The Grammar of Silence

On the Language of Erasure, Defiance, and the Things We Dare Not Name

Photo by Ernie A. Stephens on Unsplash

Silence is not an absence. It is a presence so loud it can drown out empires.

Consider this: when the Portuguese colonizers arrived in Angola, they brought not just guns and bibles, but a new grammar of silence. The oral histories of the Ndongo people were driven underground reshaping themselves into urban music forms like kilapanga, carrying echoes of subversion in their rhythms. This was silence as weapon, a language without letters, spoken in a code the oppressor couldn’t decipher. Centuries later, the Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa would resurrect those buried silences in A General Theory of Oblivion, where a woman bricks herself into her apartment to escape the chaos of revolution. For thirty years, she speaks to no one, recording the world’s collapse from her window. Her muteness becomes an archive of survival, her solitude a political act.

Stalin understood the power of silence too. He didn’t just execute poets; he erased them from photographs, leaving ghostly gaps where comrades once stood. But even the censors couldn’t fully quiet the unspoken. In one of history’s starkest images of defiance, when Anna Akhmatova stood in the prison queues during the Great Purge, a woman beside her whispered, “Can you describe this?” Akhmatova replied, “I can.” The result was Requiem, a poem so dangerous it was memorized, burned, and passed mouth to mouth like contraband. The words survive, but the pauses between them still smell of smoke.

In Chile, after Pinochet’s coup, a new silence was invented by the women of the disappeared. They marched with photos of their missing children pinned to their chests, their mouths sewn shut with wire. The performance artist Lotty Rosenfeld took this further, kneeling in the streets and unspooling white tape across military parade routes, turning the dictator’s clean, brutal lines into crooked, interrogative shapes. These were silences that shrieked.

Families, too, traffic in strategic muteness. In the McCarthy era, Arthur Miller watched neighbors erase each other from conversations mid-sentence, their voices dropping as if someone had thrown a switch. In The Crucible, he gave this silence a name: “We are what we always were — just quieter now.” A similar quiet haunts the Korean concept of Jeong, a love so thick it chokes itself into silence. In Han Kang’s The White Book, a woman mourns her dead sister by writing on blank pages: “Sometimes I wonder if silence might not be the only thing left to say.”

But it is the diaspora that knows this grammar best. When Vietnamese refugees arrived in Arkansas camps in 1975, their children were assigned English names by bureaucrats who couldn’t pronounce their own. Ocean Vuong would later write of this in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: “They named us like dogs, so we barked back without sound.” In London’s Punjabi enclaves, a different silence grew: the elders who never spoke of Partition, their stories fermenting in the warmth of communal langar bread. The British-Indian artist Sutapa Biswas paints these gaps in Housewives with Steak-Knives, where the blade’s gleam is the only punctuation on a canvas of swallowed screams.

In Nigeria, the silence was not a hush but a suffocating hum, too loud to be mistaken for anything other than deliberate. It began after Babangida annulled the June 12 federal elections, and hardened during the Abacha years, when even the walls were rumored to have ears. Journalists disappeared, newspapers vanished from newsstands, and neighbors learned to look both ways before speaking. Yet, on the day Abacha died, the silence ruptured. People poured into the streets, music blaring from once-muted radios. It did not matter that another soldier inherited the government. What mattered was that the invisible man was finally dead. In that rupture, music became language, dance became a sentence.

Writers have always known that silence is a language requiring translation. Primo Levi called it “the shame of the saved,” the tongue-biting silence of Holocaust survivors, whose words might betray those who didn’t return. In Beloved, Toni Morrison builds a cathedral from this silence: Sethe’s “thunderclap” of unspeakable love lingers in the spaces between chapters. Even the typography rebels, the missing punctuation, the lines gasping for air.

And still, history insists silence is passive. But the grammar of quiet defiance continues. Ask the Haitian revolutionaries who used coded drumbeats to coordinate uprisings the French couldn’t comprehend. Ask the Navajo Code Talkers whose language, because it was never written down, became an unbreakable weapon in World War II. Ask the young Nigerians who took to the streets to protest police brutality in the thick of a pandemic so deadly the whole world held its breath. Or ask the demonstrators in Hong Kong who, when forbidden to chant, held up blank sheets of paper, a silence so precise it could cut glass.

And ask me. Yesterday, I became a year older. For most of the day, I held my breath like my tongue, scalded in the quagmire of what it means to be an immigrant in America. It is silence. And yet, the world I know is burning. Missiles flying casually across borders, people plucked off the streets without names or headlines. I am sad, stuck, and afraid. But it is the silence that weighs heaviest on my chest. In the morning, I wake before dawn, lace up my shoes, and run. The Missouri air is thick with a humid heaviness that settles on my skin like a second garment. I glide through the streets of Delmar North, past boarded-up windows and empty bus stops. The city hums, but it hums softly, as though afraid of its own voice.

In the evening, I am in my apartment with friends, raising glasses to life, to another year, to distance, to survival. The room fills with music and laughter. Yet death hovers in the corners, invisible but insistent. It is in the tightening of the air, the shared, unacknowledged grief of people far from home, watching the places that built them unravel. And alongside death, absurdly, impossibly, there is hope. It flickers like a low flame, refusing to be extinguished, stubborn in its persistence. The grammar of survival. The unspoken contract of those who carry both memory and forgetting in their bones.

The poet Mahmoud Darwish once wrote, “Silence is the real translator.” And he was right. Every regime that has burned books, every parent who has said “we don’t talk about that,” every migrant who has swallowed their mother tongue — they all know the same truth: silence is the last dialect of the dispossessed. And when it finally speaks, it doesn’t sound like thunder. It sounds like memory itself, breaking its surface.