See No Evil, Speak No Evil - Taylor Simmons (Speak)

By Taylor Simmons -

If you didn’t see something, did it really happen? If you can’t say something, does that thought really count? In Speak, Melinda Sordino spends her freshman year of high school seeing no evil and speaking no evil. She is an outcast, she hides herself from evil in an old janitor’s closet while she is rejected by her peers for calling the police at a party over the summer where she was raped. Melinda is stunned by the fear and shame of her rape, leaving her physically unable to speak, her “throat squeezes shut,” leaving her unable to talk about this evil lifechanging event (28). Melinda bites her lips so much that they bleed (5,17) and she even imagines biting her lips so hard that she will swallow herself (39). After this rape, Melinda seems to be in denial of who she really is or was, it is almost as though she can remember the girl she was once, but the pain from her rape has taken over her entire world. Melinda needs help, and throughout the story she finds solitude in being alone, where she is most comfortable but throughout the novel, we can see Melinda’s transformation.

Throughout this story, I noticed a transformation in Melinda through her art. Her art class and Mr. Freeman seem to be the two main factors that help Melinda overcome this dark place that she is in, she even describes art class as a “dream” (9).  The rape at the party, and the beginning of the school year is the kickstart for Melinda’s depression. The rape being the main factor, and her realizing that she no longer has friends or anyone to confide in is another factor. The rape changes her so much physically and mentally that she does not even recognize her own self, “two muddy circles under black-dash eyebrows, piggy-nose nostrils, and a chewed-up horror of a mouth…I can’t stop biting my lips” (17). The trauma from this rape changes Melinda so drastically that she cannot even look at herself. She hides the mirror in her room (17) and when she encounters Heather in the bathroom, she looks at herself and washes it until she sees “nothing” (45), symbolizing how she feel on the inside, like nothing.

Melinda’s tree project in her art class is another symbol of her transformation throughout the story. The tree is Melinda. When Melinda is first assigned the tree, she struggles with drawing it, she has no clue where to start or how to draw a tree but Mr. Freeman states that the tree is Melinda’s “destiny” (12). As Melinda’s artwork grows and develops, as she begins to formulate new ideas for her tree, we can also see how she grows as a person. Her failed attempts at creating the perfect tree relate to the bad in her life and when Melinda is finally able to speak, her tree finds life, “my tree is definitely breathing…” (196). The color birds she adds to her artwork at the end of the story represent the new-found light she has found in her life after speaking up, “…the birds bloom in the light, their feathers expanding promise” (197). Melinda’s final tree represents her finally being able to talk about what she has been through in her life.


This novel is certainly not an easy read is this is an important book. I think that Laurie Halse Anderson did a great job with this story as it represents the importance of speaking up about incidents such as rape and the impact it can have on adolescents. 

Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 17, 2017 at 4:21 PM

    I liked your article Taylor! I enjoy how you compare Melinda directly to the tree. I also wrote about Melinda and the tree, but I never directly compared her to the tree, only to her emotional state. I like how many quotes you took and examples directly from the book.

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