Walled Women

In class Thursday I was particularly haunted with the picture above, JHunter's visualization of silence. While my interpretation of “Bouquet of Eyes” varies from hers, I am grateful for the push towards looking differently at a subject that I thought I had adequately explored. It is this new interpretation that I will use now to speak toward my own experience with being silenced at my summer job.

This summer I had the misfortune of learning that silence can sometimes be a group phenomenon, and it is in these particular instances when the absence of voice can be the most dangerous. From June to August I worked at an overnight camp for underprivileged youth, like I have for the past three summers. The counselors range in age from 17-21, not much older than the children we watch over. It is difficult for me to talk about what happened this summer in a composed way, because the happiness and welfare of the campers was and still is my utmost concern and to see that threatened was infuriating.

When looking at Jomaira’s images, I was actually a little startled.  Not because their image reflects a dimension of silence I seldom imagine, but because several years ago, I would have likely put up a very similar image of silence.  What startled me was that I didn’t realize how my first-gut connotations of silence have shifted in recent years.  Before, my initial thoughts and feelings of silence would have been ones that were associated with oppression, the inability to speak, absence, dark—concepts that I think are evoked when looking at their images.  But recently, I often associate silence with more positive notions and less tension.  Just as one example of how and why, I think of silence and light together and chose my photo accordingly.  We often forget how remarkably silent light is given what it does.  Light, unassuming and silent, has capabilities that range from giving us the capacity of sight, the dichotomy of day and night, and also life itself.

Before I begin writing about my experiences of silencing/being silenced, I think it is important note that it was difficult for me to think of such a time, and the privilege that comes with that.  It privileges me because I can see myself as neither oppressor nor subordinated in this regard, at least on the surface.  When I think of silencing someone, I think stereotypically yelling “silence!” as we saw from many popular movie scenes in the youtube clip.  I would like to think that is hard for me to remember silencing someone because it is not something I do, but I am sure that is not the case.  Even if I haven’t directly yelled “silence!” at someone, there are probably times I have silenced a person or group either with an offhand comment or by being a bystander and not helping a person that I recognized as needing a voice (i.e.: watching someone be bullied).  However, memories of being oppressed are, in general, easier to conjure up than memories of being an oppressor. 

Okay, folks, I think I've found what we've (well, I've) been looking for (ta dah!):
a way that you can read the articles for this class (all your classes?) on your computer,
and annotate the electronic text, without having to print anything out.

These are the steps that worked for me:
1) download (the free) Adobe Reader X from http://www.adobe.com/products/reader.html
2) open up one of the pdfs assigned for class reading
3) The Comment & Markup toolbar doesn’t appear by default, so either
select View > Comment > Annotations, or click the Comment button in the Task toolbar.
This will make both the highlighting and the sticky notes functions available, so go to town!
4) There are tutorials on how to use other features @
 http://cjasn.asnjournals.org/site/misc/annotating.pdf
but, for now, these functionalities are enough for me!
Have fun--

Yours in the service of paper-less-ness
("I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues"),
A.

I realized today that this 360 reminds me of one of my favorite TED talks by Bryan Stevenson, an activist and lawyer in the American justice system. Similar to our 360, Stevenson brings up issues of race and poverty in our justice, or more like our injustice, system. More importantly, he highlights how there is a silence in our society about the injustices that mar the image and realities of individuals in prison. I invite everyone to listen to this TED talk, it is definitely worth listening to and thought-provoking. I think he does a beautiful job at talking in depth about his vision for our justice system, the unheard voices in prison and the silence that keeps society as a whole from caring.

I also wanted to leave you with my favorite quote from the talk:

“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve done” –Bryan Stevenson

I have also posted the link here:

http://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice.html

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”

As I was reading both Smith's and Cliff's writings, I was struck by two statements: "'The word, the word above all, is truly magical, not only by its meaning, but by its artful manipulation"' (Smith Intro) and "When I began... to approach myself as a subject, my writing was jagged, nonlinear, almost shorthand"' (Cliff p31), I couldn't help but think of language as a tool that one has to learn how to use. So often do we see people that do not have the opportunities afforded to them to learn how to manipulate language that they get lost in translation. So often do I hear of people, including myself, feeling as though we have so much to say, but do not know how to say it. I find myself asking, what causes this disconnect? If I am answering this question for myself, I would say that my inability to treat language  as something that can be manipulated as opposed to something that manipulates me, has to do with the insecurities imposed on me by my race, gender, culture, ethnicity and ideology. Despite having the education that I have had I continue to be hindered, and I fear that such feeling will always linger.