Local Natives

It is difficult not to hear in standard English always the sound of slaughter and conquest. —bell hooks

It’s interesting how the words “local” and “native” are slyly used to displace people on their very own home turf.  These words are almost never applied to real human beings—they’re applied to the strange, swarthy people whose babble you can’t understand, and whose culture obscures your spectacular view of the sun setting over the virgin terrain from the hotel.

This subtle subversion of common words—in mouths of the tourist, the explorer, the missionary, the invader—becomes the first slash of the conquering sickle.  A conqueror, after all, is only a foreigner, until he convinces himself and everyone else otherwise.

All this brooding was sparked by a good friend’s anecdote about being taken for a “local” in a photo from her recent journey to Panama, and the strange question of where to place her indignation over it.  It’s certainly not that you want to take the bait and grow outraged at being taken for one of “those people.”  It’s more that the vast cultural chasm between people raised continents apart doesn’t disappear when brown skin marks them both as “other” in the white Western gaze.

And I’m offering this closing quote not only because it is so nicely contrasted with hooks’ words at the opening of this post, but because I think it’s representative of a commonly held and dangerously arrogant assumption among Anglophone wordsmiths, one which I hope will become soon outdated.  Sometimes we who work with words can fall into believing it’s words themselves that we love.  But I think what we are in love with, enthralled by, and compelled toward, is what words carry, and how they have done it.   There are so many reasons why we just can’t afford not to explore languages other than our native ones.

English remains the most beautiful of languages. It will do anything. —Maya Angelou