night, her secret pregnancy and attempts to end it, and her father’s beatings. I used language of “they” versus “I” to depict the fight for control over her body as a losing battle between the narrator and the rest of her world. I wanted to highlight the double standards women in Layla’s position face, so I juxtaposed stanzas describing these expectations; the first begins with “they tell me I must be pure,” followed by a stanza that begins with “yet they market me as a commodity” to highlight the hypocrisy of suppressing female sexuality on the one hand, and then at the same time valuing women solely as sexual objects. In the last few stanzas of the poem, I sought to portray the irony that despite the woman being the person who actually feels her body and the actions inflicted upon it, her feelings and desires are cast aside as irrelevant by those who claim ownership over her.
