When you consider the trading history of the area, it is no small wonder that Macau was the site for development of this local patois. The Chinese were sending huge exploration fleets out to explore India, Africa and the Spice Islands well before the Portuguese ships ventured around the Cape of Good Hope, which was first sighted by Bartolomeu Dias in 1488. Chinese maritime activity was at its zenith during the period between 1400-1450 and fleets much larger than the forthcoming Portuguese ones sailed as far west as Mogadishu in East Africa, to Calicut and Goa in India and to the Spice Islands of Bantam and Moluccas. By the time the Portuguese arrived in Macau in the 16th Century, the locals were well-versed in the concept of exploration and intercultural language, this perhaps partly explains the success of the colony and the development of the Macanese dialect.

When you wander the streets of Macau now, the evidence of this conglomerate of cultures is clearly evident. Streets that are paved with Portuguese-style tiles are adorned with Chinese temples and the stunning ruins of early Jesuit churches. In one day’s worth of dining, you can cross cultures with an Asian breakfast buffet, a lunch of Portuguese soup and enjoy a dinner of mixed origins such as the traditional Macanese-style feijoada, which has replaced chorizo with Chinese and blood sausage.

Macau sits low down on the wide and impressive Pearl River Delta and was an ideal trading post for the Portuguese visitors. The Chinese eventually saw the benefits of the arrival of the Portuguese, renting Macau to Portugal in 1557. The Portuguese embarked on a building program; docks and trading facilities were soon accompanied by buildings to accommodate the settlers’ needs, such as churches and schools. Macau (also known as Macao) remained under Chinese control but was administered by the Portuguese until 1887, when it was declared a colony of Portugal. This arrangement was ended in 1999 when Macau was handed back to the Chinese government, but stipulations of high autonomy until 2049 remain to protect the unique nature of this settlement.

Despite the existing presence of traders from other countries, it was the Portuguese who left the strongest genetic footprint upon Macau which, was one of the first European colonies where inter racial marriages were commonly experienced. Macau’s genetic mix is not limited to local Chinese and colonising Portuguese, but also includes elements from Malay, Japanese and Filipino visitors. Another strong influence on the development of the Macanese language in the colony was the declaration in 1576 by the Catholic Church of Macau as a diocese. This enabled church funds and support to be sent into the area, which led to a rush of cathedral building alongside growing influences over education and science. The first Bible printed in Chinese was printed in Macau, but the fact that the Macanese language was never officially taught in schools has helped with its more recent demise.

As the demographics of Macau changed, the Macanese patois developed and thrived as a lingua franca between different ethnic groups. With strong elements of Portuguese and Cantonese, the dialect also contains suggestions of different Indian languages as well as smatterings from other European and Asian tongues. Called ‘Patua’ by the locals, Macanese has both ancient and modern forms. It is a reflection on the importance of Macau as a trading post that Patua had such far-reaching influence. It wasn’t just spoken amongst Macau’s Eurasian population, but also in Hong Kong and other trading posts. Macanese was very much seen as an anti-establishment reaction to Portuguese authority, and there is even evidence of its use in humorous sketches of the time.

Despite attempts by some to revive the Macanese Patua, it is now a dying language and was classified by UNESCO as ‘critically endangered’ in 2009. There is still a handful of original and fluent Macanese speakers in both Macau and overseas, but these are mainly members of the older population. Macau’s modern status as a Chinese gambling capital has not done anything to improve this situation.

Macau Skyline in 2015

Patua’s proponents struggle on with their mission to revive this lost language, and its culture of satire is continued with the writing and performance each year of a Patua play. You are unlikely to hear spoken Macanese as a visitor to Macau, but if you do, listen out for such lovely language gems as ‘beefy’ to represent an English person, ‘babachai’ for baby and the beautiful ‘saiang’, which means ‘longing’ – something that the Macanese people probably do for their lost culture.

There are still those who wish to see Patua thrive, but its demise appears to be inevitable as the population who use it ages.

Photo Credits

Bartolomeu Dias Wikimedia Creative Commons

“Plan de la Ville et du Port de Macao,” Jacques Nicholas Bellin (1764) Courtesy of Luna

Macau’s skyline in 2015 – Wikimedia Creative Commons

Guest Author Bio
Mike Virtanen

Mike Virtanen is working in the gaming industry as an online marketing specialist. He spends most of his free-time reading about history.

