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When the bald man asks to speak for his baldness, he is not condemning the hirsute man. He simply wants to tell of the feel of rain on his naked head. When we speak of privilege, we are not condemning its owners: We simply ask to be the owners of our stories. In 1999...
...my old man was still under the tutelage of theological giants in Mozambique seminary when we received new neighbors. Like my father, my neighbor was on scholarship. Like my father, he was a foreigner. He had a son & a wife - who was rudimentarily slender. They were Sudanese.
His son, Tunda, had a singular attribute which made him the butt of jokes. He would run home to hide under the bed whenever he heard a tire burst, or simply hide behind, or on, trees, until he felt it safe to come down. It was odd and to our young spirits, cowardice...
Later when I was older, and on the throes of lucidity, it occurred to me that we had abused Tunda's reality. In terming him cowardly, we painted his reality dark with the brush of privilege. Unlike us, Tunda had been born & raised in the heart of the Sudanese Civil War.
What manifested to us as a tire burst, was in Tunda's mind the pervasive ricochet of guns informing his prior reality. While he was in peace, all he'd known was war. In war, the default response to any eccentric sound, was HIDE. Years later, Tunda would subdue his "cowardice"
But for the life of me, I never could overcome my guilt. And I try as much as possible, to see the world from a man's eye before I define "reality". And today, we have so many Tundas out there. Whose realities are informed by pain & sorrow. Whose existence is a laborious sentence
Like the young Syrian girl Hudea, who threw her hands up in the air, when she saw a camera man zooming in on her. She thought it was a gun. Privilege wouldn't understand. Because privilege affords you rose-colored glasses. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-32121732
Whenever you write the book of life, it must be embellished by the chapters of alternate realities. Whenever, we create policies, we must take into account those that have known war, beyond the prevailing peace. We must sing their incoherent tunes, mold them into cogent songs...
As we trudge through this storm of mishap, let the bald man speak. While we can tell the stories of wet hair, we cannot tell of the belaboring feel of rain on a bald naked head. Let the bald man speak.
