Ruchika Gothoskar Reviews Samantha Garner’s The Quiet is Loud
The Quiet is Loud. Samantha Garner. Invisible Publishing. $17.96 CDN, 336 pp., ISBN 9781988784717
Tender and sharp, The Quiet is Loud is a piece of speculative fiction whose very rhythm seems to match the disposition of its central character, Freya Tanangco. Filipino-Canadian Freya is a quiet twenty-eight year old who has spent most of her life hiding an integral piece of her identity from those around her – she is a veker, someone with extraordinary mental abilities that result in their ostracization from mainstream society. Freya’s veker abilities manifest in her being able to see glimpses of the future, things that sometimes scare and confuse her, including the traumatizing death of her own mother. Freya spends her life hiding her secret, in fear of not only the way she will be treated by the outside world, but also in fear of her own father, a renowned novelist with an explicit and unwavering hatred for vekers, as made clear in his explosive memoir about their family. However, when she meets a group of people with similar experiences, Freya leans into her veker abilities, learning for the first time in her life: it is not shameful to be who we are.
Told in first person with the careful weaving of third-person flashbacks, Freya leads us through her life, and in a way, through a late bloomer coming-of-age story. By flipping between scenes from Freya’s life as a child in the 90s, to her current circumstances as a young adult in 2015, author Samantha Garner gracefully creates loops of time beautifully juxtaposed, showing Freya’s descent into solitude and eventual brave leap out of it. Garner is able to conjure a fantastical world, chock full of delicious Filipino foods, stunning descriptions of tarot cards, and enchanting re-tellings of Norse legends, all while placing Freya and her friends in the familiar streets of Canadian cities, really making this novel feel like home.
While the novel focuses on Freya’s journey, it also poses the difficult questions surrounding identity, what it means to be mixed-race, and begs the question: who gets to tell our stories? Women, and specifically women of colour, are so often taught that our lives, our experiences are not our own. We are daughters, wives, sisters, girlfriends – always relationally understood. We are to rip open our hearts and perform trauma and heartbreak and anguish for bystanders and voyeurs who do not seem to care how we mend these wounds, and only remain invested in our proving that these wounds exist. Time and time again, women of colour are silenced, made smaller.
Trauma rips through our lives and through time, taking from us not once, but every time we remember the hurt. Healing, however, comes from a reclamation of the hurt. It comes from the retirement of shame, and from the simple understanding that all our stories – good, bad, painful, silly – are ultimately ours to tell. Freya embodies this through her gentle mending of her relationship with her father, through her resolve in the face of strife, and through her ability to be true to herself through it all. Reminiscent of the women in Naomi Alderman’s Power, or even of the Handmaids in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, Freya tells the men in her life who want to be the narrators of her story a short, simple answer: no.
A journey into self-acceptance peppered with mythology, magic, resilience, and friendship, Garner’s narrative allows readers to go on a journey with Freya. Complex and vulnerable, The Quiet is Loud, is a wonderful stepping stone for those who love magical realism but might find the likes of One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera a bit intimidating, or for readers looking to explore magical realism for the first time. While Freya’s paradextrous abilities might not be of this realm, her quiet strength and enduring resolve are something we are all sure to find a little bit of in ourselves.
Ruchika Gothoskar is an editor, writer, reader, and settler, currently living on the territory of the Anishinabek, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Ojibway/Chippewa peoples, in Ontario. She holds a BA in English and Cultural Studies from McMaster University and is currently pursuing her MA in Gender, Feminist and Women's Studies at York University. Find her at @rgothoskar on Instagram, and Twitter.