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What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence | Introduction

"What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence" by John Edgar Wideman was first published in the December 2003 issue of Harper's. It is also available in a collection of Wideman's stories, God's Gym (2005). This disturbing story features an anonymous black, middle-aged male narrator who becomes obsessed by the imprisoned son of a dead friend. He spends much time struggling with prison bureaucracy in order to track the man down to a prison in the Arizona desert. The story, which is told in a stream-of-consciousness style, reflects Wideman's concerns about the high levels of incarceration of African American men (as of 2006, Wideman's younger brother and son were serving life sentences). Themes include the dehumanizing nature of the prison system, the political and economic division between the races, and the social isolation and fear felt by many African Americans. Also emphasized are the broader human difficulties of gaining reliable knowledge and of forming connections with, and knowledge of, other people in a society characterized by disconnection, fragmentation, and mechanization.

What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence Summary

"What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence" begins with the anonymous fifty-seven-year-old narrator announcing that he has a friend with a son in an Arizona prison. About once a year, this friend visits his son. The friend says that the hardest part of visiting is leaving, in the painful knowledge that his son is left behind, trapped in prison.

The narrator has just received a letter from a lawyer announcing the death of his friend, who is called Donald Williams. Inside the lawyer's envelope is a sealed letter that the friend has addressed to the narrator. The narrator is surprised that Williams thought him significant enough to be informed of his death. They had not known each other well and had been acquaintances rather than friends. Because of their not being close and because he accepts death as inevitable, the narrator has no strong emotional response to Williams's death. However, he finds himself grief-stricken over the plight of the son, who, according to Williams, never had any other visitors. The narrator wonders if his grief is partly due to the fact that he himself is, metaphorically speaking, imprisoned, interacting less and less with others.

He writes to the lawyer asking for the son's mailing address. The lawyer's office replies saying that while it executed Williams's will, it has no knowledge of any son. The narrator researches prisons in Arizona in an attempt to track down the son. He finds that there are many prisons and retirement communities in that state and wonders if the skills required in managing retirees translate to managing prisoners. This human "traffic" is processed by a huge number of computer specialists who input and retrieve information all day.

The narrator is motivated in his search by curiosity about the son and anger that though the system has the information he requires, it refuses to divulge it. He observes that if a person ever... ยป Complete What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in... Summary