How Do We Breathe, again?

Language is breath linked to sound linked to meaning

 – Marlene Nourbese Phillip

Any attempt to reclaim language is also an attempt to reclaim the self. The issue at hand is not only linguistic or disciplinary, and this is not a matter bound by language or field. It is a matter of existence. It is a matter of how we live. It concerns how language shapes the very conditions of our becoming, how it scripts our possibilities before we have learned to speak, and how it can be both a structure of liberation and a mechanism of erasure. For if language has been colonized, then surely other parts of us have been colonized with it. And in that recognition, we must ask: what new forms of being become possible when language is reclaimed?

Just as a string does not choose to vibrate when touched, the mind does not choose its first impulse to speak; language arises where the world strikes us. Our words are the vibrations of consciousness registering an encounter with reality, consuming what touches us and transforming it into meaning. But even in this articulation, a question presses against us, that is, where do we lose choice? At what moment do the vibrations cease to be our own, becoming instead the inherited frequencies of history, power, and domination?

Language is breath before it is anything else. It is the exhale that binds inner life to our outer world, like a thread stitching consciousness to existence. But language is also a form of consumption because every word we speak draws something into the body, metabolizes it, and releases it, transformed. It is no surprise that humans are consumers. In fact, we are avid consumers, shaping the very rhythm of our living with every breath, every thought, and every word. In the act of consuming, we hold the possibility for nourishment and the threat of loss. It is a contradiction we cannot escape, because every word that feeds us risks starving another. For every naming, something unnamed slips into obscurity. This is the hidden cost of language. Each word we summon leaves a shadow behind, a silence where something else should have lived.

So, who is lost in the stories we tell? And who, therefore, is lost in us? We consume one another’s meanings, inherit one another’s silences, and metabolize the wounds of history without necessarily noticing their weight. Language travels lightly, but it carries us forever, weightless, like a pulse through generations.And if language is the zephyr of breath, then we move through the lungs that once held another. But there comes a moment, one that is desperate, and necessary, when we must ask for a new beginning. A rearranging of syntax. A shift in grammar capable of returning breath to the places that have forgotten how to breathe. Sometimes we do not choose the darkness we are swallowed into; our thirst follows the only path we’ve been taught. A path in which grammar itself has been governed.

And so, we must ask, where does language falter? At what point does it cease to name the world and begin instead to disfigure it? I ask not only as a matter of words, but as a matter of being. Because when language fails, something else in us collapses, and it is loneliness that enters this fracture. Loneliness not as sentiment, but as a scaffolding within us, eating us, consuming us back. Loneliness prowling the corridors of our flesh, gnawing at our bones, and feeding on the dark spaces between thought and memory. It waits in the fractures where language splinters, where presence decays, where the self begins to crumble. Because we are also what we have lost; to lose is to remember, and in remembrance we weave absence into eternity.

What happens, then, when our words are wrong even in our own mouths? When the rhythm of language no longer mirrors the rhythm of being? Words are more than a form of communication; they are the heartbeat of the people, the pulse of life itself. To lose the integrity of a word is to lose the integrity of the world it names. Words also carry consequences. Toni Morrison, in her 1993 Nobel Prize lecture claims that:

Without the language to recognize such consequences, we move undefended through a world where words learn to draw blood. This is why we must speak of and with responsibility. Language is not private property; it is a collective inheritance. We have the responsibility to speak of ourselves and how we are collectively in this moment in time. We must carry the past, in a form as simple as breathing, allowing memory to transform into vision. The past must be with us in the progression of the future because epistemology is not some relic of the past, it is a crucible of thought, a problem constitutive of our very being. Education, then, is what stands at the center of this crisis. It is through education that knowledge is shaped, that memory is preserved or erased, that language either expands or ossifies. Within its structures, we learn how to imagine, how to read, how to narrate ourselves. And yet education itself is often the site where language becomes most impoverished, reduced to metrics, stripped of imagination, hollowed into utility.

Language dies when the mind is unfed. And an unfed mind devours itself. Naturally, each of us has a unique breath, a singular vibration of sound and meaning, a language of being that emerges from the unrepeatable and sometimes, unbearable conditions of our existence. But it is this uniqueness, when coupled with active resistance, that refuses the flattening impulse of essentialism. It resists being reduced to a category, an abstraction, or a predetermined identity. To reclaim language, therefore, is to reclaim being itself; it is to refuse the essentialist violence that insists we must fit into narrow frames. Because essentialism is hegemony at its core. It is the tyranny of the obvious, the normalization of what has never been examined. And there is violence in this simplicity. Abstractions become a form of brutality because they erase context, history, and breath. When knowing is reduced to comfort, truth collapses into convenience.

