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    [post_content] => A secret language, Láadan, allows women to express feelings and experiences for which English, with its male-centric deficiency of words, phrases and grammar, does not possess.

In May of 2017, while many were still reeling from shock at the spectacle of Donald Trump as president of the United States, the New York Review of Books published an article by Masha Gessen called “The Autocrat’s Language.” Gessen, a non-binary person who uses gender-neutral pronouns, was rapidly taking their place as a Trump explainer, drawing upon years of covering the Putin presidency in their native Russia to position themself as an expert in contemporary authoritarianism. In their piece for the NYRB, Gessen explained that because autocrats distorted the meaning of words by using them to lie, journalists were forced to use an impoverished vocabulary in order to report the truth.  Suzette Haden Elgin, a linguist and novelist, uses a variation on this scenario to inform her 1984 science fiction novel, Native Tongue; it is set in a patriarchal future United States of 2205, a place where the nineteenth amendment was repealed in 1991, stripping women of their rights. To combat male dominance, a group of female linguists invent a language of their own. Today the question posed by Native Tongue seems especially relevant to Gessen’s warning about language manipulation: is it possible to restructure language to re-alter our reality?

A particularly prescient science fiction book can offer an eerie prediction of current events years before they happen. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel A Handmaid’s Tale  describes a dystopia in which women’s civil rights had been rescinded; they could not vote or control their own procreation. Adapted for television in 2018, the steep erosion of rights didn’t seem so far-fetched in the Trump era. The dramatic series reflected the emerging reality that resulted from what Gessen describes as Trump’s ability to invert phrases and words dealing with power relationships into their exact opposite, thus doing “violence to language.”

This violence was strongly exemplified in Trump's July 3rd speech, given in the context of the recent protests demanding that Black lives matter as well as the Covid-19 crisis. In an attempt to discredit those calling for change, Trump spoke of a “new far-left fascism.” He argued that, “If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted and punished.” In twisting these words to speak of discrimination against those in power rather than those who are oppressed, terms such as “fascism,” “censor,” “banish,” “blacklist,” “persecution” and “punishment” are stripped of their original meaning and begin to become hollow.

Native Tongue, the first of a three-book series, envisions repairing this damage to language. In Elgin imagined United States of 2205, women effectively belong to men. They are not allowed to own their own property, or to work outside the home without permission from a male relative. Because interplanetary exchange and colonization are crucial for the United States, linguists play a central role in society as interpreters for extra-terrestrial negotiations. Due to the strong demand for translation, linguistic “lines,” or dynasties, have evolved; each child of the lines is trained in at least one alien language and in multiple human languages. Native Tongue follows a group of linguist women whose secret language, Láadan, allows them to express feelings and experiences for which English, with its male-centric deficiency of words, phrases and grammar, does not possess.

Artificial, or constructed and imaginary, languages (conlang) are spoken in popular television series like Star Trek (Klingon) and Game of Thrones (Dothraki and Valyrian). They are also seen in a wide array of speculative fiction by authors like Francis Godwin and Thomas More. Artificial languages have been used in fiction to explore imaginary voyages and worlds, but in a 2007 interview Hadan Elgin described Láadan as a “thought experiment” with directives for women’s change within society. Elgin, who had a PhD in linguistics, was a writer and poet best known for a series called The Gentle Art of Verbal Defense. She also subscribed to the controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which she described in her book Language Imperative as the idea that languages “structure and constrain human perceptions of reality in significant and interesting ways”.

Accordingly, speakers of different languages see the world in very divergent ways: how one perceives the world is based both on linguistic structures in chosen words and their corresponding broader metaphors. For example, binaries such as male/female are often paired with other associations, such as strong/weak or active/passive. Elgin believed that English is dominated by male perception; that its lack of a vocabulary for women to discuss their feelings and experiences directly structures societal inequality. She argued that this configuration is upheld by societal metaphors, such as “women are objects,” reflected in cultural production ranging from fashion magazines to sitcoms. These structures, she posited, must be directly challenged by language itself. “By the technology of language– we insert new metaphors into our culture to replace the old ones, just as we have done in turning ‘war’ into ‘defense’. You don't use guns, or laws, to insert new metaphors into a culture. The only tool available for metaphor-insertion is LANGUAGE.”

