Sylvia Wynter's Dream

I wrote a poem last academic year for a creative writing course at school. The portfolio got me an A+.

Was it the trauma that was so enrapturing? The way my body writhed and shuddered on the pages of those poems? Perhaps the way I recounted it softly? The way it inched into the ears and split the mind open when read?

Completely removed from the occurrence at the time, I recalled the events, wrote the drafts, edited the form, and sat back while my academic peers ripped through it in workshop.

“I like this line, but it has an abstract that needs to be removed.”

“Aaliyah you can do better. Tell it like it is.”

Tell it like it is? That would be easy, save now I cannot but think of the poem or the event without screaming. The way I screamed on the days when my mom left me at my cousin’s house. The way I screamed when heavy hands clamped mine to the bed and tried to scream when my womb ripped open from his jagged, perverted desire. The way I screamed on my knees at the altar at church.

Not screaming out of praise and adoration like all the little girls beside me on the altar. Nor want for salvation like the unsaved. My bellows were from the bottom of my guts. The heart wrenching wailing from the belly of a woman, travailing in childbirth, where her child has not survived. The cry that froths up from the womb of a mother having lost the seventh baby, her own body turning against her deepest desires. Rachel’s blood curdling cry for her children, slaughtered at the hands of Herod the Great – as he searched for my savior, a bounty on his newborn head.

The cry of the Israelites from as far back as Judges 19. A woman’s body, violated, cut to pieces, not yet avenged. The cry I wished my mother would cry for me. But she was enraptured in something else, so I cried on the altar for myself. Aged five, already defiled.

I sat back on the pews after I could cry out no more. I listened to the sermon continue – the blessed Virgin Mary. An emblem of hope for women, that our Father sees our deeds. A picture of faith and endurance. So perfect, so pure.