When I was a child and my parents moved from Europe to Morocco, I had all the words. My mother worked at a medical clinic, so on weekdays she left me in the care of Fatima, a 17-year-old Berber woman who was my nanny. Like everyone in Morocco, Fatima spoke Darija, a local Maghrebi Arabic dialect. In school, I spoke French; at home, during the day, I learned enough Darija with Fatima to speak in full sentences and sometimes swear like a pint-sized sailor. In the evening, with my parents, I spoke their native Portuguese.
On those rare occasions when Fatima was otherwise occupied, her aunt Ijju would look after me, and Ijju compensated for her lack of tenderness with an asperity and starkness that shattered all childhood illusions of autonomy and esteem. One day, in her impatience, she ordered me around bluntly, and in a moment of mutiny, I placed my small fists on my hips, arms akimbo, and declared in rapid-fire and more-or-less correct Darija that she was not Fatima, whom I loved, and she was not a parent, either. She chortled at first, but she backed down.
What I understood that day was that words, simple words, could lead to auspicious results. If I could name something correctly—a situation, an injustice—I could begin to redress the wrong, and for a little girl, that was a heady realization.
What I understood that day was that words, simple words, could lead to auspicious results.
Ijju was grim, but she was not malicious; she was rough, and life had probably been rough with her too, but others, I would soon discover, were truly heinous. Predictably, my intuition about the power of words would soon hit a wall as I encountered the problem of evil, which left the child I was momentarily speechless.
We lived on the outskirts of Rabat, in a white residential building with a dramatic spiral staircase within, which any good architect will tell you symbolizes man’s ascent towards the divine. One day, as I winged so that Fatima would carry me in her arms to our apartment on the second-to-last floor, a neighbour threw a kitten from the top floor. I saw the minuscule, striped gray ball of fur, eyes electric with fear, fall four stories to the ground with a shrill, terrified cry that caused Fatima to scoop me up in her arms, hold my head firmly against her chest to put an end to my witnessing, and run up to our apartment as the door slammed shut on the floor above.
I never saw what happened to the kitten below. I know I cried. I also know that when I have asthma, which I developed after that day, the wheezing sounds like that kitten going down, for the trauma of evil embeds itself in the body and not just in the mind. But neither Fatima nor I spoke about it to each other or to my parents.
For the rest of my childhood, I became convinced that if I could find not only the words but also the nerve to describe injustice, when I became good enough, readers would be so moved by my descriptions that they would stop hurting others.
What I failed to grasp as a child is that words do not always conjure understanding
What I failed to grasp as a child is that words do not always conjure understanding; most often, they follow it, which shields the willfully blind from seeing and naming the wrong and acting to defeat it. So the question also becomes how we get decent people to see blatant injustice clearly, but this is a topic for a different essay. I want to believe that reasonably informed people see what is going on in our world today and are wondering in good faith what to do about it.
Recently, in an opinion piece in The Guardian titled “How Do We Lead Moral Lives in an Age of Bullies,” attorney and politician Robert Reich noted our shift from decency to what he calls a new “tolerance of cruelty.” Unfortunately, he offers no methodical way out of dark tunnels and back to civility.
In the US, under Donald Trump’s command, ICE arrests and deports without due process anyone who seems darker than white. American universities may be forced to provide lists of non-White students and their provenance. The Middle East is a permanent battleground, a place of relentless, unyielding carnage. During the last US presidential campaign, vice-presidential contender JD Vance insisted Haitians ate their pets. In Canada, Pierre Poilievre tells us First Nations survivors of residential schools need to acquire a better work ethic. The devastation of the Ukrainian land and people by Russia has been going on now for over three years. This past summer, the planet was literally on fire. Is this too much cruelty? And yet it’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Is this too much cruelty?
As I edited this essay in a Montréal park, a woman approached me. She had been writing in her diary in an Adirondack chair close to mine, and she was curious what I was writing.
“What’s wrong with the world?” she burst out after I had explained the gist of my argument—“the world is fine!” I argued with her: what is fine about killing civilians and children during war? What is fine about depriving citizens of dignity, health, food, and civil liberties?
She would not pick up on violations of the laws of war, but she insisted Donald Trump has been ridding America of extensive corruption. How? Robert Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, she told me, is making sure adults and children stay away from processed foods, thereby fighting large food-preparation companies. He is making sure Americans and future generations become healthier.
That was a part-for-the-whole fallacy; she was taking an arguably noble initiative and implying all of Kennedy’s ideas are equally wholesome and extend to the rest of the Trump administration, but what about his defunding of scientific research, for instance, which will limit access to vaccines and affect many, not only in America, but around the world?
“People can fight disease on their own,” she shrugged, echoing the disinformation going around on social media these days.
