what are you saying when you say what you say?
reflection on words and language, pt. 1
This month, I’m sharing somewhat rambling words about words. More specifically language, the meaning of words, where words may fail us and where we may pivot when words fail. I’m obsessed with words and languages and hope to write about this more. Maybe a future essay on Right Speech?
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When I was little, offhand and unaware, I used the word “market” to describe the place where my family goes to buy food. Childishly incredulous - and - a little mocking, my friend said “It isn’t a market. It is called a grocery store.”
Since then, and probably longer, I have been oriented toward how words hold multiple meanings. In my household, Swahili was spoken, but not to my brother and me. This left me in a strange fog, in particular, having conversations with myself over the din of my parents unintelligible back and forth and parsing the tone of their voice for meaning and subtext.
Listen to the sound of a word.
Feel the shape of the word in the mouth.
Notice the vibration of a vowel or a consonant in the throat.
As a result, I turn toward a more poetic computation of language. If I can string the right combination of words together, and get them in sequence or rhythm, and create the right sounds, I can more accurately communicate my feelings. Right?
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Really, we have weak means to communicate meaning with each other. Shared language holds multiple weights and scales of meaning so much so that even if I speak English and the person I’m in conversation with speaks English too, we don’t understand each other at all. For example -
With an ex-lover, the word “disappointment” was a point of contention. When I casually (or so I thought) expressed my disappointment, he heard a more loaded statement.
I said “I’d be disappointed -” and he heard me say “You’ve done something wrong.”
What I meant by “disappointed” was “That’d suck, I’d feel bummed out - ”
And I tried to express this. But “disappointment” carried more weight for him. I often felt a loss, not knowing what language to use to communicate my experience to him, and frustrated that there seemingly wasn’t space for the word to have meaning outside of his own. We didn’t know how to talk to each other. Or, we didn’t understand each other’s language.
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In another conversation, an exchange about the “appropriate use” of naming colonization and apartheid, a dude says “It’s more or less beside the point whether colonial administration and post WWII nation creation was moral. Nothing is ever moral. That is not the correct standard.”
I respond “If we can’t hold morality as a shared value, then it feels like we’re having completely different conversations.”
We’re having completely different conversations. We’re talking at each other.
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How do we start having conversations? How can we learn to speak the same language?
In the conversation with the ex-lover, we pulled out some non-violent communication tools, specifically the feels and needs list (I enjoy the resources from Bay Area NVC). In the conversation with the the dude, I asked him “If not morality, what shared values can we agree on?”
In both approaches, my intention was to understand. In these challenging conversations, the willingness to try to understand, to face the potential discomfort of asking “What does this word mean to you?”, can crack open the space of shared language. The goal is not to come to a common understanding of the world. It is to understand the subtext of a word in the other person’s experience.
Fruitful conversations take time and, often, returning to the same point again and again with the shared goal of understanding each other’s experience. Although we may not speak the same language, we can find a translation that conveys a similar meaning.
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One of my grad school mentors taught me that language is action. I see this in the global response to the violence in Gaza and the growing consciousness around the words “colonialism” and “decolonization”.
In a recent interview with On The Media, Palestinian human rights activist, Iyad el-Baghdadi clarifies what these words mean and explains why muddling them can be risky.
Iyad el-Baghdadi: In extractive colonialism, the objective is to extract wealth away. You need a labor class, you need people to work the fields, you need people to work the plantations, you need them subjugated but you don't need them dead.
Brooke Gladstone: Then the second, settler colonialism, where the colonizer wants the land without the people, and that el-Baghdadi says describes what happened in Palestine.
Iyad el-Baghdadi: In settler colonialism, the colonizer here wants the land for expansion for a new settlement, displacing the natives. The tools of hegemony over here are much more brutal because we don't need those people to be there.
Brooke Gladstone: The word that's most muddled, and he says dangerously so is decolonization. It's too often confused with another term, anti-colonial.
Iyad el-Baghdadi: Not every anti-colonial movement is decolonial. Anti-colonial simply mean opposed to the presence of colonialism. Anti-colonial movements themselves can fall into the same patterns of the colonizers. They can start to have a worldview which is built upon these colonial concepts. Decolonization, on the other hand, the way that I approach it, is that it's not really about removing people, it's about removing supremacy.
There's no longer colonizer and colonized, there's simply equal citizens in one state. This, of course, does not erase the inequities of the past, but this is the only light that can lead us towards the future.
Iyad el-Baghdadi emphasizes nuance in language, orienting us toward a specificity that places power on our words and how we use them. What are you saying when you say what you say? What are you saying when you say “decolonization”? What are you saying when you say “liberation”?
I’m thinking about this a lot and hoping to more clearly understand what these words mean while simultaneously translating them into my language. When I speak my words aloud I don’t them to fall out of my mouth. I want to speak them out in my stomach, my throat, my bones.
What about you? Hit me up in the comments. 👇 See you next month. 💁🏾♀️
xo Jessica
COOL RESOURCE ALERT: The Know-Your-Rights Calendar by Red Canary Song
Sharing this resource, a calendar presented by Red Canary Song and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund which includes information about your rights, what you can do to protect yourself in a variety of situations, and whom you can contact for help with issues ranging from immigration to healthcare to housing. The calendar also includes success stories of migrant-driven justice movements. You can download the calendar here.
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