Polyglossia - 2021

Dear Reader, Welcome to the Cambridge University Languages and Culture Society’s annual magazine Polyglossia. It is the product of months of work from an incredibly talented authorial and editorial team, who deserve all my thanks!

For obvious reasons, the magazine’s international outlook felt more significant this year, with many of our writers exploring contemporary global issues, from the dominance of the English language to the contentious question of repatriating cultural artefacts. I had the privilege of speaking to Cambridge epidemiologist Ebele Mogo, . . who connected public health and language, a theme which is always prominent in Polyglossia. The consideration of language permeates much of the writing in this issue, creating articles which are delightfully difficult to categorise.

These include Suchir Salhan’s discussion of the Sanskrit grammarian Pānini, connecting his ancient observations . to modern linguistic theory, through to computer science, as well as Juliette Odolant’s investigation into whether a single Chinese character can really be to blame for the Sino-European conflict of the 19th century. This linguistic preoccupation extends to literature, with two fantastic literary musings in this issue, as well as original poetry and prose. The magazine also includes an article in French with a full translation by the author Sophie Clare, a small step towards the extensive multilingualism which Polyglossia could achieve, and which I hope future issues will continue to approach. A cross-cutting theme I have noted, in this magazine and from the events of the past year, is the strength of the link between the global stage and the lives of individuals, a notion perfectly illustrated by the personal essay The Language of Tea, by Henry Spencer, with whom we begin.

Marion Willingham Editor-in-Chief

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The Language of Tea A personal essay by Henry Spencer

T

he conversation starts after tea and Syrian sweets are served.

‘Hello!’

“!‫ ”أهال وسهال‬he greets me.

‘Hello.’

“.‫ ”أهال بك‬I respond, taking in a shallow, nervous breath.

‘How are you?’

“‫”كيف حالك؟‬, he asks after my health.

‘I’m well.’ (lit. ‘praise be to God’)

“‫الحمدهللا‬.” I give the traditional response.

Those first few moments of conversation when this language of music rolls off my tongue are exhilarating. The grammar and sounds of Arabic have made it one of my favourite languages. I feel the moments of solitude with my books finally transforming into real conversation.

I see a smile on Ali’s face. Of course, he has a few corrections: the ‘h’ should come from deeper in my throat and my intonation needs improvement, but he says I’m making progress. We’ve been meeting weekly for three months now, having been put in touch by a local refugee organization to provide Ali’s family support as they settle into life in Canada. I take a sip of shay—tea—made specially by Ali’s wife, Alal. This bitter red liquid sweetened with copious amounts of sugar has formed a backbone for our conversations, times of total immersion in Arabic language and culture.

As my turn speaking Arabic ends, Ali starts to practice his English.

We read from a bilingual book of classic Arabic stories I gave him. Ali knows many of the stories featuring the traditional Arab trickster, Juha, and explains some of the jokes to me with much hearty laughter. When the shay is finished, our conversation is interrupted, and my attention shifts to the little ones by their train set on the floor.

While the kids are playing, Ali scrolls through his Facebook feed.

There’s a memorial post for a family he knew who were killed by

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a car bomb in his hometown. His usual smile fades and he looks off into the distance. Alal returns with more shay; Ali speaks to her softly in Kurdish. There’s a strange mix of grief and nostalgia shared between them. They mourn their friends; they long to go back to the plains of Syrian Kurdistan.

Ali turns to me and speaks quickly, ignoring grammatical rules, but it doesn’t matter. Alal helps him with some words he doesn’t know as he tries to explain to me what it’s like to be a refugee. He speaks more openly and fluently than during our usual Sunday visits; his grammar is more accurate and his sentences flow without awkward pauses. In the four months he’s been in Canada, Ali has vastly improved since starting out with his rudimentary English. Even when he does stumble, the way he stares at me with his eyes squinting and gentle smile help break our language barrier.

What his limited vocabulary can’t express is made up for by the depth of the emotions he shows.

He pauses for a moment to take a sip of tea. It’s a moment to think and reflect, a physical ‘um’. There’s something about tea’s warm silkiness that calms the nerves and prepares the throat and mouth for more speaking as its sweetness lingers on the tongue.

Ali’s need to communicate his story reminds me of my elderly Chinese neighbour Hongmei who is isolated by a similar language barrier. In her living room, Hongmei pours Pu-erh from a little yixing clay teapot while we catch up after almost a year without meeting. She’s staying at her son’s house for a few months before she returns to China. As a native of Yunnan province, she has exquisite taste for Pu-erh. Our conversation pauses for a few seconds while the earthy chá steeps. I ask her how long she’s staying in Canada: ‘How long are you staying in Canada?’

“你在加拿大待多久?” “三个月。” Three months.

We talk about my recent school exchange to Shanghai. Even though I feel more confident speaking now, I still stumble to find the right word and struggle to fully understand Hongmei’s thick Yunnan accent. I tell her about the ‘tea lesson’ I had in Shanghai, which reminds her about a ‘tea tour’ she recently took around Yunnan, visiting different terroirs and factories. Her eyes grow with excitement as she tries to convey the experience. She wants to tell me all that she has learned, what it’s like trying the freshest leaves as well as the rare, aged tea guarded in mountain cellars.

Hongmei lifts the teapot and the chá pours into the ‘fair cup’ to ensure everyone’s tea tastes the same.

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This process is a part of a tradition called Gōngfu Chá, roughly translating as ‘tea with great skill’ with gōngfu related to English kung fu. Sometimes referred to as the ‘Chinese tea ceremony’, Gōngfu Chá differs greatly from the Japanese Chadō or ‘way of tea’. While certain aspects of the Chinese ceremony are ritualised, it places more emphasis on the practitioner’s use of their own skill to prepare the best tea at the same time as fostering a social space.

Any momentary lull in the conversation can be filled by discussion of the endless characteristics of every infusion of tea—its colour, smell, taste. Just as tea facilitates language through conversation, it also sparks the development of words. The complexity of the ritual necessitates a specificity of language. On Hongmei’s table sit several gàiwǎn, a type of a cup for brewing tea, a gōngdàobēi or ‘fair cup’, and a cháchǒng or ‘tea pet’—a funny looking clay animal that turns colour with hot water. There are words I only learned after many misunderstandings, lots of laughter, and of course the help of dictionaries.

Van Driem, G., (2019).

The Tale of Tea: A Comprehensive History of Tea from Prehistoric Times to the Present Day. Leiden: Brill.

Hongmei’s elaborate tea ceremony may seem like an ancient art, but it probably only dates from the eighteenth century near Fujian Province. As tea rapidly spread across the world with European expeditions into East Asia, Chinese tea underwent its own evolution. Even in its homeland, tea is not stagnant; like the water used to make it, tea is constantly flowing, changing with the times. A century before Gōngfu Chá emerged the Dutch began shipping tea to Morocco. Although the Moroccans may have not developed the same ritual of preparing tea, they did infuse it with their own fresh minty flavour, creating a distinct drink.

I’m sitting at my French teacher Farida’s dining room table and the kettle is screaming. She’s finishing picking mint leaves off a branch. I can smell their cool freshness a room away. As soon as she finishes, she turns the stove off and pours the water into the silver teapot, the whole time talking:

‘And your mother?

How’s she doing?’

‘Well, She’s a bit busy, but she’s doing well nonetheless.’

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« Et ta mère ? Comment va-t-elle ? » « Bien, elle est un peu occupée, mais elle va bien quand même. » She sets the teapot on the table and pours the pale yellow tea into the glass. Whenever I would come for my lesson, Farida used to ask if I wanted tea and, when I said yes, she’d offer me earl grey, English breakfast, licorice—her cupboard is full of an assortment of flavours. Eventually, she stopped asking and when I arrived the kettle would already be on, the mint sitting on the counter ready for making this delicate, crisp drink from her native Maghreb.

Tea is more than just a drink to calm my nerves during our speaking practice; it’s the very way I first met Farida. After a mutual friend put us in touch, Farida wanted to meet me before taking me on as a student. Naturally, we invited her over for tea. While English tea may not be referred to as a ceremony, it still has its rituals.

Unlike the Chinese tradition, the focus is not on the tea. Rather tea is an excuse to meet with people. Utterances of ‘let’s go for tea’ or ‘come over for tea’ are more about the coming together than the drink. It’s not surprising that across cultures tea is intertwined with conversation. Farida’s tea even weaves multiple varieties together; the North African flavours accompany spoken French in a Canadian apartment.

At the other end of the Mediterranean, Farida’s tea is in stark contrast to Alal’s, even in its denomination. The colloquial word for this type of tea, atay, differs from the standard shay. While shay relates to the Kurdish çay, and Hindi chaay, all stemming from the Chinese word that gives Mandarin chá, atay comes from a Dutch loanword which stems from the Hokkien tê. Maghrebi Arabic is not alone in using different forms of the Chinese word for different types of tea; English uses ‘tea’ for the general drink, while ‘chai’ is typically associated with a spiced Indian version.

This semantically rich Chinese word highlights how material and linguistic culture can both reveal and foster transnational connections.

