Walled Women

To reach the state of absolute silence is hard. The reason I choose this picture is to represent the place where I think I might find certain level of silence. Every object, whether it's living or not, has its own way of exsiting in this world and makes its sound in its own frequency. The world we are living is composed of the music made by all objects around us. Their existences don't depend on our achknowledgement. However, it is said that once you reach the deeper depth of sea, you will experience deadly silence. I still doubt whether it's absolute silence. If we can't hear it, does it mean that the silence finally takes place.  

The image is my bedroom.  I chose this photo because it's intuitively devoid of sound because it's devoid of people.  Even to me, someone who talks in there incessantly, knows that the sound of the upstair's cat's footsteps are thumpering from the ceiling, and just knows this space intimately.  It's always interesting how we tend to associate sounds with people--especially in more man-made constructions and constructs.

In regards to yesterday's conversation, I find more solace and comfort in silence.  This picture of my bedroom makes me wish I was home and alone. 

Though Anna Deavere Smith raises many interesting points, I couldn't reconcile myself with her simultaneous celebration of the beauty in imperfect language and the poetic, sometimes over-written words I held in my hands.  I think the greatest issue was, as she admits, trying to explain a piece that is about dialogue on the silent, static, monochromatic world of the page.  I don't know if I'm reading too much, some pun intended, into her introduction, but the dissonance bothers me.  Her descriptions of the interviews and audience's reactions to her play don't make me feel anything.  And maybe this proves her point about the transformative nature not of words themselves but of what happens when words are spoken.

Despite this struggle with her words, I did find much of Smith's piece thought-provoking, particularly her exploration of the hesitation to mimic actually serving as an insult.  She raises many interesting questions, many more than would be productive to share in this space.  If I ignore your difference, do I ignore you?  If I fail to speak about how I see and hear you, or if I sanitize my speech in efforts to be 'politically correct,' am I effectively transforming you into me?  Is this a form of verbal genocide--the murder of the language of an oppressed group?  And, if I fail to speak about my own experience, am I truly myself?

After reading Cliff, I've noticed that she places much emphasis on projecting anger outwards rather than inwards as way to deal with oppression. She claims that she used the piece "If I could Write this in Fire I would Write this in Fire" to express her anger at her experience as a member of a colonized country. This has made me think about the power of words, and the prisons these "voices" can become, even when we see them as therapeutic. As I struggle with my identity as an immigrant, a woman of color, a latina, and a woman anger has been an option too many times but so has silence. So what is the best way to deal with the effects that all of the "-isms" have on us? I have used silence, and failed. As I swallowed my words I became angrier at my inability to point out statements or actions that I felt were hurtful to my community and myself. Silence, was what I was taught was the best way to handle these things in America, as my mother and father repeatedly brushed off blatantly disrespectful situations. I have also chosen anger. After coming to Bryn Mawr, I began being loud. I pointed out and sought situations that would allow me to "educate" those who spoke ignorant comments but that was exhausting. In both voice and silence I found myself unhappy when dealing with these "isms." I wonder how the author felt after releasing all of the anger, and how others deal with issues as deep as colonialism, racism, and sexism. 

Benjamin Franklin Senior High is an image that emphasizes silence for me. As I sat by my computer looking through the photos I had taken this summer, I came across some of my old high school. I had taken these pictures on an evening out with my mother because I thought the campus looked so beautiful.  I neglected to see however, how much of the beauty I saw was due to the silence of no students walking around. When I was a student here I remember always feeling like the students' lack of interest in the school or in academia itself made way for trivial conversations and relationship that cluttered the halls of the school with noise- trivial noise. Now, as I think back on my thoughts, I realize how much of what I found so trivial was voice in the midst of silence. What I found to be so trivial, because it didn't revolve around academia, the poster board image for change and growth, was in fact a response (possibly a response they were unaware they were sending, but a response nonetheless) to media's constant protrayal of the school as an urban public school in need of assistance. Kids were acting out the very image they were being protrayed as: bad kids who are uninterested in education. Althougth I don't know whether this voice was a voice of choice or whether it was a voice that was imposed on the students, I wonder whether either voice is being heard, or whether it remains silent? 

This is a picture I took while I was abroad.  It was during our two week travel break.  Being abroad in general was a much less stressful environment than being at Bryn Mawr and during travel break, I was generally even more relaxed.  I chose this picture because I remember feeling that my mind was very clear and quiet and today in class one of the main themes seemed to be silencing our minds. I kept a blog while abroad and wrote this about the hike: We had the hike first thing after breakfast and I wasn’t super excited, but once we were out in the woods it was a really wonderful and relaxing experience. It reminded me of hikes I’ve been on with my family (with my grandparents in Connecticut and with my dad in brother in New Hampshire). Although I wouldn’t say my mind was completely free of stress ( is it ever? ) I was definitely more relaxed and at peace in the woods than I have been in such a long time…

When I first started reading the Deavere Smith text, I had to double check to make sure I was reading the right thing. I think I was so hung up on the fact that it's an article pertaining to theater and performances... and I checked out momentarily.  What really caught my attention was her observation about the difficulty she had in memorizing a passage: "I had not controlled the words. I had presented myself as an empty vessel, a repeater, and they had shown their power" (XXV). I immediately thought of Paulo Freire and the concept of "banking education" and got really excited that I could tie in something from this course to a previous Education course I had taken! In our Critical Issues class and E-Sem, while I struggled to understand and come to terms with the fact that my all-knowing teachers may have viewed me as an empty vessel waiting to be filled with knowledge, I never dwelled on the idea that I could use my voice to improve my learning experiences as a student. I thought maybe making class a little more interactive could do the trick but I never thought of explicitly using my voice to create change. I can't just expect for my teachers to change things on their own - I have to use my voice to make change because as Deavere Smith's Shakespeare teacher said, speech is an action. Using my voice would be an example of me having the agency to change the way I'm being taught. It seems painfully obvious now that I think of it.

This is a illustration I came across while traveling last semester, by two artists named Anders Meisner and Mical Noelson. It's a sort plump, child-like body with straw hands and a straw head. It has neither a mouth nor ears, and therefore has no voice -- a type of artistic scare-crow. Having grown up on a farm in WV, I feel very comfortable and familiar with not speaking or being spoken to for long periods of time, as my experience in such a rural place involved less people and and those people spoke much less often than many of the people I've met at Bryn Mawr and in Philadelphia. I can relate to the straw-headed figure, non-verbal. However, not using verbal communication isn't necessarily silence, although we sometimes consider the pauses in between bits of dialogue to be "awkward silences." Ignoring the myriad of other sounds, the "background noise,"  only acknowledges human voices as noise and denies all other sounds. Similarly, we are much more inclined to consider the absence of man-made or industrial sounds to be silence, when nature is full of sounds and life. Is this a human-centric, speech-centric view of the audible world? Is it us defining silence only in human terms?

The imagine represents a human quietness which I can relate to and enjoy, but not a silence -- a natural soundscape.