#themiraproject

[themiraproject]

The City and Me

I’m 13, barely growing into my body, and I don’t know the city enough. Home to school to back home, my relationship with the city’s roads are defined in bus rides and sweltering Sundays spent in Connaught Place, surrounded by café-hoppers and chewing tobacco lovers. The only place I can recognize like the soles of my feet is the round bookstore near the place where my mother buys her jhumkas and kurtas. People only look at me to sell me things, as I navigate the city on my mother’s terms.

I’m 15, and we trace footsteps to the mall and back. We make space for ourselves in movie theatres and coffee shops. My friends learn to be loud in groups while I follow them with feathery footsteps and a pair of lips permanently stitched together with shyness. I chalk it up to the fact that I’m just the girl we’re all supposed to learn to be anyway – my silence is a head-start as we all grow into the gender the billboards teach us to become.

I’m 17, body growing in places I don’t understand the meaning of, and no one bothers to explain. We look at the women in Swarovski and Chanel posters and try to figure out where our bodies fit. We become more acquainted in the mall and corners where it’s safe for boys to touch us. We become more acquainted with “safety”: don’t stay out past 8, don’t step into an autorickshaw without calling your mother first, don’t invite boys at home, don’t, don’t, don’t. I am taught to spell “woman” before I am taught to spell “freedom” but I am told I’m allowed to experience both equally. “Equality” is reduced to a set of syllables like the murmuring of my mother praying each morning, and I wonder what do these words mean – if this is meant for me, why is it that I’m still taught how to use pepper spray before I am taught how to drive? “Equality” is an auto-ride into cognitive dissonance. “Freedom” is a trip to the mall. My reality is a world apart from the white women in all the advertisements. Sometimes I feel like a consumer, but mostly I too feel like a product, and the city is moulding me to become both at the same time.

I’m 19 and freedom tastes different: it tastes like wet earth in parks we were always forbidden to visit, passive smoke and cheap chicken rolls. Freedom looks like the walls of forts and monuments and history I’m just beginning to discover. Freedom looks like a city I’ve lived in all my life and am only now experiencing. The city teaches me to revel in it, to brave the crowds and the staring, the “eveteasing” and the hands trying to grope you on busy metro trains. We shed the word “safety” and “security” and learn the ways of the world as we wear down the broken footpath edges with our busy feet.

I’m 21 and the city is on fire. I become part of the protests in university, I run from the men who chase us with slurs about our bodies in one breath and slogans about the nation in another. Freedom looks more and more like transformation of the city and the self. It is no more centred on my desire to consume. I loiter in parks after dark but only when I am allowed to. The possibilities in the city present itself: public spaces, accessible to all, that can change the nature of how we mingle with each other. Finding friendship on sweltering afternoons at Arts Fac, or at chai stalls in CR Park, I finally understand this is what it means to be part of a city, and for the city to be part of me.

Shirin Choudhary is a poet, activist and enthusiast of hugs from New Delhi, India. They love to talk/write about human rights, poetry, literature, love and the pleasures of holding your friend's hands.

[viperslang]

The Belle Grotesque was fully realized today. Salud!

(Vale la pena. Do the work that matters.)

[thewriterscaravan]

A community for discussions, awareness, sharing on womanhood, womyn identified issues - neurodivergence, safety, arts & healing.

Go follow.

[themiraproject]

IF YOU TEACH A GIRL WHAT POWER MEANS

After If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

If you go to an all-girls school, you learn several adjectives to describe women, or les femmes: belles, jolies, jeunes, grandes, petites. Girls aren’t just girls but women of women of action, learning, empowerment. You learn that women have a say. Women are women of power but more than that, women are power: la puissance. The noun is feminine.

If words like la puissance and les femmes become associated with one another, you learn that there are spaces where women matter. There are student council seats that lead to seats in Congress, in government. Female representation matters & so do you.

If you read Adrienne Rich’s poetry in your feminist studies class, you learn that Marie Curie died from the same source as her power. You begin to wonder whether power is something radioactive, a bottle amber. You begin to wonder if power is tangible. A solid, molecules packed tightly together.

Sometimes if you try and express your power, you are silenced. Power is taken from you. You discover that you are wounded from the very same radium you have been purifying. You learn that there are adjectives. Belles, jolies, jeunes, grandes petites. Adjectives that affirm women as powerful, worth respecting. But there are also words that are antitheses. Slut and whore and bitch. Nouns that take your power away.

If you learn what power means, you start to think that maybe it wasn’t the radium, but Marie Curie. Solid, tangible. You start wondering if you can touch it too.

Valerie Wu is a Chinese American student in  California. She was a National Gold Medalist in the 2017 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Her work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times Insider, and more.

[viperslang]

It has been roughly a little over an year since I started The Mira Project and today I woke up to this -- we are in the national newspapers!

This is fulfilling and affirming and helps me continue to do the work we are laboring at through this initiative. 

I encourage all the women/trans/gender nc/queer folks to share their stories against street harassment, gendered violence and in support of mental health at  @themiraproject or write to us at themiraproject at gmail dot com.

