john edgar wideman. the european response: a special issue || in praise of silence

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In Praise of Silence Author(s): John Edgar Wideman Source: Callaloo, Vol. 22, No. 3, John Edgar Wideman. The European Response: A Special Issue (Summer, 1999), pp. 546-549 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3299780 . Accessed: 10/06/2014 02:06 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Callaloo. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 188.72.127.150 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 02:06:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: John Edgar Wideman. The European Response: A Special Issue || In Praise of Silence

In Praise of SilenceAuthor(s): John Edgar WidemanSource: Callaloo, Vol. 22, No. 3, John Edgar Wideman. The European Response: A Special Issue(Summer, 1999), pp. 546-549Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3299780 .

Accessed: 10/06/2014 02:06

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toCallaloo.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.150 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 02:06:00 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: John Edgar Wideman. The European Response: A Special Issue || In Praise of Silence

IN PRAISE OF SILENCE

by John Edgar Wideman

On a roomsize dock beside a Maine lake where for 30-some summers I've gone each morning to write, I often find myself thinking about silence. When I'm writing or, more likely, in the spaces between writing that are also writing-the spaces when words aren't being scratched on the page, either because one thought is finished or another won't come or because I'm having thoughts for which no words exist, no words I know yet anyway-when I'm pausing, looking out at water, trees and sky, the silence of my hideaway in the woods meets the silence inside me and forms a horizon as tangible and razor-sharp as the shoreline across the lake, dividing trees from their upside-down reflections on days when water and wind are calm.

Perhaps words lie behind this horizon, but for the moment they are utterly inaccessible and can remain so for what seems like minutes, hours, days, on and off the dock. Some mornings I'm frustrated by the pause, disquieted by a foreboding that no words exist, that even if there are words, they will always fail, that this pause might go on and on, but more often I find myself growing calmer, relaxing, spreading out, breathing deeper because I'm aware of time's motion, its capaciousness, aware of being inside it, bundled, dragged, gliding along. I never get closer to understanding time than in these moments when inner and outer silence meet: Silence, a medium I enter and feel around and inside me, an affirming vital presence always, whether or not I'm conscious of it.

The more I write, the more I realize how deeply I'm indebted to a communal experience of time and silence, an African-American language evolving from that experience, a language vernacular, visceral, sensuous, depending on the entire body's expressive repertoire, subversive, liberating, freighted with laughter, song and sigh, burdened and energized by opposition. African-rooted, culturally descended ways and means of speaking that emerged from the dungeon and dance of silence.

For a people who have endured a long, long history of waiting-waiting at the Jordan river, waiting chained in stone forts on the west coast of Africa, waiting for slavery and discrimination to end, waiting for justice and respect as first-class citizens, waiting for prison gates to open, waiting eternities in emergency wards and clinic lines of sorry urban hospitals-silence is an old, familiar companion. Time and silence, silence and time. The silence attending waiting, waiting through times of enforced silence. Silence the ground upon which wishes are inscribed while the endless waiting continues. Silence a dreaming space where what's awaited is imag-

This essay first appeared in Book World (November 29, 1998) and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

Callaloo 22.3 (1999) 547-549

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Page 3: John Edgar Wideman. The European Response: A Special Issue || In Praise of Silence

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Photo by Phyllis Graber Jensen, Bates College

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Page 4: John Edgar Wideman. The European Response: A Special Issue || In Praise of Silence

CALLALOO

ined and, when it doesn't come, the space where dreams are dismantled, dissolving again into silence. Dreams born and dying and born again in the deep womb of silence, and silence, tainted though it is by disappointment and waiting, also a reservoir of hope.

Imagine yourself disembarked on an alien shore after a long, painful voyage so

harrowing you're not certain you survived it. You're sick, weak, profoundly disori- ented. You fear you haven't actually arrived anywhere but are just slipping into another fold of a nightmare.

You are naked and chained to others who look like you, under the merciless control of brutal strangers who look and act nothing like you and, much worse, do not speak your language. To you their language is gibberish, the ba-ba-baaing of barbarians.

They communicate their orders with blows, screams, shoves, crude pantomime. You are compelled at the peril of life and limb to make sense of verbal assault, physical abuse. You realize you're learning a new language even as you swallow the bitterness, the humiliation of learning the uselessness of your own. Much of this learning and

unlearning occurs in silence inside your skull, in the sanctuary where you're simul- taneously struggling to retain traces of who you are, what you were before this terrible, scouring ordeal began. In order to save your life, when you attempt to utter the first word of a new tongue, are you also violating your identity and dignity? When

you break your silence, are you surrendering, acknowledging the strangers' power to own you, rule you? Are you forfeiting your chance to tell your story in your own words some day?

