Breaking Through the Sounds of Silence
By David Joseph


Because of my working class background, it is very difficult for me to speak, write, or concentrate. There are walls around everything, and when I try to communicate, I must bludgeon my way through, unfortunately usually unsuccessfully. To speak or write or do anything at all is a tremendous struggle. This idea of struggle has kept me going, so far, battling against seemingly impossible odds to express my own viewpoint on my working class life and experiences. Struggle has kept me alive.
No one in my family told stories. Communication does not seem to have been one of their high priorities. Consequently, I have had little means of developing a narrative framework by which I could begin to grasp what happened to them. Whenever I would ask questions, which would be often, I'd be met by a silence of incomprehension. In this total absence of an orally transmitted identity, one of my brothers just made up a background for himself. This inability to get answers about the most basic matters of genealogy or a family story has been one of the frustrating experiences of my life which seems to represent a collective impotence. Marx's axiom in Capital that the working class does not exist apart from its own self-conscious knowledge of itself would mean that we were working class in objective fact only, since we had no received body of information by which to define ourselves.
Even when the connections were miraculously offered, I missed the moment of opportunity. For example, at one point a few years back before my grandma lapsed into her oncoming senility, she offered me a leather-covered booklet containing family charts. For some reason I did not understand this was my once in a lifetime chance and did not snap them into my clutches at that instant, and so the window closed forever.
Perhaps it was because of my inability to interpret words and gestures that I was unable to respond appropriately in the situation, since language was not one of the great shared arts of my family, I was not then and am not now able to follow what people are trying to say unless done so in a straightforward matter-of-fact manner. My grandma, though quite lively and interested in things, had no sense of humor. She said that the comics in the Sunday paper weren't funny. My grandma was shaped like no other human being I'd ever seen before or since, kind of like a five foot diameter human ball with a big, round, Okie face, no breasts that I could make out, wide hips ideally-suited evidently as a birthing machine. Her short, stocky, strong arms and legs were perfect for the arduous chores of farm work.
My grandma's biscuits were the size of small loaves of bread. Potatoes were called spuds, and mashed potatoes were always referred to as smashed spuds. She had strong hands for milking cows. She slopped the hogs, gathered eggs from the hen house and started churning butter, all before breakfast. Every morning would find her chopping wood and lighting the stove to cook and heat water.
Grandma admired all her grandchildren. She was fond of giving us affectionate hugs, and we were fond of receiving them. The only words from Grandma were ones of admiration. Grandma meant food and hugs.
The one "fact" my grandma managed to impart to me about her upbringing was that her father or her grandfather, I'm not sure which, had been a healer. Whatever that was I didn't and don't know, except that they were politically suppressed by medical doctors, but this identity seemed to be significant to her, at least enough so to tell me.
My grandpa on my mama's side was terse, gruff and grumpy, given to scowling alternating with frequent outbursts of anger. I was terrified of him. When he wasn't working in the U.S. Naval Shipyard, he busied himself with the endless chores involved with keeping up the woodland farm they had built. When he rested, mostly watching television, sleeping and chewing tobacco, he wanted no one to disturb him. He wore several layers of clothes in the hottest weather. I admired him for the farm buildings he had constructed with the help of his sons, but most of all for the concrete dam he built on the creek on their land which connected to the pipeline to the house formed the gravitational system for their drinking water running downhill a distance of several acres, the whole thing I thought quite ingenious.
Grandma and Grandpa had eight children, four girls and four boys, my mama being the second oldest. Grandma had been born in Oklahoma. She and Grandpa were married in Idaho I think. Mama spent her childhood near Boise before they moved to the woods outside of Belfair, near Bremerton, Washington, across the Puget Sound from Seattle, so that Grandpa could work in the U.S. Naval Shipyard in Bremerton. Kitsap, the county they lived in, had been a hotbed of radicalism with a contingent of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, also known as the Wobblies) organizing in the back woods there earlier in the century, but there was never any consciousness of that history either. The family were, however, staunch New Deal Democrats and nonreligious and nondenominational as far as I could tell.
My uncles often spoke in mumbles, slurring their words so I couldn't understand what they were saying. When asked what they said or to repeat themselves, they got flustered, frustrated or mad. I, and one of my brothers too, both have had the same problem, though in my case not as extremely. Still even today people do not usually respond when I speak, possibly because they do not hear me. I don't think that I speak quietly, nevertheless people do not hear me anyway.
