‘Silence is power’

Both ‘Talking Back’ and ‘Sins of Silence’ express the suffering women have to go throughout their lives due to the suppression of family and male figures.  Although this issue is not anything new, I found them very interesting because of how each of these women, Bell Hooks and Mai Kao Thao, were educated by their families and how their cultures mold them differently regarding this issue.

I was personally more shocked by Mai Kao Thao’s experience rather than Bell Hooks because of her mother’s attitude, her education, culture and her decision to remain silent knowing she shouldn’t. Mai Kao Thao begins her paper by remembering her mom’s words: ‘always be a good, obedient woman, and smile silently to the bitterness of others’. Due to their culture, Thao and her mother would not ‘talk back’ as Bell Hooks did, thus accepting the condition they lived in and how they were treated. Her mother’s acceptance actually bothered me a little, since she was always trying to suggest that by remaining silent and allowing men to abuse of them, things would be much better since they could avoid conflict. Although both of them reamin silent, one can clearly see Mai Kao Thao’s real feelings. She is able to convey her feelings in a very simple and direct way, highlighting very strong words, leaving them as single sentences. She writes, ‘I was a good girl. Wordless. Humble. Obedient. A perfect Hmong woman’ and ‘I was stone. Silent. Hard. Emotionless. Nothing was going to hurt me’. The contraction between the words reveals the reality of her situation; how she, as well as many women in her society, appear to be, and how they actual feel.

Mai Kao Thao finally concludes by suggesting that if she were to break the silence, she would no longer be a good Hmong woman.

The most notable aspect of Hooks experiences is how women have seemed to look for each other for comfort and to destroy the silence, suggesting that ‘woman talk’, the name she uses to describe this, does give them hope. This ‘woman talk’ has also led Bell Hooks to look for further means of breaking the silence, finding this freedom in writing. I found Hooks story more inspiring since she has actually found a way back into society, not permitting the suppression of family and male figures stop her development as a person.