As their silence was taken to be deliberate, the label “elective mutes” was applied to them by medical professionals as recently as 1994. Shawcross knows the territory intimately: at 13, she herself stopped speaking at school for nearly a year. Shawcross is broadly sceptical, both about the curative power of words and of off-the-peg concepts of the self. Unspeakable is billed as a study of the power of silence, but is as much an affirmation of the vital safety net of speech. “I am struck once again,” Shawcross writes, “by the way silence is so often met with anger.” Perhaps it’s neither speech nor silence that is the problem, only the context in which they occur.

Source: The Guardian April 25, 2019 13:00 UTC