I Speak for These People

by Lloyd B. Abrams

I see for people who have been blinded.

I hear for people who have been deafened.

But mostly, I speak the cacophonous, almost indecipherable words for people who scream out their barely discernable cries or those who are too exhausted or enfeebled to speak or those who have been muted.

I am their channel, their harrowing, narrowing path to their outside.

It seems that I am their only hope.

You cannot see me but I do exist, but not in the usual sense.

But let me assure you, I do exist.

Or so I’ve been told.

I inhabit the corridors of fear and duress. I dwell within the back halls of torture and humiliation. Of extraordinary rendition and refined interrogation techniques and special methods of questioning – vague multi-syllabic euphemisms for the horrors that you’ve heard about, and everyone has heard about, and if you don’t exactly know, you have a damn good idea of what’s going on – words by their very slipperiness give permission for humans – your fellow humans – to be put into stress positions and hooded and water-boarded and deprived of sleep. To be accosted with inextinguishable brightness and unbearable noise.

I inhabit all those institutions and camps with neutral-sounding names and laughably bizarre names like Halls of Justice and Resettlement Camps and Detention Centers and Juvenile Correctional Facilities. I am anywhere and everywhere where my people are deprecated and tormented and emasculated. Where my people are threatened and defiled and crucified.

I speak for these people, these people who have names very much unlike Myles Standish, John Carver and William Bradford, who came across the Atlantic on the Mayflower to escape persecution.

My people have Arabic names, Polish names, Bosnian names

                 Jewish names, Haitian names, Yemeni names

                 South African names, Columbian names, Cambodian names

                 Vietnamese names, Liberian names, Darfurian names

                 Mexican names, Russian names, Brazilian names

                 Chinese names, Korean names, Japanese names

                 Spanish names, Cajun names, black and brown peoples’ names

                 names of the mentally ill and names of the elderly

                 names from all across the world

                 and from time immemorial.

These … all of these are my minions.

These are the people I speak for.

But I have been kept much too busy. I am weary and wearing out and fading fast. I feel like I’m suffocating – I do know that I am dying inside – although I’ve been told that I am infinite.

I speak for all these people, but now only in whispers.

For I can do nothing.

My voice, too, is being silenced.

– This story, originally written in 2011, was resurrected from my “Works in Progress” folder

Originally written / June 15, 2011 .. Rev 4 / April 11, 2020

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April 11, 2020 … Copyright © 2020, Lloyd B. Abrams