It’s not just noise and distraction that keep us from experiencing silence in healthy rhythms; it’s also our fear of silence, based on the ways we’ve experienced silence in unhealthy ways. Here is the first of those three misuses: the silent treatment. Allow me to set the scene; or more accurately, three scenes:

Toward the end of the film Forrest Gump, the childlike title character finds himself in the middle of the legendary Vietnam protest that took over Washington, D.C.’s National Mall. As in so many of the film’s scenes, he doesn’t seem to be there by choice; his presence is somehow destined and accidentally pivotal. The rally promoters usher him up to the stage and urge him out to the microphone. Here he is, a naïf, a possible hippie, yet wearing a military uniform. Surely, the crowd thinks, if anyone has important words for us to hear at a moment like this, it’s Forrest: he’s both deeply experienced and yet unsullied. But as he reaches the microphone, what none of them expects is that a government agent will sabotage the speech. Before Forrest can get out more than a few words, the man has ripped the audio cords from their sockets. The words tens of thousands have been waiting to hear are suddenly inaudible.[1]

*           *           *

In the philosophical sci-fi film The Matrix, the man we only ever know as Neo is captured by Agent Smith, a supernatural villain posing as a police officer. Neo doesn’t understand yet about the true world beneath the artificial one he’s experiencing. He doesn’t know that Agent Smith possesses supernatural powers. And so, in this moment of seeming arrest, he resists. “Give me my phone call,” he demands. The villain’s smile curls wickedly. “What good is a phone call . . . if you can’t speak?” Neo stares back at him, puzzled, until he finds that the skin of his face is closing over his mouth. After a few moments, his eyes betray just how terrifying it is to live in a body whose voice has been so radically silenced.[2]

*           *           *

In the film Get Out, the main character is Chris, an African-American man who finds himself increasingly suspicious of his white girlfriend’s family on a visit to their remote estate. In the film’s most famous scene, Chris’s fears begin to be confirmed. Rose’s mom lures him into recounting the most painful memory of his childhood as she stirs a cup of hot tea with a spoon. As he nears the end of his story, Chris realizes she has hypnotized him. Suddenly, her tone shifts darkly, and she announces that it is time for him to “sink into the floor.” When he does, against his will, he realizes he is floating deep in a black abyss, his former view of the world now reduced to the size of a distant television screen. From this dark place, he yells. He shakes his arms. But no one can hear him. Just when he suspects that he’s dreaming, she confirms that what Chris is experiencing is real. “Now you’re in the Sunken Place.”[3]

Silence like a cancer grows.

These three scenes have something in common. People are silenced. Against their will. This is the first of three misuses of silence we’ll consider, three reasons many of us feel silence as sinister. This first misuse is the silent treatment. We might even call it weaponizing silence, because it’s like using a gun silencer in order to harm someone. The silencer might believe that, since no one hears, they’ve done less wrong, and consequences will be less likely.

I believe that silencing is most compelling in Get Out, no matter who you are or what your background. That’s because this dark pit, the “sunken place,” is a visceral symbol of what any silenced person feels just as viscerally. For Jordan Peele, the filmmaker who wrote and directed Get Out, the sunken place isn’t imaginary, even if the abyss is symbolic. To him and many others, it represents “the system that silences the voices of women, minorities, and other people. Every day there is proof that we are in the sunken place. No matter how hard we scream, the system silences us.”[4] Of course, there is also irony in the fact that Chris’s hypnotism is performed through china and a silver spoon. Civility. Tradition. Seeming gentility. Weaponized silence.

The silent treatment isn’t just uncomfortable, something you’d prefer not to encounter. It can be agonizing, as you may remember if you’ve ever experienced it. They don’t call it the silent “treatment” for nothing: it truly feels like a kind of torture. If someone withholds not just love but also sound from another person—no matter what the reason—it can have profound effects, both on the relationship and on that other person. That other person might be you, or it might be your spouse, a family member, a friend, a colleague, a child. The effects can feel, according to therapist Jane Greer, like “emotional assassination.”[5]

Since it’s meant to exclude another person from dialogue, from relationship, the silent treatment can take many forms. Sometimes it can look simply like leaving people out of the team, the project, the loop. It might look like snubbing them when they look interested in joining your conversation, literally turning your back on them. It can look like choosing not to invite them in the first place, to the party, to the event, to dinner. If they manage to get close to you and you still choose to use the silent treatment, it can look like ignoring them when they’re talking to you, or when they’re talking at all. Or it can mean interrupting them, even barring them from speaking in the first place.

Many of these forms of the silent treatment might not seem as severe as “what you see in the movies.” Some of them seem minor enough that we could easily dismiss them. The problem is that the other person, the one being silenced, can’t. They can’t dismiss the slight because they were in fact the ones being dismissed, being dehumanized by our choices.

