1.
I spend my time thinking about voice, of a distinctly literary kind. How it travels, how it breathes, and how it sets in stone. I’m one of the lucky few to receive financial support to study what I love and care about, literature, and especially that which is written in Greek and Latin, poetry and prose. Veering ever into anachronistic territory but stopping short of real sacrilege, I have a tendency to draw parallels between the lives I study and my own. So, as much as I have gathered about the voices of others, and of the past, I’m forced to think about what leaves my mouth, too. Voice can be a touchy—literally haptic or metaphorically sensitive—subject indeed, not least when possession comes into question, and it no longer feels like one’s own. This I now know.

2.
For the Augustan-era rhetorician Dionysius of Halicarnassus, older classical authors, hardened and wisened by age and Atticism, enclosed a ‘patina of antiquity’ in their written form.[1] Their words left an archaising tinge on their faces, a thin but noticeable surface of rusty green and bronzed tarnish, (patiently, or not so patiently) waiting to be reanimated and reproduced with every ensuing epoch and its clamour for the vox antiqua reborn.[2] Nothing could beat the seniority of a by-gone era and its lingering tune.

3.
Like the handprints of the potter cling[ing] to the clay vessel. This (translated) sentence is from Walter Benjamin’s ‘Die Erzähler’, where he describes the luxury of the oral storyteller whose words soar from his mouth in real time, shaped but not wholly fixed: the performer can leave behind distinct traces of himself on his voice, those floating sounds which are in the process of leaving his body but are not yet disembodied, like handprints stamped in still damp clay. By contrast, the plight of the modern novelist, as Benjamin frames it, is one of isolation, in production and reception both; his firm words exist on a concrete page begging to be heated up and lifted from their stagnant material conditions, made alive by the calor of moving lips.[3] One wonders what happens when the clay sets.

4.
I filled four dozen cylinders in two settings, then found I could have said about as much with the pen and said it a deal better. So ranted Mark Twain, in an 1891 letter to William Dean Howells, after he had tried to use the gramophone machine to record his then novel-in-progress The American Claimant. Afflicted with rheumatism in his right hand, and initially in want of an alternate outlet for his literary voice, Twain ended up despising the failed disembodied potential of the phonograph, the ‘recording angel’ which in fact compressed the voice into a pale imitation of itself. Throwing one’s voice would turn it into something uncanny, bereft of its vigour, shine, ornament, all while the ‘sound-engraver’ (φωνή + γράφω) made its infelicitous mark, ‘unsmiling as the devil’ (Twain’s words) at the thought of the untruth it had created. What would this phony devil make of my voice?

5.
A voice establishes me as an inside capable of recognising and being recognised by an outside. As I speak, I seem to be situated in front of myself, leaving myself behind. But if my voice is out in front of me, this makes me feel that I am somewhat behind it. I am able to shelter my voice, only if my voice can be me.[4] Recently, it feels like my voice has rendered me all too perceived, and all too unrecognisable. My voice makes me, but I am not all my voice entails. Sometimes, even, I stand steps behind my vocal cords, as they balloon.

6.
I also spend my time thinking about voice of a decidedly linguistic kind, about how I have mother tongues and (half) proficiencies, and how these abilities are trialled and tested in my new environment. How, I too, now live in a diverse, arguably complicated, linguistic landscape, where diglossia, between Standard German and Swiss German[5], blooms, and  constitutional four-pronged (FR/DE/IT/RM) multilingualism endures, in Helvetic manner. I can even reach Dreiländereck (a point at which three countries meet) in a tram ride which lasts no longer than ten minutes.

7.
I moved to Switzerland six months ago for my PhD. More accurately, I moved back to Switzerland, one should say, because I was born here to Iranian parents, and then promptly whisked away on an English adventure, never really thinking I’d return. Until I did, of course. But that was Romandie (in Geneva, and Lausanne), and this is Basel Stadt, two different (linguistic) worlds, and the whole thing is a long story best heard in my dad’s (unmistakeably Vaudois) French, with interjections from my mother’s SoCal tones.[6] So, let’s write that I moved to Switzerland, and that, among so much good, it’s new and scary, neu und unheimlich, neu u unheimlegg.

