Fill in the blanks / See fictional artifacts

Today:  Ben Ehrenreich, author of Desert Notebooks and The Way to the Spring; and Shirley Wang, writer and managing editor of Flaming Hydra.

Issue No. 58

The Silence Is Deafening
Ben Ehrenreich

The Museum of Innocence
Shirley Wang

The Silence Is Deafening

by Ben Ehrenreich

“Silences,” wrote the great Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “are necessary to the account.” He meant this in the same broad, dialectical way that darkness is necessary to sight: every story is composed not only of what is told, but also and equally of what is left out. Meaning would otherwise be impossible, just as the letters that form this sentence would be unreadable without the white space on which they appear. But silence was not for Trouillot a passive condition of narration. It is “an active and transitive process: one ‘silences’ a fact or an individual as a silencer silences a gun.” 

I have spent the last few years working on a writing project—a book, let’s call it—that has required, and will require for the foreseeable future, vast amounts of research on an array of topics sufficiently far-flung to make any sane person pause, breathe deeply, and walk away feeling relieved about not being me. But I am under contract to deliver a manuscript, so I continue digging.