
Stutter, Stammer, Stumble: On (Not) “Speaking Well” by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
When in major chronic illness flare-ups or activated trauma states or brain fog arising for any number of reasons, I sometimes gain a stutter. Because of childhood trauma, I also have historically not been fantastic at speaking in public off-the-cuff. Under the pressure of performing on the spot, I often stumble as my nervous system is beclouded with the morass of complex post-traumatic stress. I used to simply say I was shy, and that speech was not my first language (I am, at heart, a writer), but I believe this is another way of communicating, or an also to the fact, that I enter into a freeze response. Needless to say, improv is not my game. My brain gets cloudy and glitchy, language and clear thought become less accessible. I sweat and tremble and struggle to articulate. Stutter may enter the room. I might, in those moments, be perceived as less intelligent than I am, especially to those who have a limited measure for conceptualizing intelligence and are not tuned in to what is happening inside of me.
My fury has been piqued all my life, for example, by instances in which certain white people have said that “so-and-so (usually referring to a person of color) sounds ignorant for not speaking ‘proper’ English.” This, of course, is racialized, and also gendered and classed, as an experience. I have more than once in academia and professional worlds left an experience in tears because I found myself stumbling during a presentation, and gazed or commented upon by white and male colleagues with looks of scorn or pity for having failed to perform the proper cognitive brilliance or self-possessed comportment that is expected in those spaces and held up as standards of competence.
Further, living with what gets called “delayed processing” means sometimes the effort to reign in the universe of thoughts, images, feelings, and experiences within and beyond me can feel like an unfurling of a lighting storm in my brain. Critical perspectives on neurodivergence suggest that delayed information processing does not mean we are less intelligent, and does not always mean we are slower at processing information, but often means that we are processing so much more information than neurotypical nervous systems. Might we then embrace delay as elemental to crip time and paraontologies, while also expanding our language toward something akin to amplified informational processing, which makes room for the more?
In moments of sustained amplification, everything is blur and chaos, I freeze in the spacetime of the unspoken, struggling to form thought into speech at all, leaving me stuttering or utterly silent. In the Middle Ages, a belief that allegedly circulated was that if you looked upon a witch, she could steal your speech by feeding your tongue to her familiar, often a cat—one explanation among a few regarding the origins of the phrase, “cat got your tongue?” The threat of “stolen” speech as one linked to witchcraft potentially connects the pathologization of speech differences to religious and governmental power: those whose tongues had been got were seen as touched by the devil. The Curative Regime inherits the imperative to exorcise.
Growing up in the US as brown, queer, neurodivergent, lower-middle class, and second-generation immigrant (with a mother for whom English is a second language and spoken with “an accent”), the pressure of “speaking well” as an assimilative social mandate was ever-present. The stutter and the stumble came to feel like social and moral failures for the fact that I did not always have better control over my ability to “speak well.”
To speak well. I can’t help but see an intimacy woven through between the notion of speaking well and compulsory wellness, compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, and racialized violence. The linking of “well-formed speech” to the romanticization of “self-possession” as a keystone of western, liberal, “healthy” adult subject formation is one example of the historical weaving of ableism with racialized property regimes: to be human in its proper form is to be one’s own prosperous property, to display the property of speaking well. To not speak well is, in the eyes of society, to fall short of human-being. It is to be rendered a less-than-human object of disappointment needing intervention. The stutter meets a shuttering of potential mutual regard.
Josephine Hoegaerts explains in her essay, “Stammering, stuttering and stumbling: A transnational history of the pathologization of dysfluency in nineteenth-century Europe,” that in the nineteenth century, a whole set of vocabularies emerged in Europe and spread transnationally, to understand, diagnose, and treat disfluency, or stuttering. Along with the medicalization and pathologization of speech impediment, she points out, there was a far-reaching bourgeois cultural repertoire through which ideas and mechanisms for recovery of speech toward the ability to “speak well” were constructed and circulated. It seems no coincidence that this increase in methods for regulating speech and public wellness, which also proliferated in the US, converged with three other major, well-known moments in US history: the post-Emancipation era that brought new modes of white governance over black life and speech; the establishment of programs for removal of native children from their communities, and their placement into boarding schools with curriculum that included forcible integration into English-language use and punishment for use of their native languages; and the increasing influx of immigrants entering the US at Ellis Island, where literacy and language tests were used to determine who was “unfit” for entry into the US. “Speaking well” was/is about being white and middle-class, as much as it was about being “fit” or “fluent” or abled. “Fluency” was/is as much about racialized assimilation—of language, speech, and embodiment—as it was/is about assimilation into abled subjectivity.
