TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

I just read a memoir I loved. It’s called A Silent Treatment, by Jeannie Vanasco. She writes about how her mother moves into the renovated basement apartment of her home and then starts using the silent treatment not long after moving in. The silences begin at any perceived slight. Her shortest period of silence lasts two weeks. Her longest lasts six months. 

Giving someone the “silent treatment,” or stonewalling, involves not speaking to someone or, in some cases, refusing to acknowledge their existence. The silent treatment can be a form of gaslighting, where the stonewaller makes the other person doubt their feelings and perceptions, or even question if their needs for communication and connection are unreasonable. 

In a family, the silent treatment can be a form of emotional abuse. For instance, a parent might ignore a child after a disagreement, using silence as a means of punishment, to control the child or to get them to comply. This can happen with spouses as well. Silence can be manipulative and punitive. It’s passive, not aggressive, and it often occurs in private—in families or in intimate relationships—so it can be hard to identify. Although it’s not physically violent, the silent treatment can be brutal, especially if it’s prolonged. If someone in your life has stonewalled you, you know what I mean. Human beings crave connection, so it’s especially painful when that connection is withheld.

Today’s poem touched me in how it explores the intimacy of sound, and especially the human voice. How, too, the silence between us can be so loud.

Given to Rust
by Vievee Francis

Every time I open my mouth my teeth reveal 
more than I mean to. I can’t stop tonguing them, my teeth.
Almost giddy to know they’re still there (my mother lost hers)
but I am embarrassed nonetheless that even they aren’t
pretty. Still, I did once like my voice, the way it moved
through the gap in my teeth like birdsong in the morning,
like the slow swirl of a creek at dusk. Just yesterday
a woman closed her eyes as I read aloud, and
said she wanted to sleep in the sound of it, my voice.
I can still sing some. Early cancer didn’t stop the compulsion
to sing but
there’s gravel now. An undercurrent
that also reveals me. Time and disaster. A heavy landslide
down the mountain. When you stopped speaking to me
what you really wanted was for me to stop speaking to you. To 
stifle the sound of my voice. I know.
Didn’t want the quicksilver of it in your ear.
What does it mean
to silence another? It means I ruminate on the hit
of rain against the tin roof of childhood, how I could listen
all day until the water rusted its way in. And there I was
putting a pan over here and a pot over there to catch it.

"Given to Rust" by Vievee Francis from THE SHARED WORLD copyright © 2023 by Northwestern University. Published 2023 by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press.