As writers, we have a responsibility. Actually, more than a responsibility. We communicate stories and voices through our words, through the stetches and scribbles in our notebook, and people take the time to sit and absorb those words.
Anyone can write about themself, about heartbreak and failure and sadness, but it takes a true writer to look at something from the other side of a filthy window and convey it on a page, striking an impact with the reader. You must realize your words leave indents on the soul, slow, yet deep indents. With such power comes responsibility.
Comes obligation.
When I revisted poetry, I dived deep into my emotions. I felt a constant cycle of failure and pain and uselessness, so I wrote it down in line breaks and poetry.
As these feelings faded away after weeks of struggle, I turned my attention to another issue that I had been researching for the past year: Uighur detainment in China. Most people do not know who Uighurs are, or what is happening to them. Currently, they are being actively repressed in China for being Muslims and ethnically turkic, fighting for their soverignity like Tibet and Hong Kong.
So I wrote about it. I wrote about that oppression and hunger and starvation and inequality and all of those issues we don’t like to write or talk about. Why? Perhaps we’re scared, perhaps we fear backlash, perhaps we fear losing our precious followers due to a clash in opinion.
Perhaps, we’re stuck in our own world.
As writers, we have a duty to tell stories that should not be forgotten. We leave behind thousands upon thousands of people everyday to fuel our on convience and confort. We abandon them in the darkness and pursue the light.
As writers, we have a unique talent to create an impact through a page, a screen, a very unliving thing. How? Because we stare from the other side of the window and we observe. We empathize. We voice the voiceless because more than anything it is our job to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
How will you use your voice to amplify those who cannot?
a little poem from me
The Morning We Mourned That morning we mourned you. You, who most of us had neither seen or known, You, who society struck until your lips were sown You, who battled from dusk till dawn You, who none of us wish were gone. I am sorry I did nothing. I’m sorry all I can do is sit on my bed praying for you. I’m sorry all we do is light candles in your memory Or hold riots demanding justice and equity I’m sorry that this kindness rumbling through our community is not truly innocent, but reactionary. But I cannot shame them for feeling ashamed. For I feel it too. every. single. day. We all struggled the morning we mourned your soul, struggling to accept that you went through it alone. -being black should not be a death sentence riya m. cyriac
The Enthusiast 