March 13th, 2025: Silence, Quietness, and Cultural Identity
On notions of silence and quietness:
“My recommendation, one that is anti-colonial but also radical is that we need more Silence. The use of capital S – Silence is to emphasize that it is a conceptual practice rooted in many Indigenous cultures, and it serves a purpose rather than a punishment. The concept of Silence in Indigenous culture is to literally create space for people to express themselves and feel important
and heard and seen. It is a form of inclusive boundary setting that allows one to hold space with other people rather than away from people. The use of Silence is to also show that one is taking in what you have said and is allowing themselves to feel the weight of your words. In a Western colonial context silence is depicted as violent, scary, out putting, uncomfortable, belittling, isolating, controlling, ignoring a person or things presences. To be silent is to be ‘owned.’ The idea of being ‘owned’ is the idea that if your response is not witty enough, if you are not quick enough to speak then you are left speechless because you cannot keep up intellectually with the discord. Not keeping up with the discord is a sign of stupidity, and stupidity is weakness.”
A: I’m curious, since we read the passage on silence, does silence feel uncomfortable for you guys? I’ve always felt comfortable with silence. Certainly in my family. But that changed when I got into the school system.
B: My grandpa taught in Native reservations in Arizona and he was a very quiet person. I heard from others that he was a very active child, but I always remembered an older, quiet person. I think that silence is comfortable for me because it reminds me of my grandpa. But in the school system, if you’re silent, you’re not “participating” or “keeping up”.
A: I remember in school that there are “participation requirements” and that you’re forced to keep up and talk.
C: I’m Afghan and we have a very oral tradition so we’re basically forced to talk. There may be times we keep quiet due to situations, but we always find ways to talk. I think that applies to a lot of immigrant families.
D: That’s true for most immigrant families. The silence is uncomfortable and awkward. But once you’re confident in yourself, you don’t have to feel the awkwardness or fill the gap. You can be with yourself.
B: My grandpa was the only silent one. Everyone else was talking - and downtime with the family over the holidays was always filled with games and time with each other. I think the first time I chose to be as an individual was when I chose to not talk around my family. I’m from North Carolina or the Southern US, so there is a massive ingrained culture. By choosing not to speak, I chose to do something for myself that wasn’t ingrained and went against the culture where we had to speak with elders.
D: Silence makes you value someone else’s presence. I think that when you listen and you’re there, it shows emotional maturity when you don’t have to force a conversation and you can have silence.
C: I think there’s a massive small talk culture in North America because we don’t really have small talk in Asia. We either have massive conversations or none at all and the people I’m around are more comfortable with silence. I think the culture here is a lot more talkative, which means that we’re never silent.
B: I get that, that’s why capital S “Silence” and lowercase s “silence” are distinguished. There’s a massive difference.
C: In my culture, we have to show a massive level of respect to our elders. Because of that culture, we have to be able to be silent (in their presence). But you can also experience a more wholesome silence to connect on a deeper level with your relatives.
D: I have a question - do you feel like Western culture requires “noise” to be connected?
A: I think yes.
B : I say yes, even as someone who came from a rural area. Noise is how I know nature is healthy, so hearing crickets and birds and cicadas - I need to hear the sounds of nature to know it is healthy. I grew up around noises and lakes. Even the splashing of fish at the surface, even snakes make noise, so I always have to hear noise. If I don’t hear noise, I would go sick with worry. I could do away with the noise of the city, but I need to have some noise.
C: Remember the TikTok trend where it goes “without a trendy noise”? For me, that was pretty interesting. I think there’s a big difference if you haven’t had the chance to experience a different culture or society to embed yourself like that. Here, you always need to capitalize and “experience things”. (The trends are) all about ambience and sounds and how they “have to be”, without regards to tuning into an actual environment.
A: I read a Medium article that was talking about “nostalgia soundtracks”. These soundtracks could be anything, like a soundtrack called “when you’re walking down an alleyway and there’s only two streetlights”. The articles was about how those titles artificially create a nostalgia and hijack a sense of orientation around that space, even when you’ve never experienced it, which is actually predatory because it creates a nostalgia you’ve never actually experienced, and keeps you coming back for more.
