There is much to be said about silence, yet it is usually passed over. We live in a world that is unequal by design. A world-making project that brought this world intro fruition by destroying other worlds. We used to inhabit a world where, depending on where you were, you had a different relationship to time, space, environment, nature, cosmology — I could go on. Yet, the forces of imperialism and colonisation, applied by Western powers, has shifted us into a collective paradigm that we are forced to accept as normal. All the erasures of our culture, our very ways of being, are now silences. We must speak up.

This is one of the many rallying cries of the oppressed across the world. That we must raise our voices. That we must articulate the violence that we face. In the midst of all this, we expect that allies do the same. Not in some patronising sense of being the voice of the voiceless. Fuck that. We all have our voices, but we have been silenced. The simplest step for an ally is to pass the mic. If you have a platform and an audience, a seat at the table, a family, friends, community, then it is of crucial importance that you draw attention and educate others on just how violent a world it is that we live in.

A call to conscience and the need for empathy

Yet, this instinct will not be present within our selves if we are not open to empathy. If we feel that we must look away when we feel discomfort observing the injustice of the world, then we are already denying ourselves of that capacity. We must endure. We must be witnesses. We must hear the testimony of the traumatised. Still, there are those who, while doing so, feel it appropriate to police the ways in which this testimony is presented. Under the guise of “community guidelines”, the powers that be, that control the flow of information, “protect” us from witnessing too much. The very real and immediate trauma of the oppressed is hidden as “sensitive”, which is all the more ironic given just how desensitised we have become.

I say “we” here to be more welcoming. We are not all the same. As much as universalism tries to convince us that it is the case, I have to believe that it is not. This world attempts to blur out the particularities of our experiences. The kind of conscience that it allows is one that appeals to a universal notion of humanity. This is ahistorical given how many worlds used to co-exist on this planet just a few hundred years ago. Why do we need to see others as the same in order to feel empathy? Why is it so difficult to allow your conscience to feel for those who look and sound different? These are questions everyone must ask themselves.

Acknowledging complicity and doing something about it

No one likes to be told that they are complicit. It makes them uncomfortable. Case in point, this week, in India, the consecration and inauguration of the Ram Mandir in “Ayodhya” — simultaneously the deconsecration of Faizabad’s Babri Masjid that was demolished by a violent mob in 1992 — saw waves of support and celebration across the nation. It also saw outbursts of violence targeting Muslims across the nation. Saffron flags were even raised atop a church, and no religious minority feels safe. The nation state is heading towards an election season, and it is of utmost importance to raise our voices against the cementing of Hindu Raj and what is certainly fascism coming into full force.

When I raised this issue on my Instagram stories, an Indian acquaintance who is from a Hindu family responded:

I agree with you. In my sphere, the conversations about how messed up this “celebration” is, are happening and have happened in offline spaces. With parents and in-laws and uncles and aunts, who are not on social media, but are celebrating the “second coming of Ram” without thinking about the implications of this temple and this action. Just wanted to say that, I have nothing to post about this on social media since the people that I am personally questioning are not on this platform — it seems performative when I would rather save my energy for the real familial arguments that my questions bring about. However, I am not celebrating. I am not complicit.

To which I responded:

Thanks for clarifying! Yet I do feel that, as a minority, it does not feel performative to me when Sinhalese Buddhists raise their voices in solidarity for Tamil and Muslim communities on the island. It helps me get a sense of who I can be in conversation with, and it is through following up on that, of course, that a better sense of whether these people actually live up to it comes to light. I feel like the term “performative” now has a specific connotation that is limiting to what it denotates. By that connotation, a lot of the work of activists and artists and academics who use twitter or social media to express themselves and be in conversation with each other would also be reduced to “performativity”, despite their actual work and dedication to what they care for.

Thankfully, it elicited an empathetic and reflective response:

You’re right. As I think about it, I wonder whether there is some measure of shame present for me, even though I do not consider myself a Hindu and Hinduism as a philosophy is something I am trying to understand through learning and studying the texts, instead of what happens back home in the name of religion.

However, I completely understand that every voice matters, especially when you’re coming from the minority. From that point of view, it does matter to me to make it clear where I stand.

