letter fourteen: nonverbal

where did your darlings learn how to kill?

Dearest friend,

When I first started drafting this letter to you last July, I had just started a new job. I began writing because, earlier that week, I’d made this joke to my manager in one of our onboarding meetings — something she must have read as needlessly self-deprecating, because she’d paused me to let me know I’m a “good writer,” that she has to “correct the language here” so I don’t leave the room believing I’m anything but that. 

Words are the sharpest weapons in the armory that is publicity and marketing, and my mistake in starting this job was perhaps believing that being in the publishing circle will soften the impact of those particular would-be bruises. I maintain that I was far too underqualified for this job, which I applied to for reasons more related to the ennui of career goals attained too early than any real desire; at the time, I just thought: I haven’t worked in marketing and publishing before, and what a great opportunity this is to learn and channel my love for words and books somewhere new. 

But — to say the obvious — it’s very easy to make words not mean anything in the world of PR and Communications, even dealing in books, and therefore very easy to make words simply… not matter. Copywriting for the literary world demands a kind of skull-bludgeoning, I’ve found. It sounds pretentious to exaggerate, and it’s true that it wasn’t terrible in the beginning. Yet it accumulates, until you wonder how direct violence could be passive aggressive. In that job, at least, you had to be willing to shake and shake and shake words until nothing else fell out. And only then — when it’s an empty husk, when its meaning is only what someone brings to it from the outside — will they tell you that it’s worth being seen. 

Do you know how to describe what it feels like to be complimented for your ability to choose the right words in a situation like that? I still don’t. It’s hard, to find the words for it. The irony, yet how oddly fitting all the same. 

For me, with writing, the verb has always mattered more than the noun or any adjective attached. I write. That’s all. I’ve always believed that everything was secondary to my love for language. I just love words. That’s the be-all and end-all of it. I bastardize my use of them plenty, I clinicalize them even more, but mentally, emotionally, physically, I do love words, and I know the reasoning behind every life path I have pursued and rejected can eventually be traced back to a love of language. 

People hear that, however, and assume that I love it because I see romance in it, that I believe in its inherent goodness, in its power, in its capacity for absolute truth. I don’t. I think it’s naive to believe language can ever be synonymous with truth. I don’t say that out of my disillusionment; I find only that you don’t attain a certain level of comfort in using words, that you don’t live a life where you are handed certain privileges and luck simply because you wield language a certain way, and come out of that believing that language has any purity to it. 

If you walk into a bank tomorrow, point a gun to someone’s head and walk away within three minutes with not only a truck full of money but recognition from a federal intelligence branch that they need exactly someone like you for an undercover job, you don’t just walk away forgetting that enough competence will outweigh illegality and immorality. The threat, the crime, will always be what it is, and the reward always tied to what you were willing to do. You know what I mean? 

Words are no different. A fraction of reality put into words does not mean it’s any less a kind of death, a kind of murder, than how Susan Sontag describes photographs. What does she call them? A way of “certifying experience” — yet “also a way of refusing it, by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.” The craft of language is similarly paradoxical: in capturing an emotion, an experience, a scenario, through even the best, most evocative words possible, you are making it tangible through the abstract as much as you are offering a detachment between the abstract and the tangible.

The thing is: language has always been violent in my eyes. It’s always been caked with mud and blood. It has always smelled like something burning. Sometimes it has felt like performing surgery with a small chainsaw. That’s what I love about it. That there’s a sick thrill to the viscera, and an irreplaceable satisfaction to the clean-up after. My love for writing is also what might well be a lack of respect for it, because if to love a creature is to see it for all that it is then to love something like language is to know you are loving something that does not deserve to be loved. 

Is there a word for a religious devotee that defiles the object of its devotion rather than sanctifies it as a subject of worship? 

A liar, maybe? A heretic?