The Good Shepherd

I don’t often write poetry these days. I did as an adolescent, and during two periods in my adult life when I was prey to overwhelming and conflicting emotions. At times like that, the emotional dimension changes the whole structure of my experience, and linear prose seems woefully inadequate to describe what I want to express.

I am also  painter, and there is a similar phenomenon in the visual arts I produce. During periods of emotional stability, I paint what someone categorized as “creative non-fiction” —  landscapes that highlight what I choose as the object of focus, but without extensive manipulation. During periods of emotional upheaval, I paint elaborate, seemingly chaotic, surrealistic pieces, full of metaphor and unexpected connections. This takes the two-dimensional space, upon which I am skilled at creating the illusion of a third dimension, and adds a time element by linking it metaphorically with other works of art.

Painting in the Celtic Style, 1982

For the past seven months I have been studying Old English, the language spoken in Britain between 500 and 1066 AD, the language of Beowulf. This involves, among other things, trying to decipher and understand poetry in a language structurally very different from modern English, from a very different culture, intended to be delivered orally and for the most part transmitted orally. In other words, pretty much all of the assumptions are different.

I had as my stated goal becoming proficient enough in Old English that I could write passable texts in the language for the Society for Creative Anachronism. I’m not there yet. Yesterday I found myself wanting to write a piece synthesizing a cluster of observations that are related in my mind, and which are a source of personal inspiration. I have tried, and failed, to digest them into a piece of linear English prose that convinces anyone. I imagined myself expressing them in Old English poetry, to a person living in 1000 AD, and fancied (although this is probably wishful thinking) that he would have a better grasp of my message than a modern academic audience. 

My central idea involves a resonance between the years 535, 1315 and 1815 created by stupendous volcanic eruptions that cause abrupt global cooling, massive mortality and disruption of human activity, followed, after a significant time lag, by reorganization according to new principles. I wanted to look at the pattern, and its ramifications, from the perspectives of 535, 1315, 1815 and 2015.

The complexity of this framework defies linear organization. Trying to fit an exposition into an academic mold would result in a tome of unwieldy proportions, unlikely to be consulted, whose interrelated pieces were too far removed from each other to interact in the mind of the reader. To some extent that difficulty can be overcome by having the piece in electronic format and using a search engine, but search engines are extremely literal and fail to uncover metaphors. When I use a search engine, I only find what I am looking for. When I allow my human brain to range over the same texts, I see things I wasn’t looking for, some potentially of great significance.  

I resorted to poetry. I took as my point of entry the Old English poem Deor in which a bard who has lost his place relates a series of historical and mythical reversals of fortune, with the refrain Þæs ofereode,þisses swa mæg (That passed, this may well also). Using this refrain for each of the stanzas of my poem established a connection to the sentiment, not only as it might be construed in 2015, but also as it might have been construed circa 1000 AD. Repetition of words, imagery, meter, rhyme and alliteration creates resonance between the stanzas, integrating the hole, and also resonance with other pieces of poetry known to the listener or reader.

The other two literary/artistic pieces I specifically incorporated were the mosaics in San Vitale in Ravenna, in process in 535 AD , and Dante’s Paradiso, written around 1315 in Ravenna. I interpret Canto XXVII to contain a description of the atmospheric effects accompanying the 1315 eruption. 

The final stanza of my poem came as a complete surprise to me — I had planned to end the poem with

What poet now
In some virtual Ravenna
Or Florence by the Western sea
Gazing skyward, prophesies
Famine, war, pestilence
Another cycle grinding painfully
To new beginnings?         2015
Þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg!

But that became the penultimate verse, and rather than leaving the image of impeding doom as the capstone, I added an image from near-death experiences and made the poem more hopeful, if not for this world, for the next.

There is no man, who having tasted death
However briefly
Does not know Heaven.
Why then do we cower under darkened skies?
Þæs ofereode,þisses swa mæg!

Did the unconventional creative process generate this result, or did it somehow come from outside? Ultimately, does it matter?

Image Credits

Image #1: The Good Shepherd, mosaic in Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna. Wikipedia. Public domain.