8.
My voice has always carried some uniqueness. I am part of the first generation of my family to be a native speaker of English, after all. Since I was four, there has been an English which has become mine, to twist and turn and be complimented for its displays of wit and verve; I have been told it’s a beautiful English indeed, a phonetic skin to be worn with pride. This is a voice that must be reconciled with the ethnically Persian vessel whence it arises: even if my visual façade doesn’t match up to one’s idea of England, my accent certainly does, and my voice ruthlessly denounces the fool who tries to divorce the two. The handprints in the clay are mine, and they are deeply embedded. Or at least I like to think.

9.
I remember when I was at Oxford, I was asked to do a voiceover for a small-scale exhibition on photography and its British origins, when I had anything but. Apparently, my voice sounded ‘proper’, and right, suitably English, to give life to Laura Mundy, the sister-in-law of Henry Fox Talbot. I turned up to the Weston one day in January, and was given a letter of Mundy’s to read, complimenting Talbot’s ‘shadowy experiment’. When the exhibition opened to the public, friends and acquaintances went to listen. They unanimously commented on how amusing it was that I could sound even more posh over audio recording; my faceless voice had done all the talking.

10.
But outside of England, I know my language has a power which has come to encompass something else entirely. I embody the global lingua franca; I have the immense privilege of not necessarily having to speak anything other than my first language in those international settings where others must scramble to find a linguistic middle-ground. In my milieu of European colleagues and friends, I get asked to edit and proof-read English articles, to explain grammar rules I typically only think about in a cursory manner, to sound out differences in vowel quality. In short, to be an authority on English(ness) as I never have been before; a newly appointed, and frankly dizzying, position, happy as I am to do these tasks. So much hangs, suddenly, on the way I sound, how this makes me an asset and a curiosity, how hearing me speak in this specific accent may constitute a stated pleasure before it can strike up ‘ursprünglich?’ curiosity in the mind of the hearer.

11.
Flying back to Basel (via Munich) from Vienna , where I had gone for a workshop, I struck up conversation with my row-mate, a talkative German actor on his way home. He asked me where I was from, and though receptive to my initial answer (England), was ultimately dissatisfied with its perceived superficiality. He motioned to my forearm, wagering his own suggestion. ‘A beautiful olive tinge! Arab?’ Though Dionysius had some (unfavourable) ink to spill on the ‘Asianic’ style of rhetoric, this man’s idea of patina was altogether different. And yet, earlier that day, I had received many compliments on my presentation style, my rhetorical flair, and that beautiful English, oh that beautiful English! Like going back in time! So, for better or for worse, it would situate me here on this plane, in this exchange, too, with some concessions.

12.
In general, I am less complicated now, I think. Yes, this is a voice which can sing Hark the Herald during Christmas celebrations, and still recite some Ferdowsi (فردوسی) for Shab-e Yalda (شب یلدا).[7] Yes, this is a body which will take a train to Lausanne to visit some family, and fly to Orange County, California to see the rest. These are potential disclaimers I may trot out at a university apéro, for fear of seeming like a fraud, in face and sign and being. But I am less complicated, now abroad, and more English. My voice has immeasurably smoothed out my path for me, for which I feel gratitude and guilt. It feels a disservice to my family’s contours to find comfort in the flattened version of my heritage, to take the pale imitation of identity my voice conveys, and let it swallow me whole. But I do it, and stand there a willing phonograph of my own phonos.

13.
I lost my voice the other day, in a lethal mixture of seasonal cold and excessive carolling. My English patina started turning into nebulous, discoloured croaks. Uneasy at the thought, I turned the kettle on. Gargling salt water for a sore throat is a universal cure, right?

14.
My voice now carries a hint of shame, too, amidst peers who can display their second (and third, and fourth) language acquisition so effortlessly, though I know their non-native voices have come with admirable graft. My Farsi has turned stagnant, practised only over the phone,; my German exists in the shadows between the schriftlich and mündlich, lapidified in commendation from the Goethe Institut. When I do make an attempt at my overly keen Hochdeutsch, it is really a desperate linguistic plea that, if my interlocutor knows I’m from London, their response would be one of surprise, dass man das nicht hört. There could even be some attempts at Baseldytsch tucked in there, but these days are too early for dialectal dalliance. There’s some French too, of some deliberately vague disposition, in snatches here and there, un peu ici, un peu là.

