A short first-person spoken reflection describing a childhood marked by household violence and pervasive silence. The speaker recounts witnessing physical abuse, social inaction, and the lasting difficulty of forming a sense of masculinity in that environment; the piece urges the importance of speaking up implicitly by showing harms of silence.
If I could describe my childhood in one word, I would use the word unsafe. It was unsafe to have an opinion. It was unsafe to think. It was unsafe to speak. It was unsafe to be mean at Brown. You know, when the infamous movie One Three warriors was released, I was 10 years old, I sat on the falla on the mat on the ground. And my siblings and I, we laughed. We cracked up through the entire film because we thought it was a comedy. We would compare Beth Hickey's black eyes to my mum's black eyes. You know, Mum's black eyes are way bigger than Beth's because she would go to church like this, you know, bruised face, big sunglasses. But no one said or did anything. People knew the violence, people heard the violence, but no one ever spoke up. And so for me, navigating my masculinity, what it means to be a man around violence was very hard. You know, you never forget.
