Making a Difference

Unborn Poem I labored, but could not deliver at the place where poems are born. I wanted to birth a poem in Thandiwe's voice, take you to the scariest room of her seventeen-month-old mind, hear a baby girl's worst trauma in South Africa, the world's rape capital. Thandiwe's chocolate-kiss mouth doesn't chatter words like "virgin myth," a belief that sex with a virgin, the younger the better, cures AIDS. Babies who play peek-a-boo with trusted adults, cling to them like love magnets, savor silly songs, not sexual assault. I hoped my poetic pregnancy would yield waters of rancid reality. Thandiwe would speak through me, explain how a fragile flower was plundered. We would hear what it was like to be five months old, have two men cut her open with a bottle, rape her until her pelvic floor burned like a forest fire. One year, three operations later, her sewn-up body bristles with lightning from her colostomy-bag changing. Terror stalks her in dreams of demons roaming freely like the men who raped her. No security blanket protects babies during a rape epidemic swaddled in a silent conspiracy. I wanted to bring forth a poem with Thandiwe speaking her own anguish. But, a toddler's woeful words couldn't describe the horror of being plunged into hell¹s ghetto where her raped, mutilated body was left screaming in a pool of blood that almost washed her off the planet. Frances Shani Parker 2003