The Silence in Sentences

Losing and Learning One’s Language

I learned to write by attending to the silence on the peripheries. I learned to write within and without the boundaries of the margin rule, the rule-governed decorum of my language lessons, and from my father’s struggles with syntax. I learned to write by mimicry, listening closely to my father, conscious of his own breath. I learned from the clean white edge of the page and what that white edge surrounds.

…

I am in the Speech Pathologist’s office looking at all the toys decorating what is otherwise a beige box of a room. White IKEA bookcases shelter dozens of stuffed animals, assorted toys, picture books. The Speech Pathologist is playing with puppets in front of my son whose face is impassive as they both try to enact a drama. The Speech Pathologist’s face is kind and she’s speaking in a high-pitched but slowly delivered cadence and my son is attempting to parrot the words she speaks. They are sitting on a rug with groups of phonemes. Together they move the puppets in their delicate conversation from one set of letters to the next. I notice she is recording him with a small cassette player perched atop the bookcase. I can hear the gears pull the acetate through the spool.

…

When I was learning to read, my father would read aloud passages of books and record them using a Dictaphone. I would replay the stories at bedtime, recorded on 60-minute Memorex cassette tapes. My father’s voice hissing in acetate. The limits of the story defined by the medium in which he was recording. It was also a means for him, my father, to erase his accent. Rehearse the English language to his own ear so that he could hear how he sounded. And so the stories would stop, abruptly. Fragmented by his stops and starts. His erasures. His ear speaking back to him a version of himself he was trying to unlearn.

…

As my son is re-learning to speak, he hesitates because he is trying the sound out in his mouth. Fish becomes “ish” and he drags the shushing sound into the next “ish” sound. Fish becomes “ish ish,” the doubling made loud in the language loss experienced when he is first diagnosed on the autism spectrum. At first, he was full of words and then a silence that surrounded us.

…

The audible click of the record button can be heard as my father’s voice comes on. Tinny. Restricted by the unspooling tape. This version of him which is mirrored back to him. His rephrasing and trying on of words. His stops and starts. The continued utterances of his unlearning. He is reading aloud a passage from the local paper which is about something mundane. Livestock, etc. The fishing report. The weather. And in the shape of the recording, he is sensing himself forming sentences. Listening back to his accented voice which is a voice he is ever aware of.

…

When I was learning to read, I was pulled from my classroom in second grade and made to read aloud because I was not pausing from sentence to sentence. My words collided, spilling past the periods and commas, crashing into other words. I was made to pause for two breaths between periods. One inhale. One exhale. One inhale. One exhale. An exaggerated stoppage so that between moments of sentences meaning lingered there in the air. I was made to stop because I read like my father who was also trying out the sound of English in his mouth.

…

Meredith and I noticed that our son was fading away from us. He had hit all the milestones of someone who was neurotypical, raising his head, smiling, crawling, walking. He was also speaking. Saying dada and mama. Saying dog. Saying no. And then a little door slid shut.

…

On another cassette, which my father had left on record inadvertently, you can hear him speaking to my mother, switching from Tagalog and back to English. Him correcting his “F” sound so that it sounds like an “F.” So that a feather is a feather. The fricatives pressed against his lips, pushed forward. Squeezed through the opening of his mouth, made smaller by the muscles of his lips.

…

My father asks me to answer the phone. He never answers the phone for fear of people on the other end of the line misunderstanding him. His chief worry, that the receiver captures, in some way, the wrong version of him so that he is not seen or comprehended. He can speak on the phone for no longer than five minutes before needing to hang up. The voice on his answering machine is mine so that if someone were to call my father they would hear me asking them to leave a message.

…

As my son is re-learning to speak, he is in the care of my father. My son watches my father’s lips form around a letter, shaping it into a sound. My son watches my father’s mouth grapple with a sentence that he pushes forward into the space before him. Meredith and I watch the two of them together, cozy on the sofa. “Sesame Street” is playing, and the puppets are phonetically sounding out words that my father and my son repeat back to the television. They surround themselves in each other’s voices. They shape and reshape vowels and consonants. I see the syllables in front of them, bright ribbons of song.

Oliver de la Paz ’94, ’95 is a poet and professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is the author or editor of seven books, including the poetry collections “The Diaspora Sonnets,” which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and “The Boy in the Labyrinth.” His “Trellises” appeared in the winter 2022 edition (Vol. 10, No. 2) of LMU Magazine. de la Paz’s essay is one of 10 on the subject of loss collectively titled “The Road From Loss” that were solicited by LMU Magazine. The others can be found here.