Almira Tabaeva, a doctoral scholar from Uzbekistan, studied feminism in India, comparing the traditions and cultures of South Asian and Central Asian women. Her academic interest includes gender studies and creative arts in education in Central Asia through postcolonial and decolonial feminist theories.
In January 2024, she penned the poem “Decolonising the Womb” for the roundtable discussion “Looking Forward, Moving Forward – Decoloniality, Being, and Imagining Alternative Futures for Central Asia,” hosted at the BASEES conference at the University of Cambridge. This poem was her response to the question of how decoloniality manifests in both her daily life and her scholarly pursuits.
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It didn’t end with a new name of state,
or so-called independence, albeit.
They left traces deep and profound,
complexity and calamity all around.
The Soviet invasion — a freaking moment
that erased culture, language and pride.
Central Asia — a laboratory ferment,
with imposed ideologies all sweeping aside.
Is it “Matrix of power” from tales of Quijano?
Land taken. Language changed. Women unveiled.
“Decolonise your mind” was echoing Mignolo,
honoring the memories that need to be saved.
“One is not born, but becomes a woman”
was loudly shouting Simone de Beauvoir.
Yet my women’s fate in a womb is made,
to serve, to please and not to penetrate.
They claimed women “to emancipate”
from darkness their faces “to liberate”
Through famine, gulags, unveiling assault,
by killing thousands like a thunderbolt.
Yet women got lost somewhere in the attic,
neither liberated, nor emancipated.
The literature tainted with a western view,
tripling the burden, colonialism anew.
Let’s free us women from societal chains,
redefine emancipation in which equality reigns.
Does our worth lie in the labour alone?
or in the power of our minds, yet unknown?
I am writing from home, on a dried shore,
where the Aral Sea thrived, but exists no more.
Swallowed by countless and vast cotton fields,
with women’s picking hands and children in wombs.
Yet, my pain is beyond defending my plea,
it actually starts from the River to the Sea!
I ask. Why humanity failed on this genocide?
I answer. It is because “they” are not white!
Like a broken antenna I was waiting for,
to pick up the signal to tell my sore.
I will pave the way now, give me the pen!
it is time to write my own stories then.
maqaal 