Family Stories Untold. Doing Family through Practices of Silence (original) (raw)
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Through coming alongside a Sami family, we open spaces to contemplate multiple forms of silence. We argue that rather than the antithesis to narrative, silence is an integral part of narrative inquiry. As narrative inquirers we need to be wakeful to what is told and also untold, often simultaneously. We believe that narrative inquiry is not necessarily about breaking silences, but it is also about honoring silences, as well as the practice of silence. By calling forward one author’s intergenerational experiences, we explore different aspects of silence such as silence as text, silence as context for living and telling, and silences following silencing. We explore how we live with, and within, silences, and how our told and untold stories are shaped by silences and, in turn, also shape silences.
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Voice and silence are socially constructed in conversational interactions between speakers and listeners that are influenced by canonical cultural narratives which define lives and selves. Arguing from feminist and sociocultural theories, I make a distinction between being silenced and being silent; when being silenced is contrasted with voice, it is conceptualised as imposed, and it signifies a loss of power and self. But silence can also be conceptualised as being silent, a shared understanding that need not be voiced. More specifically, culturally dominant narratives provide for shared understandings that can remain silent; deviations from the norm call for voice, and thus in this case silence is power and voice expresses loss of power. At both the cultural and the individual level, there are tensions between culturally dominant and prescriptive narratives and narratives of resistance and deviation, leading to an ongoing dialectic between voice and silence. I end with a discussion of why, ultimately, it matters what is voiced and what is silenced for memory, identity and well-being.
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In this article, we suggest that silence is often more about remembering than forgetting. We consider ways in which silences can occupy and dominate state discourse, community knowledge, family stories and individual narratives. Drawing on research material from Poland and the Czech Republic in the late socialist and post-socialist periods, we look at ways similar patterns of narrative fusion take place in various contexts in which both the public and the private domains are often shadowed by things veiled in secrecy and hidden from the general gaze. We argue that personal family and kin accounts of private things which for some reason cannot be spoken become entangled with, and to some extent communicated through, broader and more public historical narratives, and vice versa, and show how partial accounts are thus transmitted from generation to generation even while remaining largely unspoken. In developing our argument, we focus on the idea of walls of silence and on the process o...
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Memory Studies, 2019
Constructing a shared past is one of the ways to integrate young people into their communities. In a multicultural post-socialist society like Estonia, different narratives sometimes complement, but often compete with each other. Thus, the conflicting stories need to be negotiated to create a usable past. Based on 14 interviews within 5 families, the article explores the issues of negotiating memory in family contexts. It will be argued that in certain cases the tales of kin need to be re-shaped, rearranged or reasoned in order to relate to grand national narratives. When family stories would not allow to identify positively with patterns of institutionalized memory, the national discourse is either rejected, ignored, or relativized to reconcile the versions. The article calls for looking into the mechanisms of these reconciliations on the individual level to find ways of shaping the collective narratives for a more cohesive mnemonic culture.
“In Search of a Tale They can Live With”: About Loss, Family Secrets, and Selective Disclosure
Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 2011
Several authors have written about family secrets in the family therapy literature in interesting ways. According to these authors, the questions ''who knows the secret?'' and ''who does not know the secret?'' are central. In the present study, we have qualitatively analyzed the documentary film Familiegeheim (Family Secret) by the Dutch director Jaap van Hoewijk. The film shows van Hoewijk's investigation into the death of his father in 1974 and tells the story of a family in which the suicide of the father is kept secret from the three children. Our analysis of the film highlights the complex ways in which families deal with sensitive issues like loss, grief, and suicide. The concept of family secrets seems to poorly capture this complexity, focusing one-sidedly on the destructive effects of withholding delicate information. The concept of selective disclosure is proposed as an alternative. Selective disclosure refers to the complex processes involved in dealing with the dialectic tension between sharing information and keeping it secret. The concept is not only focused on the destructiveness of secrecy but, in addition, also makes room for an appreciation of the caution with which family members deal with sensitive family issues.. . .and then mother said 'daddy was in an accident and daddy is dead.'.. . (Quote from the movie Familiegeheim) As family therapists, we are privileged that we can listen to families talk intimately about their struggles, their love for each other, their worries, their sorrow, and their pain. However, in our practices, very often we meet families in which some important things are not said. We are in conversation with them, and first there is talk, but then there is a slight hesitation, a vague movement of the body, and a silence. And then they talk about something else. This article will report on a qualitative study we did on family secrecy, and on some of our reflections about the concept of family secrets that developed from doing this study. In the first part of the article, we will review the literature on the subject of family secrecy, and then, in the second part, we will analyze as a case in point the documentary film Familiegeheim 1 (Family Secret) by the Dutch director Jaap van Hoewijk to reflect on the complexity of the concept of family secrets. Familiegeheim is a film van Hoewijk made about his own family and in particular about the death of his father in 1974. The film tells the story of a family in which a traumatic