Transparency & Unveiling

On Kate, chemotherapy, conferences, Annie Ernaux & especially, doing & bringing the work

By Caitlin Oriel via Unsplash.

Hello old and new readers. As always, thank you for being here. After a summer break, I have been starting a “return” newsletter for two weeks now. But everything I write seems, for a lack of a better word for this linguist, blah. I wanted to write about the linguistics conference I attended earlier this month, a “summer camp for linguists” as my friend and colleague H described it. Although the conference was great and inspiring live, my eyes glazed over writing about it in detail. (I will still share some highlights as it really was great!)

I was also going to write about justification, excuse and explanation or, interrelated speech acts while exploring that mid 20^th-century excuse about having to wash your hair in the evening instead of going out. (I think a lot about hair, hair loss and the act of washing my hair these days but more on that also to come.) But that too felt like a cop out as I was hiding behind linguistics jargon!

I never for a second considered writing about Kate Middleton for this first fall newsletter but in the past week, I have heard myself defending her more times than I’d like or rather, not defending her but the video she released about completing chemotherapy. So, I will begin with Kate’s video but stay with me!

I have lived in the UK for the past 12 years, and have never attended a royal-type event. When asked why, mostly by Canadian friends back home, I could go on and on about the atrocities of colonialism and the monarchy’s figureheads who represent that colonialism, and the crowds obviously, but I often say the money spent on these events and these people should go to funding the NHS and hundreds of other more important causes. I rarely read about the monarchy and stopped watching The Crown after the first season!

But the video about Kate completing chemotherapy hit differently because I, a lowly commoner also spent the summer undergoing adjuvant chemotherapy for a breast cancer that was removed in the spring. Like Kate, I am in my forties and have young children and only completed active treatment a month ago. Since the video’s release, I have been reading a lot about what it means to other cancer patients and survivors and to people in general. The reactions are understandably varied and my own feelings are layered  and complex but what some of the analysis and criticism misses is something that in my opinion is pivotal if you are offering an opinion on this video: what chemotherapy does to a person, to a body, to a mind – commoner or royal. This is not the end of Kate’s cancer treatment, it is the end of one part of it and the effects of chemotherapy last for a very long time, if not forever in some cases.

The best description of chemotherapy I have ever read is in Anne Boyer’s Pulitzer-prize winning book, The Undying:

“Someone once said that choosing chemotherapy is like choosing to jump off a building when someone is holding a gun to your head. You jump out of fear of death, or at least a fear of the painful and ugly version of death that is cancer, or you jump from a desire to live, even if that life will be for the rest of its duration a painful one.”

And this, also by Boyer:

“My body feels like it is dying as a side effect of what is promised to keep it alive, and requests, as its preservation, its destruction…”

And if that is not enough, Boyer describes the language of chemo, or rather how chemo and chemo fog affects some people cognitively and linguistically this way, especially mothers, in one of the many passages in her book that took my breath away:

“Vocabularies re-form into awkward translations of words we once knew or new words we never will. Children who were once taught to speak by their mothers now stare at their sick mothers, who are gesturing like babies learning to talk, unable to recall the word for ‘television’ or the word for ‘cup.”

In case it needs to be said, chemotherapy saves lives and when you are faced with impossible choices, you do what you have to do.

In some of the analysis of the Kate video, the cancer and the therapy are afterthoughts as if they are not the only things a person who has just weeks ago completed their active treatment, does not think about 24/7. And even after the last infusion, there is so much more to face. Publicity videos by public figures will always be analyzed, discussed, critiqued and they should be because they are part of a bigger narrative. The monarchy should be held accountable in every possible way for a history of violence, murder and greed, that is never in question. But in this case, if you note Kate’s womanhood or her femininity in the video or mention how the moments of her and Will touching and kissing are off-brand, or perhaps on-brand to tell the world the marriage is fine, you also need to acknowledge what chemotherapy does to a person’s femininity, womanhood, to intimacy, to partnership, to motherhood while yes, of course noting the immense white woman power and privilege Kate has compared to everyone else. Chemotherapy changes everything, at least for a while and that too needs to be part of the conversation and analysis and how that plays into this narrative, this performance, this power. And if you are lucky not to know, ask.

By Atul Pandey via Unsplash.

But back to that linguistics summer camp, a happy place with new friends, stimulating conversation, coffee breaks and cookies. One of the conference’s keynote speakers was the amazing Uju Anya whose keynote was titled, “Applied Linguistics for Social Justice: Critical Perspectives on Language Teaching, Research, and Civic Engagement”. A couple of years ago, Anya, the daughter of colonial subjects who survived the genocide in Nigeria in the 1960s, shared her family’s experience of colonialism after she tweeted about the Queen’s death and received horrendous backlash.

At the conference, Anya began her talk with examples of accent discrimination, something I write about at length in Mother Tongue Tied. As I and many linguists say over and over again, there is no way to speak without an accent and accents are just as much part of the listener and the person perceiving the accent as they are part of the person speaking or communicating. Or, as Anya noted, “Accents are jointly created with those perceiving them.” There is a famous study in linguistics where people listened to a dialogue and were shown either a photo of a white woman or an Asian woman and told this was the person speaking. In each instance, it was the same recording, just different photos. What do you think happened? Did the listeners hear an accent when they were shown one photo as opposed to another?  

Anya also reminded all of us linguists in the auditorium that we need to mobilize, to bring the work to the people that will benefit the most. It lit the fire under me to continue pushing MTT into the world and the messages around linguistic inequality and multilingualism. And it also reminded me of why I read so many books this summer about illness, cancer and grief. I wanted and needed to find comfort in someone else’s words perhaps to put into perspective my own experience, or simply to feel less alone.

The New Yorker published an essay recently by Annie Ernaux titled, “On Cancer and Desire”. Ernaux writes, in true Ernaux fashion, about her experience with chemotherapy after a breast cancer diagnosis in her 60s:

“For months, my body was a theatre of violent operations.”

“To say ‘I’ve got chemo tomorrow’ became as natural as it had been the year before to say ‘I’ve got a hair appointment.’”

But it was the passage below that has stayed with me since reading the article. Here, she writes about the invisibility of breast cancer in our societies and the need to reveal, unveil, make transparent that pain and the suffering:

“In the waiting room for Radiotherapy at the Pontoise clinic, I kept seeing an issue of Madame Figaro whose cover featured a bare-breasted girl in a thin voile dress. Written in big letters were the words “DARE TRANSPARENCY!” In France, more than a million women have had or currently suffer from breast cancer. More than a million breasts stitched, scanned, marked with red-and-blue drawings, irradiated, reconstructed, hidden under blouses and T-shirts, invisible. Indeed we must dare to show them one day. (Writing about mine is part of this unveiling.) ”

The same can be said of all the brutalities, the violence in any form against people and their bodies, the atrocities and the suffering in the world that have happened and continue to occur daily. Here is to a fall and beyond of more transparency, unveiling (dévoilement) and bringing the work to the people who need it most.

As always, I would love to hear what you think. Thank you for reading.