Anis Mojgani acknowledges these excluded ones in his spoken word poem “Shake the dust”:

This is for the ones who are told,

‘Speak only when you are spoken to’,

and then are never spoken to . . .[6]

Many people experience this kind of silencing at some point in their lives. Maybe you experienced it as a child, when a parent or relative told you that being a child means that you are supposed to be “seen and not heard.” Or that you should “speak only when you are spoken to,” and you soon found yourself in the company of those Mojgani salutes—never spoken to. But you need not be a child to be excluded, silenced in this way. Age doesn’t matter. The sunken place is just as tangible.

It’s helpful for us to realize both the range and the severity of silencing, because we can forget what it feels like to have our words stolen from us before we even get the chance to speak them. We need extreme examples like these and others, to help us imagine the small acts of violence we inflict through the silent treatment. And there are certain other examples that are even more extreme, like the mythological examples of Philomela and Lavinia, both women who had their tongues cut out—not as punishment, but to keep them from confessing other people’s crimes. Or the fertile women of A Handmaid’s Tale, some of whom have rings looped through their lips to keep them from speaking, marking them as less than human.[7]

Though we may not feel the damage like the other person does, each time we silence someone else, or intentionally exclude their voice, we are weaponizing silence. Every time someone mansplains, and silences a woman by his interruption, the silent treatment is damaging both that woman and that man, just as surely as the Rohingya were silenced through genocide.[8] It may not have the same intensity or extremity as genocide, but it is silencing and damaging nonetheless. It’s all too easy for us to minimize the silencing we do to others, or even fail to notice altogether. We know that the sunken place is painful when we experience it, but it’s easy to be oblivious to someone else’s pain when it’s not us,

Mel Brooks once commented on the difference between what we find hilarious and what we find painful, noticing that the difference often lies in how personally we’re experiencing harm. “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”[9] In other words, weaponized silence succeeds mainly because each of us finds ourselves to be far more real than we find others.

The silent treatment has a double quality to it. We can actively silence others by our words, our actions, and our responses, as we’ve already considered. But we can also use it generically, to retreat further and further into our own ideological trenches until we hear only voices that sound like ours. Each time we choose to turn off a voice we hear because it is not like ours, or not to our liking, we are weaponizing silence. If this accusation troubles you, it should. To gain more clarity, think how you would feel if you were on the receiving end. Whether you were in person or not.

James Baldwin explains the damage of silencing the most eloquently I’ve ever heard it, when he considers that slavery and the racism that followed in its wake was an act of silencing that damaged far more than the African-American people who were its targets. The silent treatment also harmed the very white people who weaponized the silence in the first place. Both groups of people were dehumanized in the act of silencing. In a televised debate with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., Baldwin argued that the kind of silencing that produced the n-word and the silencing that word represented is like a gun that explodes in the hand of the shooter, harming everyone in the process:

What white people have to do is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary for them to have a n----- in the first place. Because I am not a n-----. I am a man. If I’m not the n----- here, and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you have to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that.[10]

Not just the future of a country. The future of any of us. And not just those who have wielded silencing through racism. All of us, since we have all silenced.

You can imagine at this point that, if we have experienced silence as a weapon (on the giving or the receiving end), we’re far less likely to pursue any kind of silence afterward. We’re far less likely to think of silence as potentially good. It’s possible that all silence now seems weaponized, or potentially so. It may even feel blasphemous to imagine that any kind of silence could heal instead of harm . . . even if we long for that to be true.

[1] This scene from Forrest Gump can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmMtjKmDNuE.

[2] This scene from The Matrix can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4D7cPH7DHgA.

[3] This scene from Get Out can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBwVWrBk_uo.

[4] Jordan Peele’s comments on the “sunken place” can be seen at https://www.themarysue.com/jordan-peele-explains-sunken-place/.

[5] Jane Greer named the silent treatment “emotional assassination” in an interview here: https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/sc-fam-0902-silent-treatment-20140902-story.html.

[6] Anis Mogjani’s performance of his spoken-word poem “Shake the dust” can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qDtHdloK44.

[7] An overview of the stories of Philomela and Lavinia can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philomela and here: https://www.playshakespeare.com/titus-andronicus/characters/lavinia, while the character in A Handmaid’s Tale whose lips are looped with rings is discussed here: https://the-handmaids-tale.fandom.com/wiki/Ofgeorge.

[8] An overview of the Rohingya crisis can be seen here: https://www.hrw.org/tag/rohingya-crisis.

 [9] Mel Brooks darkly humorous distinction between comedy and tragedy can be found here: https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/tragedy_is_when_i_cut_my_finger_comedy_is_when_you_fall_into_an_open_sewer.

[10] The relevant clip from James Baldwin’s interview can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0LNjf4vSMQ.

Selah

Take a few minutes and consider the following questions:

Where, specifically, have I been silenced by others in my life? How did it feel?

Whom have I silenced, and how did I do it? What should I do about it now?