My first voice-breaker told me I had learned to speak incorrectly. She said I was stumbling through the Swedish language, out of step with its choreography. Holding my tongue between her fingers, she initiated the project of dismantling my voice. But in my attempts at returning to a mother tongue, I arrived at something else entirely, something I named linguistic science-fiction.
Later, another voice-breaker told me Swedish inhabited certain spaces within the human body. My speech was seemingly trespassing beyond the borders of Swedish, taking possession of organs it had no claim to. Or perhaps my body was sounding outside its jurisdiction, desiring verbal agency.
Yet a third voice-breaker made me commit to my vocal exercises. At the dinner table, in rush-hour traffic, under the fluorescent lights of a Lidl store. I realized time and again that my voice was in fact not my own. Each space that received my tongue-twisters transformed them into their own.
Desperate, I instead gave my body to the German language, wishing it to mold me into something else. In Berlin, in exile, I met my last voice-breaker.
I kept finding myself looking for excuses to go to Lidl. The labyrinth of aisles lent a familiar choreography, an ominous feeling of home in the grocery store chain. I spoke in garbled German to the cashier. He smiled uncomprehending. Again, I was reminded that my voice was not my own. Enduring the stares of other shoppers I offered once more my German-Swedish chimera to the man at the counter. Hesitating at first, he then accepted. Together we stumbled through an emerging Lidl dialect.
The following week I returned to Stockholm, voice-broken. I was no longer speaking at the cavities of architecture, nor the skin and textiles of other bodies, but with them.
Webpage: https://www.aronfogelstrom.com/
Photos 1–5: Jean-Baptiste Béranger
