THOUSAND FACES OF SILENCE: AN INTERTEXTUAL READING OF ILYA KAMINSKY’S DEAF REPUBLIC

Abstract

The power of silence in literature lies in its transcending and enriching characteristic which renders it possible to grasp a deeper meaning by way of telling the things that cannot be told by words. In this respect, Ilya Kaminsky uses polysemous silence as a narrative technic in his partially autobiographic book, Deaf Republic. Silence is primarily used as an instrument of insurgency by the townspeople who reject to hear consciously and revolt against the authoritarian government. With this unusual resistance, the meaning of silence expands. The ongoing power relations between the public and the state gets destabilized. Relatedly, stripped of its primary meaning in all the poems, silence becomes an important part of the dialogue and turns out to be a significant component of the language. Another layer is that metamorphosing the concept of silence that has been used against them as a tool of oppression for centuries, women use it this time to raise their voices. Lastly, it is seen that in most of the poems, Kaminsky creates absences with various forms and once again silence takes its place in these absences, visibly loaded with meaning. Hereby, consciously refusing to hear with a kind of resistance that can be called an act of civil disobedience in certain aspects, the citizens resist against tyranny and thus silence gets positioned at the centre of the narrative, which allows the phenomenon of silence to be analysed with the aforementioned aspects. In this respect, the aim of this study is to analyse the phenomenon of silence in Deaf Republic as a multilayered field of meaning with its theoretical dimensions.