Standing in Between Accents, Listening for Whispers

Saba M. · Psychoanalytic Dialogues (2025) · DOI: 10.1080/10481885.2025.2550253

Resumen

In this commentary on Tara Chivukula’s paper, Saba follows the resonances Chivukula awakens–listening for the ways accents, more than mere inflections of sound, carry memory, displacement, and longing. Chivukula invites us to consider how accents both expose and conceal, how they can reduce a person to stereotype while also holding the possibility of play, recognition, and creativity. Saba reflects on Chivukula’s call to hear accents in breath, pauses, and hesitations–listening for whispers that escape categorization. In dialogue with her work, Saba asks how psychoanalysis can become a space where the accented voice is not flattened but held, where paradoxes are sustained rather than erased. Standing between accents, Saba explores how difference can generate connection, how sound itself–following Winnicott–may become a transitional object, and how listening attuned to resonance can help sustain the immigrant’s right to go on being. But that time was broken.

Instituciones: Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas