How long have you felt like you have been screaming into a void, so loud that your throat is closing, it’s red raw with rage and the violence is now reverberating through your cells?
How long before the sound of your voice will reach the place where the changes are made?
Who’s voice gets chosen and who decides that?
How do we value all voices equally when some don’t even know they have one…?
I am a confident, connected, articulate and well educated woman and yet, in the context of the systems we are currently living in, even in a supposedly democratic nation, I am silenced by process, systems and geographic impediment and feel as though my screaming voice echoes in a vacuum.
Imagine what it’s like for those who don’t occupy the privilege I have.
‘Like silent raindrops fell and echoed in the wells of silence’ Simon and Garfunkel.
Since white people occupied this land the custodians have had their voices silenced.
Men and women and children stripped of their language and of their country and their pleas for community fell on deaf ears as the colonisers. Some were taken in, falling for the offers of a better life. But all of them lost.
But, they are not lost.
Their voices have been gathering power, clarity and timing.
Biding their time.
I feel the power of this space screaming through me to continue to speak up for this place and her people.
‘We change for them, we modify everything we do to suit them, but what to do they do for us’ she wails.
The most dangerous space to occupy is the time within a system that is fighting to retain it’s grip and is at risk of losing it – but is living the lie or illusion of change or of listening.
This is the context in which the greatest lateral violence occurs.
When margnialised people are invited in – by a wolf in sheep’s clothing – tempted by the chance to be heard; only to find they weren’t. And worse. Nothing has changed or more likely, it’s now worse.
Or they have been extracted from and now denied the royalty from it.
Where are you colonising?
Where are you being colonised?
Who are you without the colonisers identity?
