from A Cat in the Throat

In the bilingual context here described one learns to move from one language to the next while being released from this kind of unquestioned psychosomatic attachment. It is not about having a ‘voice’ (another difficult naturalising concept), it is about siting ‘voice’, locating the spaces and actions through which it becomes possible to be in one’s languages, to stay with languages, to effect one’s speech and work at a point of traffic between them, like a constant transport that takes place in the exchange between one’s body, the air, and the world.

Caroline Bergvall in Jacket

So there is this friction inside the speaker’s mouth. This friction on the throat. The intake of breath, the raspy sound as one clears one’s throat, the spit that forms and wells up, the sounds that follow, the words that form: all of this is linguistically where you are, and how you must begin to understand who you are in language. Friction brings awareness of connection and of obstruction, of physicality and of language twitches. Preparing oneself to speak is part of speaking. Breathing, coughing, spitting become part and parcel of the linguistic situation. It shows the sounds of language as explicitly composed of the body’s mechanics. It is at the root of Sound Poetry’s revolutionary and internationalist poetics, its profound revolt against semantic dominance, and it is also present in the crucial body explorations (this often includes buccal investigations) by performance artists from the 1970s on such as Carolee Schneeman, Adrian Piper, Ann Hamilton, Gary Hill, Lygia Clark, who remind us that the body speaks in mysterious ways and from unexpected orifices.


see ubuweb sound