This was an introduction to the symposium on Antifascist Language in Multilingual Societies: Debating Ways Forward, April 23-24, 2020.
By Yuliya Komska
A year ago, inspired by the incredible work of poets, scholars, public thinkers, translators, language revitalization activists, and journalists—some of them are in attendance today and others couldn’t join us but are present spectrally in our words and thoughts—I started to plan a very different event from the one that we are having. It would have brought a much smaller physical community together on a budget not conducive to much international participation. That was before Covid19.
There’s little doubt that searching for silver linings in the horrors of the pandemic and its political and economic fallout is a dubious undertaking. But the paradox remains that, despite our original budget issues, despite the many closed borders and the foreseeably draconian immigration policies of the present and of the near future, we can hold this mind-bogglingly international gathering. Against so many odds and against so much bleakness, we can widen the increasingly more urgent conversations. We can dream of something better. We can care. And we can learn from each other. This seems incredible. Thank you all for joining us, and we look forward to your contributions today and tomorrow. In the next minutes, let me outline the rationale for our gathering, point to some resources on our website, and describe some procedural steps before we start the first conversation.
Like many of you, I’m guessing, I have spent the last few years being overwhelmed, enraged, and depressed by seeing language contorted far and wide as an overture to one crime or deplorable action or another. Sure, it is possible that the dehumanizing tropes, the antisemitic and racist slurs, the dog whistles, the euphemisms, and the hyperbole that we are exposed to almost daily may have not actually increased in quantity compared to before. But they have certainly increased in visibility and mobility, sprawling with lightning speed, aided by digital technologies. Synagogue and mosque shooters or Black church arsonists have deployed them in manifestos and on online platforms. Right-wing politicians, from Poland to Brazil, from the Philippines to the U.S., have made use of them, propagating them from the highest civic offices imaginable. Social media trolls and bots have disseminated “vermin talk” in multiple languages at once.
There was a brief moment of uncertainty about the future of such verbal violence (and its frequent translation into physical violence) as Covid19 began to move from one country to the next. Some commentators felt bold enough to envision its attrition and to look forward to a newfound unity against a common “enemy,” as some reports had it. Indeed, for a few weeks, support for the far-right parties plummeted in some countries. But these forecasts turned out to be rash and, frankly, naïve. Because in the same few weeks, “the fear of the virus,” as Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk puts it, “has brought about the atavistic conviction that there must be foreigners to blame, that it is they who introduce the threat.” The divisions between “us” and “them,” which the Right have stoked, persisted with or without them, crystallizing in language almost immediately.
In the US, the half-forgotten racist slurs resurfaced to be flung against Asian Americans, “openly and with … raw hate,” as writer and poet Kathy Park Hong wrote. In China, Black people became the primary targets of racist abuse. In India, the Muslim population was accused of planning a “Coronajihad” and worse. Seemingly everywhere, old antisemitic conspiracy theories reared their ugly heads. The tenacity of “us” versus “them” has revealed a darkness more mainstream and more entrenched than the political party affiliations let on. It has thrown into sharp relief what anthropologist Agnieszka Pasieka, echoing Hannah Arendt, describes as “the banality” of the far-right—that is, the far right’s reliance on and exploitation of the widely shared, not to say normative, social prejudices and “values.”
To many of us, these toxic verbal eruptions have rung a bell. They have called to mind fascist verbiage as it had been meticulously classified, described, and situated by such chroniclers as the German-Jewish Romance philologist Victor Klemperer and his less well-known contemporaries working in Nazi-era and postwar Germany.
For better or worse, the trusted formula for confronting this vocabulary—and it is worth noting that the focus has been on words almost exclusively—has also been familiar. It is three-pronged, instructing us to identify, avoid, and excise fascist diction. This same triad was relied upon by Klemperer and his peers. Courageous and important steps, no doubt, originally devised at a great personal risk. But how effective and, above all, how creative have they been—given that fascist diction has returned, time and again, in ever-changing but nevertheless recognizable guises? Time seems ripe for a reconsideration.
