She is building castles and burying her feet in the sand when a little boy appears at the playground. Imagine, if you will, a little girl playing in a sandbox. As I wrote in my piece on conscientious feminism, “I will live but that is all I will do for patriarchy”.

I don’t accommodate any kind of sexism-lite or Diet Sexism in my love life. Last but not least, I am too uncompromisingly feminist. “My heart has grown rich with the passing of years, it is one to me they come and go” as Sara Teasdale writes in a poem on solitude. I’m still no role model for relationships, for the record. I’m reminded of an East African saying I came across, “A butterfly who brushes against thorns will tear its wings”. But please approach it gently, with tenderness toward yourself, you are getting to know yourself, not judging yourself. Women of African heritage should especially try to engage in such practice because the world is already conspiring against us in so many intersectional and interconnected ways that the last thing we should be doing is conspiring against ourselves too. Then mull over questions such as: Am I doing work that fulfils me? Am I growing in my relationships? Do my friends inspire and encourage me? Do my actions match my words? Am I eating well and looking after my health? Do I live where I want to? Are my thoughts self destructive? Do I maybe prefer women to men? Am I enjoying sex or am I too busy performing to truly enjoy it? Am. If not through actual meditation, which I would encourage, then through walks in nature, dance, swimming, anything that calms your mind so that your subconscious can speak to you. If there is one way of saying thank you to life, it is to ask – Am I conspiring against myself? (Am I being unappreciative of the gift that life is?) To answer this question, you will need to develop a meditative state of mind. Life is a gift and a temporary one at that.

I strive to be of service in a way that inspires women to resist the limiting roles that conspire against them. The tweets in the thread – in fact all of my work – is so much characterised in that one line. In the song, Raman sings, “Woman, The roles you learned to play / Conspire against you / And hold you down / Why don’t you fight?”. The tweets, and the title of this blog, are inspired by a song called “ Woman” by Susheela Raman. I have become patriarchal society’s nemesis – a woman who feels as entitled as a man but who is honest in the way only a woman can be.Ī couple of years ago, I started an ongoing Twitter thread that I refer to as the “Woman-series”. With that realisation, I gradually and effortlessly started to feel as entitled as any man. I’m not saying that all men are dishonest, and certainly not that they are dishonest by default, but it is rare for men to have integrity because they are taught from an early age that it’s masculine to manipulate their own and others’ emotions. Then I realised that while men are conditioned to be entitled, they are also conditioned to be dishonest to both themselves and others. I did not only want to be close to my lovers, I wanted to be them. I was attracted to the things that I missed in myself, confidence, freedom, entitlement. The completion I perceived in men was actually the wholeness I wanted in myself. But most importantly, I would learn that what I thought was a man completing me, was mostly me conspiring against myself thinking I needed male validation. So anyway, I remember sitting on his couch thinking that I love him so much that should he leave me – I will never find someone with whom I feel as complete again. I loved him the way one loves the ocean, automatically and playfully until its waves crash on your skin. The patriarchal system’s conditioning is such. I come to learn that many men don’t believe that women truly love them. We argue a lot and break each others’ hearts. While he works at night, I go to bed but I don’t fall asleep until his body is next to mine, heavy and warm. At daytime, while I work, he cooks and feeds both my mind and my stomach with delicious food. I feel like the pan-African Simone de Beauvoir and he is my equivalent Jean-Paul Sartre.

We spend our days talking about philosophy, poetry, African gods and debating gender politics. If there are two things I love, it is men and books and here I am basking in the divine combination of both. There are books everywhere in his house under the tables, by the coat rack, all over the stair case, on the window panes not to mention the walls of bookshelves. I am sitting on his couch surrounded by books.

Conspire against me