When the Silence Speaks: Decoding the Silence of the Blacks in Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus

In literature, silence has been represented in different ways over the ages but what has been common in all of these representations is the idea that silence signifies weakness. It is with silence that the positions of black or colonized characters are generally defined and it is by not providing them with a voice that their marginalized positions are emphasized and justified by the writers of the western canon. The African and Afro-American writers have tried to subvert this kind of interpretation of silence and have initiated the play of the meaning of silence through their varied empowering representations of silence in their writings. The enabling nature of silence had been overlooked by those for whom language meant presence while silence signified absence or meaninglessness. It is by countering the stereotypical realm of the absence with their reinterpretations that the writers like Alice Walker and Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie have created a ground for constructing a new form of presence. Silence becomes another possibility of expression in the narratives of Adichie and Walker where the characters gain significant shades in their selves through the manifestation of silence as a tool to assert power. Both Walker and Adichie did not privilege silence at the cost of destroying the significance that language bears, but they tried to break the restrictive structure and create a parallel position of silence.