Silence as a De-Colonial Project in We the Animals
Katerina Pavlidis
Consider silence as more than just quietude: silence as lacking nothing, as an act of withholding, as complete within itself. Yes, Justin Torres’ carefully crafted silences in We the Animals give his readers the much-needed opportunity to come up for air as they navigate his fierce succession of vignettes. For his characters, however, these breaths of silence offer an escape, the opportunity for tenderness, a reprieve from animalhood. Acknowledging the many kinds of silence that manifest throughout We the Animals as active, intentional—as opposed to coincidental or aesthetic pauses of any sort—sets the foundation for a critique of colonized notions of silence, particularly as it relates to ‘the closet,’ in Torres’ text. To achieve this, first I will draw on b. binaohan’s decolonizing trans/gender 101 for their definition and understanding of ‘the closet’ as a colonial social construction. From there, I will use Emilie Bergmann’s Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings to better explore interpretations of Torres’ silences for their ability to empower victims of colonial suppression (as it is based in orality). Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate the capacity for Torres’ silences to be part of a de-colonial project that simultaneously breaks down the construction of silence as an absence, and reimagines it with an empowering, marked intentionality.
To understand Torres’ silences as subversions of a suppressive, colonial orality, it is important to first examine a breakdown of the closet as it relates to silencing queerness. In their book, binaohan breaks down ‘the closet’ as a “myth,” a “social construction” that “fits into the larger context of white hegemonic discourse … the construction of the closet relies heavily on the public/private distinction so crucial to whiteness (and capitalism as it happens)” (39). This distinction is “one of the many results of colonialism” and restricts the queer individual to existing either ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the mythological closet, eliminating the possibility of ambiguity or flexibility between these two poles (39). The dichotomy also presumes that an individual’s queerness is necessarily at odds with their cultural identity and community, which is to erase many indigenous and pre-colonial conceptions of gender and sexuality.
Furthermore, binaohan points out that ultimately “the invocation of the private/public dichotomy in closet discourse … ends up glorifying white individualism (or exceptionalism) over and above any other concerns” (41). In other words, the strict division between public and private life assumes it is preferable to be ‘out’ and ostracized from one’s family and culture as opposed to remaining ‘closeted’ and (forcibly, passively) silent about one’s sexuality. Furthermore, it dismisses silence as a nothingness, invisibilizing the queer person who is not ‘out.’ In the context of We the Animals, this invocation prioritizes public orality over preservation of family ties or one’s own well-being. Although Torres’ text ends with a tragic succumbing to this dichotomy as a result of the narrator’s being forcibly outed, for most of We the Animals, the narrator chooses silence in an active rejection of the closet as it works to contain him, to render him the illegitimate “other.”
To further explore his act of rejection, we must assess Torres’ various mechanisms in his subversions of silence. In his novel, silence commonly realizes fear. The narrator, for example, expresses that “I was afraid of the dark [of poison, of black magic], but no one knew; I’d never spoken the fear” (87). In refusing to break the silence around his fear, he implicitly pairs these sinister symbols with the other, main silence of the text: the silence of the closet (that conceals his queerness until the penultimate chapter). In this example the narrator’s silence is an act of survival—to vocalize these truths about himself would be to make himself a vulnerable other. As Bergmann writes in Entiendes?, “this was the silence of fear, of repression, of inner exile, the silence of the literary closet and of the refusal to come out of that closet or, perhaps, this was the silence of the heroic” (170). She positions “silence as a kind of cypher that becomes, over time, an intricate weapon” against the violence of orality (170). For the narrator to verbally ‘out’ himself would be to engage with the violent collective voice, which utilizes “orality against (and [is] imposed on) the silence of the homosexual body” (Bergmann 123). Put another way, the narrator’s silence is a weapon itself against colonial, violent suppression.
