What African Women think inside - A review of poetry on Batuo’s World

Blog reviewed by George Esunge Fominyen

Originally published in http://www.gefominyen.com/

Is it easy to be an African woman? Always having other people deciding what you do, have, like or say; and how you should feel and act. Except if you are a woman like Joyce Ashutantang; a Cameroonian literary academic, actress, playwright, scriptwriter and poet.

In a series of poems posted on her blog –Batuo’s World – she masterfully brings out women's  innermost feelings about love and life that some of society’s “protectors” in her country and continent of origin would want gagged and buried inside.

One of those issues is whether to allow women choose to keep or terminate pregnancy within given conditions. In “Sarah Palin: A Poem for Women” Ashutantang writes: “She can kill a moose, I can’t / She touts a gun, I hate guns / She derides abortions; I stand by them; my body is mine…”

Recently in Cameroon, persons who speak for women (and who seem to know better than women about choices they should make) got thousands of men and women to march on the streets against the parliament’s decision to ratify the Protocol to theAfrican Charter on Human and People's Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa which simply provides that right to choose.

How many contemporary Cameroonian women would hate to be given the choice to terminate or keep a pregnancy they got because a group of brutes (in that insecurity infested country) stormed into a home, asked the “head of the family” to hand-over the Njangi money he just received,sexually abused him, gang raped his wife and three daughters and asked him (father of the house) to have sex with his own daughters under the pressure of a gun to his temple?

The protestors were told it (the protocol) was ratifying homosexuality (I didn't see that in the Protocol) and murder.

Article 14, paragraph 2C of the Maputo Protocol simply requires of states to: “protect the reproductive rights of women by authorising medical abortion in cases of sexual assault, rape, incest, and where the continued pregnancy endangers the mental and physical health of the mother or the life of the mother or the unborn child”

If a woman’s body is hers, to paraphrase Ashutantang, isn’t she entitled to decide whether it is a gift from heaven or hell to carry (for nine-months) the foetus from a violent sexual relationship with an HIV infected gangster or live to nurture a child born of one’s own father?

Beyond what meets the eye

The rhythm, tempo and colour of Ashutangtang’s poems on Batuo’s world are so entrapping one may miss the undertones.

Is it easy to be an African woman? Always having other people deciding what you do, have, like or say; and how you should feel and act. Except if you are a woman like Joyce Ashutantang; a Cameroonian literary academic, actress, playwright, scriptwriter and poet.

In a series of poems posted on her blog –Batuo’s World – she masterfully brings out women's  innermost feelings about love and life that some of society’s “protectors” in her country and continent of origin would want gagged and buried inside.

One of those issues is whether to allow women choose to keep or terminate pregnancy within given conditions. In “Sarah Palin: A Poem for Women” Ashutantang writes: “She can kill a moose, I can’t / She touts a gun, I hate guns / She derides abortions; I stand by them; my body is mine…”

Recently in Cameroon, persons who speak for women (and who seem to know better than women about choices they should make) got thousands of men and women to march on the streets against the parliament’s decision to ratify the Protocol to theAfrican Charter on Human and People's Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa which simply provides that right to choose.

How many contemporary Cameroonian women would hate to be given the choice to terminate or keep a pregnancy they got because a group of brutes (in that insecurity infested country) stormed into a home, asked the “head of the family” to hand-over the Njangi money he just received,sexually abused him, gang raped his wife and three daughters and asked him (father of the house) to have sex with his own daughters under the pressure of a gun to his temple?

The protestors were told it (the protocol) was ratifying homosexuality (I didn't see that in the Protocol) and murder.

Article 14, paragraph 2C of the Maputo Protocol simply requires of states to: “protect the reproductive rights of women by authorising medical abortion in cases of sexual assault, rape, incest, and where the continued pregnancy endangers the mental and physical health of the mother or the life of the mother or the unborn child”

If a woman’s body is hers, to paraphrase Ashutantang, isn’t she entitled to decide whether it is a gift from heaven or hell to carry (for nine-months) the foetus from a violent sexual relationship with an HIV infected gangster or live to nurture a child born of one’s own father?

Beyond what meets the eye

The rhythm, tempo and colour of Ashutangtang’s poems on Batuo’s world are so entrapping one may miss the undertones.