Discussing her Giller Prize-winnning short story collection How to Pronounce Knife, Souvankham Thammavongsa considers the productive possibilities of refusal: “some refusals or turning aways are actually wonderful opportunities for curiosity, for other learning opportunities. I feel those are opportunities for students to learn beyond the page. […] I think that refusal is an opening for them to feel joy and pleasure for just the idea of telling a story” (“Writing Refugees” 30:04-31:24). This emphasis comes, it seems, from Thammavongsa’s own experiences as a Canadian author, through which she has refused “to be relegated to the role of a Lao native informant; [refused] to anglicize her name to make it easier for white audiences to pronounce, despite pressure from literary publishers'' (Troeung). Y-Dang Troeung sees in these refusals “acts of disobedience [that] place [Thammavongsa] within a long genealogy of women of colour writers who have similarly refused to be named or renamed.” Refusal, then, speaks; it poses questions about what (seeming) absence, silence, and reticence signify, refracting a lack of action or response into a communicative act. Consistent with Thammavongsa’s goal to convey aspects of refugee experiences that frequently go untold, defiance and ingratitude mark the narratives contained in How to Pronounce Knife:

I knew that whenever we encounter stories of immigrants and refugees, they are always sad and tragic. And rightly so; they are. But I feel like that image is very narrow about who we really are. We’re also fun and ferocious and hilarious. And also we can be ungrateful and there should be room for that. I wanted the story to address that. […] I wanted to write about an immigrant child in a different way that (sic) we often encounter them in literature… what we don't [typically] see is defiance, which in my experience that’s who I really am. (Thammmavongsa qtd. by Patrick)

These themes, as well as Laotian representation, also loom large in Canadian Literature’s 2020 forum on Thammavongsa’s body of work (Note 1), undoubtedly prompted by the critical success of the poet-turned-short-story-writer’s first foray into fiction. Questions around speech, silence, and representation are thus vital considerations when reading the collection—as, indeed, they are for refugee literature writ large.

This essay considers refusal as a speech tactic in two of Thammavongsa’s stories—those that bookend the collection—which seeks to defy the silencing of (former) refugees. I begin by situating the problem of speaking of/for the oppressed, as so many others have, in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” before briefly tracing the concept of refusal through Audra Simpson and Edward Ou Jin Lee’s work. Turning to “How to Pronounce Knife,” I argue that this story refuses silences and silencing, though it nevertheless leaves open the question of reception—that is, what will others hear of and in the refugee’s speech? Considering the figure of the grateful refugee, I contend “Picking Worms” denies debt through the assertion of refugee freedom in the act of wanting. Further, the story’s ending closes the collection with a reversal of the gaze that situates refusal as an act of re-presentation. Ultimately, one cannot guarantee that refusal as a speech act will be heard. Nonetheless, its denial of existing systems of oppression goes beyond speaking against to complete rejection, and in so doing, refuses unjust terms of engagement.

In the original version of her essay, published in 1988, Spivak concludes, “[t]he subaltern cannot speak”; “[b]etween patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization” ([1994] 104, 102). A later revision calls the “lament: the subaltern cannot speak!” an “inadvisable remark,” yet the bind—“What is at stake when we insist that the subaltern speaks?”—remains ([2010] 63, 64). The problem of all speaking is that it “entails a distanced decipherment by another, which is, at best, an interception” ([2010] 64), such that it continues to plague thinkers concerned with speaking of and for the oppressed. In considering this dilemma in relation to the figure of the refugee, I do not mean to suggest the (former) refugee as inherently subaltern, nor, as Didur and Heffernan opine, employ the concept “far too vaguely to denote ‘oppression’ or ‘otherness’” (qtd. in Maggio 421). Rather, I am interested in the refugee as, like the sexed and postcolonial subaltern, “defined as the being on the other side of difference, or an epistemic fracture” (Spivak [2010] 64). In his foreword to Selected Subaltern Studies, Edward Said pairs the political connotations of the term “subaltern,” which imply the categories of “the urban poor and the peasants,” with the Gramscian connotations “in which, wherever there is history, there is class, and… the essence of the historical is the long and extraordinarily varied socio-cultural interplay between… the elite, dominant, or hegemonic class and the subaltern” (vi). Class, before and after (im)migration, thus inflects the refugee’s subalternity; yet, as Vinh Nguyen observes, the majority of refugees hold this status indefinitely but are “deemed an anomaly in a world system organized around the nation-state and citizenship. … In this framework, the refugee is not a viable political subject” (“Refugeetude” 112-3). Imagined as a brief exception, “an aberration in the otherwise consistent experience of nationality and political rights” (113), the perpetual refugee emerges as Other and Object, continually without or on the precarity of agency and political (or, indeed, human) rights. 

