Tora Estep
“The Harvest”
Preparatory thumbnail sketch, graphite on paper
Response
We Roar
By Natascha Dea Burdeinei
Inspiration piece
Rage battles disappointment; anger and frustration swirl and bubble up again. The scream I need to feel coming out of me in a pelting windstorm is shrunk down for city living as I plunge my face into a sink full of water to roar—in a postage stamp of a bathroom. Tears fall on my wet face as my girlfriends text. One, then another. From all corners of the United States. Women, wounded, ferociously enraged, grieving. Their Nation chipping away at them, their daughters, and granddaughters.
Women carry the promise of two generations inside us at birth and throughout our thirty or forty-some years of reproductive viability. And as I feel a rage rise up in me toward the white men who make up just 30% of our population in the United States and yet manage to exercise minority rule in 42 state legislatures, the House, the Senate, SCOTUS, and statewide offices across the United States* actively using this power to strip their female, Black, brown, and LGBTQ neighbors of rights and liberties, I know it isn’t just my rage.
It is the rage of the two generations of women I carried briefly before my body failed me.
It is the rage of my grandmother. My grandmother, who carried my mother and me while stationed in Germany serving in our armed forces.
It is the rage of her grandmothers who lived under the constant threat of Russian violence and genocide in the Pale of Settlement. They couldn’t have known their first-generation American granddaughter would join the US Army to fight for them during World War II.
I plunge my face back into the cold water to scream some more. The salt from my tears mixes into the water reminding me we are our life source. The bringers and birthers of all human life. Our bodies and souls are bound and gagged, raped, abused, scarred, murdered or imprisoned, and legislated because of it. And we roar. Fuck this shit.
A clap of thunder rings out overhead. The storm is here. And I will rage into it, shooting flaming arrows of fury and a soft but strong heart while speaking words bolstered by my mothers into the wind for the thirty percent.
“We’re coming for you,” the gales of wind scream as they transport my warning across the mountains, cornfields, rivers, dales, forests, hollows, and beaches of this Nation.
“We’re coming for YOU.”
“WE’RE COMING FOR YOU.”
“Now!”
* source: Reflective Democracy Campaign
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