Image #2: Original Celtic-style painting, by Martha Sherwood, 1982. All rights reserved.

The Rosetta Stone

Not that long ago deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics was proving to be extremely difficult, if not impossible. It seemed to be a challenge of epic proportions. Then along came a fellow, Pierre-François Bouchard, of the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt in 1799, who spotted a stone with three different types of writing: ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic script, and Ancient Greek. He was intrigued enough to save the stone, so it was removed from its site near Rashid (Rosetta), becoming French property. A very short time later, in 1801, British troops defeated the French in Egypt, so the stone became British property. It was transported to London and has been on public display at the British Museum since 1802. It turns out that the Rosetta Stone, a big chunk of black rock, inscribed with a decree issued in three languages in 196 BC on behalf of King Ptolemy V is the key to unlocking the meaning of the hieroglyphics.

Fast-forward almost two hundred years from that first public showing in London and you’ll find me in the British Museum standing beside the stone and having a gut reaction. The kind I always get when I happen across ancient artefacts. There is only a red velvet rope between me and the stone. I reach out and touch it. Its black surface is cool and hard beneath my hand and I feel my heart rate increase and my breathing pick up as I run my fingers across the 1800-year-old writing. The world moves on around me as if something amazing hasn’t just happened. I am time traveling.

My daughter looks at me and looks at the stone and is indifferent and unaffected. She hasn’t heard of the Rosetta Stone; it means nothing to her. Even so, I make her touch it and tell her that perhaps one day she will be grateful that I made her do so. One day it will be behind glass to protect it from the same kinds of hands which shaped it.

The other day as I stood staring out across the waters of the Atlantic I thought about this feeling I get when I wander through the ruins of the Acropolis, or run my hands over the bricks in the Coliseum, or walk along the paths beside Hadrian’s Wall. We are here for such a brief time. Yet we can still be connected across such great voids. Over the years I’ve found that my reaction isn’t restricted to only those things which have been touched by human hands. I feel the same when I see a great chasm cut into the earth over the millennia by the fast flowing waters of a river. Or hoodoos carved inch by inch  with just the movement of air. Or lava fields, hardened and seemingly permanent, waiting only for the elements to transform it into something new.

The amazing part is that long after mankind becomes dust, this world will still be here. New life and possibly new civilizations will appear and disappear before this blue planet itself turns to dust. But even then I know that there will still be some part of me floating on the universal winds until once again the whole thing starts again. And perhaps one day, someone on a brand new world will place her hands on a stone and touch history and we will time-travel together.

Image Credit

“The Rosetta Stone,” by Christopher Chan. www.flickr.com. Some rights reserved.

Then I heard a call. Shifting my eyes, suddenly all I saw was crow – a very large one, perched atop a tree across the street.

I forgot my class for a little while.

The sun had fallen behind the houses, and there was a slight, cool wind: just enough to make the skin shiver.

I found myself standing still. The crow was also still and, occasionally, very loud. Almost too loud to be viewed as just another bird in a tree making noise.

It sat on the edge of a thin reed of wood, now silent, now squawking. In its silence, I heard my students’ discussion vocabulary, struggling to string together sentences in a second language, as the crow and I took in the world together.

One last time, the sound of that crow cawing rattled its way through my body, reminding me to pay attention to my life just as it is. And as crow talk went silent again, I noticed the student talking had quieted down, and the writing had almost stopped.

I turned and saw one of the women in my class. She asked me a question, and I responded.

During that time, the crow disappeared. But its words – and silence – are here with me now.

Photo Credit:

The Crow by Baban Shyam via Flickr Creative Commons. Some rights reserved.

Universal communication as envisioned by the Golden Age myth can either involve everyone literally speaking the same language, or everyone being able to understand a communication no matter what language is used to express it. The most usual interpretation of the Pentecost story is that the Apostles were speaking in some unknown language, gifted to them by the Holy Spirit, which was intelligible to people from the farthest corners of the Roman Empire. However, the enumerated gifts of the Holy Spirit also include interpreting tongues, so it is possible to view the scene as a gift of the Spirit, enabling people of diverse backgrounds in the audience to understand a sermon given in the Galilean dialect of Aramaic.

