Art Sculpture & Poem Honoring Woman Martyr of Afghanistan

MEENA - WOMAN MARTYR OF AFGHANISTAN

I WILL NEVER RETURN

I’m the woman who has awakened.

I’ve arisen and become a tempest through the ashes of my burnt children.

I've arisen from the rivulets of my brother’s blood.

My nation’s wrath has empowered me.

My ruined and burnt villages fill me with hatred against the enemy.

Oh compatriot, no longer regard me weak and incapable.

My voice has mingled with thousands of arisen women.

My fists are clenched with fists of thousands compatriots

To break all these sufferings all these fetters of slavery.

I’m the woman who has awoken,

I’ve found my path and will never return.

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I am Rachel Citrino, an artist in the USA. I have a global interest in the collective symbology of humankind and use them freely in my work. I have been an activist for women's art for many years serving as chapter president and as a national board member of the Women's Caucus for Art in the USA. I also brought the first group of women artists to be honored and exhibited in the USA from Italy under the auspices of the Sister Cities International program.

In 1996 I began a series of paintings of snakes and madonnas…the madonnas being shrouded female figures. I was dealing at that time with some medieval imagery and symbology but the shrouded woman began to evolve then. She became La Tristezza three four ago when I visited a family of women in mourning for a husband, a brother and a son and the image of this 93 year old mother shrouded in black sitting by the fireplace burned in my brain as I traveled on a train from Abruzzi back to Florence. A very tiny pencil drawing grew into La Tristezza and while working with this image another shrouded woman emerged out of clay: the whispering woman under the burka. Originally part of a series of clay heads two year ago exhibited as Talking Heads. Surfing the web I came across www.RAWA.com and was educated and moved. I realized that my woman whispering under a burka had to be Meena.