Silence, gesture and words

Everyone breathes in air, but it's a wise person who knows when to use that air to speak and when to exhale in silence.
- Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni¹

I think about the statement: "If you don't understand an Aboriginal person's silence, you will never understand his words." I certainly don't necessarily understand silence. It's something I've been raised to be uncomfortable with. And yet, within my culture, many of my friends say that I'm a good listener, that they really feel heard when they talk to me. I talk a lot, but I listen a lot too. But I don't understand the silences. What does an Aboriginal person's silence mean? How could I understand that? Silence can be wiser than chattering mindlessly, but it can also have other social meanings.

I got a little insight from the Steve Harris piece² on Yolngu rules of interpersonal communication. I might be able to understand silence in a couple of instances. Sometimes, the silence doesn't mean anything, in the sense of it's not a pregnant pause. It just means the other person assumes you've done as you wished and don't need to be thanked, for example. If you give a Yolngu person a ride in your boat, and he walks away in silence without saying thank you, is he being rude? No, he will assume that you, like he does, have chosen to do something because you wanted to do it, i.e., you gave him a ride because you wanted to give him a ride in your boat. There is also the possibility that one might encounter silence when one has asked a confronting question, such as a why question, a question that doesn't leave the person a way out. I'm not very good at being indirect, myself. But at least I can understand what silence might mean when I'm too blunt and direct for another person's culture. But these two examples are not going to cover many situations in which I might encounter an Aboriginal person's silence.

Nuance in social interaction is mostly in tone of voice and gesture, not in the content of what is said. I'm also likely to misunderstand gestures, nonverbal cues. Nonverbal gestures vary hugely from one culture to another. One would have to spend years living in a culture to be able to understand these nuances. I'm sure there are lots of nonverbal cues from white Australian culture I don't get – my friend Heidi says I stand too close to people, for example. In signaling amusement, Aussies seem a lot more subtle and understated than North Americans (either U.S. or Canada). I'm at a loss.


¹ Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams, p. 322 (NY: Anchor Books, 2004).
² Stephen G. Harris (1987). Yolngu rules of interpersonal communication. In W.H. Edwards (Ed.), Traditional Aboriginal Society: A Reader (pp. 1-9). Melbourne: MacMillan, 1987.