flowing from the deep well
an endless river
the subconscious, no self censorship, no filter
a surrender that goes deeper with each word, an attempt to reconnect with the beginning
motivation
As I am (and a lot of us) are still walking on this journey of decolonising our internal systems, I can’t help but realise that since I am only doing it in the language of the coloniser I am slowly losing the flexibility of my tongue and the sounds I can make in the other languages that I speak.
As Malaysian born Chinese, I grew up speaking Mandarin and Cantonese, and in the past year, I am really noticing how I am starting to lose words, empty gaps starting to form in my head when speaking to my mother, and frustration starting to build when I give in and used English to finish my sentences. My national language Malay is also slowly escaping me, the words all muddled up with Korean (which I learned in my adulthood) because of the similar vowels in both languages, and I can hear my Malaysian sounds thinning out from the lack of use.
What I’m trying to do with Stream of consciousness is akin to climbing down a deep well on a very thin thread, praying that it can hold this body up, praying that my feet will find the ground before this thread breaks.
Decolonising the body and mind through language and songs
Micro histories, stories passed down
Epistomologies
The contradiction of decolonising the tongue in the language of the coloniser
How do we make and hold space with words
A meditation on our inner binaries
sound.
if the trees/soil/water/walls/streets could speak, what would they say?
Roots of mangrove trees, rhythm of waves at coastal plains, the wind flowing through ceilings of old colonial buildings,
smells of the streets and flavours of nostalgia
resilience reflected in songs that make up the soundscape of every day life
these tongues that survived occupations, revolutions, reformations
I hear that it holds stories not recorded in history books,
and I want to be there to listen to all they have to say
and somehow try to remember
and somehow attempt to articulate it
through words, accumulated soundscapes that spoke to me.
