1 Speaking Up! Speaking Out! Naming the silences
Women, power, authority and love in the Pacific
Seforosa Carroll
I write about power, authority and love, inspired by and drawing on the experiences I have had in the Pacific, many of which have come about through my work with UnitingWorld. I acknowledge with deep gratitude the land on which I am working, ever mindful of the First Peoples to whom this land belongs and who for times past, present and future continue to tend and care for this place, and whose wisdom we depend on and seek for well-being in the present and future of both human and non-human life on this earth, Godâs Oikos.
My work in the Pacific revolved around two key themes: gender (specifically gender-based violence) and climate change. Both of these themes intersected with interpretations and abuses of power, authority and love in a myriad of waysâfor example, the appeal to the authority of scripture to justify the subservient place of women which legitimises the abuse of and violence towards women (and children), the power assigned to men validated by both culture and scripture, the power of the colonial enterprise that continues to shape politics and the imbalance of power between the West and Pacific that impacts livelihoods and cultures, with one of the biggest impacts being the effects of climate change, not only on the slowly disappearing islands of Tuvalu and Kiribati but also on the whole of the Pacific. Climate change affects people disproportionately and differently. Climate change exacerbates poverty and gender inequality. The poor are particularly vulnerable to climate change, and women, who are over-represented among the poor, bear most of the responsibility for the survival and flourishing of communities.1 Women support communities emotionally and physically: as caregivers and nurturers, as well as providers of household needs, including food, water and sources of heating. Women are continually challenged to gain access to the available resources and to develop the needed skills. On the other hand, women possess practical understanding and coping skills to adapt to changing environmental realities, as well as to contribute to the solution.2 Unfortunately, womenâs perspectives on strategies to deal with climate change are still a largely untapped resource. The intersection between climate change and gender is an important emerging area of research in the Pacific. It is a complex and multifaceted relationship that cannot be explored sufficiently in this chapter. But it is important to acknowledge that climate change in the Pacific is an added layer of complexity and burden on womenâs lives, which, if not intentionally addressed, will keep womenâs voices and perspectives silent and invisible.
The title of this chapter, âSpeaking Up, Speaking Outâ, takes inspiration from Audre Lorde, who advocated for the âtransformation of silence into language and actionâ.3 Lordeâs powerful essay, a reflection sparked by her close encounter with breast cancer that led her to face her mortality, brought to light that a major regret was her silence. She asked, âOf what had I ever been afraid?â4 Her essay explores the uneasy dance between fear and silence: the fear of speaking up and speaking out, the fear of acknowledging injustice because then we have a responsibility to do something about it, the fear of offending, the fear of doing the wrong thing when intending to do the right thing. She wrote,
We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.5
Lorde argued that such âimportantâ things âmust be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having [them] bruised or misunderstoodâ.6 She concluded by stating that âit is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be brokenâ.7 The question that arises is how do we continue to break the silences held by (mis)understandings of power and authority as domination, competition and control and transform these silences into language and action? The tragic reality is that little has changed since Lordeâs essay was written in the 1990s, despite all the knowledge we hold. Similarly, in the Pacificâas Nicole George observedâdespite 30 or so years of aid programming, specifically to address gender-based violence and redress gender inequality, there has been minimal or no change.8 Why is this so?
This idea of transforming âsilence into language and actionâ sits within Rebecca Choppâs âpoetics of testimonyâ.9 It is Choppâs conviction that there are times when we need to say what has happened and to say how we have responded. Chopp argued that we need to speak about the situations and events in which we find ourselves: as a discursive practice, the poetics of testimon...
