The Mute Always Speak: On Women’s Silences at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

In expanding our conceptual tools to understand the workings of silences we reveal the invisible but agentic work of the imagination to reconfigure our social worlds. When we reject dominant western oppositional hierarchies of silence and speech, and instead adopt frameworks where words, silence, dreams, gestures, tears all exist interdependently and within the same interpretive field, we find that the muted are always speaking. The article interrogates these ideas by discussing the institutional and symbolic features of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, within which women’s recollections were framed. It identifies the limits of verbal language and proposes that we reinterpret silence as language by outlining why and how. The article locates ways of reading these silences present in TRC testi-monies through a discussion of the following themes: silence as resistance and courage; silence as illusion of stability; and silence as a site for coping and the reconstitution of self.