Words have always fascinated me. Growing up multilingual and discovering that some words existed in one language to describe feelings, emotions and objects which other languages had no equivalent to, amazed me. Laying down words on paper quickly became a soothing practice for me, my safe space, one of the only places where I did not overthink how much space I took up. I could fill as many pages as I wanted – grant it there were no prescribed guidelines and word limits – and nobody would interrupt my thought process. That is where writing feels political to me and has felt so for so many other women* before and after me. It is the way I feel the French feminist slogan l’intime est politique[1]in my core. Not being interrupted, as a woman* is rare. When, in 2020, the French openly lesbian politician Alice Coffin wrote in Le Génie Lesbien[2] (The Lesbian Genius) that she was making the conscious choice of not consuming works of art written and produced by cis men anymore, it caused an outrage. How dare she exclude all those writers from her repertoire? But what should really have been asked is: why were there so many cisgendered men in her repertoire in the first place? Why did that stay unquestioned? Why are our academic curricula still filled with white cis-male scholars, why are the films we watch, the media we consume, the art we hang up in museums and galleries, the political rhetoric we listen to, still coming from the mouths and hands of white cis men? When universality is supposedly embodied by white cisgender heterosexual men, their words and therefore their work is seen as a-gendered, neutral, universal, representative of all voices.
What Alice Coffin decided to do consciously, I began doing unconsciously, my shelfs slowly filling up with essays and fiction written by cis women, trans women and men, non-binary people, people of color, disabled voices, queer folks, and many other voices from the “margins”[3]. And that is when I realized that there had always been an emptiness inside of me waiting to be filled, a disconnect between me and the thoughts I read, the words I consumed, the images that my fantasy was feeding off and therefore creating. Audre Lorde would say, there was a silence inside of me and for the first time, this silence was being filled. In The transformation of Silence into Language and Action, she wrote: “And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger”[4]. It is not only a question of self-revelation, it’s also about self-determination: “the decision to define ourselves, name ourselves, and speak for ourselves, instead of being defined and spoken for by others.”[5]
But how do we name ourselves and speak for ourselves, when others - whose reality is so different to ours - have done so before, using language that has now been co-opted, jeopardized, and tainted? Audre Lorde calls upon her readers to reclaim “that language which has been made to work against us”[6]. Even though my reality and that of Audre Lorde differ in a lot of ways, I feel addressed by this “us”. I am a white, cisgender, pansexual woman, living in Europe in the 21st century, while she was a Black lesbian woman living in the United States in the 20th century. It’s only through language that I came to understand how our different identities shape our worlds. I acknowledge that her words are aimed at Black women and that my feeling addressed and seen by them, doesn’t mean that I feel the reality their speaking on in my core. But it’s through listening to the voices of those whose existence differs from mine and through reading their words that I came closer to imagining what that reality might look and feel like. When Selina Makana writes in her portrait of the South African activist Charlotte Manye Maxeke that her education provided her with “a language to challenge the oppression of Black South Africans”[7] she underlines that language is needed in order, not only to understand the systems of oppression that divide us, but most importantly to challenge them. That is why I believe in the power of words to build bridges, rather than further dig the moat separating us from each other. As Audre Lorde writes: “it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.”[8]
But how does one break the silence if there is nothing to fill it with? What if those silences result from a meticulous act of erasure? Saidiya Hartmann works extensively with archives and writes: “The irreparable violence of the Atlantic slave trade resides precisely in all the stories that we cannot know and that will never be recovered.”[9] What we have are numbers, horrific numbers, but we don’t have individual stories, often we don’t even have names. That is why her work is committed to “telling stories (…) to represent the lives of the nameless and the forgotten, to reckon with loss, and to respect the limits of what cannot be known.”[10] Through what she calls “critical fabulation”, a story-telling between history and fictional writing, she fills in the blanks, she tries to imagine what might have happened to those nameless individuals, giving them back the agency they were never attributed. By rewriting the past, she makes room for those lives in our present and makes us vigilant to the erasure. An erasure which Black feminist scholars are still battling with in the academic world today, where their voices are being silenced, their agency taken away from them. In her paper “Citation, Erasure, and Violence: A memoir”, Christen A. Smith recalls arriving at a conference only to realize her work had been used without crediting her: “My words, twisted yet recognizable, sat in front of me without my permission, and I felt violated.”[11] That led her to create the Cite Black Women Movement, “a Black feminist intellectual project, praxis, and global movement to decolonize the practice of citation by redressing the epistemic erasure of Black women from the literal and figurative bibliographies of the world.”[12] Decolonizing the practice of citation also means listening to, acknowledging and critically engaging with the voices of black female* scholars. It also means creating space for new perspectives and most importantly for a new vocabulary.