Efforts to establish a world language historically have concentrated on establishing a normative language and teaching people to speak it, either alongside or to the exclusion of what was traditionally spoken in the home. The administratively imposed use of Latin in the Western Roman Empire and in Medieval Europe, Greek in the Eastern Roman Empire, Arabic for liturgical purposes under Islam even to the present day, and English in the British Empire (including the US) represent top-down, politically imposed linguistic conformity which has at times broken down the communication barrier, at least between the ruling classes.

Examples of attempts to create a universal language by synthesis and voluntary association are rarer and tend to be more local. Historically, trade associations of tribal groups have led to the spontaneous emergence of composite, creolized languages like Swahili and Chinook. Esperanto, a modern synthetic Indo-European language, has some limited applications, and Bahasa Indonesia, a synthetic Malay-Polynesian language, was successfully introduced as the public and official language of 200 million people due to its being taught as an obligate subject in primary schools.

Twenty years ago I attempted to learn Bahasa Indonesia, but never got to the point where I could communicate with an individual who spoke only that language. I speak three foreign languages with reasonable fluency and read another six languages well enough that texts are accessible, but Indonesian is one of hundreds of world languages, some of them spoken by tens of millions of people, that were completely unavailable to me unless someone had translated them or I had the means to pay someone to translate a document.

All that has changed dramatically with the introduction of computerized translation software. As long as I have a document in electronic format, in a widely-spoken modern language, I can run it through a translation program to produce intelligible text in English. Translation programs are constantly being improved. I have noticed, for example, that they have gotten considerably better at recognizing grammatical forms in Russian that have no English equivalent and rendering them in a way that is less confusing and clumsy. We are at the point where the long email from a friend in Indonesia and the scholarly paper on Avicenna in Turkish will communicate to me a close approximation of what the writer intended, without much more effort on my part than would be required to read an email and a scholarly paper from Great Britain.

We have, in effect, a universal world language. It’s English, and Turkish, and Russian, and Bahasa Indonesia, and a host of other languages connected through translation software. Including minor languages like Chuchki and Guarani would require a major programming effort, but it would only need to be done once.

While writing this article I received an email which illustrated the point about universal communication quite nicely. It came from an Internet discussion group devoted to historic knitting techniques and responded to a query about hinged knitting needles. The writer pointed out that there was a recent Chinese patent for hinged knitting needles and directed us to a website containing the electronically translated text of the patent itself. That text:

”The utility model discloses a knitting needle constituted by an upper hinge, an upper needle body, a middle needle body, a lower needle body, and a lower hinge. The knitting needle is characterized in that the upper hinge is disposed on the middle needle body, the upper needle body is disposed on the upper hinge, the lower hinge is disposed on the middle needle body, and the lower needle body is disposed on the lower hinge; when in use, the upper needle body and the lower needle body can be expanded by using the upper hinge and the lower hinge, therefore the knitting can be realized. The knitting needle has advantages of simple design, low costs, and large practicality.”

It is awkward, but it is intelligible to a knitter. Considering the enormous differences in grammar and vocabulary between English and Chinese, it is quite remarkable that a machine produced a usable result. At present computerized translation programs are best at rendering factual material like patents and business communications, but they are constantly improving. Perhaps some day they will be able to handle literature and spiritual concepts, or perhaps, conversely, humans will decide that those texts that can only be faithfully rendered in the source language are specific to that culture, and require a living human being who is not only truly bilingual but uncommonly wise to translate at all.

Image Credit

“Pieter Bruegel the Elder – The Tower of Babel (Vienna)” Wikipedia.

I have posted photos that ridicule mistakes in signage and other print materials and I have joined with others who point and laugh at errors shared through social media, but recently I started to turn a corner.

Thanks to Stephen Fry’s reflection on language I recognized that suggesting my knowledge of grammar makes me a better person is an annoying and rather embarrassing habit. And you know what? It’s like shedding a whole layer of stress. I haven’t quite kicked the internal tic that manifests when I see “Your Invited” but even if I never do, learning to accept casual grammar errors feels a lot better.

The core of Fry’s rant is that there is a difference between how we write when it “matters” for resumes, manuscripts, or press releases versus how we compose casual interactions such as comments, status updates, tweets, and yes, even the average blog post. He suggests one can “wear what you like, linguistically,” when among friends. That simple image, comparing language to clothing, is what changed my mind.

