Misspeaking Poetics

In chapter 3, I look at artists who have used their speech impediments to generate new work—Norma Cole’s “Speech Production” and Jordan Scott’s Blert. One section deals with various artists’ interpretation of the shibboleth as it applies to more recent history. Paul Celan’s poem “Shibboleth” responds to the horrors of the Holocaust; Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth carves a crack in the Tate Modern’s massive gallery to memorialize global subjects who fall through cracks in national narratives; Caroline Bergvall’s “Say, ‘Parsley’” remembers the murder of Haitians by Dominican military for their inability to pronounce the Spanish word for parsley, perejil. Jordan Scott’s Blert offers an exercise in transforming his “blurts,” caused by a lifelong stammer, into sound poems based on ecopolitical issues that link his speech impediment to the global environment. The work of Jordanian-Lebanese artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan involves studying acoustic technologies and surveillance in determining how mispronunciation is used to identify “true” from “false” asylum seekers.