Transcriber: Lucy Driver Reviewer: Lidia Cámara de la Fuente
I'm presenting this talk to you in a single language.
The English I speak was given to me by my parents, those who educated me,
passed down, shifting and changing in accent in subtle ways,
over generations in my family.
It came to me through butchers, weavers, factory workers, farmers,
generations of mothers and fathers.
As education became widely available, it came to me through teachers
and, latterly, universities.
English was an accident of birth,
which has meant I can assume a certain privilege in the world.
I can expect many to speak to me in my own language
without needing to make any effort myself.
There is a danger in the dominance of a single language.
The dominance of English in the world
is held in place historically, politically and economically.
It is no accident or God-given right
and it is the language I use to speak to you now,
because of the histories of slavery,
of colonialism, of trade, of globalization.
Because of pacts, treaties and laws made by others,
which stick to me, and to you, like glue.
It is the language privileged by global education systems,
and English has become a tool in the UK for policing immigration
and access for international students to higher education,
especially by requiring expensive language testing.
Hospitality is a strong test of a language and of a people.
So, to present a talk in English
is to continue the structures of inequality and injustice
which have lead to its dominance.
It is a strangely arrogant and partial thing to do.
Arrogance and partiality are always dangerous.
They deny connectivity.
To speak in English without reflection on how this has come to be,
is concealing of the structures which place limitations on so many.
So, what difference does it make
that English, that this language, is the one I now use to speak to you in?
It's the end of the road.
She shows me the form which contains the removal directions.
At the bottom it says:
'This has been explained to you in the -- English -- language'.
An official has written 'English' in the gap.
She does not speak English.
The person sitting in front of me
is awaiting imminent deportation from the UK.
She has come seeking refuge and has been refused
in a language she does not understand.
She speaks 4 languages fluently and a 5th she speaks well.
I am sitting with her in the immigration removal centre,
I befriend her.
There is nothing much to say to her as her situation is just desperately sad.
English. The global language.
The language of hope, the language of business,
the language of education, the language of interrogation,
of the legal system, the language of the law,
of the bureaucrat, of the form,
of the guards in the centre, who will force her, against her will,
to get onto a plane, and go back to what she believes will be a dreadful future,
if there is a future at all.
English.
I speak to her in English in an attempt at friendship,
and she winces as if in pain.
It's too hard, she's too tired of these words.
They have refusèd me.
I try speaking a little French.
She softens, recognizing something familiar,
rather than a language which she associated with hope
and now experiences as the language of betrayal.
The language of clear, unequivocal rejection.
I ask her about the other languages she speaks,
and if she might teach me a word or two.
She laughs, and begins to tell me how to greet people in her mother tongue.
I stumble and babble and struggle.
She fills out with presence and pride
as she shows me exactly where to place my tongue on my teeth
to make the right sound.
And it makes us both laugh when I do.
So, for a moment,
in the dreary visits room of the removal centre,
dignity is restored and the world comes into balance.
For a moment, she is the teacher now, the one with the knowledge and control,
and I am learning from her how to live in multilingual worlds.
This is a modern day story of the Tower of Babel.
The story of Babel is a curious one.
The uses to which the builders of the tower put their one language
were not pleasing to their God, who, in the story,
intervened to stop the building of their tower,
and to create a multilingual world.
There have been many different interpretations of this story,
and what it's trying to tell us about languages.
In some readings, this story is understood
to tell of how confusion came upon the Earth.
In other readings, it warns of arrogance, of pride in grand achievements.
It may be seen as a cautionary tale,
of what happens when human beings detach themselves through technology
from the diversity of life down on Earth.
The destruction of the tower leads to the need
for concentrated effort in learning and listening.
The suggestion is left hanging for us,
that learning to live in multilingual worlds
is an ethical necessity for life to flourish,
one which might even give us the conditions for peace.
And there's a paradox here,
as there is in my story of learning words of greeting
from someone about to be removed and sent away from safety,
and whom I've never seen again.
Vulnerability is acute
when there is one technological solution that is unequally shared.
Temporary relief from this vulnerability comes here through language learning,
through attending to things we might fear to do and not readily understand,
in order to practise living with diversity and to get good at doing so by practising.
Temporary relief comes by allowing people time-out
in a language in which they can rest too,
in sharing the burden of comprehension and communication.
Temporary relief comes by having a go
at letting languages be the connectors, not barriers,
inhabiting multilingual worlds and their struggles together.
In this view, there is no problem of translation, no loss,
there is the endless possibility of mutuality.
The languages I have learned well are French and German.
They are the languages we favour in our schools' curricula,
but these too are all languages that bear the marks of violence,
and refugees wash up on our shores as a historical and political consequence.
My experiences of befriending those awaiting deportation,
together with my experience of researching language learning,
led me to a crunch point.
In 2007, I took the decision, with my family, to open our home
to destitute asylum seekers and refugees.
In a very real sense we were refusing to live in an English-only world.
It's one thing to share different food, habits of sleep and waking;
it is quite another to relinquish easy understanding
and to have to slow down rhythms of speech,
to create new linguistic normalities
to explain in many and creative ways things not readily grasped.
I'm under no illusion that this small, insignificant decision
will change the overwhelming structures of linguistic inequality.
But I do know that it has had a profound and important effect on me,
and changed who I am.
Many of those who came to live with us spoke languages I'm ashamed to say
I did not even know existed in the world.
One of those who came has joined our family.
A young Bilen and Tigrinya speaker, persecuted in her homeland,
who fled to the UK, aged 14.
And so it was I had to change my understanding
of what it meant to have a mother tongue,
when the tongue spoken by my foster daughter
was not that of this mother.
I labour still at the edges of her language
managing a few rote lane sentences of greeting, meeting and eating,
but little more.
The materials and opportunities to learn her languages
are all but out of reach to me.
They barely exist in the world.
Painfully slowly, I'm using my pen to trace the shapes of the Ge'ez script
as I begin to learn Tigrinya,
one of the mother tongues of my foster daughter.
The irony is intense -- a daughter tongue.
It curves beautifully as I trace out the contours
that would make the pointing of her name.
And I'm hopelessly bad at this.
It's a physical struggle to voice the consonants and vowels
that are so remote from my phonetic experience and practice.
I realize I know the words for peace, for mercy, for hope,
but not for war, death, torture or the hell of her former life.
She teaches me to chant the script:
he, ho, he, ha, hie, hi, ho, le, lu, le, la, lie, li, lo.
My foster daughter is teaching me her mother tongue,
a tongue to foster, a daughter tongue.
At such moments of connection and intimacy,
moments when I cannot speak the language of those who live with me,
I'm brought down
from my rhetorically sophisticated English tower
into a multilingual place of humility.
I have to slow down, take time, be dependent, full of errors.
This daily experience changes me and changes how I research.
It begins to engender empathy as I experience
what others experience all the time.
I begin to consider
where and how languages are part of all the research I undertake.
Researching in just one language may speed things up, but it's partial,
marked by ignorance and absence too.
Crossing in and out of languages
allows questions and experiences to be seen from different angles,
connections to be made in new ways.
It places us, when we hesitate or lack understanding,
in a place of listening, observing, rather than controlling the connections.
It levels us, it quietens us, means we too may experience
what it is not to understand.
It allows us also to receive from gracious others, who slow down,
work at making sure we all understand,
enabling us to share in the language effort
as a hard, common task.
I'm often asked to advise people
on which language their children should learn,
and what use it is to learn a language
when English is spoken by everyone worldwide.
My reply is this:
English is not spoken by everyone worldwide.
Access to structured ways of learning English as a foreign language
are expensive and exclusive.
It's another place in the world where inequalities are increasing.
I say: Learn the languages which will illuminate,
languages which will help you understand your history,
languages which will create connection through trade or aid or travel.
Languages which will mean you better connect
with the neighbours in the street and the neighbouring countries,
languages spoken in your community.
I say: Work for structural change in education,
monitor who is in and who is rejected by language structures.
Learn other languages as an act of poetic activism,
but never believe that this will in itself be a route to emancipation.
There is no pure place to speak from,
but this still means that there's important work to do with words.
When this fails, work for a change in the language laws.
And finally, learning languages will increase your capacity to be human,
to love, to empathize with others.
Don't retreat into a language bunker, but come out, have a go.
It is disarming for those used to having to struggle on in English
to hear words spoken which demonstrate palpably, bodily, that they are welcome,
rather than assuming that they will have to do all the work
of coming towards us.
We need languages to make us human,
the danger is that a single language will diminish our humanity,
all the more so, when we insist on it.
Learn languages, not because they are functionally useful in a superficial way,
but because languaging, learning to live in multilingual worlds,
will give you a new chance at connecting as a human being,
through humility.
It is a risk to be in a world of unknowingness,
to step out from what's familiar,
and the languages which formed us from small.
It is a risk to step into other language worlds,
but perhaps this is the ethical necessity of the Babel story.
One language can never explain the whole world.
So, I will make myself in this world with strangers,
I will change my habits of language learned from birth.
I have given this talk in English.
This talk remains incomplete.
It does not need to be this way.
It needs the gift of those who cross into English,
bearing other languages,
inviting by their presence ways of learning how to live,
which are tender, even kind.
I have given this talk in English.
Thank you.
(Applause)