15.
So, I’m not your average monolingual Brit on paper, but in practice I consider myself no better. I can so easily hide behind my English, leaving myself behind, and others are so gracious to let me, that a new flattening occurs. While my voice screams—I am capable of more!—my body resists, lodging discomfort in the throat instead of letting it hang thickly in the air and on my skin. I have the luxury of choosing between public embarrassment and private shame, and I go for the latter. I think the scars of avoidance will start to show soon enough, though. And once I have cleared my throat of all its phlegm, I will make polite if unpolished forays into non-English. Gleich werde ich meine Stimme in anderen Farben zeigen, if I may evoke Yoko Tawada for my own helles Vokal.

16.
Gleich werde ich meinen
Bauch zeigen und tanzen an einem
Teich wo eine deutsche
Eiche steht. Ein gottloses
Buch werde ich
euch schreiben und steige
hoch auf den Galgen.

17.
While my voice suffers (self-) compression, for the time being at least, I look to Basel’s multi-layered Stimme/stimm/voix.[8] In the seams between Baseldytsch, Swiss Standard German (Schweizer Hochdeutsch), and Hochdeutsch, with English proficiency to boot, between orality and Schriftlichkeit, between bordering Saint Louis and neighbouring Weil am Rhein, Basel is polylectal in its very nature, a layered fabric woven together for its people to slip in and out of. These inter-weavings of voice may not always be smooth—in fact they certainly are not—but Basel’s linguistic tissue remains structurally intact all the same. The question that lies for me, then, is how I should find my way in these folds, or if I should be happy to sit on the seams’ sidelines, with a voice that bears enough deep-seated identity contortions of its own.

18.
A voice establishes me as an inside capable of recognising and being recognised by an outside. Before the clay sets, however, I want to turn away from my voice, and give vocal films their engraving due..

19.
The last time I was in London, seeking a place of comfort, I went to the BFI, and chose an uncomforting film. Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (1974), a joint directorial endeavour by film theorists Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, is an experiment precisely in surface and depth, and in disembodied language, wherein we witness a ‘history of women’s silences’.[9] We see Kleist’s ill-performed Penthesilea in mime, then Wollen’s overly (?) loquacious lecture on the fearsome Amazonian princess, traced along misplaced, pink-lined, capitalised index cards (FICTION—SITUATE. THEORISTS—FILM).

20.
Did you know ancient authors (Virgil, Tryphiodorus, Propertius?) didn’t know what to do with this fierce woman? Rather, they often didn’t know how to give her voice, at least not in ways we can now receive. The third section of Mulvey/Wollen’s Penthesilea’s is a response to this vocal absence: a sequence of the Amazons in material form—in painting and stone and sculpture and tapestry, and Wonder Woman comics, too—overlaid by the sounds of a woman’s screams, and laughs, hisses and choking. The fourth section is the silent American film from 1913, 80 Million Women Want – ?, on women’s suffrage. But fear not, for the silence is given voice, and a powerful one at that: women’s rights campaigner Jesse Ashley’s, on feminism, and class politics, and the leisured woman. And, as Bruno Guaraná writes, ‘the film attempts to build a new, radical language as it connects Greek mythology to media representation and its feminist politics of its time’.[10]

21.
I later found out that the third sequence’s accompanying ‘voice’ was Luciano Berio’s Visage, electronic music with Cathy Berberian’s voice on tape, and on top. Visage can also be regarded as a transformation of real examples of vocal behaviour that go from unarticulated sound to syllable, from laughing to weeping and singing, from aphasia to types of inflections derived from specific languages. […] Thus, Visage does not offer a meaningful text or a meaningful language: it only develops the resemblance of them.[11] And how haunting and beautiful it is, to have voice as the tipping point between feigned resemblance and meaningful language. And how haunted and beautiful I feel, to exist in that moment.

22.
MONTAGE: DISCONTINUTIES. NO SINGLE THREAD. IT IS ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE: THE SPACE BETWEEN A STORY WHICH IS NEVER TOLD AND A HISTORY WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN MADE.[12]

23.
Penthesilea isn’t a film one ‘gets’ right away, or perhaps at all. Or at least I didn’t. It is an exhibition of changing voices one can only grasp at. Negative aesthetics, anti-diegesis, and anti-exegesis, text and art and inheritance made to kiss and enmesh together. An act of ‘scorched earth’,[13] and of a scorched tongue, too.

