Impossible Word: Toward a Poetics of Aphasia

He asks me where it is, and I point upstairs from the nest of my bed. I can picture the place, the door in the hallway, which, when opened, reveals a stack of shelves brimming with towels, linens, pillowcases. “It’s in the ...” He stands there looking at me, waiting. “You know, up in the ...” The word won’t come to me. I could lead him there and show him; I could describe how to get there, what the place is made of  (knob, door, hinges, shelves), but the word for the place has estranged itself. The word is hiding in the storm-cloud of symptom, is dressed in a kind of drag, or glamouring in a shapeshifting escapade of evasion. Castle, I hear myself say. “It’s in the castle.” No. That isn’t right. I know it isn’t right. That place is no castle. What a grand name for such a tiny architecture, barely a wardrobe of cupboard-like proportion deposited with poorly-folded bed and bath garments. The recess in the wall demurring to reveal its everyday and most common appellation, cached away in the darkness of its chest, its sign hemmed in solitude in the painted cavity of the abode; a secret kept in the chamber, concealed from my grasp in its most private enclosure; the cloistered anatomy on the second floor, a shut-in shuttering of skeletal symbolism. I circumlocute, and the word, the word has fled, a fugitive sound, an exiled locution located in a string of letters I receive part-forbidden, and mostly-rearranged. The a thinks it is the o’s doppelgänger, but I know better. I see the a riding in on the word castle, itself a shuffled-up jumble of a Trojan horse, thinking it will surprise me by subterfuge of  the warring city in my ante-mouth.

Of course, the irony of the domestic storehouse disguising itself as a castle in the folds of my brain is not lost on my queer-poet sensibility. I am one to question the white, homonormative narrative—that coming out and its perpetually venerated confessional model is the ultimate form of queer freedom. But how we make castles of airless vaults, locking our queerest longings away in towers, or surrounding ourselves with moats of pretense, is its own painful diminution of spirit, however complex a survival strategy it may be at times. It is also not lost on me in that moment that the impediment to my speech, to my ability to name the place, might not be divorced from the impulse hauling me toward the larger speech act of coming out (yet again)—to announce to the world, my worlds, that I am (still) queer, and  very, very sick. The castle, the castle shivers its cold stone on my tongue in the mindfog of  autoimmune miseries, moored in the inflammatory lacunae of  this aphasic episode. The castle looms, a temporary stand-in for the lexicon’s booming absence. But closet  is nowhere to be found.

Affecting about two million US Americans, according to the National Aphasia Association, aphasia is considered a language disorder in which the loss of ability to produce or comprehend speech, and the ability to read and write, are a result of  brain injury due to any number of neurobiological, psychological, and environmental stressors. (“Aphasia” tends to be the term used, but some also use the word “dysphasia” interchangeably.) It can be severe or mild, long term or episodic, conducive to recovery in whole or part or not at all. Speech clinicians differentiate between at least six forms of aphasia, though do not limit aphasic syndromes strictly to these forms, acknowledging a complex relationship between language, the brain, and illness-related impairments. The most severe form of aphasia may emerge after a stroke. Other forms are effected through neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, each often rendering speech a laborious task by limiting vocabulary access and sound formation, producing grammatical disruption. With my own autoimmune illness, what is called “anomic aphasia” or “anomia” sometimes emerges when I experience a flare of symptoms brought on by physical, psychological, or chemical stress. It is a considerably more minor aphasic form wherein word supply is meddled with to various degrees. In particular, nouns and verbs, the names of things or what they do, stray into truancy, despite the expectation that they will show up to maintain the order of language, the sequence of a normative quotidian prose. A kind of cataphoric catastrophe. As the first stanza of Vijay Seshadri’s poem “Aphasia” so beautifully renders it:

His signs flick off.

His names of birds

and his beautiful words—

eleemosynary, fir, cinerarium, reckless—

skip like pearls from a snapped necklace

scattering over linoleum.

