Poetically Remembering Grief

Chinaka Hodge, a playwright, screenwriter, educator and poet, considers what all the events that the past year brought mean for women around the world in her poem on 2016.

She opens by saying, "Tell your daughters of this year, how we woke needing coffee but discovered instead cadavers strewn about our morning papers, waterlogged facsimiles of our sisters, spouses, small children." Afterwards, she considers the steps backwards society has taken in terms of women's rights, as well as the continued issues associated with rape culture that tend to coincide. In addition to speaking to the inequality women continue to face, Chinaka Hodge sews a message of empowerment into her poem on 2016.

For the purpose of promoting change, she instructs her audience to reveal the struggles they've faced to their daughters, to "Tell her the truth, how you lived in spite of crooked odds. Tell her you were brave, and always, always in the company of courage, mostly the days when you just had yourself. Tell her she was born as you were, as your mothers before, and the sisters beside them, in the age of legends, like always."