An Inscribed Intangibility: The Language Deeper than English
“Language is who you are. It has its own place. It belongs to that place.”
- Songspirals, Gay’Wu Group of Women
The realm of aboriginal thought offered me the language to express a feeling of isolation that has long burdened me. In my conversation with aboriginal keepers of the land, I found myself explaining an experience of desperation that very few could understand.
Me, my people, Black people forced from their mother’s land, are tasked with conceiving the unimaginable. We are left to decipher our existence without the language of our ancestors, without the land of our ancestors, without the tangible foundation crafted by our ancestors.
Then, what are we left with? When the stories of our bloodline have been deeply and intentionally obscured. What are we left with? When our people have been forcibly removed from the lands that held our stories. What are we left with? When our ancestral languages have been shredded and melted into a pot of multicultural mush, leaving us unable to decipher the tales that once shaped our existence. What are we left with?
We are left with each other, in the present moment, conceiving life with the intangible foundations inscribed in our blood. The greatest intangibility shines through our creation of expression—dance, rhythm, song, language; like the way that Black Vernacular bends the white man’s language, weaving songs into stark spellings.
The ultimate beauty of Black vernacular is in the way that our dialects defy the gravity of English. From a language that leaves us “talking backwards,” we birth original vibrations (Gay’Wu Group of Women). We birth languages—like Jamaican patois—so rhythmic that the melody uncurls tightly wound grammar. We birth languages—like AAVE—so peculiar that every note holds wisdom and only finely tuned ears are meant to decipher. We birth languages in song, dance, instrument, paint. We birth language from the world around us—an intangibility “already written through our blood” (Gay’Wu Group of Women).
Oppressors attempted to obliterate the language of our ancestors, so they could whitewash our heritage. Yet, they didn’t know that our languages—like our customs—were meant to evolve with time and space. So, in response to their warfare, we evolved our tone to account for the loss of words that encompass love. We molded our stories to our current landscapes because we know that “language is like water flowing in the river, picking up all the sediment, the rocks, the leaves, and the sand. It moulds it all with the clay” (Gay’Wu Group Women).
We are intimately acquainted with the language that is deeper than English, deeper than Spanish, deeper than French, deeper than Arabic, deeper than any colonizer’s tongue, deeper than even verbalization. We know that language is a spiritual technology, a tool of remembering, a way of grounding us to people and place. The colonizer thought they could alienate us from this truth; yet, in our spirt we know that language is beyond word.
Language is an intimate communication between us— between us and land, between us and spirit. As indigenous people, our power comes from the ease with which we transmute our deeper language into song, dance, art, movement. Forms of language, codes of the universe, that keep us safe. Shared language that brings us joy. Together, in community, we listen and speak, intent on interpreting sound as a collective, formulating a living tradition where we create and re-create the power of our stories.
And so, what do we do with all this power meant to weave stories into our blood for remembrance? What stories do we uplift with our minds of melody to help us remember our knowing?
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On a brief layover in Tokyo, I sit in terminal 108A, as the sky turns from black to cloudy gray. On a nearby screen a narrator speaks over videos and images. These short documentaries playing over and over share brief snippets of Japanese culture. When I finally look up, an image draws me into the screen, into the story. Men are dressed in straw like material with marks on their face. They stand facing a shrine with a priest-like figure blessing them. Then, they begin to run in an almost dance-like fashion. They are welcomed into homes and villages. The subtitles reveal that this is a tradition entitled Namahage. The men were first blessed as messengers of god and then sent to nearby villages as harbingers of good luck. It’s a new year’s ritual that occurs in the northern part of Japan.
It is the familiarity of the straw like costumes, dance-like run, and shrine that initially brought me to the screen. The folklore and spirituality of many African peoples evoke the same images. Asian cultures across the board—Japanese, Chinese, Indian—have been able to maintain and preserve their spiritual traditions. They continue to honor the beliefs of their ancestors and westerners have afforded them more respect in the analysis of their spiritual traditions—while racism is still deeply embedded in the western view, their entire tradition has not been reduced to hedonistic, devil worship performed by savage practitioners.
In many ways, their ability to preserve the stories of their ancestors also comes from the blessing that they have been able to preserve many of their ancestor’s languages while also remaining close to the land of their ancestors. Regardless, it is my hope to restore respect for the ancient spiritual traditions that are alive within indigenous bloodlines. It is my hope that people can acknowledge the wisdom that exists within remembering these stories. Ancestral stories that held the truths that guided our people to themselves and their purpose for centuries.
