“The voice” is lost, but what is it that really can’t be spoken?
How not facing unspeakable truths prevents the whole group from moving forward.
It has been a rough few weeks on the global stage. It seems that everyday another tragedy emerges that brings with it huge amounts of grief. A wise man once told me that grief is the price we pay for having loved something. In psychotherapy, we sometimes think about the build up of loving as “attachment”. In this respect, I often find myself saying to clients that sometimes we aren’t aware of how attached we are to something until we risk losing it. And while it’s obvious we can attach to a person, we can also attach to a group, to an institution, or even an idea or a movement.
I realised just how attached I’d become to the outcome of Australia’s “The voice” referendum on indigenous parliamentary representation, when I saw the vote was defeated by a 60% majority. On hearing the news, I was baffled — as an Australian living overseas I’d started to think the country I’d left in the naughties had matured. But the confusion also came from a more heartfelt place — as an empathic human, I find it difficult to express in words how I imagine an indigenous person in Australia might feel at this result. Is heartbreak a good place to start? Or maybe, yet another heartbreak that’s been numbed, by a lifetime of such hurt? Of course I can’t claim to know that feeling. But I can know that I, with some distance from that lived reality, felt quite a painful loss.
Working with grief we know that after shock comes a stage of bargaining, the intellectual inquiry of “what happened” and “why”. After I saw the news I reached out to a few Australian friends and trawled Twitter to understand the “why?”. My articulate and insightful sister said “we’ve got some drongo’s in this country” (she meant the no voters). Media savvy mates proclaimed “the Murdoch empire piled on the fear”. Twitter spewed forth more rebuke: “we can’t represent one group above others, in a representative democracy”. This one, at least at surface, felt worthy of further inquiry.
The facts are, that the referendum would have enacted, if endorsed, a non-binding advisory committee, to voice the concerns of First Nations Australians to parliament. This phrase (First Nations) is important. It recognises the construct of nationhood is itself a product of colonisation. It recognises the breadth and depth of indigenous cultures, including those all but wiped out by my forbears. The advisory committee would have been powerful symbol which modified the founding documents of the country. The change would have begged us to question the assumption of British settlement: that no nation existed. “Begged” being the operative word. Because what’s being asked here is a plead to the heart as well as the mind. And that’s where the argument that “no other group gets representation” becomes completely unstuck.
The truth of the matter is that no other group in Australian society has been so bloodily abused. Vilified, murdered and disenfranchised in the most horrendous of ways. Historically this is unquestionable. And yet it seems this referendum result indicates that for many Australians, the bloody facts remains unspeakable. At first, that might sound strange, so bear with me.
In my work in groups, I am often struck by the unconscious silencing of racial issues. Many times I’ve witnessed a plea for being seen or heard, from a non-white person. A plea which will go unheard by a mostly white group. This is despite that such groups are usually filled with well meaning participants who are usually quite psychologically aware. It’s almost as if a spell of “unspeakability” is cast, and the group unconsciously complies.
Many who understand unconscious group dynamics have written on this. But the shorthand is, we operate unwittingly and automatically in group situations, including in the “big group” of society. Powerful instinctual forces come into play, these include adhering to powerful or dominant paradigms, kept in place by strong feelings of fear and guilt. When the mob rule (the dominant paradigm) is threatened, these instinctual forces demand that we “protect the tribe”. But on a more individual level, we are attempting to maintain a belonging to that dominance. To this end, concepts and memories, even the real-time sentiment from others, that might undermine this dominant paradigm become taboo. And in order to maintain supremacy, we don’t speak about them. You might recognise this feeling driven dynamic in your own institutional and familial groups.
In a bigger group of society we can also be unconsciously silenced. Think through the feelings of taboo that might be around on topics like gun control, the royal family, abortion or climate. Some things are hard to speak about. A recognition of this automatic censoring came up when I was listening to an otherwise insightful BBC radio 4 piece on the Australian referendum. In it, the correspondent listed the reasons for which First Nations Australians are subjugated. All manner of disservice, including the stolen generation of 1960s were mentioned, but the correspondent did not touch on the colonial genocides and massacres, or the decimation of First Nations spirituality through the forced removal from land. I was shocked at what I didn’t hear. I replayed that part of the episode twice, trying to understand how the core wounds which underly race relations in Australia, could not be mentioned.
Of course I can’t know why. It might have been a valid editorial or journalistic decision. Then again, it might have been the full bloodiness of the history remains unspeakable, or in this case un-broadcast-able. I felt angry for a moment, then I remembered all of the times when in a group I’ve done the same thing. Unconsciously gone with a dynamic of silencing, which at heart, is white supremacist.
It takes strength to face reality and to begin a process of reconciliation. Historical recognitions are a necessary part of resolving uncomfortable histories which persist into the here and now. But such recognitions force us to embrace uncomfortable truths. This requires a great inner strength: to see how we descendants of white colonisers carry the perpetrator within ourselves. This means we must face our own pain, shame and guilt. This in itself is difficult, perhaps more-so as it can feel like a betrayal of some tribal rule. And there’s a certain truth in this betrayal. For we must recognise those colonising tendencies live on in our relationships to greed and power — and that’s an unpalatable recognition — that has big implications, for individuals, for institutions and indeed, for nations.
My hope and my prayer is that someday, and hopefully someday soon, that which for now remains unspeakable in each of these contexts might shift. We are all indigenous to one earth, and while we continue the silencing of what we have done to one another, we deny what has been done to the oneness of humanity. The silencing shows up as perpetuating inequalities and the denial of experience. But the silencing also denies the chance to grieve. And in so doing, we deny the chance to heal.
Thank you Jared for a beautiful piece, written from the heart . An element of victory is represented in the 40% yes result and the Uluṟu statement, that remains alive, truthful, generous and compassionate. The other 60% (no), in my opinion, represents a lot of people who didn’t know what to vote, were ignorant of the facts, including our history, ill informed, mislead, misguided when putting pencil to paper, and frightened of the unknown, mostly their own unknown.
Beautiful written. ❤️