iii Go back to where you came from

3 of a short series of 3

I am from there, I am from here,
but I am neither there nor here

Mahmoud Darwish

Adagio – to accompany reading

Three posts now in what has become, without quite intending it, a small series — arising, as I wrote last time, not from plan but from encounter. First, a walk, some birds, and the great Swedish botanist who spent his lifetime naming creation, only to have his own names taken from him in the end. Then a Bengali poet’s hollowed reed, and a Varanasi weaver who stubbornly refused to let the divine be housed in any one building or adequately named by any one name. Threading through all of it, three words that have become something like this series’ quiet motto: pay attention, name carefully, hold lightly.

This morning I want to sit with a different kind of naming. A harder kind.

The phrase ‘go back to where you came from’ has become one of the defining utterances of our political moment — shouted, tweeted, insinuated, increasingly legitimised — aimed at those deemed not to belong, not to fit, not to be truly ‘of’ whatever place they inhabit. It is meant as an exclusion. But language, examined carefully, has a habit of subverting those who wield it carelessly.

So. Where do we come from?

The word alien comes from the Latin alienus — ‘belonging to another’ — from alius, meaning simply ‘other.’ The strangeness, the menace, the otherness we load upon it came later, and from us. Barbarian — that ancient term of contempt — derives from the Greek barbaros, thought to be onomatopoeic: an imitation of how foreign speech sounded to Greek ears. Bar-bar-bar. Every language, to someone who doesn’t speak it, sounds like babbling. The barbarian is simply the one whose music you haven’t yet learned to hear – the one who unwittingly holds up the mirrored reflection of your own ignorance and parochialism to you. Pagan and heathen were, originally, purely geographic: the paganus was the villager the new faith hadn’t yet reached; the heathen was the one who lived on the heath. Neither began as a moral judgment. Both became weapons.

And then there is treasonous — a word much in circulation just now. It comes from the Latin tradere, ‘to hand over, to pass on.’ And tradere also gives us the word tradition. Treason and tradition share the same root. To betray and to pass on a heritage: linguistically, etymologically twinned. Worth pausing over, I think, in a moment when the word is thrown so freely at those who question inherited arrangements.

Hannah Arendt — herself a stateless refugee, herself someone else’s alien — wrote of what she called thoughtlessness: not stupidity, but the failure to pause, to think, to consider the world from any perspective other than one’s own immediate position. It was thoughtlessness, she argued — not demonic evil, not unique depravity — that enabled ordinary people to participate in extraordinary harm. Those who processed the categories. Applied the labels. People who had simply stopped asking what their words actually meant.

Toni Morrison put it more precisely: oppressive language, she said, does not merely represent violence. It is violence. The naming is not neutral. When we say alien, foreigner, of another faith, go back to where you came from, we are not merely describing. We are doing something to another human being. We are making them less, in the only place it has to happen first: in the mind and the mouth of the one who speaks.

Martin Buber — whose I and Thou has haunted a lifetime of contemplation, and continues to haunt this series — saw this as the fundamental failure, spiritual and ethical at once: the reduction of the Thou to an It. To meet another as a Thou is to encounter them in their irreducible particularity — this person, this life, this story, this adamah-made, stardust-formed creature. To name them ‘alien’ or ‘illegal’ or ‘of another faith’ is to convert them into an It: a category, a problem, a statistic.

The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish — less well known in these islands than he deserves to be — spent his life writing from the experience of perpetual displacement, perpetually named as other, perpetually told he did not belong. He wrote: I am from there, I am from here, but I am neither there nor here. Out of that dispossession he made some of the most luminous poetry of the twentieth century. Which is what humans sometimes do with the stones thrown at them: they build something else entirely.

I began this series with adamah — the Hebrew ground, the earth from which the human is formed. We are, every one of us, earthlings. Made of the same dark, generative stuff. The sciences now confirm what the mystics always intuited: trace the human family back far enough, and every line leads to the same small family, on the same continent, beneath the same vast sky. If we were to follow the instruction go back to where you came from with sufficient rigour — with genuine etymological seriousness — we would all arrive at the same address. Dust. The same adamah. The same earth. The same stardust, if you want to go far enough back.

Which I always do.

The Universe doesn’t dwarf the Wren. It includes it. And if it includes Troglodytes troglodytes — the tiny cave-dweller, singing its outsized heart out in a Cumbrian hedgerow — then it includes the one who crosses the sea in a small boat, the one whose prayers sound to unlistening ears like bar-bar-bar, the one who loves differently, the one who has been told, one way or another, their whole life long, that they do not quite belong.

Pay attention. Name carefully. Hold lightly.

The cantus firmus endures. ALL the songs continue.

.

The Universe includes the Wren
Thou emptiest again
Go back to where you came from

The Continuing Road – a Postscript

.

archive – a list of all earlier posts

HOME

.