Shout

Writing a memoir is clearly one way Anderson is able to exercise her own agency, but it also allows her to delve into her own perspective on who should be able to tell their own stories. Survivors are often forced to stay quiet about their trauma and are thus robbed of the opportunity to share what they have been through and how it has affected them. Without agency, there is no way to stop sexual violence or to bring perpetrators to justice.

As a child, Anderson is taught, “I learned then that words / had such power / some must never be spoken / and was thus robbed of both / tongue and the truth” (16). Words, language, and stories all hold a particular power, and as a young girl Anderson was taught not to speak up. As a result, when she is raped, she does not believe that she can speak her truth to anyone else. Her lack of agency deprives her of comfort, support, and healing. Anderson’s suffering in silence during her childhood and adolescence reverberates not only in her younger years, but in her writing.

Agency is also integral to Anderson’s decision to write fiction. She writes about how several of her protagonists came to be and why she wanted to tell their stories. Melinda, the protagonist of Speak, however, is a strong example of Anderson’s desire to give survivors a chance to say what they need to say, even if it must be through a fictional character. Melinda is described as if she were a real person, as Anderson insists, “the crying girl was lost in my head / and she wouldn’t let me sleep / because she couldn’t speak / and she needed an interpreter” (158). Anderson writes about Melinda’s genesis as a means to tell the reader just how vivid and vital the story felt to her and why she was so motivated to tell it. She thus validates the vivid and vital memories survivors must live with and creates a safe place for them to navigate those memories while reading.

Anderson also invokes agency in her call to action, addressing different sections of her audience—young men, older women, etc.—and reminding them of the ways in which they may accidentally or purposefully rob a survivor of their ability to tell their own story. She relates to each group, such as women of her own generation who may be survivors but are unwilling to see themselves that way. By invoking their humanity and reminding them of how they can, and should, support survivors, Anderson spreads a message to the world to allow survivors to speak more and for the world to choose to listen more closely. She also directly addresses survivors who have never spoken their truth, reminding them that they are still loved and they can still seek support. This gesture outwards towards the reader is meant to speak to those who have never shared the violence they experienced and help them feel strong enough to tell their story.

Shout is written in verse, in part due to Anderson’s own familial history writing poetry, and in part to invoke the fractured, challenging landscape of personal trauma. Her decision to use poetry employing enjambment, disjointed lines, negative space, metaphor, and other poetic devices gives the reader a visual and verbal idea of how violence augments and alters a survivor’s memory.

Trauma and fracture can also been seen in Anderson’s diction, particularly when she is describing an instance of violence and its aftermath. Early on in the book, Anderson describes her father, a veteran who witnessed many horrors when serving in World War II, hitting her mother. Though she does discuss her father’s own experiences as a survivor of violence and war, she also searches for language to describe how her mother suffered at his hands: “The image of my father hitting / my mother picassoed in front of me” (10). Here Anderson creates a new word to portray the devastation of the violence her father wields against her mother, referring to the geometric and uncanny artwork of Cubist painter Pablo Picasso. She does this to show the reader that the English language is so limited in its range that she needs to create new words or borrow from other languages to fully convey the power of the event. Although this moment occurred before she was born, she can envision it through narratives she was told by her parents, and she forms a retroactive memory of it that requires an entirely new vocabulary.

This traumatic experience of domestic violence spurs Anderson’s mother to rewrite the story in her head because it does not square with the man she thought she married: “He beat her. / But beatings didn’t fit in the fairy tales / she liked to tell herself / so she sugarcoated the story / to make it easier to swallow” (12). When Anderson says that this horrific incident doesn’t fit her mother’s idea of a fairy tale ending, she illustrates her mother’s coping mechanism, which is a common one used by survivors use to move past violence without fully addressing the devastation it caused.

These events not only fracture their marriage, but fracture the family as a whole, creating a rippling effect that threatens to move from one generation to the next. The reader sees this cycle of violence, silence, and fracturing of the self after Anderson is assaulted in her early adolescence: “This is life / inside the jaws / of the beast” (75). This quote comes directly after Anderson lists the many things that trigger her anxiety while in high school. She notes that when she was young, the word “trauma” wasn’t used, and she felt entirely alone while she was spiraling into despair. The fear, panic, and pain she feels after her assault create a fault line between herself and her classmates, as well as her family. Sexual assault is violent not merely because of the act itself, but because of the way it isolates the survivor from the ones they love, from language that can encapsulate their experience, and from fully engaging with world around them.