THREE METAPHORICAL USES OF “SILENCE”
IN THREE FEMALE POSTCOLONIAL WRITERS’ WORKS
“Silence” in postcolonial literary text connects the issues
of language and national character, while in the works by
female postcolonial writers, it is the prescription given to
colonial females by social gender role or racial role, and
also the form colonial females use to revolt against such a
prescription. It is fair to say that the silence female
postcolonial writers manifest in their works is actually a
sound “silence”, their pens make such a sound of “silence”
resound in the world of letters. Thence, “silence” is no longer
“silent”, the colonial females seen in the “silence” in
postcolonial texts are in fact crying revolt against the
mainstream society from the periphery where they subsist.
Owing to different national and cultural backgrounds,
“silence” is manifested in different forms by different female
writers, and different writers use “silence” to express
different meanings. The “silence” manifested by the female
writer of African origin MN Philips signifies the agony of
being denuded of the ability to speak. The manifestation of
“silence” imagery in Philips poetry is to manifest “aphasia”
by using “language”, thus directs her diatribes against the
racial and gender issues closely related to aphasia. The long
rule over her native land, Africa, by colonists makes her
people almost lose their mother tongue, therefore, the people
under colonial rule fall into an “aphasic”. “silence”. In the
works of Anita Desai, the fiction writer of India origin using
English in her writing, the “silence” imagery is manifested
more as the resistance against sexism. “Silence”, a marginal
status of the sexual exiles, is often complimented as a
traditional virtue of Orient females, but questioned in
Desai’s writings. The “silence” in the works of Joy Kogawa,
the Canadian fiction-writer and poet of Japanese origin,
embraces an abundance of religions meanings. When manifesting
“silence” in her fictions, she tends to use “silence” to
metaphorize some highest Buddhist spiritual realm, especially
the “void” or “nothing” in Buddhism. She maintains that truth
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conceals itself in somewhere beyond all languages, no language
or sound can carry truth, to express truth is bound to be
“trying to discriminate but failing in finding the exact
words”.
A. “Silence ” of the Mutes Depicted by Marlene Nourbese Philip, a
Writer of African Descent
“Silence” characterizes the agony of the muteness of the
colonized. Under the colonization, the colonized are deprived
of their local vernaculars and are forced to use the languages
of the colonized thence great anguish of the forced “muteness”,
a state in which their national culture, feelings and thoughts
cannot be conveyed through their national languages but
through those of the foreigners’ (the colonizers’). What
M.N.Philip, a writer of African breed, expresses in her
writings is just the great sufferings resulted from such
conditions.
In Philip’s poetry the imagery of “silence” is acquired by
presenting the “muteness” through “languages” thereupon
pointing to race and gender, which are closely related to the
“muteness”. Due to long-term colonial rule in her motherland,
Africa, the native Africans nearly forget their mother tongues
hence the subsequent speechless “silence”.
So far She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, Philp’s
third collection of poetry, is her most successful work, in
which the imageries of “silence” are most densely presented.
In this collection the opening paragraph of the first chapter
“Every Piece of Land and Sea” immediately brings the readers
to a context of diasporas soaked in sadness.
The symbol of mother’s losing touch with her daughter and
finding the daughter nowhere not only aptly reveals the
author’s exile mood resulted from her cultural dislocation
and spiritual estrangement but also serves as a necessary
foreshadow for developing the theme of losing mother tongue
in the subsequent parts. In Greek myth, Siras attempted to
find her lost daughter, Pushfeny, but in vain. In Philip’s
poems, the mother wants to hold her daughter in her own language,
but like Siras, she finally fails to keep her daughter in her
mother tongue, the tongue used by her ancestors. “Address on
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the Logic of Language”, the most important piece in She Tries
Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, is a statement of the
theme of the entire collection. The beginning of this poem
is divided in the same page into three separate columns, which
are in three distinct typefaces. In the main body, namely the
column in the middle, the poet writes:
In the left column, the poet says:
All these three columns center on the same topic but in
different aspects and from different perspectives — — the
difficulty of “muteness”, that is, the native language not
being spoken in mother’s tongue. Owing to the loss of native
language in its true sense, the colonized have to take the
patriarchal languages as their native languages instead and
therefore have to taste the “ bitterness of alienness” in using
them. The true “mother tongue” transmits all the comforts a
baby gains from its mother’s tender and assuring licks. But
because of segregation by the slave owners, the mother tongue
loses its capability to communicate and accordingly withers
till death in the end. The loss of mother tongue, like baby’s
inaccessibility to its mother’s licks, means not only danger
but also sadness.
Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (1991),
Philip’s last work, tells a story of an African girl who travels
in boundless time and space. She is the daughter of Africa,
wandering without destination in time and space beyond their
historical and geographical senses. She is always seeking for
her origin, the origin of culture and mother tongue. But like
Siras’ failure in searching for her daughter or the daughter’s
failure in finding the mother, she found nothing but “silence”.
Almost all the names of the of the characters the heroine
encounters in her journey are related to “silence”, and the
only difference is that the letters in them are rearranged
like CESLIEN， NEECLIS，SINCEEL or ECNELIS, which symbolizes
the silent Africa suffering from “muteness”.
II.Gender-specific “Silence” Described by Anita Desai, A Woman Writer
of Indian Descent
If Philip’s portrayal of “silence” is more concerned than
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anything else with the problem of languages regarding the
racial and national awareness, the imagery of “silence”
presented by Anita Desai, an Indian-descent novelist writing
in English, can be said to have expressed resistance against
sexual discrimination. Born of a family with both western and
eastern background and growing up in New Deli, Desai stamps
her female characters, most of whom live a marginal life far
off the man-dominant center, with the oriental silence
peculiar to the traditional Indian women. Their life desires
being regulated by all sorts of restrictions from religion,
society and conventions, they can only silently live in
solitude, an exile life neglected by most. Thus when “silence”,
a marginal living condition characteristic of gender exiles,
is hailed as the virtue of oriental women, Desai questions
it without hesitation in her writings.
Maya, the heroine in Desai’s virgin novel “Cry, the Peacock”,
is a woman who seeks to be accepted by the society as a separate
sex, but in the end finds it is hardly possible to accomplish
this goal in the Indian institutional and cultural context.
Taken as a figurine without thought and feelings, she lives
in the social margin without independent personality and
identity. She is exiled spiritually, her thoughts and feelings
drifting along the border of the reality. She is not able to
enter the reality world, for it is the domain of men; being
silent and having little communication with her husband when
living together, she has to retreat to her inner world.
“Silence” in Indian culture is a merit considered typical of
women; therefore Maya is confined to her traditional part,
hard to escape.
In Desai’s novels, the imagery of “silence” is always
connected with that of death, which seems to be the way the
heroines resist “silence” with the very silence. In “Cry,
Peacock”, the reserved heroine, Maya, told her husband one
day that she wanted to die, saying:”Don’t you know that I never
mind if I die right now? … No one more word is necessary and
all is over.” This remark sounds a thunder in silence to her
husband, so does it to the readers when they try to feel Maya’s
torrential emotions in disguise of silence by claiming: “no
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one more word is necessary”. It is just by such sharp contrasts
that Anita Desai succeeding in presenting “silence” that is
by no means silent. In Desai’s novels, the imagery of death
is always put side by side with that of “silence”. When she
finds it impossible to escape all sorts conventional,
religious and social restrictions, Monisha, the apparently
indifferent and reserved heroine in “Voices in the City”,
chose to die, a silent but the most resounding resistance to
the world she dwells in. She herself after her death is silent,
but as what is put in the story, “she wants to make her death
the meaningful parts of her life, affirming and freeing
herself, an attempt to articulate her own voices to this
world.”
What Desai tries to depict in her writings is just this extreme
form of “silence”, viz. death, used by a group of exiles to
question and resist the gender-specific diaspora. Her
writings themselves are a type of audible “silence” in the
sense that silence is broken by the presentation of silence.
With such presentations the silent women encaged in the inner
bitterness wage protests and challenges at the marginal
position against the trendy culture. When the sufferings of
the silent Indian women are articulated in English instead
of Hindi, more listeners are attracted and the “silence” is
accordingly changed into utterances.