Tea’s incredible journey across the world, however, has not only involved peaceful communication. Tea trade was made possible through European companies, such as the Dutch East India Company, which were engaged in the colonization of much of the region. Tea is also historically linked to the Opium Wars, which led to the weakening of Chinese power and the expansion of British hegemony into China. It even became a symbol of revolution with the Boston Tea Party. Modern tea production and trade is not without its own issues, including modern slavery and human trafficking. It’s hard to imagine that a drink that is used to bring people together has also been, and still is, the cause of much suffering. Tea highlights human connections, as demonstrated by the very fact that the favourite drink of the UK is also the favourite of China, Japan, and Morocco. The power to build friendships and share laughter, trigger wars and create peace — all in one small leaf.

Huxtable, A., (2018).

A Cuppa Reality: The Truth behind your Brew [online]. Available at: <https://www.sheffield. ac.uk/research/ forced-labour> [Accessed 19 March 2021]

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Communication & Misinformation in Public Health A conversation with Dr. Ebele Mogo Marion Willingham

E Walsh, L., (2020).

Found in Translation. [online]. Available at: <https://www.cam. ac.uk/stories/Translations-for-Africa> [Accessed 27 April 2021].

bele Mọgọ is a doctor of Public Health, a research associate at Cambridge, the Principal of the public health advisory practice ERIM Consulting, and Founder of the Engage Africa Foundation, which advocates for integrating health into development in light of the rise of chronic diseases on the African continent. I was made aware of her work when it was reported that she and a team of 30 volunteers had translated evidence-based coronavirus infographics from the World Health Organisation into 18 languages widely spoken in Africa, in a mere four weeks. The need for such an urgent project not only exposes stark inequalities in access to health information, but also reveals the importance of immaterial communications-based approaches in tackling health crises.

Curious about this intersection between language and health, I spoke to Ebele about the role of communications in public health and how they can be optimised to impact all strata of a population, which involves far more than simply translating them into multiple languages.

At the outset, Ebele is keen to distinguish public health from healthcare; the latter is concerned with curing existing ailments, while the former aims to prevent or manage diseases before they worsen to such an extent that expensive healthcare is necessary.

It is during this preventative stage that communications can be vitally important. Whilst public health has entered contemporary

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discourse in the context of a viral pandemic, much of Ebele’s work focuses on non-communicable diseases, which can often be prevented with lifestyle changes, such as improved diet and exercise regimes. A key objective in public health solutions is ‘shaping behaviours’ and ‘changing social norms’, whether these relate to jogging or face masks. According to Ebele, communications can help achieve this objective by changing people’s attitudes towards a health issue and equipping them with the necessary knowledge to implement behavioural changes.

Under the impression that public health communications are just statements of scientific fact, I ask Ebele what exactly goes into designing them. She explains that the barriers preventing a community from acting on health guidelines are numerous and varied, and a statement of fact alone cannot always prompt behavioural change. We take the importance of regular exercise as an example, considering that even if someone knows its benefits, they might not exercise as they don’t feel safe in their local area, or because they don’t know how to exercise effectively, or because they have negative cultural associations between weight loss interventions and the appearance of sickness. Communications on the same topic have to be framed differently for different sections of the community. Ebele describes a project she worked on in Canada, where exercise advice was being adapted to accommodate the specific needs of disabled children. Beyond the knowledge that exercise is an essential component of a healthy lifestyle, disabled children and their parents required a local directory of sports and fitness activities adapted to their needs. Designing public health communications involves first identifying which communities you are communicating with, and then asking ‘what does the population even think about this health issue we are trying to change?’

In an ideal world, we could get an accurate picture of the population and its various communities from detailed large-scale data, but Ebele notes that this is hard to come by, and even if it is available it might inadvertently exclude more isolated groups, such as settlements of displaced populations or migrants. Instead, Ebele emphasises the importance of ‘co-design’. This approach to designing public health solutions actively involves representatives of the community, such as local officials, religious leaders or key members of community groups, in the design process. This allows local representatives to identify the various groups making up the community, and to ascertain what the community itself thinks and needs. In Ebele’s own research at Cambridge, she collaborates with researchers and policy makers in Nigeria, Cameroon, South Africa and Kenya to design solutions to the negative health implications of living in urban centres. Co-design is also important in making sure communications reach all of the target population.

Non-communicable diseases are those which are not directly transmissible from one human to another. These include heart diseases, cancers, and autoimmune diseases.

Draper, C. et al., (2015).

‘Perceptions relating to body size, weight loss and weight-loss interventions in black South African women: A qualitative study.’ Public Health Nutrition, 1-9.

Mogo, E. et al., (2020).

‘Using a rapid review process to engage stakeholders, inform policy and set priorities for promoting physical activity and leisure participation for children with disabilities in British Columbia.’ Leisure/Loisir, 44:2, 225-253, DOI: 10.1080/14927713.202 0.1760121 Also known as ‘participatory design’.

Mogo, E. et al., (2020).

Shaping Research to Create More Social Impact (SSIR). [online].

Available at: <https:// ssir.org/articles/entry/ shaping_research_ to_create_more_social_impact?fbclid=IwAR0rFiv0hP9qH7ZxoKbyc5Q2aoV3ClJIdQh8Ox8dTAJ7sH3ww1b_0_

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mqko4> [Accessed 2 May 2021].

Scherer, L.D. et al., (2021). ‘Who is susceptible to online health misinformation? A test of four psychosocial hypotheses.’ Health Psychology, 40(4):274284.

SAGE, (2021). ‘Ethnic minority groups less likely to take COVID vaccine.’ Understanding Society. [online] Available at: <https://www. understandingsociety. ac.uk/2021/01/18/ ethnic-minority-groupsless-likely-to-take-covidvaccine> [Accessed 27 April 2021].

Donovan, J. et al., (2021). Mitigating Medical Misinformation: A Whole-of-Society Approach to countering spam, scams and hoaxes. [online] Available at: <https://mediamanipulation.org/research/ mitigating-medical-misinformation-whole-society-approach-counter ingspam-scams-and-hoaxes> [Accessed 27 April 2021]

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Community representatives can recommend which avenues will reach the most people, based on what language they speak, as well as on other barriers such as internet access or level of formal education. This is especially important, Ebele says, as ‘the least reachable people are the people who, oftentimes, are dying the most of certain illnesses.’

Beyond making sure your communications reach everybody, Ebele notes that the most effective communications ‘meet people where they are’, whether that means using their native language or dialect, appearing in the sources they use most regularly (such as popular TV channels or radio stations), or coming from figures who they trust. This question of trust leads us to a conversation about misinformation and ‘fake news’ surrounding health and medicine. I ask Ebele if misinformation is more likely to spread in communities with a lower level of trust in their healthcare system or government. She confirms this to be the case, and goes on to discuss how marginalised communities tend to have lower trust in medical authorities, leading misinformation to be more pervasive in these communities. Indeed, in the UK a study from ‘Understanding Society’ found that ethnic minority groups were significantly more hesitant to take a Covid-19 vaccine.

Ebele adds that this mistrust is often founded in legitimate concerns about historical medical misconduct. She mentions enslaved peoples who were operated on against their will, one example of a widespread and repeated problem. Ebele says that the maxim ‘trust the science’ fails to capture the historical basis many communities cite for not trusting the authorities wielding ‘the science’.

Unfortunately, the resulting mistrust has created a perfect atmosphere for dangerous misinformation to spread. On top of this, Ebele mentions that in a pandemic an additional global dimension emerges, shaped by international power dynamics, in which some countries are the ‘originators’ of solutions like vaccines and some the ‘recipients’, who have no involvement in design. She says ‘when you’re considered the other, I don’t think anybody would necessarily trust the thing that treats them that way.’

I ask if Ebele considers tackling misinformation when designing public health solutions. She replies that although the focus of public health communications is to release accurate health information, new research suggests that communications which actively engage with and address misinformation form the most effective approaches. Once more, working with the relevant communities is vital in discovering what people’s particular concerns are, and Ebele adds that analysis of social media platforms can be of use in finding out which false claims are spreading within a community.

By the end of our conversation, I completely understand why Ebele had to separate public health from healthcare or medicine: it seems to be more of a sociocultural exercise than a medical one, asking not ‘How do we cure this disease?’, but rather ‘Who makes up the population?’, ‘Which cultural, economic, educational, linguistic (etc.) barriers are affecting their health?’ and ‘How do we reach them?’. None of these questions are overtly scientific, and when I ask Ebele for her closing thoughts she focuses on ‘breaking out’ public health from traditional medical research.

She says that if public health were just about scientific evidence ‘everybody would be fit and healthy!’ but that the implementation of this evidence in real societies is a crucial next step. Ebele highlights ‘action-based research’, in which action and research occur simultaneously, and ‘transdisciplinary work’, in which experts from various fields collaborate on an investigation, as two innovative ways in which the field can make breakthroughs in this mission, as well as centring community figures, which has become a theme of our discussion. She concludes, ‘A lot of what I do, we already know what [scientifically] works, it’s not magic, but really the gaps are in getting this knowledge into action, and that’s why I put my work into this nexus of translating knowledge to action and innovation because there’s that huge gap.’ It is in this gap that Ebele believes that designing effective communications has a major role to play.

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tokyo moment Margaux Emmanuel I was standing on the platform of Akabane station.

Thank you for choosing the Saikyou line. “gaijin” they call me, 外人 foreigner, 外: outside human:人 far away dissected from my humanity, everything around me, far away the landscapes, flashing before me, taunting never truly within my grasp only a weary cigarette clutched

loosely between my fingers : only thing I can feel, holding me dying.

