Tag: #WordsHavePower

Mary Mba (Ph.D.)

for Sony Labou Tansi, Martial, Chaïdana, and all the unspeakables; for those who remember what was said and what was unsaid

What happens when words vanish from policy, from screens, from speech?

“Erasure” is a poetic meditation on censorship, identity, and memory—drawing inspiration from Sony Labou Tansi’s La Vie et demie, the Trump-era word bans, and the resistance found in storytelling. Through surreal imagery and postcolonial echoes, the poem explores the silencing of identities—and the defiant power of naming what was meant to be forgotten.

They said:
Let’s keep things neutral.
Let’s clean up the language.
Let’s not say diversity—
it makes some uncomfortable.

Let’s say merit. Let’s say unity.
Let’s not say transgender.
Let’s not say pregnant person.
Let’s not say climate change so loudly.
(It’s just weather, after all.)

And so, one by one,
the words went missing—
folded out of funding reports,
redacted from federal websites,
tucked behind quiet executive orders.

The list grew.
Evidence-based. Science-based.
Vulnerable. Equity. LGBTQ.
Non-binary. Racial justice. Systemic racism.
Female. Woman.
Each word silenced carried with it a body,
a memory, a need unmet.

Sony Labou Tansi once wrote:
“They renamed everything. Even the dead.”
In his world, absurdity was law,
and survival meant remembering
what you were told to forget.

Here, too, people remember—
in classrooms, in poems,
in quiet footnotes and fiery sermons,
in stories passed between colleagues
over coffee or courage.

We are not always loud.
But we speak.
Sometimes in metaphor.
Sometimes in satire.
Sometimes in comedy.
Sometimes in laughter.
Sometimes in carefully chosen words
that slip through the cracks.