Walking beside me is a smartly dressed lady holding her child’s hand and I dare to ask “can I borrow your power?” “Do you mean my lighter? I don’t have any by the way, I quitted few years ago when got pregnant”, she replies while walking away from me. “No, I did mean your power”, I said to myself while seeing her disappear among the crowd of mums and some dads and their little ones, some not so little any more. These parents are the guardians of their children’s voice. In their hands resides the power to allow these children’s voices to be heard or not. I wish I could approach them and ask to borrow this indescribable power for a while to be able to open a dialogue with those who may have something to teach me about unspoken truths. Although I could not ask them directly, I may find someone with the power to ask them. So the game would be “can I borrow your power to ask parents for borrowing their power over their chidlren’s voice?”. It sounds rather an impossible dialogue.
By the time this thought fully developed on my mind I was already outside the school gate, about to meet the head of education. In few minutes I was sat on a red velvet chair, ready to say “Can I borrow your power?” to that person who had not shown any sign of emotion or empathy to my presence so far. I made a brief description of my research purposes and jumped straight to her earlier question “how can I help?”, although I knew that the phrase did not exactly mean that she was willing to help anyhow, apparently it was rather a cliché that she was suppose to say, I guess. After listening to my nervous attempt to make clear and short my complex research purposes, she started a game which I still cannot name. She offered me a certain slice of time when I could probably meet the children, followed by the withdraw of that very offer soon after I had agreed on it. She then would immediately start another analysis, leading to another possibility, which I gladly nodded positively just brief enough to notice that she had already withdrawn that offer too. The game continued for a good half an hour or so, time in which I gradually converted in the little girl I knew from my mother’s accounts about her own mother. I had turned into my grandmother, when in her childhood she had been educated to not be a spoiled child by consecutive offers made by her parents of things to buy for her, always followed by the frustrating result of buying exactly what she had not chosen followed by the (un)reasoning: “If we buy what you ask, you may think you can get anything you want! This way you know that we don’t get everything we want to”.
How ironic it was now that my childhood feelings towards this image of my grandmother as a poor vulnerable person, whose will was never respected and of all the sadness that I believed that she had hold, and a profound desire to go back in time and save her were right now replaced by a feeling of self-pity — as much as I hate to admit it — for the injustice of this moment and a completely sense of powerlessness. “Can I borrow your power?” and the answer was an iconic and ironic “No” followed by a kind “here is the code you need to open the gate on way out”. That was certainly not the code I wanted, and I had no choice but leave with “my tail between my legs”, as we say in Brazil. And so I left not knowing if the children behind those brick walls would like to take part in a dialogue with me. “We don’t get everything we want”, I knew it.
I leave that place thinking about ethnography and the simple concept of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. I had just experienced that in an unexpected way. The strange that became familiar has little or nothing to do with my research though, which was experiencing my grandma’s lack of power. That feeling that for years I had towards that which was for me nothing but an extremelly bizarre way of rising children and the submissive attitude of my grandma — which was also strange for me — had become very familiar. In addition to that, the familiar environment of a school, which had been my professional habitat for ages became as strange as strange can be, with its codes to open gates and clichés empty in meaning.
I still intend to do an ethnographic study though, so I will keep on asking if someone can lend me their power so I could achieve my purpose of giving voice to the voiceless. I just need to include in my equation that those voiceless I want to meet and work with do not own even their own silence. While all this happens, the words “voice” and “silence” keep dancing among my thoughts and an old song that I sang a lot of times in my teens echoes with my reflections and I wish I could translate it properly, but roughly it says that “there would not exist sound if there was not for the silence” and goes on saying that “it would not exist light if was not for the dark”. I allow the song to sing itself inside my mind and keep on walking.