Silence in this context is a measure of resistance and tension. A drastic expression of difference that maintains the distinction between using a language and allowing it to use you.

That was yesterday. Yet much has not changed. Centuries have not erased the archetypal differences between people of African descent brought to the new world as slaves, and the people who claimed this new world, claimed our African bodies and minds. Tension and resistance characterize the practices African-descended peoples have employed to keep their distance from imposed tongues, imposed disciplines. Generation after generation has been compelled to negotiate-for better or worse, and with self-determination and self-realization at stake-the quicksand of a foreign language that continues by its structure, vocabulary, its deployment in social interac- tions, its retention of racist assumptions, expressions and attitudes, its contamination by theories of racial hierarchy to recreate the scenario of master and slave.

Uneasiness and a kind of disbelief of this incriminating language we've been forced to adopt never go away. Some of us choose to speak very, very little or not at all. Let our actions, other parts of our bodies besides the mouth, speak for us. Lots of us refuse to change speech habits that distinguish us as southern or urban or rural or

hip or poor and lacking formal education. Some glory in these habits, others can switch when convenient, necessary or enjoyable. Plenty of us have mastered the master and always wear the mask. Many, whether proficient or not in standard dialects, despise them. Mangle, distort, satirize the would-be master's tongue. Reject most of it, stigmatize the so-called mainstream language, seal it in a ghetto, a barrio, separate and unequal. Some strategies are defensive, reactionary, destructive, others

548

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Page 5: John Edgar Wideman. The European Response: A Special Issue || In Praise of Silence

CALLALOO

outrageously healthy and creative, and the totality of these strategies make up the African-American culture.

Silence marks time, saturates and shapes African-American art. Silences structure our music, fill the spaces-point, counterpoint-of rhythm, cadence, phrasing. Think of the eloquent silences of Thelonious Monk, sometimes comic, sometimes manic and

threatening. Recall gospel's wordless choruses hummed, moaned, keened, words left far behind as singers strive to reach what's unsayable, the silent pulse of Great Time

abiding within the song. Silence times our habits of speech and non-speech, choreographs the intricate

dance of oral tradition, marks who speaks first, last, how long and with what

authority. Silence indicates who is accorded respect, deference, modulates call-and- response, draws out the music in words and phrases. Silence a species of argument, logical and emotionally persuading, heightening what's at stake. Silence like Amen at the end of a prayer invokes the presence of invisible ancestors whose voices, though quiet now, permeate the stillness, quicken the ancient wisdom silence holds.

The sign of silence presides over my work. Characters who can't speak, won't speak, choose never to speak until this world changes. Stories and essays whose explicit subject or theme is silence. My impulse to give voice to the dead, the unborn, to outlaws and outcasts whose voices have been stolen or muted by violence. Characters who talk in tongues, riddles, prophecies, at the margins, unintelligible until it's too late. Alternate forms of speech, in my fiction, which celebrate the body's ingenuity, how it compensates the loss of one expressive sense with eloquence in another. My ongoing attempt to define African-American culture, explicate its heavy debt, its intimacy with silence. My journey back to lost African cultures, to the stories of Homewood, the Pittsburgh community where I was raised. My struggle to emulate the achievement of African-American artists in song, dance, sport; invent a language that doesn't feel secondhand, borrowed, a language rich with time and silence that animate the written word.

And thinking about that struggle takes me back to those mornings on the dock in Maine. The silence I experience there is not really silence. It's an illusion. If we hear

nothing, if one ever can hear nothing, it only means we aren't listening hard enough. At a minimum, we can hear ourselves listening. The total absence of sound is never a possibility for a hearing person, is it? Unless we pretend to have God's ear and can stand aside, outside being, outside self, and listen. So silence is a metaphor. A way of

thinking about how it might feel to be both creature and creator, able to experience whatever there might be to hear or not hear if the earth stopped spinning. Silence is a way of imagining such a moment outside time, imagining the possibility of pausing at ground zero and examining our lives before the buzz of the world overtakes us. Nice work if we could get it, and even though we can't, we have the power to see ourselves other than we are. Silence is proof that the decision to listen or not is ours. Proof that we are called to pay attention.

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