Responsibility to Break the Silence –
There was a meme going around with the words on this card, but it then said something like the women were looking over your shoulder wondering about the computer. That seemed to miss the point, so I created this card to hang over my monitor as a reminder. I do a little collaging, so I had this packet of cardboard images of women and girls.
What does it mean? At the social/cultural level, women have been silenced forever by patriarchy, racism, capitalism-driven poverty, and religious training – and silenced on the individual level by interpersonal and family dynamics created by/supported by those forces. Women have been silenced by cultural oppression, political oppression, exhaustion – having nothing left at the end of the day after working multiple jobs and caring for children, illness and inadequate health care, and more.
Thankfully, many women found a way to break through.
I can’t write in the voice of a Black, Indigenous, Latina/Hispanic, Asian, LBTQ+, etc. woman. I can amplify their voices, which I need to do a better job of. I need to educate myself more.
I guess as a white woman I have two jobs: (1) amplifying women who don’t have as much access to public literary space as white women do and (2) writing from my own voice and the imagined voices of women like me – exploring where our enforced silences occurred and opening up those spaces, at least in an imagined landscape.
As far as me actually writing goes, I’ve got two imperatives in front of my face, literally: the words on this card and Cheryl Strayed’s words on the mug sitting on my desk. I’m clearer on what the first one means, but I still haven’t figured out the latter.
