I recall, with a pang both fond and mournful, the first time I attended a town hall meeting in a small rural community in Trinidad. The chairs were mismatched, the fans groaned in their casings, and the microphone cut out just when someone with something vital to say stepped forward. And yet, what I remember most is not the inefficiency, but the language, the cadence of grief wrapped in humour, protest hidden in parable, love conveyed in the fierce precision of local idiom. It was a language not meant for export. And yet it sang with truth.
In every society, there are voices that speak from the centre,and others that must raise their volume just to be noticed. The trouble is that we often confuse volume with value.
Every language has a grammar, but power has one too. It dictates who gets to speak and who is spoken for; whose stories become history and whose are footnotes; whose accent is admired and whose is mocked.
In the public sphere, polished speech garners respect, while the speech of the poor, the displaced, the differently abled, or the foreign-born is often filtered out before it reaches the mainstream ear. We may say we value diversity of voice, but the reality is: we often only welcome it if it comes fluently dressed in the language of the dominant class.
There is a brutal irony here. The centre borrows from the margins,its music, its slang, its stories,yet rarely yields the microphone.
When we fail to listen to the language of the margins, we do more than ignore certain voices. We limit our own vocabulary for understanding reality.
What if the refugee child, struggling with a second tongue, holds a metaphor that could unlock a new way of seeing justice? What if the street preacher’s rhythm carries a critique of empire sharper than a hundred academic essays? What if the softest speaker in the room is the one most aware of the earthquake beneath our feet?
By ignoring these voices, we don’t just fail them,we impoverish ourselves.
To speak is power. But to listen,truly listen,is revolutionary.
It takes courage to let another’s syntax challenge your own. It takes humility to accept that the language of the margins might reveal truths your own tongue cannot carry. It takes attention to notice when the unheard are speaking,not in volume, but in wisdom.
There is, in the Gospels, a quiet moment easily overlooked: the Syrophoenician woman, not Jewish, not male, not clean in the religious sense, confronts Jesus with wit and grit. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs,” she says,and Jesus, to his credit, listens. He changes. It is a rare miracle: the Word made flesh is spoken to by the flesh of the margins. And the Word listens.
We would do well to follow suit.
In a similar vein, one of my favourite hymns of the modern era is “ We go out with hope of Resurrection”, There is a beautiful line which I believe for all its goodwill misses the point. (Apologies to the hymn writer, June Boyce-Tilman).The Line, “ We’ll give a voice to those who have not spoken, We’ll find the words for those whose lips are sealed, we’ll make the tunes for those who sing no longer…” . How different it would be if we sang, “We’ll welcome the voice of those who have not spoken, We’ll hear the hearts of those whose lips are sealed, we’ll play the tunes of those who sing no longer,…”
If you hold the microphone, pass it.
If you are offered the platform, consider whom you might bring with you.
If you work with words, write in such a way that those who live on society’s edge recognize themselves not as objects of pity, but as authors of meaning.
And most of all: listen. Seek out the voices that do not trend, the stories that do not sell, the speakers who stammer or speak in tongues your algorithms ignore.
Because language, at its best, is a communal act of becoming.
And no community is whole when its margins are mute.
