JSalter PhD Final Thesis Submission.pdf - University of Guelph

suffered” and she “often forgets the meaning of the most basic words” (41), but “[t]ouch
has remained important to Mother” (41). Similarly, Goto’s storyteller explains how
“there are times when one can touch the other without language to disrupt us” (25). The
complexities of touch and gesture become apparent when Goto’s old woman character
recognizes that her granddaughter has learned to “read the lines on my brow, the creases
beside my mouth” (15). Emotion, fear, obsession, and loss all transmit via non-verbal
cues. Unlike this body talk, verbal communication depends upon a shared understanding
of the language used, the physical ability to speak and hear, the willingness to listen, and
the cognitive ability to comprehend the information being shared.
Addressing familial, historical, and mythic origins and cultural understandings,
old racialized diasporic women’s stories problematize cultural continuity, by
demonstrating how language differences, cultural distance, and/or subjective bias inhibit
their listeners’ ability to hear, interpret, or translate stories. Trinh T. Minh-ha warns that
storytelling can perpetuate unequal power dynamics between the storyteller and her
listeners. As Neal Norrick reminds us, “[l]isteners draw inferences from the storytelling
performance based on their own background knowledge” (922). A listener too often
remains inherently restricted by his or her limited perspective, social experiences, and
subjective cultural biases. Without the “same background knowledge” (Norrick 920),
there is always potential for misunderstanding and “‘tellability’ can be lost altogether”
(Norrick 922). Further, as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun rightly asks, how can a listener
understand the politics of listening when so often one is never trained to listen?
Filmmaker and scholar Claude Lanzmann asserts that the act of listening to traumatic
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