A Celebration of all Women across the World

This article is archived, and is no longer part of Vekllei canon.

In Vekllei on the first of each May, the women’s councils and industrial unions wipe clean their banners and flags and join great parades that regale the main streets of the city with song and colour. They carry flags and banners in celebration of womanhood and remembrance of the dead — for those Potter’s Fields and unmarked graves that intern nameless women across the world.

They walk in universal solidarity but not without local identity — women’s unions, called chapels, number themselves. Here Local Chapel № 23, represented mostly by a half-dozen families and a few generations, make their way to the Little Vekllei prefecture, where the day’s march will take them back to the heart of the city. Little Lili leads the charge with confetti, while her sisters, mother and grandmother follow. They will find it difficult to fit the flags on the streetcar. Her bespectacled sister Patet is sickly and this is the first time she’s left the house in five days.

The catastrophe of the first atomic war had set in motion what no protest or revolution ever had — a cleansing of the political and cultural landscape, and a rebirth of Vekllei traditional culture and reestablishment of Upen in everyday life.

It is a day where the men shower the precious women of their lives with gifts and affection.

Although Vekllei is not necessarily a progressive country, and is often a land of absurd contradiction in Western political tradition, Vekllei women enjoy a society built for them. And really built for them too, on an infrastructural level. Womanhood in the country is not defined by commodity or appearance, but by superficially humanist ideas the culture associates with womanhood – compassion, bravery, intelligence, grace, etc. They are defined not by their relationships or their economic circumstance, but by their friends, political opinions, ability, etc. The decommodification of society has also decommodified womanhood. Vekllei is not simply a good place to be a woman, but is in fact a female country.

let me know if you have any questions! www.vekllei.city or insta fer more