My signs flick off, and my names of beloveds, my words—for all the beauty I see, or the most ordinary object before me—wander off from the string cohering into sentences, a handful of scattered pearls that have rolled across the floor and fallen into the crack under the floorboard. There are moments I will be standing next to someone I’ve known, perhaps loved deeply, for twenty or thirty years and cannot tell you what they call themselves. Sometimes I stand at my apartment door, questioning if I do actually live there, the “4B” appearing unfamiliar, unsolid, leaving me afraid I may be intruding upon some unsuspecting neighbor, and relieved when I realize it is indeed home—that the intrusion was merely the absence projected upon my clarity. Yesterday, I could see bourbon, its caramel color sloshing in my mind’s eye, I could taste its vanilla oak in my memory-mouth, but I could not have ordered that honey liquid by its handle. Often, the first letter of an otherwise absenting word will present itself, b-b-b, buh-buh-buh. I feel the misfire of synaptic ligatures, the momentary broken-record repetition in playback, as the word searches for the enunciation of itself, the shape it is owed. Unable to form a response, I find the sound of my attempted utterance repeatedly hitting up against my teeth, the start and stop of the mouth’s engine, the halted guttural, the frustrated maw, delaying the formation of anything intelligible. I know where I’m headed, I just can’t get there right away. The aphasic stutter stumbles out.

(As an aside: the stutter, I feel, offers its own possibilities for dissenting poetics disruptive of linearities. Miri Davidson has a stunning piece on the politics and history of medical response to the stutter, titled “Speech Work.”)

Neuroimaging of aphasic brains often shows evidence of lesions, appearing on scans as uninvited spots that indicate injury to the structural anatomy of the brain’s language machinery. But it is not intelligence that is impacted: it is language processing and communication. The mind still knows the beauty of its languages. It simply cannot always, or sometimes evermore, reach them. Like a blind spot in the rearview, one knows there is something unrevealed that is significant, but nonetheless carefully strives to keep on the move.
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Perhaps most famously among poets, Charles Baudelaire contended with aphasia after a stroke in 1866 that left him with a singular utterance available to him through most of the final year of his life: crénom! A curse akin to holy shit! or bloody hell!—crénom derives from sacré nom, or holy name—a French exclamatory swear phrase prefixed to any number of words such as dog, blue, pipe, little boy, Zeus—all as attenuations of God’s name, which may also be used, such that the literal translation is “holy name of X!” as in, Holy name of God!

Holy name: the mockery that aphasia’s lawless brain makes of Baudelaire, of his ability to name, to name anything that remained holy in the infinite glimmer of his spotted mind: what doctors explained to his mother as a loss of “the memory of sound.” His brilliance remained intact, but he could no longer manifest it in the world, neither in social relation, nor in relation on, or with, the page. Holy name: a curse the poet turns back upon the world for shaping itself thus through language lost, and through the losses inherent in putting anything to language. To mark the sacred-profane of what cannot be said because it has become literally unspeakable.

How has the name of the thing been made sacred, proper? What does my temporary inability to name something, my anomia, perform on the sacrosanct and reifying force of the name? If my wellness is imperiled, and I have lost my autonomous will to the word, am I still a poet? In times without wellness—which is to say, the word—will there be poetry? And how does our being in (or out of ) speech, a-nomic, “without-name” and “without-law,” produce an otherwise against the logocentrism of linguistic order? What does this do to the power relations between subject and object, the named and the nameless, the holy and the degenerate of poetry’s substance and form? Where the order of linguistic law reigns, the aphasic brain runs lawless, a wandering in errantries in a hieroglyphic gestural scrawl. But efficiency is a necessity under the rule of fascist and capitalist linguistic orders. As in the early nineteenth-century French use of the word for “aphemia,” the disorder of articulation, aphemie, carried homophonic similitude with infamie (English: “infamy”): a shameful malignment of the illness for its criminal offense against the reign of grammatical truth. A kind of linguistic protest by way of lexical work stoppage, therefore, also opens onto the page as the poet’s aphasic subversion.

