Small Strokes

Borders are difficult things to manage; they are not real in the sense that this computer or this desk is real – they are not tangible.  When two groups meet, however, an inevitable border is formed, and when cultures clash, this border, or contact zone as Pratt labels it, can feel more real than any tangible item.  According to Pratt, contact zones are “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in the contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (251-252).  It is in these contact zones, where language is highly charged and people are emotionally and culturally bound to discussions that syntax matters, and very often words take on many meanings depending on who is using them and to what end.  Blauner describes this issue in regards to the word “racism”:

The question then becomes what to do about these multiple and confusing meanings of racism and their extraordinary personal and political charge.  I would begin by honoring both the black and white readings of the term.  Such an attitude might help facilitate the interracial dialogue so badly needed and yet so rare today. (309)

In Blauner’s example, the word “racism” becomes intensely confusing as well as a source of contention because of its many definitions.  In a situation where words are so confusing and emotionally charged in so many different ways, discussion is impossible; arguments erupt because of misunderstandings.

I have been thinking about this quite a bit, and I cannot think of one “border situation” in which the definition of a word has not been in question.  Debates between races, cultures, men and women, women and women (as is the case with my Installment Paper), gays and homophobics, and the list goes on.  It seems, more often than not, that the “othered” group must take on the language of the dominant group in order to be heard at all.  Such is the case in Rita Dove’s poem, “Arrow,” when she writes “When the moment came I raised my had,/phrased my question as I had to: sardonic,/eminently civil my condemnation/phrased in the language of fathers…” (lines 25-28).  In order to question the man lecturing about poetry in which women are invisible, the speaker must adopt his language.  Her question is “sardonic,” yes, but “civil” and phrased in the language of men, as it has to be.  The lecturer’s answer comes as “it had to” (line 30), as well, and he speaks of celebrating differences and the “virility of ethnicity” (line 32).  It’s almost as if this man took on language that was not his own, language he thought was hers, in order to appease her.

As we see with the women at the end of the poem – angry about the lecture and subsequent response – such discussion is rarely, if ever, helpful in negotiating borders and contact zones.  Using the language of the other group is either an act of conceding or condescension.  We in academia like to talk about language and syntax and borders and culture, but I think it will take a real-world discussion about the barriers that language creates – even (and especially) between people who speak the same language – to come to common definitions and then, finally, have productive conversations.

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