Heba Ahmed
My resistance comes from years of experience of oppression, of myself, my mother and her mother. During these long years we fought back, inch by inch, foot by foot, in the hope of covering miles. We were fighters, fighting against a system determined to keep us as victims.
My resistance is not your staged game of claiming, pretending victimhood. You, with your privilege, you want to claim that you are victims so that you can ridicule our life stories, erode our experience, rob us of our authenticity, and displace us from the battlefield. But my resistance is struggle, not a trumpet of victimhood.
My resistance is not yours to misrecognise, in your failure to give solidarity when I am punished by the fascists, and your failure to take my name when I achieve a small victory.
My resistance is against your arrogance, your arrogance which makes you think that the field of resistance is yours to rule over, your arrogance which makes you think I am an outsider, your arrogance with which you claim that I am like the fascists! My resistance is against the arrogance of your claim.
My resistance is a strenuous effort, to assert my presence in those very places which have been marked off as too “pure”, to claim that I belong to a history which you have denied, to remind you of that past when you killed me and tore me to bits. My resistance is the slap on your face, because you killed me in the past but you make a show of solidarity today, just to reign undisputed in the contested field of battle.
My resistance is in the vigour of my slogans, in the treble of my words, in the beat of my drum. My resistance is also my stubbornness to refuse to be cowed down with your mockery of my slogans, your ridicule of my drumbeat.
My resistance is my existence against your constant attempts to write me down as a pseudo activist.My resistance is my determination to not let you wipe me out.
Heba Ahmed is a research scholar from JNU , New Delhi
