Abeer Zaki/unsplash, CC BY-NDTongue is a debut book, but Australian author Kathryn Crowcroft has previously published scholarly articles, poems and reviews. Tongue emerges from her doctorate, as the product of thinking and observations that couldn’t be contained within that work. Review: Tongue – Kathryn Crowcroft (Giramondo)Tongue certainly shows its research DNA, but it is considerably more than that. The writing is exquisitely poetic; the hybrid structure suggests artistic innovation; and it balances reflections on the history of the tongue with an account of her own family relationships. The book straddles genres, blending nonfiction and memoir in a style identified as a “nodal essay”: a sequence of fragments, or discrete narrative nodes, rather than a conventional linear story.It seems to have been woven together from fragments of a life and memories of parent/child interactions, flavoured with quotations from archival documents, and coloured with vignettes of day-to-day interactions with colleagues – Florian, Rowan, Dora – who are given no backstory, nor identifiable features. Threaded through this fabric are interweaving strands that provide both the through-line for the story and the moments of illumination that make the reading so absorbing. A shapeshifterOne thread is, of course, the tongue. The book crafts an expansive and extensive portrait of that (rather unattractive) muscle that is, as she writes in the opening pages, “an organ moulded by the art of movement, a shapeshifter”. Accounts of its qualities, its composition and its function dot the pages, in descriptions that shift between the clinical and the lyrical. Here and there are images of tongues she has found in medieval or later medical texts. One is a drawing of the papillae – the small bumps on the surface of the tongue – in which three tongues look exactly like strange beings relaxing on a park bench. Other images present cross-sections of membranes, a badly bitten tongue, one that is badly blistered, another that resembles a dragon … and so on. Drawing of a tongue from a 1910 medical book. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY Personally, I have always found the tongue to be a little repulsive, something best hidden away in the mouth, heard but not seen. Yet it is an important organ, and a significant part of the self. The tongue is what permits us to use speech, enabling us to tell poetry and stories and lies, providing us with “the sensations that motivate words into shapes”. But is also a problem for morality, as Crowcroft’s research demonstrates: tongues can’t be trusted because they speak of both the sacred and of sin; they communicate compassion as easily as cruelty; they celebrate both healthy communities and promulgate misogyny, racism and hatred. Mendacity and truthA second thread that runs through this book is Crowcroft’s family history, told in ways that tease out the often complex relationships between adult children and their parents. Crowcroft introduces her mother and then her late father and next, the ongoing impact his life and his person had on them both. Neither woman, it seems, has resolved their relationship to the dead husband, the dead father. Neither can speak directly and transparently about this man of violence. Her mother only tells it slant; Crowcroft writes, for example, that when her mother says that “her rib is playing up”, she “speaks like occlusion […], says got fractured as opposed to he cracked it”.The father threads right through the narrative, though Crowcroft herself avoids specifics, even when her friend Florian wants more detail: ‘Tell me what actually happened, he said", because without detail, “he was left wondering whether the violence was significant”. Perhaps this is why Crowcroft doesn’t come right out and describe the violence, blow by blow. She writes, in this respect, “I find it wiser to state the fact of violence solely. […] I have nothing to confess or to prove, and little interest in martyrdom”. Still, the frequent references throughout the book to her mother’s refusal to acknowledge the violence, and her own insistence that it should be spoken, is a continual point of tension and the source of what Crowcroft calls “lies”: which brings us back to the tongue, that organ of mendacity as well as of truth. Giramondo She and her mother do indeed communicate, mostly through short text messages which – charmingly – her mother signs off with LOL. For her, this stands for “lots of love”; for Crowcroft (for most of us) it means “laugh out loud”. Any laughter though, in this account, seems to be a response to ironic thoughts and moments, rather than an expression of mirth or joy. Overall, their communication seems to be characterised more by silence than by speech; silences that allow them to avoid direct confrontation of their memories of her father. Perhaps this is because speaking something out carries too great a risk. “I know there were moments […] witnessing the violence, when the stuck muscle in my mouth became stone”, Crowcroft writes. Later she describes her session with a speech therapist where she performs the exercises that will loosen her tongue. The noises she makes then “recall the sounds of a baby, or a hurt thing […] birthing a voice that emerged – spirit-like – from his death”.Silence plays an important part in this story, and does so not least by drawing attention to the complexity and ambiguity of language. Meaning, of course, is not easily pinned down; meaning loses its way. Crowcroft quotes from a late 19th-century lecture on the tongue that ends with the statement “let the tongue speak for itself”. Her response to this suggestion is that if a tongue speaks for itself, “A sort of schism takes place where the meanings become slightly unhinged”. A tongue, after all, cannot speak for itself; and it certainly cannot secure meaning. After all, the tongue is mobile and slippery piece of flesh and similarly the words it allows us to speak slide away from any stable position. Consequently, Crowcroft suggests that, for her, To speak had often felt unfit for purpose, like using an appliance with the wires all spitting and live. Words change depending on who hears them, on who is listening. And yet maintaining silence does not necessarily help. Silence too can produce meanings well beyond what we would like to have conveyed. ResolutionThis may sound a bit grim, but the book does not present tongues, language, speech, simply as a matter of anxiety and ambiguity. Something else the tongue can facilitate is a resolution of resentments and misunderstandings and a restoration of relationships, whether with one’s past, one’s self, or one’s parents. Crowcroft writes and shows in Tongue, that she and her mother were able to achieve this, and “to reconcile our differing interpretations of the past and piece together a more graceful future”. A more graceful future: what a lovely phrase. The coda to the book, tucked away at the very back, leaves us with that sense of grace: Crowcroft is nursing her tiny daughter, and finding silence “the truest response” as she watches her baby open her mouth, and lift “her leaf-like tongue”.This is an astounding and deeply engaging account not just of the complexity of one small organ in the human body, but also of what we already know and sometimes forget – the complexity of language and of relationships; and the enormous value of connectedness and care.Jen Webb has receive funding from the Australian Research Council.