This article is part of Ananke’s 10th anniversary special edition. The eZine can be viewed on ISSUU by clicking on this link.
In my feminism class at NYUAD, I teach an essay titled “Just Stop” by Egyptian photojournalist Eman Hilal. Each semester, it elicits a powerful reaction from my first-year students. They are often shocked and sometimes even disgusted upon learning about Hilal’s choice to remain silent about her experience of sexual harassment during a field assignment, where she was the only female journalist.
Hilal’s motivation for this decision was clear: if she spoke out, she wouldn’t bring the perpetrator to justice; instead, she would jeopardize future opportunities for other female journalists. She understood that speaking up would likely lead to victim-blaming and possibly to her being confined for her “own protection.” By choosing silence, she resisted the narrative—one that often rings true—that public spaces are unsafe for women. Her intent was not defeatism but a desire to normalize the presence of women journalists in the field. She believed that if enough women ventured out, it would reduce the likelihood of any one of them facing similar situations alone. Thus, she remained silent about her assault while encouraging other women to step forward and claim their space.
It often takes time for my students to grasp that silence can also be an act of feminist resistance. In a society that champions the calls to “speak up,” “use your voice,” and “tell your story,” silence is frequently framed as a betrayal—of oneself, one’s community, or the broader fight for justice. Today, the valorization of speech, particularly for women and minorities, is seen as the ultimate act of defiance against oppressive structures. However, there is inherent value—and often a profound necessity—in choosing silence, not as an act of passivity, but as a deliberate assertion of agency.
For women and minorities, the act of speaking has long been entwined with survival. Audre Lorde’s iconic statement, “Your silence will not protect you,” encapsulated an era when silence equated to complicity, and finding voice meant reclaiming power. But as the discourse around a binary identities and radical social media activism grows louder and the acknowledgment of intersectionality shrinks, the imperative to speak up can feel less like a liberation and more like an obligation.
Agreed, that movements like #MeToo inspire the transformative power of speaking out. Through it, survivors of sexual harassment and assault broke long-held silences, exposing systemic abuses and holding powerful individuals accountable. Yet, for every survivor who chose to speak, countless others opted for silence—not out of weakness or complicity, but for self-preservation, privacy, or the fear of backlash. Take the case of Misha Shafi, a famous Pakistani singer who faced a huge backlash of victim blaming when she spoke up against sexual harassment. Misha was strong enough to follow it to the courts but there were many others who did not have the family support to do so. This is not to discourage women from speaking out, but to not judge those whose circumstances prevent them from doing so. In the end everyone’s situation is different and all we can do is honour their silence instead of holding it against them.
The risks of speaking out are not hypothetical; they are real, tangible, and punitive. Recently, students in the United States faced arrests for protesting against the Palestinian genocide and Israeli human rights abuses, highlighting the precariousness of free speech. The irony is stark: while society celebrates the courage of speaking out, it punishes those who challenge deeply entrenched systems of power.
But what of those who want to speak yet find themselves unable? In a system where survival depends on complicity—where mortgages, student loans, and school fees tether individuals to structures they might otherwise critique—silence becomes less a choice and more a necessity. Speaking out in such contexts can risk not just professional repercussions but the very stability of one’s family and future of those who depend on them. In such a case can we really call their silence selfish?
It’s important to remember that, silence, in this context, becomes more than self-preservation—it becomes a form of strategy. Choosing not to speak can be a way to preserve stability while finding quieter, less visible ways to resist. For some, this might involve financially supporting movements or educating their children to challenge the very systems they cannot. For others, silence might mean building networks of solidarity away from the public eye. For Hilal, it was taking on the pain so she could create space for others to heal. This reframes silence not as selfishness but as a kind of complex courage—one that acknowledges the constraints of complicity while refusing to abandon the larger social goals of justice. Ones that require us to think in more complicated ways, acknowledging the intersectionality of people’s identities and individual circumstances of gender, class and geographies.
If there is one thing that my students and I take away from analyzing Hilal’s essay, it’s that living within systems of oppression often means becoming entangled in them. From paying mortgages to funding children’s education, everyday acts of survival can bind individuals to structures they might wish to dismantle. This complicity is not a moral failing but a reflection of systemic power: to survive in these systems is to depend on them.
The emotional toll of this complicity is profound. The desire to speak up clashes with the realities of job security, financial obligations, and familial responsibilities. Many feel the weight of this contradiction—aware of their role within the system but powerless to extricate themselves from it without immense personal and communal risk.
Yet even within this entanglement, silence can hold meaning. It can signify the recognition of one’s limitations while striving to create a better world for those who follow. Silence can be a pause—a moment to regroup, strategize, and act when the stakes align more favorably. For any thinking person, not speaking up against the genocide in Palestine, or the ethnic cleansing of the Baloch in Pakistan, the atrocities against Kashmiris in India, the Rohingyas in Burma, war that Ukrainians are fighting, the war against the women in Afghanistan or Iran or against women’s bodies in western democracies like the US, Brazil or Poland whether it is the right to choose abortion or the right to choose what to wear, there is a profound sense of frustration. And the weight of self-censorship involved in staying silent against so much injustice in the world. But, ultimately, the question of whether to speak or to remain silent is deeply personal and contextual.
