Speak: Silencing Factors/Healing Factors

Melinda is the messed up protagonist in Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. I will attempt to write about a few incidents that are factors in Melinda's silence and then in her subsequent healing. I will only mention a few for I believe there are many on both sides. 

Melinda and her friends go to a high school party the summer between 8^th and 9^th grade. She gets drunk and is raped by high school upper-classman, Andy Evans. In a state of shock Melinda calls the police but she doesn’t identify herself or say why she called. In fact, she doesn’t say anything at all. Someone discovers that she’s on the phone with the police and panic ensues. She disappears before the police arrive. She finds that she cannot tell anyone and soon finds herself alienated, isolated, and ridiculed. She regresses into herself and it’s difficult for her to carry on a conversation with anyone.

“It is getting harder to talk. My throat is always sore, my lips raw. When I wake up in the morning, my jaws are clenched so tight I have a headache. Sometimes my mouth relaxes around Heather, if we’re alone. Every time I try to talk to my parents or a teacher, I sputter or freeze. What is wrong with me? It’s like I have some kind of spastic laryngitis” (32).

She tries to say something to her parents, but she figures that it wouldn’t matter. Her family does not communicate. “My family doesn’t talk much and we have nothing in common, but if my mother cooks a proper Thanksgiving dinner, it says we’ll be a family for one more year” (35). Melinda even considers suicide…

“I open up a paper clip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this? A whimper, a peep? I draw little windowcracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting. It looks like I arm-wrestled a rosebush.
Mom sees the wrist at breakfast.
Mom: “I don’t have time for this, Melinda.”

Melinda begins her healing process after she finds a janitor’s closet been abandoned and goes there for sanctuary. She decorates it with a Maya Angelou poster, a chair, some books, and blankets. She considers her closet as a “good thing, a quiet place that helps me hold these thoughts inside my head where no one can hear them” (32).

Her biology class is another thing that helps Melinda heal. She takes an interest in the unit on seeds and plants. She takes that knowledge and works on her own front yard. It is an awakening for her to helps her on her journey back to the living.

She finds solace in her art class, as well, as she attempts to draw a simple tree. But she finds that drawing a simple tree is not that easy…she tries to give it live and discovers that it is only in the pruning and the scarring, that the tree truly lives. It was just as her father said, “By cutting off the damage, you make it possible for the tree to grow again”(100). She didn’t understand at the time, in fact, she was angry with her dad. But when Melinda finishes her tree, she finally comes to terms with that awful night.

                    “It wasn’t my fault. He hurt me. It wasn’t my fault.

                    And I’m not going to let it kill me. I can grow” (105).