Searching for an answer to the loaded question: 'Where are you from?'

THE African writers we looked at a fortnight ago are accessible to those of us who read only English but we can’t simply ignore the indigenous languages beyond English, any more than we can forget Scots and Gaelic. Imperialism suppressed languages in Africa as it did in Scotland, and linguistic imperialism sums up all other kinds.

Understanding this is essential if we have any worthwhile hope for a new Scotland, so it applies very forcefully to Michael Fry’s assessment of Gaelic in Scotland, “We need more than political gestures to save Gaelic culture” (The National, April 20) and to the powerful letters in response to it from Jim Finnie, Derrick McClure and George Pattison, “Gaelic is only a ‘dying’ language because it was beaten out of us!” (The National, April 22), not to mention the egregious pontifications of the “comedian” David Mitchell on his “soapbox” in 2010. (A good exercise in combining mathematics and intellectual interpretation would be to count the number of errors and insults in this recording’s three minutes and 45 seconds.)

Killing their language is the most absolute way to control people. But language is resilient. It goes underground and can be relearned, from the earth and oceans, up. Contours, currents, tides and terrain can teach us how language works.

The Englishman Tim Robinson (1935-2020), after studying mathematics at Cambridge and working as a teacher and artist in Istanbul, Vienna and London, moved to the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland to write and make maps.

His books, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (1986) and Labyrinth (1995), and the maps he made, rise out of close study and experience of the Gaelic language and of the Gaelic terrain in which he invested his life and his mind. He was once asked, at an event in Galway, a question about his work as a whole, and answered that he saw it as “reparation”. That answer moved his questioner to tears.

The emphasis there is on locality but deeply involved in such an engagement is what we would describe as “translation”. Moving from one language to another is like moving from one landscape to another. Sometimes what you take for granted simply doesn’t apply. Deserts are not forests. The people of coastal communities aren’t the same as those who live on the moors or the Great Plains. This means that translation is always a liability. But it’s also always a necessity, and at its best, a delight and liberation.

Niyi Osundare is characteristically optimistic about the virtues of translation: “When two languages meet, they kiss and quarrel. They achieve a tacit understanding on the common grounds of similarity and convergence, then negotiate, often through strident rivalry and self-preserving altercations, their areas of dissimilarity and divergence.”

For Osundare’s people, he says: “The Yoruba believe that to endow something with a name is to give it life beyond subsistence. This world did not exist until a word existed in which its name was found. The world itself was evoked into being by the proclamation of that name. To live is to have a name; to have a name is to live.”

READ MORE: How poet Niyi Osundare met the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina with his art

As with many of us here in Scotland, for Osundare there was a language of the school classroom and that of the playground: “Yoruba is my mother tongue, English my acquired language. The former brings warm intimations of the cradle and the homestead, the latter stern memories of the classroom and the blackboard. In Yoruba, poetry is song and chant, a performed or performable event throbbing with human breath, with a robust sense of audience and participation … So poetry for me is song, performance” and rhythm “is systemic and pervasive. It is secreted in every consonant and every vowel even as both engage in the musical union that begets the syllable. The Yoruba syllable is a unit of music.”

Such units beget structures of affinity, and when these beget a literature, dialect becomes language, a tongue becomes sufficiently codified to permit its interpretation beyond the hall of its own imagination.

THE rising idea of a world literature, a permeable sense of what languages are, is a political development most neatly noted in the French Revolution. Liberty, democracy, fraternity – fraternity and sorority we should say – also means the republicanisation of western polities, and a world of windows opening onto vistas of translated texts. (The insularity of “Britain/England” is partly down to the ignorance generated by anglophone exclusivism. And one thing remains a bafflement to all translators: you can’t translate Conservative Party policy into human decency in any language.)

To quote Osundare again: “Bless translators, those healers of rift, those stitches in the rent tongues of Babel, bridge-builders, threshold crossers.” Through their “magic of mediation” we can see through the eyes of Aeschylus and Baudelaire, Tolstoy and Sappho, Li Po and Basho, we can rise towards what the Yoruba call laakaye (intelligence, wisdom, resourcefulness, all in one: beyond mere knowledge or competence).

READ MORE: OUT OF AFRICA: Putting the poems of Niyi Osundare in context of modern literature

To do so is to acknowledge thresholds, to cross borders,. Sometimes it’s risky. The Irish poet Moya Cannon has a wonderful short poem indicating the risks involved, even to the well-intentioned:

One of the Most Foolish Questions...

I ever asked was of a young

historian in Florida.

I asked her that Irish question,

used to keep conversation flowing,

if she knew where her family

had come from originally.

She paused and said, “It is difficult –

you can tell a certain amount from

auction sales records and cargo lists,”

But one family, she said, had a song,

which they had managed

to track back

to a village in Senegal.

That’s one of the most haunting poems I’ve read in recent months. Beyond it is all the anger and resentment that might have been there if you took the occasion in a certain direction, and all the pedantry of documentation that might have bogged down an understanding of identity, such laws on immigration exulted in by more than one “Home Secretary”. Yet the poem eludes and subverts these dangers and rests its sense of value in a song, and patience, what language and humanity can do. That shared sense of fallibility is also there in Jackie Kay’s poem, “In My Country”:

walking by the waters,

down where an honest river

shakes hands with the sea,

a woman passed round me

in a slow, watchful circle,

as if I were a superstition;

or the worst dregs of her imagination,

so when she finally spoke her words spliced into bars

of an old wheel. A segment of air.

Where do you come from?

“Here,” I said, “Here. These parts.”

Where do you come from?

It’s always a good question, even if sometimes foolish. It doesn’t automatically carry racist implications but can arise simply from respect and optimistic curiosity: Where is your voice from? Where is your music from? I haven’t heard it before but I welcome it here, you’re welcome, here, in these parts. Please teach me your dances! Let me learn the music of your poetry!

Where are you from? There is one good answer, every time: from Africa.