*“Your silence will not protect you.” – Audre Lorde
Language in War: A Shield and a Weapon
A couple of months ago, I took my children to “Ricochets”, the Francis Alÿs exhibit at the Barbican Centre in London. The exhibit was part of a larger body of work spanning decades about children’s games and notions of play around the world. Throughout the space, video screens showed different games children play in different countries and languages, some familiar, some specific to the environment.
In “Parol” (2023) filmed in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine, three boys dressed in military fatigues complete with wooden guns playfully, but in full character, stop cars driving by in search of Russian spies. (The Ukrainian drivers play along with the boys in the video.) After checking IDs and inspecting trunks, the boys ask the drivers to pronounce the Ukrainian word for bread, Palyanitsya, something non-Ukrainian speakers (note: Russians nearby), cannot pronounce in the same way a fluent speaker of Ukrainian would (I am not saying “right” or “correctly” here because we need to move away from notions around what is wrong/right in pronunciation but in this context, obviously it matters). Yes, an ode to the biblical shibboleth.
I was reminded of the video recently while at a seminar about language policy in Ukraine and how more than a means to communicate, Ukrainian belongs to an “existential category”. All languages are markers of belonging in some way but for many Ukrainians, especially since the Russian invasion and because of a long history of linguicide, Ukrainian is much more:
“If there is no language, there is no nation.”
– Kateryna Skyba on language policy in Ukraine at the British Association for Applied Linguistics conference
“If there is no language, there is no nation.”
Language is emotional but it is also political. Families now living abroad since and because of the invasion are trying to keep Ukrainian alive with their children, an immense pressure already for every caregiver and any language. But for Ukrainian, there is an added and unimaginable burden of knowing that keeping the Ukrainian language alive for the next generation is vital for the survival of an entire country. In Ukraine and for speakers of Ukrainian far from home, language is both a weapon and a unifying factor.
Gag Orders & Silence Enablers
On a recent long-haul flight, I watched two journalism-themed movies back-to-back, Spotlight and She Said. It was my first time watching the latter and the second or third watching Spotlight. Both films are about investigative reporting for newspapers, the Boston Globe and the New York Times respectively, and teams of reporters who are searching for the truth about horrendous acts of violence and abuse amid lies, cover-ups and decades of silence. I never worked in a daily newspaper newsroom, but I did work for many magazines where I had the pleasure and freedom of working on long-form stories for weeks at a time. It is one of the best parts of journalism and of course vital in uncovering crimes, injustices and bringing important topics to the public. Sadly, there are so few resources for journalists to do this type of work anymore.
Spotlight came out in 2015, She Said, based on the 2019 book of the same name, was released in 2022. The Boston Globe journalists uncovered the sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests and the church in Boston, while the NYT’s Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey exposed the countless sexual crimes of Harvey Weinstein. In both films, the reporters come up against gag orders, or settlement cases that involved non-disclosure agreements where victims of crimes cannot speak about what happened after settling, often out of court.
Settlements and NDAs are often complex and no one knows what the victims have gone through so this is not about their silence as much as it is about the silence of others, those who enable predators and abusers: in Spotlight almost everyone in the Catholic Church in Boston and even around the country knew about the abuse; in She Said, it was most of Hollywood. As one character in She Said notes, it is (always) a much bigger story than one man.
Sadly, as I write this, the Mohamed Al Fayed case of abuse at Harrods continues to unfold. Al Fayed died last year but as this article notes about the decades-long abuse, there was “a whole system to facilitate this”.
Thank you for reading.