I see, my eyes

follow wheezing roads | twitching lights | hypodermic skyscrapers | a half-asleep salaryman sitting in front of me alone and he let a smile dangle and then i saw, in the stale air, among the crowds of people the unfamiliar familiar scenes of the smell of sweet tatami basking in the young sun the warmth of a child’s smile fine sand speckled with kakigori syrup and the ocean bursting with laughter 12 | Polyglossia 2021

and so I smiled back and gave him my palm, the leaning grasses, the tender moments under the benevolent apple boughs, spread on the burnt summer grass, letting time feed off treacle-tasting peeling bark these memories are not mine but ours (私たちの), I give them to you: replace the train’s harsh whistle with wind chimes, and the rough edges with tilting pines, make all the desolate suburban stations river trails in the dusty even light You will soon arrive at Shinjuku. The doors on the left side will open. he lightly bows, breaks the gaze and gets off the train : such grace we are this is

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Sanskrit & Linguistics From Ancient Civilisation to Modern Technology Suchir Salhan

F

or the uninitiated, Linguistics is a discipline shrouded in mystery. The rare insights that popular culture does offer are, generally, uninformative. In Pygmalion, George Bernard-Shaw caricatures 19th century British Phonetician Henry Sweet through his portrayal of Henry Higgins, who works to improve Cockney flower-girl turned socialite Eliza Doolittle’s perceived social standing through rigorous phonetic training. In fact, linguists are not prescriptivists who treat the rules and paradigms of their grammar books as incontrovertible rule of law, and they do not regard Received Pronunciation as ‘correct English’. Unlike the ‘prescriptivism’ portrayed in Pygmalion, linguistics is a scientific discipline aiming to accurately observe and describe the realities of language use, in the hopes of proposing some general principles or underlying mechanisms governing the phenomenon of language. Despite Shaw’s misleading portrayal of the chief goal of linguistic study, one linguistically significant legacy of Pygmalion is its inspiration for the name of the computer chatbot ELIZA.

Weizenbaum, J., (1966).

‘ELIZA—a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine’. Commun.

ACM, 9(1), 36-45.

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ELIZA, developed by Joseph Weizenbaum in the 1960s, was one of the first computer chatbots capable of ‘communicating’ with text entered by a human user: ELIZA analysed keywords in the text input to produce an output. Whilst ELIZA was in many ways rudimental, it served as a precursor for the current developments in language technology, the discipline behind conversational agents like Siri and Alexa. Although associated with computer science, the development of language technology is often informed by insights from traditional ‘descriptive’ linguistic study. Historically, descriptive linguistics largely focused on the classical

languages of the West. Today, linguists often use large and varied language samples to ensure the integrity of their investigations, but the importance of detailed classical study should not be dismissed, and one particular language’s influence on the field of linguistics is of particular note. Sanskrit, the classical language of Ancient India, has had a vast impact on contemporary understanding of language, and provides a tangible and exceptionally interesting example of how classical civilisation forms the intellectual bedrock of language technology, found in applications such as ELIZA. Sanskrit has had an immense cultural, literary and religious impact in the Indian subcontinent, however its intellectual impact is not well-known outside the linguistics community. The initial insights into Indo-European linguistics were made by European scholars studying Sanskrit, who noticed lexical similarities between Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. William Jones, in his 1786 lecture to the Asiatic Society of Bengal remarked that Sanskrit bore a ‘stronger affinity’ to Latin and Greek than was possible by chance. Jones conjectured that the three languages shared a common ancestor, now referred to as ‘proto-Indo-European’, despite the immense geographical distance between Indian and Graeco-Roman civilisations. Observations about the Sanskrit language motivated the proposal of proto-languages and methods for their reconstruction. Contemporary historical linguistic research utilises the Comparative Method, a set of principles that guide the reconstruction process of the phonology (sound system), morphology (word-internal structure) and syntax (word order) of the shared ancestor of two languages, or language families. By this method, the Sanskrit and Latin words for fire, agni and ignis respectively, can be reconstructed to a common ancestor, *egnis.

Comparative Reconstruction forms one of the foundational pillars of historical linguistic research, and raises important theoretical questions about the processes underlying historical syntactic and phonological change. It also raises complex evolutionary questions: if Sanskrit, Latin and Greek derive from a single linguistic ancestor, then could all languages ultimately have derived from a single ancestor? Integrating the proposed proto-language reconstructions with human evolution and migration patterns is a focus of current interdisciplinary historical and evolutionary linguistic work. Linguistic observations about the Sanskrit language have spawned the study of historical, and later evolutionary linguistic research.

The influence of Sanskrit stretches beyond the limits of historical linguistic work. Modern Linguistic Theory employs formal (i.e mathematical) tools to describe how aspects of language operate.

This approach to language is motivated by Noam Chomsky’s Cambridge University Languages and Culture Society | 15

insights about the formal nature of sentence structure in the 1950s. While this formal approach to language arose in modern linguistics in the past century, it is remarkable to note that the ancient Sanskrit grammarian, Pāṇini (पाणिनि) developed in his Aṣṭādhyāyī (अष्टाध्यायी) a similar formal description of the Sanskrit language in the 4th century BCE. Pāṇini’s grammar is the most well-known and influential Sanskrit grammar, though his work was situated within the broader context of Indian linguistic thought. In comparison to other ancient civilisations, the Ancient Indian grammarian tradition exhibited a significantly higher degree of linguistic sophistication, which is why Indian grammarians and Pāṇini in particular have attracted a lot of interest from contemporary linguists.

Early Chomskyan approaches to syntax attempted to account for the full extent of native speakers’ linguistic capacities, for example the ability to produce one, two or a hundred nested prepositional phrases. A speaker can produce a sentence like ‘John sat on the chair’ or ‘John sat [on the chair [in the park]]’ or even ‘John sat [on the chair [in the park [by the bank]]]’. An early Chomskyan approach proposes that a noun phrase, NP can be described using a rule NP → N, which means a noun phrase is rewritten as a noun, N (e.g John). Noun phrases can optionally contain a determiner, Det (e.g. the chair) or a prepositional phrase, PP (e.g. the chair in the park), so the rule can be expressed as NP → (Det) N (PP). A PP (e.g in the park) can be analysed using a phrase structure rule PP → P NP, which means a prepositional phrase can be rewritten as the sequence preposition followed by a noun phrase. This approach to syntax proposes that speakers have the capacity to produce sentences with infinitely many prepositional phrases because the phrase structure rules of a noun phrase and a prepositional phrase are recursive. In other words, speakers can produce sentences like this because the NP rule can optionally generate a PP, which generates an NP, which may generate another PP, and so on. Recursion is a computational process: it is the same process that underlies the Fibonacci sequence in mathematics. Just as the next term in a Fibonacci sequence is the sum of its previous two terms, the language system can apply previously used rules to generate a new phrase ad infinitum. From this theoretical perspective, language is a computational system, as it operates using principles underlying formal systems in mathematics.

Incredibly, Pāṇini’s analysis of Sanskrit grammar from the 4th century BCE shows a sensitivity to the formal properties of language that has only emerged in modern linguistics in the last century. In his treatment of clausal syntax, Pāṇini analyses sentence structure using a set of generative rules. This is essentially similar to modern treatments of syntax: Pāṇini’s system of syntactic 16 | Polyglossia 2021

analysis highlighted the recursive nature of language. Even more surprising is Pāṇini’s recognition and analysis of the ‘linking problem’ between syntactic position and the semantic role of words in the sentence, analysed in contemporary syntax using the theory of ‘theta roles’. In essence, the Aṣṭādhyāyī describes an intricate set of semi-formal ‘algorithms’ to generate words and sentences that are grammatical in Sanskrit. Pāṇini offers a rule-based description of the Sanskrit phonology, morphology, and syntax. Pāṇini wrote his grammar in a systematic, simple and consistent manner, using a highly idiosyncratic form of Sanskrit, which is widely regarded to be a ‘metalanguage’. Many of the insights in Pāṇini’s grammar were ‘rediscovered’ in modern linguistics and represent important theoretical developments.

‘Theta-roles’ express the semantic (meaning) relation that a noun bears towards the verb.

Many theorists have proposed supposedly universal sets of theta-roles.

The syntactic arrangement of theta-roles varies cross-linguistically.

Charting the development of the field of linguistics from the 4th century BCE to the 21st century through the lens of Sanskrit, it is evident that Sanskrit has influenced linguistics far beyond the realm of historical linguistics: Pāṇinian grammar addresses theoretically insightful and significant issues in contemporary linguistic research. But so what?

Pāṇini’s insight that language can be analysed in a formal, scientific way has important consequences for language technology.

Computational Linguistics (or Natural Language Processing) is the field of research which utilises and develops formal descriptions of language to ‘teach’ computers the grammar of a language to check a user’s grammar, facilitate translation, and crucially to understand meaning. While there is still a long way to go before computers can truly attain a naturalistic human-like comprehension of word and sentence meaning, when (or if) computers can get to such a position, this will undoubtedly revolutionise the scope of human-computer interaction. Chomskyan approaches to language were incredibly influential in early computational linguistics, as his description of language could be implemented using finite-state automata. Generative rules describing natural language connected the historically distinct disciplines of linguistics and computer science. In a sense, however, the connection between the two disciplines was anticipated far earlier in Pāṇinian grammar, as he identified many of the principles captured by modern generative rules. Some Pāṇinian rules directly lend themselves to computational implementation. For example, Pāṇini’s description of sandhi, a morphophonological process that describes sound changes at morpheme boundaries, e.g. Sanskrit devas api > devo’pi ‘also a god’ and English syn-pathy > sympathy, has been computationally implemented using finite-state automata by Hyman (2009). Many modern approaches in computational linguistics now rely on making statistical predictions

A finite-state automaton is a computational machine which can be in exactly one of a finite set of states at any given time. An FSA can change from state-tostate based on a specified input. FSAs have various applications in computational linguistics, including in syntactic parsing.

