OF THINGS NOT SAID: SILENCE AND WRITING.pdf

Memory, 2010

Voice and silence are socially constructed in conversational interactions between speakers and listeners that are influenced by canonical cultural narratives which define lives and selves. Arguing from feminist and sociocultural theories, I make a distinction between being silenced and being silent; when being silenced is contrasted with voice, it is conceptualised as imposed, and it signifies a loss of power and self. But silence can also be conceptualised as being silent, a shared understanding that need not be voiced. More specifically, culturally dominant narratives provide for shared understandings that can remain silent; deviations from the norm call for voice, and thus in this case silence is power and voice expresses loss of power. At both the cultural and the individual level, there are tensions between culturally dominant and prescriptive narratives and narratives of resistance and deviation, leading to an ongoing dialectic between voice and silence. I end with a discussion of why, ultimately, it matters what is voiced and what is silenced for memory, identity and well-being.

Narratives of the Unspoken in Contemporary Irish Fiction: Silences that Speak, 2023

This chapter provides a critical overview and a theoretical introduction to Narratives of the Unspoken in Contemporary Irish Fiction: Silences that Speak. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives and considerations on silence through a broad diversity of themes and functions, this introductory essay reclaims an unprecedented attentiveness to the unspoken in today’s Irish fiction. The chapter argues that in Irish contemporary writing silence features as multivalent and multifaceted: it can function as a form of resistance, a strategy of defiance, empowerment and emancipation, but also a way of covering up stories which remain untold and invisible, thus distorting or directly concealing inconvenient truths from the public eye. Ultimately, as the book itself demonstrates, for contemporary Irish writers, the unspoken is not just a constraint but a productive site of enquiry, a silence that “speaks”.

International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 2024

Silence and "the unsaid" are interesting phenomena. Besides and beyond words and narratives, we are made of silencessilences to be read, (re)searched, heard, and understood. If it is true that reality is one and manifold because it exists simultaneously as it is lived subjectively and constructed socially/relationally/situationally, it is also true that not all stories are told with words and not all words become stories.

Writing the silences of the past through the lives of others brings with it important ethical considerations. What draws historical fiction writers to the lives silenced and therefore erased by history? What are the ethical considerations faced by the historical writer enabling the voice of the silenced? Of what worth is it to speak the silences of the past? How do these silences connect with present times? In this paper these questions will be addressed via a discussion on the practice of historical fiction writers, as well as drawing from my own writing practice that continues to give advocacy to Anne Boleyn.

Ethnologia Europaea, 2016

Family history can be seen to be comprised of both told and untold stories and sentiments related to them, all of which affect family members. Drawing on interviews conducted with immigrants from the former Soviet Union living in Finland and their family members living in the country of origin (in Russian Karelia and Estonia), this article1 explores the silenced aspects of family storytelling and analyses how the absence of narration can serve as a protector and maintainer of family as a set of relationships, or an enabler of “normal” family life. The focus of the article is on family past, and the continuum from tellable to silenced experiences will be analysed. However, the methodological side of studying unsaid or unsayable things is also touched upon.

2011

2016

This thesis discusses female silence, voice and representation as portrayed in four postcolonial novels written by Asian female writers or those from the Asian diaspora. The novels included in the corpus are The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo, Brick Lane by Monica Ali and Brixton Beach by Roma Tearne. This thesis aims to explore the different strategies adopted by the authors to represent different forms of silence of the type highlighted in theoretical work by Spivak, Olsen and Showalter. The novels analysed open up new contexts in which issues of silence, migration, displacement and multiculturalism, which are central in postcolonial literature, are explored. In its examination of these issues in detail, the thesis has been influenced by postcolonial and diasporic studies, with a focus on women's issues and feminist thought. Instead of focusing on the role of silence solely in relation to specific characters, the thesis attempts to engage with the complex ways in which these narratives represent various forms, moments and scenes of silence. From the analysis, we can exemplify that the novels can also be used to suggest the ambivalences of speaking/not-speaking via the narrative representations of silence. Authorial silence involves the author's deliberate refusal to speak directly in the text ; instead, the author utilises several literary devices to convey something indirectly to the reader. Silence is also linked to concepts such as shame, secrets and gossip. One is likely to refrain from speaking if he or she is ashamed, secretive or is the topic of gossip in one's community. There are also some female characters who are portrayed as not-speaking, or choosing to remain silent so as not to cause problems for the family. A few other characters have been portrayed as refusing to speak out as they have been traumatised into silence. Lastly, women can also be complicit in holding on to patriarchal structures and in the process, attempt to speak out in order to to silence or to cause problems to other women.

Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 2019

F ew things inspire the anthropologist’s imagination and analytical speculation as much as silences and secrets encountered in fieldwork. They compel one to ponder whether something interesting might lie beneath what appears to be covered by silence or secrets, and if so, through what means that something might be uncovered. Relatedly, few things launch the anthropologist into more profound methodological, ethical, and political deliberations than the silences one does unveil and the secrets one is made privy to in the field, many of these converging in the question of how secrets and silence should be treated in one’s writing. This special issue delves into the interconnections between these two: silences and secrets in fieldwork encounters, and the silences that are produced through the knowledge we gain within them. The articles examine how secrets and silences are embedded in social structures: how they include and exclude people and map the operations of power, and how they are reproduced, transformed, and broken in the narratives people tell about themselves.

Woolf's first novel The Voyage Out, flows from characteristic conversation of objective perceptions to conflicts of muted perspectives eventually subsuming in silence, a silence as powerful as words and a silence which needed the same effort as conversation. In her diaries and letters she struggles with not only how to comprehend the space of novel writing but also how to lucidly portray the silences between conversations, and to her latter seemed more important, as one can see her toying with this idea all throughout her oeuvre. This paper would like to understand what silence meant for Virginia Woolf and why the in-between silences mattered to her and why she constantly projects that in her writing by charting a literary landscape for us with distinguishing spaces and the sounds and silences it envelopes, I would explore this through a discussion of the narrative of her first novel The Voyage Out.

Tydskrif vir letterkunde, 2005

Giving Voice: Narrating Silence, History and Memory This essay examines André Brinks two most recent novels, The Other Side of Silence (2002) and Before I Forget (2004), in terms of their voicing of silence and the rewriting of history and memory. Each has a theme familiar to Brinks readers an historical story of colonial violence and violation avenged; and the recounting by an older writer of his last love, respectively and each is mediated by a male narrator. Both narrators, though, draw attention to the problems associated with this reconstructive and potentially appropriative storytelling. These texts thereby enact, in a more complex way than many of Brinks previous novels, the intersections of narrative, history and memory.