To expropriate is to take something away—legally, forcibly, permanently. Land, power, voice, dignity. It is a word laced with tension, with history, with the long shadow of loss. But buried in its echo is a deeper meditation on ownership, belonging, and what it means to truly possess something.
We often think of expropriation as an act done by others, a headline from another place, a wrong imposed on someone else. But if we listen closely, we find it happening all around us—in personal spaces, in emotional territories, in the quiet theft of selfhood.
The Weight of What Is Taken
To be expropriated is to be told, this is no longer yours.
Sometimes it’s physical: a home uprooted, a resource claimed, a heritage erased.
Other times, it’s invisible: your story retold by someone louder, your labor rewarded elsewhere, your worth negotiated without your voice.
Expropriation is not always loud. It often happens subtly, behind polished doors and kind smiles. It wears the mask of reason, of law, of necessity. But beneath it is a question with teeth: Who decides what belongs to whom?
The Quiet Expropriations Within
We may not all lose land, but we’ve each felt something taken:
- The credit for our work.
- The space to grieve in our own way.
- The permission to be complex, to be unsure.
- The safety to speak the truth without consequence.
And we too, sometimes, are not just the expropriated—we are the expropriators.
When we center our comfort over someone else’s pain.
When we speak over silence that was never ours to fill.
When we take love but leave behind responsibility.
Expropriation asks us not only what has been taken from us,
but what we have taken without asking.
Reclaiming What Cannot Be Taken
There are things that cannot be expropriated, not truly:
- Integrity.
- Imagination.
- The unrecorded moments of real connection.
- The self that survives even when everything else is stripped away.
Reclamation begins when we stop believing the lie that only power defines possession. That only signatures on paper determine truth. What is deeply ours—our voice, our memory, our knowing—cannot be erased, though it can be buried.
Waking up to expropriation is the first act of reclamation. Naming it is resistance. Creating in its aftermath is healing.
The Reckoning and the Repair
To live meaningfully is to reckon with the thefts—those done to us and those we’ve done. It is to listen to the silenced, to return what we can, to repair what was shattered, even if the pieces no longer fit as they once did.
Repair is not reversal. It’s not pretending the taking didn’t happen. It is building something honest in its wake.
We cannot undo every expropriation. But we can refuse to build futures on what was taken unjustly. We can choose to listen more than we speak. We can choose not to possess what was never ours.
In the End
Expropriation is a wound, but also a mirror. It shows us the deep longing for control, for safety, for permanence in a world that offers none of it fully.
But perhaps the truest strength lies not in taking,
but in learning to live with open hands—
offering what we can, holding gently what we love,
and releasing what was never ours to begin with.
Because in that release,
in that humility,
we find something no one can take:
a self grounded not in possession,
but in presence.