Finding one’s voice in Speak. A novel by Laurie Halse Anderson.

As usual, you know the drill. Read the book, spoilers ahead.

“I was angry with my friend;

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

I was angry with my foe:

I told it not, my wrath did grow.”

- The Poison Tree by William Blake

Maybe I’ve been inundated with stories of American high school recently, starting with Palacio’s Wonder, moving on to Green’s Looking for Alaska, and now this. Each is different in its own right, each has a serious element and some not-so-serious ones, true to the tropes of the young adult genre. Each deals with a distinct problem. In Wonder, Auggie has to deal with his deformity, the friends in Looking for Alaska have to deal with grief, and in Speak, we are dealing with rape. American high schools, it seems, is a place where tragedy and human drama is ever lurking, almost ever present. And let’s not even mention school shootings.

It is not a light subject matter for young adult fiction, but it is perhaps a book that might be able to connect with young girls who might go through the same thing or unfortunately, have gone through the same thing. Judging from the reviews of Goodreads, some readers connected with the book exactly on that level. Thus, if it’s a work that helps in some emotional level, then all the more good.

The plights of high school life, as a rape victim

When we meet Melinda getting back to school after the summer holidays, she had become casteless, an outcast not belonging to any particular group or affiliation. Yet, she had a best friend, Rachel who now sneers at her and opt for the friendship of the new exchange students instead. She made a new friend, Heather, a new girl who’s a tad too clingy but it wasn’t like she had other options.

But soon, Melinda was being absorbed by the Marthas caste, the do-gooders who’s doing good deeds for recognition’s sake as opposed to actual good itself. Melinda was soon shunted away, while Heather was the bottom of the rung in the Marthas. Life at home wasn’t so crash hot either, with lackluster parents who won’t meet eye to eye, even when they agree that their daughter is flailing at school, and the fact that they’re likely to be cheating behind each other’s backs.

Melinda finds refuge in an old broom closet and in her art class with a renegade art teacher who’d openly complain about the school’s lack of funding to foster the student’s creativity. Her assignment was to create a piece of art based on a random object, which for her was a tree. It wasn’t all tragedy though, as she kind of made friends with her lab partner and she made some sort of acquaintance with another art student, Ivy.

Severing the poisonous branch from the trunk

You can’t mistake the cover of the book, I don’t think there’s a lot of variation. It is a tree superimposed on a young girl’s face. Trees as a leitmotif is prevalent in the story, acting as a symbol for growth and maturity. Speak, more than a young adult novel, is a bildungsroman as Melinda transitioned from a mere girl more towards womanhood.

Her womanhood is not defined by her sexuality, and her forced entry into sexuality, but in finding her voice. For the majority of the time, Melinda resorted into her shell, wanting to speak but barely speaking. She acted from the outside, more as an observer than a participant, aloof to the fact that she must in fact participate in order to find her voice.

Melinda’s battle is against an invisible enemy, a mind-forged manacle imposed on her as a rape victim. The thought of it is a sick branch on her tree, which was bound to poison her if she failed to overcome this noxious boogeyman. We come back, in fact, to the first four lines of William Blake’s poem “A Poison Tree”, where the refusal to voice out what happened to her is the toxin to her life, the bane of her existence.

In this sense, I think it is quite a significant book which might help young women find the courage to use their voice, and lately with the #metoo movement, more and more women have used this significant voice of theirs to affect change, and influenced the law to punish the predators they were victims to. Speak, in this vein, is the quest for this justice.

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Yet, I can’t say I like the book. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I didn’t connect with Melinda. I didn’t like her character. I thought she was apathetic and frustrating, and perhaps the prose that Anderson used in the first person narrative made her seem like a little bitch. We can reason that Melinda’s apathy and attitude is due to the events that had taken part in her life, but no matter how much tragedy you’ve been through, if you ooze out unlikeable vibes, then I’m not going to make the effort to like you. This is true for characters in a book or anybody that I come across.

I wanted to like the book more because of the importance of its underlying message, but ironically and unfortunately, the voice is grating to my reading ears.