Your Silence Will Not Protect You
From the Archives: Audre Lorde says, "survival is not just a walk through the rain"
Upcoming at WITD
🎆 FLASH SALE! Grab a 15% back-to-school discount on annual subscriptions just in time for our fall seasonal intensive: The Letter Re-Imagined.
📝 Writing in the Dark: THE SCHOOL closes registration on Labor Day. SCHOOL is our new 9-month slow-writing program for people serious about advancing their craft and joyful about "doing language better.” Starts September 19. ALL LEVELS.
🗓️ End-of-Summer Write-In for paid members and a celebratory WITD Salon with flash readings coming soon—dates announced next week.
orig. published July 2024
“Your silence will not protect you.” –Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action
I wish to speak to you about the wound and the weapon of silence, and the cure of speaking out.
August is a time of “what comes next,” that wave of liminal beauty crashing into a space abundant and deafening with in-between, a stretch of still-green before autumn’s inevitable endings, finish lines, and even small deaths—at least in the metaphorical sense—as one year gives way to another, leaving old things to fall away and new things to emerge.
I gave birth to all three of my children in August. My youngest child,
became a foster parent to my youngest grandchild, Z, in August. I married my husband in August. I also ended my first marriage in August. August is a really big month for me, filled with beginnings, endings, and Tilt-A-Whirls.August shows us our own past selves in the rearview mirror, standing on the boulevard confused and perhaps a little melancholy, but with that determined set of the jaw signaling the will to march forward into the uncertain future with an equal mix of grit and hope.
In those moments, I wish for myself the same thing I’ve wished before: that I might continue marching with renewed resolve to gently set down any old forced silences, along with the false belief that such silences will keep me safe, or even safer.
Maybe there was a time when quieting ourselves, when cottoning our tongues, protected us from forces more powerful than ourselves, or seemed to. And maybe there will be times again when humming through our teeth is the least painful path. But too often, our silence is both the wound and the weapon against self. In those cases, speaking out a scrap of truth becomes a cure.
As Lorde has said:
“I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk through the rain.”
Another way to think about this is through the lens of Dorianne Laux’s sublime poem, “Dust”:
But what if we do open that window?
What if we engage in the ultimately freeing act of giving voice to the stories we cannot write, the truths we cannot tell?
These might be the old stories we’ve carried quietly for decades, stories that have stubbornly evaded any past attempts to breathe them free with words. To breathe them free with words.
Or they might be brand-new stories, experiences that otherwise felt quiet, unusual, or strange to articulate with language.
Either way, you are invited to speak the unspeakable this week, and let it surprise you with its holiness, for it is indeed holy to sing out from a crawlspace of truth.
Your voice opens the window and lets God in.
I’m not religious, but I love the the ending of “Dust,” the way Laux describes God as “all bright light and black wings.” It’s surprising and a little distressing and makes me lean in with curiosity and an almost urgent need to understand. I love, too, that the speaker of the poem equates God to “truth/just a few words/but I recognized it.”
Like Mary Oliver said, I don’t know what God is, but I do experience moments such as the one Laux describes, in which I recognize something true and become not “elated or frightened/but simply rapt, aware.”
Such moments do feel holy. It’s too easy to say I feel this kind of truth with animals, but I do. Animals and babies keep truth, or God, or the doorway to “:rapt awareness” close to the surface, where it can be so readily seen and felt. Trees, too, of course, and the ocean, sun, and moon.
In other words, every beautiful thing that hovers closest to the source also shares the shelf with cliche.
There is no other way.
This is why I encourage myself and all of us, really, to look harder.
To “look with our eyes,” as my mother used to tell me to do when I was a child in charge of finding lost things. Looking with our eyes requires us to see past the easiness of animals and moons (not that we can’t appreciate animals and moons, for we can, and should, love them so!) to the equally beautiful truths found in sharper objects, in harder edges, in muddier puddles.
Writing Exercise: Your Silence Will Not Protect You
This exercise invites you to express some part of the inexpressible. Remember, parts are allowed. We do not need to burden ourselves always with the task of wholeness!
You might begin with making a list of stories you carry but cannot tell. Let your mind wander broadly; do not censor. Making a list will not harm anyone.
Remember that the kinds of stories you cannot tell might be personal stories—i.e., things that happened to you or things that you did. Or, they may be less personal stories that involve you only tangentially. Be open and do not limit your imagination.
Important: You need not use this exercise to tell the worst thing that ever happened to you, or the darkest tunnel you’ve crawled through.
Some of the strangest silences are almost comical in their innocence. There are so many ways to be silent, as Ada Limon so beautifully articulates in her poem, The Quiet Machine.
So, be expansive with your listmaking, and let yourself explore all types of silence, from secret loves and pleasures to untellable sorrows. Again, you don’t have to write any of these stories unless you want to. It’s just a list.
When you tire of making lists of untellable stories, it’s time decide if you’d like to write one of them.
You might start with the sentence, This is not the story of ___________. Or, This story is not about _________.
Then you might say, Because that's a story I cannot write. Yes, just go ahead and write that down, the fact that you are defying gravity, breaking the unwritten