Reflections on Alice Walker's “Overcoming Speechlessness”
Repost from May 17, 2024
During a 1-1 meeting for work yesterday, a colleague and I discussed previous comments I made on May 3 after student protesters at UCLA and Dartmouth were attacked by zionists and brutalized by campus and local police forces. I shared how helpless I felt in the weeks during and since the attacks and my fear of what this violence could mean for the November 2024 elections. This colleague listened as I vented my personal frustrations, then asked if this ongoing genocide in Palestine affects us in Hawaiʻi and if I had a worst-case scenario in mind for the outcome of the U.S. elections. Images and scenes from the January 6, 2021 insurrection, The Handmaid's Tale, The Hunger Games film series, even dystopian short stories like Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" and Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" popped into my head.
"From an education standpoint," I said. "A worst-case scenario is another regime in which the elites continue to support and allow genocide and students in Hawai'i suffer from lack of funding for schools."
To be honest, I should have added, continued silence, apathy, and indifference to the plight of Palestinians and all those experiencing genocide of mind, body, and spirit.
Later that night, I read Alice Walker's Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, and Palestine/Israel (2010). It's short and certainly worth multiple reads for Walker's powerful reflections on her experiences in war-torn nations with people actively resisting and healing from genocide.
Equipped with additional knowledge on Palestine/Israel-U.S. relations, I am confident that Palestine's survival or fall will greatly impact us. In thinking about inaction and the maintenance of status quos, Walker looks to history and the "silence" and "speechlessness" of Germans during the Holocaust, white Americans during legalized enslavement of Africans, and Jewish people during the genocide of Palestinians. She reminds us of the violence that continued unchecked despie "Good Germans, good Americans, good Jews" (p. 67). I fear adding "good Hawaiians" to this list of people who were slient and complicit in the murder of thousands and possibly millions if we do not stand with our Indigenous relatives and act.
The impact in Hawai'i is catastrophic. It is the cost of our humanity. A stain on humankind. We are already responsible for the extinction of countless species of more-than-human relatives. Are we to add an entire nation, an Indigenous People to our already lengthy list of injustices?
Overcoming Speechlessness is an important read for so many reasons. It calls on us to shift our attention beyond U.S.-centered and Eurocentric events. It provides a truthful account of history through the lens of a feminist, Writer of Color and her conversations with those who have learned and experienced the horrors of genocide "on the ground" (p. 34). It raises our consciousness levels about the repetitive nature of history and the insidiousness of colonialism and imperialism, the root causes of genocide in the U.S., the Congo, Palestine/Israel, and Rwanda.
In fact, I leave you with a collection of facts from Walker's book that leave me unsettled yet motivated to spread the truth about Palestine and fight for Indigenous futures.
on Rwanda: The Belgian settlers determined with the measurements of Hutu and Tutsi skulls that the Tutsi were more intelligent than the Hutu, more like Europeans, and therefore placed the Tutsi above the Hutu. ... The hatred this diabolical decision caused between these formerly coexisting peoples festered over generations, coming to a lethal boil in the tragedy of genocide (p. 8).
Over 4 million Congolese have been murdered in an endless war whose foundation rests on the mineral wealth of the Congo (p. 11–12).
Americans have been deliberately misled by our government and by the media about the reality and meaning of events in the Middle East; this is especially true where Palestine and Israel are concerned (p. 22–23).
former Israeli president Ariel Sharon, known as the “Butcher of Sabra and Shatila“ (refugee camps in Lebanon where he led a massacre of the people) ... talked about making a pastrami sandwich of the Palestinian people, riddling their lands with Jewish settlements until no one would be able to imagine a whole Palestine. Or would know Palestine ever existed (p. 29).
