TRANSLATING KUIR MAGAZINE

I would like to take advantage of these few minutes to continue thinking with you all about
the translation of this word: crip. Crip lives: dragged, broken, crippled, limping, crazy, anxious,
obsessive, blemished, dysfunctional, painful, fatigued, disposable, disabled, depressed,
insufficient…I pronounce crip without the original Saxon accent, with the intention of
approximating its vibrations and subtle movements, of transforming this word into a touchable
and touching body: I drag myself in my precarious raft there, I push the pronunciation against
the mud of this hybrid and undermined tongue that I speak with and hear every day. I sense that
this act of linguistic and somatic disobedience could be a start. Translating a word, obsessing
over its elusions, its feints, its resistance and its mysterious flotsam is much more to me than
managing to find the more or less precise adaptations: it affects the world. As I translate I feel
like I can make a more habitable world. In different circumstances in my life, and for distinct
reasons, I’ve had to make myself such a solitary world with the few words that happened to be
within my reach, that preoccupied me, that moved me, that sheltered me, that energized me,
that accompanied me.
So, crip: a teasing monosyllable, if you will, that for a while has bothered me and has called
me to traffic, to reappropriation, to shared resonances. Traffic that in my case always ends up
dispersed, incomplete, and unstable. Writing these lines, I also thought about how monosyllabic
words rarely have much idiomatic value and status: neither do crip lives. They drag, and we
drag our flesh-covered skeletons with their scars into the fresh air. We do this work of dragging,
of pulling through the mud and of swimming however we can and whatever arises from us,
always at the edge of exhaustion–and sometimes not even that. Inhabiting a crip body in a
world that seems to only want productive, capable, fast, resolute, competent, upright, straight,
whole bodies embroils me and embroils many of us in the political task of survival. There are
essential jobs, there are essential bodies, and words that are also essential: recognizing them,
dignifying them, making space for them is also a crip task. Saying crip (with your heart on
your sleeve) is not always welcome. Not being welcome can sometimes be a stroke of luck, an
unknown force, from which we fan the flame of writing, of thinking, of mutual and common
support. Weaving through bodies and dwellings that we dock, we do not always move and
feel in the most expected or appropriate ways. Crip lives speak with muddy, tireless tongues.
Speaking in tongues, wrote Gloria Anzaldúa, allows us to make times and spaces that foster
mutual flourishing. Time, place, land. Crip: a life, lives that break themselves; rhythms, speeds,
bonds that aren’t available nor possible. Sometimes there isn’t even a remedy for the damage.
We seek support in the face of what appears incurable: saying crip gives the feeling of the
fragil, vibrating, and even of the untranslatable.
We find friendly tongues, build precarious rafts on the sea, havens for our rejected bodies, for
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