Homebound rather than roaming freely, compared to nonflying creatures, the narrator looks for her bird. Refusing to be trapped by old and familiar cages, declining to whisper in the dark or to keep silent, she portrays the flying bird as a symbol of her sense of entrapment as well as her desire to take full flight and sing. Looking for her bird thus becomes synonymous with looking for her identity. Immobility of body and voice will no longer mark her thereafter.

The narrator is admired frequently for her silence. “I have been praised for it time and again,” she confides. “I was seven or eight years old when I realized not all children have this virtue. My silence was considered my best asset” (19). Once when she refuses to answer her father’s probing question regarding Aunt Mahboub, “not out of wisdom but out of fear,” she realizes that her “simple and cowardly act of going mute” is turned into “a meaningful and wise silence” (20). The positive reinforcement continues. “In later years, I was repeatedly admired by the women in the family for being reserved, for being secretive” (20). On rare occasions, when she abandons fleetingly her distinctive and celebrated quality, she earns the censure of her family and the epithet “tattletale.” “I don’t like tattletales,” says a furious Aunt Mahboub. “She pressed her hand on my bony chest: ‘A woman should learn to keep everything here. Do you understand?’ I understood” (28). Although the narrator comes to the realization that just as “There are a hundred types of kindness” (17), there are also different varieties of silence, even though she knows all too well that full transparency is an illusion that refuses to be called what it is, she nonetheless vows to express the previously unarticulated.

If during her childhood the narrator was characterized above all by her silence, which was neither willed nor voluntary, if her silence had a “history” and was imposed on her through a complex system of reward and punishment, if she was like “a chest full of secrets with a tight lid” (20), she pledges to begin expressing the deepest emotions, naming forbidden feelings, uttering suppressed voices.16 If she was scared to go deep into the utmost reaches of her memory and her past—what she calls euphemistically “the basement”—she now wants to find the “courage to walk” there, “carefully look at its walls,” and find out about all its “corners and passages,” feeling “no fear” (129). She wants to turn her observing eye into a shining light and look through its darkness. In short, she wants to be able “to return to the basement” anytime she wants, “like a traveler who returns to her homeland” (129).