Tongues of Trauma: Narrating through Code-Switching Typhoon Haiyan in Daryll Delgado’s Remains

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the deliberate use of code-switching in Daryll Delgado’s novel Remains (2019), which narrates the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. Through this reading, I argue that the alternation of various languages such as Filipino, Waray and English in the novel enhances the development of its characters, setting and narrative structure to access a kind of trauma that resists being signified by one language. I posit that the code-switching within the novel goes beyond the literary genre’s propensity for heteroglossia and instead situates trauma as a moment of convergence and interruption. Moreover, such linguistic motion between languages supplements the gaps of the unspeakable trauma of survivors and witnesses. As an ethic, code-switching’s deployment carefully accesses trauma from the material and intangible debris of the catastrophe. Remains complicates trauma within the work of languages traversing the local and global, and the real and the imagined, in order to disclose wounds exacerbated by both imperial and environmental violence.