What this acquaintance is detailing here is certainly an important form of showing solidarity. How many folks from oppressor communities would take the time and energy to question and educate their loves ones, friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances about the ways in which they are partaking in the oppression of others? It is easy to criticise social media posts as “performative”, but there is some value to that act, too. To everyone who fights the good fight in their family Whatsapp group chats, thank you. This is a necessary form of resistance.

“Everyone is familiar with the slogan “The personal is political” — not only that what we experience on a personal level has profound political implications, but that our interior lives, our emotional lives are very much informed by ideology. We oftentimes do the work of the state in and through our interior lives. What we often assume belongs most intimately to ourselves and to our emotional life has been produced elsewhere and has been recruited to do the work of racism and repression.”

Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement (2016)

Breaking the silence and finding the words to do so

Living in the Sinhala Buddhist supremacist state of Sri Lanka, it goes without saying that many of the most necessary voices are silenced. When did you last hear a member of the indigenous communities speak? No, I am not referring to Sinhalese or Tamil communities here. I am referring to the Aathikudi, the Wanniyala Aetto. Many in this country are not educated on their ways of life, their relationship to ecology, their cosmology, let alone their immediate and long-standing concerns. It is not that they have nothing to say. It is certainly that the state is structured in such a way that they are not given a voice.

I have always felt a strange sense of complicity when I have partaken in discourse with those outside of Sri Lanka, particularly during Zoom discussions mid-pandemic. They always began with land acknowledgements. This made me wonder why we do not have a culture of doing so, be it in the arts, activism, academia, or otherwise. Recently, I tried to encapsulate a sense of how that might be worded. I am sharing it here for anyone to use, and, I hope, add to:

My name is Imaad Majeed and I am speaking to you from an island known by its Sinhala Buddhist settler-colonial name: Sri Lanka. This land belongs to the indigenous Wanniyala Aetto, Aathikudi, Palankudi communities, spirits, and endemic flora and fauna that inhabit the island that is experiencing ongoing Sinhala Buddhist colonisation, the genocide of the Tamil minority, indentured labour of Malaiyaha Tamils, Islamophobia, environmental degradation including deforestation on an island that is vulnerable to climate change, and still reeling from economic collapse.

Land acknowledgement for the island I prefer to refer to as “Ilankai” (2024)

There is so much strength and resilience to be found in the words we choose to use when we resist the structures that oppress us and those around us. We have to be constantly engaged in the act of finding the words. This is not just of importance to writers, poets, lyricists, etc., but also for us to discover through the process of conversation with our beloveds, our kin, our family. I believe that poetry already exists among us, within us, and never without us. And poetry is potent. Poetry is urgent. It is powerful.

In her essay “Arts of the Possible”, Adrienne Rich says:

The impulse to create begins — often terribly and fearfully — in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?

Adrienne Rich, Arts of the Possible (1997)

As we witness the violence — structural, ambient, and direct — of nation states around the world, let us also listen closely to the silences. Certain silences we perceive are not by choice, but by circumstance. There are those in the world whose voices we do not amplify. We do not pass the mic. We have not lived up to the title of “ally”. Here, we must do better.

Then there are the silences of those who have to self-censor, succumbing to the ever-increasing pressure of living under oppressive states. The Sri Lankan Parliament has just passed the Online Safety Bill, with 108-62 votes, which will “make provisions to prohibit online communication of certain statements of fact in Sri Lanka”. The Asia Internet Coalition’s Managing Director Jeff Paine has urged that the “legislation should not dampen innovation by restricting public debate and the exchange of ideas that can consequently impact the digital economy.” Even the United Nations Human Rights Office spoke against the bill, back in October, concerned that it “includes an overly broad definition of terrorism and grants wide powers to the police — and to the military — to stop, question and search, and to arrest and detain people, with inadequate judicial oversight.”

What can we now do about it? We must look out for those whose voices are important to be heard. We must create spaces for them to feel safe in enunciating the very words that will liberate others. Do we protect our lives by speaking anonymously? Yet, anonymous voices are so easy to dismiss as being “some bot” on the internet. It is strange to live in the present, terminally online world, where every name has a face to it (and maybe even a blue tick). I grew up to an internet where anonymity was perhaps one of its greatest freedoms. However, attitudes towards this have changed, especially given how this freedom is routinely abused by bad actors. I do not have a solution for this crisis that has descended upon us. Write to me if you do.

“Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don’t yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it’s actually going to be possible.”

Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement (2016)