“What? I didn’t quite get that the first time around.” Communication and Translation, part 1?

I need to foreclose the thought that language is our main form of communication (as humans). Like too much peanut butter in your mouth or cotton candy in your hands, language can be clunky, hard to use.

On the other hand, we can’t forget that language has the ability to spread the idea of revolution, to translate ideas into action, or to enrapture us in the experience of a good storyteller. Language might be sufficient when we are learning how to turn on our computer (even that requires a mix of hieroglyphs and previous electronic knowledge), but is language sufficient when you are explaining the time you felt an irrational sense of fear, or you are telling someone that you’re still in love. Was your experience properly translated and understood by the (an)other?

I want to go deeper, to understand those silent spaces of not-speech, of not-language. At the same time I want to craft my writing so that what you read on this page is a physical experience. What is language really? What are the potentials of language, and what are its unique abilities? Where does the use of language end and our emotions and physicality begin? I’d like to place my microscope upon those shadowy spaces.

I need to foreclose the idea that we might never fully understand one another. That we are all islands, that we cannot communicate adequately.

Yet, I still have my doubts.

In Life and Words anthropologist Veena Das (2007) writes that, in the face of violence, there is a “poverty of words” (91). There are some things that words cannot describe, that people do not want to describe. Das argues that these things are intimately connected to the question of what we consider to be human – while the victim of violence knows that the perpetrator is human, we question whether a human could do such a thing. Humans do indescribable things to other humans. Das’ work points out that these things are indescribable precisely because they question the limits of the human.

“Words can show one’s numbed relation to life just as gesture can tell us what forms of life, what forms of dying, become the soil on which words can grow or not” (Das, 2007:94). In other words (pun not entirely intended), words and language are furiously wrapped and connected to human experience, to society. Words “grow or not” based on how we live our lives, what we experience and what we deem as being human. Words and languages morph and exchange alongside our human lives. Language cannot be understood alone. Language must be contextualized.