She called it The power of love and sang it with all of the winds in her lungs. What a force those winds packed.It pierced not only through the competing power of the accompanying instruments , but also through the air, straight into the soma, and like natures hurricane when bent on having its way, the winds from her lungs knocked down everything in its path to carve a road straight into the soul.As I listened through it, my mind, quavered by the sheer sonics, involuntarily and deftly shifted from the power of love, which is Celine Dions thrust, to the power of voice.Celine Dion comes out celestial in her rendition of The power of love and unless one is an emotional castrate, listening is bound to rustle up some emotion.What vibrates your drum is Power of love but what vibrates your entire system is the power of voice; and it does so without being figurative. I have always maintained that if there was some love whose power I could capitulate to, whatever my fortune today would have bloomed a hundred times.That is how intensely I believe in the power of love and its ability to catapult when it finds you fit.But Celine Dion has alerted me to more than her rendition, which has unintentionally aroused me to another power: the power of Voice.The love she enjoys in the world today comes through the power of voice. Kill the voice and kill nothing, but a zero remains on the score board.Just as Dion and her likes have found favour with voice, soaring like eagles in open and limitless skies, numerous others are tied down below the radar; well below breadlines, on their knees or butts, voicelessly looking for crumbs and pickings from arid skies that are neither always visible nor open to them. Between them and those skies, numerous ceilings endure, thickened with the opaque clouds of voices that hover above them.Voice has muscled Dions wings to flap elegantly above those clouds nearly as much as the condition of being voiceless has muzzled what wings the middling multitudes beneath ever had.I am yet to see anyone without a voice box. But I have seen more than many people without a voice.When you lose your voice box to diseases or their treatment, you learn how to speak by some other means. You evolve another voice box.But when you are bereft of voice by connivance of political and socio-economic predicaments, you are as good as dead.There are many among us who are as good as dead.The world population is branded at six billion. Easily more than half of this population is dead, not because they are dead or want to be dead, but because their voices and so their lives are drowned out by the other half, whose voices gush out like tornadoes, squeezing within their vortices, the voice boxes of the hapless.The voice box is an anatomic marvel. Even before I listened to Celine, I knew that. I see it every day, or almost every day. I must pass by it each time I reach into the throat steering telescopes into stomach. We must enter it to dethrone consciousness, most times, prior to entering the body with the knife.And how so many times, chalk in one hand, scalpel in the other, I earned a wage, letting pupils into the anatomic recesses of the voice box using such boxes as have become forever silenced, voiceless because the cords have gone cadaveric.For the box, its strength, just like its weakness, lies in the structure; a contraption, the size of a mini purse, slung in muscles, carved in muscles, worked by muscles, shielded behind an Adams apple delicately graced and balanced with nothing harder than little pieces of gristles harmoniously set to push and pull in well choreographed highly innervated sequences, conducting wind between bellows below and chambers above through an aperture, guarded by no more than two tiny strands of flimsy tissues/cords in a V stance.The structural flimsiness of it all, a disguise for the life and death that power wielded on even the mightiest of men.Drawing a breath, or dealing a voice, is pegged on the compliant integrity of the V. Resilient flexibility is the evident and overriding purpose and what allows the voice box to do the bidding of its owner. Tinker the V, and you tinker the voice or tinker the breath.But the very strength of flexibility, secured in the absence of anything bone, is also the weakness that allows a deadly collapsibility.Celine Dion will probably never know collapsibility, but there are those whose environments do nothing than exploit collapsibility.Tyranny is the albatross that perches on voice boxes, weighing down heavily on a boneless device till the muscles are muzzled and the V lost.Tyranny comes in many guises: of the oligarch, the elite, the rich or the fanatic, all subsumed into one and same tyranny of the titans.The titans seek trade-offs by hook or crook with the voices of the downtrodden, converting the latter into voiceless observers and muted facilitators in their own tail spins. They manipulate the downtrodden, foster ignorance and then deploy it in the service of their pleasures, yet another brand of tyranny, which is the tyranny of ignorance.Ignorance is the tyranny of tyrannies and the new leverage used by titans to perpetuate their monopolies, be this in politics, business or industries.Basil Fadipe can be reached at http://www.justinfadipehospital.com
Click here to read full news..