While permanent de facto statelessness surely warrants the label of subaltern, such terms become nebulous in the process of resettlement, with its variant outcomes across and between nation-states and refugees. In The Gift of Freedom, Mimi Thi Nguyen argues that for the refugee, “[t]o be given freedom is a process of becoming without being,” a transmutation from unfree to free by another’s hand; meanwhile, freedom is “the gift that keeps on giving, [and] the debt it imposes… troubles the recipient far into the foreseeable future” (18-9, emphasis original). As such, the refugee’s unbecoming through the granting of refuge reinscribes the objecthood of those without it, who are unfree and lack agency, even as the new marking as debtor ties the former refugee forever to an expectation of gratitude that implies otherness—put plainly, we do not typically expect thanks for the bestowing of inalienable rights of citizenship for the native-born nor the privileged (im)migrant, such that to impose a debt for the refugee’s freedom implies such rights to be alienable after all (Note 2). These issues are also heavily inflected by racial difference, as exemplified by the case of UK-born Shamima Begum, who was deprived of her British citizenship “after leaving the UK as a 15-year-old schoolgirl to join Islamic State, and lost her battle to have it restored in February 2021” (Taylor), and has been further exposed by the differing responses to white and racialized Ukrainian refugees (Howard et al.) (Note 3). Analysis of the racialized refugee must account for identity as an intersectional phenomenon when considering avenues of speech, the mobilization of state power, and discourses of debt and gratitude. Vinh Nguyen proposes “refugeetude” as a recuperative mode and epistemological shift that “take[s] social experiences of marginalization and oppression and recast[s] them as states of being or agency” (“Refugeetude” 110). Faced with the problems of speaking and of representation that Spivak sets out, how might this project, like others both in and outside of the academy seeking to end oppressive systems and epistemologies, “acknowledge our complicity in the muting, in order precisely to be more effective in the long run” (Spivak [2010] 64)?

Such a question is, of course, expansive; the more modest goal of this essay is to consider refusal as a tactic of speech for the refugee whose ingratitude—and correlatively, ungrateful speech acts—are foreclosed. “Refusal” as I understand it follows from Edward Ou Jin Lee’s use of the term in his chapter “Queer and Trans Migrants, Colonial Logics, and the Politics of Refusal,” which has its genealogy in Audra Simpson’s ethnographic work. In Mohawk Interruptus, Simpson describes ethnographic refusal by Kahnawà:ke Mohawks while also employing it as a methodology; for Simpson, “to think and write about sovereignty… involves an ethnographic calculus of what you need to know and what [she] refuse[s] to write” (105). Refusal protects the concerns of the community in question, but it also reveals “a stance, a principle, a historical narrative, and an enjoyment in the reveal” (105, 107, emphasis original)—a refracted perspective of silence and reticence. Lee glosses ethnographic refusal as both

a critique of colonial modes of knowledge production and… a political strategy for Indigenous people to refuse to be “known” in a static and ritualistic manner by the white settler colonial state. These refusals are not only a response against something but are also a shift towards somewhere. The practice of refusal is generative both politically and theoretically, fostering the creation of new socialities as well as highlighting the “limits and possibilities, especially but not only of the state and other institutions.” (144; quoting McGranahan, 319)

Generative and willful, refusal is also social and “as revenge… rejects external state and institutional structures” (McGranahan 322-3). As such, it differs from resistance in functioning as critique (322)—as explicit “denial or rejection of something requested, demanded, or offered” (“refusal, n.”). 

In the transit from anthropology to literature, refusal necessarily shifts, most blatantly in its facticity; while the question of truth-value in fiction cannot be addressed here, refusal in an anthropological sense refers to a denial—enacted, somatic, and fully-realized—in the “real,” not fictional, world. Literary refusal might then be characterized as a parallel, “real” act of the author, but not of its actant or character, who remains an imagined creation. While refusal loses the descriptor “ethnographic” in this relocation, I argue that in Thammavongsa’s work, it maintains its social aspect as a collective act. Although the characters I discuss refuse alone and in ways that are often more interpersonal than institutional, they are not the subjects of the “harmonious human personality development… in its encounter with the structures of the social world [that precipitate] an enfolding of the individual within and by those structures” that typifies the individualist bildungsroman (Slaughter 101, emphasis original). That is, Thammavongsa’s characters do not strive for an exceptionalist, American Dream-esque actualization into Western society, aligned with neoliberal emphasis on the individual as the site of agency and action. Rather, they refuse social integration and convey, in their parallel and representative appearances across Thammavongsa’s collection of stories, refusal itself as a tactic available for collective use. 

