Picture two Black girls who are twins and have to move around from an early age due to their father’s military career. In some ways, they were always destined to be different and stick out. June and Jennifer Gibbons were from an immigrant family who moved from Barbados to the United Kingdom in the ’60s.
It was a tumultuous time to say the least, and despite their father working for the RAF, they were always seen as different by the societies they grew up in. Eventually, their family settles in Wales, a place where their dark skin stuck out amid their mostly white host nation.
What made it worse was the fact that they were twins and already considered freaks for the unique and troubled way they lived their lives.The Silent Twinswas a film starringLetitia Wrightand Tamara Lawrance that attempted to capture what these two girls experienced in their lives. While the film did a fine job, it was virtually impossible for it to fully capture the true nuance of their experiences. Here’s a little more of the true story ofThe Silent Twinsexplained.
Always Different
Since they grew up looking different and being different as a family, June and Jennifer Gibbons were always destined to stick out in a way. Wales in the ’60s and ’70s sawa massive wave of immigrants, and local communities didn’t always take kindly to them. From a young age, the girls had already been innately taught that outsiders were a threat to them.
Related:The Silent Twins Review: The Tragic True Story of June & Jennifer Gibbons
Being twins, they already shared a unique bond that all twins do in some way — but these girls were different in another way too. They had been born different, grew up different, and were treated different. In some ways, being different was probably their first real form of identity.
A Secret World
So what do two young girls do when they’re forced to feel different and threatened by a world that doesn’t understand them, and would rather push them around and scar them for being different rather than seek to understand them? They retreat, to the farthest recesses of their collective mind - Into a world where their imagination has no shackles and their lives knows no limitations.
Remarkably, June and Jennifer Gibbons didn’t just cut themselves off from the outside world in a way, they created a new world for themselves where they could feel free and safe. By age eight, the girls had stopped communicating with the outside world altogether and looked inward, to a fantasy world that was their inner sanctum and a place to safeguard their special psyches.
They could understand and speak to each otheras close sisters, so effectively that they actually invented their own esoteric language to do so. Yet, others had always found it difficult to understand them. While much is said of them going silent, the truth is that both girls had always spoken a sped up version of Creole. When they were mercilessly ostracized and bullied at school for looking different and sounding different, they took this language idiosyncrasy and sent it into a new dimension.
The Price of Being Silent Twins
Not only did the girls go completely silent to the outside world, they took their language and turned it into an example of cryptophasia: a language developed by twins and that only the two could understand. For cutting out the external world as a defense mechanism, the girls were sent to separate schools in an effort to get them to break their bond. Instead, it strengthened, and they became catatonic when apart.
Reunited, they would spend hours locked in their room together. While they refused to write, read, or speak to others in school, together they would compose wonderfully elaborate stories and eventually even wrote their own novel together and set about getting it published. They mimicked each other’s movements and were almost in sync at times. Mind you, they also had some intense, epic fights, but were ultimately inseparable.
Their teenage years were rough. Falling in with the wrong people, they began abusing drugs and alcohol, chasing sex, and later even committing petty criminal acts such as vandalism, and then worse ones like arson. This led to the girls being indefinitely detained in Broadmoor Hospital, a mental health facility. For being different, they were ostracized again. While delinquents usually spent two years in such facilities, their selective mutism gave authorities an excuse to hold them longer — 11 years to be exact.
Related:Exclusive: Director Agnieszka Smoczyńska Discusses The Silent Twins
After years of being fed anti-psychotics, the girls lost all interest in creative writing and their fantasy worlds were destroyed and dissipated altogether inthe resulting depression. The girls had a long-standing agreement with each that if either ever died, the other would begin speaking and live a normal life. In March 1993, Jennifer did pass away, in suspicious circumstances that almost seemed to hint at an act of self-sacrifice so that June could be freed and live a normal life.
The Silent Twins Film
In 2022, a film was made of the girls' experiences calledThe Silent Twins.Itstarred Letitia WrightofBlack Pantherfame and Tamara Lawrance who’s done turns in Shakespearian productions. The film aptly captures the girls' lives and struggles but faces a difficult time trying to be perfect since their full story is so nuanced and richly detailed.
While the film was given generally positive reviews, and received June’s blessing, it was a Sisyphean task to truly capture just how horrific and tragic many aspects of these unique girls' lives actually were. What was clear is that their life was seemingly destined to be one defined by being different. In some ways, their entire life was an allegory for discrimination and a world that would rather choose to ostracize, hate, and fear what it doesn’t understand.
Here’s a snippet of whatThe Los Angeles Timeshad to say about the film:
“Twins are frequently portrayed onscreen as a novelty, or even as creepy. But in director Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s “The Silent Twins,” based on the true story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, everyone involved wanted to ensure that a sense of humanity came through in their representation of the identical sisters who were beaten down by a system that refused to understand them. The twins, who notably began to refuse to speak to anyone except each other from an early age, were considered strange by their community and the British press, but Smoczyńska wanted to showcase how the twins did express themselves, through the art they created and the novels they wrote.”