In my pre-high school years, in the country I was born, one of my tasks as a four-year member of the student government was to “catch” students who weren’t speaking in English and to mark down their resulting demerits. I guess that does something to you, at that age. I tried to let as many of my classmates go as I could. Maybe even then, a child would know there was something not quite right about forbidding an entire grade from using their first language just because English is the mark of supposed education, but — well. There are countless other elements of the nation’s deep-rooted colonial history embedded in every single layer of the whole country’s culture and society; in that moment, though, I suppose I internalized a perspective that will only solidify the more I learned about the world: that language not only maintains but contains inherent power dynamics, and even — or especially — at its most “amoral,” it is guilty of being both the root and propagator of exactly that category of systemic violence. It might not have been so nuanced a thought at the time, at eight or eleven years old, but it was there. It was planted. It will grow. 

To say 2023 has made me disillusioned with language isn’t quite right. That job, yes, which has made me reassess my own words and find only coldness in them, but also — everything in the world. Everything in this fucking world. 

There’s that one Danez Smith poem that ends with it doesn’t feel like a time to write / when all my muses are begging / for their lives. It was published in 2016, nearly eight years ago, and the haziness of that breadth of time is as surreal as the clarity of this present moment, where that verse has only become more true as we watch victims of genocide and colonial violence in so many parts of the world use every single word at their disposal, every single headline and photo and witness account, to make their reality known to us — and for it not to matter to their murderers, and the people who might as well be holding the knife themselves for all their inability to intervene. 

I spent much of the holiday season attending Palestine protests here in Toronto, and I wish I could tell you that these filled me only with hope and vigor. But the grief is immense, the fury even more so, and underneath those, a moment where I was looking over at all these signs — Artists For A Free Palestine, Health For Gaza! Stop The Genocide!, Canada STOP Arming Israel — and couldn’t help thinking: Why on earth would they listen to us, when the voices of the dying didn’t even matter to anyone until they were already dead? What good are these words, if in the end speaking up becomes emblematic of “this is all we can do”?

The philosopher and activist Bayo Akomalafe said: 

What we have today is an activism that is ideologically sterile. It seems that all we have been doing for a long while now is just directing our efforts to resisting the system — which is important work, protesting injustice and all that, but we’re also learning that the more we do that, the more we resist the system, the more we seem to assume the shape of the system. There’s a dynamic there. The more I use a tool, the more I become a tool to the tool, the more I’m used by the tool. Audre Lorde said that the master’s tools do not dismantle the master’s house, and I think that is instructive here. We cannot simply continue to depend on that paradigm of resistance singularly. We need a paradigm of renewal. 

It is so easy, especially online, to parrot words. Language is recyclable like that. It’s what the craft of writing depends on: that little shortcut to the voice in your head, collected from hundreds upon thousands of data harnessed from other times you’ve heard that word used whether you know it or not. But in action, when it’s supposed to matter, it’s a revolting thing to witness. I say that as someone who writes. People assume that I take pride in writing because I love it, that I believe words have any bearing on truth, but it’s exactly because I write that I do not hold writing to such romance. Such idealism. Such naivete. Writing is a violent thing. Writing is manipulative. It has to be, even at its most well-intentioned, its most “raw” and vulnerable. To reveal anything in writing is, in fact, to obscure and filter information in the same way that a sculpture is chiseled away from a once-whole. Even expansiveness in writing is an illusion, and it wears me out how little people, especially these days, realize that language is not our friend. It is not our savior. It is not a prophet. It is not a dealer of truths any more than a blackjack dealer is on your side when there is profit for the casino to ensure and to maximize. 

Did you know genocide begins with language? The first step of genocide, formally, is generally understood to be classification. It doesn’t have to be literal words: it can be pure semiotics, pure semantics, and it will be enough to use as foundation for all the other steps that will come after: the discrimination, the dehumanization, the extermination, all of them founded upon the crucial ground that language broke for them. 

Part of that, I assume, is that there’s nothing in your brain easier to hijack than language. When headlines start calling it a “conflict” rather than a genocide, when a three-year-old child becomes a three-year-old “young lady,” when wiping out entire communities and lineages becomes merely a matter of “neutralizing” — the mind will follow. Appealing to the morality of people who feel justified in committing atrocities can’t be expected to accomplish much; in their minds, the labels have been attached, and the justifications will follow accordingly, inevitably, and cohesively. When you start calling an entire people animals, those two things, sharing a linguistic link, begin to occupy the same space in your brain, until their slaughter means just about as much as the animals we see as collateral to our own survival.

