During this past week, we’ve enjoyed sharing on Facebook and Twitter a small but powerful selection of poems written by survivors of conflict-related sexual violence from all around the world. SEMA’s poetry campaign ends today, on World Poetry Day 2020.
If this action inspires you, please feel free to share your own poem of survival and resilience in the comments!
We’d like to send a warm shout out to the Lutheran World Federation, who organised a very special creative writing workshop for a group of SEMA members last November. Some of the poems we’ve featured this week were created during that session, where survivors identified positive truths about their responses to circumstances and their process of healing. While simple in concept, the writing process proved quite powerful for the survivors, who wrote revelatory poems about their experiences.
We have translated this poem, a compilation of a number of their poems, into English, French, and Spanish, for a glimpse at the inspiring strength of this collective of survivors, and the individual strengths of all these women who continue to break the silence and taboos around the reality of conflict-related sexual violence.
