A Warm, Woolly Silence: Rethinking Silence through T.O. Molefe's ‘Lower Main’ & Monica Arac de Nyeko's ‘Jambula Tree’

Summary

Rather than a universalized and dogmatic insistence on voice, loudness and visibility, it is important that the global queer movement begins to enhance our abilities to read and decipher the important roles of silence as a collective language of some queer communities particularly in the Global South.

Stella Nyanzi (‘When the State Produces Hate’: 190)

Silence is not an easy thing to listen to. In the realm of social, political and cultural activism, silence, more often than not, is tantamount to inaction, and in the face of crises such as the HIV/AIDS pandemics, the rise of fascism and authoritarian regimes, and increasingly common instances of overt homophobia, we are told that both silence and inaction amount to death – a death largely left to be inferred as our own. While, in academic circles, silence is often an exciting site of discovery via numerous interpretive methodologies, silence around the homoerotic in African cultural and literary productions has become increasingly unbearable to listen to. For instance, Deborah Amory asserts that the works of those of us who study Africa ‘need to be informed by an awareness of the multiple causes of political persecution and oppression: gender, race, ethnicity, class, religion, as well as sexuality’ (‘“Homosexuality” in Africa: Issues and Debates’: 9). Similarly, Marc Epprecht implores that it ‘surely behoves people who care about democracy, human rights, and good scholarship to sensitise themselves to the complexity of the historical denials of indigenous homosexualities’ (‘The “Unsaying” of Indigenous Homosexualities in Zimbabwe’: 651). In between the critiques of silence that focus on the institutional level, Kenyan author and critic Binyavanga Wainaina diligently and movingly works to expose the damages of silence on the intimate levels at both familial and social bonds, and one's psychological health, contributing one of the most heart-wrenching critiques of the role of silence in sexual identity (‘I Am a Homosexual, Mum’).

Working to rethink the relationship between the languages of sexuality used in the Global North and enactments of non-heterosexual identities in the Global South, Stella Nyanzi acutely points out the paucity of critical attention paid to ‘the tensions between interpretations of silence as power and the counter-position that interprets silence as powerlessness’ (181).