Our Unspoken Voice

Free Speech Movement: Our Unspoken Voice

“Mario Savio, a man of brilliance, compassion, and humor, came to public notice as a spokesman for the Free Speech Movement at the University of California in 1964. His moral clarity, his eloquence, and his democratic style of leadership inspired thousands of fellow Berkeley students to protest university regulations which severely limited political speech and activity on campus…”
http://savio.org/

Mario died 14 years ago , November 6, 1996, at the age of 52 from a heart attack. I wrote this for his memorial and the future. It is called Free Speech Movement: Our unspoken voice.

Mario Savio was a man with a great spirit. There are no simple words to describe who he was and the significance of his life. “He was a man who felt that he had a personal, inescapable moral obligation to defend those who were oppressed…”

Link to Obituary for Mario Savio:http://www.physics.sfsu.edu/savio-obit.html

It seems that he never lost this moral that strongly lived in his life. Through his love for poetry and debate, he found a way to communicate with his fellow human being about others pain and struggles, which he took deeply to heart. His life was a commitment to the fulfillment of this strong conviction for making a just world.

I still distinctly remember the very moment that I found him in my life: I saw him in a documentary called Berkeley in 60’s. There I found his voice, “There comes a time operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop…” (Mario Savio, Dec 2, 1964).

Link to Mario Speech:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcx9BJRadfw



I was electrified. His speech completely moved me, and I realized that this is what free speech can do and the power it has to create the future. It was the moment of carrying the voice, giving it a kind of autonomy, allowing it to move through the throat and breathe out to the world freely. Through that voice of free speech, I heard our own voices -the bliss and joy of Dr. King’s rapture “Thanks God. We are free, we are free at last!”

Later I have heard a story about Mario often stuttered when he gave a speech. It often happened when he was in a small crowd of people, yet when he got up in front of a larger audience, he never stuttered. I saw the video of him later in life describing what the free speech movement meant to him. In that interview he said: “I had a very bad stammer, the worst stammer that I absolutely have ever encountered. I stammered for years very, very badly, right up through high school. It started to subside … on the last day of high school, I delivered the valedictory. I stumbled on the first word and then the rest came out smooth; and then thereafter, over a period of a couple of years the stammer gradually disappeared. An unusual pattern… [So] to me, in addition to its political meaning, and its moral and philosophical meaning, the Free Speech Movement was a pun: my free speech movement, the free movement of my speech. So very much I was deeply, viscerally involved in the idea of free speech…for me free speech was not a tactic, not something to win for political…”
Link to Mario Savio on Free Speech:http://www.fsm-a.org/stacks/mario/savio_gilles.htm

Living in Berkeley, with the leaves wearing makeup for welcoming a new season, in their vivid colors of cheeks -red, yellow and brown, in the fresh air coming through the ocean, from the bay, I miss Mario… in a foggy breath of a man jogging, the sound of a bicycle ring passing by. I look for him…I stop by and turn around to see if it is him. In the Saturday afternoon, the smell of a street stall in a farmers market; in the park distanced from a crowd, I see his shadow lying on a tree reading a book, occasionally raising his eyes to watch us. As I walk on the street, Telegraph, Shattuck toward Berkeley Way… I see him everywhere, his voice from past to the present, getting louder and louder…echoing; “…You’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it…”

On this day I received a question carried in the baton he passed on us, the question of what free speech means to us. What is it to mean for we as humans, as species of languages, mammals of voices, living between the hierarchy of the angels and animals-to have free speech?

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning
with God. All things were made through him. Without him
was not anything made that has been made. In him was
life, and the life was the light of men. The light
shines in the darkness, and the darkness hasn’t overcome it.”(John, 1-1).

This Word created a movement in the stilled universe and shed light into the darkness. Words and the ability to speak are the very things that distinguish human species from animals and angels. It is the very thing that created light that dark never can overcome. What is our responsibility as species of languages? What does it mean to have a voice, and right to freely speak? It is a right, which is guaranteed in the Constitution. So is it a privilege, something that only man possesses, as a gift from God? Are we special because of this ability to speak, or actually any better than other creatures? Mario knew that our ability to speak was never meant to be a privilege; instead it was a gift.

It came to my mind that a free speech movement is a movement of liberation. We free ourselves from the reality of a human world surrounded by a language of barricades that sustains this reality. The names and concepts imposed on the sounds of vowels and consonants, abstract a kind of illusion of separation between humans and all other creatures, dividing one world into species of speakers and species of voiceless, into rulers and controlled. This liberation is remembering the moment we silenced nature and the voice of stars, stones, trees, and rivers… the moment when we pressed the mute button on the world trapped in time, in a two dimensional TV set screen. The speech organ is developed along with the listening organ. For people to gain free speech requires first listening and remembering those that are forgotten and hearing voices that are silenced. Through freeing speech movement, what we set free is the movement of thought from the bondage of the mind. When we open our mouth to speak freely, for the first time we breathe in the air -of freedom and remember the pain of separation -the first cry in the arms of mother, the birth of the unique individuality-ones own voice. In the air we breathe, life is inspired. We give something back to life rather than just receiving it. The air of vibration comes through the free space opened in the throat -like an eye of a needle. By freeing this space and widening it with our love and courage- the voice of heart invites the voices of others, eventually becoming a collective voice. Speak this voice. I believe that this is the only way for us to take back the airwaves that were swollen by greedy mouth of corporations, back to where it belongs –Give the air back to Gaia and her life sustaining breath, her love nurturing all beings. Our chained tongues often search for sophisticated, appropriate words-what is seemingly the standard civilized tone. Out of fear, we control the movement of the tongue, which itself knows its way toward freedom.