This is evident in the naming of the main character in the title story, “How to Pronounce Knife.” Though the narration refers to her as “the child,” we learn from her teacher that her name is Joy; Thammavongsa’s use of the generalized noun name of “child” represents a departure from the individualized, knowable subject and instead situates the child in relation—she is the child of her parents, Laotian refugees. The story opens with her being visibly marked as other, dressed differently from the rest of her class for picture day, her mother having been unable to read the note sent home pinned to her shirt (Thammavongsa, How to Pronounce Knife 3-5). As a result, she is “seated a little off to the side, with the grade and year sign placed in front of her” in her class photo (5). Though no longer legally a refugee, having reached a site of “refuge,” refugeeness remains “difficult to jettison from the self” and continues to set her aside as anomalous (Vinh Nguyen, “Refugeetude” 111). Fittingly, the story turns on a failed speech act: the child cannot pronounce “knife” correctly, neither herself nor her father, who she asks for help, knowing that the “k” is silent (6-7). When asked to read her book in front of the class at school, the child “said it the way her father had told her, but she knew it was wrong because Miss Choi would not turn the page” (7). Her teacher does not recognize “kahnneyff” and the child’s efforts to speak in a language intelligible and acceptable to Miss Choi (who is the institutional and its authority figures in microcosm) go unheard. The child, however, refuses to accept both the nonsensical silencing of the “k” and the threat it poses to her image of her father, “the only one in their home who knew how to read” (7-9). She “had insisted the letter k was not silent. It couldn’t be, and she had argued and argued, ‘It’s in the front! The first one! It should have a sound!’ and then she screamed as if they had taken some important thing away. She never gave up on what her father said, on that first sound there” (9). If “elaborations of insurgency stand in the place of ‘the utterance’[, t]he sender… marked only as a pointer to an irretrievable consciousness” (Spivak [1994] 82), the child refuses to let the pointer be unobtrusive; she stands on the other side of difference from her classmates, but in the case of the “k,” unlike the class photo, she will not sit quietly off to the side. She is so insistent on the sound of the “k” that she is sent to the principal’s office (Thammavongsa, How to Pronounce Knife 8). 

Her refusal of the silencing of the letter metonymic for her father “and his friends, who were educated and had great jobs in Laos” (4), moreover, works; at the end of the day, Miss Choi lets her pick a prize despite not having read her book “correctly” (9). The child’s awareness that these refugees had “had to begin all over again, as if the life they led before didn’t count” (4) prompts her defiance, and whether or not her teacher recognizes this subtext, the refusal exhorts the desired response. As in Lee’s study, refusal “serve[s] as more than a survival strategy” for a child belittled by a well-off classmate, but also as “a refusal of the immigration/colonization regime’s textual framing of migrants with precarious status as undeserving of legal personhood” (Lee 158; Thammavongsa, How to Pronounce Knife 8). The child will not accept a reading of “knife” that imputes that her father is lesser—less knowledgeable, less able to speak and be heard—but grapples alone with what this means for her and her family: “As she watches her father eat his dinner, she thinks of what else he doesn’t know. What else she would have to find out for herself” (9). Reconciling this reality of life in a new country which will bring an “inevitable generational divide” (Nayeri, “Cultural Repatriation” 366), the child has spoken as best she can, through a generative refusal. And yet, the story poses Spivak’s problem as reframed by J. Maggio: rather than, can the subaltern speak, Maggio argues the better question is, can the subaltern be heard? For Devadas and Nicholls, “the ‘cannot speak’ in ‘the subaltern cannot speak’ is gesturing to the impossibility of speech to an audience that refuses to hear and respond to the crying out. It is this incomplete transaction that suppresses the subaltern. … [S]peaking, as a complete transaction, is only possible on the contingency of the reception of the sent message” (qtd. in Maggio 430). Though Maggio’s reformulation is, perhaps, reductive of the subaltern’s agency—to pose the problem of speaking as one solely of hearing is to resituate the site of action and agency with the privileged Western subject rather than the speaker themselves, as well as to reduce the enormous complexity of speaking which Spivak enumerates (Note 4)—the issue of the reception of refusal is significant (Note 5). The child refuses silence in a dual sense (the silent “k” and to be silent herself in response), but the reader cannot know how her speech has been “intercepted,” to use Spivak’s term. Does her refusal register as a protest against a teaching method that cannot account for inequities outside the classroom, against the de-skilling of her father and other refugees struggling to adjust to Western institutions and bureaucracies? Or is it taken to be no more than a child’s tantrum, as incomprehensible as her refusal to admit a silent “k”? To reverse Abena P. A. Busia’s formation, “we must not confuse the meanings of ‘can,’” mistaking ability to speak with permission or the possibility of being heard (102). 

