The Therapeutic Cartograph of Alternative Languages and Languaging as a Praxis beyond Communication in Kei Miller’s Augustown

Abstract

By reading the silence and non-speech of each character in an impoverished black Jamaican community as an intersectional code to decipher in Jamaican author Kei Miller’s Augustown (2016), this paper engages with different socio-linguistic theories and critical lenses and approaches as well as literary interpretations to investigate what I call “a therapeutic cartograph of languages” in a narrative. Cartograph of languages and languaging—a praxis of language beyond communication—for healing is an interdisciplinary method for mapping and thinking of silence and alternative dialects, as opposed to heteronormative whiteness as linguistic normalcy. This paper reassigns a sociocultural, linguistic, and interdisciplinary meaning of Augustown as a contested language zone within Miller’s cartograph of healing and alternative ways of grass root black languages to recuperate the scarred history of slavery and British colonization through storytelling, singing, silencing, and desiring. Also, by exploring the meaning behind the black homosexual relationship between two characters, this paper will demonstrate how desire and frustrated sexuality can present a possible form of language and languaging that stands against the heteronormative ideologies of white language, seeking a refuge transgressing multilayered boundaries of race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and other contested elements.