Summer Reading #5 — Resistance
By Robert Wood
Poet Robert Wood is the Liminal Summer Reading columnist for 2021.
Join us over the summer for six columns, on Decolonisation, translation, resistance and more.
Two works inform this one. The first is Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’. The second is Arundhati Roy’s 2004 Sydney Peace Prize Lecture. To quote Spivak towards the end of her piece, and to answer the question she sets out in the title, “the subaltern cannot speak”, and, to quote a parenthetical aside from Roy “we know of course there's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” Both turn on the idea that speaking is a good thing, which is something we should assume to be the case coming as it does from intellectuals accustomed to speaking (and being heard). However, what might reclaiming silence as a tactic of resistance mean? After all, there is some pleasure (and some power) to being quiet when all the world is afire with its own positions and opinions. And perhaps, at the end of the day, silence matters just as much as speaking. This is not to say those who cannot speak, or, those who are voiceless, or even those who are silenced, are in the same position. It is to comment on what can be done by intellectuals in positions of relative power who have already arrived and yet cannot seem to disavow their speech. What can be done is to actively listen. When one is silent, one can listen, either to Others or to the universe in all of us. This is not a question of can the subaltern listen, nor is to to argue there is no such thing as the unlistening. It is to comment on what speech relies upon in its very assumption and construction in order to have value.
As a corollary to listening, we could think of reading, and of writing. I write a lot. Over the last twenty years, I have written a lot. That is not to say it is compulsive or without consideration. But, I use it as a way to process thoughts. I used to write and hide it away, then I put it in an archive I burnt to ash, then I began publishing in small journals in Australia, then I wrote some columns in America, then I stopped. Writing these blog pieces for LIMINAL has been a return, somewhat, but with a new awareness of my own potential place in a conversation. The question at the heart of writing is ‘space’, and, a desire to take up the right amount of space in the public imagination, neither too much, nor too little. And, perhaps more importantly, to make space for other voices to speak into and out of and from and towards and back and forwards. That might be about recognising the value in writing, but it is also a recognition of what is means to be out there in the world whether it circulates or stays at home and dwells.
The question of space has become more pronounced to me since I began working at the Centre for Stories. In specific regard to mentoring projects we run, where we have guided all kinds of people towards their first performance or publication, I have been taught by our participants that we need to encourage emerging people to come through. And that means giving up space as much as making it open out for others still. The point is to bring your people with you, and, this is where we come to the shifting definitions of a historical identity like the subaltern.
If we define the subaltern as those that cannot speak, then we know it is not an essential position that does not change over time. To look only at the ‘Australian’ publishing landscape, we have seen great strides by our communities in the last ten years. There were long ago diverse voices and there have been landmark publications before now, but it seems important to acknowledge that what is subaltern does not say the same, and, so we should think of it as the ones who cannot speak most of all. Perhaps then, the most subaltern position to occupy is the reader or the listener who never enters the discourse.
And so we come to the ‘deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard’. Censorship in ‘Australia’ is more often a matter of public discipline rather than authoritarian intervention. People internalise boundaries and sensibilities, but I rarely hear of journalists being killed. This goes even for First Nations people despite the overlap with the violence perpetuated by the state. Unlike, say India or China, people are generally free to voice their opinion without fear of reprisal. If we are to talk about Roy’s maxim then, we are often talking about the ‘preferably unheard’. These are the nuisances that just won’t go away, who are still here without being disappeared. In that way, the greater challenge to censorship is structural. To consider only the rights of prisoners, it is very hard to get material in languages other than English, and doubly so for First Nations languages. This is one way in which people are silenced and the violence is systemic rather than direct when viewed in an international context.
So if the subaltern is always shifting and we want to hear from the preferably unheard, what are we to do? We must open ourselves out to listening more, and, to making space available for silence to happen in the first place. And that brings us to a related question - is silence different in different languages, in different places, in different historical moments? Are you being silent so you can simply speak at the end of it? Are you lonely when it is silent? Is silence the same as listening? What is the moral importance of being silent so others can speak, and, what does one learn when one is silent? These are all philosophical questions that demand answering, because it helps us think about decolonisation, paracoloniality, and how to resist the ongoing noise that has been brought by the British Crown to these shores. After all, there is so much noise pollution here that clogs the ears and makes it hard to listen to what is being said - by the Country itself, but also by other people who continue to speak in a language that does not suit its surroundings.
To think through as well, what this means for the subaltern. It depends on context. What counts as silence, what counts as listening, might change depending on when and where and why one is there. And this brings us to a fundamental fault in identity politics at a conceptual level - privilege as much as marginalisation is lived beyond and within and without true fidelity to the categories. However, we know some people are more subaltern than others, and, we know this from the material barriers that make it hard for them to speak. This is where representation continues to matter, this is where LIMINAL makes sense as well. For all the precious thought given to authorship then, we must now turn to who is doing the listening, what silence they create implicitly or explicitly, and whether this inhibits or encourages the true consciousness of the subaltern in our midst. It is not then, only about the preferably unheard, but about whose preferences continue to matter. That is why we must value each other as our own audience of readers who read in silence, or, listeners who create safe silences in which we are actually valued in and of ourselves. The subaltern then is about the community that is created through solidarity, and returning to the quiet of reflection is a great gift to be given to those who have been oppressed in our very midst.
Robert Wood is a poet. He is interested in dream, enlightenment, nature, suburbs and philosophy. Robert is a Malayali with connections to the East Indian Ocean. He lives on Noongar country in Australia.