ON March 3, World Press Freedom Day, I realized how the world is still split between the information haves and have-nots.
At the 2018 Philippine Journalism Research Conference conducted by the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman Journalism Department, I listened to journalists discuss how practitioners, by returning again and again to “good journalism,” sustain “the fight” for “democracy” and against “disinformation.”
In the afternoon, I joined other judges as students from private and public universities presented their academic news analyses, academic journalism studies, special projects, and investigative reports.
Like the media professionals, these young communication researchers tackled issues created by the excess of information and the resulting cultural tumult.
Yet, one encounter reminded me that the other side of today’s information traffic is silence.
I had trawled online, as well as searched the database of the university’s library system. No copy of this book was available. So when I ran into my graduate professor, who has an extensive library of e-books, I asked if she had a copy of “Silences.”
“Who wrote it?” my teacher asked. I forgot; I had to look in my phone’s memo to remember: Tillie Olsen.
More are familiar with Virginia Woolf, who speculated that if Shakespeare had a sister, she might have passed away without writing a single word because she was a woman of her time.
In 1929, Woolf wrote that the women passing away in silence “live” on “in you and me and in many women who are not here tonight because they are washing the dishes or putting the children to sleep.”
In the 1930s, Olsen needed more than “a room of one’s own,” the metaphor used by Woolf to describe the “full freedom and courage (needed) to write what is in our minds.”
She was a mother of four. She organized workers and was jailed. She lived in the margins, waiting after her children slept or using bus rides to read, make notes, or copy passages from books she could not afford to buy.
“Almost no mothers—almost no part-time, part-self persons—have created enduring literatures,” Olsen wrote in “Silences” (1978), the “unnatural” silences that are about the “unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being.”
Yet, despite a thin body of works, Olsen lives on in other writers drawing on her words. I would like to think it is Olsen speaking through the mother ironing the clothes of her teenage daughter in her short story, “I Stand Here Ironing”: “So all that is in her will not bloom... There is still enough to live by... Only help her to know... that she is more than this dress, helpless before the iron.”