Aranya Johar is the new voice for gender equality. Aranya is from Mombei in India and she is a courageous militant for women’s rights. How does she makes herself heard? By poetry, slam to be exact. At only 18 years old she has written many powerful texts but the most popular one is named “A Brown Girl’s Guide To Gender”. It talks about how women and men are inequals, how women are degrated and how little respect they get in India.

The piece perfetly sums the many ways girls internalize the message that they’re inferior as they grow up. The young woman performed the poem at an international women’s day event by UnErase Poetry the march 6th 2017. It starts with an evocative story:”The first boy who held my hand, told me boys don’t want to hear about vaginas bleeding. Younger me could smell the misogny. Vaginas only meant to be f*cked, breasts only meant to be sucked and mouths only meant to blow. It’s true, I know my waist meant to be compare to an hourglass, my voice only meant to quiver “ugh, please, fast”. Yet I am silenced.” Oh, did this passage offend you? It would probably be hard for us, girls from Canada where we are completely free and not powerless when confronted to men, to live in the skin of an indian girl for just one day. In India, discrimination against women based on their sex is normal for men. Girls are traditionnally considered by society as weaker sex. They are exploited, degrated, violated and raped both in or out of their house.

Not everyone has the ability to put experience and pain into words and perfectly make them rhyme, but Aranya Johar does. With her recent video about ‘A brown girl’s guide to gender’, she has gained mass attention on social media for speaking the ‘unspoken’. Her encouraging slam definitely holds the power to change the world in two minutes, take a look at it yourself.

(writed by Lorryann Faucher; edited by Emma Côté.)