Perhaps the silence that surrounded them influenced my mother and aunts to become obsessed with religion. They became Jehovah's Witnesses. Mama was the first to convert. Dad refused. The rest of the family ridiculed our beliefs. For example, Jehovah's Witnesses were not supposed to take blood transfusions. A rumor had spread among Witnesses that Wonder Bread had blood added to it when it was made. My uncles were fond of cracking jokes at us as they chomped down their sandwiches of Wonder Bread. But we were really afraid to eat the stuff for fear of ingesting the blood.
Growing up as a Jehovah's Witness was tough all round. It set us apart immediately among our peers in the classroom. From the flag salute first thing in the morning through the celebration of every holiday from Halloween to Christmas, which we were prohibited from celebrating, we were marked as different, and by no means could we explain the reasoning since it all had to do with obtuse dogma which made no sense. The religion seemed to be centered on the idea of denial of joy.
One thing that seemed to be connected with the religion as far as my family was concerned though, was an obsession with truth, that is, with telling the truth. We were so impressed with the idea of always telling the truth that I was left without the conception of how to stretch it for purposes of survival. I still have a difficult time trying to elaborate the truth, which puts me at a considerable disadvantage when it comes to the job search.
Grandma and Grandpa had been serious disciplinarians. There was a big, black leather strap hanging off the wall in their house. My mama was also a true believer in corporal punishment. Another thing that I noticed was that some of my aunts seemed to have an extreme disliking for their dad and never wanted to be left alone with him. Whether incest was involved I've always been uncertain.
My parents were unable to spend a great deal of time with my two brothers and me. We had each been born eighteen months apart, so we were all infants and toddlers at the same time. Our mama had to deal with our formative development with all three at once, and she couldn't handle it. She constantly complained of migraines. Consequently, I bore the brunt of her anger.
She spanked me a minimum of once a day, my middle brother a little less than me, my youngest brother a little less than him. The spankings increased in frequency, duration and severity. She said she did it to me because she loved me, which was bewildering. Though I thought that she probably really did love me, being belted and bruised all over my body, raising welts and drawing blood, did not seem like affection to me. This so-called discipline was supposed to correct my bad behavior, but I was always at a complete loss to know what, if anything, I had done wrong.
The fourteen years I lived with my mama, she physically and emotionally abused me everyday of my life, usually several times a day. Her abuse included a repertoire of regular beatings, including assaults with anything at hand including the furniture. One of my earliest memories is of Mama chaining me to a clothesline behind our house. As I became a teenager and my mama's abuse continued unabated, I warned her first that if she didn't stop I would fight back, and then, as she started striking me I defended myself.
Shortly after I began to strike back, she was killed in a car-train collision when trying to get to work on time at the supermarket where she clerked she attempted to cross the railroad tracks that crossed the one-lane dead-end dirt road we lived on in the middle of expansive country fields ahead of the oncoming train. She needed the job. She needed to be on time. She needed to cross the tracks. Such was the dialectic which ended my mama's life.
Her passing caused me great grief, and simultaneously, great relief. The event irrevocably ended years of misery for both of us, yet left me with no shared resolution of the conflict of our relationship. It has been years now since I could recall the sound of her voice, such as when I would hear my name called and spring bolt upright in bed. Unfortunately the pain of the blows is still very much with me. Thinking of her beatings, I shudder involuntarily.
During all that time Mama spent beating me, my dad was mostly silent, watching television. The nightly ritual from the moment my dad arrived home was an endless barrage of words from Mama employing rage and sarcasm about her situation, some of it rational, much of it not, met mostly by Dad's silence. Mama was literally screaming for help, and not just to Dad, but to everyone within earshot, especially all the relatives. She would scream, "I'm crazy, I'm going to kill myself, I want a divorce." She was telegraphing her distress signal, and there was no way anyone could have missed it.
What has always amazed me was how everyone could choose to ignore her. Rather than intervening to save her, they were muddling through their own lives, apparently thinking she was just that way and that everything is always the same, never seeing the train coming.
Mama continued her monologue interminably. Nights my dad sat by, mostly silent, watching television. The sound of my mama's voice, my dad's silence and the television's imbecility went on late into the night, long after I went to bed. With no bedroom door to shut out the roar coming from the living room meant I hung on every word from my mama's mouth and every sound from every program. I didn't get much sleep. I was tired in the mornings, never ready to wake up. I was tired all day. The routine was always the same. It never changed.
