Dumb: a memoir about the legacy of silence and resistance
Normandy, 7 June 1944: in the wake of D Day, a five-year old boy escapes his home to shelter in a barn.
Normandy, Christmas Eve 1949: a forty-three-year-old former résistant dies in a river. His death is never explained. No one ever talks about him again.
London, 10 February 2014: a two-year-old boy is diagnosed with a rare condition which means he will never speak.
The five-year-old French boy fleeing the bombs is my father, Pierre.
The former French résistant is my grandfather, Louis.
The Franco-British boy who shan’t speak is my son, Dexter.
Exactly seventy years after the Battle of Normandy, I am told I carry the gene responsible for my son’s rare disorder. I am also told that my father has passed it to me. My son’s dumbness is our inheritance.
A blend of memoir and genetic-historical detective story, this is an account of inherited silence over three generations, told through the voice of a mother desperate to help her son speak. What do you do when you learn that your son’s condition is genetically inherited? What do you make of the silence you have always felt inside you and the guilt of having passed it to your son? The book charts two narratives, as the present-day enquiry into Carole’s son’s illness turns into an exhumation of her family’s past. Trying to make sense of his harrowing diagnosis while learning what it means to be a carer, she tracks down the reasons for her grandfather’s unexplained death, four years after the end of the Second World War.
Offering a hopeful perspective, while its roots push into the dirt of family history, DUMB is ultimately about a woman finding her voice through claiming her identity and speaking for her son, thereby breaking three generations of silence.
Carole Aubrée-Dumont 