A frantic pipsqueak
plea against the fringe,
shushed and hushed, later praised
for every word (don’t speak,
not those, not heard,
never heard), only to raise
the tattered scrolls, rolled,
cloaked in velvet,
the tinkling silver-kissed shame of
the same
twisted truth:
we all laughed it off
together.
How has your voice been silenced?
What does it feel like to use your voice now?
What have you accomplished with your voice?
I struggled far more than expected with this prompt. Attempting to connect the concept of voice with those years… FFS, I was a writer, praised for my ability with words – yet punished for protesting the grandfather’s hands and fingers and mouth, his perverse language about me and my body, his open treatment of me as his object to be owned. It all took place against the backdrop of Jewish family culture; ceremonial celebrations of the Torah made their way into the words above.
My “no” was family lore. The women paraded memories of my protests; how tiny I was, how young when I first spoke, how my earliest phrases included begging him to stop, using (the word for this) a Yiddish phrase I learned from them, roughly translated as “to torture or torment.” Later, my expressed non-consent yielded outright rebuke; how dare I upset him, how dare I hurt his feelings?
My fears were comic family fodder as well. No one bothered to wonder *why* I was terrified of men with dark hair and booming voices.
And at the same time, by the same women (my mother, mostly), a call to a distorted feminism – an articulated responsibility to use my voice, my gift with words, to become a suited, briefcased not-woman, to follow only the paths of men and maleness, to dismiss the deep sense of myself as female, in all areas of life that mattered. My voice, I was informed, would have value only if strained through the filter of maleness.
I still can’t reconcile the mixed message. I’ve stopped trying. It needs to be enough that I’m using my voice now, that I’m making myself heard.
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