the walls

i've been able to preserve my sanity because of the liliac coloured walls. monstrous intimacy gets lost in their monotone warmth with a hint of closure. it turns me low and slows my machinic thoughts into warped phrases, upside down commas, and then a string of silence. we merge, finally.

A quotation on language and violence

While I haven't read Gloria Anzaldua's beautifully written and dense text Borderlands in a while, I was reminded of the epigraph she uses at the beginning of her chapter "How to Tame a Wild Tongue." Here she quotes Ray Gwyn Smith who posits the following rhetorical question: "Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?" This theft amounts to: the premature silencing of a people; the erasure of an identity; the cutting of a tongue. This insidious erasure is at times subtle, silent, but never sudden. So let's not devalue our tongues.

Here's a painting by Ray Gwyn Smith:


Ray Gwyn Smith, Dream of Eritrea, 2002