In “Black Feminist Thought – Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment” Patricia Hill Collins wrote: “Oppressed groups are frequently placed in the situation of being listened to only if we frame our ideas in the language that is familiar to and comfortable for a dominant group.”[13] But how can one find language outside of that imposed by a dominant group? How can one reclaim words that have been co-opted and used against us? To me, the power of words also lies in the mouth - or the pen/keyboard - of the beholder and it is therefore crucial that this pen/keyboard gets placed into new hands. Some words have been used by “majorities” to stigmatize and other “minorities”. Through the political and linguistic act of “reclamation”, those who suffered that stigmatization choose to reclaim those insults and wear them as crowns and swords. Mihaela Popa-Wyatt defines it as “a form of socio-political protest that seeks to re-shape oppressive social practices by controlling what can be done with words.”[14] Multiple slurs have been reclaimed, slurs based on race, gender, sexuality, nationality and more. This act of reclaiming is “part of a larger process of resistance and taking back control.”[15] It’s about reclaiming words that exist and shifting the power dynamic. Furthermore, reclaiming terms can also be done by reintroducing a forgotten or erased terminology. Zethu Matebeni for example, in her article “Nongayindoda: moving beyond gender in a South African context” reintroduces a Nguni term “nongayindoda” which refers to genderfluidity: “The notion is both man and woman, male and female, subversive and normative, communal and individual.”[16] What her article highlights, is that the disappearance of a word is never just that. It’s the erasure of what it brought to life, what possibility and reality it embodied. She concludes: “Its disappearance from regular speech has left a gaping wound and a social distancing of any who may encounter themselves reflected in nongayindoda. Instead, we have found ourselves reflected in borrowed terms, Western languages and gender relations that have packaged our existence in dichotomies, limiting our experiences and expressions. One is queer or not, normative or non-normative, and the race is to get to either side.”[17]
When language is imposed upon us, it is never liberating. That is why I see immense liberatory potential in the creation of new words and new labels. I think the moral panic created by far right and conservatist thinkers around the so called “danger of micro-labels” or “identity politics” is an indicator of the power that lies in the act of self-definition. A new generation that is creating new words to define their sexuality, their gender or how they want to be address and spoken about, represents a threat. By creating a new vocabulary, they refuse the binary and essentialist categories imposed upon them and they underline that those categories where never meant for everybody in the first place anyways. In 1851, Sojourner Truth summarized this in her speech at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio by asking this simple yet poignant question: “Ain’t I a woman?”[18]. Femininity and masculinity have been - and keep on being - denied to those who weren’t - and aren’t – considered and therefore treated as humans. Historians, such as Hortense Spiller have underlined how archives from the Transatlantic slave trade present slaves as commodities: “"Slave" appears in the same context with beasts of burden, all and any animal(s), various livestock, and a virtually endless profusion of domestic content from the culinary item to the book.”[19] The present is far from liberated from this dehumanization and othering of all those lives that do not fit the binary, that refuse to perform what is expected of them.
