An altar for the fleshy tongue

This artistic research investigation asks: How does the idea of the “multitude,” of being one yet composed of many, generate new ways of positioning oneself against monolithic, essentialist representations within language? Can languages be held within the body across generations? And if so, what tools do we need to reawaken this dormant knowledge? Stephanie Misa posits these ideas to examine her own linguistic inheritance and spoken languages untethered to read-write structures that are in danger of erasure, as well as those that are all but gone aside from scattered traces. To access these different positions, Misa writes of her own fragmented “mother tongue” and the case of Fanny Cochrane Smith, the only recorded speaker of an Aboriginal Tasmanian language. Misa asks what it means for the body, voice, sound, and tongue to endure colonization, as these embodied articulations (or oralities)—acknowledged as strategies of colonial resistance— are determined by their persistence, circulation, and continuation as forms of oral communication within Indigenous communities undergoing structural evisceration. The author also explores the different ways of “knowing” an orality and addresses the challenges of researching practices outside one’s own cultural sphere, emphasizing that relationship-building and time are key for an ethical methodology. The essay follows this speculative journey to trace the tongue as the site where language leaves the body and enters the world, asking what secrets might lie within this fleshy transmitter.