The curse, as the singular utterance in Baudelaire’s aphasic well of the unspoken, turns against the sacredness of the name, its propers, its properties, the subject’s possessive realm, which begins, nominally, self-reflexively, with the I. Baudelaire thinks a whole wide world teeming with modernity’s evil flowers, but aphasically can no longer speak much other than that single phrase: (Hello, my name is Baudelaire.) Crénom! (I want an apple.) Crénom! (I cut myself.) Crénom! (Do you want to go for a walk?) Crénom! (Leave me alone.) Crénom! (Kiss me.) Crénom! (Every poem left that yearns for the page.) Crénom, crénom! Holy name, holy name, holy name!

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In Harryette Mullen’s poetry collection Sleeping with the Dictionary, her poem “Wipe That Simile Off Your Aphasia” plays with the meaning-making rendered possible through the metonymic word substitution harnessed by the aphasic mind:

as horses as for
as purple as we go
as heartbeat as if
as silverware as it were
as onion as I can

Her own list of closets that become castles, the cognitive replacement of words with others, carry some not-quite resemblance. Simile, smile; aphasia, face—Mullen plays with the inventive meaning-making, the poetics, of aphasia’s possibilities in seemingly random word replacement induced by the brain gone a bit haywire. When I call the closet a castle, all meaning is not lost. A new meaning, a poetics born of aphasia, opens onto infinite possibilities as the brain finds anything but the proper name for the thing. Emily P. Beall writes of Mullen’s piece, pointing to its use of the defamiliarization technique common to cognitive poetics, that Mullen “manipulates not only the subject matter of her writing but the process the reader undertakes in attempting to read that defamiliarized language as well.” The aphasic mind takes everyday and familiar language, expected syntax and vocabularies, and renders them unfamiliar so as to see them anew. The phonological similarity of its replacements strike me as an artful deviation that extends names proper into a heterolinguistic or heteronomic plenitude. In other words, the heterogeneous landscape of meaning posed by the aphasic mind offers up what Hypatia Vourloumis, citing Paolo Virno, calls a “grammar of the multitude.” She writes that aphasia is a “syncopetic space that is the irregularity and suppression of speech” affecting the ability to “produce coherent articulations.” Syncopation, synkoptein, Greek for “a cutting,” suggests that syncopetics opens onto syncopoetics—a poetics, a making of the world, emerging from the cutting off, in this case, of speech, of the name. Further, “in order to understand how language works we must look at situations where speech collapses,” Vourloumis writes, “suggesting that perhaps the secrets of articulation reveal themselves in those who cannot speak. That to know language is to know it in its absence or its disruption.” Aphasia is thus a haunting in the mouth; the word, the world of the word, an arrivant absent for being cut off but present as it remains on its way. The word living in the cut. Never and always on its way.

In the quiet loss by way of aphasia’s taking of language, we watch a death unfold, nothing spectacular, and quite solitary, as with Chris Abani’s poem “Aphasia”:

My language is dying the same way

                  my father did:

Alone. Night. And there are no storms. Only

                  moonlight straining through holes in a tin roof

And the slight exhalation, lips

                  pursed as though to say:  Uwa'm. 

In the notes to his book Hands Washing Water, Abani writes of this poem:

Uwa’m translates as “my world.” But in Igbo, it is also understood to be a phrase, “my goodness.” It also means “my life,” “my destiny”; it can also be a lament. This is not exhaustive. At death, it is, quite literally, “giving up the ghost.”

As though to say, uwa’m stays in the ante-mouth, hanging off the pursed lips but never reaching utterance, the poem alerting us to its presence, but watching the mouth, the mind, that has lost access to it. Not only is the word lost, but in its incommunicability, its unsayability, it dies without flesh— my world, my life, the lament that would chronicle a mourning. It is the haunted unspoken that in its speaking would mark the giving up of the ghost, the death of the language that is its condition of possibility as something that has a ghost to give up in the first place. And also, my goodness, a more tame interjective expression cousin to Baudelaire’s crénom!—the curse that also invokes the name of God: my goodness, my God, Holy Name!