24.
‘Did their words / wreck him, strip him naked, cast him on an island […]
Oh those voices whistle like a hurricane shredded by the strings of a golden harp / […]
higher than the clouds, so high’[14]
Damian Garside, ‘If Julia Kristeva had Written The Odyssey’

25.
I’m back in Basel, and sat in the Kunsthalle, on the steps which lead from the ground floor to the first. I’ve been silent thus far, and in fact, so have the others on these stairs. We’re waiting for the After the Afternoon Film Program to begin. I’m especially waiting to re-watch a short film I’ve come to admire from Regionale 26, which cinematically unfolds as if Kristeva had written The Odyssey.

26.
‘SEA FULL OF SONG’ (2025, dir. Nefeli Chrysa Avgeris) follows a dreaming figure who floats through the Sirenusas islands. At once skimming the surface of the sea, at once a rickety boat, at once a bird in the sky eyeing onto the Amalfi coast, we hear only their breath, contorting and short, while the text on screen gives us some glimpses into our ‘protagonist’ beyond their dyspnoea. From a vivid day I now remember the sound of my breath. Sirens survived through their myth. A myth as a memory. The water is beautiful, but opaque, unrelentingly secretive. For these thirteen minutes, it is the gasping voice that endures, that has a flowing if sparse life outside of a caging materiality.

27.
There’s a Q+A section after each film screening, for the artists and directors to humour an inquisitive audience, who’ve now grown restless on these cushioned steps. It’s in Hochdeutsch, though some artists, even if Swiss, would rather describe their artistic process in English. I raise my hand. I want to ask about Homer, and orality, and what it means to show stories, which we find in an oral tradition, on a screen where we don’t hear words at all. So I do, in a garbled but (orally) legible German, and I get my response, generous and interested. I nod happily, and my voice does, too. πάντα ῥεῖ (everything flows) on the Rhine,[15] after all.

28.
SEA FULL OF SONG positions voice within (if we return to Garside) the ‘music / from a time of horror, of true belonging’, of a time ‘long before words, logic, grammar, circumspection’; its Ur-Art has vocally sated me. In the space between a story which has never been told and a history which has not yet been made, zwischen Stille und Klang, my scorched tongue feels quite at peace.

______________________

Notes:
[1] ὁ πίνος ὁ τῆς ἀρχαιότητος, as Dionysius writes with regards to Plato’s Phaedrus (Dem. 5.3)
[2] Cf. James Porter’s article ‘Feeling Classical’ (2006:325).
[3] A description I owe (anachronistically) to Quintilian (Inst. 10.3.6).
[4] From Steven Connor’s Dumbstruck (2000:5-6), lightly adapted.
[5] Swiss German (Schwyzertüüsch/Schwyzerdütsch) itself is in fact an ‘umbrella term for several Alemannic dialects’ (Stepkowska 2012: 202) and thus the term refers to multiple non-standard varieties.
[6] Have you already got a sense of my family’s complicated national make-up?
[7] The Winter Solstice.
[8] On the (sociolinguistic) relationship between Swiss German dialects, Swiss Standard German, and Federal German Standard German, cf. Büchler, Bülow & Britain (2024:174-176), which also covers the positive evaluation of dialects in German-speaking Switzerland, noting how they are best not classified as ‘low-varieties’ in the Fergusonian sense.
[9] As Nicolas Helm-Grovas (2023:68) writes in The Films of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen (ed. Oliver Fuke).
[10] In Film Quarterly (Summer 2023) 76.4
[11] Visage (author’s note), Centro Studi Luciano Berio
[12] One of the aforementioned index cards.
[13] Mulvey discusses the ‘ “scorched earth” principles’ of their film-making in conversation with Oliver Fuke, and Bruno Guaraná, published in Film Quarterly (2023) 76.4.
[14] From English Academy Review (2013), 30.2.
[15] The title of a listening session at the Kunsthalle in February 2026, led by Haseeb Ahmed, and named after the Heraclitean dictum.

________________________

Kiana Rezakhanlou is currently a PhD student in Latin and Greek Literature at the University of Basel. Her essays and poetry have been published in Minor Literature[s], Wilderness House Literary Review, and Paloma Magazine, among others. During her studies in the UK, at Oxford and Cambridge, she edited The Isis Magazine, The Oxford Review of Books, The Alexandria, and The Camera Publication.