D: Spotify does that and I’ve seen that!
B: Would you describe yourself as quiet? Is it a good or bad thing?
A: I think it’s relative. There would be a different baseline for everyone on what “quiet” means. But in terms of the connotation - I don’t think being quiet carries a bad connotation.
C: I think there are both positive and negative connotations.
B: I think it reflects the culture. I do have negative connotations with it, but they’re not my own. I know that I project my voice and that I’m well-spoken and I know that I can argue and debate well. But if you’re asking me if it’s always been there, that wouldn’t be true because I was raised quiet and shy. I learned it to be a bad thing because nobody would want to talk to me since I would mumble and stay quiet. Even now, I recognize that I am talking… If I can get away without saying words for days, I can and I do. If I can get away being quiet, I will do it. But in times I choose to be in these spaces, I will talk. Even though you might hear me speak, it doesn’t mean that I want to.
D: I can say that I’m a quiet person. I don’t see it in a negative way. It improves my social skills, makes me more aware, and makes me see others. My family doesn’t see it that way: they see it as me hiding stuff and not being open. They’d point out to me to say something when I’m sitting and enjoying everyone’s presence.
A: We’re talking about different baselines and cultures. If I think of the people I know who I associate with being quiet, they’re people who don’t share things unless you directly ask them.
D: And some of these people will actually offer valuable input if you ask, but it depends on the person.
B: I definitely agree that silence is good for thinking and for reflecting, that’s the way I would describe my grandpa. That’s what I hold to when I think really hard, and I take a lot of pauses when I think of important things. It’s not that I have to say anything profound - I have to give anyone I’m speaking to a considerate comment. I’ve done field work with children during my undergrad, and we’ve talked about silence and effective communication, and I saw silence as something negative and neutral at a time. I taught them that once you say something, you can’t take it back. I think that if I taught them what I know now, I would tell them silence is valuable.
D: So you feel like your grandpa taught you to value silence?
B: He did.
D: My grandpa was the opposite. He would want you to talk. He would yap and yap and yap and that would teach me to appreciate silence.
B: I wish my grandpa would be like that. My grandpa went to a historical Black school during the segregation movement. The reason why restaurants no longer have segregation was because of his classmates doing sit-ins in Greensboro. I had to learn about all the stuff he did at the funeral, and I wish I was able to talk about these things with him. I’ve seen him turn on the high stove to reheat coffee with a mug. Other than that, he was a very cool man.
E: I feel like silence is a way to erase family history. I find my own silence to be my safety and I’m able to hear everyone’s stories.
D: I think that silence teaches you when to speak and when to listen. I think it’s a great lesson.
On cultural identity, narrative, and media:
“Anzaldúa (How to Tame a Wild Tongue, 1987)... notes that “chicanos and other people of color suffer economically for not acculturating. This voluntary (yet forced) alienation makes for psychological conflict, a kind of dual identity we don’t identify with the Anglo-American cultural values, and we don’t totally identify with the Mexican cultural values. We are a synergy of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicaness or Angloness. I have so internalized the borderland conflict that sometimes I feel like one cancels the other and we are zero, nothing, one. A veces no soy nada ni nadie ... Pero basta cuando no lo soy, lo soy.” She openly contradicts herself in this single quote, with even pulling more from the book, and yet she is asking people to understand that her forcing her to chose one way to face the world and describe her world dilutes the other aspect and it is uncomfortable. I also want to note that in my interpretation, her use of ‘we’ is to her and the other people of color, but also her and her other half of her identity.”
D: As a Palestinian who’s lived in Kuwait, I always have the question of fitting in and not losing my own culture, and how to do that.
