from “on criticism” by eli guieb:

Criticism shatters.  It shatters the shibboleths of our silenced lives, the deep silences about the wrongs of society.  To challenge those silences has often come to mean courting tragedy.  Criticism challenges those silences.  It breaks silence free from its silence.  It proffers breakthroughs that break down debilitating silences, and, in the process, rejoices in the breakdown of unwanted silence. 

Criticism is not about answers.  It is about questions.  The aim of criticism is to offer sheaf after sheaf of provocative questions that negotiate the terrains of the wrongs and the wronged, and the wrongdoers.  Why is there too deep a silence about the wrongs of society?  Perhaps, because we have been comfortable with the answers – and have been too negligent to ask. To be comfortable with answers is again an invitation to the discomforts of a morbidly terrible silence.

read the rest of it here.