The Great Unquiet
Artist Marta Singh grew up under the blanket of censorship. As an adult, she freed herself—and her mother's memories as a woman living in Argentina—through storytelling.
Long before I (definitely) did not cry on Tressie McMillan Cottom’s shoulder during a meeting with her in the summer of 2022,1 I wondered if the MacArthur Fellow had installed some genius bit of surveillance in my home.
What else could explain the way she seemed to deliver this line from a recorded speaking engagement directly to me, like she was breaking the fourth wall in a monologue?
“It’s really hard to write,” she said, “when you’re scared. And when you’ve been starved.”
After I completed a feature of McMillan Cottom, a New York Times columnist and sociologist, for the UNC alumni magazine, I hung up my laptop and walked away from 20 years of writing magazine profiles. All of my instincts told me it was time to turn the page. Everyone I interviewed in my work had impacted me, but every thought McMillan Cottom shared—every insight she shared with the world, period—was like a mic drop on my critical thinking skills.2
Especially this one:
“Who you are going to be in the world starts the moment you start deciding what that trauma is going to do to you,” she had told Charlotte journalist Tommy Tomlinson about the loss of her daughter. It “reset my baseline for how badly I could be hurt.”
At the time of our interview, I hadn’t fully processed the grief of my disownment from the previous year; work and the busyness of my own family life would not allow it. I knew I did not want to repair my relationship with my mother; my head understood that I had allowed her to silence my voice in the world long enough.
My heart wasn’t there yet. The heart always wants her mother.
But that line. “Who you are going to be in the world starts the moment you start deciding what that trauma is going to do to you …”
Oh, that line stirred and stirred and stirred inside my slow heart.
Weeks passed. I tooled around my beloved art museum. I had surgery to fix a foot disfigured by years of wearing high heels. (A literal and symbolic repair.) The pines beyond my office window stopped their swaying and gave into a still and uneventful winter. And there I was, stirring.
Finally, I pulled my laptop out of hibernation and watched The Clip again.
It’s really hard to write when you’re scared. And when you’ve been starved.
I knew my baseline for hurt was resetting itself, and so was my baseline for fear. Importantly, so was my tolerance for silence. I knew because I was searching for ways to write about this ambiguous grief that would make sense, searching for others who had embarked on their own era of unquiet after years of silence. I was searching for who to be in the world, here, now, on the other side of everything.
No one knew that journey as intimately or as intensely as this incredible artist:
Marta Singh grew up in Argentina under Jorge Rafael Videla’s brutal dictatorship. Videla’s military junta in 1976 ousted a democratically elected president and proceeded to sow chaos throughout the country for the next seven years, silencing free speech and ordering the death and disappearance of 30,000 dissidents. Families were particular targets of his cruelty; as many as 500 babies who were born in captivity were kidnapped and their parents murdered.
The remnants of that fear have never gone away for Argentinians.
“I grew up with a picture that was everywhere in Buenos Aires,” Singh told students in a memoir-writing class I’d enrolled in. “It was a woman in her thirties holding her index finger to her pursed lips. The caption read: ‘Silence is health.’ Because if you didn’t shut up, you'd be shut down. Disappeared. Dead."
Language became everything to Singh. She dreamed of being a writer. She became a simultaneous interpreter instead, sought after by global entities like the World Bank and NGOs.
And then a move to Ottawa, followed by her divorce, led her to join a community of oral storytellers when she was 33. It’s an art form as old as speech itself, one born of sharing news with villagers and fables with children, a form of communication completely distinct from writing for the page or screen.
The experience shook loose her past.
After steeping herself in the telling of fairy tales and folk tales for six years, she began working in personal story—a genre of telling that demanded vulnerability, that was “no net, all risk.” Singh’s true story came to her on scraps of paper and piles of repressed memories. It came as a tense narrative about a young girl hiding beneath a blanket in the back seat of her mother’s car as they approached a military checkpoint in Videla’s Argentina. It came with darkness and rifles, family intrigue, and whispers of danger.
And that was just the first 4 1/2 minutes.
Landscapes of Silence: A Daughter’s Story, became Singh’s 90-minute storytelling memoir that married the vivid imagery, structure, and universal framing of a fairy tale with the lasting, real-life consequences of fear and oppression.
“It’s the story of two silences: the public silence enforced by the dictatorship and the personal silence that resulted from that,” said Singh, who came to Quebec in July to open a new chapter of her storytelling—in French. “It is also the story of a very personal silence. It pays tribute to what storytelling did for me as a person and to what stories do to that which we have locked inside us."
Silence can shackle you in any number of ways, as Singh can attest. But there is only one way out of it, and that’s straight through your own voice.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When you first conceived of Landscapes of Silence, was it with the components of a fairy tale in mind?
No, I had never consciously thought of translating it like a fairy tale. First of all, I had totally forgotten that it was part of my life. I had repressed it with everything I had because it was necessary for survival at the time. But when it came up, it was bigger than me. It was hard for me to tell it.