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At the end of the second act of Schoenberg’s 1932 opera Moses und Aron, Moses proclaims, “O word, thou word, that I lack!” (O wort, du wort, das mir fehlt!) In addressing the word as thou, the word stands in for the intimate presence of God, but the word eludes. The failure of words to appear, manifest, or express the name of God, the Holy Name (which is also curse), due to what in it cannot be said, leaves Moses prophesying an invincibility in the wasteland that will allow for union with the sacred divine of the unnameable. The desert in the mouth is a wilderness; the word, horizon.

Adorno writes that in his failure to put the divine into language, Moses’s lament of that failure becomes music, and having become music, his thought remains unarticulated, protected in its silence. As philosophy scholar Lydia Goehr tells us, viewing Moses’s proclamation, O word, thou word, that I lack! in light of the early German Romantics’ commitment to a politics and aesthetics of fragmentation, Adorno understands this biblical moment of Schoenberg as representative of the “insoluble conflict between the finite and the infinite.” The sacred of life taken up in the word encounters the word’s inability to grasp it. And let us not forget that the prophets are also poets: the act of poesis building world out of word, even as word cannot contain world. Following theological scholar Richard Viladesau, the imagination, in word and sense, can evoke the unnameable, and hence bring us closer to the encounter with the secular divine, the sacred and profane of it all, the mystery and mundanity, the force of life and its living. This is, some of us believe, a reason for poetry, rooted in the arts of summoning the unnameable, the impossibles of the finite and the infinite, into the world and into the word, in pieces. The aphasic utterance, its poetic cut, its piecing of language to name the unnameable, its yearning for the word that is lacked, summons up the impossible language from world and word, in pieces. B-B-B. Snapped pearls. Crénom! The sigh in place of uwa’m.

As Goehr writes, “To produce a fragment was all one could and should now do if one’s art was to hold on to the sacred, as one holds on to life, in a world in which a work, as a life, ‘can no longer be lived.’” For Baudelaire, the holy-name-and-curse-as-fragment holds his world on the edge of his tongue, a fragment of a presence containing the absence, the loss, the death, the life that can no longer be lived. For Abani, uwa’m is world and loss of world all at once, the unnameable truth at the cliff of the mouth, a fragment always-already not-yet and no-longer. For myself, in the moments of anomia, meaning is disrupted and the fiction of the self as any kind of whole and contained subject shatters. The what-would-have-been-said is defamiliarized by what is never said or what is said instead, by circumlocution or metonymy, as speech forms a self in the world other than what was expected or desired. The unspeakable, the ghost at my tongue, is mirror to a disintegrated subjectivity, as fragmented speech and fragmented self face the humiliation, the degradation that is the source of fury, as well as reminder of the sacredness and asingularity of being. The word that I lack forces me to become a kind of music.

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Felisa Hervey, celebrated veteran, activist, and poet, suffered a stroke in 2015, resulting in aphasia. Her declaration that “I feel that God has disappeared” echoes Abani’s loss of world, as her words hang in the crush of the unspeakable. The word as a sacred-profane form of the secular divine, in its unspeakability, makes language both urgent and unrecognizable in its national forms, as an aphasic poetics steps in, suggesting that if God has disappeared, it is because, as Nietzsche proclaimed, God—or here, Language (as Universal Law)—has long been dead. An aphasic poetics, as a joyful pursuit of poetry without law, unfolds into the exhilarating and terrifying open sea of possibility, a shimmer spread across the water’s horizon. When Hervey says, “war sad, but heart tie,” and “head but trapped,” the aphasic disruption of grammar defamiliarizes syntax in a syncopoetics that renders language toward the surprise and unexpected that is at the center of our cravings for poetic innovation.

Charles Simic asks us to question the value of the whole in poetic language and representation. He proposes, in a sense, a kind of anomia (to be or to write without Name, without Law). As J. Heath Atchley writes,

According to Simic, poetic images change the meaning of meaning: a language that valorises the poetic image is one that does not seek secure signification in order to be valuable. This type of language evokes an asubjective presence that is also an absence, a recognition of a metaphysical emptiness that lies at the limits of consciousness. For Simic, this sense of presence is a secular experience of the divine.