The final story in Thammavongsa’s collection is “Picking Worms,” in which a fourteen-year-old girl works collecting worms at a hog farm on Saturdays, her mother’s job all week. A boy at school, James, asks the girl to a dance, to which the girl’s mother had wanted her to go (“She said I shouldn’t miss out on things in life”), and so James enters their world of Lao (im)migrants (Thammavongsa How to Pronounce Knife 173-4). He later comes to pick worms with them, willing to work for free, and this “initiative” gets him promoted to the role of manager (175-6). As in “How to Pronounce Knife,” refusal is not the immediate response of the protagonist. She is not enthusiastic about James but does not refuse his invitation to the dance, though she later tries to get him to quit their group project by being intentionally careless (173-4). This is because her mother seems to like him, and she does not “want her to get too attached to him. I didn’t want him to break her heart” (174). At first, the girl seems to fear that any man in their lives will break their hearts, as did her father’s death by drowning as they fled Laos (172-3), but as time goes on, it is James’ privilege that bothers her: 

I wanted him to know that [picking worms] wasn’t awesome at all. I wanted him to see that it was hard work… I wanted to see him struggle to fill a box, to step on the worms because he didn’t know where to look for them, to pull too hard and have their bodies break apart in his hands. I wanted him to be yelled at when his count was low, and for him to depend on something for his living that he had no control of—the weather. (174-5)

The repetition of “I wanted” in this passage is significant in setting the stage for refusal. For Thammavongsa, want is powerful and profound: “my mom gave birth to me in a refugee camp, because she wanted me… My parents built a raft made of bamboo to get to a refugee camp, because they wanted a better life” (“Writing Refugees” 13:40-14:08). Want shapes life conditions and is an avowal of subjecthood, the ability to act, which is particularly important for the unfree refugee who exists in “a condition of social abjection” (Vinh Nguyen, “Refugeetude” 110). To want is then an invocation of freedom that denies its necessity as gift and the corresponding “permanent relationship of bondage” that imposes perpetual gratitude to the nation-state of refuge (Mimi Thi Nguyen 18).

If “How to Pronounce Knife” is a story that refuses silencing, “Picking Worms” is one that refuses gratitude. As James becomes the girl’s and her mother’s boss, the girl watches him impose new rules that change a job her mother loved to one she struggles to do; “[s]he began to forget the things she once did so naturally… I watched her heart break. She had been the best, but it hadn’t mattered” (Thammavongsa, How to Pronounce Knife 177). So on the evening of the school dance, the girl, home alone, locks the door, turns out the lights, and watches as James “rang the doorbell. Then he rang it again. When after a few minutes I still did not open the door, he started banging and struggled to turn the knob… I saw it all, standing on the other side of the door, in the dark, watching him in the golden circle that framed the peephole. I did nothing. Not even when I heard him sob” (179). Refusing to be grateful for James’ unwanted attention, for a hard job that still failed to recognize her mother’s worth, for the “gift” of freedom with its strings attached, the girl also refuses to respond to James’ desperation. She sees him in his “golden circle” of privilege and ease and will not comply with the expectation that she should be grateful for conditions in a country that relies on Lao refugees to do the dirty jobs (166), and then passes them over to promote a 14-year-old boy. In her article in the Guardian, Dina Nayeri writes,

Despite a lifetime spent striving to fulfil my own potential, of trying to prove that the west is better for having known me, I cannot accept this way of thinking, this separation of the worthy exile from the unworthy. Civilised people don’t ask for resumes when answering calls from the edge of a grave. […] There should be no question of earning my place, of showing that I was a good bet. My family and I were once humans in danger, and we knocked on the doors of every embassy we came across: the UK, America, Australia, Italy. America answered and so, decades later, I still feel a need to bow down to airport immigration officers simply for saying “Welcome home”. But what America did was a basic human obligation. (“The Ungrateful Refugee”) (Note 6)

This refusal of gratitude is couched in its constant expectation by those Nayeri encounters as a child in Oklahoma: “[a]s refugees, we owed them our previous identity. We had to lay it at their door like an offering, and gleefully deny it to earn our place in this new country” (“The Ungrateful Refugee”). Given the “gift of freedom” and its attendant debt, ingratitude radically refuses liberal imperialism’s power to “shape life,” whether couched in the institutional or the interpersonal. It asks, “[w]hy are we—those of us who have received this previous, poisonous gift of freedom—obliged to thank?” (Mimi Thi Nguyen 3)

