Native Tongue (50 page)

rathóo:
non-guest, someone who comes to visit knowing perfectly well that they are intruding and causing difficulty

raweshalh:
non-gestalt, a collection of parts with no relationship other than coincidence, a perverse choice of items to call a set; especially when used as “evidence”

sháadehul:
growth through transcendence, either of a person, a non-human, or thing (for example, an organization, or a city, or a sect)

wohosheni:
a word meaning the opposite of alienation; to feel joined to, part of someone or something without reservations or barriers

wonewith:
to be socially dyslexic; uncomprehending of the social signals of others

zhaláad:
the act of relinquishing a cherished/comforting/familiar illusion or frame of perception

A First Dictionary and Grammar of Láadan
is published by the Society for the Furtherance and Study of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Inc. For further information send SASE to Láadan, P.O. Box 1137, Huntsville, AR 72740-1137.

Afterword

Encoding a Woman’s Language

Native Tongue
(1984) inaugurates Suzette Haden Elgin’s powerful trilogy about the invention of a female language. As the first volume of this trilogy,
Native Tongue
introduces us to the patriarchal culture of a future Earth, where a small number of linguistically skilled women are banding together to fight their second-class status by secretly creating a women’s language. The sequel,
The Judas Rose
(1987), follows the story of that language, Láadan, as it evolves from the private creation of a very few women to a shared language that subversively links women worldwide, and then as it is discovered by the patriarchal church and state it was created to oppose. The concluding book in the trilogy,
Earthsong
(1994), turns from the question of a gender-based language to the broader question of alternate and gender-linked forms of nourishment, as women try to spread the news of another way of feeding the world, aurally rather than orally.

Central to this trilogy, as to most of the science fiction of Suzette Haden Elgin, are two interrelated convictions: “The first hypothesis is that language is our best and most powerful resource for bringing about social change; the second is that science fiction is our best and most powerful resource for trying out social changes before we make them, to find out what their consequences might be” (Elgin, “Linguistics”). Elgin’s definition of feminism can be gleaned from the type of social change she is most interested in making: the eradication of patriarchy and its replacement with “a society and culture that can be sustained without violence” (Elgin, “Feminist” 46). The belief that “patriarchy requires violence in the same way that human beings require oxygen” links the Native Tongue trilogy to Elgin’s bestselling non fiction book,
The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense
: both are concerned with feminist linguistic interventions,
the production and/or teaching of “gentle” linguistic strategies to counter, and thus change, verbal violence (Elgin, “Feminist” 46).

Fifteen years after it was first published, and despite a number of years out of print,
Native Tongue
retains a cult following and remains an important contribution to the canon of feminist science fiction as well as to feminist debates about the significance of language. Its importance is far more than academic, although it also serves as a historical document highlighting the particular concerns of feminism in the early 1980s. With all of the changes feminism has wrought in American society,
Native Tongue
and its sequels remain exciting for the sense of expanded social possibilities they embody.

The themes of the Native Tongue books have been woven throughout Suzette Haden Elgin’s life and work. She received her Ph.D. in linguistics, with a focus on the Navajo language, from the University of California at San Diego in 1973, at the age of thirty-seven. Earlier degrees were in French, English, and music, all of which came into play in her later teaching. Elgin taught at San Diego State University until she retired in 1980, at which time she began the Ozark Center for Language Studies near Huntsville, Arkansas. She is the founder and president of
LOVINGKINDNESS
, a nonprofit organization that investigates religious language and its effect on individuals, as well as the editor and publisher of
Linguistics and Science Fiction
, a bimonthly newsletter interested in language issues in genre fiction. She writes prolifically in a variety of forms, including fiction, poetry, and essays, and she now draws prolifically as well. Her best-known work, however, is the popular series of books that begins with
The Gentle Art of Verbal Self- Defense
, which teaches readers how to identify and defuse verbally violent or combative situations.
¹

Elgin’s most basic tenet is that language is power: “If speaking a language were like brain surgery, learned only after many long years of difficult study and practiced only by a handful of remarkable individuals at great expense, we would view it with similar respect and awe. But because almost every human being knows and uses one or more languages, we have let that miracle be trivialized into ‘only talk’” (Elgin,
Language Imperative
239). Overlooked because it is so inherent, language may in fact be “our only real high technology” (Elgin, “Washing Utopian” 45). It is certainly our most prominent social technology, the primary way human beings manipulate the material world (De Lauretis 3). Yet our very familiarity with language leads to its undervaluation. How can something as everyday as talk shape reality?

Elgin subscribes to a widely discussed but highly controversial theory that in linguistics is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
²
This
hypothesis claims that languages “structure and constrain human perceptions of reality in significant and interesting ways” (Elgin,
Language Imperative
xvi). Based on a study of American Indian languages, this hypothesis proposed that languages vary dramatically and in ways not easily anticipated, and that such variations encode dramatically different understandings of reality, so that people speaking different languages actually see the world in widely divergent ways (Bothamley 473). How we perceive the world depends upon our linguistic structures in both the words we choose and the larger metaphors they encode. These structures, for example, powerfully affect our understandings of gender. Assumptions about gender roles are everywhere encoded in our language, particularly in our habit of binary thinking, through which the paired terms
male/female
become associated with other pairs:
active/passive, strong/weak, right/left
, and so on. The work of feminist anthropologist Emily Martin provides an excellent example of this idea. In “The Egg and the Sperm,” Martin examines the metaphors used by gynecology and obstetrics textbooks to describe female reproductive processes. Dominant social assumptions about gender roles, she discovers, color the books’ scientific descriptions of conception: the egg is represented as waiting passively for the sperm to compete for the privilege of entering it. Linguistic structures for representing gender lead researchers to focus on characteristics that accord with their conceptual presuppositions. Thus, a passive egg/active sperm model prevails over another model, which might involve a “sticky” egg capturing sperm (1–18).

