Time and again we keep falling into this notion and habit of dismissing or silencing voices - for whatever reason it may be. Political, cultural, religious, professional, personal… but humans always find ways to make themselves heard or live their best authentic lives whether the oppressor sees it or not. The oppressor often triumphs through the idea that it has dismantled the ideology, identity, or question of the oppressed. “If we don’t see it, if we don’t hear it, then it doesn’t exist.”
But that to me is a fool’s paradise. Given the oppressor’s moves mostly arise from fear of the oppressed – rational or irrational – the biggest “victory” lies in believing the “threat” no longer exists… but that existence is, of course, relative. Does it exist if we don’t know? If we don’t see it? If we don’t hear it? I think it would bring us to the famous philosophical question, “If a tree falls in a forest but you didn’t hear it, did it really fall?”
What the oppressor often forgets, however, is that the oppressed always, almost always, find a way to resist. The resistance might not be strong or big enough to dismantle and take the oppressor down, or it may even be some perpetual state of resistance with no time limit in its conventional sense… but it certainly serves a purpose or two. A purpose to be, to speak, to express, to organise… a purpose to simply exist.
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