Dad also had a retail clerk job as a shoe salesman in a department store to tune out. Both my parents were rank-and-file members of the Retail Clerks union, but I don't remember them ever discussing union business. If they attended any membership meetings, it must have been a rarified occasion such as a contract renewal. At that time the Retail Clerks were pretty dispirited being under the thumb of the Washington state Teamsters boss who controlled them, even though they were an AFL-CIO union. The Retail Clerks did not have a reputation for being democratic. Fundamentally, though, my dad wasn't suited to the job. He complained that he got tired of spending his days looking at everything from the point of view of women's feet. He later took a variety of low paying jobs, doing everything from farm work to clerking in a convenience store. He was always proud of the work he did and enjoyed showing me around his places of employment.
The third thing my dad used the television to tune out may have been a. troubled childhood. Somehow I divined that his mother and father had divorced, and then sometime afterward his dad was killed in some kind of mysterious accident. Even in school my dad had apparently been pretty mute. In probably the only story I ever did hear him utter, his teacher asked, "How do we brush our teeth?" My dad said he thought he knew the answer to that question. He was proud, excited to be able to know an answer and get himself called upon too. "Up and down," he said. The school marm replied, "Wrong. Up and down on the uppers and up and down on the lowers." My dad never spoke again in school.
Dad's inability to construct a personal history that I can carry with me is a constant in my life. I once gave him a tape recorder and asked him to record any memories or descriptions of anything he wanted to on it, thinking it might be a way he could express himself. The method had worked excellently when my girlfriend's dad, a truck driver, had tried it, and we even ended up publishing one of his stories in my magazine, Working Classics. But with my dad nothing ever came of it.
In school I was a butt of jokes, because I lived on the wrong side of the tracks, had the wrong religion picked out for me, my dad and mama made their living for us by the wrong occupations, and I was too socially maladjusted because of my home life. Though considered bright scholastically, I was thought of as a troublemaker. I went on to become the class clown and an outcast. I got progressively into more trouble.
In 1968 I was sent to a summer program at the University of Washington in Bellingham. It was called Project Catch-up and was designed for adolescents who were underachievers. The kids who attended Project Catch-Up were white working-class, Chicano and Native Americans. I loved it. I thrived in it. For the first time in my life I got the attention I craved. I loved the other kids. They were my people, my peers. They all came from culturally disadvantaged backgrounds just like myself. They were diverse, excited and physically appealing. Unlike the kids who sneered at me in my school, the Project Catch-Up kids didn't deny one another's essential human dignity.
1968 was a defining year for the everyone everywhere. Workers and students around the world were rising up. May Day in Paris. The Summer Olympics in Mexico City. The Democratic Convention in Chicago. Black Power. La Raza. Indian Power. Feminism. Gay Rights. The Anti-War Movement. Millions marched against the war. Soldiers in the states were organizing themselves into unions opposing the military hierarchy. The soldiers in the field were in open rebellion against their commanders. It was scary, but wonderful, a giddy and naive time, when it seemed that the whole world was about to rise up into revolution, or if not the whole world, at least the U.S. People seemed determined. They were very hopeful.
The idea of struggle, the very word struggle, had a profound effect on me. It was like a mantra. All I had to do was say it and apply it to whatever was at hand. It meant I could fight back. It meant I could solve problems a little at a time one at a time. It was a tool. It was a word, the possibility for personal power in my own life. It meant that everything was not always the same. Things changed, and I could have something to do with it. I did not have to just take everything lying down. I could actively have some say. Even within my own thoughts and feelings, I could struggle with an idea. I could replace a bad thought-pattern with a better one. Struggle saved me.
My only survival tool has been struggle. How have I used it? I would struggle to get up in the morning, struggle to wake up, deal with my depression, with the pain of having been abused the first fourteen years of my life, with thoughts of suicide, struggle to go to college, complete my courses, go to my job, do my tasks, write, connect one word to another, to love another person. I would struggle to remove myself from a bench where I would sit for hours at a time, so that I could go to class. Every day was struggle, every moment. Everyday I would say to myself, "What can I do today?" If I can accomplish only one thing all day, at least that may make a difference. I have to consciously think of it all the time, to try, to do, because it doesn't come naturally. It isn't natural, not to me, not even now. I am still struggling with struggle. Now as I write I am again painfully aware of the silences that have controlled my life. History and the economy have run out, and I've been discarded as so much human excrement.
In 1980 I got a clerical job at a university. It was unionized, modestly paying, secure and steady, in fact, everyone considered it a job for life with a good pension plan for retirement. But concomitant with it was the Reagan counter-revolution, which would represent the redistribution of wealth to the rich accompanied by the withering away of the middle class. After twelve years, I was laid off.
