Amanda’ reading of Foe alongside Singapore’s legal structures was really eye-opening; especially the focus on tools like recorded interviews and the Appropriate Adult Scheme. But while I fully agree that the Singapore legal system has built infrastructures to support speech, it also left me wondering if these systems always do so for every single person, and if they not only support speech but demand it.

In Singapore, silence during interrogation can be treated not as neutral, but as suspicion and even an admission of guilt. This turns silence into something punishable. Legal personhood becomes tied to the ability to produce a coherent, timely, normatively acceptable narrative: what the law recognizes as “truth.” But for many, like those who are neurodivergent, linguistically marginalized, traumatized etc., speech is not always accessible or safe, or takes the same form. Law demands not only voice, but a specific kind of legible voice, shaped by dominant interpretive norms.

This reminded me of our discussions on feminist and critical race legal theory; law’s historical reliance on master narratives while marginalizing oppositional ones. As Richard Delgado argued, storytelling could expose legal erasures — but only if those stories are allowed to exist in their own terms. In some cases, silence or fragmented speech isn’t a lack; it’s an affective response to structural violence. Refusal to interpret silence as meaningful potentially reproduces that violence.

Thus, I’d add that silence can itself be a form of authorship; like how Friday’s refusal to speak was resistance to being turned into someone else’s narrative. In legal settings, however, such refusals are rarely given space. Instead, they are overwritten by judicial summaries, police reports etc.. In line with the Narrative Turn (1980s – 1990s), this illustrates how law privileges certain kinds of stories, often driven by a master, political narrative.

While systems like Appropriate Adults etc. aim to support the vulnerable, they rarely confront the deeper epistemic inequalities that determine who gets to be heard and believed. They risk being well-meaning, but ultimately flattening; those who can’t produce narratives that fit legal expectations are not just unheard but re-authored.

The law should also recognize silence as meaningful — not as a gap to be corrected, but as a mode of authorship in itself. If it relies on speech to stabilize truth, then perhaps the goal is not to force reality into narrative, but to develop interpretive practices that let the unspeakable remain visible. Without that, it risks reproducing exactly what it claims to remedy: the silencing of the vulnerable under the guise of protection.

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