Silence is like a cancer. It starts with one hush, one truth buried, and then spreads to every suffering, injustice, opinion, and emotion until our voice is eternally suppressed — unless we learn to Speak Out.
Be Silent! I see this sign everywhere: hospitals, schools, buses, movie theatres, and even at our houses when “mdingi” gets home. The silence message — the pretty little nurse with her index finger on her red plump lips shushing everyone. Who does she think she is? Does she know what kinds of ideas are buried, lost deep in our minds? Does she know of the screams that get lost in our lungs, the please help me, the save her, the why this injustice, the voices within us—does she even care? But this is not about hospitals, the nurse just reminds me of the powerful — the presidents, the ruling parties, the abusers, and the phrase money talks. Yet this is not even about the powerful vs. the hopeful, it is about EVERYTHING.
The culture of silence. The lack of confidence in our voice, and ideas. Did someone tell us we are not good enough to speak? Perhaps it is the new custom of the powerful attacking those with the guts to speak out. But this silence is in more than just injustices. It is in schools, in little crammed notes that are supposedly correct answers. It is present when someone else’s thoughts are made superior to our own. It is present when people do not believe in their own ideas. It is present when we do not reward original thought, but instead muse over copied, and pasted foreign ideas. A wise man once told me, literacy is useless if the literate cannot express their own thoughts. If people are not empowered to express their thoughts, aren’t they mere parrots, narrating someone else’s thoughts, talking but not really saying anything?
We cultivate this culture of silence in more than just our parrot-like curriculum — leaves are green, gold is yellow. We plant it in our homes; when we do not let our children speak their minds, when we suppress their individuality and never hear them out. We nurture it in our societies; when we do not reward curiosity, and creativity. Our silence lives in our untold history; our braveness is hung with forgotten heroes.
But we are good enough people, with good enough ideas. Our presence here is not decorative. Let’s not be silent. Let’s not speak as parrots do, let’s say something. Let’s not suppress our ideas, opinions, thoughts, or emotions. Let’s have the courage to call out social injustice and question what we are told as true.
Be Silent Not. Speak Out — you might just make a difference. You might just change the world.
We need to speak out. But what happens when our languages (our modes of speaking or ways of communicating) have developed such that we can never really speak “out”, but continue to speak “for” the systems which dominate our minds? By “systems”, I refer here to those systems that educate us, that tell us what is happening in our city, that heal us when in pain, that protect us when we are in secure, etc.