Jamake Highwater

“Not everyone has a voice. Many outsiders cannot speak through walls, and, as a consequence, they become silent and invisible. Some give up their voices willingly. Others cannot face the ferocious silence of their lives; so they replace their genuine voices with incomprehensible shrieks of rage. They bombard the wall with wrath or batter it with explosives. The silence is broken by their rage, but nothing changes. They remain outsiders who are desperate to be allowed into the world.”

“I have spent most of my adult life in a ghetto among countless other outsiders who have also learned how to talk through the wall. We revel in each other's voices, but the people within the walled city are often offended by the sounds of outsiders that penetrate the sturdy barriers of conformity. They attempt to silence the voices, but occasionally the valiant utterances of outsiders manage to loosen a bit of the mortar, perhaps even dislodge a few bricks, opening the wall to a strong, new light that has never before been seen by those who are safely walled up.”

“The wall that separates insiders from outsiders is not born of human nature but methodically built, brick by brick, by tribal convention. The "wall" about which I will often speak in this book is not an organism or a membranous extension of some inborn aspect of "human nature". It is a mechanistic process-a barrier meticulously constructed by erratic community decrees as a means of identifying those who are part of the group and marking those who are not. It is not difficult to imagine the chauvinism that require a community to mark its territories and distinguish its members from its enemies. It is far more difficult to understand the kind of "outsiders" who are the subjects of this book-those who are part of the group and yet are rejected by their peers and cast into a terrible internal exile. It is an exile called "alienation".”

“We often take for granted the notion that some people are insiders, while others are outsiders. But such a notion is a social contrivance, that, like virtually every public construct, is a legacy of a primordial and tribal mentality.”

“People who exist at the margins of society are very much like Alice in Wonderland. They are not required to make the tough decision to risk their lives by embarking on an adventure of self-discovery. They have already been thrust beyond the city’s walls that keep ordinary people at a safe distance from the unknown. For at least some outsiders, “alienation” has destroyed traditional presumptions of identity and opened up the mythic hero’s path to the possibility of discovery. What outsiders discover in their adventures on the other side of the looking glass is the courage to repudiate self-contempt and recognise their “alienation” as a precious gift of freedom from arbitrary norms that they did not make and did not sanction. At the moment a person questions the validity of the rules, the victim is no longer a victim.”