The words give notice

Parashat Tazria-Metzora is challenging. It speaks of skin afflictions, bodily emissions, and quarantine. It outlines processes of purification that seem archaic and unsettling. But at the heart of this portion lies something deeply relevant, something vital to our lives, our communities, and even our planetary crisis, the power of speech.

I spoke about words just this week at Emma Critchley’s Soundings exhibition at the Hansard Gallery. I was invited and inspired by Professor Dina Lupin and with colleagues, we explored representation, inclusion, and speech in engagements/experiences/decision-making related to ocean justice. I saw a parallel. Let me explain. Tradition teaches that tzara’at, the biblical skin affliction sometimes incorrectly translated as leprosy, often came as a divine consequence of lashon hara, malicious speech. The rabbis don’t treat tzara’at as a random skin disease, but as a physical manifestation of spiritual or ethical failure. Words, they insist, have power. Words can harm. Words can build, or they can destroy. And when words are misused, when they become tools of exclusion, othering, or violence, the whole body politic is afflicted. So the question is not only what is said?, but who gets to speak? And crucially, who is heard?

This week’s parashah doesn’t just describe a condition. It describes a process of noticing, of listening, inspecting, naming, and sometimes isolating. The Cohen listens to and observes the symptoms. And if they discern tzara’at, they must respond. The words give notice. But the priest’s words, the declaration of tamei (impure) or tahor (pure), also construct reality. They hold power, not only diagnostic but social. Speech becomes a boundary-maker. If words give notice, then we must ask, who gets to say the words that matter? Who determines purity, inclusion, or exclusion? Whose afflictions are seen, whose suffering is named, and who is silenced?

This is a question I bring with me from my own work, work rooted in the Black Radical Tradition. Which is not just an intellectual lineage, it is lived experience. It is resistance and culture. It is the memory of grandmothers holding land for generations, of mariners crossing oceans not just for survival but for solidarity. It is also a framework to interrogate climate change. Whose suffering is named, whose voice is heard, and whose life is deemed expendable.

Like the Cohen priests in the Torah portion, policymakers and scientists today examine the world, identify afflictions, and name responses. But all too often, this naming excludes the lived realities of Black and Indigenous communities. Our suffering becomes depoliticised, erased, or explained away as misfortune. Oppression is not neglect. It is not ignorance. It is not bad luck. Oppression is deliberate. And language is part of that structure.

As Fred Moten reminds us in Uncommon, Disordered sounds may disturb us depending on who the ‘us’ is. To some, Black speech, Black resistance, even Black mourning may sound like cacophony, too loud, too angry, too much. But for those who listen, it gives notice. It echoes like the kol, the voice, of the metzora outside the camp, crying tamei, tamei. Not for shame, but so others may respond.

What is the role of speech in this portion? The metzora, the one afflicted, must call out their status. But who today gets to name their affliction and be believed? Who, when they cry out, are responded to with care and not criminalisation?

Let me tell you a bit about my own ancestry. My father and grandfather, zikhronam livrakha, may their memories be for a blessing, were both mariners. Grandad was a seaman in Hull, a trawler engineer but his main career was on deep sea rescue tugs, sailing the oceans to help others in distress – Dad, Nzema from western region of Ghana arrived on Black Star Liners ships. He left his people and sailed into Hull. He was from the Nzema people, an Akan grouping in Ghana. Well known but not often spoken that they are a matrilineal society – indeed there are many matrilineal societies where the grandmothers hold the land for the coming generations and have been mariners or fisher folk, The Khasi in India, Bribri of Costa Rica, Basque in Europe, in Indonesia Minangkabau, and the Mosuo of China. The power of words can reconfigure and uncover what has been erased or is made invisible.  

Their lives marked by the sea, a sea both liberatory and deadly.

I only began thinking and talking of this heritage recently. Speech can be reclamation. Words can recover what has been erased. They can make visible what capitalism, racism, and colonialism have tried to bury.

This is personal. But it is also structural.

This picture is the Gilder in the Arctic and was painted by Robert Willoughby in 1813. It was an 18th century whaling vessel. My great ancestor 25 generations ago, Peter Nvquist arrived in the UK aboard this very vessel in the painting. My great great, great etc., my grandad and my dad all sailed the ocean, passing over without doubt, wrecks on the ocean floor, wrecks of slavers ships, indeed, after the demise of whaling, many whalers vessels were recommissioned to become people carrying vessels. Those now submarine vessels have been subsumed into the floor of the ocean, their carbon sequestered, their mineral content entwined with the sea. And now threatened to be exposed by extractive capitalism.

Ships that carried my ancestors also carried others in chains. Whaling ships, slaving ships, sometimes the same vessel, just repurposed. And those vessels left a wake, not just in water, but in history, in language, in silence. Christina Sharpe writes of the wake as the ongoing resonance of slavery in the present. The wake gives notice, if we are willing to listen.

So when we talk about the climate crisis, I ask, who gets to speak? And who is spoken about, not with?

Climate policy too often treats Black death as natural, or as unfortunate but inevitable. Flood maps show where water will rise, but not where rescue will fail to reach. Antiblackness determines where the water pools, where help is delayed, where suffering is normalised.

The Torah teaches that when someone is healed, they are not simply reabsorbed. The priest goes out to meet them. The process of reintegration is communal. The metzora is not just healed but welcomed. Are we willing to meet those afflicted by our collective sins? Are we willing to listen?

In Hull, where I work, floods have come and gone, but memory does not always stay. There is a forgetting of who suffers first and most. The climate crisis is not only a matter of carbon and temperature. It is a matter of justice, of language, of who is called tahor and who is left outside the camp.

And yet, we also dream. We dream of Drexciya[1].

Drexciya is a fictional underwater civilisation, born from techno music – who knew techno was originated in Black Detroit? – Drexciya comes from radical Black imagination. According to the mythos, Drexciyans were the children of pregnant African women thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. They were born breathing underwater, forming a new civilisation beneath the waves. It is a reimagination of horror into possibility. A way of saying, even in the depths, we live. We live.

There is power in such storytelling. It does not erase the past, but it refuses to be defined by it. Drexciya gives notice, we are still here. Our futures are not confined to death. So what do we do?

First, listen. Listen to those who cry out, not to judge, but to accompany. Listen to the kol, the voice, whether it is loud or silent, whether it speaks in English, in Twi, or in silence. Listen across borders of identity and privilege.

Second, share the bounty. The Torah speaks of sacrifice and offering, of purification and re-entry. But these are never individual processes. They are communal. We must share resources, access, decision-making. In a climate-changed world, survival cannot be hoarded.

Third, envision a liberated future. Language helps us imagine. And imagination is not frivolous, it is a strategy. A Drexciyan world may be myth, but it is also a call to dream beyond what we are told is possible.

Tazria-Metzora teaches that affliction is real, but so is healing. Speech can damage, but it can also restore. Our challenge is to use our words not to mark out others as impure, but to give notice of the world we want, a world where Black life is not an afterthought, where affliction is not punishment, and where all can return to the camp.

The Torah reminds us that holiness is not separateness, but responsibility. We are responsible for what we say. And we are responsible for what we refuse to hear.

May we speak words that build

May we hear words that challenge

May we dream in the wake, and still rise

Shabbat Shalom

[1] https://mixmag.net/feature/drexciya-history-interview-feature