Hyman, M.D., (2009) ‘From Pāninian Sandhi to Finite State Calculus.’

In: Huet G., Kulkarni A., Scharf P. (eds.)

(2009) Sanskrit Computational Linguistics.

ISCLS 2007, ISCLS 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5402. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-64200155-0_10

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Magueresse, A., Carles, V., & Heetderks, E., (2020). Low-resource Languages: A Review of Past Work and Future Challenges [online].

ArXiv, abs/2006.07264.

Available at: <2006.07264v1.pdf (arxiv.org)> [Accessed: 28 April 2021]

based on large amounts of language data, but these approaches are not useful for ‘low-resource’ dialects and languages, such as Sanskrit. As computational linguistic research broadens its horizons beyond the 20 well-documented languages traditionally studied in NLP, rule-based approaches like those implementing Pāṇini’s description of Sanskrit may continue to play an important role in developing computational models of Sanskrit and other languages.

Regardless of whether the most successful formal analysis of language is Pāṇinian or Chomskyan in nature, the extremely powerful insight that language can be analysed in a formal, scientific way has its roots in ancient Indian civilisation, transcending millennia of linguistic thought. This idea forms the intellectual bedrock for language technology and has only just started to yield fruitful technological developments that have the potential to drastically change our society at large.

Le retour des œuvres culturelles pourrait-il faciliter la réconciliation?

Sophie Clare

For English translation, see page 26.

L

a question épineuse de la restitution entraîne des enjeux politiques, diplomatiques et principalement décoloniaux. Il s’agit d’un débat continu mais encore récent à propos des œuvres d’art ‘acquises’ pendant l’époque coloniale, qui constituaient des récompenses et des symboles de statut pour les colonisateurs. Ces objets revetaient une importance spirituelle et individuelle pour les communautés d’où ils avaient été enlevés, et pourraient créer

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une fierté régionale et nationale si retournées. Ceci explique la raison pour laquelle plusieurs activistes préconisent la restitution, toutefois ce débat se complexifie. Après avoir effectué des recherches sur ce thème au lycée, j’ai suivi avec intérêt l’évolution de la situation aussi bien que les influences de la pandémie et le mouvement Black Lives Matter sur les relations diplomatiques, ces derniers posant souvent un obstacle aux efforts de restitution.

La France et l’Angleterre sont parmi les pays les plus fortement impliqués dans ce débat, ce qui m’intéresse beaucoup en tant que Britannique étudiant le français.

Personnellement, la restitution des artefacts culturels est sans aucun doute une étape incontournable dans le processus de décolonisation se déroulant entre les pays européens et les pays ayant subi leur colonisation. Il est bien sûr important pour les pays européens de disposer d’objets d’arts africains pour l’apprentissage de tous, cependant il faudrait aussi en restituer la majorité à l’Afrique, pour ne pas pénaliser le patrimoine de ces cultures. La confrontation avec l’histoire honteuse de la colonisation est douloureuse, mais doit tout de même avoir lieu afin de faire avancer le monde - elle ne doit plus être ignorée.

La polémique actuelle En novembre 2018, le Président Macron endosse le reportage Savoy-Sarr, qui renouvelle l’importance de ce débat par rapport aux objets culturels qui ont été pris pendant l’époque coloniale. On constate qu’il y a au moins 90 000 objets d’art d’Afrique subsaharienne dans les collections publiques en France (donc cela exclut le contenu des collections privées). Plus de deux tiers de ces objets d’art se trouvent au Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, qui comporte en somme près de 370 000 œuvres originaires d’Afrique, du Proche-Orient, d’Asie, d’Océanie et des Amériques.

Plusieurs spécialistes - y compris les représentants des communautés impliquées - s’accordent à dire que la valeur des objets est mieux comprise dans le contexte de leur lieu et culture d’origine.

La restitution des objets pourrait redonner de la dignité et de l’espoir aux cultures auxquelles un patrimoine matériel a été dérobé, leur accordant ainsi une forme de réparation qui permettrait aussi l’amélioration des relations post-coloniales. La compréhension et le respect mutuels sont à privilégier.

Sarr, F. & Savoy, B., (2018). Rapport sur la restitution du patrimoine culturel africain.

Vers une nouvelle éthique relationnelle. [online]. Available at: <http://restitutionreport2018.com/> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac. History of the Collections. [online]. Available at: <https://www.quaibranly.fr/en/collections/ all-collections/history-of-the-collections/> [Accessed 11 July 2021]

Cependant, il semble exister un décalage entre les questions du patrimoine et les priorités politiques et sociales, y compris les inquiétudes contemporaines de santé et sécurité. Les arguments pour et contre le rapatriement semblent avoir été oubliés en

Cambridge University Languages and Culture Society | 19

Nayeri, F., (2019).

‘France Vowed to Return Looted Treasures.

But Few Are Heading Back.’ New York Times. [online]. Available at: <https://www.nytimes. com/2019/11/22/ arts/design/restitution-france-africa.html> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

Hel Guedj, J., (2020).

‘Mwazulu Diyabanza, dirigeant d’Unité-Dignité-Courage: “Je porte une parole opprimée”’.

L’Echo. [online].

Available at: <https:// www.lecho.be/culture/ general/mwazulu-diyabanza-dirigeant-dunite-dignite-courageje-porte-une-paroleopprimee/10265426. html> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

Willsher, K., (2021). ‘‘We want our riches back’ – the African activist taking treasures from Europe’s museums.’

The Guardian. [online.]

Available at: <https:// www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2021/ feb/07/mwariches-african-activist-stealing-europes-museums> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

Cadeau, L., (2020).

‘Quatre choses à savoir sur Emery Mwazulu Diyabanza, ce militant qui “vole” des objets africains dans les musées.’ franceinfo. [online]. Available at: < https://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/ provence-alpes-cote-dazur/bouches-du-rhone/ marseille/quatre-choses-savoir-emery-mwazulu-diyabanza-ce-militant-qui-vole-objets-africains-musees-1895424. html> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

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raison de ces soucis. D’autres raisons principales pour l’échec de cette mission de retour comprennent une peur irrationnelle de vider les musées en Europe, des préoccupations concernant la sécurité des œuvres d’art dans leur pays d’origine, ainsi que des cas d’ignorance et d’incompréhension, par exemple le fait de ne pas comprendre les origines ou la signification de certaines œuvres d’art.

C’est bien beau de mettre en place des déclarations en faveur de la restitution, cependant les progrès concrets ne sont pas au rendez-vous. Dans l’Hexagone, la date limite annoncée par le Président Macron en 2017 pour la restitution approche à grands pas.

Il avait souligné : “Je veux que d’ici cinq ans les conditions soient réunies pour des restitutions temporaires ou définitives du patrimoine africain en Afrique.” Nous sommes toutefois à quatre ans depuis cette déclaration, et presque trois ans depuis la publication du rapport Savoy-Sarr. Et cependant seulement 27 restitutions ont été annoncées par la France et un objet restitué : un sabre a été remis au président sénégalais en 2019, ayant appartenu à l’erudit et autorité islamique Omar Saidou Tall, qui avait mené une lutte anticoloniale contre les Français au XIXème siècle.

Emery Mwazulu Diyabanza Les questions du patrimoine semblent avoir été éclipsées par la pandémie mondiale. Néanmoins, les actions polémiques d’activistes comme Emery Mwazulu Diyabanza ont fait des gros titres.

Diyabanza dirige le mouvement d’Unité-Dignité-Courage, Yanka Nku, une association panafricaine qui milite pour la restitution depuis 2018. Certains le considèrent comme “un Robin des Bois contemporain” qui vole des œuvres d’art pour “rendre à l’Afrique son héritage.”

Ses actions ont entraîné des conséquences diverses, y compris d’une part des amendes, la détention par la police et une peine de prison avec sursis, et d’autre part les acquittements et la compréhension : comme aux Pays-Bas, où le juge a reconnu que son acte avait des intentions politiques plutôt que criminelles, ce qui lui ouvre la possibilité de revenir discuter avec les autorités des musées là-bas.

Diyabanza élargit sa campagne avec la création du FMAS, le Front Multiculturel Anti Spoliation : son objectif est de réunir les peuples du monde entier avec leur patrimoine spolié. Il s’agit notamment d’objets appartenant aux tribus amérindiennes, aux aborigènes et aux peuples indigènes des Philippines, d’Indonésie,

Cambridge University Languages and Culture Society | 21

du Pérou et d’ailleurs. La chose la plus frappante est que Diyabanza n’est pas opposé à l’exposition des objets africains en Europe. Il souhaite qu’ils soient restitués d’abord et qu’ils puissent ensuite être prêtés suivant les demandes de leurs propriétaires - une proposition qu’il paraît difficile de contrer.

Quoi que l’on pense de sa soi-disante “diplomatie active”, à travers de laquelle lui et d’autres militants pénètrent dans des musées et tentent de retirer des objets, ces actes ont recentré le débat. À juste titre : comment les communautés peuvent-elles se tourner vers l’avenir lorsque leur passé reste entre les mains de leurs anciens oppresseurs ? Bien que ce débat ait été principalement limité aux discussions entre les activistes communautaires, les conservateurs et ceux qui s’intéressent à la culture et à la décolonisation, il gagne maintenant en notoriété. Je pense que les militants risquent d’aliéner encore plus le groupe ‘anti-restitution’ lorsqu’ils prennent en charge ces questions, mais on ne peut pas négliger leur signification quand ils portent la question à l’attention d’un public plus large. Ce que j’espère, c’est que la pression sur les gouvernements augmentera afin qu’ils tiennent leurs promesses de restitution.

Covid-19 et la digitalisation de la culture Il va sans dire que le choc double d’une crise sanitaire mondiale associée aux maux économiques a bouleversé la vie quotidienne de tous. Ces conséquences ont également impacté le monde de la culture. Depuis plusieurs années la digitalisation du patrimoine s’est intensifiée afin que les objets fragiles qui ne peuvent pas être exposés puissent être appréciés en ligne. La numérisation de la culture se développe encore, véritablement catalysée par le covid-19, avec le partage numérique plus répandu des expositions et objets. Des méthodes numériques du partage culturel permettraient la restitution d’œuvres sans que les musées en Europe deviennent vides (une préoccupation quand même erronée et tout à fait exagérée : le musée du Louvre par exemple possède environ 380 000 œuvres mais n’en expose que 35 000, soit moins de 10%!)

La possibilité d’assister aux expositions chez soi, aussi bien que le catalogage numérique des œuvres, renforcent les arguments pour et contre la restitution. D’un côté, la digitalisation rend possible l’accès aux œuvres au-delà des frontières nationales - on pourrait se poser la question de la nécessité de la restitution, si quelqu’un peut découvrir un objet tout en restant dans leur pays. Il faut néanmoins examiner le revers de la médaille: pourquoi ne pas restituer un objet à son pays d’origine, quand en Europe Mad22 | Polyglossia 2021

ame et Monsieur Tout-le-Monde, qui sont souvent plus enclins à bénéficier d’un accès à internet, peuvent tout aussi facilement le découvrir en ligne?

La circulation des œuvres à travers les expositions itinérantes et les copies autorisées d’objets constitue un autre aspect de la restitution. Grâce à la numérisation et l’impression 3D, on peut réaliser des copies physiques et numériques d’artefacts sensibles, permettant aux visiteurs d’étudier les copies de près ou bien les originaux en ligne. Cette technologie a déjà été utilisée en France pour protéger les grottes préhistoriques de Lascaux, où les visiteurs peuvent explorer une réplique complète des grottes - appelée Lascaux IV - parce que les vraies grottes sont menacées par l’érosion et la sur-fréquentation. Le développement de reproductions physiques ou bien numériques faciliterait la restitution, car les objets pourraient être répartis de manière beaucoup plus égale entre les musées, au lieu d’être concentrés dans des collections individuelles et somme toute européennes.

Pour ma part, je pense que la restitution des œuvres à leur pays d’origine et la mise en place de versions digitales ou de reproductions dans le pays colonisateur seraient excellentes pour faire progresser les discussions sur la restitution. C’est une approche semblable au prêt initial d’objets à leur pays d’origine ; pour une question si controversée une étape intermédiaire avant la restitution permanente éviterait l’inaction totale et élargirait aussi l’accès actuel à la culture dans les anciennes colonies.

University of Brighton, (2019). How 3D printing can help repatriate colonial artefacts. [online]. Available at: <https://www.brighton. ac.uk/news/2019/ how-3d-printing-can-help-repatriate-colonial-artefacts> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

Lascaux IV. [online].

Available at: < https:// www.lascaux.fr/fr> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

Les objets culturels des Maasaï Par ailleurs, les critiques de la restitution citent les origines ambiguës des objets comme contre-argument, affirmant qu’on ne peut jamais savoir précisément où on doit les retourner. Personnellement, je leur ferai référence au projet entre les Maasaï de la Tanzanie et du Kenya et des musées à Oxford et Cambridge. En 2018 ainsi qu’en 2020, des activistes et chefs spirituels culturels Maasaï ont visité l’Angleterre afin d’établir un projet de recherche, de compréhension et de collaboration. Au musée de Pitt Rivers à Oxford en 2018, l’activiste Samwel Nangiria a pu reconnaître non seulement les œuvres de sa communauté mais aussi les objets qui étaient “mal décrits, sans que l’on sache à quoi l’objet est destiné [ni sa] signification culturelle.”

Parmi les objets les plus troublants trouvés pendant une visite l’année dernière aux musées de Pitt Rivers et d’Archéologie et d’Anthropologie (MAA) à Cambridge étaient des orkatar. Ces brassards sont transmis de père en fils et ne sont jamais vendus ni

Pitt Rivers Museum.

Maasai Living Cultures Project. [online.] Available at: <https://www. prm.ox.ac.uk/maasai-living-cultures> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

Koshy, Y., (2018). ‘Hey, that’s our stuff: Maasai tribespeople tackle Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum.’ The Guardian. [online]. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/ dec/04/pitt-rivers-museum-oxford-maasai-colonial-artefacts> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

Cambridge University Languages and Culture Society | 23

Elliott, M., (2020).

‘Knowing What Is Important: Rethinking the collections with Maasai cultural leaders.’

University of Cambrige Museums & Botanic Garden. [online]. Available at: <https://www. museums.cam.ac.uk/ blog/2020/07/20/ knowing-what-is-important-rethinking-collections-with-maasai-cultural-leaders/> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

donnés. Ainsi les Maasaï ne s’attendaient pas à en trouver en dehors de leur communauté et veulent en fin de compte leur restitution à leur culture dynamique. Les Maasaï ont expliqué la signification plus complexe et profonde de plusieurs objets, tels qu’un bâton de feu : il ne s’agit pas uniquement d’un moyen pour faire du feu, mais d’un élément important des rituels de la vie sociale.

Peut-être l’aspect le plus central pour ce débat : les Maasaï n’étaient pas contre l’idée que le bâton de feu fasse partie d’une collection en Angleterre. En revanche, ils s’opposaient à ce que les informations données sur cet objet, les histoires partagées avec d’autres à son sujet, et par extension la connaissance de leur culture, soient si limitées. Il me semble que l’effort de collaboration avec la communauté Maasaï démontre l’importance d’impliquer les communautés d’origine dans la préservation et la compréhension de leur patrimoine. De plus, il ne s’agit pas forcément de restituer la totalité des objets; la priorité pourrait et devrait être accordée aux objets comme les orkatar, qui revêtent une importance profonde pour la communauté et les familles auxquelles ils ont été enlevés. Ce ne serait pas difficile par exemple d’installer des reproductions de ces objets à forte signification dans les pays occidentaux et de rendre les originaux aux pays africains.

Black Lives Matter Je souhaite que ces exemples soulignent que le but de la restitution n’est pas de vider les musées en Europe en restituant des œuvres (une inquiétude erronée des détracteurs du rapatriement), mais plutôt d’établir des liens culturels d’égalité et de respect entre les anciennes colonies et les anciens empires, tout en encourageant la compréhension mutuelle. On se demande souvent comment établir une méthode pour choisir quelles œuvres sont à considérer en priorité, et quelles communautés à privilégier en premier lieu. Toute approche nécessiterait une réflexion et une compréhension des héritages géopolitiques complexes du colonialisme.

Je pense que le plus important serait que ces pays travaillent ensemble, identifient les moments les plus contentieux et significatifs de leurs histoires coloniales, puis s’efforcent de désamorcer l’héritage de la destruction en restituant les objets avant tout aux communautés les plus touchées par l’impérialisme et le néocolonialisme. En consultant ces communautés, comme les Maasaï, il ne serait pas difficile de catégoriser les objets et d’établir un ordre de priorité.

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Le retour des œuvres culturelles se montre particulièrement important dans le contexte des mouvements globaux comme Black Lives Matter, qui ont remis en question les héritages du colonialisme, de l’esclavage et du racisme qui ont conduit à notre société actuelle.

Un exemple proche de nous tous - l’université de Cambridge va mener une étude approfondie sur la manière dont elle a contribué à l’esclavage pendant l’ère coloniale, ou bien en quelle mesure elle l’a contesté. L’enquête examinera les archives, bibliothèques et musées aussi bien qu’un nombre considérable de documents afin de découvrir comment l’institution a pu tirer profit de l’esclavage et de l’exploitation de la main-d’œuvre. On recherchera également dans quelle mesure les études menées à l’université ont pu renforcer et valider la pensée fondée sur la race entre le XVIIIe et le début du XXe siècle. De plus, les musées de l’université de Cambridge ont reçu un financement de près de £90 000 pour leur enquête sur les “héritages de l’empire et de l’esclavage dans les collections.” La recherche servira de base à un programme d’événements publics qui comprendra une exposition au Musée Fitzwilliam en 2022. Ces exemples de la recherche collaborative et la réflexion sur l’histoire permettront de mieux comprendre nos histoires mondiales liées, et de dépasser la perspective du vainqueur.

Afin qu’on puisse commencer un nouveau récit de coopération et d’appréciation interculturelles, il faut reconnaître l’interdépendance actuelle de nos histoires et cultures. La restitution d’objets significatifs constituerait non seulement un geste de bonne volonté, mais aussi un pas vers des réparations pour les atrocités humaines et culturelles commises lors de l’époque coloniale.

University of Cambridge Museums, (2020). ‘Exploring the legacies of empire and enslavement.’ University of Cambridge Museums & Botanic Garden. [online]. Available at: < https://www. museums.cam.ac.uk/ blog/2020/07/22/ exploring-the-legacies-of-empire-and-enslavement/> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

Isman, S., (2021).

‘Funding announced for University Museums’ empire and slavery project’. Varsity. [online.]

Available at: < https:// www.varsity.co.uk/ news/20597> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

Ainsi, lorsque l’on restitue des œuvres qui se doivent être retournées, on peut améliorer les rapports entre les pays et faire en sorte que les objets culturels puissent être appréciés au-delà des frontières de l’Europe. Après tout, l’humanité a produit tellement de biens culturels au fil des ans, qu’il y a plus qu’assez à partager entre les musées du monde entier. En guise de conclusion, nul ne peut nier que la restitution permettrait la réconciliation.

Cambridge University Languages and Culture Society | 25

Can the return of cultural artefacts facilitate reconciliation?

Sophie Clare

T

he contentious issue of restitution encompasses political, diplomatic and above all decolonial issues. It concerns an enduring, yet still recent debate, regarding works of art which were ‘acquired’ during the colonial era, as rewards and status symbols for colonisers. These objects embodied both spiritual and individual importance for the communities from which they were taken, and could bolster regional and national pride if returned. This explains why several activists call for restitution - nonetheless, the debate is becoming more and more complex. After researching this topic at sixth form, I followed the development of the situation with interest, especially given the influences of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement on diplomatic relations, which themselves often pose an obstacle to repatriation efforts.

France and Great Britain are among the most strongly implicated countries in this debate, which interests me greatly as a British student of French.

In my opinion, the restitution of cultural artefacts is without doubt an indispensable step in the process of decolonisation between European countries and the countries which they colonised. It is of course important that those of us in Europe are able to explore African artworks for our intercultural understanding, however, we should look to return the majority of them to their places of origin, so that the heritage of their cultures is preserved, not restricted. Confronting the shameful history of colonisation is painful, but it must be done in order to bring the world forward this can no longer be ignored.

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The current debate In November 2018, President Macron endorsed the Savoy-Sarr report, renewing the importance of this debate in relation to cultural objects taken during the colonial period. It is noted that at least 90,000 objects of sub Saharan African art are exhibited in France (excluding the contents of private collections). More than two thirds of these objects can be found in the Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac museum, which comprises a total collection of 370,000 works originating from Africa, the Middle-East, Asia, Oceania and the Americas.

Numerous specialists - including representatives of the communities involved - agree that the value of these objects is best understood in the context of their place and culture of origin. The restitution of objects could return dignity and hope to cultures whose material heritage was taken, providing them a form of reparation which would also facilitate post-colonial relations.

However, there seems to be a disconnect between questions of heritage and political and social priorities, such as recent health and security concerns. Arguments for and against restitution appear to have been forgotten because of these worries. Other key reasons for the failure of the mission to return artefacts include an irrational fear of emptying Europe’s museums, concerns about the security of artworks in their country of origin, as well as cases of ignorance and misunderstanding, such as not understanding the origins or significance of certain artworks.

It’s all well and good to make statements in favour of restitution, however concrete progress is not forthcoming. In France, the deadline for restitution announced by President Macron in 2017 is fast approaching. He emphasised: “I want the conditions to be in place within five years from now for the temporary or permanent restitution of African heritage in Africa.” Nevertheless, it is now four years after this declaration, and almost three years since the publication of the Savoy-Sarr report. However, only 27 restitutions have been announced by France and one single object returned: a sword was returned to the Senegalese President in 2019, having belonged to the Islamic scholar and leader Omar Saidou Tall, who had led an anticolonial struggle against the French in the 19th century.

Emery Mwazulu Diyabanza Questions of heritage have clearly been eclipsed by the global pandemic. Even so, the controversial actions of activists like Emery

Sarr, F. & Savoy, B., (2018). Rapport sur la restitution du patrimoine culturel africain.

Vers une nouvelle éthique relationnelle. [online]. Available at: <http://restitutionreport2018.com/> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac. History of the Collections. [online]. Available at: <https://www.quaibranly.fr/en/collections/ all-collections/history-of-the-collections/> [Accessed 11 July 2021] Nayeri, F., (2019).

‘France Vowed to Return Looted Treasures.

But Few Are Heading Back.’ New York Times. [online]. Available at: <https://www.nytimes. com/2019/11/22/ arts/design/restitution-france-africa.html> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

Hel Guedj, J., (2020).

‘Mwazulu Diyabanza, dirigeant d’Unité-Dignité-Courage: “Je porte une parole opprimée”’.

L’Echo. [online].

Available at: <https:// www.lecho.be/culture/ general/mwazulu-diyabanza-dirigeant-dunite-dignite-courageje-porte-une-paroleopprimee/10265426. html> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

Willsher, K., (2021). ‘‘We want our riches back’ – the African activist taking treasures from Europe’s museums.’

The Guardian. [online.]

Available at: <https:// www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2021/ feb/07/mwariches-african-activist-stealing-europes-museums> [Ac-

Cambridge University Languages and Culture Society | 27

cessed 11 July 2021].

Cadeau, L., (2020).

‘Quatre choses à savoir sur Emery Mwazulu Diyabanza, ce militant qui “vole” des objets africains dans les musées.’ franceinfo. [online]. Available at: <https://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/ provence-alpes-cote-dazur/bouches-du-rhone/ marseille/quatre-choses-savoir-emery-mwazulu-diyabanza-ce-militant-qui-vole-objets-africains-musees-1895424. html> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

Mwazulu Diyabanza have made headlines. Diyabanza directs the Yanka Nku movement - Unity, Dignity, Courage. This Pan-African organisation has campaigned for restitution since 2018. Some regard him as a “contemporary Robin Hood” who steals works of art to “return Africa its heritage.”

Diyabanza’s actions have resulted in various consequences, including fines, police detention and a suspended prison sentence on the one hand and acquittals and understanding on the other.

In the Netherlands, the judge recognised that his action had political (rather than criminal) intentions, opening up the possibility for Diyabanza to return and discuss the issue with museum authorities there.

Diyabanza has enlarged his campaign with the creation of the FMAS: the Multicultural Anti-Spoilation Front: its objective is to reunite people the world over with their plundered heritage. This notably involves objects belonging to Native American tribes, Aboriginal peoples and indigenous peoples of the Philippines, Indonesia, Peru and elsewhere. The most striking thing is that Diyabanza is not opposed to the exhibition of African objects in Europe. Rather, he wishes for these objects to be returned first and then loaned out according to their owners’ requests - a proposal that seems difficult to oppose.

Whatever you think of his so-called “active diplomacy”, through which Diyabanza and other activists enter museums and attempt to remove objects, these actions have refocused the debate. Rightly so: how can communities look to the future when their past remains in the hands of their former oppressors? Although this debate was initially limited to discussions between community activists, curators and those interested in culture and decolonisation, it is now gaining traction more broadly. I think that activists of course risk alienating even further the ‘anti-restitution’ camp when taking on these issues, but we cannot ignore their significance through bringing the question to the attention of a much larger audience. What I hope is that pressure on governments will increase enough that they keep their promises of repatriation.

Covid-19 and the digitalisation of culture It goes without saying that the combination of a global health crisis and economic woes has brought about considerable upheaval in our everyday life. These consequences have also impacted the cultural sector. For several years the digitisation of heritage has intensified so that fragile objects which can’t be displayed can be appreciated online. This digitisation of culture is still developing, 28 | Polyglossia 2021

certainly catalysed by Covid-19, which has brought about a more widespread digital sharing of exhibitions and objects. Digital methods of cultural exchange would allow the restitution of objects without European museums being emptied (a concern that is nonetheless mistaken and completely exaggerated: the Louvre for instance owns 380,000 artworks but only exhibits 35,000, which is less than 10%!)

The possibility to attend exhibitions from home and the digital cataloguing of artworks reinforce arguments both for and against restitution. On the one hand, digitisation makes possible access to artworks beyond national borders - the necessity of restitution could be questioned, if someone can discover an object all while staying in their own country. It is important however to consider the counter argument here: why not return an object to its country of origin, when the average person in Europe (who is often more likely to have internet access) can then easily discover it online?

The circulation of artworks through travelling exhibitions and authorised copies of artefacts are another aspect of restitution.

Thanks to 3D scanning and printing, it is possible to construct both physical and digital copies of delicate objects, allowing visitors to study them up close or view the originals online. This technology has already been used in France to protect the prehistoric Lascaux caves, where visitors can explore a complete replica of the caves - called Lascaux IV - because the real ones are threatened by erosion and overcrowding. The development of physical or indeed digital reproductions would facilitate restitution, because objects could be much more equally distributed, rather than being concentrated in specific, and above all European, collections.

Personally, I think the restitution of artworks to their country of origin and the implementation of digital copies or physical reproductions in the former colonising countries would be excellent solutions to progress discussions concerning repatriation. This approach is similar to the initial loan of objects to their country of origin; for such a controversial question, an intermediate stage before permanent restitution would avoid total inaction and also expand access to culture in former colonies.

University of Brighton, (2019). How 3D printing can help repatriate colonial artefacts. [online]. Available at: <https://www.brighton. ac.uk/news/2019/ how-3d-printing-can-help-repatriate-colonial-artefacts> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

Lascaux !V. [online].

Available at: < https:// www.lascaux.fr/fr> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

The cultural objects of the Maasai Critics of restitution cite the ambiguous origins of objects as a counter-argument, claiming that we can never precisely know where to return artworks. Personally, I would direct them to a project between the Maasai of Tanzania and Kenya, and several museums in Oxford and Cambridge. In 2018 and again in Cambridge University Languages and Culture Society | 29

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2020, activists and cultural and spiritual leaders from the Maasai community visited England to establish a project encompassing research, understanding and collaboration. At the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in 2018, activist Samwel Nangiria was able to recognise not only the artworks belonging to his community, but also objects which were “poorly described, with a lack of what the object is meant for [and its] cultural significance.”

Among the most troubling objects found during a visit last year to the Pitt Rivers and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge were the orkatar. These armbands are passed down from father to son and are never sold or given away. Therefore the Maasai did not expect to find them outside their community and ultimately want them returned to their dynamic culture. The Maasai explained the complex and profound significance of several objects, such as a fire stick: not only a way to make fire, but also an important element in rituals and social life.

Perhaps the most important aspect in relation to the restitution debate: the Maasai were not against the fire stick being displayed in a collection in England. However, they were opposed to the limited nature of the information and stories shared with others about the object, and by extension the limited knowledge of their culture. It seems to me that this effort of collaboration with the Maasai community demonstrates the importance of involving communities in the preservation and understanding of their heritage. What’s more, it does not necessarily mean the return of all objects; priority could and should be given to objects like the orkatar, which retain a profound importance for the community and families from whom they were taken. It would not be difficult for example to exhibit reproductions of these highly significant objects in European countries and return the originals to where they rightfully belong.

Pitt Rivers Museum.

Maasai Living Cultures Project. [online.] Available at: <https://www. prm.ox.ac.uk/maasai-living-cultures> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

Koshy, Y., (2018). ‘Hey, that’s our stuff: Maasai tribespeople tackle Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum.’ The Guardian. [online]. Available at: < https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/ dec/04/pitt-rivers-museum-oxford-maasai-colonial-artefacts> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

Elliott, M. (2020).

Knowing What Is Important: Rethinking the collections with Maasai cultural leaders.’

University of Cambrige Museums & Botanic Garden. [online]. Available at: < https://www. museums.cam.ac.uk/ blog/2020/07/20/ knowing-what-is-important-rethinking-collections-with-maasai-cultural-leaders/> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

Black Lives Matter I hope that these examples underline how the goal of restitution is not to empty museums in Europe (a misguided concern of opponents of repatriation), but rather to establish cultural links of equality and respect between former colonies and former imperial powers, all while encouraging mutual cooperation. Another key question is how we can establish a method to choose which artworks should be prioritised, and which communities should be considered first and foremost. Any approach would require reflection and understanding of the complex geopolitical legacies of colonialism.

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I think the most important thing would be for countries to work together, identifying the most contentious and significant moments of their colonial histories, then looking to deconstruct a heritage of destruction by returning objects to the communities most impacted by imperialism and neocolonialism. By consulting these communities, such as the Maasai, it would not be difficult to categorise objects and create an order of priority.

The return of cultural artefacts has shown itself to be particularly important in the context of global movements like Black Lives Matter, which has directly questioned and called out the legacies of colonialism, slavery and racism which have led to our contemporary society.

University of Cambridge Museums, (2020). ‘Exploring the legacies of empire and enslavement.’ University of Cambridge Museums & Botanic Garden. [online]. Available at: <https://www. museums.cam.ac.uk/ blog/2020/07/22/ exploring-the-legacies-of-empire-and-enslavement/> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

Isman, S., (2021).

‘Funding announced for University Museums’ empire and slavery project’. Varsity. [online].

Available at: <https:// www.varsity.co.uk/ news/20597> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

An example close to us all - the University of Cambridge will lead an in-depth study regarding the ways in which it contributed to slavery during the colonial era, or indeed contested it. The research will examine material from archives, libraries and museums, as well as a considerable number of documents to discover how the institution was able to profit from slavery and workforce exploitation.

Equally, research will look into the extent to which courses led at the university were able to reinforce or validate perceived racial ideology and ideas between the 18th and 20th centuries. Furthermore, the Cambridge University Museums have received almost £90,000 in funding for their research into “legacies of empire and enslavement in collections.” The research will form the basis of a programme of public events which will include an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in 2022. These examples of collaborative research and reflection on the past will enable us to better understand our interconnected global histories, and to move beyond the perspective of the victor.

So that we can begin a new story of cooperation and intercultural appreciation, it is fundamental that we recognise the contemporary interdependence of our histories and our cultures. The restitution of significant objects would not only constitute a gesture of good will, but also a step towards reparations for the human and cultural atrocities committed during the colonial era.

Ultimately, when we return artefacts which are suitable for restitution, we can improve relations between countries and enable the appreciation of cultural objects and artworks beyond the borders of Europe. After all, humanity has produced so many rich cultural goods over the years, that there is more than enough to share between museums around the world. To sum it all up, it cannot be denied that restitution is the first step towards reconciliation.

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The Short-sighted Global Dominance of the English Language

Niamh Curran

P

icture this: you have just arrived in Spain, raring to test out your language skills and become a pseudo-local for the duration of your stay. You sit down at a tranquil restaurant in a quaint little side street and order your meal in perfect Spanish, delighted with yourself, then watch in restrained horror as your waiter responds in *gasp* English. For the rest of the meal you persist, desperately trying to convince this native that you can, in fact, speak the language, but to no avail, as they continue to respond in your mother tongue, smiling down at your dashed polyglot dreams.

This is an experience to which we, in our privileged native English-speaking bubble, can certainly relate, but it only represents a tiny fraction of the larger story of the pervasiveness of the language that seems to follow us all over the world. Such encounters never fail to leave us wondering: why is there such an obsession with English? In today’s increasingly globalised world, English is now the lingua franca, used for communication between those who do not share a native language. However, English seems to have evolved into more than a mere tool; it is beginning to loom dangerously into the territory of overshadowing or even erasing linguistic alterity.

The historical background to this is clear. Before expanding into territories further afield, the British Empire first set its sights on Ireland as a colony, with settlers arriving in the 12th century. Over the years, with the help of the establishment of the Penal Laws in the 17th century, a no-tolerance policy was instated regarding the Irish language. English was imposed in its place. This policy succeeded in stamping out the country’s national language almost Cambridge University Languages and Culture Society | 33

entirely. Ireland was just the first of the British Empire’s many colonies, beginning an imperialist trend of plundering countries rich in natural materials and ripping them of their heritage, while simultaneously imposing a new and foreign one upon them.

w3techs.com, (2021).

Usage Statistics and Market Share of Content Languages for Websites, April 2021. [online] Available at: <https:// w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_ language> [Accessed July 11 2021].

Julios, C., ( 2017).

Contemporary British identity. Taylor & Francis, 23.

UNESCO.org, (2010).

UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. [online]. Available at: <http://www.unesco. org/languages-atlas/> [Accessed July 11 2021].

Corradi, A. et al., (2017). ‘The Linguistic Colonialism of English’.

Brown Political Review. [online]. Available at: <https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2017/04/ linguistic-colonialism-english/> [Accessed 27 April 2021].

Tragically, the reason for the initial diffusion and current prevalence of the English language can largely be attributed to the strength of the colonial forces, as almost all of the British Empire’s former colonies have maintained English as at least one of the official languages, making up the majority of the 57 nations who do.

Following the technological revolution, English has exploded even further, making up over 60% of all content on the internet, and reaching people all over the world with one click of a button. During Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, speakers of English on the planet amounted to an estimated five to seven million. Today, there are approximately 360 million who consider it their mother tongue, and an innumerable number of non-native speakers.

However, with the dominance of one lingua franca comes the demise of countless indigenous languages: UNESCO found that at least 230 languages have gone extinct since 1950, with approximately 3000 more endangered. Linguistics professor Okoth Okombo expressed the gravity of such a loss, stating: ‘The death of a language is like the burning of a library’. This is an exceptionally poignant statement; it illustrates the immense weight that a single language carries in terms of one culture’s heritage, history, nuances and customs. The loss of such a number of languages is a bereavement of the highest order for the world as a whole, for in the language lies the anthropological history of a people and its cultural identity – over 230 unique histories that have been wiped out and replaced by just a few Western languages, English being chief of them.

What we are witnessing now can essentially be construed as a slower and less forceful version of what happened to Ireland and many other of England’s colonial dominions: the English language’s global dissemination resulting, amongst other consequences, in the under-valuing of linguistic variety. In Ireland there were the Penal Laws, forbidding Irishmen to speak or write in their own language. In the modern world, there are unspoken penalties and disadvantages for those who do not speak English, and fewer opportunities readily available, as more and more jobs seek to conform to a globalized working environment by including English in their application requirements.

