Today I pared it down to the bare minimum.

Surrounded by 15 youthful young faces around the ages of seven years old – ten years old, I found myself helping to make posters and placards for the annual Take Back the Night March tomorrow evening.

In the community centre room, the kids got crazy with paintbrushes, glue, markers, and crayons. And time and time again, I was asked “what are we making these for?”

We have been asked not to mention the “sexual” in sexual violence awareness week. So with not much else to go on, I answered quite simply.

I explained that we were making posters that people would hold up on sticks in a big march tomorrow night for women and children under the age of 12, and that the march was against violence. Simple. That’s it.

Kids are never so simple.

“What’s violence?”
“Who’s fighting?”
“Why are they fighting?”

How to explain to children these not-so-simple things? Their posters, so brilliant, were covered with peace symbols, trees, birds, butterflies, sometimes people. They had slogans such as “stop fighting” on them.

But to explain all the eccentricities and complexities of violence – how to do that with kids? How, when I don’t even know myself still?

Tomorrow night I’m going to march for the 5th year in the Take Back the Night March. One of my favorite nights of the year, it also saddens me.

I am empowered.
I am taking initiative.
I am taking charge.
I am taking control.
I am taking back power.

And…

I hear you all.
I listen.
I empathize.
I weep.

I am empassioned anew.

There is a moment during the march, when each woman and child is given the opportunity to approach the steps of the courthouse building, and mark with chalk a simple “X” to make visible the many women who have been silenced through violence, silenced through our legal and judicial systems. Who are not named, and deseve to be named. I watch each woman approach – my friends, colleagues, coworkers, acquaintances, sisters – and mark 1, 2, 5, sometimes more X’s on the courthouse building. I myself mark so many. For so many I know. For myself. I weep. And I am empassioned anew.

Empassioned for yet another year.

Still with no answers for these children who ask me “who’s fighting?” and “why are they fighting?”

Why?
I have no answers. But I’m ready to try again, to learn and to stop the violence.

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Kymaro said:

The empowerment of women exists because of being pushed down through a series of legal, political, domestic, foreign, and personal struggles by man and traditions. Events like Take Back The Night is a reminder that women should be revered, not pushed down. Equal, not suburbanite, and most of all, free not indentured in how we feel our place is in society as a whole.

February 16, 2010 | url

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