This job meant a lot to me, since I had no hope of ever getting "professional" employment. Although I attended college, I never finished.I felt alienated from my middle class peers. Writing papers were agony, because the linear, rational thinking required of them was impossible for someone with my background. Therefore, the working class for me is something there is no escape from. It's an eternal present as well as a memory.
Whether I'll ever work again at present I don't know. If not I'll lose everything as have so many others already. Although I technically fall under a category called "preferential rehire" in my former place of work, they appear to have no intention of rehiring me.
The university's Personnel Department has evidently decided to weed out all former employees it deems undesireables. I've been chosen to go on the compost heap for not fitting in to the new professional business image. My speech is too stumbling, too halting. Too working class. I'm trying to improve upon my communication skills in order to fit in to the new environment. But there is a certain level of development which it would be impossible for me to ever attain. I am not going to be able to transcend my working class background completely. I wouldn't want to even if I could.
One woman in the Personnel Department read to me from my Personnel file, all about how badly I interviewed. Some of the comments management had written into my file had been quite vicious. If I hadn't been feeling bad enough from being arbitrarily laid-off again, this wasn't the encouragement I needed to send me off on a job search. Her "help" succeeded in making me feel miserable.
My family used a system of coding which I use creatively to write poetry and fiction. Where this system leads from here I don't know. My family spoke in the language of violence, of physical and emotional abuse. They spoke too in the language of silence, not just of suppression, but also of being overwhelmed by their lives. My mama screamed in an inchoate agony for help. My dad spoke in a pantomime touring people through the sites and substance of his worklife. Between the poverty of spoken communication and the onslaught of desperate verbiage, I found the impetus to connect words into a descriptive lyric and an attempt to create a story based in context out of the coding and pantomime.
John Cage, the composer, in his book, Silence, explained how in music silence is the part which occurs apart from the composition and performance, that is, it is extra-musical, not really silence at all, but actually everyday sounds. These everyday sounds occur all the time, before, after, and simultaneously with the music. They may be heard during a pause or a quiet passage. They are essentially purposeless as far as the composing and performing of music is concerned, inasmuch as the purpose of music is music. As Cage was interested in composing a music of sounds, he felt an affinity with their "purposelessness" and so created a music of athematic purposelessness.
In literature the working class is silence. We are murdered while the old-moneyed family go on to inherit Howard’s End. Sounds are not necessarily purposeless, they just may have their own purposes irrelevant to or in contradiction with music. There is literature, and then there is the working class. We are outside its scope or purpose. Part of its purpose is to deny the working class's existence, as assuredly as the representatives of the Personnel Department deny me my right to exist. John Cage could be famous for his purposeless music, whether it had any significance or not, because of his education in the academies of music and his connection to eastern establishment art circles. A working class artist has none of these options available.
Recently I saw The Long Day Closes, an autobiographical film written and directed by Terrence Davies, a British working class Catholic. Just as with his previous film, Distant Voices, Still Lives, I was amazed at how his working class English family sang a lot socially. This was a phenomenon prior to the advent of television. Then I remembered how one of my brothers and I used to sing together in the back of our station wagon on our way to our grandma's, how my dad played phonograph records of musicals too, how much he seemed to enjoy the music.
One, Carousel, was a powerful and tragic tale of a carnie worker in a sailing town. My dad loved it, but my mama hated to hear it. The story through and music were overwhelmingly sad. To this day that record still has the same effect on me. Despite the sadness the music had a catharsis which my dad apparently enjoyed. Like my mama I sometimes cannot take listening to it, but sometimes I feel a need to. Somehow through the music the words take on more significance, the lyrics become poetry, the poetry of the tragedy of ordinary people's lives.
Georges Sorel in Meditations on Violence had said that the working class would have to organize itself in obscurity. Like my mama hiding in plain sight, the working class is resigned in obscurity. This principle certainly is true when we consider the art and literature of the working class. Jude remains obscure.
Any art of the working class is not going to be encouraged and brought to light by the power elite who own, operate and control our society. If they select any such work for commendation, they do not necessarily have our best interests in mind. Therefore, working class art and literature are do-it-yourself projects. That silence equals death is not only true for AIDS survivors. The working class must break through the walls of silence.
In Haiti workers are paid fourteen cents an hour. But is that low enough? The owning class will not be satisfied with a wage of one cent a century. The corpses' bones can surely be ground down to a fine powder. In these dark times it is imperative that we seize the means of creation.

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