A discussion of Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?," an essay that interrogates the discursive conditions of speaking and the coloniality of such conditions. We focus here on silence, withdrawal, and the refusal to enter into discourse as a form of resistance and ethics. In particular, we are here interested in why Spivak makes this claim - what is protected, what is kept from colonial view - and what are its implications for thinking about gaps and silences in the archive of subaltern history and lives.