Silence as Rhetorical Art: Allowing Silence to Speak

Intro

"It's important for me to share my story. I don't believe that I, or other women, should live in a world where our successes are hidden. Women's successes should be celebrated and protected... And so, I want to be heard. I want the whole world to listen," pleas Pashtana Durrani, a Kandahar Afghan woman, in regards to the ramifications women face due to the August 6th, 2021 Taliban seizure of power in Afghanistan (Haung). Durrani and millions of other Afghan women confront the fear of their futures, as the Taliban, in the cities of Herat and Kandahar, reportedly bar women from entry to universities and workplaces. The UN's rights chief reports that authoritative powers forbid women from leaving their homes without a male chaperone; some are "flogged and beaten" for resisting their orders (Haung). Events like these are the unceasing and pertinent reminder of the adversity women encounter around the world every day. Even within our own communities, voices like Durrani's struggle to reach the surface, as their greatest power, voice, becomes their oppressors' target for domination. If daring, brave, and courageous enough to speak up, telling stories becomes an anchor of hope. How do we create a space where women's experiences are celebrated and protected? How will silenced women be heard? Most importantly, how do we make room for silence to speak?

Silence as Rhetorical Art

Much of the past carries irrevocable silence. Period after period, people and events vanish beneath the surface. Evidence of stories' redefinition, subtraction, and translation span across history. In a society dominated by sound, silence falls in the deep cracks of our consciousness. The interruption of phone alerts, buzzes, and email tones threatens even our most intimate moments with silence. Noise becomes the constant reminder of the power and command of speech and the written word. Even the digital spaces we occupy confront the user with an oversaturated content landscape, such as the never-ending scroll of news articles, blog posts, TikTok videos, and memes. However, rhetorical power is not limited to words alone. In Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence, feminist and rhetoric scholar, Cheryl Glenn contends, "The rhetorical tradition, long preoccupied with written and spoken rhetorics, has for too long ignored the rhetorical powers of silence" (2). Silence and language work together. Each forms an interlocking dynamic relationship that generates meaning-making. Swiss writer and philosopher, Max Picard explains:

Speech came out of silence, out of the fullness of silence. The fullness of silence would have exploded if it had not been able to flow out into speech...There is something silent in every word, as an abiding token of the origin of speech. And in every silence there is something of the spoken word, as an abiding token of the power of silence to create speech (qtd in Glenn, Unspoken 4). 

Their reciprocal relationship with one another marks the rhetorical significance of silence- carrying grammar, value, and meaning (Glenn, Unspoken 7). Although speech and silence create the foundation for which we make sense of our world, there is a "...Western notion of language as positive, and silence as negative; language as foreground, silence as background; language as melody, silence as harmony" (Glenn, Unspoken 5). 

Silence is a simple yet complex act. Whether silence surrounds a group meditation, fills a room of mourners at a funeral, or faces voices of power, all occur around the same absence of sound. Silence presents in the same way. Thus, you cannot perform silence louder or softer, as one does with speech. However, silence rhetorically manifests in complex manners that stand in opposition to silence's straightforward delivery. Glenn describes the compounded nature silence takes:

 Silence exists in overlapping states: environmental, locational, communal, personal. It can be self- or other-initiated, self- or other-derived. Silence can be something one does, something that is done to someone, or something one experiences. However it takes shape, the form of silence (the delivery) is always the same, but the function of specific acts, states, phenomena of silence- that is, its interpretation by and effect upon other people - varies according to the social-rhetorical context in which it occurs. (Unspoken 9)

The shape of silence is the same, but the function becomes a site of analysis when exploring its complexities and power. Glenn's focus on "its interpretation by and effect upon other people'' drives the key question of whether silence is our choice (whether conscious or unconscious) or that of someone else (Unspoken 13)? Depending on the context, silence can empower or oppress. Thus, there are ramifications when systematic forms of silencing arise in order to marginalize certain groups of people. One historical, current, and crucial site of silencing is gendered silences, Glenn argues, "Silence may be the most undervalued and under-understood traditionally feminine site and concomitant rhetorical art (Unspoken 2). Glenn points to the historical footprints of revered figures to highlight the oppressive connection between silence and women. In addition to her examples of Aristotle and John Bunyan, she states, "Throughout Western social history, all people gendered feminine (or weaker) have been systematically muted if not silenced. Silence has been the ornament of the female sex; The Virgin Mary served as the model of feminine silence, for the Bible mentions no more than five times that she spoke during her entrie life" (Unspoken 10). I want to examine how silence functions to interpret, understand, and have tools to analyze the silences women experience.

Tools to Interpret Silence

Silence's functions exist upon a spectrum. Through her groundbreaking research on silence, Glenn notably categorizes silence as expected and unexpected. Both can carry meaning but in very different ways. While unexpected silence unsettles us, expected silences go unnoticed and are associated with oppression and control. Although Glenn does not give exact definitions of unexpected and expected silence, she gives examples of both. Unexpected silence occurs when we telephone or message a friend, and the friend does not help carry the conversation forward (Unspoken 11). They fall silent. Thus, the unexpected silence creates anxiety within us, wondering why the other person did not want to speak with us. Unexpected silence can also fall upon ourselves when we face strange lapses of memory, like a forgotten name, address, or phone number. These types of silences are auditorily identifiable and deeply unsettle us because it's hard to know why or how they happen.