Who controls truth? Whose voice is authorized to speak it? Whose silence is mistaken for consent? Essentialism strips the “I” from its rightful place, not as ego, but as authorship. It reduces identity to categories, abstracts presence into definitions, and denies the singularity of lived experience. But the “I” is a conjuring, an invocation of presence. It hails itself into being on the spectral ground of its own authority, declaring I am here. I am a witness. I am becoming. To repeat “I” is not narcissism when it is survival, especially for those whose subjecthood has long been denied, and it insists upon its right to exist beyond abstraction. Uniqueness, then, is the essence of transformation. It is the beating heart of revolution, the very possibility of renewal. It cuts through essentialism. Without idiosyncrasy, there can be no imagination and without imagination, no liberation, and without liberation, no future worthy of becoming. The world depends on difference for its own continuation, because sameness isthe death of possibility.

To decolonize language is to reopen the world. It is to examine the hidden logic nested within the governing logic, to uncover the silent rules that dictate who may speak, who may be heard, and who is rendered unspeakable. Decolonizing language is the work of freeing being from the scripts that have confined us, and of restoring to each person the dignity of authorship, breath, and becoming. Literature, especially, teaches the imagination to cross dimensions, to inhabit unfamiliar interiors, to enter other people’s worlds without conquest. The reader becomes, for a moment, someone else. And this in itself is solidarity. But in this time of life, digitalization and instrumental thinking, our new idols of efficiency, do not prepare us well to address questions of ethical and political justice. Algorithms cannot teach empathy. Binary logic cannot hold the density of lived reality. The world fractures under categories and yet we continue to behave as though human beings can be captured by a toggle switch. A mind ensconced in binaries cannot perceive contradiction, complexity, or nuance. It cannot understand suffering, nor can it imagine repair.

 So how do we live? To live, one must learn to think beyond the self, not to abandon the self, but to recognize that the moral horizon always exceeds individual experience. We must ask whether morality can arise outside of ourselves, whether we can live outside of ourselves, whether there exists a form of collective ethics capable of holding the contradictions we inherit; the present is constantly rewriting the past, correcting, distorting, erasing, and reconstituting, and we must learn to see this rewriting as a responsibility more than a danger. But what does it mean when the dark parts of our minds become normalized? When violence becomes shorthand for order, when loneliness becomes a symptom of survival, when essentialism becomes common sense? The task of education is not to stabilize these norms but to unsettle them, to train us in refusal.

To refuse is to resist. Resistance through connectivity, communal building, solidarity, where solidarity is itself a radical form of freedom. It is a refusal to be singular, an insistence that our lives are indeed, entangled. Solidarity intertwines histories and presences, creating new world-making practices that expand the possibilities of liberated life. When we read together, speak together, imagine together, we become something more than individuals, we become a social force capable of movement. Literacy, too, is resistance. It is the practice of reading the world as well as the word. It is the refusal of silence, the reclaiming of narrative authority. Resistance is not some distant, heroic act when it is so clearly woven into the everyday. It surrounds us, touches us, compels us to come together. Because we should be doing more than surviving. Survival is the lowest threshold of existence; freedom requires flourishing.And yet, think, so many novels, the most cherished forms of literary knowledge, are haunted by histories of colonization, imperialism, and exploitation. Why do we return to them? Perhaps because novels are archives of humanity’s wounds, its dreams, its contradictions. They hold the memory of both violence and possibility. They remind us that language has always been a battleground, a site where domination is inscribed and where liberation is imagined. Novels carry the weight of historical events and familial stories. Through narrative, collective living becomes imaginable, because stories themselves are intergenerational bridges. Literacy thus becomes a space for challenging exclusions, for rewriting the world from the margins themselves. To decolonize language within education is to recognize that every word carries a weight, a politics, every curriculum a worldview, every silence a history, a breath. It is to undo the binary logic that constricts human possibility, and to build instead, an epistemology spacious enough to hold difference without annihilating it. This is the work of freeing breath. This is the work of reclaiming being. So, if education is where the structure of our world gets internalized, then emotion is where that structure becomes lived. We do not simply learn through the mind; we learn through the pulse, through what wounds us and what awakens us.

