Upon Arrival
Aliens! Non-Linear Language! Philosophical musings on the promise & terror of the past & the future
I will be at the Caper Bookshop in Oxford next Tuesday, July 2nd talking about Mother Tongue Tied with the wonderful Cate Hamilton. Please come and ask me questions & get a book signed. I will bring stickers and, if my children do not eat them all, book cookies (biscuits)! Details for tickets at the link! Hope to see you there and thank you for all the love & support so far.
I rewatched the 2016 Denis Villeneuve film Arrival a few weeks ago. It was not intentional, it just popped up on my screen while I was scrolling through mindless watching options. The movie stars Amy Adams as Louise Banks, a linguist (but also referred to as a translator1), who is hired by the U.S. government to figure out how to communicate with aliens who have landed on earth. It is a beautiful movie that does not feel sci-fi but rather, sort of drama with a hint of action (army! helicopters! explosion!). Ultimately it is about language, love, life, loss and communication. The aliens add the sci-fi element obviously but even then, they feel less extraterrestrial and more a means to show how vulnerable and often ignorant human beings really are. And that theme song! Oh that haunting song, Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” that keeps playing over and over again in the film. AsVox writer Alissa Wilkinson noted, it is the saddest song in the world so beware if you’re like me and melancholic movie soundtracks break you.
The movie is also about motherhood as we learn early on Banks has (or will…) suffer(ed) the loss of a daughter. The has or will is another one of the movie’s main themes: how we perceive time in a linear manner when perhaps the past, present and future are all happening at the same time. Initially, we think Banks is having flashbacks to times with her baby daughter, then playing with her preschooler and finally, being there when her young teen is sick and dies. But as the movie goes on, it becomes clear memories are premonitions. As Banks begins to decipher the aliens’ non-linear language, she begins to figure out what she thinks has already happened is in fact yet to come.
In a half-hearted attempt to throw some linguistics jargon into the film, the movie briefly tackles the controversial and much-disputed Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or whether language shapes our human reality. I have written about this before as have many other linguists but the idea that we are different, that we experience life differently because of our language is dangerous territory. It is othering and amplifying rifts, separation and differences. It is similar to the idea of untranslatable words. Just because a language does not have one single word to identify a feeling or experience does not mean users of that language do not feel or live that same experience. Do our lives and contexts influence our language and vice versa? Of course. But that is not the same as language altering our reality.
The idea of non-linear language and in turn, time and the way we communicate about and around it offers such a beautiful perspective, something other films tackle as well. How does the way we use language change when we think and communicate about life events if we are no longer sure where one thing begins and another one ends? But more importantly, if we know the future holds unimaginable pain, sadness and loss, would we live our lives in the same way to still have the beautiful moments before the sorrow? For me, the answer to this also involves hindsight and the notion that time heals. In a moment of great sadness or pain, it is much harder to see the future free of that pain and a past where you can imagine reliving the moments of despair.
It was only after I finished the movie this time, I realized the last section of Mother Tongue Tied is called Arrivals. It has nothing to do with the movie as it wasn’t on my mind while I was writing the book and the last time I saw it was in 2016. My Arrivals refers to a quote by French philosopher Jacques Derrida from Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin:
As if there were only arrivals [arrivées], and therefore only events without arrival. From these sole ‘arrivals,’ and from these arrivals alone, desire springs forth.
When I was writing MTT and included the quote as a footnote, I couldn’t stop thinking of the idea of arrivals without departures. I wanted to end the book on a note about how we can get somewhere, arrive without necessarily departing. I am not saying this is in fact possible but in the sense of letting go of a fear of expectation, the fear of leaving something behind or the fear of losing something that may never actually be lost in the context of raising multilingual children, or perhaps in the context of anything in life. If we focused more on the arrivals than the departures, one forward movement at a time without looking back at what may be left behind, would life be a little bit easier?
I picked up Derrida’s book again while writing this newsletter and flipped through the marked pages. It was not until the last page I found something that reminded me of Arrival, the movie:
Beyond memory and time lost… A desire without horizon, for that is its luck or its condition. And a promise that no longer expects what it waits for: there where, striving for what is given to come, I finally know how not to have to distinguish any longer between promise and terror.
Arrival is based on a 1998 short story, "Story of Your Life," by Ted Chiang that also explores the idea around free will. If we know the future and it cannot be changed, where does that leave us in terms of having, or thinking we have, free will over our lives? And yet this knowledge or the acceptance that things are out of our control can also make us live differently not to change anything but to experience what is to come perhaps in a different way. And in turn we may communicate differently. This is where Derrida’s idea of no longer having to distinguish between promise and terror comes in: the promise and terror of what we consider the future is in many ways indistinguishable. You cannot have one without the other.
Thank you for reading.
As other writers pointed out when the movie first came out, at the beginning Louise Banks is recruited to “translate” the alien language because she is one of the top “translators” in the world. Linguists are not translators because these are separate professions. Some linguists speak multiple languages and may, to some degree be able to translate, but translation is a specific skill that requires a lot more than most people think. Linguists are also not necessarily polyglots meaning they do not always speak more than one language and multilingualism certainly is not a prerequisite for linguistics. I also loved how some articles about the movie called Banks a “professional linguist” or a “linguistics expert”. I love the idea of an “amateur linguist”!