Eyestorm
AMPLIFYING WOMEN’S VOICES TO CREATE LASTING CHANGE
THE POWER OF WORDS – AND HAIR
MI ELFVERSON | FRSA
Founder of EyeStorm Women
Head coach, the EyeStorm Academy
Brand Photographer, Video producer and Visibility Coach
Websites:
www.vlogacademy.com
www.mielfverson.com
Mi is our EyeStorm Women director and regularly shares her thoughts on the state of affairs, books, films and ideas around women’s rights and gender equality.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
By coincidence – or not – I’ve recently been reading two books by authors who grew up under dictatorships in Europe. Both authors are still very much alive; they’re not much older than me.
The first one is Katerina Janouch’s Sommarbarn (in Swedish), about her family’s escape from Prague during the Soviet occupation. The second is Herta Müller’s The King Bows and Kills, which recounts her life in German-speaking Romania under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu.
These books serve as a stark reminder of how recently oppressive governments ruled over our neighbouring countries—and how quickly fundamental human rights can vanish when power falls into the wrong hands.
We may believe that we live in an era that values information and freedom of speech more than ever, but if we look at history, it’s always been about gathering as much information as possible to gain control of people, their words, and their opinions.
Letters, manuscripts, research and personal notes were collected at a scale we can’t even fathom, considering much of it was stored on paper rather than in megabytes.
Authors, scientists and journalists were bugged, followed, kidnapped, and tortured—all to make them Speak. Neighbours, friends, even family members were forced to spy on one another. Ordinary citizens went to jail, and many simply never came back.
Herta Müller’s The King Bows and Kills reads more like an essay, vibrating with the severe trauma anyone who grew up under an oppressive regime would develop.
The fear of being dragged away in the middle of the night, being interrogated, imprisoned without cause and maybe never to be seen again. The betrayal of being turned in by your nearest friend. These experiences leave scars, not just on the body, but in the heart and soul.
Herta shares how she found the Romanian language much more poetic than German—how it flows gently, seamlessly weaving one word together with another, effortlessly turning into poetry. To hide dangerous information, people altered the language. They reshaped sentences, twisted words, turned sad news into jokes, transformed secrets into rhymes or songs—hiding their true meaning from the authorities. Sometimes, a single picture had to say it all. Sometimes, a single word on a postcard. Memes of the time.
“Everything was forbidden—except for breathing.”
Most bizarrely, oppression has always had a strange connection to hair.
Strict control of hair length is a tool of power. Having hair is a symbol of freedom—literally the ability to let your hair down. In strict schools, hair is measured down to the millimetre. Of course in the military it has to be cut short. In prisons, often shaved off completely.
Women, subjected to brutal interrogations and incarcerated for merely existing, often had their heads shaved—to strip away their dignity, make them feel exposed and vulnerable.
Hair—or the absence of it—has long signified liberation or subjugation. From the flowing long hair of ‘60s hippies to present-day Iran, hair remains both a weapon of oppression and an arme de résistance when words are not enough or can’t be spoken.
Herta was in and out of interrogations 50 times. She was brave and resistant. An interrogation officer once discovered a single hair on her shoulder, told her off for it and was about to remove it, when she sharply said “put that back immediately, it belongs to me!”, the officer was thrown off his protocol, put the hair back and ended his scolding.
These single hairs played a role in her survival. They were slipped inside letters, on her door handle or drawers, to see if anyone had tampered with them. Now a well-known Bond trick. Back then, a matter of life and death.
In the end, Herta and her friends had to learn how to read people’s facial expressions instead of their words.
Herta felt trapped inside of her own mind, unable to share her true thoughts and it took her a long time to find the freedom of her own voice. Her first book, Nadirs, was published in 1982, but it wasn’t until she had fled and settled in Berlin with her husband in 1987, that she finally felt free to start expressing her true thoughts and feelings.
Herta Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009.
We are living in volatile times. We have more ways of expressing ourselves than ever, but it can feel as if the world is closing in from all sides. Words are twisted, misused, manipulated. Lies once again become official statements.
Information travels faster than ever—but disappears just as quickly. Not only women’s voices are silenced; men’s words are also blocked, ridiculed, dismissed as nonsense or fake news. Platforms appear and disappear. Journalists are muted. Jailed. People still disappear.
Those in power have stronger weapons, bigger budgets and faster impact than ever before, but we can’t lose our courage to oppose oppressors. We cannot lose our right to speak up. We need to stand stronger against the machinery of power-hungry men when they send in the thought-police to silence anyone who has a different opinion.
Keep your voice strong against oppression, for women, men and our children, whoever you are and whatever you do. We can’t allow anyone to take our words – or hair – away.