The introduction opens with a childhood story about tongues that Charania heard as a little girl. Using this story as a way into the onto-epistemologies her mother's tongue passed on and, more broadly, the brown maternal, this chapter explores the multiple ways the tongue is considered a “bad object.” This chapter turns toward psychoanalysis to exhume its genealogy of producing the maternal as always and already threatening, withholding, devouring, and abandoning of queer of color critiques and centers other modes of thought—the “elsewhere” of theory, the body, the senses, the resonant, the feminine. Suturing together the book's three central theorems—brownness, tongues, and the maternal—this chapter explores how the brown mother and her tongues offer an epistemological disruption that moves, shakes, and vexes us toward another set of vocabularies.