Examining the Power of Words as America Debates Political Censorship

The important stories we’re not telling

Trigger alter: This article briefly mentions suicide.

It’s 1988. Every time I get on the bus, the kids chant, “Prude, prude, prude, prude!” I walk down the aisle, my cheeks burning with shame, and quickly settle into a seat, ducking my head, knowing they’ll stop in a few minutes.

They’ll do it again or something like it. The bus driver never says a word. There are no rules about bullying on buses or school grounds yet.

And that’s where things will get worse — on school grounds. I know what to expect — the rumors, the chanting, the name-calling. Everyone is obsessed with my sex life.

How can that be? I’m twelve years old. I’ve never had sex.

But I have large breasts and people seem to think that must be an indication that I’m either sexually experienced — or at least hungry.

I shocked them all, though, when my boyfriend tried to kiss me at the party last weekend and I told him I wasn’t ready.

He told everyone that — surprise! — I wasn’t a sex-hungry succubus, as my breasts implied, but a prude. A stuck-up, frigid bitch who wouldn’t even do normal things with her boyfriend.

My classmates never forgot it and the chanting, name-calling, and rumor-spreading went on and on.

I thought about killing myself two years later. I still remember writing about it in my journal. The constant bullying had worn me into a frayed, exposed nerve, thrumming with pain in the open air. There was no end to what nonsense people would spread about me.

All I wanted was for the pain to go away — and the only way I could think to accomplish that was to end my life.

Thankfully, I did not. But I remembered all of that when I became a high school English teacher and one of my students disappeared one day. She had tried to kill herself and had to leave school to undergo intensive therapy.

Why did this happen? Because her classmates had relentlessly bullied her, just as mine had bullied me. Except they did it in 2010, on social media. They tweeted. They posted things on Facebook. They spread rumors that went viral, even finding their way into the feeds of classmates she had never met in the 1,200-count student body.

She couldn’t take it and, like me, decided there was only one solution.

Fast-forward ten years: mid-January 2021. On Facebook, my cousin, who is the mother of two daughters, 18 months old and 2 months old, posted a quote about how important it is for mothers to protect their children’s ability to “not react” when they “hear something they don’t like.” And if we accept living in a society, her post went on, in which we decide to shut out and censor voices that say something we don’t agree with, our children will never learn this critical lesson.

I can’t help but wonder how she will feel about this in 13 or 14 years when her little girls are in high school and their classmates decide to bully-tweet them until the only solution seems to be ending their own life.

“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts…”

― Diane Setterfield

It’s winter 2020.

“When are you going to let him curse?” my mother asks.

We’re on a video call with my sister and her 14-year-old son Ben keeps adorably inserting himself into the conversation. As the eldest in his family, we are watching with curiosity to see how things will unfold on his journey to adulthood.

“Not until he’s 18!” my sister jokes.

Of course, we’re curious about this. We are a raggedy group of potty mouths who love to try to outdo one another with our verbal filth. It’s gonna be so fun when Ben can curse and join the rest of us ne’er-do-wells.

“I’d like him to have some class,” my sister goes on. “And to understand that words are important. They have a lot of power.”

“It’s not that big a deal,” Ben pipes up, predictably. “Words are just words.”

“Actually,” I say, “did you know that Maya Angelou wouldn’t let people curse or say rude things in her house because she believed words stuck to the walls and she didn’t want that filth in her home?”

“I don’t think it’s that bad,” he said. “It’s just words.”

“Maybe. But haven’t you ever been really hurt by something that someone said to you? Haven’t you seen the way words can hurt others? I think words are far more powerful than we like to believe.”

“Maybe,” he said. “I’ll think about that.”

“…Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you.”

–Maya Angelou

Rewind. Let’s go all the way back to, say, somewhere near 200 BCE. Back to the pre-Christian Celtic tribes. Back to the time of the poets, bards, and druids.

Tori Amos once shared the story behind the lyrics to The Battle of Trees as a companion to Eric Satie’s Gnossienne No. 1, for her boldly experimental (and underappreciated) album Night of Hunters. The lyrics, she said, were inspired by her studies of the Ogham alphabet and a vision of the two characters in the album’s sonic narrative living a past life in which they defended the mother goddess in battle. They were not the knights or soldiers we might envision in our modern-day understanding of war.

They were poets.

“The power of the poet, in ancient Ireland…it was something we don’t understand,” she said.

In my own explorations into my ancestry, into the stories and myths and histories I long to know but will never be able to, I’ve been studying these cultures through a class led by Dr. Sharon Blackie. She talks a lot about charms, incantations, spells, curses, and prayers and the roles these played in ancient Celtic cultures, and indeed, in many Indo-European cultures and cultures across the globe.

Words were often repeated during rituals or in healing procedures, suggesting a belief in the relationship between one’s words and the object of which they are speaking. She also goes on to say that there were healing rituals that included sharing a story about how an injury was healed in order to heal someone else’s injury of the same kind.

Through these practices and other evidence, we know that Tori Amos was correct in the suggestion that the poets of ancient Ireland wielded words powerful enough to take into battle.

They understood a sacred knowledge that we have lost over the centuries.

“We fought side by side. Then he said to me, ‘I’ve dodged bullets and even poisoned arrows Only to be felled by the blade of a vowel.’”

-Tori Amos

Over the course of my life, my worst problem as a writer has been the same as every other writer: creative blocks. Periods of time when I can’t seem to produce anything, no matter how hard I stare at the screen.

But I have a new problem, lately. I’m driven to write. I cannot stop.

And then I get to the end of a piece and…nothing. It’s like having sex without the orgasm over and over and over again. I’m used to throwing out a lot of my work, as all creative people are, but for the past three weeks, I’ve thrown away 80% of it. Eighty percent.

What is happening? I’m angry. I’m afraid. I’m heartbroken. I’m outraged.

I have a lot to say. And yet, again and again, I’m called to refrain from sharing those words in public. It’s not that it’s crap. But…I don’t think it will be helpful.

If my words don’t inspire, heal, examine…then what is the point? Right now, as the world becomes increasingly loud, I find myself less and less inclined to add to the din.

I am sharpening the blades of my vowels and I want to use them well.

We are in a war again — still fighting the same Thunder God. We often forget all the nuances of how we use words, language, communication. That’s easy to do with all the noise this god makes.

We also like to pretend that we can do no lasting damage with our words, that, worst case scenario, we might hurt someone’s feelings. In actuality, words can start wars, destroy governments, and even kill people.

Right now, there are teenagers out there who are contemplating suicide. There is a 244-year-old government standing on the precipice of its own extinction. There are hit lists circulating, marking innocent people for death.

The words have stuck to the walls. Gotten into the upholstery. Into our clothes and into us.

What will we do now? What will we say?

What will we do with our arsenal of vowels and consonants?

“Words are like eggs dropped from great heights; you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall.”

― Jodi Picoult

© Yael Wolfe 2021

More on words and the fight against the Thunder God: