[This post also available as a podcast.]
I’m always a bit more secure on the territory of words and their transfer across the supposed boundaries among languages. Maybe this is inevitable, given my expertise and how I have spent most of my time in the world.
So in reading two books recommended to me as possibly intersecting with my book-in-progress Sea of Intimacy, namely, Robert MacFarlane’s Landmarks and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweet Grass, I zero in on certain claims right away. I’m writing about these in the book now, so I won’t go into a lot of detail, but here’s the gist. I read them together, so my thoughts about them are intertwined, but here I’ll stick mostly to the Kimmerer book and turn to MacFarlane in another post.
I am often moved by the writing, especially the memoir component, while the botanical wonders the author introduces are just that, as well as enlightening. I especially like the insistence on beauty as an aspect of the natural world with an importance often overlooked or thought of as somehow superfluous in scientific (at least old-fashioned scientific) approaches. Again and again I marvel at the weaving of the two together, the skill of the narrative, and the commitment and sincerity of the voice. It’s quite compelling.
I am uncertain, maybe even a bit uncomfortable, with some of the claims about language, however. And it was probably reading the two books against one another that made this clear to me. MacFarlane marvels at the many different wondrous ways the various peoples in the British Isles came to express aspects of their landscape (again, another post for this). But he never suggests one or another is primary, more original, somehow better or more authentic. They’re just all apt and wonderful and distinctively associated with their locations.
But those associations (primacy, authenticity, intimacy) come through in Kimmerer’s claims. The native words spoken about the land in North America, she suggests, are somehow the right ones, the ones the beings and the land itself recognize, just as they recognize Native Americans as the rightful people.
Now, this is sensitive territory, I know, so I tread carefully. The last sentiment is close to the sorts of things people often say in land acknowledgments, which I believe are respectful and right. So what’s the problem here? I think it’s with the implied notion of how words work in the world, not just in this place. Again, MacFarlane’s approach shows the contrast I have in mind and makes me wonder, Would nature turn up its nose at a visitor to the rain forest expressing her admiration in, say, Indonesian?
Is it only First Nations to whom this suggestion of closeness to, intimacy with the land applies? If so, what would we do with a land, and a sea — and here anyone who’s been reading my posts will see where I’m going — where the First Nations have been lost to history? Did nature stop listening after they went away? Or where the First Nations were supplanted by a Second, a Third, and more? Which would be the right idiom to use? Which words would be the ones nature would recognize?
Kimmerer’s narrator never quite makes such claims explicitly, and she is careful to note that she doesn’t think everyone needs to learn Potawatomi. The settlers came with other languages, she grants, which had their own rich traditions of associations. But this feels like a concession to otherness, not an acknowledgment that those languages are equally good for expressing and living in intimacy with the land anywhere.
It does not excuse injustice to see this. And the obverse — seeing one idiom as somehow more appropriate to a place because of a people’s historic claim to it — is both linguistically slippery and also a slippery slope. Isn’t this the sort of claim German nationalists made with regard to the Volk, that is, an organic, unique connection to the German land, and so on from there? It is, of course, different in a Native American context. The differences would take far too long to explore here (power and genocide are two big items on the list), but I’m referring to the use of language and an implicit claim about how words relate to the world.
Let me put this another way. There was a pop-up medley outside my Zadar window early this morning. Above the occasional whoosh of a car passing and the bells of the church down the road, a show choir singing: Common Swift, Eurasian Blackbird, and Eurasian Blackcap (a little frenetic to my ear at this hour), with occasional shy solos by House Sparrow, Palid Sparrow, and European Robin, and the varied but sure staccato of European Greenfinch. Impressively choreographed and in full costume.
Would it be more accurate, more intimate, to express my admiration using the local Croatian names for the members of the group? Or, reaching back another five hundred years, the Venetian names? Or another three hundred or so before that, the Byzantine Greek names? Or the Latin names of the Roman Empire, which would take us back to the first century BCE or so? Or the Liburnian names, if we could discover them, for the two or three thousand years that they called out to these kindred beings in admiration and wonder? We have no idea who preceded the Liburnians, but someone probably did since people have been around these parts since at least the last ice age. Surely whoever was here then had some names of their own.
Isn’t it possible, rather, that the land, the water, and the living beings all around might respond equally to whatever language, whatever expressive mode, we might employ, and that the key to this puzzle lies in the expression that includes ourselves?
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Russell Scott Valentino 