WOMEN’S organizations are devoted exclusively to female problems. But Simorgh Women’s Resource and Publication Centre has this time chosen to discuss a subject that offers a wider scope for study and discussion. It was a three-day seminar held in Lahore, the subject being: The Politics of Language. I wish I had attended all the sessions and listened to all the papers read there, and the discussion these papers provoked. But at the moment, I have two papers before me, one by Dr Tariq Rahman and the other by Kishwer Naheed.
If we go by what Dr Tariq Rahman said, the title of the discussion, The Politics of Language, may well have been ‘The Curse of Language’.
Traditionally, we take pride in saying that human beings have been endowed with the faculty of speech because of which they have evolved manifold languages. But seen from Dr Rahman’s point of view, woe to the day when man spoke the first word. That was the starting point of evil in the world. Language, according to Dr Rahman, is the root cause of all evil in human society. As I read his arguments, I grew envious of monkeys because they know not what war is. Nor do they believe in terrorism. No monkey will ever stoop to the level of a terrorist. And never a case of rape has been reported by monkeys. They are lucky to have no language, national or regional.
“If we,” says Dr Rahman, “did not have language, the basis of power would have been physical force that would have created individual violence, and not systems of power creating and sustaining violence.... We would have had fights as animals do, but not wars.”
According to Dr Rahman, it is through language that ideologies are evolved that serve the purpose of justifying domination of one group over the other in different forms. “It is only through language that ideologies of this kind make it possible to perpetuate violence over slaves, the working classes (who are taught to know their place), over women (who are taught to accept patriarchy), and over the peoples of Africa and Asia.”
There is, according to Dr Rahman, an inter-connection between language and violence, and in so many forms that it is difficult to catalogue all of it. But some forms of violence are so obvious that he should not have missed them. For instance, while talking of verbal violence in Pakistan, he cites the example of sexual invectives. But there is another kind of verbal violence that is very popular with us. I mean slogans, more particularly political slogans. And at times, some slogan creeps into the realm of poetry, that is supposed to be a subtle form of expression. Poets have been seen in certain cases drawing sustenance from some fiery slogan or from some ideology leading to a slogan. We have seen poets of this breed addressing us in a way that those singing of love in undertones are overshadowed. Perhaps some such situation had provoked Stendthal to comment: “Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar and yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse one’s attention.”
How will Dr Rahman define his theory of verbal violence, as a kind of poetry and fiction? By the way, one hopes that he will not try to discern some streak of violence in love poetry at least. After all, love poetry, too, is written in one language or the other. And Dr Rahman is bound by his thesis that “it is only the possession of language which makes human beings a violent species, which has, above all, to justify its violence.”
However, Dr Rahman is not alone in his campaign against language. He has found a zealous ally in Kishwar Naheed. She, too, has a strong case against language. Her objection is that language is a male-dominated phenomenon. She cites the example of Man who, when referred to as a species, is always considered as a masculine gender. Why masculine when the species includes females, too?
Here, Kishwar appears to be engaged in a linguistic study. She has found two types of languages. In one group are the languages where the division of masculine and feminine has been to a great extent overlooked, while in the other group this division has been much emphasized. Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu and Hindi fall in this group.
But what makes her study interesting is her research that military people are generally sex-obsessed. According to her research, military terms are, to a great extent, sex-oriented. The same is the case with the names of the armours. And it is not a case of one or two countries. She has cited the examples of different countries including France and has tried to prove that sex obsession is an international phenomenon so far as military circles are concerned.
How intriguing| We need a Freud to analyze the situation.
WOMEN’S organizations are devoted exclusively to female problems. But Simorgh Women’s Resource and Publication Centre has this time chosen to discuss a subject that offers a wider scope for study and discussion. It was a three-day seminar held in Lahore, the subject being: The Politics of Language. I wish I had attended all the sessions and listened to all the papers read there, and the discussion these papers provoked. But at the moment, I have two papers before me, one by Dr Tariq Rahman and the other by Kishwer Naheed.
