Fouad Asfour

This is not my language: spitting (m)other tongues

Inspired by Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuna’s book “Spit Temple”, this performance explores a bodily discomfort of inhabiting a body and identity that is fixed, inscribed, named. It interrogates how language, as symbolic form of communication, is enacted through canonised governance of national grammars. Drawing from the contested debate around decolonising language and use of colonial languages, I refer to the practices of artists and writers who declared war on the epistemic colonial, as “linguistic guerrilla” (Mohamed Khair-Eddine), or “border-writing” (Gloria Anzaldua). Using food colourant to spray my elocution onto suspended paper, I refuse the correct pronunciation of any language that roams my body, making the unhoming of my “hand-to-hand combat” of accent (Derrida) visible.

In my spitting writing practice, I want to make visible the performativity of language and re-enact the multiple forms of migration my family has experienced, and so listen to the silenced unhomed Arabic language of my father who migrated to Germany in the 60s. The performance activates the repulsive affect of spitting in public, in a bid to sound out borders that are drawn across my writing/body/self. Borders do not only appear as fleshiness, or grain, or rustle of language (Barthes) but I want to examine the desire to disappear in a “pure” form of elocution and accented-less-ness, which is erected as border against unhomedness, against any language “other”, and how the performance of language erects and re-enacts physical borders against of a perceived bastardised, creolised and deformed language. Similar to seasickness, this spitting is induced by standing still and being fixed in language by grammaticality, driven by a desire to delimit, queer and other languaging to find new forms of estranged communities. 

Performance, 2022