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Mona Eltahawy Profile picture
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8 Dec, 12 tweets, 4 min read
Dec. 8, 2011: I had surgery on my left arm to straighten the fractured bone so that it could fuse properly, after Egyptian riot police broke it during the Mohamed Mahmoud protest on Nov 23/24. Mona lying on a hospital bed under a blanket. She is wearing
The ortho surgeon inserted a titanium plate & 5 screws and I have a beautiful faint white scar that reminds me.

Soon after surgery,I flew from NYC to meet my family at my brother’s home in the Midwest: I asked for a wheelchair because I could not do anything w/both arms in casts Mona with an arm in a sling and another in a cast. She is we
At boarding gate, I started to cry because I felt sorry for myself.

Onboard, I asked the woman sitting next to me to open the bottle that contained my pain killers. She asked what happened to me. I told her but knew that what had happened would be impossible for most to absorb.
I’m not writing this so that you can cry and feel sorry for me too. I’m writing this because after I arrived at my brother’s home, I told one of my nieces that the doctor told my treatment included a kiss on my cheek once a day. The sweet girl delivered my medicine once a day!
That same niece a few years later had this conversation with me:
Niece: I know why you got tattoos. (pointing to my forearms)
Me: Why?
Niece: Because they broke those arms and you wanted to say ‘I’m free and awesome! (Pause) Why did they break your arms? feministgiant.com/p/essay-my-amb…
Me: They wanted to scare me and make me go home and stop protesting.
Niece: Did you go home?
Me: No
Niece: Good!

Fuck the patriarchy in every time zone and every universe. I have passed the baton to the girls, you fuckers. They’re coming for you.

feministgiant.com/p/write-danger…
If feminism is like a relay, that conversation with my niece was the moment I passed into her hands the Baton of Free and Awesome, as she so beautifully put it.

I also call it the baton of ambition; an ambition that tells a girl she can be more than.

feministgiant.com/p/essay-my-amb…
The most dangerous writing is that through which we are known because to insist on being known--especially as a woman--is the ultimate disobedience to the directive that we must be modest, shrink to fit ourselves to patriarchy’s measurements, compliant to its dictates.
Why else are we alive but to be known as the ultimate act of revolt against silence? Is that not freedom: to spit out our silences and in the doing to slay shame and fear?
Words are important--to fight silence, shame, fear and the violence that that trifecta exacts on us. Words are flags planted on the planets of our beings, they say this is mine, I have fought for it and despite your best attempts, I am still here.

feministgiant.com/p/write-danger…
I am the daughter of the taboos and silences from which I fought to free myself.

I am the sister of every woman struggling against the oppressive forces that have suffocated us at home and on the streets and which find their power reflected back to them by the state.
I am the best friend of the woman who marches in protest against the political despots outside and continues that protest against the personal despots inside.

Words help us find each other & overcome the isolation that threatens to overwhelm & to break us feministgiant.com

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More from @monaeltahawy

Mona Eltahawy Profile picture
7 Dec
The focus of #16DaysofActivism2021 to End Gender-Based Violence is femicide: the killing of a woman or a girl by a man because of her gender, sometimes also used to refer to the epidemic of women killed by men in intimate settings 16dayscampaign.org/wp-content/upl… feministgiant.com/p/essay-the-te…
If terrorism means politically-motivated violence intended to scare us into changing the way we behave, then surely femicide is terrorism. Patriarchy is the ideology; cis men are the terrorists.

#16Days
Unless we impose on societal consciousness just how quotidian violence against women is and how it is ordinary men who commit it, it will continue to benefit ordinary men. It does.

Say it. Violence against women is everyday; ordinary men commit it.
Read 8 tweets
Mona Eltahawy Profile picture
2 Dec
Read this article about Dr. Meera Shah, a New York physician who monthly commutes to South Bend, Indiana — an 800-mile trip across four states — to perform abortions. I am grateful to her and abortion providers everywhere washingtonpost.com/national/this-…
In 2020, I was asked to blurb Dr. Shah’s powerful You’re the Only One I’ve Told: The Stories Behind Abortion, in which she shares the personal narratives of people who have had abortion but who have rarely if ever told anyone. youretheonlyoneivetold.com Cover of the book You're the Only One I've Told (letters in
I enthusiastically blurbed Dr. Shah’s book because the narratives are vital and because she is one of the few women of colour doctors I know of who write openly about providing abortion care.

Read 5 tweets
Mona Eltahawy Profile picture
2 Dec
No matter how often those of us from authoritarian countries and those of us who have fought fascism -- be it via military rule/rule of religious fundamentalists -- warned & warned, white Americans arrogantly shook their head that it couldn’t happen here. feministgiant.com/p/if-amy-coney…
And no matter how often we warned you that the fate of nations is not a straight line bending towards a “manifest destiny,” you only saw Iran & women in chadors or Afghanistan & women in burqas and refused to believe that their fate awaited you.

That fate never comes overnight.
Just as Trump was not an aberration, but rather a fruition of decades of white supremacist, misogynist, bigoted rot, so too is the conservative dominance of the Supreme Court, which conservatives have worked for since the early 1970s.
Read 4 tweets
Mona Eltahawy Profile picture
1 Dec
WE ARE NOT WALKING INCUBATORS FOR FUCK SAKE Text: Justice Amy Coney Barrett said pregnant women who do n
I have had two abortions. I was not raped. I was not sick. The pregnancies did not threaten my life. I did not already have children. I just did not want to be pregnant. I did not want to have a child. And so I had two abortions. feministgiant.com/p/abortion-is-…
And for those who were willing to give Amy Coney Barrett any benefit of any doubt: she is a Five-Star General of White Supremacist Patriarchy and we've know she'll bring disaster. She is the fruition of decades of work by that patriarchy feministgiant.com/p/if-amy-coney…
Read 9 tweets
Mona Eltahawy Profile picture
1 Dec
With every attempt to ban, now in Mississippi, remember: It's what white supremacist Christian conservatives have been working for, while telling US women "be grateful you don't live over there (Muslim country)." I explain 👇🏽#DobbsvJackson #SCOTUS
Liberal, affluent, white cisgender women thought as long as Roe v. Wade survived, they could ignore whatever the Christians were saying all along - since the 1970s. In the U.S., white and Chrisitian is considered the default, a norm, not scary, not brown or Muslim or pathologized
They remained willfully ignorant to the fact that Roe v. Wade died for many Black and women of colour and poor women in the South, where one after another clinics that provide abortions were being shuttered.
Read 9 tweets
Mona Eltahawy Profile picture
1 Dec
In 1996 I had an “illegal” abortion in Egypt. In 2000 I had a “legal” abortion in the U.S. I use "-" because the State can fuck off with its opinions about what I can and can’t do with my uterus. That control belongs to me. feministgiant.com/p/abortion-is-…
I was not raped. I was not sick. The pregnancies did not threaten my life. I did not already have children. I just did not want to be pregnant. I did not want to have a child. And so I had two abortions.
I am glad I had my abortions.They gave me the freedom to live the life I have chosen.

Criminalizing abortion doesn't eradicate it nor does it make it rare. It makes it dangerous & often deadly for the poorest & most vulnerable people who can get pregnant feministgiant.com/p/abortion-is-…
Read 7 tweets

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