My vagina is tired by Nyx

Introduction

This monologue stems from working in activism around gender-based violence on Rhodes campus and within the local Grahamstown context.

My vagina is tired/will listen

My vagina is tired. Weary, soul aching tired – a severe thread of tension pulls from my heart to my vagina. Taut, trembling, near unraveling every time another breaking and entering of a fellow vagina is reported. I enter a room and know, statistically that 2 out of every 3 vaginas have been violated or will be violated at some point in their lives. I feel the fear that is my own, and that of women collective who know not when - but know with certainty that some day it will happen to them.

My vagina is tired. Curl up and stay in bed all week tired. Depressed. Near-numb from listening to other vaginas question, doubt and violate with suspicion the truth of vaginas telling of how they were forced and broken into.

My vagina believes the vagina of a sister when she says she was pushed, broken, spread open, forced. Raped.
Vaginas turn against their sisters bleeding. Maybe because they cannot handle the truth. Maybe because they have been numbed to the point of disbelief. maybe because they cant take another sister in pain, another sister having lost a part of her self.
Maybe because they too believe that women lie about something so physically and psychically traumatic.
I do not know why women turn from each other. I know only that I won’t be that woman.
That I will listen to a vagina when she tells me she is broken and bleeding and needing a sister to be there for her. That she needs someone to believe her when the world turns against her. When her sisters leave her.

I will listen to her because I will need someone to listen to me.