Thank you for this invitation to share in International Stuttering/ Stammering Awareness week. A special shout out to Sakina and the other organizers for all that they did to make this happen, and all they are doing to build up this inspiring organization.
Thanks also to Courtney Luckman, for her sharing today and also for her research. It blows my mind that these days, when a child or young person, on some late night, with tears in their eyes, is searching desperately on the internet for some sort of help, some answers about their speech — how lucky we are that they might find Courtney and her articles, or her lab, all of these amazing stammering speech language pathologists and researchers, who are adding so much information into the public sphere and into the culture. We all benefit from that, so thank you.
How lucky I am to meet you. As a child I could not imagine a space like this one– the Ghana Stammering Association. I could not have imagined this space, but I desperately longed for it. You see, I was raised in the diaspora. My parents, siblings and I left Ghana, Cape Coast, in the early 1980s in a time of coups, food crisis, and soldier rule. We left “for a few years” knowing that we could come back, and those few years, for me, have stretched into forty and counting. So I was raised in the United States with this sense of roots transportation, with the sense of alienation, a sense of being in a place that was not my own, and where I was seen as less than within this system. We were the only African family in our small, white town in Massachusetts which meant that there was already a gulf of misunderstanding, of ignorance, surrounding us. “Did we live in trees back in Africa? Did we wear clothes or shoes? Weren’t we escaping starvation, or civil war? Weren’t we so grateful to be here?” And then on top of that I stammered. This, surely, did not help my case. After all, these people already saw me as less-than, already teased and scoffed at my dark skin, already were surprised that I spoke English at all. And then when I open my mouth to speak, I stammer?! Oof! Partially I blamed myself? Why couldn’t I be like my other siblings? Why couldn’t I speak easily? Maybe I would have been more able to fit in, if I did not have this struggle.
BREATHE
I have written a small poem for that small Abena because finding the transnational Ghana Stammering Association for her would have been like finding a lifeboat in a storm.
The ocean between us
slips from my lips and springs from your eyes.
“Mmmy N-n-name is Abena Asare”
In the twists and tricks and trills of my tongue and lips,
Shame and shock trickle then gush, pity sweeps me from my feet.
The water rise, push us to opposite shores
my heart is a speck, bobbing in the distance.
These waters are opaque, unfathomed,
teeming with all that has been,
all that never was,
all that is left unsaid.
So as a child, I decided that If I could not overcome my stammering, perhaps I could drown out this shame with a flood of other achievements. I would try to always come first in the class, I would be the best at sports, I would write the longest and most creative essay. I would shine above and beyond in the hopes that my worth would never be questioned. If I could not overcome my stammering, I would excel myself out of the cycle of shame. I would do all the public speaking and find a way to get it right! I could practice something perfectly fifty times, and then the event would come, and suddenly, up on the stage, sometimes my stammer would appear. This was the elephant in the room, or rather I should say the elephant in my head. And I never talked about it with anyone– if I did not call attention to it, maybe one day, poof, would just disappear. But what happens when that elephant in the room is never acknowledged? It becomes your own private elephant to carry.
Carrying it was exhausting. I tried everything. Prayer, different tricks and tools. I would practice the text, I would tap my fingers, I would switch/ change around/ alter/shift words. I would work on my breathing, my elongation, I would imagine the audience naked, I would calm my nerves, I would do anything and everything to “overcome” my stammer. Sometimes these techniques and practices would work. I would have moments, months, years, of public fluency and control. In high school I was a national speech team champion. In my youth, I won numerous awards for my public speaking, and I did this all without mentioning my stammering, just would hide it, control it, by force.
It. Was. Exhausting.
Maintaining the facade of fluency was like another course, a full-time job or maybe even another Ph.D. Moreover, there was a rind of anxiety that was always there. In a fluent moment, I was anxious about when the stammer would emerge and everything would change. If I was stammering, I was awash in shame and disappointment. What about all of my hard work? So I was excelling, and I was tired, and I was lonely, carrying this elephant on my back.
