Journeying Home: Poetics, Silence, and International Relations

This dissertation examines silence as a form of language, rather than a lack or void in need of being captured or ratified. It explores untranslatability as an onto-epistemology in International Relations, rethinking how one can attend to that which refuses to be captured. This poetic ethnographic refusal, which does not fit into words, derives from my journey with my own and others familial silences and in this way, I seek to understand how individuals' political identity (or their engagement with the political) have been shaped through the historical intersectional experiences of trauma and political oppression. My work provides a decolonial reading of silence through the pairing of Islamic Sufism with Quantum Physics and Methodological Hauntology in order to understand the effects that silence has on the transmission of political trauma intergenerationally – working/weaving the silenced narratives of Chilean and Haitian refugees in Canada, while actively refusing all claims to expertise that may be connected with the geographic locations associated with my co-travellers.

Writing through the limits of ontology and epistemology this dissertation shows that, what appears to be nothingness, inconsistencies that challenge assumptions, in fact has a non-identifiable somethingness. Yet, through these indeterminacies and tensions to translate, nothingness – or silence – 'speaks' and/or appears in the shape of its absence. Questions of ethics, justice, unknowing and uncertainty when encountering 'the Other' in silence offers opportunities to mediate on the relationship between self and the universe, between micro and macro and between particular and universal. I engage with these problematics through the Sufi philosophy of Wahdat al-Vojud – Oneness of Beings – and the notion of entanglement found in Quantum Physics. By diffractively reading these two philosophies, silence becomes a matter of ontological indeterminacy rather than a state of perpetual doubt or epistemological uncertainty. The questions that this labor opens up go beyond the methodological or empirical landscape that revolves around what becomes visible, when and how; rather, it pushes us to grapple with the manner in which that which has been silent or absent refuses to become translated as distinct.