Women in Black Asheville - Silence is a Visible Strength

Silence is a Visible Strength

Emma Goldman didn’t want to be part of any revolution if she couldn’t dance. It is the challenge and imperative of these times to not forsake joy as we remain mindful of a world in peril. Our brave sister Emma knew that it is the “organized violence on the top which creates individual violence at the bottom.” Now we have turned the calendar on the most violent century in human history. War has claimed more civilian lives than combatants. It is women and children who have borne the brunt of this brutality. We women today must find the way through the darkness. We must persevere as we move forward in this 21st century and act boldly to bring about a world without war.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead said: “it has been women’s task throughout history to go on believing in life when there was almost no hope.” And the Quaker Lucretia Mott wanted us to “hold to the belief, the faith, in the possibility of removing mountains to the side of right. If we believe that war is wrong, as everyone must,” she said, “then we ought to believe that by proper efforts on our part, it may be done away with.”

But first, somehow, we must find the way to express our pain for the world. Joanna Macy believes that this will wake us up, bring us out of the stupor of despair. “We must, as women,” she said, “help this sick society to get in touch with our fear and our pain for the world – we must find ways to honor the grief – the appropriate grief of all this killing.”

The international peace movement known as Women in Black is one important way to honor the grief. Women in Black began in

Jerusalem about fifteen years ago in response to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by the Israeli military. A small group of women gathered once a week at the same hour at a major traffic intersection. They wore black clothing and raised a black sign in the shape of a hand with white lettering that read, “Stop the Occupation.” Within months, vigils sprang up throughout Israel. Then solidarity vigils began in other countries. Women in Black has become a worldwide movement. What unites us is the commitment to justice and a world free from violence in our homes and from the organized violence of militarism and war.

We women dress in black as an expression of grief for all the victims of violence and war. We stand in silence because mere words cannot express the tragedy that wars and hatred bring. Our silence is a visible strength - a counter-force to the military and corporate elite who speak the language of domination and war. Our public silence is a potent expression of our grief and a gathering in of our collective strength that will help release the energy and the vision we need to build peace.

Since November, 2001, Asheville, North Carolina Women in Black have gathered in silent community at Vance Monument downtown each Friday from 5-6p.m. Week after week, in cold and rain we have stood together. And we invite all women to stand with us, to grieve together for our sisters who have been raped, tortured or killed – for those held in concentration camps and refugee centers, for the women locked away in our plantation prisons. Grieve with us for all women who have been disappeared or whose loved ones have vanished for speaking out or organizing for change; stand with us for women who suffer the violence of poverty while the weapons makers flourish and the arms merchants thrive; stand with us for all who have no safe and certain home place, or those whose homes have been demolished. Grieve for the theft of our sons and daughters into the armed forces; for the poisoning of our mother Earth by the weapons industries and the extortion by taxation that fuels militarism at an intolerable cost to human services and environmental protection.

We wear black as a symbol of mourning for all victims of war: the child soldiers and their child victims, the blindness of politicians and corporate officers who devise and promote war. We stand silently in black to mourn the destruction of people, of nature and the fabric of life. We stand as a radical act against the patriarchal, militarist regimes that dominate and destroy; we stand as a powerful non-violent act of resistance to policies that annihilate all that we hold holy and sacred and dear.

Clare Hanrahan,
-- a speech given Mother’s Day, 2002, at the University of North Carolina at Asheville

ClareHanrahan also wrote "Jailed for Justice, A Woman’s Guide to Federal Prison Camp" (2nd edition) 152 pp, trade paperback $12 postpaid from the author at P.O. Box 7641, Asheville, NC 28802. chanrahan@ncpress.net Volume discounts available.