In a final refusal, the girl “pressed a finger up to the peephole and held it there. I did not want him to see my open eye” (Thammavongsa, How to Pronounce Knife 179). This act of “simply refusing the gaze, of disengagement” (Simpson 106) provocatively closes Thammavongsa’s collection with questions of representation and the gaze. While a discussion of the overlapping male, racialized, and colonial gazes at play in the case of a young woman refugee from Southeast Asia is not possible here, the relationship between power and visuality consolidated by the concept of the gaze is clear; “the act of looking” by the girl is “an exercise of power” over James (Columpar 26-7), whereas her refusal to let him see her watching denies a reciprocal engagement. As Corinn Columpar recounts Laura Mulvey’s formative theorizing of the male gaze, it “is one that controls; to be precise, it is one that not only objectifies women, but also aligns itself with the power to act, to move the narrative forward” (32). To end a set of short stories focused on Laotian refugees who are mostly women with a refusal to let a (presumably white) man see is to suggest certain relations of representation across How to Pronounce Knife as a whole. Thammavongsa’s closing gesture denies the power to act associated with the oppressive gaze; in refusing to be seen it refuses the objectification that so often accompanies re-presentation, or speaking of the oppressed and marginalized. Like the girl in “Picking Worms,” she refuses the objectification of the (former) refugee—and their fixity in indebtedness—and returns the gaze, taking the power “to move the narrative forward” (Columpar 32). In so doing, she follows Simpson in a careful attention to re-presentation of her community that embraces refusal as methodology.

Of course, this fails to solve Spivak’s problem of speaking, not in the least because, as members of the communities of which they speak, Thammavongsa and Simpson are both uniquely positioned to speak for; at the same time, their locations in Western literary circles and the academy remove them from those most oppressed and silenced and would likely make them, for Spivak, something close to native informants. Ultimately, refusal can no more guarantee a completed, received speech act than can Bhubaneswari Bhaduri’s suicide, to recapitulate Spivak’s own example. Further, as indicated by Shamima Begum’s case and stateless persons in general, refusal is not a unidirectional, bottom-up tactic, but may also be mobilized by the nation state to deny protection, rights, and refuge. However, I want to suggest that it is an act with radical potential for the oppressed in its denial of these, and other, oppressive terms of engagement; refusal rejects compromise or concession, saying enough is enough (Simpson 111). In “How to Pronounce Knife,” the child refuses the silencing of her family and community and their stereotyping as other, unskilled, and uneducated. Whatever hearers may glean from her refusal, they are certainly unable to ignore her. The invocation of want in “Picking Worms” legitimizes the refugee as agentic subject, allowing denial of the gift of freedom and of indebtedness. As an ungrateful refugee, the girl can refuse the gaze and, in microcosm of the collection, deny objectifying re-presentation. Like, or as, refugeetude, refusal “opens up new ways of conceptualizing refugee subjects and the relationalities that extend beyond the parameters of refugeeness” (Vinh Nguyen, “Refugeetude” 110-1). As a strategy in “How to Pronounce Knife” and “Picking Worms”—as well as elsewhere in Thammavongsa’s collection—it is an opportunity for learning, listening, and reading more deeply; of the myriad ways in which the marginalized can speak, refusal offers radical potential when we are willing to hear it. 

Notes

1. See, for example, Candida Rifkind on Thammavongsa’s depictions of the labouring migrant body (Nguyen et al. 125-8) and Guy Beauregard’s discussion, “How to Pronounce Laos” (134-7), in addition to Y-Dang Troeung’s aforementioned remarks.

2. This observation is indebted to Slaughter’s “Novel Subjects and Enabling Fictions: The Formal Articulation of International Human Rights Law” in Human Rights, Inc.

3. Thank you to Priscilla Jolly for raising the example of Shamima Begum.

4. For instance, Spivak writes, “the moot decipherment by another in an academic institution… many years later must not be too quickly identified with the ‘speaking’ of the subaltern” ([2010] 64), while such decipherment seems proximate to Maggio’s goal of “translation.”

5. Audra Simpson illustrates this through her own responses to refusal early in her field work: “[w]hen doing formal fieldwork, I did not yet have the language for the calculus of refusals everywhere I went, by everyone I talked to—this labor-intensive process of assertion: around membership, which registered then to me as a kind of stubbornness, an excess of will” (113, emphasis added). What she theorizes as generative refusal she initially misread as stubbornness, a failure to speak rather than speech through refusal.

6. For an alternative reading of refugee gratitude, see Vinh Nguyen’s “Refugee Gratitude: Narrating Success and Intersubjectivity in Kim Thúy's Ru.”