The Other End of the Tongue

Abstract

This chapter explores the other end of the mother tongue: the maternal body. Cleaving the maternal tongue to the maternal body, Charania meditates on debility, illness, and healing in her mother's life. In wrestling with the attachment brown middle-class immigrants have with western medical notions of longevity of life, individual choice, and health, Charania disturbs the medical, and familial handling of the maternal body, returning the sick body to the sensual, promiscuous healing ethos of the brown maternal.