What Caribbean Silence Taught Me About Story

Growing up in the Caribbean, I learned early on that not everything was meant to be said out loud. Feelings weren’t things people talked about openly in my village, especially if it might bring shame or make the family look bad. You learned to keep your business to yourself and to understand that, a lot of the time, silence was expected of you.

(How I Hacked My Way to Writing a Novella.)

When I moved to Canada and began finding my way toward becoming a writer, I started to see how much those early lessons around silence had shaped the way I think about story. “Show don’t tell” may have been the most overused advice I was given in creative writing, but “leave something unsaid” was the one that came naturally to me.

That may be one reason I’ve always loved short stories. What draws me to them is that they can hold so much in so little space. A few pages can carry family history, grief, shame, migration, forgiveness, and all the things I’d learned not to say out loud. For me, that’s where the power of the form lives.

In my own writing, the most important parts of a story often live in the space between what happened and what gets said. I’m still finding my way through that learned silence, and part of what writing has taught me is how to be more deliberate about it on the page.

Short fiction lets me use omission and restraint as actual narrative tools, shaping what is revealed and what is held back. That way, the reader can feel what’s missing and sense the life around the scene, beyond the edges of the page. In my collection Layaway Child, I found myself returning to that space again and again, writing stories where whole histories press in from the margins and what matters most is often only partly said.

I can see this clearly in “Beneath the Softness of Snow,” the opening story in the collection. At one point, a writer friend suggested I add dialogue tags and character gestures to the phone conversation between Juliet (the protagonist) and her mother, one in Canada and the other in St. Vincent. I had left them out on purpose. Because the two women were separated by an ocean, I wanted the scene to hold more than just the words being spoken. I wanted it to carry the whole history between them without stopping to explain it all.

“But it reads like an echo,” my friend said in a text conversation.

“Sometimes, that’s how silence works,” I tried to explain to him.

Without the tags, the conversation takes on a different quality. The women’s voices blur into each other a little. The reader has to listen more closely, figure out who is speaking, and pay attention to what unsaid thing sits underneath the exchange. That feels true to the world I grew up in, the world of Juliet and her mother, where people often spoke indirectly (in proverbs and gestures).

I think about this in another story from the collection titled “Majesty” that follows the circumstances of a housekeeper/nanny. This story carries an entire life across just a few thousand words. What mattered to me in writing it was not laying out every detail of Majesty’s story but letting that history gather through what I chose to show and what the reader had to piece together. Leaving things out is part of how the piece works. It lets the story suggest a whole life without flattening it into explanation. In the end, even her choice becomes something the reader has to figure out.

Working on Layaway Child taught me something more about what omission can do in short fiction. Because the stories are loosely connected, I didn’t feel I had to make each one carry every detail on its own. Some things could be left alone for a while and picked up in another story. The collection stayed so close to my own experiences that silence often felt necessary. I needed a way to write toward the lives of the mothers and daughters without laying everything bare. Over time, that began to feel true to the life I remembered.

In 2021, during the Covid lockdown, I started taking long walks with my own mother. Somewhere in those walks, we began to talk in a way we hadn’t before. She spoke about what she endured as a young mother who had to leave her toddlers behind in the Caribbean to come to Canada. I spoke about what it was like to be uprooted from everything I knew and replanted in a place that was completely foreign, with a mother I barely knew.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” became the question we kept coming back to, and it opened something for me as a daughter and as a writer too.

When I went back to the collection, I thought I might need to explain more. But what I began to see was that the silence in the stories was already doing important work. It was carrying the pressure of what had been lived but not fully spoken, and in that way, it felt honest.

My relationship to silence and story has changed since writing this collection. For a long time, I was reluctant to publish them because it felt like I might be betraying some unspoken loyalty to family and home. Now, I’m beginning to look at it differently. Caribbean silence was never simply a lack of communication. It was often a way of carrying feelings and care without saying everything plainly. I am beginning to understand that this is part of what shaped me as a writer.

On the page, I’m still learning how to work with that inheritance deliberately, how to use omission and restraint to hold what cannot be fully said without losing the life inside it. For me, that is where silence becomes narrative intelligence.

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