Violent silence and reclamation
We pay close attention to perpetrators of ultra-violent crime. The culprit is scandalous; he-and it is usually him– seems like something other than the world. He is grotesque when he speaks so violent things. However, as long as he doesn’t speak, he could be anyone. Short cut hair, ordinary T-shirt from a regular chain store. Mouth, silence, forehead. Maybe a stuttering or nervous virtue. You could never stand out from the crowd.
That’s what makes him so curious. He is anyone. He is some kind of brother or man on the train. He is your neighbor. The impulse is to dissect him until he is something completely alienated from us, from society. The impulse is to make him unusual because his normalcy is frightening and it is disturbing to imagine that he could be anywhere. This is how he is prepared until he becomes something far away from us: an anomaly, a lone wolf.
The Halle court paid close attention to the culprit’s motivation: why did he shoot? Did it have anything to do with his mother? With the Soviet Union? With the Berlin Wall? With your alienation? With his elementary school teacher, a weak eight-year-old with a wilting voice, who was brought as a witness to testify to his character? Was it due to incel movement? Is it feminism? Or worse, the women who rejected him?
Frankly, I don’t care about his motivation. The doer is banal to me. If I met him at the bar, I would be bored. He thinks of one thing: the ideology that drives him. His consensus, the inflexibility of his thoughts, is pathetic and absolutely irritating at best. His hatred is direct and uncomplicated. Thus, his motivation in our analysis should be low, as they are only a symptom of institutionalized historical racism, anti-Semitism and anti-feminism. The analysis of his ideology is important, and it is well documented. Read about it. However, his personal motivation remains uninteresting, and highlighting them gives the culprit the fame he desperately desires, but by no means deserves.
That is why I am interested in the very ways in which the end of a woman’s life is tragic. I’m interested in Jan Lang’s life. I wonder what prompted him to stop and ask, “What are you doing there?” When no one else did. I wonder where she got her strength from – a force that was so ingrained that it was impulsive.
I am also interested in how her death follows a historical trajectory and resonates in the daily deaths of other women. Doesn’t her death – that she died speaking – seem unknown? Isn’t violent retaliation against women who choose to be seen a near-common phenomenon? It happens in subtle ways, every day. Men talk over women. Men talking to each other in the office; women are not invited to such talks. Men reject women’s good ideas. Men steal women’s good ideas and recognize them as their own. The Duchamp toilet. The DNA helix. Okay, we can handle it, and we do. These are small things.
However, women are killed for talking and often. Jan Lang died speaking. Inceli goes on mass murder. In the context of racism, classicism, women’s poverty and transphobia, the experiences make it even gloomier for transgender women, for whom 2021 was the ‘deadliest year’ for those registered: at least 375 transgender people were killed, and 96% of these victims were transgender or transgender. Women from different backgrounds kill their domestic partners, although not all cases are treated equally before the law.
The Guardian writes:
For the first time in the UK [Femicide UK] analyzed the shocking killings of women and girls between the ages of 14 and 100 by men over 10 years, 2009-2018. The census defines “femicide” as “men’s fatal violence against women” and reveals that, on average, a woman is killed every three days – a horrific statistic that has not changed in a decade.
The UK’s femicide census acknowledges that “men’s violence against women and girls will not be eradicated unless gender inequalities and the beliefs, attitudes and institutions that underpin them are fundamentally addressed”. Nor was Jan Lang’s assassination in a vacuum. This did not happen outside of the crystallized conceptions of misogyny. It happened in a world where women are dying for being women. When Lenga stopped, she basically said, “No, I’m not pretending it’s not happening. I’m not looking the other way.” Her unspoken “no” resonates with the said and unsaid “no,” which threatens to kill us, even if they work to keep us alive.
In response to her own death, Odra Lorde wrote Transforming silence into language and action:
Forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality and what I want and want in my life, no matter how short, my priorities and omissions were firmly engraved in cruel light, and most of all I regret my silence. What have I ever been afraid of? Doubting or speaking the way I believed could mean pain or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and the pain will either change or end. On the other hand, death is the last silence. And it could happen fast, now, regardless of whether I’ve ever spoken what I have to say or just given myself a little silence while I plan to speak one day or wait for someone else’s words.. And I began to recognize in myself the source of strength that comes from the realization that, while it is highly desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear in perspective gave me great strength…
My silence had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word, for every attempt I had ever made to speak the truths I was still looking for, I had made contact with other women while we tested the words to match the world we all believed in, thus reducing our differences. And the care and concern of all these women gave me strength and allowed me to scrutinize the essentials of my life.
[emphasis added]
I am learning from this power, and that is why I am speaking. Talking means taking a place where you are not meant to be, and trying not to doubt your meaning and strength. To speak is to trust my community to defend me, to trust my version of events, to assert that I need to take part in the horrific and tortuous process of justice.
The Lord continues:
“… to us [women] we are socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language and definition, and as we await in silence this ultimate luxury of fearlessness, the severity of that silence will stifle us.
The severity of silence collectively suppresses us as it develops. Like the silence of those around her, when a violent man in the Halle supermarket harassed a family for speaking Arabic, she took her life several years before her violence.
It’s like other silences. There is silence, because the reality is painful, complicated, disturbing, because we do not want it to be true: like the silence of my Jewish members about the violent occupation of Palestine. Like silence about the wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Syria. Climate disaster. Destruction of the Amazon and racist killings by the police. Barra Lorde promised that silence would not protect us, and I trust her. If the Halle process taught me something, it taught me that unless you speak, your story will be written to you, your story will be told to you, and you will not agree with how it is told.
Your story will no longer be yours.
Criticism of the German court: out-of-court justice
We were in the courtroom. The building was warm, the room was heavy. There were armed guards everywhere, in black balaclavas, friends of none of us. Their suspicious eyes and frosted machine guns were suggestive and tense as police leaned against the walls and chatted with each other. Collaborators, lawyers, scrambling reporters. The culprit, in bracelets, across the room. The judges wore black capes at their benches.
In a sense, the formulation of the German State’s criticism seemed to be a model case before a German court. While we were talking, Frontex was Involved “” repulsion “operations to expel refugees and migrants trying to enter the European Union through Greek waters”. Racial discrimination was up throughout Germany. And here we were in a country that was trying to show its noble stance against bigotry by taking the active armed man seriously and bringing him to justice. I didn’t buy it.
The judge even asked us for our testimony: “How long will you stay in Germany?” Perhaps a well-thought-out question, but one that echoed the perpetrator’s feelings rather than reflected the purpose of sharing our narratives: to show time and time again that the culprit was not a lone wolf, that white nationalism and the chest of pandora fanaticism. that it multiplies is not isolated or abnormal.
Being in a German court meant seeing who was not called in person. The Germans are fighting for change like the Americans with similar results: no. People behind The Oury Jalloh initiative is still fighting for the recognition of his friend’s 2005 murder while he was in Desava police custody. Activists behind them Initiative 19 February still fighting for clarity and justice, for the Hessen state government and its subordinate The racist attack in Hanau in 2020and to identify the need for changes to the existing structures of the Hessen security authorities.
Out-of-court justice should look like an end to silence and silence.
Out-of-court justice should look like an effort of solidarity.
Justice outside the courtroom looks like you reading this.
And it gives me hope: even if nothing seems to change, we can still be surrounded by violence and still draw from a well of endless resilience, both in society and as individuals.
This story was created through the Daily Kos Emerging Fellows (DKEF) program. Read more about DKEF (and get to know other prospective fellows) here.