The Discourse of Silence as Testimony in Jenn Díaz's Es un decir

The explosion of interest in the recovery of historical memory in Spain seeks to address many decades of silence and forgetting during the years of the Franco dictatorship and afterwards. Working with trauma theory, Michel Foucault's understanding of silence as discourse, as well as queer theory's exploration of silence as strategy and power, this article examines the multiple roles of silence in Jenn Díaz's Es un decir (2014), a novel that portrays the effects of political violence on three generations of women living in postwar Spain. With closer examination of the dynamic between enunciated and silenced discourses in the novel, this study aims to understand how silence communicates and testifies to traumatic pain and memory, strength, and resistance. This analysis shows that silence in the face of trauma does not indicate weakness, nor does it equal forgetting. Rather, it is a part of discourse that expresses suffering, conveys strength, and safeguards memory.