Writing Silence: Refiguring Victimization and Agency in My Mother’s Daughter

Abstract

Through the gendered lens, silence framed as a complex phenomenon is a site of power struggle, which privileges men the authority to ‘speak’, set against their female counterparts who are rendered ‘silent.’ The juxtaposition between ‘voice’ and ‘voiceless’ stems from the narrative of exploitation and gendered violence through the patriarchal monopoly of exclusionism tactics on women as the marginalized ‘other.’ In recent times, feminist scholarship has brought a new understanding of silence, voice, and agency. The dynamics of silence, or being silenced, can be viewed from multiple-layered perspectives, ranging from the coercive imposition of silence (by men to women) to the emerging discourse on the deliberate choice to remain ‘silent,’ or to “talk back” or “talking back” by women (hooks 5). In this paradigm, silence is an enforced tool employed by men in regressive attempts to disempower women’s identity and their autonomy/ agency through victimization and oppression. The strategic silence employed by women necessitates a paradoxical formation of a language of its own, coded with a female voice or narrative. This paper aims to delve deeply into the treatment of silence by mapping Neikehienuo Mepfhu-o’s My Mother’s Daughter from a gendered standpoint. It seeks to study victimization, oppression, voice/voicelessness, and agency through instances of silence in the text.