For centuries, starvation has been wielded as a strategic and brutally effective tool of colonial and imperial violence. What’s happening in Palestine, Sudan, the Congo, and elsewhere is nothing new. It’s the latest chapter in an old and devastating playbook.
Black New Orleanians were branded refugees, their hunger criminalized as looting, and they were deliberately abandoned by their own government. Hurricane Katrina was not nature’s work but a sanctioned American crime whose effects are still felt two decades later.
There are moments when the body remembers what the world would rather forget — the betrayals endured, the boundaries denied, the silences swallowed. For many women, especially those of the global majority, the past few years have peeled back illusion and exposed the cost of compliance. What rises now is not noise, but clarity. A quiet, unwavering return to self. To say no is not refusal — it is reclamation. Of voice. Of dignity. Of space. In a world that demands our silence, there is no act more powerful than loudly choosing ourselves.