doubly silenced
"Salamea, who encouraged the indentured to strike, and Jamni, the proximate reason for the colonial militia’s killing of five indentured men, are construed not as rebels in their own right but as responsible for the deaths of labouring Indian men. The structuring familial “violent secret” of Ryhaan Shah’s novel A Silent Life is just that: that the Indo-Guyanese woman Nani, by dint of her anticolonial labour organizing and participation in public life, caused not simply the death, but the suicide of her husband, cursing her female descendants to a life of gendered unhappiness.
A Silent Life follows the life of Muslim protagonist Aleyah Hassan, who leaves British Guiana as a young adult on the eve of 1966 independence to study in London. She stays and marries a well-off Indo-Guianese man in England, but she is continually haunted by the life and secrets of her grandmother Nani (“maternal grandmother”), to whom she had been very close as a child.
These hauntings occur in a series of temporally disrupted, nonlinear dreams and interludes of “madness,” where Aleyah “sees” terrible historical events and family incidents. She begins to chafe at her own matrimonial bonds and oppressive husband, and eventually experiences a stereotypically hysterical feminine nervous breakdown.
The breakdown causes her to divorce her husband and leave her children to return to Guyana in the 1990s, when the nation too is experiencing a time of political turmoil.. It is unclear who or what is “safe” in this moment. Nani may be safe in death, and Aleyah is safe because she has just finally filed for divorce from her husband and returned to Guyana, exercising agency over her own life for the first time.
As the Indo-Guyanese jahaji bahin, inheritor of the courage of Nani and other female plantation workers who protested colonial labour conditions, Aleyah must actively take part in the nation’s destiny."
-Aliyah Khan, “Protest and Punishment: Indo-Guyanese Women and Organized Labour,” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, 2018