Unlearning the Voicelessness: Non-Verbal Agency among Subaltern Women in The Kitchen Dwellers’ Testimony

Abstract

This study examines how the speakers in Ladan Osman’s poetry collection The Kitchen Dweller’s Testimony (2015) navigate the multiplied pressures of colonial and patriarchal structures through non-verbal actions as a legitimate way to “speak.” It addresses the limited attention given to the non-verbal, embodied, and auditive forms of resistance that subaltern women employ when conventional speech is foreclosed to them. Using a qualitative descriptive approach and textual analysis, the study analyzes selected poems through the lens of Chandra Mohanty’s postcolonial feminist framework, focusing on bodily gestures, the use of sound and noise, and strategic silence as alternative modes of communication. The findings reveal that subaltern women’s resistance is neither absent nor uniform but takes shape through the body, sound, and silence. These alternative communicative strategies enable the speakers to negotiate colonial and patriarchal structures in ways that Western feminist frameworks often fail to recognize as legitimate political acts. The study concludes that resistance should be understood beyond verbal and collective protest and that Osman’s poetry offers rich, underexplored material for understanding subaltern women’s alternative communicative strategies, thereby contributing to postcolonial feminist scholarship.