We as a human species regain the right of free speech only when we remember our lost kinship with the hierarchies. When we learn the responsibility of the species of the voice, it is to understand the higher function of our tongue, the wisdom of larynx, we understand what it is to become human. Through free speech, we gain autonomy of our tongue. This freedom is a responsibility, our obligation to those that nurture us, for other forms of life. Through our voices, stones and stars start to dialogue… Mario said, “Free speech represents the very dignity of what a human being is… That is what marks us off from the stones and the stars. You can speak freely… It is the thing that marks us as just below the angels”.

I feel that the voice of Mario… that connects with many of our ancestors who came before us, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Gandhi and Che Guevara, and not to mention Brad Will who recently joined them, has not been fully heard, and we have not fully spoken their voices. Their vision was to be carried forward by those individuals and their friends whom they shared their dreams with. Their voices haunt us from the world of night, watching and sending hope to us-residents of daylight.

Mario still speaks to us. Throughout his life, he had a feeling that his life was not being fulfilled. I sense his unfinished business is our obligation to carry on, as his voice was the baton of the relay from the past to the present, passing from generation to generation. This movement of free speech has never ceased. Why was it that so many of us were moved by his speech? What was it that we saw at the moment when he stood up and spoke? It was described by many as a kind of spiritual experience… in the moment he spoke, can we all say that we saw what a human being can become, in full dignity and beauty? The free speech movement is a natural evolution of becoming human. It never ceases and no one can ever stop its movement as no one can ever stop the baby from growing to walk and speak. So it is also with the free speech movement.

It is said the Constitution of United States guarantees us freedom of speech, but as we know, it will always be a struggle. A recent bill passed suspending habeas corpus. We are always in danger of losing our rights every minute and freedom of speech is not an exception. I think the new free speech movement is about speaking for those whose voices are not heard, those that are marginalized, the forgotten our brothers and sisters in the foreign land, the cry of trees, animals and the Earth. Speaking their voices is like speaking our own, it is because of our kinship.

I am
an Iraq child crying for milk.
I am a starved African orphan.
I am a homeless person lying on a bed of cold concrete.
I am a polar bear waking up with the sound of ice melting
I am a tree that is turned into property value
and a stream of water into which is damned by the hatred of man.

All have voices, all have something to tell and their voices are our own voices. We have free speech here in this country, and we have to use it for those who are not given the same right. These are all universal human values. As Abraham Lincoln said that “I leave you, hoping that the lamp of liberty will burn in your bosoms until there shall no longer be a doubt that all men are created free and equal”. The term ‘all men’ means all men and women in the world, and with this we all have a responsibility as species of the voice to speak for others. The movement of free speech does not stop here -it will expand into the larger movement of freeing the voices of all beings on the Earth and there will come a time that all will speak freely and our voice will become the Word once shed light to the darkness.

Freeing speech it is a process of softening the hardened heart, stretching the blood vessels through the actual (e)motion of the heart, melting the iron of a recording machine that freezes the voices, rewinding of the dead voices, its repetition preventing us from moving forward. It is a voice of speaking of the oppressed, for our stored forgotten emotions. Those are, angers, sadness, despair, rage, hatred, and fear. They are our voices of rebellion against the injustice in the world, against our brothers of amnesia who forgot our humanity, enslaved their tongues to function as a lower organ of taste-chain of greed put in the tongue to prevent us from speaking our voice, as a higher organ of speech. The voice of heart-silence is erased by noise of empty mind’s chatter.

Our Mother tongue is not just a taste of foods… saliva of desire… licker of the plates… it is a tongue to carry the voice of stars, inspired by their midnight choir, saliva of tears –star filled night-in our eyes. It is a movement of tongue that spits long time angers and sickness of the stomach, cleansing…

Through withered voices
Of the oppressed
Of forgotten
A deep abdominal breathing
Hears the voice of invitation-sympathy
A child of God that was starved…
Her cry of hungry for love
In her empty stomach…
Following (e)motions
Through the dark of the gullet
Deep down…
Into the heart
Candle in the labyrinth
Walk toward the center….
A larger voice of symphony
Finding each other in resonance
Hears the voice of the future
Mario’s passionate powerful voice… vibrating his tongue, moving -traveling through time…from the heart of eternity … into the mind of ‘here and now’
through your voice… through our voice….
“… Unless you’re free,
the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

Resounds … the entire universe
Becoming a melody .. of the stars and the stones …
We shall overcome… we shall overcome … someday …
-Remember the past, re-member those who were, have been and are ready to be free-