In many ways, as a both a woman who is a descendant of the Puerto Rican diaspora and who kisses another woman, Ma is also made queer. She, too, recognizes the power of silence when she considers running away with the boys. The narrator recalls that “Ma tried to keep talking, tried to keep all of it—the silence and hunger and the idea of Paps—at bay, but she was running out of words” (71). Because Ma holds onto her words to keep the silence away, we can know that for Ma, to submit to silence would be a way to admit (and therefore actualize) her fears of Paps’ violence, of the unknown, of becoming the vulnerable ‘other’ if she were to escape. In other words, her attempt to keep out the silence acknowledges that silence is not to be dismissed a lapse—its purpose is to signify fear; to let silence infiltrate this moment would be to recognize her fear.
In a way, drawing on binaohan’s definition, Ma is ‘closeted’ in this example because of the way in which she is positioned as the outsider. Although she does not choose silence like her son does, its role is just as intentional in its implicit recognition of her fear. In another moment of silence, Lina “put[s] her lips on Ma’s lips and held them there, soft and still, and nobody… said a word. There wasn’t a word to say” (32). The actualization of silence in this example is crucial, for it is a subversive act of queerness both literally and figuratively. In spite of this, unfortunately Ma (alongside Paps, Manny, and Joel) also perpetuates more harmful types of silence in the text.
The family’s treatment of the narrator upon the realization of his other-ness demonstrates a dismissal of silence as nothingness, one that validates the colonial notion of ‘the closet.’ Indeed, Ma’s insistence to “Listen, really listen, and that’s what she is saying in her silence” is a fearful reaction to her son’s homosexual fantasies—which, incidentally, were only discovered upon a serious breach of his boundaries (123). Unlike earlier in the text, here Ma is scared enough to let silence take over.
The narrator’s being outed is further complicated by the presence of his journal as “signify[ing] total outness” by itself, but when in the hands of his family “is consigned to the realm of the totally closeted” (Bergmann 170). As Bergmann writes, “‘Closetedness’ itself is a performance initiated by the speech act of silence—not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularity by fits and starts” (281). In other words, the existence of the journal is both a realization of the narrator’s queerness while also the way in which it is concealed. This duality is violent: when the silence is broken, the closet is actualized.
But how to reconcile his family’s complicity in this colonization (via the collective voice) with their lives as members of the Puerto Rican diaspora, a direct result of U.S. colonial violence?
Bergmann points out “the role of violence in the articulation and placement of differential internal ‘otherness,’” as it creates:
“an altogether different site for the production of meaning: silence; the tensions between a disembodied collective voice and a concrete embodied silence; the reconstitution of a center and the formation of new margins; the relativization of marginality which suggests its potential to be recentered and to become a new locus for the exercise of an oppressive power; and finally, the constant mobility and transferability of the centers of power” (123).
This is to say that colonial suppression is recreated within the family as “a process of community formation” (123). Torres further intensifies the “homogenization of the collective voice” in his decision to write much of We the Animals in the first-person plural tense, exacerbating the illegibility of the narrator’s homosexual body within the context of his community, his family (124). The closeted narrator’s silence threatens his family’s collective voice because, as Bergmann describes, when “the absence of verbal language (the absence of logos?) [acts] as a catastrophic vacuum in front of which all symbolizations (linguistic categorizations) panic and reassert their will to power … orality becomes the word of the law, of the community as law, and silence the voice of the ‘other’” (123-124). In this way, the concept of silence is colonized at a new site; the narrator is othered, his fears and silence dismissed as emptiness by the collective voice.
The disruption of this collective voice is thus a subversive and empowering manifestation of silence. At the end of We the Animals, Joel and Manny are bound by their shared silence and fear of their brother as ‘other.’ The three brothers “have divided into a dangerously dead-end pair and an ambitious and sensitive young loner” upon the discovery of the narrator’s queerness (Martin). I want to position this discovery as its own type of colonization signaled by the forced breaking of their brother’s silence. From there, we can see that as “the crunch will echo in the silence around [Manny and Joel]” as they shovel snow without their brother, the capacity of silence to comfort them in their fear and shared, queerphobic hatred of their brother is permanently disturbed as the crunch rings out. In the face of this violence, however, moments of silence can also offer recourse to victims.