It’s existential, the matter of language, as Steven Salaita writes. Language, particularly in colonial violence, has a tendency to make neutral the extreme. 

The preferred vocabulary of suppression has long been “balance.” The idea is that a so-called “pro-Palestinian” speaker or exhibit must be countered—or, more accurately, moderated—by a so-called “pro-Israel” speaker or exhibit. (These categories, by the way, are misleading.  “Pro-justice” and “pro-ethnocracy” would be more accurate even though they make little sense without an understanding of their context.) But there’s nothing balanced about this structure. The Zionist supposedly devoted to fairness doesn’t seek balance; he seeks oversight.  

The truth about language is that at its heart, at its most useful, it’s an abstraction. It’s a concept. It’s an amoral tool at best, yet we are all by now aware enough to know that amorality is immoral in a world where morality is weaponized. The idea that words have enough power on their own is a privilege we get to hold onto when we’re not the ones bleeding out and getting starved and bombed and killed, again and again. Words mobilize, but it’s mobilization that saves lives. Words expand understanding, but understanding is as much a route to doing more as it is an excuse to not do anything else. In violence on the scale that Gaza, Sudan, Congo, Haiti, Yemen are all experiencing, words from the rest of the world don’t mean anything. Not anymore. It did, once, and for the children who at least got to die with the illusion of safety that poetry and song and words of comfort provide, it must be worth more than our failure to save them. Yet words are, in the end, on this level of horror, like putting a band-aid on a freshly amputated leg. 

In this climate, it also feels like — It feels as if words are simply what we give to people who have died. As if words are what we give to people we believe will die anyway, and what a horrific thing that is. Journalists lose their lives for information that will only be filtered through words, translations, headlines that can be easily distorted. What we’re left with are people “whose resilience we celebrate,” people whose lives we memorialize and sensationalize as if those lives didn’t end exactly because their words — their pleas, their evidence, their testimonies — had been heard and ignored all the same. 

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that words don’t matter at all, or that they hold no sway on which way the wind blows. I take comfort in Andrea Long Chu’s words here, where she says:

What everyone knows on some level, I think, is that speech has the power to incite action because speech itself is already a material act. Yes, anti-Zionism is an idea, not a rock; but if it were only an idea, without any practical potential, then there would be no point in throwing it. The difference right now is that, given the tremendous political and ideological instability introduced by the war, a number of powerful people in America currently believe that talking about freeing Palestine could actually end up freeing Palestine, and it is this cascade of actions that they are ultimately trying to suppress. This tells us something very important: They are afraid. 

But it needs no explaining to see for ourselves that we must not rely on them to do the work for us, nor should we use them as stand-ins for what they should be representing. It astounds me how many people social media has taught to self-censor just to be heard, to not be buried: porn is not “corn” any more than rape is not “grape” and genocide is not “jenny slide.” This person is not being gaslit; they are merely being lied to. That bullet did not “find its way” into the victim; it had to be shot. Gaza is not “starving”; it is being starved. Removing the subject from a sentence by making the verb passive does not remove the agency in creating a man-made famine. This First Nations community was not relocated; they were dragged out of their homes and forced to leave. This autistic individual is not “acoustic,” in the way that there is a point where the desire to find alternatives that resemble a slur in every way but the exact is just about the same as saying the slur itself. Language develops, of course, and some changes are to be expected, but when language has cost us millions of lives, the least we can do in our delusion that language is ever on our side is to interrogate the words we have been trained to use — and trained to avoid. 

Maybe I am undermining my own argument in proving that words do have power. I guess what I mean to say, ultimately, is that we mustn’t expect words to have any inherent sway of its own. Language is only ever an approximation of the narratives we must tell ourselves, and that leaves them just as able to be used by the narratives someone else wants to tell us. That includes narratives told to control our resistance against their narrative. Do you know how many professors are out there patting themselves on the back because they put out one journal article about Haiti? Do you know how many celebrities feel self-satisfied, even invigorated, by parroting Ceasefire Now on a red carpet interview? 