Native Tongue provides a fictional blueprint for how these metaphors can change lived reality. While it takes several lifetimes and one more book in the Native Tongue trilogy, the linguist women eventually finish Láadan; they spread it secretly among themselves and then to some of the wider female population. Once enough linguist women have learned Láadan, the male linguists notice a startling change: their spouses, daughters and relatives have stopped complaining. Frustrated by the lack of nagging, which they realize had spurred them to respond, react and experience a sort of catharsis, the men eventually build separate houses for the linguist women. Left to their own devices, the women are freer to live, interact and express themselves, thus reveling in the real change produced by Láadan.

Láadan attempts to enable this freer expression through modifications to both the structure and intent of the language. Much of Native Tongue is occupied with “encodings”, new words for previously unexpressed experiences. The book includes part of a Láadan dictionary, available entirely online, which contains many words that feel very contemporary:
  • ralorolo: non-thunder, much talk and commotion from one (or more) with no real knowledge of what they’re talking about or trying to do, something like “hot air” but more so
  • rashida: non-game, a cruel “playing” that is a game only for the dominant “players” with the power to force others to participate
  • rathom: non-gestalt, a collection of parts with no relationship other than coincidence, a perverse choice of items to call a set; especially when used as “evidence”
While these definitions do fit uncannily well with the present political climate, some of the concepts of Láadan and Native Tongue feel outdated. The stark divisions between gender, for example, fit more with 1980s second-wave feminism in which gender essentialism was a big discussion. There’s also the glaring idea that all women are dominated by all men, which fails to take into account configurations of race, class, ability and non-binary gender identities. The questions posed by Native Tongue feel more relevant to our contemporary situation when  “male domination” is replaced with “patriarchy,” which is defined as an unjust social, political and economic system harmful to all who do not hold power within it. In this line of thought, “women’s language” could be replaced with “intersectional feminist language”—i.e., a language that expresses the views of those who, for a variety of factors, experience discrimination and oppression. Elgin wrote the Native Tongue trilogy with a ten-year timeline, aiming for Láadan to be adopted by 1994, but this never happened. While scholars such as Ruth Menzies point to the difficulty of learning a detailed new language, it is tempting to agree with Elgin, who argued that Láadan failed because women were reluctant to speak a language that forced them to parse their feelings so thoroughly. One additional detail about Láadan is that its structure makes the speaker state the emotion and intent behind everything they say. Necessary speech act morphemes, such as bíi (“I say to you, as a statement”), bóo (“I request”) and bée (“I say in warning”) are paired with suffixes, such as -li (“said in love”), -ya (“said in fear”) and -d (“said in anger”). Thus, in every sentence, the Láadan speaker must clarify their position with words such as:
  • bíili: “in love, I say as a statement…” (bíi + li)
  • bóoya: “in fear, I request…” (bóo + ya)
  • béed: “in anger, I say in warning…” (bée + d)
The type of emotional involvement in constantly analyzing one’s position, intention and feelings seems completely at odds with how English is spoken by those given the most attention, time and money to speak it. Imagine a society in which every politician, but also every citizen, must state their feelings of love, fear or paranoia in every sentence and choose from numerous words for comfort, community and wrongdoing. In her epigraph to chapter thirteen of Native Tongue, Elgin writes that, “For any language, there are perceptions which it cannot express because they would result in its indirect self-destruction.” Perhaps, as Gessen has warned, this implosion is in the not too distant future, in which the damage done by this era of American politics will leave us with few words that still hold meaning. Native Tongue provides a glimpse of how linguistic repair could be not just a tool to alter reality, but to mold it anew. [post_title] => In her 1984 science fiction novel 'Native Tongue,' linguist Suzette Haden Elgin created a feminist language from scratch [post_excerpt] => A particularly prescient science fiction book can offer an eerie prediction of current events years before they happen. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => in-her-1984-science-fiction-novel-native-tongue-linguist-suzette-haden-elgin-created-a-feminist-language-from-scratch [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:13 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:13 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://conversationalist.org/?p=1910 [menu_order] => 255 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

In her 1984 science fiction novel ‘Native Tongue,’ linguist Suzette Haden Elgin created a feminist language from scratch

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    [post_content] => A few months into his year of reading female authors, he developed a feminist spidey sense.

Inspired by television producer Shonda Rhimes’s manifesto Year of Yes, a friend spent 2017 saying ‘yes’ to every challenge thrown her way. In the same spirit, I decided that 2018 would be my year of reading women. My friend starred in a local production of the Wizard of Oz, and became pregnant with her first child. The shifts in my life were less dramatic, but notable nonetheless

I was proud to call myself a feminist, but had started to realize that my tastes did not reflect my politics.  I believed in equal pay, in sharing domestic responsibilities, in righting historical wrongs; but when I got home after a day at the office, I would put on a Kamasi Washington record, pour myself a glass of Eben Sadie wine, and read the new Murakami. If I looked up, I would see an apartment decorated with art by men, with the exception of a lone Louise Bourgeois multiple. I needed a re-education.

