Always it’s language that intrigues me, but this time, I want to explore, not the magic of how we craft language to achieve all kinds of wonderful effects, but a completely different phenomenon: how language crafts us. We don’t always realize how profoundly our native language shapes our sense of the world, but it can become amazingly clear when we compare languages. The most recent example I came across brought me to tears, those tears you get when an obscuring veil has been rent and you’re staring at and through a gaping hole directly at what’s real. It happened when I listened to Robin Kimmerer reading from Braiding Sweetgrass. She describes her desire to learn the Ojibwe language and reverse the cultural genocide that comes with annihilating a people’s language, but she finds herself inundated with verbs—70% in Ojibwe compared to 30% in English. Verb after verb, and each one with multiple forms and conjugations. To be a hill, to be a sandy stretch of beach, to be a bay… When she got to the verb to be a Saturday, she finally gave up. All these verbs just didn’t make sense. A bay, for instance, “is most definitely a person, place, or thing—a noun and not a verb.”
“And then I swear I heard the zap of synapses firing. An electric current sizzled down my arm and through my finger, and practically scorched the page where that one word lay. In that moment I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore and hear it sift onto the sand. A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive… This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us.”
Everything is alive, everything is animate, everything is in flux. It is not a collection of static objects, defined by nouns. This vision of vibrant life is my reality (and everyone’s on some level, I believe), and when Kimmerer evokes it, I find my own deeply held belief and vision confirmed. I feel exquisite relief mixed with pain because what her words accomplish is a kind of reversal of the effect of noun-heavy English on my brain, the painful stripping away of illusion and the revelation of a more beautiful world. The grief comes with realizing how this world has been obscured, even effaced…
And yet Kimmerer has achieved the reversal using the English language. She has crafted this noun-heavy idiom to evoke a native way of seeing. All of the languages brought to these shores by immigrants are to be cherished, she says. At the same time, if we are “to become native to this place, if we are to survive here, and our neighbors too, our work is to learn to speak the grammar of animacy, so that we might truly be at home.”
In the end, that brings me back to my favorite topic, because no matter what language we’re working with or how it shapes our world through its inherent structure and biases, this is always our job as creative writers—to play with language, to craft and recraft our sentences so as to enliven our connection with what is real. As readers and writers, we are nourished by the words that make our world new again, that inspire us with a fresh love for creation. Kimmerer uses the English tongue to show us the path of Skywoman, first mother and ancestor of all peoples, who was actually an immigrant and who, having fallen from the Sky, was embraced by the world into which she fell, and embraced it in return.
“She fell like a maple seed, pirouetting on an autumn breeze. A column of light streamed from a hole in the Skyworld, marking her path where only darkness had been before. It took her a long time to fall…”
With this opening, Kimmerer dramatizes her intention—to see us fall into the luminous flux that is creation. It’s a process that takes time and patience, relying as it does on the cultivation of ongoing reciprocity. Braiding Sweetgrass is made of English, but its words have been carefully chosen and tenderly arranged to entwine us, strand by strand, with the natural world. Ultimately, it is we who are being crafted, the shape that delineates us as human beings redefined—so we may become native like Skywoman and create for ourselves a home.