jo's blog

When I first thought of images of silence that I might post last week, one thing I considered was some sort of silent protest or vigil, since activism and protesting are very important parts of my life and I love the idea of silence as a political or social act. Though I chose to go in a different direction for my picture, I was interested to see that Este put up pictures of protest, and that, contrary to what I might have done, they were clearly not silent protests. She chose to use the opposite of silence, noise, to represent silence. As I see it, the opposite of silence is represented in these images of protest not only because the activists are shouting and being not silent, but because they are heard, they have power and voice, they are expressing themselves in a way that those who are silent or silenced often do not or cannot.

Cliff addressed speech in a way that I haven’t really seen before but with which I totally identify. I’ve often struggled with my written voice, and had a more difficult time expressing myself this way than using my spoken voice. I think part of it is that I get hung up on word choice and organization, on having correct, acceptable, even beautiful writing, and I get lost, or rather I lose what I want to say. Cliff’s “Notes on Speechlessness” are written in noteform because formal writing “would have contradicted the idea of speechlessness,” and there have been many times when I’ve had complex ideas I’ve wished to express (particularly in essays) and have been unable to develop completely.

Cliff’s explanation of her own journey into speech makes me feel a bit more at ease about my inability to describe or work through certain ideas in written English, and at the same time I feel somewhat bad or hypocritical for saying this.

“To write as a Caribbean woman…demands of us retracing the African part of ourselves, reclaiming as our own, and as our subject, a history sunk under the sea, or scattered as potash in the canefields, or gone to bush, or trapped in a class system notable for its rigidity and absolute dependence on color stratification. On a past bleached from our minds… It means also… mixing in the forms taught us by the oppressor, undermining his language and co-opting his style, and turning it into our purpose”