C--t! Yesterday my class and I collectively shouted out this word, twice. Right after we shouted the word "vagina!"-twice.
No, this wasn't some flaky exercise in faux feminist power, or scandalousness or boundary-pushing for its own sake.
And, yes, this is the kind of thing that my tax dollars and our oil dollars might be spent on, as long as students continue to register for my class.
It was an exercise in consciousness-raising, in revealing power in language, in thinking aloud about how our silences will not protect us.
The majority of students agreed to do this by a show of hands and of course those who didn't want to say vagina or c--t didn't have to.
One young woman who said the first but not the second, said that she saw it graffitied somewhere once, asked what it meant and was told by her mom never to use that word-and she hadn't since.
Another one, who joined in the second time, said to me after class that she had never said the word in her life...and here she was saying it twice in one day, now realising that if anyone ever called her that, she would not be intimidated as she might have been, knowing the word's original possibilities.
And, in fact, c--t historically meant the very opposite of its current patriarchal associations with insult, debasement, stupidity, failure and obscenity.
What is now the worst thing to call someone (man or woman, for different reasons) was once a word denoting the sacred, spiritual, powerful, knowledgeable, gutsy, cunning, wise, divine (meaning godlike), life-giving, heartfelt and sustaining.
Those meanings were destroyed and replaced by the ones we take to be normal, natural and timeless today. The very word that is unmentionable because it is now so shameful and dirty, especially for women is the very word that describes our sex. Surely, this can't be right.
Like any good university educator, I backed up my lecture with literature which traces the roots of the word c--t, showing the violence that left it bruised and pariah-like at the base of its ancient pedestal.
This was a violence implicated with the silences around sexual violence, with the shame invested in women's bodies, with the hold patriarchy and pornography have on women's erotic power despite Caribbean hype about phat pum pum, "waan punane bad" and punkenani power.
As long as "c--t" is both a curse and part of my body, it can be used against me and can continue to be used against women daily.
And nothing that is mine shall be cursed. Nothing that has created and birthed my child or your child shall be used against us. Nothing that makes me both woman and mother shall be used to disempower.
Nothing that was once sacred shall be used to silence and shame.
The fact that all of us are woman-born, that we are all the species womankind, leaves me without question that female bodies, wombs and vaginas are to be given the freedom from degradation which they are due, and my students now say that when they shout.