Untranslatable wounds

Abstract

A good starting point for revisiting the intersections of language, gender and sexuality is to acknowledge and understand how colonial wounds and legacies play out in our everyday lives. This essay critically addresses the multiple ways in which we are all marked in one way or another by our colonial relations and their intersections. A careful unpacking of mechanisms and linkages is critical for identifying strategies and tactics of struggle that might lead to more equitable present-days characterised by esperanza (hope). Yet a desire to decolonise language and language practices without recognising the lived experience of our own messy and colonial entanglements will never be enough to resignify the systems that hold racial, ethnic, gender, sexual and linguistic inequalities in place. This essay highlights the acts of desbordar (undoing/overflowing), trasto-car (queering) and resentir (feeling again) as alternative strategies that can be used to fracture the architectures of colonialism, starting with our own.