Project Description
Farah Didi
Dr. Farah Didi (nee Faizal) is a British-educated, human rights defender from the Maldives. She worked for the Maldives democracy movement pre-2008 and with the first democratically elected government in 2008, she served as the High Commissioner of the Republic of Maldives to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from March 2009 to February 2012. She also served as Ambassador of Maldives to France, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. Following the coup d’état in the Maldives on the 7th of February 2012, Farah resigned from her post in protest. Farah is the first Maldivian woman to get a PhD. She has been writing poetry from her young days and her recent works are mainly on the Maldives coup 2012 and its aftermath.
hearts of stone
we are persistence,
and you, intolerance,
embodied in human form,
hastily you whip up hatred,
like the storm clouds
during the monsoon,
gust after gust after gust,
you come down on us,
like locust swarms flying
a thousand miles across the sea
you engulf our nostrils, our eyes,
our faces with pepper spray,
and you laugh today,
your hearts made of stone,
ours made of supple sponge,
soft yet strong,
absorbing; absolving,
our patience
and our prayers
elastic.