C: I can relate but I have a bigger culture shock coming to Western from Windsor. Windsor has a massive Arab culture. I grew up knowing other people’s cultures and I went to Arabic school and I learned about Vietnamese and Uzbek culture and a lot of anthropological research as a kid. But there was no one from my background, so I had no cultural basis. I feel like so many people who I meet in Windsor whose cultures have big demographics stick together - my friends would have specific experiences of that culture and in that little bubble despite living in Canada. The rest of us were floating around. Coming to Western was a different experience because there’s a lot more of a white culture.
D: That actually reminds me of two things. My relatives are around the world, like in Germany. Yes, they’re Palestinian but they don’t speak Arabic, most of their friends are white, and they don’t have a sense of Palestinian identity. They identify more as German. And when I first came to Canada, I had an Arab mentality and headspace. In the Middle East, you don’t see a lot of Arabs with piercing, nails, and makeup. Whenever I’m introduced to new people they always think I’m European. I feel like I’m slowing integrating into this culture without me realizing because I’m following other peoples’ norms, so I kind of wonder where the balance is.
F: I think that the level of balance you have in retaining your own culture and fitting into another culture is intrinsic. I’ve grown up in three countries - the States, here, Thailand - and I think I’m able t retain my own culture being Thai, and explore the world and get to know other cultures. You’ll never be able to retain 100% of your own culture, because once you see the world you are going to see its flaws, and there will be things that you won't care for in your own culture. There are some parts of my culture now that I cannot accept.
D: Being half-Jordanian myself and coming here, I have come to find that honour killings are 100% not okay. If I go back, they could honor kill me. I think that there are parts of seeing another culture that will make you reject an aspect of your own. There’s a beauty in discovering other cultures.
C: We’re a Middle East-adjacent culture. Because of 9/11 and border crossings at Windsor, it was a weird experience being Muslim and not speaking Arabic. Growing up and looking at the news at home, there’s a reality that contrasts the news. Even though my family are refugees and they went to democratic countries, they still experience problems. Honor killing is also a massive issue in our culture. There is a negative reputation in our ethnicity in terms of honor killing. I’ve had to separate it from my identity and culture so hard that I purposefully forget about some of the negative stuff. I had to constantly tell people that we were normal and humans. I think that I’ve overcompensated for so long that I’ve forgotten to talk about actual issues that persist especially within the Arab, Muslim, and Middle Eastern culture that we cannot talk about, especially in regards to women. Thinking about honor killing is hard because we can’t juggle between that and genocide and we can’t catch a break. There’s so many conversations that we should be able to have but we can’t have them due to certain situations.
D: From the opposite side, from the side of sraelis, Jews, and Zionists - we have to differentiate them too. Not all Jewish people are Israelis and not all Israelis are Jews, as well as not all Jews are Zionists.
A: I’m split between here and Pakistan. My dad is from Karachi and my mom is from Lahore. He’s been all over the world and his experience is so unanchored that he doesn’t believe in nationalism. My mom is very nationalistic but in a way that she’s proud to be Pakistani and to celebrate the culture with pride. She would have us go to handicraft stores and buy little things from Pakistan to bring back to my classmates, so we could show them how beautiful our country is. I speak Urdu just fine and I can perfectly get by, but I can’t read or write as if it was truly my native tongue. There’s a point when I go back to Lahore and an elderly lady in the market or something asks me to help her read something but I can’t. That’s the only issue I have in a place where I fit in and everyone looks like me.
C: I feel like the first time my identity was affirmed was when I went to Pakistan. As a kid, you don’t really recognize nationality and you have a watercolor view of the world and I never had a different view of people until I went there. Here, there’s a lot of ignorance, but in Pakistan, there was a lot of ethnicity and lineage issues. It was unstable and there are a lot of issues still. As we were refugees, we ended up in the northern area of the country and it was under turmoil. It solidified my identity as being an Afghan who’s also Pakistani.
D: When you’re back home, do you have an internal or external pressure into fitting with an identity?
A: I feel a lot more like myself when I’m in Pakistan. I think there are a lot of norms and obligations, especially in interactions that I have with people there compared to here. I go back and forth often so it feels like a second skin. I think that because I am a foreigner there, even within my family, I get more grace for not conforming to certain things. If I were to move back, I think there would be a lot more pressure because I would be a permanent part of the community.
