The Original Assignment
While the assignment discussed above, designed in the shadow of real and recent events, invited the students to role-play, the original version of this Day of Silence activity invites students to consider a fictional literary text and extrapolate from that the feelings and experience of voicelessness into a contemporary landscape. My original concept was to present students with an excerpt from Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun. In this antiwar, first-person narrative, the protagonist, a World War I casualty, finds himself in a hospital limbless and with half his face lost Cartier Replica Watches to an explosive device. In the excerpt I provide, his desire to communicate becomes paramount. Knowing Morse code, he attempts to tap out “S.O.S.” on his pillow with his head. The attending nurse, believing he is convulsing or merely agitated, presses his head down to calm and subdue him (Trumbo 162—64).
I invite students to compare and contrast the plight of Trumbo’s protagonist to people in our culture or society who for one reason or another are disempowered. I offer an extensive list that includes many minority groups, from undocumented residents and workers to the physically and mentally challenged, the underage and underrepresented, and LGBT people. Students have a choice and can elect to work within their comfort zone. I request that students not only accurately represent their subject population’s challenges and concerns but that they also attempt to offer some solution or resolution. I also offer students the option of using the Trumbo passage as a model for writing a creative piece reflecting the concerns and voice of another otherwise voiceless character from the same list.
The students’ responses have been intriguing. In a story he wrote of a Native American high school student in a school with only a smattering of Native American students, one student wrote of the horror his character suffered watching the antics of an “Indian” mascot at a school basketball game. Another student created a fiction about a child with special needs who is ridiculed, taunted, and laughed at.
Others elected to go the personal route in narratives that recalled the pain and challenges of a friend who struggled to come out or Tag Heuer Replica a gay uncle who suffered the indignation of losing work due to his HIV-positive status in addition to sustaining the emotional hits of a less-than-comforting, less-than-caring family. These students had unique and perhaps troubling experiences. They were being validated and invited to “speak” out (silently) in a manner that, I’m afraid, is all too rare.
Most of the students who have completed either of the two versions of my Day of Silence assignments accepted the challenge with dignity and maturity. In doing so they honored all people who are invisible to—and silenced by—the rest of the world, giving voice (silently) to the voiceless. (J)
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