From Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson:
“Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world. Mrs. Winterson [the author’s adoptive mother] objected to what I had put in, but it seemed to me that what I had left out was the story’s silent twin. There are so many things that we can’t say, because they are too painful. We hope that the things we can say will soothe the rest, or appease it in some way. Stories are compensatory. The world is unfair, unjust, unknowable, out of control. When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold. When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken. Mrs. Winterson would have preferred it if I had been silent.
Do you remember the story of Philomel who is raped and then has her tongue ripped out by the rapist so that she can never tell? I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words. I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.”
Your Pages …
1. Jot down the titles of books or poems you’ve read that allowed you to “get your language back through the language of others.”
2. Who is your “Mrs. Winterson”? (Or perhaps you have several, living or not, real or not.) How will you write what you are compelled to, despite what you perceive to be another’s desire for you to remain silent? Write a never-to-be-sent letter to that person, expressing your feelings.
3. What “silence” would you want readers to hear, and understand, in one of the many stories of your life? Write that story now.
Please share your thoughts in the comments below.