Make Wheat Into Bread
Amma knows how to make wheat into bread or how to squeeze anger into fists and tame it until it’s palatable.
My sister and I are foreign to both and that’s how I want it to be, she always says. And I am not sure why she says this.
Does she want us to stop molding our anger into shapes easy to devour so every time a man tries to get hold of it, he can feel himself choking on it, or maybe she wants us to stop shrinking our anger into the size of a teaspoon so men can stop using it to dissolve sugar in their tea?
Amma wants us to take the w of the woman from wheat and everything else that is ours, keep all of the heat for ourselves and let our anger simmer in it.
For she knows, to make wheat into bread, you have to give up on the w(s) of being a woman, close your eyes so men can cheat, inhabit all our spaces and tell us how kitchen is where we belong.
Amma knows how to make wheat into bread and how easy it is to turn anger into forgiveness when you are made to believe that whatever you are left with is what you deserve, and that’s the most you will ever have.
Amma but wants us to metamorphose our anger into protests and poems and into everything that remind men that nothing has been forgotten let alone forgiven. She, through us, wants men to know that their time is up.
Amma wants us to know how to make anger into a revolution instead of wheat into bread. For she knows, how easy it is for men to ‘cheat’ on the love you put on a table and transform it into something they don’t have to pay a price for.
All they have to do is replace a t with a p.
Amma knows how to make wheat into bread and how despite all the labor and skills that go into it, there will always be something more intelligent to talk about.
She knows how a woman’s pride is reduced to silence so nobody can question a man’s inadequacy to talk about anything without talking about himself.
And she doesn’t want any of this for us.
She wants us to stop hiding behind small words like mercy so men can have the bigger ones like indignation for themselves. She wants us to stop creating spaces between our words so every time a man tries to get too comfortable with our stories, he runs out of breath.
She knows how convenient it is for men to hijack our stories so they can build their own and then tell us how we love to make wheat into bread.
