Images of 'wounded mouths' occur frequently in literary and visual artworks artefacts from both the Global South and the Global North and often imply some form of language loss in relation to trauma. There is, however, a decisive difference between language loss as a symptomatic reaction towards a single traumatic event as explained by Western trauma theorists, and language loss as part of an insidious trauma, caused and perpetuated by continuing forms of structural discrimination. This study contrasts literary and visual images from the Global South to the Global North so as to understand strategies of trauma confrontation within the ambit of what it terms Global South trauma theory.