Tata Milouda, the power of words
Portrait
Tata Milouda is a slam artist. She has an original look but above all, she has a very moving story. She is a symbol of strength and determination
I’m not the first woman, who suffered the outcomes of a forced marriage, but i’m the first woman who brought her testimony to the women of her village. They stole my childhood and adolescence periods, but they couldn’t steal my intelligence…
Tata Milouda said
Tata Milouda is a moroccan poetess, born in 1950 in a small village located in Settat, 57 Km away from Casablanca; she never went to school, and was forced to get married at the age of 14 by her parents, then she was automatically obliged to take care for a family that consists of 24 people.
She suffered for years from the violence of her husband, deprived from going out and was not able to express herself. No one was beside her when she was crying or hearing her.
In 1989, she left her ex-husband, leaving her six kids in Morocco, she arrived in France with a tourist visa. Tata Milouda was able to say only three words in french: « Bonjour », « Merci », « Au revoir » and only had 100 Francs (the currency before Euro) in her pocket.
She started working as a maid for a long time then as a driver and last as a babysitter.
She got employed afterwards by a rich Syrian family who confiscated her passport and her Moroccan identity card.
She gathered all her courage and said in front of an immense audience on Teds Show in Casablanca :
Honestly, I have lost count of the times I got punched on my face in front of my children, along with the tears I poured on my bed.
That’s why i had a huge certainty that my son would be an inheritance for explaining the behaviour of most of the violent men of these days.
In 1993, she divorced then regularised her papers in 1994 and brought her daughters to her.
At the age of 50, she joined literacy classes in the cultural center where people learn how to write, read and speak and that was actually a new chapter in her life. That chapter brought her from dark to light as she said, in her situation attending those courses was a real gift especially because it was for free and was also the reason behind bringing a new slam artist to the domain.
She’s thanking the culture for bringing her to a new world, then her notebook and her pen for letting her learn a new word and a new sentence every single day .
Today she’s a strong message and a role model to all women that lived or currently living the same situation as the case of Fatima, Aisha, Khadija, Malika, Saadia, Christina and Claudine. She’s telling and retelling those women to be brave, strong and have some will.
We can actually imagine the violence that passed on from her grandmother to her mother and then from her mother-in-law to her, this violence and suffering that unfold generation after generation.
No moroccan woman can deny that she is a symbol of real ambition and a proof that struggling in life can’t be a barrier to success.
She fought all the rules by herself and turned her weakness to strength, for her it’s never too late for education!
