Bushra Rehman Quotes

Who was going to tell these women that they didn't have to live this way? I was.

Strive to be kind to each other's whirlwind girl. Strive to remember that each one of us is precious and necessary, that drama and wars put out our light. Strive to remember that this is our one, short life, and the choices we make will determine what comes of it.

I consider myself a woman who is working to understand how spoken and unspoken messages have shaped my experiences and political perspectives.

This is the real work of woman of color feminism: to resist acquiescence to fatality and guilt, to become warriors of conscience and action who resist death in all its myriad manifestations: poverty, cultural assimilation, child abuse, motherless mothering, gentrification, mental illness, welfare cuts, the prison system, racial profiling, immigrant and queer bashing, invasion and imperialism at home and at war.

To fight any kind of war, Kahente Horn-Miller writes. "The Biggest single requirement is fighting spirit." I thought much of this as I read Colonize This! since this collection appears in print at a time of escalating world-wide war--In Colombia, Afghanistan, Palestine. But is there ever a time of no-war for women of color? Is there ever a time when our home (our body, our land of origin) is not subject to violent occupation, violent invasion? If I retain any image to hold the heart-intention of this book, it is found in what Horn-Miller calls the necessity of the war dance. This book is one rite of passage, one ceremony of preparedness on the road to consciousness, on the "the war path of greater empowerment.

I thought that if I gave everything I had inside to the people I loved, I would perhaps be able to prove I wasn't a bad person. The truth was that I really wasn't a bad person. And I didn't need to dedicate my life to defining the kind of person that I was.