A mild panic set in after I made the decision, in December 2017, to spend the coming year reading books by women. It was similar to the one I felt a year later, when I decided to give up alcohol for lent. But I quickly rationalized the project. There was exceedingly more worthwhile literature in the world than I could ever read. By limiting myself to women, I argued to myself, I would not jeopardize the quality of my to-read list; I would just change its focus. And if, after all, it was a big disaster, I could revert to my sexist ways in 2019.

In the publishing industry, conventional wisdom holds that men do not read books by women. The evidence, however, suggests that this perception does not reflect reality, although Joanna Rowling did yield to the suggestion that she might sell more books if she styled herself as J.K.. I knew I was not unique in failing to live according to my ideals, but this knowledge was not validating. I wanted to change, and I believed I could. Research has shown we can reprogram our subconscious: decorating one’s work or living space with images of successful African Americans, for example, is shown to decrease implicit anti-black bias.

I decided that the books I would read over the following year could be in any genre, and on any topic. I would make exceptions for reading related to my work or studies, and for long-form journalism in periodicals. But that was it. Even if a favorite male author published a new title, it would have to wait until 2019.

January was a few days away, so I had to figure out how to begin. I read a New York Times list of best art books of 2017, which recommended the novel Autumn, by Ali Smith. That seemed as good a place to start as any, so I ordered a copy. It was magnificent.

Finding books was, as you might imagine, easier than I had anticipated. We can often identify gender from a name. When in doubt, the dustjacket will typically provide clarity; even if there is no author portrait, a bio will refer to ‘her city of birth,’ or ‘his fifth novel.’ I did occasionally get it wrong: Tracy Daugherty, who authored a biography of Joan Didion, is a man.

I became far more acutely aware that newspapers and magazines review fewer books by women than by men. While I could have guessed this prior to my year of reading women authors, I had never given it much thought. I was discovering the patriarchal pattern that determines what we read, and when. Perversely, this pattern actually turned my experiment into a pleasurable game — a big feminist where-is-Waldo, if you will.

Nowhere was this game more challenging than in airport bookstores. I had struggled to find books while in transit even before 2018, but now I was forced to be open to unfamiliar authors and genres. As a result, some of the highlights of my year originated in airports. I read my first fantasy novel, The Shining Girls, by Lauren Beukes. I liked it so much I followed with Zoo City. On a particularly long intercontinental flight I alternated between watching The Handmaid’s Tale on the inflight entertainment system and reading two books — Margaret Atwood’s Freedom and Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s classic Women Who Run With the Wolves. I am still astonished to have discovered the latter in the tiny bookstore of my hometown airport.

A few months into the year, I started to develop a certain vigilance, a feminist spidey sense. I imagine it is second nature to many women, but it was new to me.

During a visit to Amsterdam I visited a well-known feminist bookstore called Xantippe and asked the salesperson for a recommendation. She directed me to Grand Hotel Europa by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer. A man. Not wanting to appear to second guess the store clerk, whose age, appearance, and occupation gave her a natural authority on matters of gender and literature, I mumbled something about the book’s heft, and asked for other suggestions.

Despite shelves largely filled by women, the next two recommendations were also written by men. At this stage, I quietly suggested I had walked into this book store on purpose. It was an awkward moment. When we regained our composure, we discussed the salesperson’s experience that men don’t read women, which had prompted her suggestions. She also insisted I read Pfeijffer at some point, because it really was that good. I left with a new novel by Eva Meijer.

What my encounter at Xantippe alluded to, of course, was that there is no such thing as women’s literature. Yes, non-fiction with feminist under- or overtones had become one of my staples: I read and internalized the voices of Roxane Gay, Joan Didion, Terry Castle, Sisonke Msimang, Zadie Smith, and Maggie Nelson. They gave me a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the range of female experiences in our sexist world, in a way that only the written word can.

Yet many of my most exciting discoveries were novels. Among them were Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, which won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize; Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Call Me Zebra, winner of the 2019 PEN/Faulker award; and The Parisian, the stunning debut of 27-year old Isabella Hamad. Any lingering suspicion I had that women restrict themselves to certain themes or subject matter was put to rest by the depth and range of these three writers.

