Black People : The Silent Black Twins

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The Silent Twins
June Gibbons (born 11 April 1963) and Jennifer Gibbons (11 April 1963 – 9 March 1993) were identical twins who grew up in Wales. They became known as "The Silent Twins" since they only communicated with each other. They began writing works of fiction but later turned to crime. Both women were admitted to Broadmoor Hospital where they were held for eleven years.
...the two spent several years isolating themselves in their bedroom, engaged in elaborate plays with dolls. They created many plays and stories in a sort of soap opera style, reading some of them aloud on tape as gifts for their sister, Rose. Inspired by a pair of gift diaries on Christmas 1979, they began their writing careers. They sent away for a mail-order course in creative writing, and each kept an extensive diary and wrote a number of stories, poems and novels. Set primarily in the United States and particularly in Malibu, California, the stories involve young men and women who exhibit strange and often criminal behavior.
June wrote a novel titled "Pepsi-Cola Addict", in which the high-school hero is seduced by a teacher, then sent away to a reformatory where a homosexual guard makes a play for him. The two girls pooled together their unemployment benefits in order to get the novel published by a vanity press. Their other attempts to publish novels and stories were unsuccessful. In Jennifer's "The Pugilist", a physician is so eager to save his child's life that he kills the family dog to obtain its heart for a transplant. The dog's spirit lives on in the child and ultimately has its revenge against the father. Jennifer also wrote "Discomania", the story of a young woman who discovers that the atmosphere of a local disco incites patrons to insane violence. She followed up with The Taxi-Driver's Son, a radio play called Postman and Postwoman, and several short stories. June Gibbons is considered to be an outsider writer.
In their later teenage years, the twins began experimenting with drugs and alcohol. In 1981, the girls committed a number of crimes including vandalism, petty theft and arson, which led to their being admitted to Broadmoor Hospital, a high-security mental health hospital. The twins were sentenced to indefinite detention under the Mental Health Act 1983. They remained at Broadmoor for eleven years.
... In March 1993, the twins were transferred from Broadmoor to the more open Caswell Clinic in Bridgend, Wales. On arrival Jennifer could not be roused. She was taken to the hospital where she died soon after of acute myocarditis, a sudden inflammation of the heart. There was no evidence of drugs or poison in her system, and her death remains a mystery.
...After Jennifer's death, June gave interviews with Harper's Bazaar and The Guardian. By 2008, she was living quietly and independently, near her parents in West Wales. She was no longer monitored by psychiatric services, has been accepted by her community, and sought to put the past behind her.


3 min trailer
 
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Jennifer Gibbons, Marjorie Wallace and June Gibbons 1993
Journalist Marjorie Wallace of The Sunday Times wrote a book about the two called The Silent Twins.
Documentary about the twins June and Jennifer Gibbons of Barbadian descent, born in 1963 and raised in Yorkshire and Devon, England, and in Wales, near Royal Air Force bases where their father worked as a technician. Their elective mutism was a manifestation of a psychological bond that at once sustained and strangled them, cutting them off from vital relations with anyone else. For most of their lives they were deaf to voices other than their own, cut off from the discourse of the family and the larger community surrounding them. Relies heavily on interviews with June Gibbons after the sudden death of Jennifer in 1993. --53 mins video

 

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