He goes on to say that complaining about grammar, spelling and punctuation is a waste of time when the author’s meaning is clear. It is one thing to understand the different meaning of two similar words and quite another to publicly put someone down who either may not understand or who may have simply misspoken or mistyped. Fry repeatedly refers to these critics as pedants which is, not surprisingly, the perfect term. A pedant is someone who puts excessive emphasis on minor details, especially academic knowledge or formal rules. It is not a label I wish to wear.

So, when I see an email with the subject line “Your Invited” I will not reply-all “my invited what?” because the snark only serves to belittle the author. It’s petty and unkind, especially when accompanied by the public spanking of the reply-all. There are times when it is appropriate to correct or educate someone but humiliation is not particularly useful as a teaching tool.

I will not carry my red pen with me to make edits as I go, running roughshod over others’ work. There is a time and a place for editing, and it is generally better to be invited to do so before making corrections.

I am giving up my Grammar Queen crown, or at least putting it on a shelf in the cupboard where I won’t look at it every day. On the other hand, I’m still going to steer clear of YouTube comments; no point tempting the tiger.

Photo Credits

I tend to scribble a lot – by Nic McPhee on Flickr

Double Whammy – by Dauvit Alexander on Flickr

However, social networking is far from flawless, and that’s hardly a shocking statement. Cyber bullying, for example, punctuates the news with tragic stories of teenagers whose self-esteem was destroyed by people online or via text or email until, finally, the only way out they could see was a dark and final one.

Everything has sped up. We don’t need to write letters and wait a week for correspondence anymore; we can just “message” one another. Yet what this might have done is imposed a pressure on many people – particularly younger people who have become surrounded by the technology at their disposal – to feel, and believe, that they absolutely must be up to date with the whole malarkey. When my friends and I were in our mid-teens, things were different to how I see them now, and that schism in my views will grow wider and wider as I age, I suspect. Five years ago, it seemed natural to reply to texts instantaneously, almost as if summoned; to expect the same was almost a natural feeling, annealed in, and by, the culture, because wherever you looked at fifteen, everybody was texting.

One thing I’ve given some thought to regarding my past with the eye, now, of a third year English & Creative Writing student, is the way language has changed. Changed, perhaps, in an incorrigible way. Language has been desensitised in order to be continuous. When two teenagers are texting one another for five hours on a Saturday afternoon, and then decide to meet in a park to sit on swings and engage in that unavoidable passage of what being a teenager is, they are going to talk in person, aren’t they? The boy is swinging back and forth in a bid to fill the gaps in silence with his talented launching up and down of himself. When, through sheer nervousness, he doesn’t know what to say next for fear of sounding stupid, he doesn’t look at her, he just goes as high as he can. Why? Because we’re males!

Everything is a competition at some point. Our culture dictates that we prove our virility, even from an early age. And if that means being brave and swinging so high your bladder is close to exploding, then fine. So long as it amazes the girl, right? Is she impressed? Probably not. She doesn’t text you for five hours a day because you can make yourself look fearless and stupid at the same time. What worth a man who will be killed by stupid acts of feigned bravery within a week? She cares about what you have to say; she’s a human being like you.

After hours of texting about musical tastes, books, school rumours and how Teacher X is the worst teacher ever, what can still be said in person?

Desensitised superlatives. ‘Awesome’;’ amazing’; ‘unbelievable’. Have a think, you can probably name some more. They get thrown around like tennis balls these days. Nigh on everything has something awesome about it in modern culture, because if it is awesome, it is cool, and that means we should be discussing it. However, the more it is spoken about, the less of a revelation this awe is. You buy a new pair of trainers; are they awesome? In 2013, probably. You agree where you’re meeting your friend in an hour; is the discovery that two human beings have reached an agreement awesome? In 2013, most likely; however, when compared with, say the first aeroplane, or the creation of the light bulb, is a new pair of trainers equal ballast in terms of its “awe factor”?

