Articles

Unmoored: Language Pain, Porosity, and Poisonwood

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Abstract

This paper considers the experience of unmoored multilingualism through autoethnographic reflection, literary fiction, and anthropological inquiry. Drawing from the work of Elaine Scarry, Simone Weil, Anne Carson, and Tim Ingold, Phipps contemplates the embodied relationship between pain and languages, movement, and the porosity of language worlds. Phipp’s exploration of these abstract concepts is shaped by a collage of voices from asylum seekers, refugees and their advocates, and through the voices of fiction, which tell of pain and porosity in unmoored languages. In particular, the paper draws from Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible and Camilla Gibb’s Sweetness in the Belly, as well as Phipp’s own personal experiences.

Keywords: language pain, ontology, subjectivity, poetics, trauma, Blen, Tigrinya

How to Cite:

Phipps, A., (2013) “Unmoored: Language Pain, Porosity, and Poisonwood”, Critical Multilingualism Studies 1(2), 96-118.