LEARNING A NEW LANGUAGE FOR THE NEW YEAR

"I believe that deep within our being as a nation there is a longing for a moral movement that plows deep into our souls..." Rev. Dr. William Barbar,  NAACP

A few days after the New Year, I write this as I think of what I have witnessed and withstood this past year, both as the Executive Director of GlobalGirl Media, and as an individual woman, mother, lover, friend, filmmaker and activist. There is a deep aching in my heart these days, opened by wounds both personal and global…from Ferguson to NYC to Syria, Gaza and beyond.

I find myself at a loss for words, and wanting to go deep within, to find a place of quiet and stillness….a place where the protest, the choking and even the chanting stops. Is this defeat?  

Then I read this: “If one woman told the truth about her life, the world would split open…” (Terry Tempest Williams, “When Women Were Birds…”).  Well it seems truth is what is finally being told and revealed, about police violence, about racial divide, gender violence, about anger born of enormous economic and cultural rifts, about how lost most of us feel when WE ARE NOT BEING HEARD.

I march in Oakland for the #BlackLivesMatter movement and see a young girl with a megaphone. I can't get this image out of my mind for days.  I’ve been thinking about this idea of VOICE. I was always a vocal child. In fact, people still accuse me of interrupting them all the time. I was always so eager to share my opinion and passion with others. I was always a woman with many words. Yet lately I have grown quiet. The gruesome parade of events this year that have quite literally silenced individual voices from the Boko Haram kidnappings to the NFL batterers to Eric Garner’s haunting last words, “I can’t breathe…”  have led to a darkness and hush over our collective outcries. In refusing to speak, are we complicit? Maybe we need to find a new language.

More from Terry Tempest Williams’ gem of a book: “To find our sovereign voice often requires betrayal, we just have to make certain we do not betray ourselves.” 

To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did. So now I’m in search of a new narrative, perhaps one that is not even mine. And in order to do this, I must listen. Listen for the language of beauty hidden in the darkness, for words that cannot be spoken but are written with our eyes, our tears, the touch of a human hand.  One need not speak in order to have a voice.  Like, Williams reflects (I love that we share the same surname):

“I want to feel the beauty and the pain in the age we are living…I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape of where I dwell. “

There are so many ways to change the stories we have been given. Or as Rebecca Solnit writes in Men Explain Things to Me, “Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.”

So it’s really a process, of letting go, listening, forgiving and clearing the debris of your personal defeats so you can face the unfathomable public a little less mute, a little less dumbfounded.

 On Thursday, December 4, 2014, the United Nations Secretary-General released The Road to Dignity by 2030: Ending Poverty, Transforming All Lives and Protecting the Planet,  a report that highlighted the importance of including youth in the post-2015 international development process. We at GlobalGirl Media signed on to a growing cadre of women and girls’ rights organizations calling for more inclusion. If we are to truly achieve the stated goal of an ambitious, transformational and universal post-2015 agenda that ensures equality, nondiscrimination, equity and inclusion at all levels, adolescent girls’ rights and needs must be meaningfully included and reflected throughout the process.

One of our GlobalGirls from Morocco, now studying in China told me she was struggling with her past, her longing for home, her restlessness, and wrote to me on Facebook: “I know that I will have to go step by step so the transition will take time, but I am not willing to give up the hardship I have to go through, this is the great gate to my freedom…”

In these first few days of 2015, I ask you who are reading this, what is your gate, what are you willing to walk through, and where will you find your new voice for the new year? 

From the blogger eeshap on The Crunk Feminist Collective:  "When we locate our silence, confront it, hold it close, and wrestle it with compassion and ferocity. That is when the silence slinks. That is how we make space for our stories. One at a time, all at once, unapologetic, and true."