The Question of Language

 

First Quechua Lexicon, 1560
Source: Wikimedia Commons

A few days ago there was a (positively) provocative exchange on our Instagram page, asking why our posts and other communications about THE MOUTH OF THE GODS were in English. The comment read: "No tiene sentido qué hablen de herencia latina, hablen de "descolonizar" y "festejen" el día de la invasión y pongan todos los nombres en inglés"; which translates "It makes no sense to talk about Latin heritage, talk about "decolonizing" and "commemorating" the day of the invasion and put all the names in English."

I take the point. English - the language of globalisation and conquest - doesn't seem to be the ideal medium in which to express anti-colonial sentiments. On the other hand, neither does Spanish, the language in which the comment was made! It may well be true that Spanish is the language through which London's Latin American communities communicate with one another, and so the marker of their difference in our local context - but it is every bit as much the language of colonial rule as English. If we're really going fully to "de-colonise" communication, then the languages we have to turn to are the Indigenous ones. But, while there certainly are speakers and learners of Quechua and Aymara in this city, the use of these languages in publicity would exclude all but a very small number of people. The purpose of Instagram posts is not to be our artistic statement in themselves, but to attract people to the performance, where the fuller statement is made.  I hope this performance will offer a much fuller and richer reflection on the language issue.

We are very aware of the complex questions surrounding Indigenous languages in relation to colonisation.  As Franz Fanon argued, someone "who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language" - so the maintenance and promotion of Indigenous languages is essential to the preservation and resurgence of Indigenous cultures, with their distinct and hugely helpful ways of thinking in relation to community, spirituality and environment. This is why the UN has decided to designate a Decade of Indigenous Languages, of which our work is a part. In his hugely important book about writing and theatre-making in post-colonial spaces De-colonising the Mind, the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o makes a powerful case for the avoidance of English (and other imperial languages) on the grounds that they exclude those who are already marginalised in post-colonial societies by a lack of educational opportunities. He is, of course, entirely right. 

In performance THE MOUTH OF THE GODS will actually represent a complex engagement with these very questions. There will be some use of English, in the spoken scenes performed by actors, but these will be deliberately distanced from the audience by their framing through the observation of an Indigenous community, offering a Brechtian estrangement from the language we tend to assume is "normal". The power and dominance of English will be deliberately distanced and questioned. There will be some Spanish, probably spoken and certainly in some of the sung texts from the Codex Martínez Compañón; but the dramatic context will not allow Spanish its cultural dominance either. "O dolce Jesú mio" feels much less Catholic when used to mourn an Indigenous leader executed with the endorsement of the Church. 

The final sections of the show are entirely in Indigenous language. The powerful aria Hanaq Pachap Kusikuynin, written in  Quechua, leads us towards the short opera San Francisco Xavier, which is in Chiquitano. The title is its only element in Spanish, and the only overt reference to the Jesuit order on whose missions it was originally created. Otherwise, the anonymous 18th century Indigenous writer used Chiquitano words for "god", "heaven" and so on: words which were in use long before colonisation, and so liberate the music from the Catholicising constraints of imperial evangelism. My hope is that the piece will move closer and closer to an assertion of Indigenous cultures and their value. It's just that you have to cut through the accretions of colonial language and dominance in order to get there. 

Back to Toufann

I've been re-visiting Toufann - the Mauritian play we did as long ago as 1999 - because I've been asked to talk about it and lead a workshop in Saarbrücken on Friday. It's been strange but refreshing to go back all that time and look at the way we were working then - and at the politics we were engaged in. It's still about interculturalism and post-colonialism: but the ground has definitely shifted.

Very interesting to stumble across some work by Francoise Lionnet, the Mauritian scholar now working at UCLA, to whom Toufann is dedicated (along with Shakespeare). In her book Minor Transnationalism, she looks at the play, and indeed at our production. I find it a bit odd that she analyses the effects of that production, and the meaning generated by presenting the play in a London context, seeing as she wasn't actually there..... I also think it's a bit disingenuous of her to say that I'm wrong to regard the use of the Hindi word "toufann" to convey "storm" as harking back to an Indian past, on the grounds that Dev is from the Tamil community, not the Hindu, and that he's interested in present and future, not past. It wasn't Dev I was talking about - it was his central character Prospero, who quite clearly names his tempest "toufann", even though it's not a common Creole word (or wasn't in 1991 when the play was written), and who obviously IS interested in the past. The play critiques Prospero and his standpoint, and that's where Dev's radicalism comes out.

Where she does say something very interesting, however, is in relation to the Creole phrase "tou fann", which I had not heard being linked to the title before, but clearly is. "Tou" means "all", and "fann" means "wilts" or "decays". So the title might mean not only "tempest" but also "Things Fall Apart" - evoking Yeats and Achebe to engage in a post-colonial battle alongside Shakespeare. And (though this is not in Lionnet) the Labour Party of Iran, which is also known as "toufan".

Things fall apart. There is a storm.