(O word, thou word, that I lack!) The haunting in the mouth, the word that never comes, as well as the word without sense taking its place, refuses language its secure signification—an absence that is also a presence, in the ungrammaticality of aphasia’s insistences. The fragmented self of (un) speech evoking an asubjective presence that is also an absence, a secular encounter with the Unnameable.

Though French linguist Marina Yaguello suggests that the difference between poetic texts and aphasic texts is that of intention, I wonder at how a focus on intention reproduces the liberal, individualistic subject as autonomous, willful, and speaking properly (proper speech as property), or how aphasia’s disruption of syntactical cohesion, its semantic ungrammaticality, can nourish poetry’s aim at the same? Yaguello writes,

Antonin Artaud, André Breton, Robert Desnos, James Joyce, e.e. cummings, and Gertrude Stein, to name but a few, tried to break grammar up creatively, thereby questioning the function of communication based upon the norm or social consensus in which language is founded. The reason we recognize their work as art rather than gibberish is that some meaning is intended, even when it is based on organized deviance.

The assumption is that the aphasic grammars and heteronomies, as mistakes or failures without intention behind their formation, are ill-formed. But that is precisely the point. The poetics of ill-formed language, as in, language formed by illness, violates the institution of the healthy, secure, linguistic formation and the grammatical imperialism holding it to its properties. In his first book, On Aphasia (1891), Freud cites a case from Carl Wernicke’s work: a patient whose aphasia affected the sequence of her language rather than the recall of words. After receiving a gift, she said, “There I leave for myself many many times everything possible which have you only seen. I thank many a good time that you told me all this. There I thank many times that you have been so kind, that you have been so kindly.” The patient, who was clearly attempting to express her gratitude, produced an irregular syntax that, for me, mirrors the syntactical violations of writers pursuing radical experimentation that has challenged the status quo—the likes of E.E. Cummings, who himself was considered by some incapable of poetry, purely for his revolt against tradition, as in, “somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience.” The poetics of aphasia in the speech of Wernicke’s patient absents the linear normativity of language, as do the poetics of Cummings’s modernism.

The notion that the language of one (Cummings) is considered legitimate due to its production by an autonomous will or intention into language and its subversions, and the other (Wernicke’s patient) not so because it is an effect of illness and therefore an unintended accident, reproduces a system of value contingent on the Western subject of colonialism-capitalism. The division of poetic versus aphasic (read: not-poetic) speech is layered with the racism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism of a colonial order that also continues to delegitimate other syntactical and linguistic deviations found in linguistic practices. For example, linguistic formations such as Spanglish, Black Vernacular English, and Creole English are measured against a standardized English. Experimentations with the latter are often considered literary deviations of artful subjects only when pursued by white, bourgeois, (often male,) “healthy” writers. A long history of the conflation of racialized, queer, and disabled bodies, selves, and languages shows us that bodies of color are always-already understood in the colonial imaginary (and its insidiously persistent afterlives) as disabled and queer; that queer bodies are always-already viewed as disabled and not-properly-white (improperly avoiding the property relation made possible by heterosexual marriage, for instance); and that disabled bodies are always-already queer and not-properly-white. These other forms of racialized and disabled cutting-up of standardized English pose their own artful and anticolonial deviations, inventing a new poetics and worlding through linguistic alterity, a grammar of the multitude. Aphasic speech is one among many of these counter-poetic forms born from the asubjective firmament of collective imaginaries: an “ill-formed” tongue denied authority expressly because of its insurgency against the established order of its lexifier.

