The violent attack on Salman Rushdie troubled me on multiple levels. Previously, I only knew of him from media reports I read about following the controversial publication of The Satanic Verses. Realizing the threat he has lived under for decades because of ideas he had and words he penned and that he now has “life-altering injuries” as a result of his willingness to stand on a stage intended to provide a safe space for persecuted voices, is both humbling and terrifying. 

Sadly, it is not a new story.

I think of Bryan Stevenson enduring countless threats against his life to write on behalf of justice for the incarcerated. In his memoir Just Mercy, Stevenson described one of the numerous bomb threats his office received, “After we cleared the building, the police went through the office with dogs. No bomb was found, and when the building didn’t blow up in an hour and a half, we all filed back inside. We had work to do” (p. 204). Despite the threats, Stevenson has devoted his life to a call to “[b]eat the drum for justice” (p. 46).

I consider Valarie Kaur as an undergrad driving across the country in the days immediately following the September 11 terrorist attacks, bravely capturing the stories of the violent hate crimes inflicted on Sikh Americans, Christian Arabs, South Asian Hindus, and Black Muslims. She reflected in her memoir See No Stranger, “I didn’t understand it then, but recording the stories was secondary to our real work—grieving together” (p. 43).

I recall Frederick Douglass risking his life to acquire literacy and then continuing to risk it to educate and inform his fellow slaves. Not only did his courage lead to freedom, but in taking the further risk to publish his narrative, Douglass continues to enlighten those of us who desperately need a glimpse of the atrocities of slavery in order to understand our own times.

As a writer and a writing teacher, I think about words constantly. I’m the rare soul who punctuates her texts and re-reads her emails five times before sending them to be sure they say exactly what I intend. Even then, there is plenty of room for “error,” as written communication is a reciprocal process between a writer and her reader. Each brings her own experiences and understanding to the text, creating a beautiful symbiosis where meaning is constructed not imparted. 

Our culture allows for the instant sharing of ideas on very public platforms, such a difference from the context in which Rushdie first garnered such outrage. This makes the work of a writer that much riskier. Now we are immediately banned, cancelled, labeled, and attacked in a myriad of ways for sharing our thoughts and our stories. 

However, the greatest risk is to the individual banning, cancelling, labeling, and attacking others, for a closed mind is a dark, lonely, and dangerous place. We cannot be afraid to read and hear the stories of those with whom we disagree. We cannot silence people because we don’t understand them or their experiences. And we cannot let those who are afraid of our truths keep us from writing or speaking them. 

I remember soon after the murder of George Floyd, I shared a list of resources related to racial justice on my Facebook page. A “friend” suggested I remove it because of the potentially inflammatory nature of some of the texts on the list. I politely declined, thinking that fear of reading someone else’s truth is a tremendous hindrance to the understanding and healing our nation so desperately needs. The confirmation hearings of Ketanji Brown Jackson and the educational debates about critical race theory evoked similar feelings of puzzlement and dismay in me. Why would I be afraid for my children to read and hear multiple perspectives? It is honestly more terrifying to think of them growing up with a narrow, one-sided view of the world.

Just as we must all have the courage to write and speak our stories, we must be equally eager to listen as others share their experiences in trustworthy spaces such as those encouraged by Parker Palmer and The Center for Courage and Renewal. In Palmer’s circles of trust, the philosophical underpinning is that “each of us has a voice of truth within ourselves that we need to learn to pay attention to.” The safe spaces created by establishing “a few basic operating principles” that include “no fixing, no saving, no advising, and no correcting each other” allows a place for individuals to be “alone together or in solitude in community” where “anyone can say anything they regard as true into the circle” (The Greg McKeown Podcast, Season 2 Episode 17).

As Kaur wrote, “Deep listening is an act of surrender. We risk being changed by what we hear. When I really want to hear another person’s story, I try to leave my preconceptions at the door and draw close to their telling” (p. 143). 

Stevenson has been driven by a similar philosophy influenced by his grandmother, the daughter of Virginia slaves, who constantly told him, “You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close.” He has devoted his life to maintaining “[p]roximity to the condemned, to people unfairly judged” and to righting “the injustice we create when we allow fear, anger, and distance to shape the way we treat the most vulnerable among us” (p. 14).

Kaur went on to acknowledge the difficulty of listening to someone whose beliefs are abhorrent, enraging, or terrifying to you. She concluded that, “In these moments, we can choose to remember that the goal of listening is not to feel empathy for our opponents, or validate their ideas, or even change their mind in the moment. Our goal is to understand them” (p. 156).

My personal experiences with this pale to those of Rushdie, Stevenson, or others whose very lives are at risk from the words they write. But I share their conviction that the risk only intensifies the importance of their work.  

Now in the second “half” of my life, I am relishing the immunity articulated by Richard Rohr who recognized that in this “second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you, but they also have much less power to control you or hurt you. It is the freedom of the second half of life not to need” (Falling Upward, p. 157-158).  

I will always write in support of justice and in opposition to oppression. I will speak out against abuse and racism and sexism and white supremacy. I will advocate for those individuals that society often doesn’t see or hear. I will be the girl in the pew speaking up for love when it seems that judgment often dominates. And I will have the courage to share MY story, MY thoughts, MY experiences, and MY attempts at understanding them. Because no one else can do that for me, and to give in to fear of judgment, criticism, conflict, or cancellation is to give up freedom. As New York Governor Kathy Hochul said after the vicious attack on Rushdie, “I want it out there that a man with a knife cannot silence a man with a pen.” 

So as an oppressed Disney princess once belted: “I won’t be silenced. You can’t keep me quiet–won’t tremble when you try it. All I know is I won’t go speechless.”