A Talking Book and the Silence of the Dominated

How does silence make, deconstruct, and appropriate meaning? Language has no inherent meaning - what we state, whether written or oral - is true before we verbalize it. Even without words - truth exists.

No matter how eloquently we speak, language only signifies truth (Truth) and our words only create the metaphor for meaning. We can argue, then, that, in silence, we are closer to original intent, especially when the signifier is a member of a dominated group who is merely appropriating the language and structure of someone else's cultural point of view.

In silence, we may refuse to "play the game;" sometimes it's the only move of power available.

In "Writing, 'Race,' and the Difference It Makes," Henry Louis Gates, Jr. teaches that "language use signifies the difference between cultures and their possessions of power... the difference between subordinate and superordinate, between bondsman and lord" (1894).

In a social structure in which race "[lends] to even supposedly innocent descriptions of cultural tendencies and differences the sanction of God, biology, or the natural" (1893),

a society in which a poet like Phyllis Wheatley must prove her grasp of the dominant language after proving her facility by writing a noted volume of poetry in that language,

how can any dominated group fight using the only linguistic weapon available with impunity - when even "to attempt to appropriate [their] own discourses using Western critical theory [at the very least] 'uncritically' is to substitute one mode of neocolonialism for another" (1902)?

"The trope of the talking book," says Gates, "is not a trope of the presence of voice at all, but of its absence" (1900), the absence of the black [minority] voice which, through an appropriation of legitimate language "[preserves]...a tradition of [difference]" (1901).