What do large quantities of awe and amazement and indubitable factuality do to modern conversation? It seems possible that, with the ever-shifting social hierarchies we go through during childhood and high school, where the megalomaniacs wrestle control of friendship groups and the pupils with flesh and blood leadership skills slowly feel their way through, harnessing an empathy with those around them – with all of this, there needs to be the impressive factor. If something is awesome or amazing, no matter how often the word is regurgitated, it acts as a signifier; signifying a topic of discussion, perhaps. A signifier to the person who spoke the superlative, that they are the one speaking right now, give them your utmost attention…and respect. Self-esteem is a big part of who we are in life. When we are teenagers, desperately searching for ourselves, making fists in order to wade through the everyday “shit-happens” element of life to discover who we are, and what we believe in, it matters. An insult can be a hammer blow to the chest if a teenager isn’t in a sparring mood. They can be sent reeling backwards through voids of ridicule and social hilarity. Spinning slowly, tested by everybody’s derision, until, when they pick themselves up, they are nothing but threads.

One element of social networking that can create instances of tension is the frequent interaction that people can have with the life of an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend. When the relationship ends, has it now become more difficult to walk away, with social networks holding onto the last, shattered pieces of whatever remains between you and they? People, because of the internet and networking, probably know more about the little nuances of the everyday lives of others now. If you have an argument on a recorded network or via text, instead of in person, instead of using your voice, be prepared for it to jump up and bite you a day or a week later. Not necessarily because of what you said, but because everybody can see it.

In a time and culture where males and females mingle and bond, interaction is different. Especially in teenage years. At 14 or 15, when you discover your girlfriend or boyfriend talking to a potential challenger across some technological format, what can you do? The conversation is recorded, but it is not yours. You cannot just wander over and stamp your mark, you are helpless. So many people talk now, and can this breed within us a fear? A fear that, in our partner’s mind, our views, our opinions, fail to satisfy their social needs? Are we in a growing age of social paranoia and distrust?

Cue then, the adverbs. Forever, always, never. “We’ll be together forever”; “I’ll never leave you.” Hefty statements when promulgated by a 15 year old, no? These are words that, when gazing into the eyes of your loved one, or even staring at the open conversation window on a screen, reinforce intentions. They state your readiness for commitment. But why? Why, two weeks into a relationship in high school, is there this need? Might somebody feel pressured to throw around these superlatives, these irrefutable declarations of love in order to regain the attention of a partner who is already beginning to address others more and more than two weeks ago, when everything was perfect? When it was just you and they; when the world could have exploded around you both and you would have hardly noticed, so cocooned in love you both were. The bond you had forged in that first kiss, when dry lips touched but the sensation didn’t matter, it was still wonderful. What matters is the closeness – when this happens, nothing else matters. Why then, so young, still, have we found the orator and the rhetorician within us? For what do we make these speeches, standing on a mount with thunder at our backs, affirming that Never! will we allow the bond to be broken? Is it fear? Do we use these words (forever, always) to bait partners into a cage, where only we will share this wonderful set of feelings with them?

Could this prove counterproductive? For some people, always and never might be powerful hardenings of the chains of love (until that period of sadness before the words are spoken to the next lover, and the next); for other people, could these words be like wildfire to animals? Too sudden, too harsh, too present and palpable to be dealt with at that moment.

Language is powerful. Words can build us up, and they can break us down.

Photo Credit:

Texting (27 Jan 10) via Flickr Creative Commons

My recent article for Life As A Human was all about words. Yummy, fragile, crooked, blessed words. After I finished writing it I realized I hadn’t gotten words out of my system. I just had to say more about words.

Words spin me like a whirling dervish of clandestine epiphanies. They jig me when I’m on the road to Jag. Their honey slick venom drips through my veins and makes me crazy trying to put their fevered lushness onto paper in just the right order so the magic of their poison can infect people in the marrow of their being. They mend me when my soul has frayed and slap me when I lose my balance and fall against them, tumbling to a place I dread to see as me.

 Like today.

Heading home from an eager morning of bittersweet cappuccino and grocery shopping I felt a lyric pass through me as my bus and I arrived at our stop precisely at the same instant. Kismet (another auspicious word.) Two men unwound by life settled themselves at the back of the bus and shared with each other the greasy details of their $3 breakfast excursions. As a wildfire fanned by angry winds, I felt their conversation shift direction, a haze of distrust enshrouded me and battlement walls sprang up through their voices. They were talking about the man who shot all those people last week in Aurora, Colorado.

