I have been thinking about silence a lot recently. I have no firm conclusions for sometimes the right to speak is not always as democratic as it seems. Sometimes those who speak most and most convincingly should really have held their tongues. I can think of a Hitler, a Verwoerd, a Bush, and the list goes on, right down to that annoying clerk at the grocery store, the man who beats his wife, the woman who abuses her child. Petulant masquerades of hatred and fear and let's not forget greed, for these zero-sum economists, carefully couched as concern for those select few who are considered people, in the fullest sense of the word.
If we think about histories of silence and the remaking of those histories and the way silence figures almost as a character itself, one gets a startling and somewhat dystopic sense of humanity. And yet, these histories of silence and silencings are ones we live with ourselves. Sometimes speaking is just too hard, and I don't mean the noise we make sometimes to fill those silences when you are not rubbing together comfortably against your other/s. I mean speaking, or communicating or I don't know ... I don't have the language.
Being open is the trite way of putting it or letting oneself be seen or admitting your vulnerability or you know ... that thing one can do with total acceptance, where fear does not circulate in the intersubjective exchanges with others, where who you are, whatever that fluid state means, is just okay and speaking whatever the little truths and large dramas of the self are, is not to bring shame or disrepute or judgement on the self nor is it to court pride or cultivate arrogance or push for respect, it is just the possibility of sharing the fullness of your humanity in a given time with someone who shares theirs with you. Well I know what it feels like, its harder to describe and even rarer to produce the conditions under which it flourishes.
I was not raised in a world where that was possible, it was something I had to learn and still am, a tradition of intimacy I had to cultivate. Not speaking feels more natural, it is easier and as I have learned is so much harder, it costs more, silent, heavy costs. Well, lets not mistake not speaking for talking, I do talk ... a lot. The traditions of silences I was raised in, encompassed the individual, the family, the community, the national. There were things you bore but didn't speak about, things you rewrote in silences.
The family and community histories that went unanswered because the questions were not allowed to be spoken, the private life of the family and its wreckages you did not share, the individual traumas you held close as if they defined you and somehow all those silences coaelesce, into a big dark mass, sometimes volcanic in its insistence, sometimes its miasmic qualities blinding one, sometimes an oppressive weight holding arms and limbs and thoughts and actions captive, sometimes a spur to action just any action to silence the insistence that which should not be spoken.
Now I don't know which came first. The silences of Apartheid repressions, an inescapable facet of totalitarian goverments where speaking truth to power and unwilling silences is not possible, well for many the fetters of the mind cannot even conceive the possibility to speak dissent or witness vocally, for why speak that which is and which we all know and make ourselves understand, where bending one's knee and lowering one's eyes is the natural order of things, why speak what is? I don't know if this state-cultivated tradition of silence finds its home in the family or whether the traditions of the family made the silences enforced by the state possible?
Well, we know one of the first post-apartheid acts of concession to the past was inculcating the right to speak, to break the silence and thus we had the TRC. Well, now we know that this therapeutic right to speak does not equate the right to equality or make one the recipient of distributive justice. It is just the right to speak a tale that will be retold in so many genres until the blood, sweat, tears, shit and fear and pain and love, never forget love that signalled life or death of the human bodies, hearts and minds the tale circles is elevated to high art and the refrain of never forget is meant to be its own solution, memory and stories for food, memory and stories for dignity, memory and stories for medicine, memory and stories for work, memory and stories for light, heat, the quotidian pleasures of the haves. Bah, to speak is not always such a great thing, a necessary thing but not always a great thing, especially when its promises are not always fulfilled.
It is a careful process this speaking, this breaking the silence, though it is not the silence that is broken, really it is you who breaks. In the learning to speak, it breaks you, breaks that morass that breeds itself in the darkness of silence. It unchains the pasts that hold you captive, the pains that glued you into a patchwork person of light and deep deep shadows. Just going boo to the darkness, does not do much, it is the magic of the right words, in the right moments and the actions to back it up, that make the breaks that heal. I wonder if this is so for a country, a nation. I wonder if we didn't just go boo to the darkness that lurks at and poisons our heart.
I wonder if that painful healing speaking, of deep revelation and trite fears, and unappeased sorrows, and wondrous laughter and caring and gentleness and tenderness that underlie the thorny carapace of a weighty silence still needs to be broken. I wonder what intimacies can be found when we are brought into a condition of philia, love with each other that speaks and does what we want for our best selves for our our others, what new traditions of intimacy we can found when the silences are broken, when we are broken open to face each other, naked, unashamed, accepting of the frailty our humanity.
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