The Silent Twins,” told NPR in 2015. “No one else could understand them. It was like they were speaking a foreign language. They both moved in sort of synchronicity.”Wright (“Black Panther”) and Tamara Lawrance (“Kindred”) star in “The Silent Twins,” the stranger-than-fiction story of the Gibbons twins; they play a grown June and Jennifer in director Agnieszka Smoczynska’s telling of their perplexing life story, adapted from Wallace’s book.Jennifer and June’s parents were from Barbados, and the twins were born in 1963 on a British military base in Yemen, where their father was stationed.
In the early 1970s, the family settled in Wales, where the girls were the only black children in their elementary school. The bullying they experienced seemed to increase their bond and unwillingness to communicate with others, earning the girls the nickname “the silent twins.”“Though the family spoke English at home, young June and Jennifer Gibbons began to speak another language, believed to be a sped-up version of Bajan Creole,” the site All That’s Interesting reported.
As the film shows, June and Jennifer would talk animatedly to each other until another person came into the room, then fall passive and quiet with their heads down. “Their silence was a protest towards racism — systemic racism that they experienced as children they couldn’t fully understand,” Wright told The Post.The twins’ bond, though inseparable, was not always a loving one.
According to Wallace’s book, Jennifer once tried to strangle June with the cord of a radio, while June once tried to drown Jennifer after they rivaled for the attention of some boys.
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