Do you think they’ll kill him?

The sooner the better.

Firing squad.

Like Gary Gilmore.

Do it quick, that’s what Gilmore said.

Think we should have the death penalty here in Canada?

Yep, an eye for an eye.

Do it quick. Could spend $100,000 feeding them for life.

Do it quick.

I sat and listened to the storm of their words. The calm surface of their killing voices drowned me in my own swell of anger and resentment. I felt the waves of my rage towards them pull me under in a riptide of intolerance. In the midst of the wrathful tempest rising in me I found a cove of refuge in metta, loving kindness. Offering a wish to the men and myself that we be well and happy, peaceful and at ease, that we may be free from suffering, I felt the mast of our sinking ship righted and a placid sense of care wash over us all.

Aurora. The Roman goddess of the dawn. Who would think such darkness could befall a place that holds such a namesake of light? Who would think such golden words as “love thy neighbour” could be cashed in for the tin dross of vengeance and hate? While my senses break open to beauty’s ethereal sonata I writhe in the pain of hate’s discordant dirge. Words can be messengers of emotions and thoughts, of poetry and proclamations of war. They touch us in the way they are spoken, in their place setting on a page, in the aftermath of actions taken in their name.

I still love words. Words like dishpan hands and kaleidoscopes. Rodeo and melancholy. Cheetah and stupendous. I love what they mean, the way they sound, the people who speak them and write them and tell us we are more than a scramble of letters and sentences. Our words tend to our hearts and the hearts of everyone and every thing that feels their effect. I hope my words can penetrate my own anger, my own lust, my own ignorance and find a still place of comfort and forgiveness for us all.

At the end of my earlier piece I included a video by spoken word artist, Kate Tempest, melding her luminous prose with that of Shakespeare’s, “The Tempest”. Watching it again today, my tears tipped their brink. Her words, her gentle, pointed, prophetic words speak to Aurora and the men on the bus and all the language of hate. Watch it, will you. Because the devils are here. 

Photo credits:

Aurora Borealis by Frederic Edwin Church [Public domain] – Wikimedia Commons

Originally published at suhuratdaysend.wordpress.com

I love words. Written words and spoken words. Words like hypnaogogic, gobsmacked, serendipity, and onomatopeia that lick my lips as they slip slide out of my mouth. Words in a sweet bowl of language as smooth and rich as the icing on a cake. As a child I hauled away as many books from the library as they would let me check out. My mother used to sit and read poems aloud to me and my sister as we sat rapt in the worlds of Longfellow and Poe, Browning and Dickinson, Kipling and Shelley. Words have long been my solitary confidantes, sentences my circle of friends, paragraphs my neighbourhood and books my embrace of humanity.

Hearing written words spoken stretches my senses to uncover an awakened wonder as to how a word is said and what else it could possibly mean. Studying Shakespeare in high school was a labour in strenuous elocution and brave commitment to learn what Will was really trying to tell us in his plays. Old English still taunts me, much like a miner knowing there is gold beneath the surface if only I can dig deep enough. I’ve witnessed those words take on exquisite meaning carried by the voices of such masters as Lawrence Olivier, Emma Thompson, Sir John Gielgud, Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh.

When I was in my 20’s I bought an LP of Dylan Thomas reading his short story, A Child’s Christmas in Wales. I remember sitting and staring in awe at the album cover, incredulous that someone as inconsequential as me could hold this visage of magic in her hands. The Holy Grail would not have elicited more fervor from my humbled soul. To hear the long dead author speaking his own words seemed nothing short of Lazarus stopping by for a cup of tea. For many years in the dark expectation of Christmas Eve I would listen to the rich patina of Thomas’ Welsh accent fill my living room as he shared with only me his remembrance of the ice edged fish freezing waves, Mrs. Prothoro’s garden and cats.

Words were reborn when I discovered Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam. It was an epiphany for me to hear in these new sparks of flint sharpened deliverance the way poetry could transcend meter and rhyme, race and reflection. My world opened to the unexpected directions words can take us if we’re willing to go along for the ride. Poets Alicia Keys, Gil Scott-Heron, Nikki Giovanni, Floetry, Shane Koyczan and so many others have shifted my vision of verse and beautiful, hard-wrought words.

