Identity featuring Neha Premanand

History books might remember me as a great beauty.

Or a beloved wife.

All the things I achieved, I loved, I fought - for and against,

Compressed into cursory single line

Or a paragraph at best.

From “Let them eat cake” to an enigma who  sleeps in a marbled wonder.

My person, erased. My persona masked.

I’m that inconvenient woman.

Pseudonymed, blurred, uncredited, resisted, husband-named, unrecorded by a past with selective amnesia

Who showed up at court and on the court

The classroom, the workplace, the battlefield,  the laboratory and anywhere else outside the kitchen.

The woman with an opinion.

Audacious enough to aspire to a place so fenced off

With a pronoun so possessive as HIS.

The one who insisted on being called by her name.