III. The Nil “Silence” Presented by Joy Nozomi Kogawa, A Feminist
Writer of Japanese Descent
In the works of Joy Nozomi Kogawa, a Japanese Canadian writer
and poet, the imagery of “silence” takes on rich religious
signification in that it is often metaphorically associated
with certain supreme states in Buddhism, the states of
“emptiness” and “nil” in particular. For Kogawa, truth can
never be approached to through language or sounds and the
attempt to express truth verbally must end up forgetting what
to say when the words are on the lips. It is in Obasan, the
first and the most successful novel by Kogawa, that the imagery
of “silence” is cultivated to its full. The novel is
autobiographical in that it gives a vivid account of what the
Japanese Canadians experienced during World War II. Niomy,
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the narrator in the novel, shares with the author a similar
experience in which Niomy is sent into exile by the Canadian
government to a imprisonment camp where she lives a harsh life.
During WWII Niomy and her brother, Steven, were separated from
their parents. Their mother was deprived by the Canadian
government of the right to return to Canada after she had
finished her home trip to Japan and their father was
transported and sold to a farm to work as a coolie. Niomy and
Steven had to live with their uncle and aunt, Samu and Obasan,
the family life proceeding in deadly silence. Growing up in
solitude and silence, Niomy almost lost her power to
communicate with others and had been accustomed to indulging
in silence. The whole piece develops on the displaying of the
family history and in silence Kogawa is tracing a family
history as well as the history of discrimination suffered by
the whole Japanese nation.
In Obasan the imagery of silence is a complex one in the sense
that different meanings are acquired on different levels in
different symbols. In the novel, the images of tree and forest
are recurrent, for example, in the sentences like “I hide in
the woods with green grass”, “I am part of the small grove”.
In Buddhism, tree, bodhi tree in particular, has a special
implication that practicing asceticism under a bodhi tree is
helpful for learning the true meaning of Buddhism. What Obasan
attempts to achieve is the imagery of “silence” with rich
Buddhism implications, by which the author poses questions
to the values of the real world and language, concluding that
truth is always on the move and words are incapable of
describing the ever-changing world. As a result, truth exists
only in silence, a state of nil devoid of words or objects.
At this juncture, such “silence” is presented as a kind of
spiritual target. Furthermore, stone, another recurrent image
in the novel, is taken to signal silence, the forced and
wordless silence. Just as the writer’s words in the novel “I
hate soundlessness and I hate stone”, such forced silence
results from the racial discrimination and the sexual
stipulations on the parts of traditional Japanese women. Sea,
a third recurrent image concerning silence in the novel,
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symbolizes “audible” silence, a special discourse to present
and to break silence. In narration the characters in the novel
strike the reader eternally mute and silent and their hearts
are tightly enclosed. In the parts where there are poems or
songs, blanks are left and they are in fact another way of
presenting silence in that the silence they stands for itself
is a discursive strategy. With these blanks the writer means
to tell us the fact that the blank spaces surrounding the words
are more important than words themselves and their
implications are far rich than what the words contains.
Readers familiar with oriental cultures are prone to
associating the imagery of silence presented in Obasan with
some conceptions, for instance, “sudden enlightenment” or
“Faramita”, in Buddhism. Truth is a Faramita domain that
cannot be approached to through language, nor can it be
apprehended through words or idea interpretations. Only in
instant sudden enlightenment and in speechless nil can truth
be reached.
Judging from the manifestation of “silence” by the above three
female writers, silence and utterance is put forward as a
question or laid out as an option to guide their readers to
rethink language from the angles of racial discrimination and
sexism. Different national and cultural background make the
“silence” manifested in different messages, however, to put
it briefly, the silence manifested in their works includes
merely the following states: one is the compelled silence,
one is the silence containing truth which is sought after in
the heart, one is keeping the lips sealed and one silence is
itself a language, a sound silence. The pursuit of silence
is in reality an opposition to silence, when “silence” is
employed as a resistant language, that compelled “silence”
is broken.
Ren Yiming
Literature Institute
Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences
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