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| silence |
Stories save your life. And stories are your life. We are our stories. We
make stories to save ourselves or to trap ourselves or others – stories that
lift us up or smash us against the stone wall of our own limits and fears. Liberation
is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences,
making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in
a society in which her story has a place. Violence against women is often
against our voices and our stories. It is a refusal of our voices, and of what
a voice means: the right to self-determination, to participation, to consent or
dissent; to live and participate, to interpret and narrate.Sometimes just being
able to speak, to be heard, to be believed, are crucial parts of membership in
a family, a community, a society. Sometimes our voices break those things
apart; sometimes those things are prisons.
And then when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a
society sometimes becomes intolerable. Those not impacted can fail to see or
feel the impact of segregation or police brutality or domestic violence;
stories bring home the trouble and make it unavoidable.
