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Writing as Resistance, Writing as Love | Joanna Kadi |
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the importance of silence
The ropes around my ankles and wrists cut into my skin, but the tightest gag cuts across my mouth and tears into the corners. Before tying me up, my father tells me, "You're so bad. You're so bad." Over and over. After he stalks out of the room and slams the door, I try to figure out what I did. I wrack my brain, but nothing comes to mind. Time crawls by. Has one hour passed, or five, or ten? Finally, my father decides -- relying on some internal method I could never discern -- he should undo the knots. I crawl into bed and hold myself every bit as tightly as the ropes did. Silence is critically important. Or, more precisely, my silence is critically important. I knew that from day one. Inordinate efforts, overt and covert, went into shutting me up. Teachers rewarded quiet children. My mother told me if I didn't have anything nice to say not to say anything at all, and she meant it. The priests who routinely ripped my body and mind apart held knives to my throat and told me they'd kill me if I ever said a word. My father tolerated me best when he had me muzzled. All systems of oppression -- from child abuse to racism to ableism -- function most effectively when victims don't talk. Silence isolates, keeps us focussing inward rather than outward, makes perpetrators' work easier, confuses and overwhelms. I didn't know this as a child and teenager. I just knew I had to be quiet. The few times I managed to croak something truthful, I experienced repercussions, swift and brutal, that left no doubt about my oppressors' intentions. I take speech seriously. This revolutionary action often comes with severe consequences. Speaking out carries danger, and not in abstract, theoretical ways. Telling the truth can't be taken lightly, or engaged in glibly. At the same time that I understand this, I want to speak. Through those brutal decades, the part of me that wants to talk -- and talk honestly -- somehow survived, and now gains strength daily. That part of me propels me to the desk, picks up a pen, pushes me to write honestly, to write in spite of fear, because of fear. It refuses to let me live out my life bowing to the dictates of perpetrators and accomplices who tried to destroy me.
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Writing as Resistance,
Writing as Love continued
on page 4
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