This weekend, I had the pleasure of sitting down and speaking with artist, DJ and podcaster Israel Ekanem for My Blackout podcast. This was a rare moment of good health, as I have been struggling for months with complications and chronic pain related to abdominal adhesions.
Talking to Israel was a joy. He asked complex and nuanced questions about my work as an advocate and activist. We talked about the written word and its importance as a form of healing. We discussed the ways in which we engage in political discourse, advocacy work, and showing up in community in the ways that are needed.
We also talked about pain.
Specifically, the pain I have experienced as a survivor of sexualized violence and the ways in which that has framed my perspective in this world. In particular, we discussed the retraumatization survivors experience when we go public — sharing our stories with the world around us, asking to be believed, and hoping that the pain we share will enact change. We talked about the pain we feel when people in power — be it political or positional — choose to listen, offer survivors platitudes, and then refuse to change.
This has been my experience as an advocate and activist in Nova Scotia. I am not the only one. I feel a fiery rage inside my body when I hear people refer to our Premier as compassionate, caring, and keen to engage and listen with his constituents and the electorate. This has not been my experience. Nor has it been my experience with my MLA — the Minister of Environment and MLA for Dartmouth East, Tim Halman. Both refuse to sit down with me, and other gender-based violence advocates, to discuss the regulation of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in cases of abuse, harassment, or other forms of discrimination.
But Tim Houston and Tim Halman were not the first, and they certainly won’t be the last, to do this to advocates. This is a well-known problem. In the spaces where advocacy and politics intersect, there is always harm. Politicians do not like speaking to activists. We are often referred to as “instigators,” “agitators,” and “paid protestors” — or, as Houston likes to call us, “problem stretchers.” Activists are inherently distrusting of politicians and people in political spaces because we are used and abused by them, either knowingly or unknowingly.
When it feels politically advantageous, they use our stories, our pain, our lived experiences to bolster public support for a bill. We become fodder in the political battlefield, our experiences thrown around to ensure maximum damage during question period. We sit in the gallery at the legislature, watching them defend the indefensible while claiming to be “trauma-informed” — all the while refusing to consult with those of us on the front lines of the issues they speak about.
It gets exhausting. These moments pick away at us. Day by day, sitting by sitting, we endure this ongoing use and abuse with the hope that one day, in the end, we will eventually be triumphant. That at some point, the legislation we need to see changed will change. That our stories will be the last ones that have to be told because the laws will be modified. That society and systems will finally listen to survivors and that the blood, sweat, and tears — literal tears — we have shed will finally have had some purpose.
And this behaviour isn’t limited to the party in power. This is a political systems issue as a whole. Opposition parties are just as culpable of leveraging the pain and suffering of others to score political points. As far as this behaviour goes, everyone is guilty of it.
So when Israel asked me about the pain I experience as an advocate and activist, I told him the truth: advocacy is a combination of persistence, pain, and luck. More often than not, the luck is rare. Breakthroughs can take years, if not decades, to happen. People can spend their lives sharing their trauma and hurt in pursuit of justice and never see it come to fruition. We don’t do this knowing that change is inevitable, only that it is possible.
As we head into the latest sitting of the legislature in Nova Scotia, I would remind our politicians and political parties of this one truth: how you choose to leverage our stories, our pain, and our suffering has long-term consequences.
We are aware of what you are doing and why you are doing it.
We are watching, and we will keep the receipts.
While we are left to struggle through this process, we will remember.
And we will not give up.