Silence is a hard thing for many of us to deal with. Silence can make us feel awkward and uncomfortable and is sometimes necessary for us to process and be alone with ourselves without the justification of words. There is a difference however when you choose to be silent for reflective purposes, and when you are forced into silence. Between preferring to process internally and not being able to communicate or express yourself openly. It is the difference between having a voice and choosing not to use it and having your voice taken away from you. Being told that your voice doesn’t matter or belong at the table. Every day I face many difficulties here that come with not being able to express myself to the extent that I wish I could. I often want to shout “I swear, I am way more intelligent than I seem!” As someone recently put it to me, “The limits of language are the limits of our very selves. It seems as if we are less, smaller, like we become children. That’s so hard.”
Struggling with finding my voice and expressing myself here has caused me to reflect over who exactly is given a voice. Who are the voices we listen to and value? Who do we silence? Who do we convince that it is better for them to listen to us because our ways are better or right instead of asking them about their experience or tradition? (Let’s not even get into the whole effect of colonizer/colonized which would be a whole other discussion and is extremely prevalent in almost every conversation I have had here.) Who do we allow to participate in the conversation, sit at the table, and who do we tell that they don’t deserve a voice because of their beliefs, skin color, age, sexual orientation, level of formal education, etc.?
I recognize that my country (as a whole) has been doing a lot of talking for a long time. We always get to have a voice, so maybe it is a good lesson for me to step out of my power system and be forced to listen before I speak. Be forced to ask questions and not assume that my way is the right way. Me losing my voice (even though it is by choice and only for a short amount of time) is, in fact, a good thing for me in a way. But it is still frustrating and difficult. And it makes me realize the ways we oppress people by not giving them a voice. By speaking for them. We limit one’s potential, their very being as a child of God when we tell them their voice doesn’t matter. And worse yet, by taking away their voices, they begin to internalize this oppression by believing that it is better to stay quiet because what they have to say wouldn’t matter anyway. By taking away their voices we tell them that who they are isn’t enough, and if enough voices tell you that, it is a huge struggle to be able to free yourself to think differently.
That being said, I realize that oppression is a complex and multi-faceted thing. As a United States citizen living in a colonized country, it may do me good to listen more. However, I am more than just an “estadunidense”. I am also a (white) woman. Yesterday I went to a taping of a show for a TV program of a local artist that uses hip-hop to speak out against the injustices perpetuated against the Afro-Brazilian population here in Brazil. As I looked around and found myself as the only white United States American female in an audience full of Afro-Brazilians, I faced the reality head on of the messages of beauty that women (and men) in this community have received for years. I felt like the poster child for the standard of beauty to which these women have been compared their entire lives: Smooth hair, fair/delicate skin, light eyes, etc. One of the lines of the songs asked “when are we going to stop looking at dark eyes with suspicion?” I felt like saying, “when the media stops telling you that my blue eyes are the only definition of beauty.”
It was an interesting dichotomy as I felt the tension between a part of me encompassing a stereotype of beauty here (and actually being a bit exotic) and realizing that as a white female in the US, I also face a whole different set of standards which tell me as a woman I am not good enough: I am too white (I could use some color on my pasty legs) I am not thin enough, my skin isn’t flawless, my hair could be a bit fuller, etc. etc. Living into and experiencing this tension makes me realize that oppression takes many different forms, especially for women. To say that my experience as a woman is the same as that of an Afro-Brasilian woman just because we both have ovaries is ridiculous (which is why we don’t need feminist theology but theologies.) We each receive different messages from society that oppress us and experience our own varying ways in which we oppress ourselves. The context may be different, the specific messages may be different and even the actual result may be different for each one of us, but we are each left in a position where we have to fight daily to find our voice, value our voice, dare to use it to speak out against the multitude of voices which tell us that we aren’t good enough, that we should be something else, that we need to be “perfect” to find value and love, or that buying one more product, pill, treatment or system will cause us to finally be “enough”. It is a struggle that continues daily, or as they say here “A luta continua”. And I am grateful that I have met so many “guerreiras” along the way that give me the courage to both listen with humility and speak with power.
It was an interesting dichotomy as I felt the tension between a part of me encompassing a stereotype of beauty here (and actually being a bit exotic) and realizing that as a white female in the US, I also face a whole different set of standards which tell me as a woman I am not good enough: I am too white (I could use some color on my pasty legs) I am not thin enough, my skin isn’t flawless, my hair could be a bit fuller, etc. etc. Living into and experiencing this tension makes me realize that oppression takes many different forms, especially for women. To say that my experience as a woman is the same as that of an Afro-Brasilian woman just because we both have ovaries is ridiculous (which is why we don’t need feminist theology but theologies.) We each receive different messages from society that oppress us and experience our own varying ways in which we oppress ourselves. The context may be different, the specific messages may be different and even the actual result may be different for each one of us, but we are each left in a position where we have to fight daily to find our voice, value our voice, dare to use it to speak out against the multitude of voices which tell us that we aren’t good enough, that we should be something else, that we need to be “perfect” to find value and love, or that buying one more product, pill, treatment or system will cause us to finally be “enough”. It is a struggle that continues daily, or as they say here “A luta continua”. And I am grateful that I have met so many “guerreiras” along the way that give me the courage to both listen with humility and speak with power.
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