Radical Listening: On Language, Displacement, and Land

Radical Listening is a series of sonic invitations for listeners to re-imagine their relationship to language and explore listening as ritual and as healing practice.

I have been a practicing translator and interpreter since I was at least 9 years old, not out of intellectual curiosity or artistic experimentation, but as a mode of survival and a way to understand and navigate my world. As someone who comes to language work through an experience of displacement, I am inspired by people like Christine Sun Kim, Don Mee Choi, bell hooks, Layli Long Soldier, ChristinaMaria Xochitlzihuatl Patiño Houle, and countless other BIPOC language workers across the U.S./Global South who are pushing language beyond its white supremacist, capitalist understandings into exploring different ways to see the world and create worlds. I think this practice is particularly available to and of Queer, Trans BIPOC, both in the diaspora as well as in the lands we originate from. Language always remembers us, even when we don't. 

The way that translation and interpretation have been used as a tool to "understand" us, as a tool for "cultural exchange" elucidates the dominant colonial understanding of language, especially in the United States. As Don Mee Choi beautifully states:

"My translation intent has nothing to do with personal growth, intellectual exercise, or cultural exchange, which implies an equal standing of some sort. South Korea and the U.S. are not equal. I am not transnationally equal. My intent is to expose what a neocolony is, what it does to its own, what it eats and shits." 

I find this experience visceral, as someone who is part of a diasporic community, as someone who is queer, who grew up poor and working class, who lives with disability. Language has been taken from my communities, over and over again, language work, language as a framework of liberation has been co-opted by white institutions, by white artists, by white supremacy and capitalism. Our languages have been stripped of their power and in turn used to translate us. I'm interested in exploring and pushing beyond what we currently understand as language - at least in the West and in our neoliberal suspension - to plot beyond the written word as most valuable, to scheme beyond individual self-realization as most valuable, to dream beyond humanness as most valuable and try to consecrate language as connection, as transfiguration, to each other and to the earth.  

Radical listening for me has become a type of ritual and a type of healing practice, and I'm hoping that through these sonic invitations others are able to explore and experience the ways in which language can exist beyond our tongues, and on our tongues, inside our tongues; the ways that we can see language, the ways that we can feel language, the ways that we can taste it and smell it, stomp on it, hold it, embrace it - this is a practice I personally have committed to. Food is my entry-point given its particular relationship to language in my personal experience, in my family's, and in my ancestry, as well as the parallels between the ways we might experience food beyond our mouths, beyond our stomachs, but also experience it as a language in and of its own, with or without its different textures, tastes, and smells. 

When I think about displacement, both in Third Ward and across the globe, I think about the land and I wonder what it feels like to undergo these constant traumatic changes: What is it like when the sounds, the languages of those who used to care for and be in communion with you are no longer heard? Who translates, who interprets, who connects? When we ask ourselves these questions, what are we ready to risk, to expose? 

I was reminded of this upon first connecting with ChristinaMaria Xochitlzihuatl Patiño Houle, who spoke of the sounds of indigenous languages - those are the languages that the land knows and understands. So many things remain stuck in language: who decides what gets translated? who gets translated? for whom? what about the sounds and languages beyond humanness, of the lands, plants and animals that we hear but rarely listen to? Perhaps it's through these untranslatable languages that freer worlds can come to be. What about when language occurs in the body instead of out of the mouth? What have we been saying over and over again, but never truly felt? What feels perpetually out of reach? What are experiences that are resistant to human language? 

We cannot talk about displacement - from our houses, from our neighborhoods, from our power - without the sounds of colonial chains dragging on our tongues. It's right there, in these sites of trauma and hope, of languages stolen, languages fought for, and languages never learned, that new worlds can be born. Radical Listening is about practice, not production. Radical Listening is about stillness, not work. Radical Listening is about potentiating a type of healing and power that is qualitatively different from the power that is used to oppress and divide us.