A confluence of things, lately:
- A refreshingly candid and clear-eyed talk on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict following a screening of the documentary 5 Broken Cameras, and finishing the book (Why Palestine? Reflections from Singapore) around which that talk revolved. Quite a lot of it was dedicated to questions like the utility (if any, now) of international institutions like the ICJ in stopping, ultimately, the ongoing genocide; and to stressing that part of the reason the conflict continues is because people keep being told that the only way to end it is to keep trying to find recourse in precisely the institutions and supposedly “proper” channels for protest and resistance that have already failed or proven themselves inadequate and/or too easily dismissible.
- Sinners and its deft use of horror genre storytelling tools to delve into racial politics and art (music) as conduit for both resistance and domination.
- This excerpt from a Viola Davis interview that led me to seek out the full thing, which turned out to be a thoughtful meditation on her career thus far.
- Getting around to re-reading Babel — which is not the most subtle book about language, colonialism, and imperialism — now that I can read it alongside Vicente Rafael’s Motherless Tongues. I tend to forget that the book’s full title is Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence; and now that I remember, it reminds me of a simple discussion question from that book talk that hit harder after having watched a civilian go through five different cameras that were shot out of his hands, damaged by shrapnel, etc.: “What would you have Palestinians do now?”
And as a result, then, a lot of simmering thoughts these days on the many ways to set the protocols and criteria and languages (in the broadest sense of the word) for sustaining or challenging various systems.
Mythic language is discourse, that is, it cannot be anything but systematic; one does not really make discourse at will, or statements in it, without first belonging—in some cases unconsciously, but at any rate involuntarily—to the ideology and the institutions that guarantee its existence.
From Orientalism by Edward Said
Que siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio; y de tal manera lo siguió, que junta mente començaron, crecieron y florecieron, y después junta fue la caida de entrambos.
Language was always the companion of empire, and as such, together they begin, grow, and flourish. And later, together, they fall.
from Gramática de la lengua castellana by Antonio de nebrija, as quoted in babel by r.f. kuang
“[T]he power of the [silver] bar lies in words. More specifically, the stuff of language that words are incapable of expressing — the stuff that gets lots when we move between one language and another. The silver catches what’s lost and manifests it into being.
[…]You’re in the place where magic is made. It’s got all the trappings of a modern university, but at its heart, Babel isn’t so different from the alchemists’ lairs of old. But unlike the alchemists, we’ve actually figured out the key to the transformation of a thing. It’s not in the material substance. It’s in the name.”
– Professor jerome Playfair, introducing the concept of silver-working and the british empire’s royal institute of translation, from babel by R.F. Kuang
[T]ranslation turns not just on the transfer of meaning but also on the struggle to control the processes of transferring meaning. It relates to all sorts of tensions around procedures, around the limits of what can be translated, as well as prescriptions for what must remain untranslated. […]It is not so much really to avoid difference or to avoid plurality. It is to be able to exercise total control over linguistic pluralism and to make this control as automatic as possible.
vicente rafael, in conversation with siri nergaard for translation: a transdisciplinary journal, as reproduced in motherless tongues
“It’s technical training in order to deal with the classics. […] But what it denies is the human being behind all of that.
I feel that, as a Black actress, I’m always being tasked to show that I have range by doing white work. […] But we don’t put those same parameters on white actors. You know, you can have a white actress who’s fifty-four, fifty-five years old, which is a great age to play Mama in Raisin in the Sun. Is she gonna be able to pull off Mama in Raisin in the Sun? […] They don’t have to do that. So for those four years at Juilliard, all the white actor has to do is play all white characters.
[…] Juilliard was an out-of-body experience because, once again, I did not think that I could use me. Me needed to be left at the front door, even though me was what got me in there. Viola Davis on her Juilliard education and its focus on shaping her into “a perfect white actress.”
There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces.
from Orientalism by edward said
“There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy.
Remember this: Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. The frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.
And then remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that.
And know this: The day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.
Remember this: Try.”
– Karis Nemik, from the Star Wars series Andor