People died from epidemics and pandemics when vaccines didn’t exist, I insisted, even the previously healthy. And what about the most vulnerable?
“Anyway,” she said, walking on. Tolerance of cruelty is indeed everywhere, even among neighbours. I am not certain, however, that it is new.
Tolerance of cruelty is indeed everywhere, even among neighbours.
So how do we speak the words that counter brutality, arbitrary power, and the global depreciation of human life? And what are those words?
Shakespeare, of course, has both historically contingent and universal answers for this. In The Winter’s Tale, the character of Paulina, Queen Hermione’s lady-in-waiting, confronts King Leontes when he unfairly accuses his wife of adultery:
What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?
What wheels? racks? fires? what flaying? boiling
In leads or oils? what old or newer torture
Must I receive, whose every word deserves
To taste of thy most worst? Thy tyranny
Together working with thy jealousies—
Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle
For girls of nine. . .
What Paulina illustrates so daringly is that even those without clout have a duty to speak truth to power fearlessly and to do so regardless of consequence, for without truth, we are doomed to the absolute chaos of domination.
Similarly, Richard III is a play that lays bare the dangers of absolute power, of abusive force, of totalitarianism, of the weakness and vulnerability of the law, and of what happens when sovereigns disregard the rule of law. But as the law itself is impotent in the play, because Richard runs roughshod over it, and as the possibility of justice wanes, Shakespeare accentuates the victims’ voices. The women, especially, speak up, and what they utter are curses that will become prophetic as they herald and appear to precipitate Richard’s demise.
Queen Margaret and the Duchess of York, for instance, discuss Richard when Margaret bursts forth with one of her legendary tirades to stress her grief:
I had an Edward, till a Richard killed him.
I had a Harry, till a Richard killed him.
Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard killed him.
Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard killed him.
Margaret’s naming of the crime, victims, and perpetrator is normally the beginning of the process of justice. In contrast, the men around Richard play power games or, in a sudden panic, try to save their own lives. They are far more careful than Margaret around the psychopathic Richard.
Margaret’s prophetic curses, especially, have great power. She tells Richard that those he hurt will one day “hurl down their indignation” upon him. Similarly, Richard’s wife, Lady Anne, asks that the “earth gape open wide and eat him quick.” The women invoke both Heaven and Hell so they may intervene because barristers and judges cannot. Richard laughs, but the magic still works its way into his fate, as do the curses of the ghosts who visit him the night before his death.
Martha Henry, a Shakespearean actress at the Stratford Festival, once said that “curses were believed in Medieval times,” adding that they had “substance” and were like speech taken down from the Heavens and directed at the person one wished to single out.
Such recourse may seem to us that of the weak, even if curses still inspire discomfort. Yet execrations, along with Paulina’s truth-telling, are the oldest forms of extra-judicial outrage.
Finally, the character of Macbeth urges us to “Give sorrow words” for “the grief that does not speak / Whispers the o’erfraught heart, and bids it break.” If anything else, we have a duty to speak up because to not do so harms us, and it wears away our individual and collective vigour.
Shakespeare therefore understood the need for and the authority of words in a time when power, exercised by kings and queens, was indeed absolute.
If anything else, we have a duty to speak up because to not do so harms us, and it wears away our individual and collective vigour.
Today, we may curse our enemies privately, but human rights organizations have largely taken on the role of the individual truth-teller, and their reports are filled with accusations based on observation and testimony. In the April 2025 issue of Amnesty International’s State of the World’s Human Rights report, for example, we read that in February 2024, prominent opposition leader Aleksei Navalny died in custody under suspicious circumstances. The authorities delayed releasing his body for nine days and tried to insist on a secret funeral, but his mother refused to accept this. In September, an investigative journalist from The Insider published documented allegations that Aleksei Navalny had been poisoned. The circumstances of his death were not effectively investigated.
Such reports, however, did not preclude Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, from speaking out from exile in September 2025 to argue forcefully that the Russian state orchestrated the poisoning of her husband in a Siberian Gulag, and demanding transparency and accountability.
The literature of testimony echoes human rights accounts. In Palestinian poet Jehan Bseiso’s “No Search, No Rescue,” a refugee speaks from Augusta, Italy, asks for an interpreter, and introduces “28 shoeless survivors and thousands of bodies, which she qualifies as “Bodies Syrian” and “Bodies Palestinians,” among others. Bseiso’s indictment of Europe’s indifference to war, poverty, and race is as eloquent as and perhaps more urgent than Amnesty International’s reports.
Yet one does not have to work for a non-governmental organization or be Shakespeare, a contemporary poet, or a famous dissident’s wife to use the words that denounce injustice. Ordinary words also come naturally to any sensible person—words like “They have no right,” “They are hurting us,” “They are killing them,” “You are hurting my soul,” “No,” and “Give us back our innocence.”
