Who Presumes?

Who presumes to speak for the dispossessed;

Those who strip them bare like thieves and brigands;

Those who find affront in the naming of their dispossession?

The great unwashed heave themselves 

Through drab days; the poor are always with us.

Who should presume to tell their stories,

Put concoctions of words in their invented mouths;

Those who see the voiceless as weak, the flawed dregs of failure;

Those who can only accept the testimony of mouths struck dumb?

Lenticular clouds hang over the mountains.

Cataracts of vapid air run like rivers.

Down in the human basements, we do not see

The crucified and abandoned who lie wasting there

So. who will presume to put words together,

Not from presumption, pity nor for profit,

But to tell of humanity, the good and the bad

Stirred up like too many troubles, opaque, muddied, 

Grit and filth in the depths of stagnant water?

Is it those who hide hatred in themselves, their festering bile

Or those who fear it, purge it by rendering the world in black and white?

Is it those whose heels grind down the dislocated and the different,

Who marginalise the sick, the foreign, the mad, the weird 

Or those whose hands rise up in horror, to take offence in clichés,

Who cannot speak the truth for fear of what cannot be said?

Mist in the forest, likewise in the tower-topped city,

Swirls like fire-smoke as if the world is burning

And still the streets rattle under neon motorcades;

Chasing commuters pass the rough-sleepers

Who, like all our fallen angels, cannot be seen.

Who among us is blind or sees only characterless ciphers;

Those who stand tall on the backs of disenfranchised millions;

Those who trumpet outrage for the powerless and drown them out,

Unable to reconcile human faces behind the masks they have imposed?   

Who might presume, then, to go beyond fear and say

These are people who are not myself, whose stories are not mine

But whose stories, like mine, run true, tributaries of the same river?

Who must presume to find truth in fiction, to illuminate truth

Through untruth, through stories borrowed, not stolen, 

From others whose power to speak has been silenced;

Those who dare to have compassion and believe in good and bad,

Who believe in redemption, even for the wicked;

Those who dare to speak it, write it, 

The complete and imperfect truth?

© BH, 2016

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I read the transcript of Lionel Shriver’s speech to the Brisbane Writer’s Festival, 8 September 2016. 

I also read Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s Guardian and blog piece describing why she walked out on it.

It led me to this. It’s about writing and who, indeed, presumes to speak for others.

I’m not going to deconstruct either of the above pieces. Let's just say, for me, social media has become a platform where immediate responses are shared with too little thought. It's a stupidity amplifier, making ill-considered assertions more extreme, bringing outrage in return, similarly amplified.

And there’s a pattern. Some, inflamed by transgression, take umbrage on behalf those perceived as injured. This kind of presumptive offence by proxy is patronising and creates stereotypes of a different kind from the ones that silence, marginalise and belittle; stereotypes nonetheless.

But, as a writer, to quote Jackson Browne, ‘I’m not gonna shut my mouth, Till I go down’.