Silence, Violence and Gendered Resistance

The links between notions of silence, voice and agency are more complex than they may appear from a ‘simple’ equation between silence as bad and voice as good. I argue that combining an intersectional analysis of inequalities with queer approaches to diaspora can be useful in the study of how these notions relate to narratives of transnational memories of violence. I illustrate the argument with examples from the Dutch novel Indische Duinen [My Father’s War] by Adriaan van Dis (1994/2004). The results show how the use of simplistic understandings of the different characters as either victims or perpetrators influences the formation of their respective diasporic identities. Moreover, intersectional inequalities hinder the agency of first and subsequent generations of postcolonial migrants and influence their respective opportunities to resist denials of responsibility.