But I read, heard, told, and breathed fairy tales back then. It was my world, truly. I don’t think I ever read the news. When I decided to [create Landscapes], I framed it in such a way that it would have the three language pillars of any fairy tale, which are narrative structure, strong images, and the broad stroke of the brush—the ability to translate specific events into universal images.
Instead of going into intricate details that are of relevance only to me, I moved in big waves of momentum that are of relevance to anybody alive. If you offer something that is too much of your own skin, you are asking for more of your audience than you are giving. It’s not: Look at my gift to you. It’s more like, Look at what happened to me. Stories are here to touch, to change, to affect, to shed light …
… to connect.
That. That’s the best word, yes. Connect.
One of the things I was enraptured by the first time I attended a storytelling session was the intimacy of the experience. This person seemed to be talking only to me, delivering a story as if intravenously to me, because it was so evident that everything was about me. There is a sense of closeness, a sense that the teller knows you.
It’s very few of us who have a sense that our lives have something in them worth telling. We tend to think that what makes the literature we read has nothing to do with the lives we lead. But actually, literature has such a powerful grasp on us because it is about us. Literature is the cauldron of human experience. It’s been distilled. It can be imbibed, breathed in, and really digested in a way that it can travel in our bloodstream and become part of us.
And most people think that fairy tales are for kids and that they have nothing to offer to a contemporary listener because there ain’t no magic in real life. There ain’t no godmother. We don’t have a princess. We take everything literally. But the threads out of which fairy tales are woven are the threads out of which our lives are woven.
You worked through a lot of silences to uncover the story you needed to tell with Landscapes—including that of your mother, with whom you’d had a difficult relationship. The research helped you remove a barrier. Can you talk about that?
This is the beautiful thing about working with your own life to draw material for a story. I want my story to be good. I want my character to be good. So I hold my character to the light, and I see that it is only one facet. So I went to the source to find out more. I talked to my mom: “Talk to me. Let me learn about you. Let me know you better. Let me see who you really are as a woman, as a person, not just as the mother of that girl I used to be.” So you learn things you could never imagine about her life, and you can see that flat character growing dimensions as she speaks. I saw her becoming truly a character worthy of a 90-minute story.
It allowed me to understand my mom better, to love her better, to learn about her life, and maybe to forgive her.
That’s beautiful. If your parents have passed or you’re not in contact with them—as in my case and other people I know who are estranged from family—how can you find a version of that understanding?
I would try to delve into my own perception of that person. Tap into my subconscious through writing. I would hold an imaginary conversation where my pen would lend voice to that energy and to my own energy. Because I think what we are looking for is a spirit of fairness. If it’s always the same voice that engages in dialogue with itself, it’s biased. There’s no way around it. I always make sure to bring as many voices into the story conversation as I can.
We all carry silences with us, and they can become quite heavy in our lives. What impact do they have on us over time?
I don’t remember who said this, but it’s true that you can’t expect to turn only one light off in your house. When you shut down, you think you are only shutting down what pertains to this painful memory. But that’s not true. Everything in you shuts down. All the lights turn off. Happiness depends a lot on wholeness. If there is silence within yourself, you are not whole. If too many pieces are missing or have been hidden away, it will be hard for happiness to find us.
But choosing how you will treat what’s around you, moving through the world with consciousness, is key. What you choose to see is also what you choose to be seen by.
What we learn to see—or are given to see—begins early in life. You’ve experienced that working with schoolchildren.
I remember the kids I worked with at an Ottawa elementary school as the resident storyteller. It had a high immigrant population, mostly East African, with lots of Arabic spoken and some Spanish. Some of the kids attending had English as their third language. They were making a huge effort to understand and be a part of it. This was grade two and grade three, and I visited the same class every Wednesday for a year. They were not used to being told stories. Some lived in households where parents did not read, or there were no books in their houses.
Sometimes they would go home and tell these stories to their parents, and they came back to school with stories their parents had told them. Then they were invited to take up room and tell the tales from their own cultural heritage. It became multicultural.
There was a kid, he was tiny, tiny. His English was coming along, but it was hard. And he was missing two teeth, so his voice was very soft. He was very self-conscious about speaking and taking part. But after the sixth or seventh week, this tiny little guy came and said, “I want to tell a story.” And afterward, he was beaming. The class gave him a standing ovation.
He’ll remember that moment for the rest of his life.
Yes, I have no doubt. But I got more from these students than they got from me. It was the most transforming, life-changing event for me as a performer and as a storyteller that I have ever experienced.
I hope if they ever find themselves in a dark place that they will find the stories they need to keep themselves and their loved ones alive. I hope they will have stories to tell themselves from which they can derive hope and joy and courage. I hope they will have stories which they can tell to instill hope and joy and courage. Because stories can be the ultimate weapon. It’s how we use them that matters. ♣
NEXT WEEK: How San Jose playwright Vivian Keh turned her backyard into an arboretum to cope with estrangement—and the stories she found waiting for her under its branches.
I definitely did some version of this—and she was gracious and lovely in her response.