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Listen to the Sound of My Voice
Jiri Hera / EyeEm
Not long after journalist Minelle Mahtani began hosting her own radio show in Canada, her mother was diagnosed with tongue cancer. In a poignant essay for
The Walrus, Mahtani explains how she was suddenly confronted with the painful reality that, just as she was finding her voice, her mother was losing hers:
I remembered the words of poet Rita Wong. “Habitual placement of the tongue changes the mouth. When the tongue is still, are you quiet enough to hear the dead? Quiet enough to hear the land stifled beneath massive concrete? Quiet enough to hear the beautiful, poisoned ancestors surfacing from your diaphragm?” All the stories of my ancestors, buried in my mother’s mouth, stories I would never hear again.