We are all capable of speaking up and reclaiming the world we might lose if we stay silent.
Ordinary words also come naturally to any sensible person—words like “They have no right,” “They are hurting us,” “They are killing them”…
The problem isn’t solely wordlessness—we all have words in us. But will we be disciplined at work if we speak out publicly for this side against that one? Could we even lose our job? Would we stand alone in our boldness, unsupported by allies and friends? These are the thoughts we harbour daily as we watch the news, those of us who would like to do something to alleviate collective sorrow. So our hesitation, of course, begs the question: are words enough?
Would we stand alone in our boldness, unsupported by allies and friends?
Recently, I had a conversation with a friend, an academic. I asked him a simple question: why do humans not revolt against oppressive regimes that cause incalculable harm to other persons and their dreams? My friend provided a list of factors: desensitizing entertainment, disinformation, mainstream media being owned by a handful of oligarchs who hide the truth from their readers or viewers, the distance created by social media, which results in comparison, fear, and self-protection rather than community, leaders who are less than admirable, the stifling of law’s righteous push for justice… I interrupted him: but what is the one virtue that has been lacking in humans so we may rise up, denounce, and end greed and brutality?
I expected him to launch into another private lecture, but his response confirmed my suspicions: “Courage,” he replied, falling silent.
Even in the presence of genuinely supportive kinship, words on their own, although they matter tremendously in naming injustice, can be toothless. The word, as the Bible tells us, is the spark that gives life to the inchoate. But the Bible also suggests through parables that courage—the courage not only to name but also to accuse and provide a sound critique of abuse and ruthlessness—is the combustible that sets hearts and imagination ablaze and leads to change. What fear forgets is that courage is not only a choice; it is a learned skill that accrues with use and solidarity. As more citizens find their mettle, it is abusive power that is vanquished.
“I have a dream.” “I am somebody.” These words, these world-famous instances of anaphora we study in school, would have meant little without the incandescent daring of Martin Luther King or the raging, no-fucks-left temerity of Jesse Jackson. What turned words into a movement were leaders who no longer feared isolation or dread among peers and dared to utter simple human truths.
“I have a dream.” “I am somebody.” These words, these world-famous instances of anaphora we study in school, would have meant little without the incandescent daring of Martin Luther King or the raging, no-fucks-left temerity of Jesse Jackson.
Churchill’s 1940 speech against Nazism’s evil bears repeating here as well as it pits England and its allies against nations who acquiesced to terror, bullying, and sadism, sometimes with relief. What we often forget is that his words were a gamble. “We shall go to the end,” he told his fellow citizens,
We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
Was Churchill certain he would win against Hitler? No. Did he know he was risking young British lives? Yes. But did his words galvanize a nation and allies into doing their part and, ultimately, fight to victory? Absolutely. What Churchill exemplifies is that finding the bravery to confront evil with unpretentious, direct words that inspire spirit and conscience remains a lonely, sacred, and uncertain path, a bold wager, but one worth placing.
Today, however, we prefer our heroes and our words pithy, which explains Mike Myers urging Canadians to fight American imperialism with Gordie Howe’s two-word imperative: “Elbows up!” His doing so mobilized Canadians into resistance, and this cannot be downplayed, but the fact remains that we are now in the age of catchy mantras across any partisan divide: “Yes, we can,” “masters in our own home,” “bring it home,” “make America great again,” “axe the tax.”
The motivating words and sentences are getting smaller yet more confusing, as they appeal to busy people, people who no longer love to read and may lack discernment, and people addicted to technology’s instant gratification delivery. The very world of literacy is shrinking along with our capacity to give expression to complex thoughts and realities for the benefit of a collective.
And with lack of courage and a progressive inability to give voice to transformative realities, the world we cherish is vanishing too.
… the world we cherish is vanishing too.
If we eschew our sacred obligation to witness and decry, we will fail at co-creating our world, because daring words create rich worlds—they always have. But fear, alienation, self-preservation, popular sound bites, and cautious silence destroy possibility and our humanity.
So, in the next few years, as we worry about climate change, rising food and housing costs, fascistic incursions against democracy, or unacceptable brutality and inequity in countries that aren’t even our own, we had better see what is at stake, who suffers, whether we would allow any of this to harm our child, our mother, or our brother, find the words, and bring fuel, or guts, to our game.
As American poet Carolyn Forché says, the choice is “ourselves or nothing.” The more people name injustice eloquently and invoke rights and fairness in their own way, the greater our chance of salvaging peace and dignity. It begins with words, and a decision not to put up with suffering or injustice anymore, and from there, chances are, change will follow.
*Note on Michael Bristol
Articles in Montréal Serai: “Coming to Grief,” “The Certainty of Uncertainty” and “The Man who Taught his Horse to Live without Eating“
