Silence is the ocean of the unsaid, the unspeakable, the repressed, the erased, the unheard. It surrounds the scattered islands made up of those allowed to speak and what can be said and who listens.
Silence is imposed vs quiet which is sought.
“We are volcanoes, when we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change.” Ursula K. Le Guin
If our voices are essential aspects of our humanity, to be rendered voiceless is to be dehumanized or excluded from one’s humanity.
The history of silence is central to women’s history.
Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place.
Who has been heard we know; they are the well-mapped islands, the rest are the unmappable sea of unheard, unrecorded humanity.
If libraries hold all the stories that have been told, there are ghost libraries of all the stories that have not. The ghosts outnumber the books by some unimaginably vast sum.
Narrative construction of reality – the ways in which we construct narratives in order to bolster our world view (Didion/We tell ourselves stories to survive).
Kristen Buckley 