Spoken word artists can shape shift words and sound to craft an experience beyond the letters and punctuation sleeping prone on a page.  Poetry readings are cool again. Storytelling festivals blossom across North America. One of my favourite performers is Britain’s Kate Tempest, a name that cries out to speak the words of The Bard. Her waif presence belies the depth and emotional well of her poems and the passion she brings to her work and the world. She rattles the cage of what we think we know of ourselves yet speaks to the most hidden qualities of our humanness through her the gift of her voice.

Check out Kate in her performance of a scene from “The Tempest” commissioned by The Royal Shakespeare Company. You’ll never hear Shakespeare quite the same way again.

 Credits:

Image: Diari by ariadna – morgueFile

“What we came after” performed by Kate Tempest as part of the RSC’s Sound and Fury project – Shakespeare meets modern wordplay.Originally commissioned for the egg, Theatre Royal Bath. Find our more about Kate at her website: katetempest.co.uk.

Hello, America! I’m waving at you from across that big wide pond. You’re so big and strange to me, yet uncannily familiar from films – sorry, movies –and television. You’re like a distant cousin. Younger and full of life, but with different threads of history and ancestry feeding into your known-unknown face.

I defend you. I defend you a lot. More than you’d be comfortable knowing about, I suspect. I’ve taught English in UK schools and prisons, and one of the things I am passionate about is the history of the English language. It reflects the mixed and mongrel history of the English peoples themselves, which is something the more right-wing members of our society need to remember. We have a wannabe-politician here who speaks of the “indigenous English,” which is a laughable concept. Anytime I hear someone say that, I am compelled to draw large and colourful – whoops, colourful – maps on walls which show the movement of Celts, Picts, Romans – who were from everywhere including North Africa–  Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Norse, Flemish, Franks, French and German.  Oh sorry, had you dropped off? But this is important stuff and it’s something that closed minds like to pretend isn’t true. And history doesn’t stop. That’s the other thing. I don’t speak like a 1940’s BBC announcer and I certainly don’t talk like Shakespeare. Gadzooks! My language – my accent, my intonation, my vocabulary – it’s different to my parents’ and a world away from the generations before. It’s evolving as it always has done. English has spiralled its sticky tendrils out across the world in wonderful ways.

You say tomato, I say tomato

And yet, time after time, I have to take students to task. Students who in one breath tell me it’s perfectly fine to hand in an essay written in txt, but that “Americans can’t spell” and “it’s our language.”  Sorry, spiky little student. English is not your language, nor my language, nor – I’m afraid – the Americans’ language. It’s everyone’s and no-one’s. It’s moulded and adapted by the mouths of anyone who chooses to use it. It runs alongside other languages. It merges in a patois, a sexy dance of vowels and words. It often, I am sad to say, stamps all over a smaller language and bullies them out of the house. It takes the words it wants, like dinner money, and leaves the beaten remnants in a scholar’s research paper.  It changes, it will continue to change, and that is a glorious thing. It doesn’t matter to me that your sidewalk is my pavement, my lift is your elevator. I understand you. I hope you understand me – though the relationship is a little one-sided. We get more of your influence than you get of us. Another harsh truth my students don’t like to hear, fed as we are on faded colonialism. The UK is a lot smaller than we’re happy admitting.

Communication is far more important than quibbles about spelling. Communication, dialogue, give and take and speech and listening – that should lead to understanding. I do believe that the words we choose to use reflect our inner state, and our relationships within society. And the words society uses can surreptitiously influence the people of that society. So let’s grab this flexible, evolving, changing language and make sure we put the right words into our own mouths. The words your children hear will be used by them, but with their own spin and emphasis. Give them a solid foundation of love and acceptance but don’t force them into the language of yesterday. Let the next generation build on words of peace and make a changed new future.

Photo Credit

“Statue of Liberty” – Creative Commons – Wikipedia

 “You say tomato, I say tomato.”  All rights reserved by jeffspot

 “So shall my word be.”  All rights reserved by GangaSunshine

Guest Author Bio

Autumn Barlow
Autumn Barlow is a writer and blogger in North West England. She cycles up hills, teaches English to speakers of other languages, and writes between cups of tea.

Blog / Website: http://autumnbarlow.wordpress.com