Words By: Amalia Nickel
Language is a powerful drug. When people use language to communicate ideas, words give life to thoughts and reflect the systems in which we live. The death of leader, activist and anti-apartheid revolutionary Nelson Mandela casts a hazy, filtered light on the current cultural systems that we take for granted and the language we use to address one another. Particularly in a business like the music industry, words of oppression are tossed around thoughtlessly, an indicator of the oppressed cultures from which they arise.
Mandela spent his life in service to the greater good of humanity, fighting against apartheid, and enduring a lifetime of suffering because he refused to accept the unjust and inhumane treatment of black people by white colonizers in South Africa. He spoke words of power: the words of justice, peace and equality, and he offered practical and sustainable solutions to back up his words. He famously declared, in one of the most gracious and poignant statements of the 20th century, “If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.”
The word peace, so often used as a greeting, a religious ideal or a means to war, is redefined in this statement. It becomes a word of collaboration instead of isolation. Never simply sounds, nor ink on a page, each word stands as a signifier for an object or idea – a word points to something that it represents. So it’s no small wonder that humans have long used linguistic communication
in attempts to control one another and equally so in movements to be free.
Words of oppressive domination are used to trick others into believing themselves powerless. Yet what the oppressors do not want the oppressed to know, is that within all our minds lie the sleeping giants – the words of freedom. We each have the ability to choose our language, to name and to communicate with one another in a myriad ways. Mandela claimed that “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”
Perhaps Mandela’s greatest achievement was in the example he set for us to continue in his wake: “As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same,” he told us. So where does that leave us? We are a people both fractured and unified, kept apart by judgment yet brought together through the universal struggle of being human. Which direction do we as a people turn in order to sustain the light that Mandela carried, and build his example into our own lives and communities? How can we begin to speak to one another as friends, as partners, as carriers of peace?
I’d like to hear from you: the poets, the artists, the speakers of words. How can we as a universal community do justice to the message that people have fought, suffered and died for, the message of peace?
Your words mean something, and you manifest our collective destiny when you speak. So speak, friends.