Avantika Singhal
JWB Contributor
The Poem Titled ‘Child Bride’ Will Send Shivers Down Your Spine
- JWB Post
- June 22, 2016
The World of Button Poetry is a curious and wonderful place. It breeds poets whose words are enough to make you stumble and raise goosebumps all over your body.
Emi Mahmoud’s poem ‘Child Bride’ is like getting hit by a truck several times. It is so powerful and brilliantly delivered! It elaborately describes the ill fate of child brides who have no idea what they are doing dolled up like that.
The poet recounts that she went to a wedding and wanted to converse with the bride so as to break tradition. The bride was embellished, and no one understood what she said since she only spoke Arabic.
The poem concludes on the note that child brides are brutally raped by greedy hands that explore a barely adolescent girl’s body without her permission.
It makes me wonder how sheltered a life we teenagers have been living. No one has sold us off yet, and we should be grateful for that. However, what about those illiterate men who think it is completely acceptable to marry off their 17-year-old daughters, or the mothers who can never even look beyond their veils in strict households?
The norm of child marriage is still widely prevalent, and this poem is a solid example that it still continues. The poem also goes over the fact that an educated girl will be sold off, but more dowry will have to be given. Thus, no education for the ladies.
Notify me when you see the logic in that.
This poem also won Mahmoud the 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam this past March.
Kudos to this woman who found it urgently important to bring the gruesome practice of child marriage to the forefront and to the attention of all those unaware.
It is imperative to remember that girls are not livestock that can be traded from one shepherd to another.
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