For some, voice is a tool for immediate action; for others, silence is a way to endure and resist in less visible ways. Because resistance can take the form of nurturing future activists, quietly building alternative systems, or simply surviving within structures designed to crush dissent. Who are we to throw the first stone?
At the same time, the pressure to speak can paradoxically replicate the very systems of power it seeks to dismantle. Gayatri Spivak’s seminal essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ addresses this tension, exploring how systems of knowledge production often render marginalized voices unintelligible within dominant frameworks. Spivak argues that even when subalterns speak, their voices are often co-opted, misunderstood, or dismissed by those in power.
Ironically, Spivak herself has been implicated in acts of silencing. Recently, at a college campus in India, she silenced a male student who repeatedly mispronounced a name during a discussion, highlighting the fraught dynamics of voice and authority. While her actions were intended to correct and uphold respect, they also inadvertently replicated the very structures of exclusion and dominance she critiques in her work. This incident reminds us of the complexities of voice and silence—how power operates not only in what is spoken but also in who is permitted to speak and ‘when’.
As Hilal’s essay reminds us, the expectation to speak up can itself be oppressive. Sometimes, the most radical act is to stop—to refuse the performance, reject the spectacle, and hold one’s energy for when it matters most. The challenge is to redefine silence not as surrender but as a deliberate and meaningful act. In this reframing, silence is no longer an absence but a presence.
I know that for many this may come across as a cop out or an act of cowardice. I’m not here to preach. What I try to teach in my classroom is that silence is not always a failure of courage but a recognition of the complexity of living within—and challenging—a world that demands complicity for survival. Silence, then, is not the opposite of voice. It is a survival mechanism, and a seed for future resistance.
In writing this I am not advocating silence against the atrocities the world is currently facing. But questioning why speaking up by minorities becomes the only measure of their solidarity. Yes, there are those who have the privilege and the platform to speak out and challenge, and indeed, they should be held accountable. Or those who use hate speech to draw attention away from the carnages of political and personal violence- such people should be called out. But at the same time there are those who have dependents, or individual circumstances that prevent them from speaking out- but does that make them complicit? For them it is not possible to openly condemn the violence without risking being fired or deported or arrested and lose whatever little difference they are able to make in their current positions. Such people on the fringes are only too aware that their voice makes little difference in the larger scheme of things and sadly it is on them that the pressure to use their ‘voice’ falls on the most. Some battles are won with words; others, with the refusal to give them. The challenge, then, is not simply to find one’s voice but to decide when to use it—and when to hold it close.
Ultimately, it’s not their silence that should be questioned but the loud voices of those in power who create institutionalized structures of self-censorship. In today’s world it is no longer a question of ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ but ‘Can the Subaltern Survive?’
In navigating this balance, we might remember Hilal’s plea to just stop. Stop demanding, stop consuming, stop judging and stop assuming that every silence is a surrender. In doing so, we only replicate the same structures of victim blaming by shifting responsibility away from those in power to those who are only too aware of their own powerlessness.
Silence is not merely the absence of speech but a complex and often misunderstood form of agency. As Rebecca Solnit writes in The Mother of All Questions, “Silence can be a plan, rigorously executed, the blueprint to a life. It is a presence; it has a history and a shape. Silence can be a form of protest, a refusal to offer words that legitimize injustice.” For Hilal, silence was precisely that: a plan, a protest, and a vision for a future where her voice would not be an exception but part of a collective roar.
By holding space for silence, we honor the diverse ways resistance manifests. Not every act of defiance requires a microphone or a megaphone, and Instagram post or a Tik Tok; some require the quiet endurance of individuals like Hilal, who refuse to let their pain derail the larger fight for justice. As Toni Morrison once said, “The function of freedom is to free someone else.” Hilal’s silence was her way of wielding her freedom—not to shield herself but to create space for others to step forward.
In teaching this essay to my students, I am not trying to romanticize silence or glorify suffering but to remind them that the path to justice is neither linear nor universal. It is messy, contingent, and deeply personal. Silence and Speech are not opposites; they are tools, each wielded according to the needs of the moment and the constraints of circumstance.
Finally, what Hilal’s essay teaches us is that resistance takes many forms. Sometimes, it is the quiet resolve to stay and fight another day. Sometimes, it is the loud, unrelenting cry for justice. And sometimes, it is the radical act of choosing when—and how—to break the silence. As Bell Hooks wrote, “True resistance begins with people confronting pain…and wanting to do something to change it.” Whether through silence or speech, the goal remains the same: to disrupt, to challenge, and, ultimately, to transform.
About Sabyn Javeri
 Sabyn Javeri is Senior Lecturer of Writing, Literature & Creative Writing at New York University, Abu Dhabi. She is the author of ‘Hijabistan’ (Harper Collins: 2019) and the novel ‘Nobody Killed Her’ (Harper Collins: 2017) and has initiated and edited two multilingual anthologies of student writing titled, ‘The Arzu Anthology of Student Voices’ (Vol I & II. HUP: 2019, 2018). Her writing has been widely anthologized and published in the South Asian Review, London Magazine, Litro, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Wasafiri, Oxonian Review, Trespass, and World Literature, amongst other publications, and she writes a monthly column for 3Quarks Daily on gender and identity. She has a MSt from the University of Oxford and a PhD from the University of Leicester. Her research interests include transcultural feminism, South Asian literature, inclusive pedagogy and creative writing. |