It turned out that my rule did even not even preclude me from reading about dead white men. One of my other airport bookstore finds was a biography of Seneca, by Emily Wilson.

While it is, in all respects, a classic biography, Wilson is more attuned to the gender dynamics in Seneca’s life than most male biographers would have been. Something similar had happened for me. The spidey sense I first noticed about halfway through my year of reading women had, towards the end of the twelve months, become a program that ran permanently in the background of my consciousness. I instinctively played where-is-Waldo, extending it to other domains, too. I started looking for women in jazz. Female wine makers. When reading the news, I was more likely to notice a byline. I searched out women in politics.

I am now well into year two.  While I have recently cheated — I succumbed to the overwhelming marketing for Sapiens, and did eventually read Pfeijffer’s Grand Hotel Europa — I still read women almost exclusively. They enrich my life. They give me a broader horizon. And slowly but surely, they are chipping away at my subconscious sexism. The slight sense of dread I felt when first conceiving the experiment is now a source of embarrassment. To quote feminist icon Diane Lockhart, “I realize it’s alright that the world is crazy, as long as I make my little corner of the world sane.” One book at a time.
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His year of reading women

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    [post_content] => When I was 12 years old, a lonely black femme male child, I read The Bluest Eye in a single night. Every character was in me or a reflection of my life.

Toni Morrison gave me a blueprint for the meaningful exploration of love and trauma. She accomplished this by centering her narratives on the lives of black femmes, people like me, whom society has traditionally devalued. As a result of this precise focus, Morrison’s body of work surpasses identity politics; it heals us from within the deep darkness of our society and elevates us to its bright but colorless peaks.

I spent my early childhood in a  single-parent home full of affirmation and stability. But when my mother descended very suddenly into the thick of her addiction, my life changed radically. Today, drug addicts are called victims of the opioid crisis, and there are empathetic national calls for resources to be invested in finding a therapeutic solution for them. When I was a child in the 1990s, people like my mother were called crackheads and super predators. The only solution offered to them was a well-trained beast called the prison industrial complex. Later, I would learn that the well-trained old beast was excited by a charismatic young presidential hopeful I saw playing saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. That beast chased and found my mother: she was incarcerated when I was 12 years old, and I entered the worst period of my life.

I was sent to live in a group home for teenage boys, a house full of strangers and staff supervisors that would come and go based on work shifts. It was cold and did not feel like a home at all. School was no longer the fun, curiosity-inducing place of learning that it once had been. Instead, it was a place where bullies of all genders were waiting around every corner to hurl a fist, or to yell the insults “nigger” and “faggot.” I suffered from both the fists and the insults because I was a black femme male child. Socially isolated, I floated through each day finding solace in the hope that my mother would soon be free and my life would return to normal.  

My English teacher became my unlikely savior. Mean as a rattlesnake, she was a stern-faced, pale white woman with piercing eyes and a manner of speech so acerbic that she terrorized even my bullies into silence, thus safeguarding me from their venom at least while I was in her class. One day she arrived in an unusually good mood, holding a cloth bag that contained copies of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I understood that she’d had to fight for permission to teach this book, which she distributed with the admonition that it was a treat for which we should be grateful. 

That night I sat in my room and read this book with an enthusiasm I hadn’t felt since I devoured Gertrude Warner’s The Boxcar Children, years earlier. Every character in The Bluest Eye was within me or a reflection of my life. I didn't know the word “transgender,” but I strongly believed my life would have been much better if only I had been born a girl. So I identified with Pecola, the violence-damaged, impoverished foster girl who escapes into a fantasy world; but instead of longing for blue eyes to make me beautiful, I longed for female genitalia. I come from a color-struck family so I was my mother’s “dream high yellow child” and treated with care and protected as such. I was Maureen, the light-skinned black girl, and Claudia, who comes from a poor family. I had aunts that were Miss Marie, the overweight and kind prostitute, and a few that had upper-class aspirations like Geraldine. My step father was Cholly, the destructive man who lives on the margins of society.  I finished the book and rushed back to class, flushed with enthusiasm. By the end of the semester, I had read Beloved and Song of Solomon. That experience sparked a lifelong love for Toni Morrison and the characters in her novels. I was anchored in the humanity of Pecola, of Sethe in Beloved, and of the women of the Convent in Paradise

I understood the pathology of Pecola’s request for blue eyes because I was bombarded with the same ideals of eurocentric beauty. My advantage was in being born later, by which time there was a well-established counter-narrative: James Brown had been singing “I'm Black and I'm Proud” for decades; Beverly Johnson and Naomi Campbell had appeared on the covers of glossy magazines and modeled haute couture at the Paris fashion shows; and Dorothy Dandridge had broken down barriers so that Angela Bassett could show me what’s love got to do with it. I was surrounded by beacons of light, from Grace Jones to Oprah, so I did not aspire to any attributes of whiteness. I identified with Pecola because she wanted something very badly, but as a child dealing with dysphoria without understanding the bio-psychology of transgenderism, I did not understand the pathology of my own desire. I was told was that I was delusional, mentally ill, and that I needed prayer. 