On the other hand, expected silences occupy grey areas and are harder to recognize. One form of expected silence occurs at funerals, musical events, courtrooms when people communally participate in a conscious locational silence. Thus, it is an expectation to deliver silence out of respect. People who hold particular positions of power expect silence (Glenn, Unspoken 10). Other more minute expected silences can be seen in pauses between words or time alone in a car. Above all, Glenn details another form of expected silence, "in those whose words are not valued" (Unspoken 10). This type of expected silence connects powerlessness to speechlessness. Thus she argues women, children, people of color, or any marginalized group live in a systematic existence of expected silence. How do we bring further meaning and understanding to these expected and unexpected silences? Richard L. Johannesen punctuates a list of twenty items on how individuals perceive silence and attach meaning based on their personality, prior experiences, and cultural conditions (Glenn, Unspoken 18).  

Another way to interpret the nature of interpersonal silence is through Sidney J. Baker's negative and positive silence. On a spectrum, negative silence is on one end and positive silence on the other end. Baker defines negative silence as situations where fear, hatred, anger, or acute anxiety strike us dumb. Baker further explains the anxious feelings, he says, "The silent person is too overwrought to speak or cannot find the words to express his or her feelings" (qtd. in Glenn, Unspoken 17). Positive silence is when there is a space of comfort amongst loved ones or trusted individuals where words become irrelevant. The remaining silence equates to tranquility because there is no tension or a need to converse (Glenn, Unspoken 17). With these new tools to examine how silence functions rhetorically, I want to analyze an example of a women's silenced voice in literature to better understand the silence women experience across different communities.

Silence in Memoir 

From discussions on lasting trauma, cultural difference to lost identity, memoirs document inexhaustible sites of women's silence. Women's ability to author and re-tell their experiences gives them and readers a greater understanding of ways in which silence carries meaning rhetorically. In Of Mother Born, Adrienne Rich stresses the importance of woman told stories, she says, "I believe increasingly that only the willingness to share private and sometimes painful experience can enable women to create a collective description of the world which will be truly ours…-It is her version, after all, that the reader is reading at this moment, while the accounts of others-including the dead-may go untold" (Rich 16). Understanding the collective world in which silence operates showcases the power silence can hold. When we share our experiences, our stories create a canon of voices that echo and fill the world with "her version" so each of us can hear women's struggles, pain, and challenges. One trailblazing voice who has added to that canon is Maya Angelou.

Esteemed American Poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist, Maya Angelou shares deeply personal stories of her childhood in her memoir I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, including a time in her life where she chose to be silent. She recounts being raped at 8-years-old by her mother's boyfriend, Mr. Freeman, and his death. Angelou believed that her voice killed Mr. Freeman because after telling her brother, Bailey, about the rape, and a lie in court, her uncles murdered him for his actions; Angelou stopped talking. Angelou's silence is perceived by her family as unexpected silence, which deeply unsettles them. Angelou recalls her family's reaction to her muteness, and she says, "When I refused to be the child they knew and accepted me to be, I was called imprudent and my muteness sullenness. For a while I was punished for being so uppity that I wouldn't speak; and then came the thrashings, given by any relative who felt himself offended" (86). In Johannesen's list of perceived silence, the family's perception of Angelou's silence aligns with number twelve: The person is snooty or impolite. However, when we view silence from Angelou's perspective, she imparts an expected silence on herself. Due to the violence by her uncles, she feels a sense of fear and anxiety, thus, her silence falls within the negative silence realm. Although her silence comes from a place of oppression, Angelou harnesses her silence to empower herself, she says:

I had to stop talking. I discovered that to achieve perfect personal silence all I had to do was to attach myself leechlike to sound. I began to listen to everything. I probably hoped that after I had heard all the sounds, really heard them and packed them down, deep in my ears, the world would be quiet around me. I walked into rooms where people were laughing, their voices hitting the walls like stones, and I simply stood still—in the midst of the riot of sound. After a minute or two, silence would rush into the room from its hiding place because I had eaten up all the sounds. (86)

Angelou personifies silence as a sidekick in her hope to quiet the world around her. Silence comes out of hiding when she "eats up all the sounds." She wants silence to be positive, a place of tranquility and safety, but it comes at the cost of the "sound" around her. As Glenn notes in Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence, "Silence as a means of rhetorical delivery, can be empowered action, both resistant and creative" (155). Silence has a purpose and provides protection and safety for Angelou because she sees words as too powerful to yield. Her restraint from speaking displays a type of empowered action Angelou uses as self-control. Not only does she want to keep herself safe, but, more importantly, she wants to protect the people around her. She builds authority in her quest to pack words down and listen to everything. Years of silence allows her to hone the skills to brilliantly storytell and craft words later in her life. Angelou's turn inward (five years of silence) and practice of listening leads to her keen ability to find the strength of her voice.