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On analysing Habiburahman’s First, They Erased Our Name, the first available Rohingya memoir in the post-exile era, this paper wishes to read how silence gets woven into memory. In its most primary form, silence hints at the absence of speech, not arising just from the absence of a speaker, nor just highlighting the oppressive forces rendering that silence. Rather, the speaker's socio-cultural and political identity, situatedness, and relative affects create layers of silences. Adhering to Robyn Fivush’s distinction between “being silent” and “being silenced” as its overarching framework, this paper will delve into untangling the mesh of socio-political reasons that render one speechless due to the clash of agencies of self and the other.
Ms. Monideepa Raichaudhuri. “Speech in Parentheses: Reading the Interplay of Silence in Habiburahman’s First, They Erased Our Name.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 3, June 2026, pp. 515-527. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n3.31.
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