Extract: Vocal Break by Lauren Elkin
The Voice of a Woman Is a Nakedness
'High vocal pitch goes together with talkativeness to characterise a person who is deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of control. Women, catamites, eunuchs, and androgynes fall into this category. Their sounds are bad to hear and make men uncomfortable.'
Anne Carson, 'The Gender of Sound'
The voice is a vector of power, an expression of what a society finds persuasive or excessive, valuable or superfluous.
If we challenge the mystical authenticity of the voice, and clarify that our voices do not transmit the essence of ‘who we are’, we might find instead that they convey our multiplicity, our potentialities. Just as we don’t have one single unified self that is consistent from day to day, we also don’t have one voice: we have voices, plural. If we’ve settled on one that we use more or less consistently in a daily way, it doesn’t mean it’s the truest; it’s simply the most habitual. Without forgetting that habit meant something we put on, before it meant something we usually do.
They say we can never know what our own voices sound like. What we hear when we speak or sing is echoed back to us through our sinuses, resonating in our cartilage. There is no way to get objective aural information; recordings only distort: our own voices are permanently unknowable to us. And yet we are convinced that this unknowable sound conveys some essential truth of who we are. The metaphor of the voice stands in for agency, authenticity, honesty. We want to make our voices heard. To speak up for ourselves, or on behalf of those who are being silenced. In Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, speech is the means by which humans intervene in the world, defining themselves and their politics. Through speaking, she argues, people ‘appear’ to each other, suggesting that without it, we would blur into an undifferentiated mass. ‘Having a voice is crucial,’ writes Rebecca Solnit in The Mother of All Questions. ‘It’s not all there is to human rights, but it’s central to them, and so you can consider the history of women’s rights and lack of rights as a history of silence and breaking silence.’ From self- help books to creative writing coaches, from mental health charities to after-school clubs, that imperative – find your voice – is harnessed into the service of fighting our fears, or healing our relationships. Often there is a capitalist ethos underpinning all these exhortations – your voice, if you can manage to locate it, will help you get ahead, make more money, fulfil your ambition. The voice is a vector of power, an expression of what a society finds persuasive or excessive, valuable or superfluous.
'People code-switch all the time, contouring (consciously or not) how they sound to fit the way they want to come across.'
We are forever reshaping ourselves and our voices to suit different occasions or recipients, adapting our tone, our affect, even our accents. One voice for our parents, one for our siblings. Another for our friends, or for different groups of friends. For our teachers, and our students. For our bosses, or those we supervise. Each inflection learned and ingrained and performed without thinking, each with its potentialities and limitations. Or it’s the external pressures of racial, cultural, or class-based prejudice that lead us to modulate the way we sound. People code-switch all the time, contouring (consciously or not) how they sound to fit the way they want to come across. I’ve learned this in my own life, as an immigrant first to France and then to Britain, negotiating languages and Englishes. Our voices tell the stories of our attempted assimilations. They give clues as to where we’ve been, and to whom we’ve listened. They are a record of the ways we’ve learned to use them. ‘Every sound we make,’ the poet Anne Carson writes, ‘is a bit of autobiography.’