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language: English
country: USA
year: 1984
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
series: Native Tongue, #1
dates read: 1.2.24-4.2.24
holy shit. Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue is an incredible exploration of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a response to both the reinvigorated capitalism and the Christian right of the 1980s, and a searing critique of patriarchy, in the form of a careful look at the ideological work necessary at every moment to sustain men’s material power over women. it is about the possibility of constructing another world, not someday, when we’re ready but here and now, with the tools we have available to us, even if they appear “unfinished”.
it begins from the premise: what if the Christian right of the 1980s accomplished all of their political objectives and the result were not the single-minded theocracy of Atwood’s Gilead but rather a still essentially secular, capitalist society, where patriarchal power is justified first and foremost in scientific terms. the setting is the late 22nd and early 23rd centuries, where contact with aliens is mediated through thirteen families of hereditary Linguists who are raised from birth to serve as interpreters between human languages and an ever-increasing range of alien languages. capitalism’s insatiable desire for new markets and new raw materials is expanding faster than the Linguists can keep up with, something I assume will be dealt with more in the following books. the Linguists are, because of their economic necessity and perceived power, regarded with intense suspicion (at best) or open hatred (at worst).
the novel follows several characters associated with Chornyak House, the traditional leaders of the “Lines” (the Linguist families): Thomas, the head of the House; Nazareth, his daughter, perhaps the most talented linguist of her generation; and Michaela Landry, a non-Linguist woman who has dedicated herself to killing all Linguists. intertwined with these are snapshots of an as-yet-unsuccessful government program to try to find an alternative to the Linguists.
the women of the Lines are, slowly and painstakingly, working on a project to change the world, beginning with their smaller social world, by creating a language for women — Láadan, Elgin’s own conlang. this is one of the major flaws(?) of the novel, that it is so focused on language as the site of women’s oppression. one of the reasons I think the book was so interesting, though, is that Elgin explicitly regarded the novel as a way of testing the hypothesis that language in a patriarchal society was fundamentally unsuited to women’s expressive needs and that a new language could be a better tool for women’s empowerment. in a 2007 interview, she said:
Native Tongue was a thought experiment, with a time limit of ten years. My hypothesis was that if I constructed a language designed specifically to provide a more adequate mechanism for expressing women’s perceptions, women would (a) embrace it and begin using it, or (b) embrace the idea but not the language, say “Elgin, you’ve got it all wrong!” and construct some other “women’s language” to replace it. The ten years went by, and neither of those things happened; Láadan got very little attention, even though SF3 actually published its grammar and dictionary and I published a cassette tape to go with it. Not once did any feminist magazine (or women’s magazine) ask me about the language or write a story about it.
The Klingon language, which is as “masculine” as you could possibly get, has had a tremendous impact on popular culture—there’s an institute, there’s a journal, there were bestselling grammars and cassettes, et cetera, et cetera; nothing like that happened with Láadan. My hypothesis therefore was proved invalid, and the conclusion I draw from that is that in fact women (by which I mean women who are literate in English, French, German, and Spanish, the languages in which Native Tongue appeared) do not find human languages inadequate for communication.
how fascinating to describe your novel in this way — to see it not only as an experiment but as a failed experiment.
its other flaw is the inattention to race, which is especially striking in the context of developments both in feminist circles and in US politics broadly in the 1980s. as far as I can remember it’s never mentioned once, even when there is an explicitly African character. it seems deeply implausible that the political developments the novel portrays would lead to a “post-racial” society; I’m hoping perhaps this will be dealt with in the later books, but I’m not holding my breath.
in spite of this, perhaps paradoxically, the two novels I would be most inclined to pair this with are Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand — which is also reflecting on the catastrophes of the early 1980s — and Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, because I think it could be productive to read the almost-racialization of the orogenes together with the ways the Linguists and anti-Linguist prejudice are presented in Native Tongue, as also almost-racialized.
this book was extremely good and I would highly recommend it. I’m going to be looking forward to the next two.
moods: challenging, dark, hopeful, reflective