Fragments for multilingual listening

Welcome, välkommen, marhaba, fàilte.

The following fragments have emerged over time, from moments of collective and plural listening. They are loosely arranged into three parts. The first is based on field notes from multilingual collaboration and emerging questions. The second offers scores for listening in any multilingual (and/or multispecies) environment, and pays particular attention to sensing languages we don’t understand. If you’re with someone else, you can experiment with reading these scores to one another. The third is an invitation to listen to a collaborative and multilingual sonic poem.

Welcome, välkommen, marhaba, fàilte.

Documenting multilingual listening

we rattle conkers on library chairs

crunch dry leaves in our hands

tap acorns against rocks

we find a texture that sounds like a slow smile

another a wry exclamation

a third a flash of rage

*

What does it mean to listen in this moment? Before our mouths bend around unfamiliar syllables and we slide, unsynchronized, from one linguistic repertoire to another. Can it be a liberation to listen without knowing? Can I know you without knowing your words, or you mine? When we attend, in the uncertain stretch towards one another, what does that do?

*

In our listening, who gets to sound? Who is amplified? Who gets to determine our soundscape? This collective listening doesn’t mean that we all hear the same thing. But it does open a space where we might share resonance.

*

We split open a pomegranate and stain our fingers, our chins all ruby-red juice. We open the window and the tree sings although its leaves are dead. We rub the bark of the trees and hope that some traces of their rootedness, their wisdom, might emerge in the pattern. The texture of the bins is pretty too. And the gates, although they may be locked. Out of sight, silent to us, the Swedish government is about to make it immeasurably more difficult to become a citizen. I wish it was enough for our stumbling syllables to be witnessed by the trees, for the bark to recognise our touch.

*

Astrid Gjesing’s work says the earth bears your mark. What of the air between us? The soundscapes that evaporate as if they were never there? Do you bear my mark in your ears, in your memory? I think I bear yours.

*

How to listen without rushing to meaning? How to hold the grief at how quickly all returns to silence? How to not be afraid?

Scores for multilingual listening

1. Score for station listening

In the flux of passing faces, footsteps, syllables / find yourself and all your senses / standing or sitting

Tune in to the unfamiliar voices that you might sometimes suppress / somewhere between ear and brain / hear the city, always alive despite or because of death

Notice your body / how it responds to each sound / tense? relaxed? inquisitive? fearful? / name some of these intricate responses

Keep noticing your body / allow yourself to rest in its tender expanse

Keep noticing the city / allow yourself to rest in its tender expanse

2. Score for temporal listening

Settle yourself in a multilingual aural space / Allow yourself to time travel as you listen

Where do these unknown linguistic textures take you? / Let your mind recall without judgement

Perhaps you remember a high school French test where you forgot the order of the words? / Or a movie villain who spoke in these tones?

Do you feel these traces in your body now, in muscles and synapses? / Palms sweating / Pulse drumming?

Notice, breathe / open your palms

In my travels I returned to 1988 / and Kylie is singing je ne sais pas pourquoi / I didn’t know why either

But I liked the not-knowing of then / is this what opens us? / not the encyclopaedic acquisition / but the permission to not-know?

Come back to now / notice how we carried language like a sonic treasure chest / through all the shipwrecks

3. Score for forest listening

Place ears to the ground / fingers in compost / or soles on grass / open to soundings, stirrings, articulations / inside the body and outside / Listen

Go slow / let everything emerge / today, time is a circle, an orbit, a cookie jar / help yourself to more

How many layers can you perceive? the bird’s feather as it falls? the earthworm’s slow progress through the leaf mulch? the not-quite-silence below us, where the seeds rest until they’re ready?

As we grow mycelial, rhizomatic, ecosystemic / decay becomes almost a welcome guest / can you sense it?

4. Score for positional listening

Tilt and turn your head as you hear the words / Keep turning / How many ways can you perceive each sound?

As texture, breath / air, momentum, direction / wavelengths, frequencies / the shiver of an unrepeatable larynx / a slow fade over time and distance

A deep breath in and out / inside and beyond language / we breathe each other / we language each other

New words don’t mind if you haven’t met them yet / they knock, leave a note, turn around / they might find their way back one day / for now, let them go

5. Score for etymological listening

As the sounds pass you by / try to notice just one vocalization / hold it in your ear

What is the etymology of this sound? / what is it made from? / a larynx shaped like a distant uncle’s? / an vowel intonation shaped by a primary teacher’s? / a click of the tongue that one day you’ll borrow?

Let the sound play again in your mind / Not for nothing they call it a mother tongue / Every utterance a time capsule, an ecosystem, a universe

Let this sound you have heard / be a universe for you

Invitation to multilingual listening

Made with Elvira, Leila, Tayebeh, Damascene, Meri, Gorjan, Melina, Selina, Adison, Karna and Eileen.

This is a multilingual sonic poem called Jag blunder, jag lyssnar, jag hör (I close my eyes, I listen, I hear). It was produced as part of a three-month collaborative artist residency at Eslöv city library in Skåne, Sweden. Together with a multilingual participant group (most currently students of the ‘Swedish for Immigrants’ course) we developed collective listening practices and reflected on some of the sounds we hear in everyday life. The piece starts in Swedish and opens out to include languages including Swahili, Azerbaijani, Macedonian, Turkish, English and Dari. If you want to, you can use the Score for etymological listening as you listen.

References and inspiration

• Anzaldúa, G. (2015). Light in the dark / Luz en lo oscuro: rewriting identity, spirituality, reality (A. Keating, Ed.). Duke University Press.
• hooks, b. (1989). Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 36, 15–23.
• Gjesing, A. (2010). The Earth bears your Mark. https://gjesing.org/art/JordenBaererNoerrebro/
• Phipps, A. (2013). Linguistic incompetence: Giving an account of researching multilingually. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 23(3), 329–341. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijal.12042
• Phipps, A. M. (2019). Decolonising multilingualism: Struggles to decreate. Multilingual Matters.
• Robinson, D. (2020). Hungry listening: Resonant theory for indigenous sound studies. University of Minnesota Press.