Under the Tongue by Yvonne Vera

Pamela J. Olúbùnmi Smith, University of Nebraska at Omaha

This article was reused with kind permission.

Abstract

"Grandmother says it is sometimes good to forget, to bury the heavy things of now, the things which cannot be remembered without death becoming better than life." But survival lies in the speaking of silence, in the silence of voices beaten and lost, in the silence of "the many words a woman must swallow before she can learn to speak her sorrow and be heard," in the silence of grandmothers, mothers, and daughters.