Nonnormative Communication and Metaphors of Silencing in Two Postcolonial Texts

Brian Friel’s Translations and Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor Stones both use a character with a speech impairment as a metaphorical representation of silencing and its limits under colonialism. When read purely as metaphors, as in the extensive body of criticism on Friel’s play, these characters offer competing visions of what is lost and what is not when precolonial cultures and languages are suppressed. However, a purely metaphorical reading reinforces both the broad tendency to use disability to represent other forms of oppression and the specific tendency to use communication disabilities to represent the supposed silencing of marginalized people, both of which reaffirm ableist conceptions of disability as deficiency and pull our attention away from the individuality of the disabled characters. A closer reading of each text shows the flaws in a strictly metaphorical reading, as both characters complicate the idea that their inability to vocalize is a form of silence, as they demonstrate that people with communication disabilities can have much to tell people and many ways of doing so. This poses a challenge to the overreliance on voice and voicelessness as metaphors in discussions of marginalization.