This exhaustion led me to seek help for my speech when I finished my first degree, and was finally entering my adult era. Finally, I thought, I would seek out and find the speech therapist etc. that would be able to help me “fix this” once and for all.
So, spoiler alert, I did not find that fix, but I did find the stuttering self-help community. In circles just like this one, (BREATHE) I learned and am still learning, to set down my isolation and loneliness. In circles like ours, I learned how to be with myself and my stammer, by being with other people who stammer. It was that simple: as I spent time with us I began to love us. I began to hear the beauty in our voices. It became clear to me that stammerers had as much, maybe more to say, of value than fluent speakers. I began to experience the magic that happens when we stop devaluing, censoring, or stigmatizing our voices. We may stammer less, we may stammer more, but we are able to speak joyfully and to share whatever is in our hearts.
Maybe you have heard the term ableism? Ableism is defined as: discrimination, social prejudice, or systemic bias against people with disabilities. This was a term created by the disability rights/ disability justice movement of the 20th century. They named ableism in order to identify the attitudes and structures that had to change to make a world where people with disabilities, all types of disabilities, are included and able to reach their full potential. Now, internalized ableism is when we ourselves are prejudiced, biased, and censoring of ourselves, because we have accepted the story, whether consciously and subconsciously, that we are less than as long as we stammer.
Only by being together with other people did I begin to feel that it was ok to stutter. My radical self- acceptance happened because of you. It did not come from greater fluency, or from reading studies about stuttering, or from consuming positive literature, or progressive theory, or prayer, it was sparked by spending time in stammering circles. When I hear your story, I am even more passionate about creating a society where you can thrive. When I know what you have gone through, my understanding of ableism as an injustice grows, and I begin to struggle against it.
Look, we are in times when there is a desperate need for truth-tellers, for deep thinkers, for people who have empathy and can listen well, there is a desperate need for our voices, our voices that AI can not imitate (at least not yet)! In this time of thousand pound bombs and genocide, where it seems that human life is being made to be cheap, if we make space for our own true voices and we clear space for all our fleshly authentic humanity, to rise up again and again from the ground. This is the power that we have in our stammering voices.
So I am a person who stammers.
Mmmy nnname is Aaabena Asare.
The space between A and Be is fertile.
There, time can never be money.
The clock spins backwards,
an anthill grows into a mountain and shrinks back again.
My purpose falls from my lips
The trembling of my tongue is the shaking
of a heart as it grows,
the waving of a tree in the storm.
Watch me bow and not break,
watch me tumble to the end of this word,
(Acrobatics!) And know victory, find grace,
freedom’s volume in one single breath.
What would happen if we stammered freely, stammered proudly, in a world like our own, what would change? Well, when I was a kid, I never knew anyone who stammered. I definitely never saw anyone who was stammering loud and pppproud. I did not even know that was possible. What would it have felt like to attend a meeting of the Ghana Stammering Association as a kid? What if I didn’t have to carry the elephant alone? When we are our authentic selves, just by embracing who we are, we can change the horizon drastically for the next generation. We have the opportunity to raise up a generation of youth who know that they can shine, and walk through any door, with pride and wholeness, even as they stammer. This transformed future is in our hands– or rather in our voices, and how we share them.
(This verse is dedicated to my student ——- the head of the campus-based student disability justice organization, who, in her youth, and her wisdom, and her need, asked me a question that I had never ever been asked before in my life: Professor Asare: why don’t you stutter more?)
For so many years, I saw my stammering as an obstacle to my purpose and mission in life. It was the ocean that kept me away from people, locked in isolation, it was the reason that I was misunderstood, that I had to work harder than everyone else, that or exhausted. It was the thorn in my side, always lurking. Now, I have come to feel in my body that my stammer is not an obstacle to my work, it is the pathway to my work. It is the thing that consistently keeps me authentic, keeps me creative, it is the thing that draws me closer to you. Thank you for inviting me to share some of my story, I cannot wait to hear yours.
