My voice was not meant to carry

My alma mater, a girls’ Catholic college of barely a thousand students - small by Auckland standards, held annual overnight retreats for its Year 12 and Year 13 students. The theme for my Year 13 retreat was “The Troubadour”. The retreat coordinator told us about these composers from the Middle Ages, and how their voices carried. He hoped that by the end of the retreat, we could go out and be troubadours ourselves, and let our voices carry. And like any precocious 17-year-old with a growing passion for social justice, I took his message to heart.

It was the troubadour that I thought of when I was coming up with titles for this blog. I was going originally going for the URL, troubaduck.blogspot.com, the duck part coming from a play on the first syllable of my last name. A Google search to clarify the spelling of the word led me to the Wikipedia article, which led to this discovery:

Since the word "troubadour" is etymologically masculine, a female troubadour is usually called a trobairitz.

The retreat coordinator had told us that troubadours of those days were mainly men, but he thought that it was a positive thing for us to become modern day troubadours too. Now, I find myself feeling surprised - and somewhat disappointed - that he didn’t even bother looking up the female equivalent.

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History was not favourable to the woman, the person of colour and the queer. I happen to be all three of these. Our voices did not carry throughout society, not because of our lack in numbers, but because of the persistent silencing by those in power. They were threatened by the power brought by our self-awareness and increasing organisation.

It was no wonder why something resonated with me while I skim read pages of information on the trobairitz. Because while I know that the troubadour made at least a cameo in many works of fiction set in the Middle Ages, I have yet to see any of their female counterparts.

The trobairitzes were lyricists and composers. They were women who wanted to be heard. And yet, they too, were silenced; their existence was buried in obscurity.

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For a while there, I was undecided on which URL I should take. Should I go for troubaduck, which sounded catchy and familiar? Or should I go for trobaiduck, which paid tribute to some of the first women who insisted that they had to be heard?

So I said, “Screw it,” and Googled the pronunciation of trobairitz a couple more times, before finally settling on trobaiduck.

The trobairitzes wrote about life, romance, heartbreak, sex, politics from a woman’s point of view, but they were eventually silenced. Their voices carried, but just enough for me to find them on Wikipedia, added as an afterthought, a footnote to their better chronicled male counterparts.

I will not be an afterthought. I will not be a footnote. 

My voice was not meant to carry, but starting with this blog, maybe it will.