According to the Sapir-Whorf line of thinking, language structures our perceptions not only through word choice, but through metaphors and metaphor systems, with benefits, limitations, and concrete consequences. For example, as Elgin points out in
The Language Imperative
, the language we use to talk about menopause influences how we experience it. The description of menopause as “a natural event” will produce one set of effects; with this model, a woman going through menopause is likely to interpret any negative experiences as annoyances (minor or major) rather than medicalizing them. However, if menopause is described as “a medical condition characterized by a lack of estrogen,” the menopausal woman is more likely to interpret her experiences in terms of pathology, leading to medical intervention as well as increased concern on the part of the woman, her family, and her friends. This
linguistic
shift has an effect on the woman’s material reality (75–80). It is important to point out that there is no way out of this dilemma produced by the linguistic construction of reality. Because the language we use has developed alongside human history, we are inevitably embroiled in these issues. While no form of speech
is inherently better than another, the effects of different speech acts are often very different, and Elgin encourages us to judge speech on that basis. Summarized briefly, Elgin’s linguistic position has powerful feminist implications: The language we use to describe and operate in the world affects the way we understand the world, our place in it, and our interactions with one another. Changing our language changes our world.

This idea is not unique to Elgin, nor to linguistics. Other feminist thinkers have also addressed the ways that language shapes our perceptions. French feminist philosophers Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray have both considered how language reinforces existing gender relations. Cixous argues that the subordinate position of women has its foundation in the Western habit of thinking in dual, hierarchized oppositions. Holding that the logical and linear structures of modern Western languages reproduce the values and prejudices of patriarchy, Luce Irigaray further claims that women need our own language if we are to free ourselves from domination. This idea that language matters in the day-to-day existence of humans thus brings together a variety of different disciplines and links different feminist projects. This idea is also not unique to feminist theory; it has been addressed by such philosophers as Ferdinand Saussure, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.

It also has far-reaching social and political implications. Elgin wrote what she has called the “thought experiment” of the Native Tongue books in order to test four hypotheses:

1) that the weak form of the linguistic relativity hypothesis is true [that human languages structure human perceptions in significant ways]; 2) that Gödel’s Theorem applies to language, so that there are changes you could not introduce into a language without destroying it and languages you could not introduce into a culture without destroying it;
³
3) that change in language brings about social change, rather than the contrary; and 4) that if women were offered a women’s language one of two things would happen—they would welcome and nurture it, or it would at minimum motivate them to replace it with a better women’s language of their own construction. (“Láadan”)

Elgin admits that the experiment did not produce the desired outcome: the fourth hypothesis was proven false when her constructed women’s language, Láadan, failed to be taken up in any meaningful way. But the broader questions she raises, concerning gender, language, and power, continue to resonate.

•

Should we be surprised to find these urgent feminist concerns addressed in a work of science fiction? That has been the initial response of some feminists. For example, when Carolyn Heilbrun reviewed
Native Tongue
in 1987 for the
Women’s Review of Books
, she described herself as “a non-reader of science fiction” (17). Despite her self-confessed “resistance to SF (not that I dislike it, but that I can never figure out what’s going on),” Heilbrun gave
Native Tongue
a glowing review: “There isn’t a phony or romantic moment here,” she observed, “and the story is absolutely compelling” (17). It is worth asking why science fiction has been anathema to many feminists, and worth offering a quick list of the reasons science fiction
deserves
a feminist audience. Feminist distaste for science fiction must be more than simply a response to its relatively low status as “genre fiction,” since other forms of genre fiction, from the detective novel to the romance, have their staunch feminist adherents. Responding to the historic linkages between science and its traditional values—especially masculinist objective rationality—feminist readers and critics have challenged science as a method of inquiry about the world. They have tended to avoid scientific issues, themes, plots, and images, focusing instead on the crucial projects of reclaiming forgotten women writers, questioning the gendered nature of the literary canon, and imagining alternative forms for literary expression (Squier 132–158).

“Toys for boys”: all too often, this phrase has seemed to accurately sum up the science fiction genre. But precisely because science and science fiction have seemed the rightful terrain of men at their most macho, feminists should give the genre their renewed attention, revitalizing its form and its content. The issue is, as Elgin has taught us, linguistic at its core. Until we abolish the culturally enforced hierarchical relations between science and the humanities that maintain literature as an insignificant, invisible, and feminized part of our culture in relation to significant, visible, masculinized science, we haven’t made the large-scale linguistic transformation that Elgin herself calls for. We are still representing the world by gendered binary pairs (male/female; science/literature), and ceding to males the science half of the two-culture divide.
Science
, in short, is as open to feminist redefinition as any of the other words in our lexicon. Rather than abandoning it, we simply need to encode it anew and reclaim it as one of our native tongues.

The scientific study of alien species, a classic science fiction focus on the future, and a feminist preoccupation with the science of linguistics connect science fiction and feminism in the three
interrelated narratives that compose
Native Tongue
. The primary story follows the development of the woman-language Láadan by the women of the Linguist Lines, especially the protagonist, Nazareth Chornyak Adiness. A parallel story line traces the U.S. government’s secret attempts to break the linguistic monopoly of the Lines by successfully learning, or “Interfacing” with, a non-humanoid alien language. A third narrative strand follows Michaela, a non-linguist, as she attempts to avenge her infant, who was killed in a state experiment to break the language monopoly; instead she finds surprising commonality with the linguist women. While these three narratives do not always connect smoothly, taken together they explore the constructive power of language, the origin of gendered oppression, and the material and social commonalities between women.