Every language carries an emotional weight, certain words open us while others imprison us. To speak in a language where people can locate themselves is to offer them a home, a sanctuary, a place where their emotional investments resonate rather than dissipate. Toni Morrison observed that “language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. Language can never ‘pin down’ slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.” She reminds us that language is not a vessel big enough to contain the world, but a gesture toward what exceeds it. Its power lies in its reach toward what cannot be fully spoken. And even in this approximation, even when it strains towards the unsayable, knowing it will fall short, it reaches anyway. This is resistance. And colonial language often severs this connection, asking us to speak without bleeding, to narrate ourselves in vocabularies that neither know nor mourn us, as though this severance were bloodless, a clean cut, rather than an amputation of memory that leaves the self ghosted and gasping. Reaching for breath.

The death of memory is what drives fascism. Not merely the forgetting of facts but the erasure of lived histories, the silencing of pain, the sterilization of complexity. This is what civic illiteracy produces. A nation that forgets how to remember where historical amnesia is a political strategy. What does it mean to censor an entire society? To rewrite the conditions under which truth can be spoken, felt, and recognized? To decolonize language outside the Western script is to restore memory to its rightful place. It is to refuse the oblivion that impoverishes public imagination. Memory is what carries the emotional truth of a people; it speaks in frequencies that cannot be legislated, cannot be standardized, cannot be contained. Here, I think of Jacques Derrida for his insistence that we “embrace the failure of internal coherence,” (92) suggesting that to live honestly is to recognize that nothing within us holds perfectly. The self is messy, contradictory, wounded, inconsistent and yet it is precisely this inconsistency that allows growth, that allows meaning, that allows change. We “have to fail in order to succeed,” (173) Derrida reminds us. And failure here is not collapse so much as an opening. It is the crack where the new light enters. Colonial language demands coherence, it wants one identity, one history, one truth, one narrative. But decolonized language invites contradiction. It recognizes that subjectivity itself is a shifting terrain, that to be human is to inhabit multiplicity, fragmentation, and revision. What if the fractures in language are not weaknesses but sites of possibility? What if the places where language falters are exactly where being begins? Where emotion is its pulse. To reclaim language is to reclaim feeling, to give legitimacy to the emotional rhythm’s colonization sought to discipline, contain, or silence. Without emotion, there can be no solidarity, and without solidarity, there is no resistance, and without resistance, no freedom. Emotion becomes the bridge between individual reclamation and collective transformation. It animates memory, ignites critique, and makes language something more than grammar, and into a living force capable of holding human truth. Decolonizing language requires us to speak from the wound, not to glorify injury, but to honor the histories that made us. It requires us to let memory breathe again, to allow contradiction to become a method, to accept failure as a teacher. Only then can language return to its generative role, that is, a way for becoming.

Emotion is the pulse and resistance is its heartbeat. Steady, insistent, refusing silence. So, we must make domination visible. What remains hidden cannot be confronted because what cannot be named cannot be fought. And to fight, we have to bleed. Bleed so others can see and taste where love has been. Where suffering has been. So that the wound itself becomes a passage, a place where one body seeps into another. Let it stain, and bind. Because when we bleed, we will not bleed alone; our wounds touch, mingle, and darken into a shared crimson and suffering will then become communal. This is how we will resist. There is truth in vulnerability. When our wounds are not isolated, they radiate outward, saturating the collective body. To resist is to acknowledge this shared bleeding, to transform it from private injury into public knowledge. Into public imagination. And language is always an opportunity for imagination, but imagination itself is not immune to capture. Words, we know, are not born free. They are shaped, weaponized, hollowed, and reprogrammed by power. How does language get weaponized? Quietly. Through repetition, through narrative control, through the slow normalization of dehumanizing categories. Through the elevation of fear. Through the manufacturing of ignorance so thick it becomes atmospheric like an ossified fog that blurs truth until truth becomes optional. Through essentialism.

But if language can be weaponized, it can also be disarmed. It can be reclaimed, rerouted, reimagined. Language can eliminate power by refusing its terms. And compassion is the beginning of this refusal. Compassion is clarity because it recognizes that domination thrives by fracturing our capacities to feel for one another. Violence, after all, is the absence of compassion locked within the neoliberal ideal of self-interest. Where loneliness becomes its inevitable companion, creating a systemic denial of our own social needs, a disconnection made to keep us compliant. This is how loneliness is political. It is the igniter of alienation. It is the silence imposed when people are too fractured to form a collective “we.” But who is to blame if not ourselves? What constructs loneliness if not us, humans severing our own collective consciousness. It is us who have stripped narratives, erased memories, denied presence, allowed fascism to begin right here, in the cords we have ripped from one another. In the breaths we have forgotten to breathe together. In the very attempts to structurally undermine the conditions that allow people to think, to teach, to imagine themselves beyond survival. But we also hold the rescuing powers. For as long as we live, we breathe.

