The burden of language
Hailing from Peshawar, at 24, I can read and write only in English. I can speak Urdu fluently, yet cannot read, write, or speak in either my mother tongue, Hindko, or the region’s lingua franca, Pushto. Like any other ‘good Muslim,’ I can also read Arabic without understanding anything substantial. Mine is hardly an unusual story. Most of Pakistan’s youth face the same dilemma, though to varying degrees. It is, therefore, important to understand and frame this morass in the public discourse.
First, it's imperative to take a tour of the basic architecture of languages. There is no innate language, as is proved by feral children – the children brought up by wolves and other animals. We only learn the language that we hear around us. Ergo, language is related to the social reality. Further, notwithstanding the social, economic, and geographical disparities, all languages are equal; albeit, some might have functional superiority, but not the structural one, in a certain context. For instance, English is more suitable for studying space technology vis-à-vis Urdu because of the developed diction and discourse in the former.
Historically, languages arose around 150,000 years ago, probably in Africa, when Homo sapiens began to emerge. Its study, as a science, that is, linguistics, interestingly, started in Taxila between the seventh and fifth centuries BC by Panini. It was thenceforth discussed and developed prospectively in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and thereafter. Finally, Ferdinand de Saussure, in the twentieth century, made a breakthrough that reshaped the inquiry into language -- transforming the etymology-centric exploration into a more system-centric one. The highlight of his work is the exposition of language as a system, leading to the flourishing of structuralism. Here, the knowledge of the whole system (called la langue) is in the mind of the native speaker, without which sounds or meaning cannot be created. The application of this system, i.e. the individual utterances, which are always faulty, is called parole.
Noam Chomsky, perhaps the most credible linguist of our time, adopted and tailored it. According to him, us humans have a knack for learning languages, and this faculty in mind is called the Language Acquisition Device (LAD). This device uses universal grammar (UG), i.e., general principles common to all languages. Then, for each language, we have specific rules.
Apart from technical description, the study of how language is used in society, how we create meaning, and how we express reality through language, remains an enigma and is far more important pragmatically. In this context, broadly speaking, languages have two functions: first, it works as a social lubricant. A man in Pakistan, on the internet, grieving the loss of his mother, can resonate with another woman, living in the US, who lost her son. Isn’t this fascinating? Ontologically, this interaction through a meaningful and understandable medium is what defines us as humans, and in a way, it distinguishes us from animals.
With rising globalisation, this tool has become even more powerful and useful. Especially with the pursuit of understanding other cultural nuances, facets, commonalities and disunities, and pervasive commodification of language -- from signboards to memes -- it is impossible not to dive into the language game; this exchange affects us at a more linguistic and cultural level by morphing one’s own language through selective borrowing and letting go of alien languages. A good example is the rise of Urdulish, the induction of Urdu into English, reflecting a shift toward a local "nativised" identity.
Second, a language serve as pedagogical tools, teach us and shape our process of thinking. How so? It provides us with concepts such as justice, democracy, feminism, or socialism, which can help us understand and improve reality. It organises our thoughts by influencing how speakers express time, space, relationships, and actions, and it transmits culture and moral values through stories, proverbs, literature, and everyday speech, enabling us to do complex reasoning.
And so, through a bottom-up approach, language, being a social product (as is argued in Plato’s Cratylus, relates to the culture, behaviour, and thinking at society level. However, this expression is not always perfect; there is always a residue which remains inexpressible: the difference between la langue and parole.
Expressing the inexpressible
Shadab Zeest Hashmi, in her book Ghazal Cosmopolitan, described ghazals as “a tradition of expressing the almost inexpressible.” We can expand this notion to all kinds of literary/creative texts. After all, this pursuit of attuning ideal (what is in the mind) with real (what is on the paper) foments the overabundance of meaning-ness (mazmun-afirni) that gives pleasure to our aesthetic sense, food to our intellect, and in a way, provides us the fertile ground for humanistic inquiry -- an investigation to understand ourselves -- for the readers as well as writers of the text.
Also, the experience of textual meaning is, logically, correlated to the form of the text. Against this backdrop, Fatima Ijaz, the author of The Shade of Longing and other Poems and Story Circle: Letters on Creativity & Friendship, in her chapbook, Last of the Letters, explores different forms of writing. Unlike strict poetry or prose, we see 16 unsent letters, along with a poignant, abstract poem, thereby widening the emotional and metaphysical frame of mind.
It is difficult to assess what was written before. In some letters, one feels that the poem was written before the letter, and the verses are afterwards reincarnated into an epistolary one-sided conversation. And in others, it feels like the poem is a progeny of the letter. Nonetheless, given the outlandish form, the book permeates both the permanence of text and fluidity of text -- something not usually found in standalone books. This covers the journey of her language, too; at times it is brittle, at others it is fluid.
The overlapping theme of this book/collection of unsent letters is ironic: Fatima is unable to process her thoughts in writing, so each letter presents a different pretext of this inability. She amusingly expresses her misery of not being able to express, and by extension, expresses the inexpressible. This includes the shiny, resplendent metaphors embodying the dance of the soul to the bleak, varied facets of grief articulating the void whose depth feels like a black hole -- ultimately, manifesting the emotional nuance and atrocities of the lived experience that can be imagined only in a poetic-cum-prose medium. She writes:
“the pictures of sepia
seeping through bones;
is this a memory?
are you part of it —
physically?
schubert plays
wherever you are.”