Indeed, for much of the novel, in response to the constant prospect of violent orality, silence brings tranquility to the narrator. The boys “spend their days and nights in a feverish world of stomping, chanting abandon,” and “[v]iolence is always present, either literally or as a possibility” (Martin). When the boys interrupt this chant, then, they interrupt the possibility for violence; they create the opportunity to redefine conceptions of silence by making it more than just a lapse. As Torres reflects: “Silence was our secret game and our gift and our sole accomplishment – we wanted less… We wanted nothing, just this, just this” (3). The notion that silence has a purpose to empower, to relieve, in response to an almost constant, violent, animalistic orality, can thus be read as a step towards decolonization.
In another step toward this goal, silence also actively creates the opportunity for softness throughout We the Animals. We see this most prominently in the bathroom scene, when Ma and Paps pretend to forget about their children’s presence in the bathtub so they can “find each other instead” (47). This brief interlude from the chaos of their boisterous children is not an emptiness; rather, it is a moment of intimacy both displayed and concealed. Ma and Paps seize this rare silence to create an opportunity for intentional tenderness that is otherwise lacking from their lives. This chance at intimacy humanizes Ma and Paps: because it blurs the line between public and private (they have a “secret” audience), as a reclamation of space, sound, and affection, it is inherently de-colonial.
Later, we see a similar alleviation, when silence indicates an act of solidarity. At the silence of the empty bottle landing silently in the trees, the brothers “reveled in the joy of this silent miracle” (106). The miracle being, of course, the failure of the intrusion (colonization) of the bottle (as colonizer) to disturb the precious silence of the trees. From here, we can also see the bottle as a materialization of the many causes and effects of colonialism: a phallic object, a material product (where did it come from?) to be bought, sold, and consumed, only to end up a piece of litter in the victim’s home. The three brothers know this: even as perpetrators of this attempted invasion, however, they feel relief at its failure, at another opportunity for solace.
While the main metaphor of the text connotes a certain primitivism by the boys’ loud and uncontrollable nature with animalhood, the brothers also need these moments of silence to contemplate themselves. When at the mercy of the incessant telephone ringing (a reminder of their father), for example, Ma’s picking up and returning the phone to the receiver offers an interruption in which, for a whole minute, “silence was absolution, that quiet was as close to happiness as we could ever get” (Torres 41). Here, too, silence cradles the narrator and his brothers, offering a reprieve. This same cradling happens literally, as well, when Manny “wrapped one arm and one leg around me and was silent and still for a stretch of time”; after a while, Manny breaks his silence, forming a picture in the narrator’s mind of him and his brothers as “safe as seed wrapped up in the fist of God” (Torres 85). This moment is crucial in that it stands in contrast to the constant comparison of the narrator and his brothers to animals in the text. Instead, it comforts and humanizes them, brings them closer to God.
Considering this silent moment as another critical instance of humanization of the narrator and his brother, then, we can see how Torres’ silences can be read as intentional, empowering opportunities for his characters to heal, to take up space in a made-up void that has closeted all of them. In this way, all of the characters (not just the narrator) in We the Animals are made the queer ‘other,’ for they all made the outsider in their navigations of these silences. The consequences of this authorial choice, I believe, push against white hegemonic discourse of the closet, challenge strict perceptions of queerness as it relates to gender and sexuality, and move past conceptions of silence as an absence of any sort. The capacity of these silences to provide solace and safety, then—not only for Torres’ characters, but for readers, too—is a critically defiant one.
WORKS CITED
Binaohan, b. decolonizing trans/gender 101. Toronto: Biyuti Publishing, 2014.
L, Emilie. Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings. Duke University Press, 1995.
Martin, Andrew. “We the Animals by Justin Torres.” Bookforum, 14 Sept. 2011. http://www.bookforum.com/review/8336.
Torres, Justin. We the Animals. First Mariner Books, 2012.