Savvy 10: Impact

Last night I gave a speech that nobody heard. If a woman talks into a microphone in an enormous cement floored space full of authors and people buying books and making connections with their community ... does she make a sound? Just in case the answer is, "No." Here is the sound I would have made:

The Impact of Words -

There's a great moment in Hamlet when our hero sits engrossed in a book. He is interrupted by that meddlesome Polonius, who asks, "What are you reading?"

Hamlet answers precisely: Words. words, words.

It is our hope that tonight, you will find yourself in a frenzy to buy up opportunities to read words. Words! Words! These words, these books, were written for you. As authors, we can no longer pretend that they belong to us. We know well that you will imagine our characters as you see fit. If we've done our jobs, you will hear their voices in your head. You will believe them or doubt them, root for them or despise them. Knowing this, we offer them up to you. Please take our words. By doing so, tonight, you benefit not only yourself, but this community, and the generous dream of Joy Kogawa, one of this country's greatest weavers of words.

No doubt you were raised on words. I was. Mine were: No! and Look out! Stop it! and We love you. But of course words can do much more than warn and show affection. They can heal and stab, wound and smooth over. And we are witnessing across the border, not for the first time, that words can inspire hope and act as a call to action for young people who feel energized to engage in public discourse again.

When I think about the impact of words in our daily, not-so-literary lives, I am brought back to labels and names. We name things to simplify our lives, and I am grateful that I can ask for “coffee” and not have to parse that what I am looking for is a brownish hot liquid made of beans roasted long enough to stain my teeth and keep me up past eight tonight. There is genius in the words hiccup, fever, and loneliness. Imagine trying to describe the thing we call “marshmallow.” How grateful I am these days that I can turn to my neighbours and say, “Spring” and that one word says everything.

Some of the labels we use, however, simplify too much, and are not so benign. And though we have been told for decades that words can’t hurt us, we know better. When Randall Kennedy wrote the book N**** he took flak for refusing to write out the racial slur. He responded to his critics by explaining, “That word still draws emotional blood."

I have spent some portion of my professional life addressing name-calling. I have argued (and continue to believe) that it matters what we call one another. The point borders on simplistic in a school setting, when the kid known only by a well-worn slur is found behind the bike rack with a bloody nose, or a concussion. His parents learn that day what he learned a long time before the punch: to be afraid of a word.

Most of us, if we think about it, can name the word. The one that makes our hearts plunge, sends our pulses racing with rage and fear. Over the phone. In the dark. On the street. Chances are, mine is not the same as yours.

There are some who say we should outlaw these words that hurt, these labels we use to put each other down based on race, gender, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, body size or ability. Should we disallow those words? I don’t think so. I believe we should drown out those words, overwhelming hateful speech with words of compassion, humour, wit and generosity.

As Martin Luther King said, “In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

In this great city, where difference is like spring itself- hopeful, energetic and growing, Speak up. Your words matter.

Thank you for being here. Have a wonderful evening.