This involves asking questions that may never have been asked, climbing heights that have never been climbed, dreaming that which has not been dreamed, daring our minds to soar, unfettered.
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An unceasing interrogation of the stories told to us by the schools now felt essential. It felt wrong not to ask why, and then to ask it again. I took these questions to my father, who very often refused to offer an answer, and instead referred me to more books. My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers - even the answers they themselves believed. I don’t know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined.
This being fierce with the reality of what is requires the bravery to ask of oneself three challenging and yet powerfully liberating questions:
- What am I not saying that needs to be said?
- What am I saying (in words or deeds) that’s not being heard?
- What’s being said that I’m not hearing?
It is also true in the case of domestic colonialism, like the Norwegian suppression of the language of Sami people, and variations of the same in other Scandinavian countries. The suppression of the languages of the dominated and the elevation of the language of conquest and domination were integral to the education system, which accompanied conquest and colonial occupation.
Language has always been a battlefield of ideas. It is a war zone in the struggle between enslavement and empowerment, between the dominated and the dominating, the colonized and the colonizing. The history of a language, Tom Paulin has written, is often a story of possession and dispossession, territorial struggle, and the establishment or imposition of a culture. Language has been as much the tool of conquest and resistance as the sword. Indeed some of the fiercest battles have been fought and continue to be fought in this zone.
In reality, I met a lean, dark-suited gentleman, whose height dwarfed mine. Was he going to talk about his prison days? Ask me about Kenyan politics? Or simply voice his dreams for a South Africa whose leadership he would soon assume? He didn’t ask about any of these things. He talked mostly about books: what African writers had meant to him and his fellow political prisoners, and how books had played a role in buoying their spirits. Books, books, and more books. I felt as if through me he was talking to all writers of the world.