Furthermore, words will never be able to fully embody the reality of all beings and there lies the profound frustration, but also the deep beauty, of language. Language is the tool with which we try to make sense of the world around us and therefore it is tainted by our biases and by our history. The existence of the term “nature” for example, often opposed, in western societies, to that of “culture”, embodies a huge anthropocentric bias. Its very existence implies a separation between humans and “nature”, as if we weren’t part of that very nature. In the documentary Terra Libre[20] indigenous activists fighting for the preservation of the Amazonian Forest express their struggle trying to defend their land using a juristic language that isn’t theirs and that in no way reflects their understanding and relationship to “nature”. In We Are the Middle of Forever- Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth[21] edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth, they have gathered the voices of members from different “North American Indigenous cultures and communities, generations, and geographic regions” around their experience with trying to preserve life in territories that have had to adapt and preserve in the face of destruction and genocide. Rather than listening to those voices and learning from their experiences and actions, western scientists and politicians continue to coin terms that further distance us from the problems we westerners are at the root of: “climate change”, “biodiversity loss”, “species extinction”. As the journalist Catrin Einhorn puts it in an Interview for the New York Times: “What’s the top cause for biodiversity loss (…) in the world? (…) it’s basically humans taking over ecosystems for our own purposes, agriculture, towns and communities, mining. We take over land. And we take over the sea.”[22]
Our language shapes our reality. By othering nature and thinking of ourselves as being outsiders to it, we give ourselves the permission to destroy it. By dehumanizing other human beings, we give ourselves permission to mistreat them, humiliate them, erase their history, their fights for self-determination and their attempts at defining themselves in their own terms. Rewriting what has been made impossible to write, creating a new vocabulary and reintroducing terms that have been made to disappear, listening to those who were silenced, refusing the narratives of universality and oneness in a world full of diverse plurality represent steps towards building a language of liberation rather than one of confinement.
[1] Translation: “The personal is political”
[2] Alice Coffin, Le Génie Lesbien, Grasset, 240 p., 2020.
[3] Referring to: bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, South End Press, 1984.
[4] Audre Lorde, The transformation of Silence into Language and Action Paper delivered at the Modern Language Association's "Lesbian and Literature Panel," Chicago, Illinois, December 28, 1977. First published in Sini.Her Wisdom 6 (1978) and The Cancer Journals (Spinsters, Ink, San Francisco, 1980).
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Selina Makana,“Owning Her Rightful Place: The Intellectual and Activist Life of Charlotte Manye Maxeke.” Gender & History, 31, 2019, (p. 451).
[8] Audre Lorde, op.cit.
[9] Saidiya Hartmann, “Venus in Two Acts”, Small Axe, Vol. 12, n°2, p. 1-14, 2008, URL: https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/241115.
[10] Ibid, p. 4.
[11] Christen Smith, “Citation, Erasure, and Violence: A Memoir.” Cultural Anthropology 37, n°2, p.206–213, 2022. URL: https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/5369, (p.207)
[12] C.A. Smith, E.L Williams, I.A. Wadud, W.N.L Pirtle, “Cite Black Women: A Critical Praxis (A Statement)”, Feminist Anthropology, 2, p.10-17, 2021, URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12040 (p. 12)
[13] Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought – Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, Routledge, 2000.
[14] Mihaela Popa-Wyatt, “Reclamation: Taking Back Control of Words, “Non-Derogatory Uses of Slurs””, Grazer Philosophische Studien, 2020. URL: https://philarchive.org/archive/POPRTB
[15] Ibid, p. 13.
[16] Zethu Matebeni, “Nongayindoda: moving beyond gender in a South African context”, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, Vol. 39, n°4, 565-575, 2021, URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02589001.2021.1914825?journalCode=cjca20 (p.574)
[17] Ibid, p. 574.
[18] Sojourner Truth, Ain’t I a Woman?, 1851, URL: https://thehermitage.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Sojourner-Truth_Aint-I-a-Woman_1851.pdf
[19] Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.”, Diacritics, Vol. 17, n°2, pp. 65–81, 1987, URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/464747?origin=crossref, p.79.
[20] Gert-Peter Bruch, Terra Libre, Planète Amazone, 2020.
[21] Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth (Ed.), We Are the Middle of Forever- Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth, The New Press, 2022.
[22] Michael Barbaro, “Consider the Burying Beetle. (Or Else.) The story behind an ambitious new global agreement to protect biodiversity – an Interview with Catrin Einhorn”, The Daily Podcast, January 6th, 2022. URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/podcasts/the-daily/biodiversity-cop15-montreal.html?