16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence

Day 1

Every year on the25th November, 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence begins, a UN campaign to end violence against women.

In just over an hour, I’ll be reading alongside one of my heroes Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism project and author and activist of titles such as Men Who Hate Women, Fix the System Not the Women and Everyday Sexism amongst other ground breaking works.

I’m going to try and post a poem here every day of the 16 days. I say try, because I’ll also be organising 16 events as part of our programme 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence at Manchester Metropolitan University and it’s slightly manic here!

In 2015, I published my first full-length collection The Art of Falling. In that book is a sequence of poems “ How I Abandoned My Body To His Keeping”. The first poem in that sequence “In That Year” I’ve written about here before, when I was writing about the process of drafting (you can find that post here)

“In That Year” was one of the first real poems I wrote about living in a violent relationship. I say a “real” poem - I’d written things before that didn’t elevate themselves into poetry, that were just pain, or diary entries, or just terrible poems. When I read this poem now, it feels like a telescope looking back to that year.

And though many things have changed, some things haven’t. I remain convinced that when you have experienced violence of any kind, it changes something inside you, and you see the world differently. In my darkest days, I feel as if I carry that year inside me always, as if it colours everything I do, as if it will damage and warp my relationships and my love and my friendship, as if I must always be on my guard. If that year is a path, I am still in the past and the present tense, I am still walking it.

I can choose now who I walk that path with though. November 25th 2024, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, I’m choosing to spend it with some amazing writers, my beautiful colleagues and hopefully over 130 audience members who want to think about the different kinds of violence we endure, how it changes us, how we resist it, how we can change ourselves and society.

See you on Day 2!

IN THAT YEAR
KIM MOORE

And in that year my body was a pillar of smoke
and even his hands could not hold me.

And in that year my mind was an empty table
and he laid his thoughts down like dishes of plenty.

And in that year my heart was the old monument,
the folly, and no use could be found for it.

And in that year my tongue spoke the language
of insects and not even my father knew me.

And in that year I waited for the horses
but they only shifted their feet in the darkness.

And in that year I imagined a vain thing;
I believed that the world would come for me.

And in that year I gave up on all the things
I was promised and left myself to sadness.

And then that year lay down like a path
and I walked it, I walked it, I walk it.