It’s better than nothing, I know. Many times these past couple of months, I’ve thought about writing, about being one more person to throw in their useless goddamn words into the same pool of social media threads and poetry and “educate yourselves with these books” — and each time I find the instinct to rely on these particular tools nauseating. It feels like being cornered into that dynamic that Bayo Akomalafe talked about, funneled into the same cycle of Words About This and Words About That and Sign This Petition and RETWEET THIS IF YOU CARE and Don’t Stop Talking About This. 

I thought: Haven’t we relied on language enough? Hasn’t that reliance killed enough people? Language is an abstraction, but Gaza is not. Congo is not. Sudan is not. Haiti is not. The Uyghur genocide is not. The legacy of residential schools in Canada is not. 

In an article for The Baffler, Karim Kattan writes:

This wanton carelessness and dehumanization is why we feel a compelling urge to document and describe everything, big and small, to make sure that people understand what is at stake: “But this was a child,” we want to say, “and this an adult.” Not a thing bound to die a gruesome death in a devastated city but a child who would have grown by the sea, who would have been, perhaps, a good swimmer and bad at math or grown to really love cars or cooking. “And this,” we want to say, “was a residential building, this a restaurant on the seashore, this a house with a garden, where someone played or got into a fight in the kitchen, and this is all gone.” These are people with names, we want to say, and faces too, and lives, and friends grieving them, if they are not themselves now dead; and cities, cities, entire, whole. Real cities and towns which they call their own and which are now graveyards. Pundits on television, meanwhile, talk of the thousands dead as justified collateral damage—but this, we want to say, is the gleeful obliteration of a seashore, of families, histories, cities.

How to write, how to love language, in a world that has used it to eradicate that same seashore, those same families, histories, and cities? 

There’s this one James Baldwin interview with The New York Times:

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it…

If there is no moral question, there is no reason to write. I’m an old-fashioned writer and, despite the odds, I want to change the world. 

It’s just that — If it means the world won’t have to be changed anymore, if it means there will no longer be a moral question, then I would gladly have no reason to write. 

I quit the PR job last Friday. The relief lasted for two days. Writing, these days, makes me want to crawl out of my own skin, yet the only thing that helps that need is writing. It’s a snake eating its own tail, and it’s enough, I feel, to drain a love I once thought was unbreakable. 

I don’t know what to do with this grief that words cannot contain. I don’t know what to do with this grief that words have helped make. 

It is not without reprieve, the grief. Words and the truths they have documented helped make South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice — and yet how bleak, too, that we must argue for the right to use the word genocide for a reality we can all see unfold in real time, and for that right to be denied even in being acknowledged. 

Earlier tonight, I attended what the Toronto Palestine Film Festival described as “a night of readings, music, and art.​​”

In a matter of months, they said, Israel has destroyed Gaza’s educational, cultural and artistic institutions, and yet, amid the rubble, music, art and joy still lives, providing comforts and tales by its presence.

Waiting for the lobby to empty out, I stood alone in the bathroom holding back tears without knowing what, exactly, brought it on. Maybe everything. Probably everything. I will have to get over it, to breathe and keep doing the work and that there will be nothing gained by cynicism over the role that celebration and art can play in a world that knows it must destroy those things first to destroy the soul of its victims. 

I feel angry, mostly. There is so much rage, so much resentment. I mourn the rubble of what once was, in all these countries that the world has failed, and mourn for how thoroughly destruction has made its mark on even their futures. I’m also angry at myself for the anger that undercuts that mourning. I’m angry at the selfishness of the world, angrier still at the self-centrism of even selflessness. 

I’m angry at how limited that word is. Angry. It’s not just anger. It’s a nauseating, hollowing feeling, yet hot — stone oven hot. Burning as it carves you empty. Words feel only limited next to the size of the anger. Clinical. Sterile. 

I’m sorry, my friend, that this is the first letter I’m sending you after so long. My heart is with you, as it has been all this while. There is much to do in the world. There are many words to write. I don’t know how much more I can keep doing it. But the truth of that remains just the same, and a part of me feels stronger that I can manage to write to you despite it all. 

I hope you are taking care of yourself, wherever you are, in life and the world. 

Belated but no less heartfelt as it is: welcome to the new year. I’ve missed you. 

Your huckleberry friend, 

Sha