The Shapes of Silence: Writing by Women of Colour and the Politics of Testimony, and: Subversive Silences: Nonverbal Expression and Implicit Narrative Strategies in the Works of Latin American Women Writers (review)

The tradition of associating speech with agency is a long one in Western culture. For Lacan, to enter the symbolic order—the world of social meanings and relations—is to enter the realm of language; one cannot negotiate society, then, without wielding language effectively. This basic premise is one that most of us take for granted (whatever we might think of Lacan). In the United States, our first-amendment right to freedom of speech is also a right to wield individual agency, to express our political and social opinions, and thus attempt to modify the social fabric without (theoretically, at least) the fear of legal reprisal. The assertion, then, that silence may wield its own forms of agency, may constitute in itself a form of expression or communication, may help to reshape the social or political landscape, or may be worth listening to is an intriguing and provocative one. Some years ago, Doris Sommer notably tackled the subject of motivated silences, secrets, and strategic withholding of information in Rigoberta Menchú's testimonio, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia.¹ More recently, the subject of silence has been taken up, in varying degrees, by two new studies: The Shapes of Silence: Writing by Women of Colour and the Politics of Testimony, by Proma Tagore, and Subversive Silences: Nonverbal Expression and Implicit Narrative Strategies in the Works of Latin American Women Writers, by Helene Carol Weldt-Basson. Both writers wish their readers to come away with a complex understanding of textual silence as more than just absence, passivity, or a void.

Tagore's central claim in The Shapes of Silence is that as readers we need to be more attentive to what silence tells us—to "the affective, emotive, and political dimensions" of silence (p. 3). In her introductory chapter, "Silence, Speech, Voice, and the Politics of Testimony," Tagore argues that practices of ethical listening and reading involve listening for silences as well as listening to speech (p. 27). The commonalities that tie together the authors and texts she collects under the rubric of "women of colour" do not form an essential group identity but rather reveal the urgency, diversely expressed, of a politics of sensitive listening to narratives that have historically not been attended to nor been influential in the shaping of dominant historical archives. Tagore thus emphasizes "the importance that acts of remembering and witnessing hold for women of colour, who often work to preserve and survive their stories in the face of erasure and threat" (p. 20).

Tagore's second chapter, "Witnessing as Testimony," on the novels The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo, explores forms of witnessing violence or trauma that do not necessarily involve speech. The third chapter, "Testimonial Remembrance and Historical Narration," examines the ways in which Native American (Ojibwe) Louise Erdrich's novel Tracks and Indian writer M. K. Indira's novel Phaniyamma bear witness to narratives missing in dominant colonial histories and to the silences or purposeful "forgettings" that characterize such histories. One of the major theses of this chapter is that remembering can be embodied as well as verbal or textual; we remember through our bodies, and the body is therefore the site of counter-stories that can correct or fill in the gaps of colonial histories. Chapter four, "Testimony, Translation, and Subalternity," takes up an analysis of nineteenth-century Bengali writer Rashsundari Debi's autobiography, Amar Jiban, and contemporary writer Mahasweta Devi's collection of short stories, Imaginary Maps. Tagore's conclusion constitutes the final chapter, "Witnessing, Remembrance, and...