Regaining a place from which to speak and be heard: In search of a response to the “violence of voicelessness”

Abstract

This paper is concerned with linguistic vulnerability to man-made trauma, displacement, and exclusion, as well as with strategies of resilience that valorise socially-depreciated resources within the linguistic repertoire. It focuses on an interview carried out within a transdisciplinary project which – from a medical, a psycho-therapeutical and a linguistic perspective – addressed interrelations between multilingualism, trauma and resilience. A close reading of the biographical narrative raises three main points. First, how a life in permanent precarity and suspense is lived as “violence of voicelessness†(Anthonissen) – as the loss of any acknowledged position from which one can relate oneself to the world by social action and interaction. Second, how the pressure of exclusion contributes to re-invoking earlier traumatic or stressful experiences. Finally, how (sometimes unexpected) linguistic resources can strengthen resilience. Such resources include an awareness of the potential that lies in what I would call a “heteroglossia of survivalâ€, in the possibility of mobilizing means of expression associated with the semiotic dimension of language (Kristeva), and in the struggle for recognition through which it becomes possible to re- position oneself, to regain a place from which to speak.