I have access to parts of my voice that I didn't think were accessible, and to parts of my body that I didn't know existed.
This vibration that starts in my diaphragm, passes through me, goes to the roof and beyond, then returns to the room to linger and flow as I would flow my emotions in a bath of bubbles and tears. This voice that goes beyond me reminds me of how far I've gone, how far I've surpassed the destiny written for people of my blood and seed. I seized these ropes that wanted to yank me horizontally downwards, and climbed them to beyond my horizons, virtuously and vertically upwards, I had to free my feet before my voice, let go of the metal ropes to find my vocal cords.
Thus now, I know where I'm headed, far from home but close to myself.
But as I move on, the silence I left behind, in the faces of those who couldn't pick up enough words to rival all the crap life threw at them, keeps calling me; not to come back, or to save what we all know to be a lost cause, but to remind me that, as Kateb Yacine bluntly put it, silence is not of gold, silence is strong in the memory of those who read eyes and bodies_ those who know, as in a simple categorical manicheism to those who don't. In suffering, nuances are overrated, life is radical, so let me say it for the record. For that if you know, you know silence is meaningless when you need to speak for all those who never got the chance to climb onto a podium, because they wouldn't talk the talks and walk the walks.
You see, if this silence were mine alone, I would desert it, or it would desert me. Yet it is too loud to be mine alone, it is the silence of all the silenced beings before me, and of all the quiet beings after me. Its notes are those I have never sung and its tears I have never cried. AND THEY ARE NOT OF GOLD! They're of blood and death, of pride and wratch, which are not mine, and if they are not mine, then what right do I have to desert them?_ Inspired from a poem by the Palestinian Taha Mohammed Ali_قصيدة الباشق
Cover image: 'the last day of pompeii' - karl bryullov (1833)