Fascism exists in every society, yes, not always in uniform, but in every discourse that reduces people to categories and strips away their humanity. The problem is that when a group becomes otherized, they either become invisible or hypervisible, forgotten, or rendered a threat, and entirely erased as human. Their language is delegitimized, their memories invalidated, their stories denied. This is not disappearance, no, this is exposure without recognition. And recognition is a condition of being. And so, I ask again, who is to blame if not ourselves? How do we begin to recognize each other?

Through confrontation. Recognition. Through collective breath. Through that shared inhalation that reminds us we are alive together. Recognition begins when we breathe in each other’s humanity and refuse to let the air of domination suffocate us.

And we must be cautious of ignorance. Ignorance is what reinforces this cycle. Ignorance that is not incidental but produced. Ignorance that builds walls around perception. When societies refuse to address their colonial legacies, they turn inward, toward paranoia, conspiracy, toward the seductive fantasies of White Replacement Theory and other myths that weaponize fear. Such narratives are symptoms of a mind unable to confront itself. And essentialism steps in at this moment demanding us to fall in line. But the truth is, essentialism cannot sustain a world in motion. It cannot hold the contradictions of lived experience. It cannot stop us from breathing. So, what do we do when the scripted world collapses? How do we return truth to a vocabulary bent by trauma? How do we name the forces that seek to unname us? We must begin by speaking aloud what power demands we hide. To name is to refuse erasure. To refuse is to resist. And resistance begins, as always, with the reclamation of language, our oldest and unbeatable mode of survival.

            If words carry contradictions, and they always do, then we must see contradiction itself as an invitation. Why not deconstruct everything, especially the linguistic structures that claim coherence while concealing violence? If language falters, let it falter productively. If we fall, let us fall beautifully. Hard, painfully, hopefully, because, what if we fly? Let the fractures show us where meaning has been forced, where truth has been bent, where being has been constrained. In a time when the scripts handed to us collapse under their own weight, deconstruction is not destruction. It is a method of breathing again.

We are one planet, one history, one breath, rising from the same air. The notion of totality is not about sameness, nor about dissolving difference into some imagined unity. Totality is the recognition that everything touches everything else, that no life exists in isolation, that no language grows without roots reaching deep into shared soil. The root is in the totality, not the individual. And yet it is the unique, unrepeatable, individual voice that gives totality its richness. We must understand that collective living is not a denial of the self. Really, it is the expansion of the self into the space of the “we.” Collective thinking is not conformity; it is a refusal to abandon one another. Collective breathing is not uniformity either, it is the recognition that every exhale enters a world held in common. Collective language, then, is the horizon of decolonization, not a single tongue, but a shared commitment to the dignity of all tongues. When we reclaim language, we reclaim the capacity to imagine beyond domination. We reclaim the possibility of becoming. We reclaim the right to speak in a world that has too often tried to narrate us into silence. Decolonizing language is not some academic endeavor. Not when it asks us to dismantle what constricts our breath.

Language is where being unfolds.

Language is where being is wounded.

  Language is where being resurrects itself.

In deconstructing our vocabularies, we make space for meanings that were previously unthinkable. We do not fracture truth; we free it from the cages that essentialism built around it. To decolonize language is to reclaim the world and to reclaim language is to reclaim ourselves. And to reclaim ourselves is to re-enter the totality as creators, as witnesses, as beings who refuse to live in only one register of existence. Because we will always return to breath. Breath becomes word. Word becomes world. And in the collective space where our breaths converge, where our languages touch without swallowing one another, where our stories meet without erasing difference, that is where, at last, a future becomes speakable.

Will we breathe, again?

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality. Stanford University Press, 2000.

Derrida, Jacques. Work of Mourning. Edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, The University of

Chicago Press, 2001.

Morrison, Toni. “Nobel Lecture 1993”. NobelPrize.org. Nobel PrizeOutreach, 2025.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/

Ngũgĩ a Thiong’o. “Reclaiming Language: A Conversation with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.” The Nation, 

September 2024,https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/ngugi-wa-thiongo-interview/

Read more at By Doaa Tirmizi.