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In 1988, Samuel Beckett suffered a neurological illness that left him temporarily aphasic. Slowly recovering in the hospital, he wrote his final poem about the madness of occupying language between the voluntary and involuntary of aphasia’s artful deviations. The poem begins:

folie—
folie que de—
que de—
comment dire—

madness (folly)—madness (folly) for—for to—what is the word—. Written in French and titled “Comment Dire” (literally: How to Say; or translated by Beckett: What Is the Word), the poem’s aphasic flows of “stuttered dashes, abrupt elisions, compulsive repetitions and controlled echoes that inhabit an uncanny hinterland” suggest to me not a “fruitless compulsion to search for words,” as Laura Salisbury suggests, but the cutting up of language intrinsic to aphasia’s syncopoetics, making and remaking a world. Raised on Calvinism, Beckett plays with the notion that: “In the beginning was the word and the word was God”—placing “folie,” folly, madness in the beginning of the poem. By doing so, he cuts God from the Word; God is left to linger in the cut. The sacredness of the word and of the Name are turned over on themselves as the poem’s invocation of aphasic confrontations with absence are made present in the dashes and their elisions of words ghosting themselves, haunting speech in their unspeakability. Beckett’s translation of his French title into “What Is the Word” evokes aphasia’s frustration of language, of the word that can’t be found, while simultaneously replacing God with the What, aphasia’s bringing the Law of Language into question, or rendering the Holy Name itself a question. The word was God, but what is the word? How to say what cannot be said? Without the aphasic disruption and lawlessness, meaning, perhaps, becomes finite: the possibilities for poetry are limited within the grammatical reason of the Law, which is to say, a sacred that is known, and therefore nameable. The unspeakable of the name of the many things that could be contained in the what of the uncanny hinterland, the misprisions born against language’s claims to certainty, beget the grammar of the multitude, revealing the secrets of articulation through aphasia’s collapsed speech. As Salisbury ends her essay,

Repeating its traumas and losses alongside the possibilities of the new shapes of experience it traces out, the aphasic symptom in Beckett’s work...insists that the contours of a newly complicated subjectivity reveal themselves most clearly not in health, but in the embodied, perhaps as yet untranslatable, articulations of injury and disease.

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Roman Jakobson suggests that all forms of aphasia operate between two different poles: the metaphoric and the metonymic. These effects he sees in the diversity of linguistic impairments caused by aphasia, as well as in the verbal and visual arts, including poetry. Ann Stoler has suggested that aphasia offers us metaphorical potential in helping us understand the condition of history and its writing in the wake of colonization. The Memory of the nation-state does not suffer amnesia or forgetting, she proposes. Rather, it carries a memory of history, but is at a loss for words sufficient to communicate that history—the nation-state is afflicted with “colonial aphasia.” The history of the colonized, of those from “below,” is an “absent presence” as the nation remains aphasic in its “irretrievability of a vocabulary.” It is thus not memory-work that will remedy the violence of how History with a capital H has been written, but a retrieval of the vocabulary that has been occluded from presence in the national body. In Xiao Yue Shan’s chapbook, How Often I Have Chosen Love, the poem “Nation of Aphasia” makes painfully evident how the irretrievability of a vocabulary corresponds to the irretrievability of life itself. The body of the dissident disappeared, as well as the future of national character, as free or bound to authoritarian tradition, are all at stake, foregrounding aphasia’s metaphorical potential:

when a writer goes missing in china
we take the red and gold paper emblems
that display the character for luck
off of our doors and paste them
over our mouths. and we go back to
the old books to learn again
what we’ve learned for millennia,
that you can command armies or
recompose history or traverse
from xian to changsha to mount lu
or buy a dozen eggs and none of it
will mean that your life is a promise
your country makes to you.
hong kong is a dewdrop glittering
in mid-january. we close our eyes
to take its temperature, trying to find
just the right word. the rain
only a sweet-tasting silhouette against
the gleaming skyline. late-day light
spreads a white sheet over the windows
and no one can see in. no one can see out.
still, no one ever thinks this is the day
someone will knock on the door
asking you to identify your husband
by his handwriting. how is it that
we have made a culture out of
paying a heavy price. wearing out stones
with water. chasing the sun across
the eastern front with our poems
closing in behind us like lost birds.
the gardens we do not tend. the paper
boats we do not try in the yangtze.
imagine your life is the thing
that is trapped on the tip of your tongue,
the word that is almost realized,
but you can’t quite think of.

