tonal night
(tell me what to listen for)

What does a language do when it goes unspoken? Years of not practicing my Vietnamese regularly have cost me my fluency; when talking with my parents, more often than not, I grasp for words I no longer have on hand. I can feel the shapes of meaning but cannot name them.

‍tonal night explores the failures of language as it persists in my body. Over a piece a paper I draw Vietnamese diacritics, which are accent marks that denote how a syllable should be intoned. Different tonal marks change words’ entire meanings, yet by themselves mean nothing and cannot be vocalized. Gathered together, they form a field of potential, vibrant signs of air that eludes articulation but structures what language could be.

As the tone implies the syllables that can bear it, the flock of accents gestures to the breathing body that can voice them. Language is embedded in the body, even in its silence, and shapes it all the same. Scattered across yellowing, aged newsprint, the diacritics resonate with histories that define my being, through which I am trying to recover my way.