I Lived In Total Silence For 10 Days. It Changed Everything I Knew About Noise.

"On a hot August Wednesday, I approach the 600-acre Dhamma Suttama silent-retreat center in Montebello, Quebec, a ninety-minute ride from Montreal, where I'm spending the summer. My driver, a Cameroonian man in his forties, hooks into a narrow forest corridor. We pull up to a concrete parking lot that wraps around a building paneled with wood and stone. Built in the eighties as a high school, it's now made up of sleeping quarters and meditation halls."

"I've been surrounded by noise my entire life. As a Black man, it's how I know everything is all right. When I hear laughter and arguments all on the same block in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where I live most of the time, that signals safety. But as the area gentrifies, it quietsa form of silent colonialism, Willie Mack, assistant professor of Black studies at the University of Missouri, told me on a callwhich makes me feel uneasy."

"I grew up in a duplex right off Walnut Hill in Dallas-Dallas, the two-one-foh, where CD players bumped Congolese rumba, the TV blared 106 & Park, and the kitchen smelled of hot peppers, ginger, nutmeg, garlic, and paprika. Aunts and uncles, rarely ever related by blood, always dinged the doorbell to eat, laugh, and philosophize. Every Sunday, cars pulled up at my auntie's house as she cooked for what seemed like the whole neighborhood."

A Black man arrives at a 600-acre Dhamma Suttama silent-retreat center in Montebello, Quebec, after a ninety-minute ride from Montreal. The center occupies a former high school converted into sleeping quarters and meditation halls. He feels unease about enforced quiet because loud, communal noise signaled safety and celebration throughout his Black upbringing in Dallas and Flatbush. Memories include CD players bumping Congolese rumba, crowded Sunday meals, and relatives who 'dinged the doorbell' to eat and philosophize. On his first night, a scream and a hallway dash reveal the fragility of enforced silence. He recalls school-era raucous eruptions.

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