Reframing Dysfluency Through Multilingual Poetics: the positive disruptions of translation poetics and non- normative voices.

This paper is a transdisciplinary collaboration, bringing together Tanti’s scholarship on translational poetics, with Soreny’s exploration of disability justice within applied arts practice. We consider what happens when theories of multilingual writing as a site that engenders hospitality for voices that are minoritized within Anglohegemony are put in dialogue with discourses around communication diversity and ‘dysfluency pride’ that challenge what disabled sound artist Gemma Nash calls the “vocal supremacy” of non-disabled voices.

Artists with diverse communication disabilities are reframing dysfluencies as “gifts of ellipsis. Lacuna. Caesura. Aporia. Opacity. A stretching forth of the hand through the violent waterfall, into the cool space between, to touch the stone wall” (Ellis). Likewise, multilingual writing creates what Kate Briggs refers to as “a ‘strange tremble’ that indicates that this is no smooth passage” and intentionally “make[s] the language itself stutter. And stammer” (qtd in Seita 137). These resistant translation practices exhibit “the refusal to be entirely legible […] while simultaneously demanding to be read” (Seita 137).

This paper puts Erin Moure’s multilingual Kapusta in conversation with radical self-representations of disability and non-normative voices, from the audio-visual installation co-created by Soreny’s Stories Beyond Words Collective. Together these works creatively confront and challenge dominant modes of legibility and habits of ‘dyslistening’ that silence people with diverse communication styles ranging from those with communication impairments to speakers in increasingly multilingual societies. Through this mixed media presentation, we reveal the potential of disfluent, non-normative and minoritized voices to reach into new spaces within time, space, and language.