Contemporary research has shown numerous sources of stutter: virus, trauma, genetics, to name a few. There are also less familiar sources for stutter to find us. Miri Davidson writes about how, at the age of two or three, her stutter began:
not because of an inherited neurological abnormality, but because of a malfunction in my Fisher-Price sing-along cassette recorder. At two or three years old, I was speaking into it when the playback tripped and my voice came back at me in unrecognizable form. From that moment, the story goes, I stuttered. The tape recorder and I had entered into an irreversible unity, inside of which speech did not coincide with the will to speak. Speech was reconfigured as a machine, an object, an apparatus to be wielded with great difficulty, and to wield the machine wrongly meant to invite the wrath of the social world.
But so often the impulse to identify origin of what is pathologized is also tied to efforts at prevention and treatment, aimed at “fixing” what is deemed to be a problem. What is lost in the effort to assimilate stuttered, stammering speech, and stumble, into formations of “speaking well” as constructed through ableism, whiteness, cis-masculinity, and upper- and middle-class norms?
Radical stutterers refusing ableism’s grip on our tongues disavow the pathologization of “disfluency” as deficiency and are increasingly opting to use “dysfluency.” The distinction between the two is that dysfluency claims stutter as a form of political protest. As Joshua St. Pierre has suggested, “While ‘disfluent’ feigns at being objective and sterile, ‘dysfluent’ recognizes that when we stutter we are not simply performing a lack, but we are transgressing the entire moral code of how society expects us to speak. To stutter is to disobey, to overstep the narrow boundaries of able-bodied speech.” This is more than resignification, it is a political wielding of stutter’s interruptions of settled grammars reliant on predictability.
In their book and album that constitute the performance and text project titled, The Clearing, writer, musician, and stutterer, JJJJJerome Ellis makes of the stutter a poetry and music, an opening into liberatory non-linear spacetimes, a wilderness of the mouth untamed by the enclosures of normative speech, a bridge to ancestral memory, a re-arrangement of black embodiment and thought fugitive to the brutalities of this racist world. What is so often dismissed as impediment, Erica Cardwell suggests, is composed in Ellis’ work, into an activation of black life and music, the otherworldliness of living outside of “the white time continuum.” The unpredictable of dysfluency’s stops and starts and silences, unfinished sentences and deferred meanings threatens the established order of things as the world is sustained by the decision to not only avoid the clearing, but plow it over to build the plantation, the factory, the mega-farm, toward a regulated and replicated, disciplined and undreaming populace and planet, toward life subjected to the authoritarianism of the clock. To stir against the continuum of white time and the continued and continentally proliferated governance of our crip speech and unspeaking is to evade and move toward the otherwise, against and away from what Rasheedah Phillips has called “the master’s clock” and what Ellis calls “temporal subjection.” To be together in the spacetime of the stutter, Ellis proposes in their essay, “The Clearing: Music, Dysfluency, Blackness, and Time,” is to gather in the clearing, to “create alternative temporalities that can help us heal from the wounds of [temporal] subjection. Healing, too, is an activity, not an achievement.”
In the repetitions of stutter, we also extend our subjectivity. The I-I-I-I-I-I a rally of multiple selves, a we who only appear or sound homogenous by the lens of the norm and fetish of individualism’s singularity. The stutter illuminates the more-than-one of a mouth with many mouths.
When I stutter, I feel the gathering of disobedients in me. I time jump to attend to the wounds of history that have brought us here. I time jump to find you, to meet you in the clearing where we make a feral symphony of glottal stops, consonants in repetition, silences, and prolongations. In the clearing, in the field in the forest, a silentious hush moves through the trees. A cat begins the song, untempo-ing and dissonant in the grasses. Our open mouths harbor a not-yet as synaptic lightning lights up our faces. Gathered in the outer and the under, a hefty and eloquent music.
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes (they/them) is a queer, gender fluid/trans, crip/disabled, brown, writer, artist, scholar, educator, cultural worker and creature of the Colombian diaspora. They are author of the poetry collections, The Inheritance of Haunting (2019) and ephemeral (2024). They currently live in southern California.
23 January 2025
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