These letters might help us, through a writer’s investigation of her own breadth, to understand our own selves: how we felt when we were left alone, what we missed when we ignored the flight of a moth, what more is in the brightness of the sun and serenity of the moon that we, due to chores, ignore, the emotional singularity of a pulse, an ache, a sudden collision of thought and feeling that poet, like Fatima, experience on a random Friday, and mostly importantly in our context, how the language undergoes a stress test to express the inner worlds.
Language as a beloved
Till now, we have seen different expressions of language as a structure and its manifestation through diverse forms; what is missing in the equation is the interpersonal companionship between the speaker and the means of the speech. This meaning-creation machine, much like the things we cling to in our daily lives, offers an intimacy and emotive substance on its own. In the words of Roland Barthes, “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words.” As far as my textual world is concerned, I feel I am aphasiac due to the excessive detachment from my native language in the early stage of life; now, my ancestral skin feels a stranger to me.
I recently came across this exact weltanschauung shared by the author Jhumpa Lahiri, in her book In Other Words. Jhumpa, being a Bengali American, remained flummoxed by her parent’s and society’s insistence on adopting English – and that too without a foreign accent -- rather than finding home in her own language, Bengali. This led her into an identity crisis.
After all, without indigenous words, the place, the people, the life, the streets, the light, the sky, the flowers, the sounds, all are lost to a different terrain -- far cruder and eerily constructed. One might, through trials and tribulations, decorate this foster house; yet, the dysmorphia of belongingness will haunt interminably. And that was the case with her for many years of life.
The incompatible adversaries between the two – she calls Bengali her mother and English her step-mother – nudged her, at the age of 25, to find her own language, Italian, without any family, cultural, or social pressure. To her, it was like finding a beloved; fingers to feel the entanglements of the inner world raptured by the previous two dysfunctional relationships. She writes, “This language is not in my blood, in my bones. I’m drawn to Italian and at the same time intimidated. It remains a mystery, beloved, impassive. Faced with my emotion it has no reaction.”
What we can learn from her is that the new rules, lexicon, etymology, and application of universal syntactic structure might arouse the deep layers of consciousness that were veiled before; on one hand, acquiring a novel language may expand our horizons by teaching us new ways of thinking and expressing in a different, more meticulous, and more exact way – something Fatima endeavoured for. On the other hand, this adventure might help us understand our own nature vis-à-vis the previously unfamiliar great minds of the novel tradition.
The policy angle
While we have covered the micro- and macro-level dynamics of languages, it is also important to understand the policy angle: Why do we remain a nation bereft of expertise in any language? Why can we not express ourselves properly despite higher education? What is the stupidity in education policies that hamper our students from excelling?
Frankly speaking, when we are being taught in a foreign language from Pre-1 -- even Lord Macaulay in 1835 mandated English as the medium of instruction from the sixth standard onwards -- as per the Single National Curriculum (SNC), how exactly are we going to develop competency in the subject or cognitive abilities in general when most of the time will be squandered over understanding the language of the subject rather than the subject itself?
Anjum Altaf, in his book, “Critical Reflections on the Single National Curriculum and the Medium of Instruction,” provides a very common-sense thought experiment: If we ask a girl from Baltistan to learn in Chinese because it is the language of the future, what exactly will happen? She will neither learn the language properly nor will she learn the subject. Since the attention will be dissipated in figuring out the meanings and associations of words in the alien language, rather than imbibing and creating new ideas. Similar is the case with English.
Nobody is against learning a new language. As stated above, learning it would, apart from improving communication skills, reshape how we learn, interact, and engage with the world. It is only the timing of picking up that is crucial. Studies suggest that learning in the native language develops a knack for learning new languages. And this is not something outlandish; one can observe scientists from different countries, including Japan, South Korea, China, Russia, and some countries of the EU, who study in their respective native languages and learn English as needed. They very quickly and aptly adopt it.
The solution, then, is to adopt a methodology, like Europe’s ‘Mother Tongue plus Two formula,’ where in the initial years of learning, all subjects are taught in the native language. Then a second local language is added during the elementary years, and a foreign language in secondary school.
Coda
Languages are not arbitrary; rather, they all follow a certain structure (universal principles), and a human mind, like a bot, can embrace many, given that we just imbibe the rules of that certain language at a certain stage of life when we are comfortable with our own native language. They can arouse the in-depth layers of consciousness and help us become more humane. This entails expressing, like Fatima, in multifarious, multifaceted, and multilayered forms to close the chasm between what one wants to say and what can be said. Unlike Jhumpa, not everyone has the privilege to discover and learn new languages for years, but then finding a beloved is less a task and more like a sweet accident.
Also, Anjum’s policy exposition is relevant in addition to the forms of expression and the bond with the language at a governance level. Unfortunately, here in Pakistan, languages are tied to a passport for a better job. Without realising that when a child is ostracised from his lingual home, the cost is at the same time: pedagogical, cultural, and deeply personal.
I am still in the quest of finding my own skin; I am unsure whether I will find it in the form of a new language or a rediscovery of what I already know in bits and pieces. Nonetheless, these books helped me understand this predicament, which is not merely educational but human.
Like a living companion, languages need our attention, time, energy, and openness, and so, we need to think more and more about them.
The writer is a Peshawar-based researcher who works in the financial sector. He can be reached at alifurqan647@gmail.com
All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the writer