I woke up this morning in Kazakhstan, in the apartment I have barely left for the last ten months. I checked the news for the US Senate races, expecting that to be the headline. It wasn’t.
The first thing I saw was the capitol breach, but to be more accurate I didn’t really see it, because I couldn’t really comprehend it. I read the headline again, each word, independently, familiar, but together, in that order, in that sentence, something so foreign. I clicked on the link. I read the article. I watched the video. But still- I couldn’t see it?
Something about it resisted understanding; it skated on the surface but didn’t sink. It was a thing apart. I read more. I watched more videos. I was not shocked, and I wasn’t surprised, but I still couldn’t see it.
Something about it just didn’t compute in my scheme of reality. It felt like a movie about someone else’s country. I think I have never truly understood the word “surreal” until today.
But I want to say again, to truly emphasise it- there was no shock or surprise here. We are seeing the fruit of years of misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric. It shouldn’t feel shocking to see it if you’ve been paying attention- this is where it was always going. Our destination was inevitable in the context of so many lawmakers willing to pander to, and enable, and fete President Trump as he was emboldened to say whatever was politically and personally expedient. The discourse Trump drew from was a deep well of racial politics and white supremacy that people continue to deny exists. The same people who deny it exists are those for whom it is carefully curated to offer a myopic viewpoint of rage and fear of displacement. For those who insist oppressed people have nothing to protest, they surely protest a future in which they aren’t in power. Isn’t that interesting?
For the last five years, I have been teaching a course on language, power, and literature in historical context. I can’t count how many discussions I’ve had with students about rhetoric, propaganda, and mass media- this is the section of the course that always captures students’ attention most profoundly. When the idea firmly takes root that words do, they really do, have power, I can feel the change in the classroom.
The world is made over with the knowledge that we name it and define it, and in so doing we create reality around us through the awesome simplicity of so many shared definitions. We must describe what life is in order to live it, and in societies we gather around a language of belief together. This is the power of creation we hold in our mouths.
It’s become a pat commentary to flippantly dismiss the left as overly preoccupied with words. Perceived obsessions with pronouns or naming groups or referencing historical epochs accurately are trotted out as examples of pathetic handwringing. Mocking “snowflakes” for being “offended by words” is common in most every internet comment section. But words do have power, and dismissing concerns about language and rhetoric with an eye roll and an admonition to not be so sensitive isn’t an appropriate response to those seeking to raise the alarm on the world words can make.
I watch America from afar today, and I realise I can’t truly see what’s happening because I don’t speak the same language of belief. It’s something untranslatable to me, a gibberish description of an alternate, fictional universe. I know I would feel just as far away in the middle of my hometown in Texas right now as I do in Kazakhstan. We simply don’t inhabit the same conceptually built world; we don’t name the same reality. The simplest of things can’t be taken for granted as agreed upon. Basic facts are categorised in systems that are inscrutable to me. Everything is a filtered distance, a muffled sound, a cacophony of mismatched events and phrases, situations and ill fitting explanations of those situations.
I am unmoored from a previously shared land of language, adrift, looking at a receding shore, watching it disappear. If I shouted for help to get back, no one would understand me, but more maddening, they wouldn’t even see the distance between us- they would see me instead as raving at “nothing”, ranting at imagined fears. Which is, of course, just how I see them.
These worlds that are so far apart simultaneously exist side by side, divided by the chasm of crafted chaos, something rendered in rhetoric. We are all together, but apart, occupying juxtaposed constructions of experiences we can’t describe or share.
If we were to stand shoulder to shoulder and compare conceptual maps of the same events, the emotional topography would reveal wholly different landscapes, our perspectives remaking the very earth. We are in the same place, and we are not in the same place. The built world of our perception rises to meet us- we each meet something different.
This is the impact we have to learn to respect when we consider how we got here. “Here” was literally spoken into existence- it was conceived in calculated attention, a mass insemination of a new dialect to define reality. “Here” was nurtured, tended to, fed. “Here” was a patient, slow development- painfully slow to those waiting for it, thus driving the anticipation, and also slow enough to be missed by those who wanted to dismiss it. To those who were listening, you could hear it growing. You could even read the past to know the reveal. And yet still, somehow, seeing it birthed into the world is unexpectedly confounding, even as it was inevitable.
The transition has been made from speaking to doing, and Here has arrived to action, to claim the power that was spoken into it. Here is in the people now, not in their words but in their bodies. We are past the point of theories or debates; we’ve left the linguistic realm behind. Here is where we all are now, interpreting the incomprehensible, watching the world rearrange to reflect what it has been told to be.
A word after a word after a word is power.
Margaret Atwood
