Tongue

A hybrid work of lyric nonfiction, and the debut book by a brilliant Australian poet and scholar, Tongue by Kathryn Crowcroft speaks to urgent contemporary conversations about gendered violence and control, intergenerational silence, and the politics of testimony. The text is accompanied by images, including historical illustrations, engravings, paintings and handwritten notes.

‘My mother gestures towards the erosion as we walk back from Split Point lighthouse. The insurance on the house is now void. “It’s good that you could come back now,” she says, “to help me.” This morning, after I prepared her breakfast, she said I have a light tread and that when I walk around upstairs she can barely hear me overhead. You’re like a ghost, she said. I’m not even sure you’re here. In the house the leaks come and go from the ceiling cryptically, as though the circuitry is self-repairing. We look both ways, cross the road, and follow the path to Mouth Beach. The same warning sign, only rusted now: submerged objects, unexpected waves, strong currents, deep water.’

A young researcher works in a university archive, intent on unveiling the history of the human tongue, its strange metaphors and hidden uses. The archival materials conjure memories of her own, transporting her home, half a world away, into the silence lodged between herself and her mother. Alongside the academic work, she begins a second manuscript through which a personal reckoning takes place. Between library stacks and text messages, she confronts her struggle to articulate the unspoken legacy that has shaped her past.

Framed through her research into the tongue and its untold cultural significance, Kathryn Crowcroft’s debut explores how the organ has been cast as both sacred and sinful across centuries. Tongue takes the shape of a nodal essay, composed of discrete cells that mirror the form of the organ itself: porous, muscular, bifurcated. Written in the shadow of gendered violence, and attuned to the ways in which we speak and avoid speaking, the book offers a fierce, sensitive and unique articulation of the truths we learn to lie for. Tongue creates a radical space for silence to resonate – and an exploration of how a voice might piece together what has been severed.

Muscular, reverent and beautifully researched, Tongue is a delicate archive of our past and present mysteries.
Jessica Au

In this formally thrilling debut, a writer and scholar enters the ‘primordial water’ of a university archive. From this ‘yawning elemental chaos’, Kathryn Crowcroft retrieves an astonishing history of the tongue. As she uncovers this repressive and sensual lore, she confronts the insistent silence, violence and false accounts within her own family. Impressive, smart, raw and fresh, Tongue interweaves two histories with acute insight and integrity.
Mireille Juchau

This thing the tongue, sea-creature-like in the dark cave of a mouth: by its small lappings mute substance speaks. That paradox is at the heart of this compelling work: an artful compendium of archival violence; a painstaking measure of unspoken pain. Radically, compellingly, through such rifts, the voice of the mother speaks.
Lisa Gorton