Biting Your Tongue - by Camille Saunders

by Camille Saunders

In my whole life, the book that has most impacted me is The Book of Queens, by Joumana Haddad. It is about the Armenian genocide and its impact on 4 generations of women, each represented as one of the queens from a deck of cards, and on the front cover is a drawing of one of them cutting off her own tongue.

If I look at it for too long I feel squeamish, for obvious reasons. But it is also because I have been that person about a million times, and so have all women.

I recently came to a dilemma about publishing some work I had done that was personal to me, even though the women I had shown it to said they had never felt so seen or understood. It is unedited, and I wrote it as a splurge in the 15mns walk from my last class of the day to my accommodation in the first week of university. It was dark, I was walking quickly, and I opened my notes app and spoke.

When I read it back now, I know that this is authentically exactly how I felt. There are entire sections that I would change, images that I now find clunky and phrasing that I know only really makes sense to me in the specific moments of reality that they are referencing. However, I will not edit it as it feels like cosmeticizing an authentic voice, making a guttural scream into more aesthetic poetry. Perfection was never the point of writing it, and it would be doing 2021-me a disservice to alter my voice. After all, it was fragmented for a reason.

However when it comes to publishing online, first of all, I am reminded of my digital footprint. I have had articles I wrote as a teenager plagiarised before by bots and that are now online with terrible AI-generated wording and yet my name attached. I have had my Instagram account hacked and images of my teenage-self fall into the hands of complete strangers. And I have read/written enough articles about victims of digital sexual misconduct to know that what is published on the Internet can never truly go away.

Second of all, it is very personal to the feelings I had at the time, which in turn are related to a specific turn of events that are complicated to talk about online for nothing short of legal reasons, and the fact that, again, the Internet is full of strangers. Therefore it comes out of context.

Third of all, by associating my name with something so personal it was drawn to my attention that it could conceivably give me a bad reputation as a complainer or in some way hold back my career as employers might not want to employ someone so outspoken.

These concerns are all valid.

Unfortunately for the status quo, so is my voice.

I have no way of knowing how many women will read this article, nor my work, nor how many will feel seen by it. (Though I suppose this is your cue to reach out and tell me if you are, as I will be completely in the dark after I hit ‘publish’ as to how, or even if, it is being received.) What I do know is that every single woman I have spoken to has experienced the feeling of biting their tongue in a situation where they wanted to verbally lay the other person flat. A sexist joke, an objectifying comment, an inappropriate hand on the shoulder (though in defence of men in positions of power leaning over their female interns, it is a biological fact that their knowledge can only be passed on to women through skin-to-skin contact, kind of like Novichok, or the way their own bosses stand pressed up behind them to explain the complexities of saving a Word doc. Oh, wait.)

Staying silent in moments of micro-aggressions or oppression is absolutely a situation with which I sympathise, and more than anything, I know that I do not know. I do not know every woman’s situation and their potential risks at using their voice, and it would be patronising of me to assume I did. Sadly, there are hundreds of thousands of examples of times when women have spoken up and been squashed by their superiors to prove my own stance naïve and an illogical career move.

However, what is also true is that regimes that are never questioned never crumble, and that men and boys whose misogynistic behaviour goes unchecked never change. They may also never change despite being challenged, and trying to protect oneself from danger is a normal, human instinct.

But every time I speak up when nobody else has and get even one text message saying, “thank you for that, I wanted to say something but wasn’t sure if I should”, or someone coming up to me later saying “you were so right for that, but I didn’t want to say anything”, I cannot help but keep speaking. Every time I hear a woman say “but I can’t say anything, because X” I feel I need to say double so that their voice is still heard even if they are not ready to put their own name to it yet.

The way I see it is that the patriarchy is a big, old house. It looks sturdy and intimidating from the outside, and it is incredibly difficult to get into, but when women have got inside before, they have reported back that its foundations are old and starting to rot. By speaking up, we throw a live grenade through the window of the house. When it explodes, we get a face full of shrapnel, from which women in the past have sometimes never recovered. Sometimes they have. When we group together, all speak up every single time, and not leave any woman stood by the front door with a grenade and an impossible decision to make, we give ourselves a chance to raze the house to the ground. We can then rebuild it, one brick and one woman at a time, so that what we are left with is not a pile of bricks and mortar, but a stronger, longer-lasting, better-built house, in which no woman is left alone taking risks by herself.

Boudica laid a brick.
Joan of Arc laid a brick.
Emmeline Pankhurst laid a brick.
Emily Dickinson laid a brick.
Sojourner Truth laid a brick.
Audre Lorde laid a brick.
Maya Angelou laid a brick. (The last three managed to help build two houses at once).

Benazir Bhutto laid a brick.
Malala Yousafzai laid a brick.
Julia Gillard laid a brick.
Jacinda Ardern laid a brick.
Angela Merkel laid a brick.
Michelle Bachelet laid a brick.

They all risked, and faced, far more adversity than I will ever experience: I have the privilege to say that I will not be tortured, I will not be imprisoned, I will not be shot in the head.

So if my responsibility is that much greater, why should my contribution be so much less?

Speaking up is always frightening, but, like everything else, it is less frightening when we are not alone. Whether women anywhere know my name is completely irrelevant and frankly I could not care less if I am entirely forgotten after my lifetime. What I do care about is that the women around me now, and throughout my life know as an unassailable certainty that if and when they do choose to speak out and lay a brick, they will never be alone.

So if on this blog you find more information than you were looking for, you find an expression you do not think was wise or necessary, so be it. If even one woman out there reads something and feels more inclined to speak out and help another woman feel heard, it will have been entirely worth it.

So to return to the harrowing image Joumana Haddad brought into my world with her book cover, unless someone else is so incensed by my words that they come and physically cut out my tongue, I refuse to make it easier for them by cutting out my own.

by Camille Saunders