Unfortunately, the public conversations about the contributions of Klemperer and others have tended to hit pause on the fall of Hitler’s Germany in 1945. Most eulogies to Klemperer omit his postwar despair over the abidance of fascistoid diction in his new home country, East Germany, where his now famous exposé of Nazi language, “The Language of the Third Reich,” first appeared in 1947. True, Klemperer was ready to embrace the nascent East Germany’s humane ideals. But its realities—language, again, was an early litmus test—repelled him. Daily, he recorded the same pathos, the same militant metaphors, the same oxymorons that he had just witnessed under the Nazis, in stealth notes on a manuscript that he bitterly dubbed, “The Language of the Fourth Reich.”
Over in the West, political scientist, essayist, and philosopher Dolf Sternberger attempted to do his share by alphabetizing the Nazi language crimes in parallel to Klemperer. Yet as his 1945 compendium From the Dictionary of the Inhuman went through editions over the decades, he noticed few improvements. True, the “violent syntax,” “stilted grammar,” and “monstrous . . . vocabulary” of Nazi German may have crumbled, Sternberger noted with dismay in 1957, but “no pure and new, no modest and more agile, no friendlier language entity has emerged.” Nor was the crumbling even complete. He and his two coauthors had to add eight new entries, while only two had expired for lack of use. By 1967, exasperation got the better of him. “The evil is sprawling tenaciously,” he admitted of the Nazi language in postwar West Germany, “and it’s gradually becoming difficult to remain as hopeful as we had promised ten years ago.”
It is perhaps not coincidental that in the same year, the fledgling philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug surveyed forty ostensibly anti-fascist speeches delivered by prominent faculty and university administrators across West Germany. They contained swarms of Nazi verbiage, which got in the way of a new vernacular. Under the status quo, Haug diagnosed, there could only be one kind of language. He called it “the language of helpless anti-fascism.”
So, is “the language of helpless anti-fascism” all we got? Is the formula of identifying, avoiding, and excising fascist diction only an essential stepping stone rather than the final destination? More to the point, haven’t nationalist purists of various right-wing stripes traditionally availed themselves of similar tactics to detect and extirpate the “foreign” in any given language? Is the method part of the problem, is it the execution, or is it something else? These unsettling questions have prompted our symposium.
Perhaps the trouble is that by itself, fixation on verbal poison can overwhelm many of us with powerlessness or shock us into despondency. Waking up on most days, it can be difficult to see in language more than a pile of chores, perils, and liabilities. We easily forget that language can be a source of strength rather than weakness, that it can inspire and give joy rather than suffocate. If we primarily or exclusively register language as a sick body that clamors for perennial cures and surgeries, if the oft-invoked “power of words” looms as exhausting as it does lately, if we are language skeptics more than language lovers, why not just give up on it? Why not say, like critic George Steiner did in 1960, that “languages have great reserves of life. They can absorb masses of hysteria, illiteracy, and cheapness. … But there comes a breaking point” beyond which there is no recovery.
We cannot say that because despondency, which culminates in our manifest ability to conjure up an endless number of linguistic dystopias and our lack of capacity to fathom and nourish a single language-lush place or non-place (a utopia), is a sign of privilege. In 2018, philosopher Achille Mbembe poignantly lamented “the current atrophy of an utopian imagination,” which has allowed “apocalyptic imaginaries and narratives of cataclysmic disasters and unknown futures [to] colonis[e] the spirit of our time.” To continue in this vein would be a disservice to the many anticolonial activists, linguistic justice advocates, writers on-the-hyphen, and “language warriors,” as the fearless writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o put it, who for decades have defied despair, no matter the conditions of their life and work.
“There must be ways to organise the world with language. As hopeless as everything might appear, the simple arrangement of words can tame chaos,” the late Binyavanga Wainaina’s long-term friend and peer Pwaangulongii Dauod wrote just this February. A few months earlier, the Turkish-German writer Kübra Gümüsay refused to wallow in misery over not feeling embraced by the German language, specifically as a speaker of languages that remain systematically undervalued by the still-colonial multilingual hierarchies. “If this language, the German language, isn’t mine,” she wrote, “it’s also my fault. Instead of begging and pleading for a place it in, we must take this place ourselves.”
What are these words but an occasion to admit that we can prune away all dog whistles, slurs, and dehumanizing tropes—but still not know what good language does, to whom, or why? What are these words but a source of strength to admit that this is the trap we fall into whenever fascist language returns—and that it returns partly because we have no lasting, recognizable alternative to it, only some antidotes here and there?
What is antifascist language, then? Oddly, few seem to have asked this question in so many words, and even fewer seemed to have found answers, in the past or in the present.