After finishing The Bluest Eye, I wondered if the happy ending for Pecola was being lost in the delusion that blue eyes would make her more beautiful. My 12-year-old heart was full of empathy for Pecola; I felt that, had she been given time and care before trauma ravaged her, she would have learned to appreciate her own beauty. It was this insight, gained from reading Toni Morrison’s great novel, that made me appreciate my own humanity before I had to face questions about my trans womanhood. My rock-solid belief that I was a human above all else centered me; I had no doubt that I deserved empathy and dignity while I figured out the rest of my identity.

Beloved tells a story of complicated motherly love that is different from the romantic image sold by Hollywood. Sethe saves her daughter, named Beloved, by making a horrible, complicated decision for which she suffers intense emotional trauma. My mother was raised by her abusive schizophrenic grandmother with her four cousins. Although she was the color of peanut butter, she was the darkest girl. Her childhood was filled with physical and sexual abuse all rooted in religion and the color of her skin. She felt that her mother had abandoned her, which undermined her self-esteem and made her feel out of place in the world. So when I was born, a high yellow blue-eyed curly haired infant, she treated me like a baby doll. She said “I just could not believe that something so beautiful could come from me.” She showered me with praise and adoration and told me that no one would ever hurt me, that nobody would ever take her from me. She was overprotective. She was loving. She was the perfect mother. So for all of my childhood I was certain that a mother’s love could never be broken — that it was the strongest thing in the world. I was thus completely unprepared emotionally for her fall into drug addiction and jail. 

As a teenager who did not understand the concepts of addiction and self-medicating to sublimate emotional pain, I felt betrayed and abandoned by my mother. Morrison’s novel Beloved helped me to understand that a mother’s love can manifest in a plethora of ways when she lives in a world of violence. Sethe, the runaway slave who kills her own child rather than see her returned to bondage, does the best she can to love and protect the children she has later. She is of course deeply traumatized, which hobbles her ability to nurture her living children. By analyzing Sethe’s response to having been given a second chance at mothering, I could see my mother through a completely new lens. I didn't want to haunt my mother like the ghost of Beloved. My mother is still battling her addiction, but I can see her humanity and love her, while holding her accountable for her decisions. We are on a journey of healing.

In a black trans woman’s life, community is intrinsic to survival. In 1997, when I was on the cusp of my life as an activist, I read Paradise. The novel is about a  black community led by men who turn their rage on a group of ostracized women who have found refuge in a place called the Convent. Three years after reading that novel, I won a First Amendment right victory when I successfully sued my high school for the right to attend the prom in the gender-affirming attire of my choosing. I began my matriculation as the first openly trans woman who was forced to live in a male dorm at the HBCU Jackson State University in the deeply conservative town of Jackson, Mississippi. 

I could not have survived those ordeals without the help of community. I owe my emotional well being to the black and or femme community; to my white feminist English teacher, who gave me the phone number of the ACLU, which helped me win my case in high school; to the gray-eyed Alpha Kappa Alpha at the college admission office who waived my out-of-state fees so that I could afford to be admitted; to the tall, dark dean of students who protected me from expulsion after I got into a fight with a bully during my sophomore year of college; and to my natural hair Aunt Georgia, who filled my refrigerator with food when I had no money. I owe much to the black young femme students, male and female, who showed me love and support while I went through the perils of being first to do what I was doing. Like the women in Paradise who found refuge in the convent, I found a safe haven in the black femme community. Because of them, I knew that I would never be alone and that somebody always had my back, and that I would survive because I had a safe place to be. 

Toni Morrison’s characters are complex and unique. By focusing in her novels on the least among us, Ms. Morrison transcended identity barriers. Her stories help me heal and grow my relationships with myself, my family and my community. She will continue to be beacons of light for generations to come.

 
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    [post_excerpt] => The insight I gained from reading Toni Morrison's novels made me appreciate my own humanity before I had to face questions about my trans womanhood. 
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Toni Morrison’s novels taught me to see the world through a lens of compassion