Henri Bergson wrote in Matter and Memory (1896) that aphasia is not a loss of memory but a loss of the corporeal mechanism needed to express memory. The metaphor of national aphasia in Xiao’s piece suggests that it is not that the nation has lost its memory of the price of violence paid but that the body politic has suffered an irretrievability of vocabulary for its travails, having lost its apparatus of expression for a collective memory that would rally the people’s telling against the erasures and fissures of what is available (or not) as public speech and collective national mourning. History, speech, and forms of oppression collide in the poem’s final eleven lines, producing a feeling of psychic suffocation. The as though to say is caught in suspension at the edge of the tongue, though rather than being a word that is irretrievable, it is the vibrancy of life, your life, itself in a form of freedom the poet conjures up through the sensory pleasures (freedom’s presence) and terrors (freedom’s absence) intertwined throughout the poem. Your life is the thing ... you can’t quite think of. My world, my life, uwa’m.

In another iteration of aphasia’s metaphorical register, Barnor Hesse describes what P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods call “conceptual aphasia” as the

condition of ineffability that arises when critiques of race are confronted by their denial of the continuing historical trauma and structural relations of violence residual and yet palpable from the enslavement of black populations in the racial institution of US “society.”

This “conceptual aphasia in black” results in vague circumlocutions that never actually name, but are absent of speech acknowledging the presence of Blackness and anti-Blackness as foundational to non-Black life. On the other hand, Frank B. Wilderson, in analyzing the autobiographical narratives of members of the Black Liberation Army, suggests that in the context of political trials, Black subjects are struck with a kind of aphasia in relation to articulating, to a white audience and to the state, the suffering of their own bodies in the face of violence at the hands of whiteness. In lieu of mourning, a “disorientation constituted by a paradigm of violence which is too comprehensive for words” strikes. The suffering and pain of the Black body is met with an irretrievability of language available to the Black BLA soldier, such as with Safiya Bukhari, as a form of public speech articulating the physical and psychological wounds of ongoing racialized violence. Reflection on the mutilation and death of Black bodies is occluded from the public sphere as bearing witness while Black is forced into an aphasic mode that contains its speech to facts, statistics, and description considered palatable enough for white audiences. The absence of emotion, of narration of a complex psychological response, and of the world lost in such deaths, is a symptom of a kind of social-political aphasia in which Black trauma is rendered both unspeakable as well as illegible, as its languaging is allocated to a status of ungrammaticality. Bukhari can describe the scene of violence she survived in dry detail, but the unnameable truth, the loss of world in the loss of Black life, is the haunted unspoken. Your life is the thing ... you can’t quite think of. My world, my life, uwa’m.

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In his book Poetic Intention, Édouard Glissant suggests that the poem, in its intention, must never deny “the way of the world.” This shifts intention away from that of the writer and their use of language, as healthy or sick; art or gibberish; poetic or aphasic; legitimate or illegitimate. Instead, Glissant asks us to attend to the intention (the will, desire, aspiration, reach) of the poem itself: whether it invites or forecloses; what it does or does not deny; and whether it extends toward the world, its politics, histories, possibilities. The ill-formed language of aphasia as poetic intention is necessarily one which reflects the order of valued and valuing bodies and languages in modernity, and turns it back on itself in contravention. As Nancy Rose Hunt writes, aphasia is contoured by what the German clinician Kurt Goldstein called a “detour”: how those stricken by war and catastrophe circumnavigate aphasia’s absences through peculiarities of speech—asking us to consider the intertwinements of “history, speech, and forms of oppression.” The sick poet is in the world, subject to its ways by the material needs of the body and the ramifications of its movement through a social-political order.