Does antifascist language already exist, and is the problem mainly that we habitually overlook, underfund, underappreciate the people and the places who care for it? To put it differently, does our relentless denunciation of fascist language crimes unwittingly uphold a system where a single racist’s disgusting slur becomes known to more people than all the poets’ sincerest verses or, for that matter, the public work of the people who have spent years fighting dangerous speech? Or does antifascist language still have to be imagined, invented, braided together—and, if so, by whom, how, and with what means?
It is for this reason that our speakers and attendees today are not just scholars of fascism and antifascism, but also activists, historians, linguists, journalists, poets, writers, thinkers about technology, and, more than anything, users of language and languages. It is as users, rather than experts, that we need to show up, first and foremost.
Only in this capacity and only together can we start to understand this increasingly complicated jigsaw puzzle of over 6,000 pieces—what we call “language” is, in reality, many languages. Only together can we overcome the deficit of imagination that seems to have bedraggled the formula, “identify, avoid, excise.” Only together can we get over the risk aversion that, as David Gramling notes, characterizes most approaches to public language. This is the same risk aversion that has recently driven many Americans to find comfort in the stale safety of grammatical prescriptivism and “civility” and to forego the scary but exciting ambition to dream bigger.
Will we solve the puzzle of 6,000 piece today and tomorrow? Most certainly not. This symposium is, by and large, an invitation to all those present to share their thoughts, to build new connections for language care and maintenance, to reach across borders and non-academic/academic divides. Please take a look at our website, “Political Languages in Multilingual Societies,” and reach out if you would like to be a co-conspirator on an existing initiative or have your own one in mind. It seems fitting that linguist, activist, and dreamer Alison Phipps has recently used the word “co-conspirator” to describe the particular conviviality of “breathing together,” or cōnspīrāre, which all of us need to keep doing.
Phipps writes about a search that is very related to ours—the search for decolonizing multilingualism—in inspiring ways. Let me quote: “We aren’t going to get this right the first time. Or even the tenth time. It’s not something you can clean up theoretically or conceptually and have a correct methodological framework for developing. It’s going to be messy, it’s going to be like all human endeavor, it’s going to need some awkward practice, uneasy rehearsals, the development together of new scripts which we trace out from having made it up as we went along the journey with others.”
Perhaps one of the troubles that we face today is that antifascism historically did harness multilingualism. But, knee-deep in the misery of twentieth-century wars, it could not move past the early stage of awkward and messy practice. Jorge Marco and Maria Thomas’ pathbreaking research on the Spanish Civil War-era language policies of the International Brigades suggests that their commanders valued multilingualism as the antifascist movement’s best international calling card. Yet, confronted with the need to issue comprehensible orders to fighters from all across the world quickly, they had no time to act on their utopian dreams. Instead of a banner, multilingualism became a stumbling block, and monolingual or “Hispanicized” battalions began to be formed. And yet, while the bold dreams had to be put on hold, some micro-multilingualisms survived. Jewish fighters from across Eastern Europe could communicate amongst themselves in Yiddish. And an informal hybrid language emerged, to be carried back to the speakers’ homes later.
Despite the surfeit of martial metaphors in conversations about the pandemic, most of us are not at war. Even in the face of a depression, we have the wherewithal to be smarter, more deliberate, and more caring about the future of antifascist multilingualism. No, we do not have monopoly on multilingualism as such, and it is no wonder drug—the far right are multilingual, too—and so thinking about including more than a few languages and about promoting multilingualism in a way that’s informed by anticolonial and antifascist thinking is paramount.
It is, perhaps, a small act of historical justice that today’s gathering is generously supported by several programs and departments at Dartmouth College: first and foremost the Leslie Center for the Humanities, but also by the Departments of German Studies and Philosophy, the Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies, and the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences. Dartmouth was founded on Abenaki land to educate Indigenous students, and yet in the first 200 years of its existence, fewer than twenty of them benefitted. The College has sought to rectify this historical injustice over the past fifty years. And yet, the linguistic injustice has persisted, as Indigenous languages have not been recognized as equal to the languages we teach, and it is only now that this is beginning to change, all too slowly. This, too, is part of this symposium’s story.
In conclusion, let me draw on this quote from Arundhati Roy’s recent essay that many of you may have read: “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.” That is the spirit.