Dorcas Agbogun currently lives in Nigeria, her home country, she is a very recent graduate of Mass Communication at the University of Ilorin, Nigeria. She is a writer across many forms and many of her work is themed on liberating women.
Our world continues to be governed by a macho system which presents itself as natural and therefore unquestionable and invariably a just process. It depends on the sustaining of this ideology as popular to thrive.
A dangerous woman is one who reneges on loyalty to the standards and expectations of the patriarchal society, becoming a threat and danger to its existing system.
DANGEROUS IS NOT SAFE
Be Safe; be weak
You’ll do just fine!
Be the fancy; the prim
Well, that’s mine!
Draw the curtains; lock the doors
Stay in!
But what am I?
Evil? No good?
What is to fear?
Myself?
A thousand pictures
Distorted images
Slivers off a shattered mirror
What you are? Or what you’re told to be?
An iron curtain
But around her mind
Chains
But inside her head
The Macho
He’s Mr. Jailer
He’s the Jury
The sentence
The gaolterm
He’s the charges made.
He said:
She’s evil
She’s no good
She’s to be feared
Even by herself.
Like a scolded child
Face to the wall
The curtains drawn
Door locked
Stayed-in
Now, she’s safe.
A voice calls
Someone’s at the door
I can’t open, it’s locked
– Of course you can; you locked it yourself
But I’m safe this way
– Who said you’re meant to be safe?
Back and forth
And back and forth
To heed the stranger?
Or hide from danger?
For the first time
She pulls open the door
The illusions defragment
Like pieces of a jigsaw.
Be safe? No.
Dangerous is who she truly is
Trojan to the Macho organism
Threat to its system
Untamed by its customs
Nor existing on its terms.
Featured image: Windows by Simon Matzinger on Flickr, used under CC-BY-2.0 license.