I am in the world, unable to deny the way of it. I carry the world in me. It is because of the world that I am sick. Aphasia is a symptom of being in the world, of living in language and its limits. The poetic intention of the aphasic mind can only be a confirmation of the body in the world remembered but unnameable, the world as historical and subject to language: an invitation to its making and unmaking and making again. In this sense, aphasia brings us to what Michel Foucault called the “edge of anguish”—a displacement or disassociation from relating oneself through words and story, the trauma of incommunicability and its well of loneliness. But it is also a resistance of alienation—not the disappearance of God or self or relation but the phantasmagoric appearance of God and self and relation in fragmented and ghostly forms of absence resulting in the repuzzling of the jigsaw of language. (To my delight, jigsaw puzzle, in Spanish, is called a rompecabeza—literally that which breaks the head.) The intimacy between dislocated language and fragmented subjectivity is, for Gilles Deleuze, an anti-capitalist opening against the investments of homogenous equilibrium of speech. Aphasia is, rather than pathology denying us a world, a political and poetic achievement which art and philosophy are meant to serve, in refusal of common sense and capitalist forms of communication. For Nancy Rose Hunt, a “volatile poetic aphasia” is a kind of anti-poise, a freedom in disequilibrium.

Aphasia’s poetics throw the terrible and marvelous of its broken head out against the dreary machinery of capitalist poetry. Its jam of speech jams the order. It becomes music, a jam session of ghosts in the before and after of speech, a quarter-note pulse on the cymbal, or the staccato of the aphasic stutter preceding its silences, B-B-B; it is a speculative encounter between words and not-words, words that never will, words that might be, and words that might be otherwise. In the break of the aphasic stutter and its eventual utterances, an uncommodifiable poetics is born. The aphasic mind, broken and in the break, objects to poetry’s commodifiability. In his formidable work, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Fred Moten writes of Black life, Black noise, Black bodies and selves, refusing the reduction to pure commodity under slavery. Quoting Glissant, he notes that speech was forbidden the enslaved even as the spoken imposed a syntax of the master’s language. There is no poetry in the violence of the system, the order of things. But there is poetry in what life, what beautiful, we make from it. For Moten, the enslaved as one denied legibility as an agential speaking subject countered this denial through revolting against language “by way of an interruption of phonic substance that cuts and augments meaning with a phonographic, rematerializing inscription.” Phono-graphic: writing by sound—a poesis, a making and breaking of world from the place of broken. Further, such deuniversalizations (defamiliarizations, if you will, estrangements) are “fissures or invaginations of a foreclosed universality, a heroic but bounded eroticism.” I can’t help but wonder how aphasia’s varied and complicated utterances, its agrammaticalities, the diverse and ill-formed syntax of the afflicted, produce its own interruptions, fissures, cuts, syncopoetics of foreclosed universality, in part through the stutter as a phonographic interruption, but also through an abessegraphic mode—writing by absence. It is a bounded eroticism found in the cut, in the break of language—a way to touch, to love, to entangle through the encounter with incoherences insisting on a revision of the conditions of possibility for meaning-making. That aphasia’s “non-sense” as a rematerializing inscription produces a syntax estranging us from the commodifiability of language, documenting a world more strange than what we think we know, is at the foundation of its poetic possibilities. As for Moten, “every disappearance is a recording.” The castle where a closet had been. Crénom! Uwa’m, my world, my life. The word giving up the ghost. How I love my world, my life, in the absence of the word, the name for what is holy to me.

To borrow from Deleuze: as with art and disease, poetry in or from disease can reinvent the givens we have come to expect of language and its worlding, wresting it from predetermined modes of self and text to joyfully or furiously afflict it with an aesthetic alterity, to queer its sensibilities. If queer is about deviance and deviation from the norm, the ungrammaticality of the ill-formed utterance is a queering of language, a subversion of the expected into which we are otherwise conscripted. The symptom, the loss of language, the loss of the Name, is also an elixir which, while no remedy, alchemizes the materiality of illness with that of language (our bodies, historical and in relation through these things), inside of and in spite of the non-lexical and ideational processes of the aphasic mind spilled into utterances of artful deviation. As though to say what cannot be said. To not say what must be said. To haunt language with a proliferation of absences exposing the folly of belief in the reliability of words as they appear. To be, and let language be, the ghost one must give up. To build castles where they don’t belong. To hurl the Holy Name, crénom! To mourn the loss of my world, my life, and to find it in the poem, an infinite glimmer, never and always out of reach.