C: I feel like, especially in Pakistan, the country is not homogenous and it’s very diverse, and some people are very open-minded. People are so in tune with their own localities that they don’t care about the other ones, so there’s not as much issue as in a homogenous country. These people are aware that there are different ways of life than their own. There’s a large pocket of different religions in Pakistan. If you’re living in a country with a majority, you’d expect some things that would be a lot harder. I haven’t really seen systemic discrimination as much as I’ve seen in Kashmir, and I would see Pakistan as a democratic haven. Kashmir is under a Hindu nationalist occupation and there is a large military presence. There’s been a lockdown and a decrease in autonomy. There is occupation, ethnic cleansing, and settler colonialism. Pakistan was a different experience and there are generalizations that are made about it that aren’t exactly true.
A: There was an article by Al Jazeera about monsoon brides, in which young girls - 14, 15, 16 - were being married off because of the massive floods a few years ago that submerged a third of the country destroyed their livelihoods. They had no other way to survive but to marry off their young daughters for an income. These people are getting criticized by the West for being backwards, for having third-world solutions to third-world problems. There is no context about what the situation is - and that the situation was caused by Western country’s scale of carbon emissions. Pakistan is paying the price.
E: I think something that resonates with me, being around white people, is that information about different people around the world is warped and people are villianized. A lot of white people will not be able to point Kashmir out on a map. I think hearing about how globally-oriented minds the people (in the Circle are) is the first step towards justice and solving issues.
D: I think the media is not being used to its full potential. When I first came to Canada, a lot of my friends were white and didn’t know about any other culture except for their own, even if there is a lot of information on the Internet that can be used to research.
E: There’s also a lot of Zionism in the media that people just take in.
C: I think that through my background and lived experiences has allowed me to reach places. I can understand post-British colonialism a lot better. I was able to understand my Nigerian friends and share the post-British colonialism experiences of ethnic divides, tensions, and understand exploitation. The encampments also helped.
A: A huge thing I’ve been thinking about is that the diasporic identity doesn’t really exist. It definitely differs on what community is in the diaspora - the Palestinian diaspora, for example, has some incredible literature. But in my experience, I always had to balance being Pakistani or Canadian. I could never say I’m Pakistani without being told I’m not a local. I would also be reminded that I’m a minority when I say I’m Canadian. The duality is not allowed to exist. That’s one thing that came to my mind when I read the article. My relationship with the term “culture” is that culture is a medium I can use to explain myself to myself for the purpose of my own narrative. This allows for duality.
D: I feel like culture is a social construct, just like how race is a social construct.
E: And culture isn’t only about ethnicity. It’s like how we are a culture right here, in the Circle.
C: I think the Western world has a very narrow mind on other parts of the world. In one of my poli-sci classes, we were discussing a practice called “durga” in which village elders choose appropriate punishments for crimes. This system has worked effectively but it’s being criticized and villainized so heavily here because it’s on the different side of the world. I don’t understand why people are criticizing things that have worked for generations.
D: Both stories bring back the massive ignorance in the Western culture, and that they don’t use the media to fight ignorance.
E: They’re pushing narratives that just aren’t true.
D: There’s also no advocacy and people to fight against the ignorance.
E: There’s also ignorance about climate change and who contributes to it.
C: Yes, it’s like how Nigeria and Pakistan don’t contribute to climate change. The floods in Pakistan are extremely detrimental to people who are not complicit to contributing to climate change. A lot of things are under threat there, like glaciers.
A: That’s true, because Pakistan contributes less than 1% to global climate change. Some are even calling the floods “climate apartheid” - meaning that the people who are complicit the most are the ones who are not paying the price for it. I wasn’t able to make it to Pakistan to visit back in winter, and one of our family friends said “it’s good that you can’t because you can’t breathe here.” The smog has gotten so extreme in Pakistan. The AQI levels in Lahore is 1,100.
