Dear distant relative, there is a feeling of estrangement when speaking many languages, fluently and broken in a western patriarchal nation. To research this feeling, I set up a table for poets, artists, composers, academics and activists who challenge writing as a technology for communication. With close readings of Audre Lorde, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Amelia Rosselli, I argue that a broken tongue is not a fracture of speech, but a sign of inhabiting multiple cultural identities. The mother tongue is a muscle memory passed on by ancestors, not the possession of a nation. Writing has the potential to shape inner worlds and undo the lines of western- (his)toricities. Sadie Plant, Aria Dean, and Luisiana Parisi & Denise Ferrera da Silva question how the internet, a written technology, carries colonial motives and governs different voices into sexist, racist and classist categories. Cybernetics, viewed here as the 1950s “son” of capitalism, is a technology constructed with the aim of controlling the communication between human,  machine and capital. Treating an origin as a linear narrative will continue to oscillate in the cybernetic loop, encoding past violences into present systems.  The complex feeling of not being able to reach back to a cultural identity of ancestors, not having the desire to disappear into a script not written oneself, is why the question who am i is political. 

Keywords  writing-as-resistance, de-colonization, resilience, disobedience, noise, corporal, poetry

Author: Celeste Perret