Afterthoughts: The Sound of Silence

Lately I’ve been thinking about sounds. The noises that animate our world, along with the sounds that bend and stretch to reach our deep interiors. Bird calls and the squawk of neighborhood chickens. The sputter of a car backfiring down the street. Then, turning inward, the frantic flutter of fears, plans, anxieties, aspirations—orchestrating the soundtrack of our daily lives.

As a writer, I was raised to revere language, and what is language if not a constellation of sounds?

I loved following the sounds of a sentence, manipulating syntax to render music on the page. It’s how I wrote the 11 stories in my first book, Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare, and how I entered the early pages of my second one. My agent had sold both in a two-book deal, and at the time Every Drop had reached its final form, the novel was in rough shape. I had 50 pages of attractive prose that belied an insecure, undefined interior. At the time of sale, I had been working on the novel for more than four years. It would take three more years to unearth the heart of the thing, and even more time to become a book in my hands.

Illustration: James Nakamura

Much would unfold over the years: My first book would enter the world, receive positive press (thank God!), and ultimately be named a USA Today national bestseller. I would travel on a six-city book tour over 10 days. I would get married. I’d earn my master’s degree then start two separate teaching appointments. I’d navigate a health scare that would resolve positively.

And I would wrestle with the new book. That’s how I described the process in response to the repeated question from well-meaning readers and loved ones, the dreaded, What’s next? It’s an unanswerable question that I evaded with figurative language. The book and I were wrestling, struggling, fighting. We contended every morning, me writing into the sunrise, trying to keep my head down, to locate silence and with silence, a way forward. Only retrospectively do I see now I’d chosen the wrong metaphor.

Instead of “wrestling,” I should have spoken of seeking silence. Yet in working to excavate the heart of my novel, I was also absorbing reviews of my debut collection—the praise, yes, but also the critiques, misreads, aggressive pans. I was receiving sales updates from my publisher and links to interviews in which I felt I made no sense. The onslaught of press was as much a gift as it was a complete destabilization of my writing process. Never before had I waded through as many conflicting voices, opinions, perspectives, sounds. Noise.

The story I sought to write was already too loud with its demands. In this second book, despite it being a single narrative rather than 11 separate ones, the scope of my inquiry had nonetheless widened: I was interested in examining the many ways to be a Hawaiian woman, an activist, a mother, while exploring legacies formed at the intersection of colonization, militarization and tourism. Simultaneously, I was asking the central question I seem always to be asking: How do we go on?

And in the writing of book two: how do I go on? The only path forward, I came to discover after pursuing many paths, was one of silence. Silence did not require writing into a soundless silo, only deep intentionality. It meant erecting guardrails to protect my focus and time. It meant at once appreciating the public engagement with my first book without diminishing the hard, persistent grit that was required to write the next.

The next book is a gift I refused to take for granted.

I’m tentatively calling this novel What Feeds You, a question each character seems to pose without ever uttering those three words. Seven years after starting it, I continue to be filled up with questions, and to seek the silence that permits me to ask them.

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Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is the author of Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare and was named best Author Under 35 as part of the 2023 HONOLULU Book Awards.