Silence is violence – Part 3

OVER the last two weeks I’ve been working my way round to Rebecca Solnit’s new book, Whose Story is This?: Old Confl icts, New Chapters. I’m not offering a review of the book here, just a few comments on the premise on which it’s built. Please just take my word for it, Rebecca Solnit is one of the most important writers treading Planet Earth in our times. Her new book is a manifesto for the paths we must take to ensure a different kind of world from our present one. And when, in the quotation below Solnit says “We” she is talking about a collective of different groups of “we”, working nonetheless for a broadly common goal, a world different from our current world of oppression and injustice (and please, readers, bear in mind what I was saying before about the moral and logistical problems involved in “speaking for”). Solnit says: “we are building something immense together that, though invisible and immaterial, is a structure.” This project is about “race, class, gender, sexuality, about nature, power, climate, the interconnectedness of all things; about compassion, generosity, collectivity, communion; about justice, equality, possibility.” And—my observation—to get back to that idea of “we” and “we”—when a rich black man asks “should I worry about the welfare of a poor white woman?” or when a rich white woman asks “should I worry about the oppression of a poor black gay man?” the answer is, yes, they should, because they may well be party to the oppression The book contains 20 short essays, organized into two sections titled “The Shouters and the Silenced” and “Openings.” Shouters are those like Trump who hate the idea of anyone standing up for their rights, but shouters are also those who protest the denial of rights. I do hope all my readers are shouters in the latter sense; if not (and I address this comment to my long-suffering editor) a packet of throat lozenges should be provided with every week’s issue of thepost. Two more quotations from Solnit to wrap up with and to give you a sense of what a fi ne writer she is. First, I should say something about the word “woke”, because I’m not sure it’s caught on yet in southern Africa. Whatever its origins, this is now a term mostly used by way of an abusive rejection of those who are sensitive to oppression and speak against it. Solnit comments “if you think you’re woke, it’s because someone woke you up, so thank the human alarm clocks.” The other comment speaks to all the struggles—think of the recent campaign to haul down statues commemorating vile men such as slave traders, think of the struggles against colonialism and apartheid, the struggle for gay rights and (most arduous of all) the struggle called feminism. Solnit describes her own waking up to the struggle of Native Americans (or First Peoples), who are amongst the most horrendously unfree in the Land of the Free, a waking up that occurred when she was a student, thirty years ago. She then talks about “the struggle of new stories to be born, against the forces that prefer to shut them out or shut us down, against the people who work hard at not hearing and not seeing.” Hullo Trump, Hullo Boris Johnson, Hullo an apparently endless succession of Prime Ministers in Lesotho (please Ntate Majoro, try to break the mould—I believe you have it in you). Chris Dunton