[themiraproject]

This is Your Space

This is a community-built space for discussions on gender, mental health, street harassment and gender-based violence.

If you have a story about dealing with gender-based violence and/or street-harassment, please send it to us. 500-600 word count is recommended but please feel free to discuss more with us if you need to convey and communicate additional information.

We publish stories both - anonymously and also with people’s names attached to them, depending on what you are comfortable with. The whole idea here is to give you space to process your feelings, share your story and your survival and feel heard.

You can send us your story via the submission box or you can mail us at themiraproject at gmail dot com.

Take Space. Without Apologies.

[themiraproject]

Afghan artist Kubra Khademi’s 8-minute walk in Kabul in armour to highlight male street harassment and abuse of women.

[viperslang]

Coming Soon. The Mira Collective Reading Series.

[viperslang]

The Mira Project is a global conversation about gender, violence and mental health focussed on women // woman-identified folx. We are a growing and thriving community that uses storytelling and expressive arts to speak about street harassment, gendered violence & neurodivergence without pathologizing survivors. Document your presence, your survival and your voice.

Do you have a story you want to share with us or perhaps you want to add your story to our current story bank? 

Write to me : themiraproject at gmail dot com

Take space. Without apologies. 

[viperslang]

the mira project

@themiraproject is my global, cross-cultural dialogue against gendered violence & street harassment faced by women/woman-identified/trans/non-binary folx. we curate stories and experiences of having faced and fought against gendered violence.

we want to hear from you & invite you to share your story. 

please visit the website or send us an email : themiraproject at gmail dot com

[viperslang]

Pretty excited to reveal that I will be speaking at AlterConf about the work we are doing via “The Mira Project”

[viperslang]

On a daily basis, I tend to invoke Gloria Anzaldua and wrap myself in her mantra that I am not going to persevere in a tradition of silence. This allows me to pivot the axis of our project into a new terrain for newer opportunities. A lot of my work currently involves creating and holding space for collaborative storytelling that is slowly patterning itself into an enduring mosaic of resilience and expressive art. It is a unique and formerly uncharted space for me. My learning curve is evolving on a daily basis. The hardest part is striving for the thoroughness of a prolonged equilibrium in how we curate the stories that are shared with us with a preamble for radical compassion. It is not easy for the participants in this project to invite us into the cloister of their experience without considering the implications. It is definitely not easy reading through a lot of it either but all of it is necessary, needed..

Scherezade Siobhan on @themiraproject, Interviewed at The Red Elephant Foundation

[themiraproject]

[themiraproject]

An open poem to sisters

[themiraproject]

MIRROR

Sometimes, she told me, liking someone is just a way to pass the time. Each illicit word a loose tooth slipping from the open mouth of our class flirt— the kindest name fourteen-year-olds pinned to a girl infamous through every grade for tucking teachers' names under her tongue as if forbidden candy in place of hunger. See, we hadn’t understood yet where the empty comes from even though we had been told girls were always wanting to be filled. How, across the vast foyer that held only waiting, sunlight launched silver curveballs off the sleek roof of every car rounding the smooth driveway & yet never quite caught our shadows. Her arm, bright with sweat, near enough to radiate dangerous heat. I thought she meant pretending the way every bright carriage becomes a cool hand in an afternoon buzzing with searching bodies so I breathed I understand into the space separating any two mouths. But I didn’t know, then, how waiting turns the waking hours into one long stretch for tomorrow until the makeshift relief of fiction turns into the tenuous thing itself. Once, beyond outflung classroom doors, I saw her touching herself under battered desks with a blacksmith’s hands. The shape of loneliness splintering a body into pathways out of fear. The precarious attempt to know wholeness not as sensation but indescribable matter. Her fingers moving fast & brutal as if mapping blue edges of the unseen sky. This is what it means to really want something. Her open mouth an iris ringed with desperation deeper than shame. You’ll forsake everything if only to be real—

Natalie Wee is the author of Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines (Words Dance Publishing, 2016) and Once in a Blue Moon (BookThug, 2018). She has been published or has work forthcoming in numerous publications, including The Adroit Journal, Drunken Boat, Room Magazine, & more. She has been nominated for the 2016 Best of the Net Anthology and a Pushcart Prize. Find her first book at http://natalieweepoetry.com/.

[themiraproject]

#DearMira is an online initiative extended to women who have experienced street harassment and gendered violence in any shape or form. Very frequently, the complicit silence and negation around the subject means those who experience have to normalize what happens to them or even justify it. Patriarchy is deadwood. Am chopping it up. I am a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist trained in Ratio Emotive Behavioural Therapy with extensive experience in working with organizations, individuals, communities. As part of this initiative, am inviting womxn of all nationalities, shapes, sizes, colours to write to themiraproject@gmail.com if you need help processing any instance of street harassment or would like an empathetic, listening space. It is a support  system where I listen, pay attention and help you with resources to process what you have experienced. I will respond to each email personally. Feel free to share this widely with your own networks. Catharsis is always shared. Catharsis is a conversation. Conversations build communities.