At first glance, a common language presents myriad advantages, eliminating the cumbersome (and expensive) hurdle of the language barrier in business and diplomacy, and generally facilitating

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international correspondence. In an ideal world, it could only be a benefit for everyone to speak the same language, on top of their mother tongue. In the real world, however, things are not this simple. Despite its vast global intrusion, not everyone speaks English because not everyone can afford to. Linguistic globalisation is a further source of inequality for the many people without the financial means to undergo supplementary English language training alongside their regular obligations.

The toils of the prevalence of English on the individual are particularly striking in a study conducted by Jamie Shinhee Lee. Lee questioned a group of elderly Korean women with little-to-no English on the effects the prevalence of English in Korea has on their daily lives. Unanimously, the participants responded that their inability to understand English was an incredibly debilitating hindrance, also noting that they tend to be perceived as unintelligent and even illiterate by other Koreans for not being able to speak it. For these women, the result is a total dependence on any friends or family members who may speak English. When left alone, these women flounder: one recalls not being able to attend an appointment because she could not find the building, since all road and building signs are written in English; another states her conundrum that the instructions of a vital heart medication are also entirely in English. This is one example of the sad consequences of linguistic globalisation on the individual: Korea, like many countries, desperately wants to keep up with the globalised world, and to do so, it self-imposes a strict but foreign cultural and linguistic singularity, prioritising global commerce over the safeguarding of its own culture and people.

There is nothing wrong with diversifying and enriching a language through loan words and linguistically adopting cultural trends of the moment. Almost every language has borrowed a litany of French and Italian terms: ‘pièce de résistance’, ‘mise en scène’, ‘faux pas’, ‘lingua franca’, ‘stanza’, the list goes on. However, the case of English is different – it pervades every modern language.

Italian writer Dacia Maraini once spoke of the ‘imbastardimento’ (bastardisation) of the Italian language from the plague of English words inserted into common parlance, quoting the word ‘location’ as her most hated example. In other words, allowing English to invade a language too much is a colossal shame, as it begins to chip away at the identity of the language itself. Modern Greek, too, has been grossly westernised in recent years and now uses thousands of loan words from Romance languages. This seems like sacrilege, given Greek’s extremely rich heritage.

Shinhee Lee, J., (2016).

‘Everywhere You Go, You See English!’: Elderly Women’s Perspectives on Globalization and English’, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 13:4, 2016. 319-350

alma.TV (2021). 10 domande a Dacia Maraini [online]. Available at: <https://www. almaedizioni.it/it/almatv/10-domande/10-domande-dacia-maraini/> [Accessed 11 July 2021].

The overarching question remains: do we want to live in such a globalised world, where the loss of richness and heritage of differ Cambridge University Languages and Culture Society | 35

ent cultures simply for the sake of ease of travel and communication is accepted as inevitable? In discouraging linguistic diversity we are gradually resigning ourselves to a world of monotony and blandness.

von Goethe, J., (1893). Maximen und Reflexionen. Helmut Koopmann (Hrsg.), Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag und C.H.Beck, München 2006, (aus der Reihe Kleine Bibliothek der Weltweisheiten, Band 14).

Part of the joy of linguistic diversity is found in the accompanying culture, the linguistic and socio-cultural quirks specific to each one, and, most fascinatingly, the untranslatable terms and idioms that form a crucial part of the rich local heritage. Even foreign language television and film clearly demonstrate differences in cultural mannerisms, modes of expression, and customs. If every director tried to conduct their films in English, for the sake of the box office, assimilating to what they assume to be a universal ‘English’ culture, we would be watching the same films on repeat for the rest of our lives. Part of the reason why many foreign-language shows are so popular is because they provide us with a glimpse of a culture that is different to our own, perhaps even of aspects of life that we might be inspired from. As Goethe once said, ‘Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own’. If we were to live in a world with one language and one culture, our lives would be exceedingly dull, void of any variety, or even friendly conflict – since it is in the encounters and clashes with cultures different to our own where we learn the most about ourselves and people in general. In other words, retaining a singular mind-set can only damage us.

There is such an emphasis in our current world on supply and demand and speed of production, no matter the commodity. I believe this explains why, after the initial colonial spread, English has succeeded in becoming a universal lingua franca, since it seems to provide the ‘simplest solution’ to the ‘problem’ of language barriers. Why bother shouldering the cost of professional translators or interpreters when we can all get by on a common language? If we choose to accept as inevitable the complete dominance of English, we are opting to lose any sense of cultural individuality or variety, and to live in a globalised, homogenised world.

Corradi (2017), as above.

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As Anna Corradi argues, ‘If the preservation of other cultures is given the same importance and value as spreading English is currently receiving, the language can be an addition, not a replacement, to a naturally evolving culture’s array of nuances’. English should be a helpful tool, supplementing other languages rather than extinguishing them. We must pay much more attention to the preservation of cultural nuance before it is wiped out completely, and not allow the mass dissemination of English to take precedence. Therefore, keep learning languages, keep watching foreign films, and keep answering your waiters in Spanish.

Linguistic or Cultural Mistranslation?

Incompatible paradigms at the root of the Sino-European conflict in the 19th Century Juliette Odolant

I

n his reputed work On War, the Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) argues that ‘war is diplomacy by other means’. In response to this, sinologist William Hanes, suggests that in the context of the Sino-European Opium Wars, substance abuse should equally be regarded as such. Language is another important aspect of diplomacy that, though often overlooked, has also significantly impacted the evolution of Sino-British relations. During the 19th century, the Qing empire (1644-1911), now referred to as China, began to crumble under the weight of foreign intervention, demographic explosion and geographic constraints.

The late 18th and 19th centuries saw tensions build between the British, French and Qing empires; European trade interests conflicted with the preservation of Chinese sovereignty and contributed to the outbreak of the destructive Opium Wars. These tensions were reflected in and partially heightened by issues of mistranslation or ‘catachresis’, that is to say linguistic misuse.

One of the most notable cases of catachresis-induced conflict in history is the extended Sino-British dispute over the Chinese character 夷 yi, more precisely its usage, meaning, and translation. According to Lydia Liu in The Clash of Empires, this character alone can be accredited with causing failures of diplomatic missions, stalemates in negotiations, and even outbreaks of

Clausewitz, C. et al., (1984). On War. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. Print.

Hanes, W., and Sanello, F., (2007) The Opium Wars: the Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another.

Sourcebooks.

Liu, L., (2006). The Clash of Empires: the Invention of China in Modern World Making.

Harvard University Press.

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Bruce, J. et al., (1858), Peace Treaty between the Queen of Great Britain and the Emperor of China, Tianjin.

San Tan, K., (2014).

‘Dynastic China: an Elementary History.’

Dynastic China: an Elementary History, The Other Press, 50–51.

Theobald, U., (2013).

‘Yi 夷.’ Yi 夷 [online].

Available at: www. chinaknowledge.de/ History/Altera/yi.html [Accessed 11 July 2021.]

war. While this attribution may be hyperbolic, the word and its implications were clearly deemed grave enough to merit it being banned from use in the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin. Devoting approximately half of her book The Clash of Empires to the analysis of this ‘super-sign’, Lydia Liu claims this ‘monstrous creature’ is the word that has most impacted world history. What is the story behind this contentious word, and how did its (mis)translation affect Sino-British relations? Just how important were language and (mis)translation in 18-19th century Sino-British relations, in an era where so much more appeared to be at stake than a few uttered or written words?

The character 夷 can be traced back to the 商 Shang dynasty (1600–1046 BC), during which its historical form appeared on oracle bones. Until at least the 周 Zhou dynasty (1046-256 BC), it was simply used to denote non-Chinese tribes or generic foreigners and so enforced a distinction between a culturally united China and culturally or ethnically disparate outsiders. Depending on the context, the word could take on a pejorative connotation, approximately meaning ‘barbarian’. When the British initiated commercial and cultural relations with China, the word was not initially perceived as having a negative significance, simply translated as ‘foreigner’ in Robert Morrison’s 1815 Dictionary of the Chinese Language.

It was only in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when Sino-British relations started to decline that the word and its potential meanings began to be problematized. During this period, the British increasingly pressured the Chinese into reducing customs duties and opening other ports to foreign trade; the Chinese government’s resentment grew as the destructive British-fuelled opium trade only intensified. The first notable spike in tensions provoked by the word 夷 occurred as early as 1832, when a supercargo of the British East India company Hugh Lindsay (1802–1881) clashed with a Chinese admiral Wu Qitai over the use and significance of the word. Lindsay, offended by the Admiral’s use of it, drew upon examples from the Chinese classics to prove its pejorative connotation and make Chinese officials refrain from its usage when referring to the British. Recounting the event in his journal, Lindsay’s missionary-interpreter Charles Gützlaff translated the term as ‘barbarians’, interestingly contradicting the earlier dictionary translation, observing that ‘they [applied] it to all strangers indiscriminately’ always with ‘the idea of cunning and treachery’.

In 1839 Commissioner Lin Zexu addressed a letter to Queen Victoria, sovereign of the British Empire. His drastic decrees aiming at severely punishing opium merchants, smugglers and

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addicts and ending the trade had all been unsuccessful, and this was his last resort. Half-threat, half-plea, the document showcases issues of linguistic and cultural mistranslation. Lin himself did not speak English, and Western speakers of Chinese were few and far between, as until 1844 it was illegal for Chinese natives to teach foreigners the Chinese language. He therefore relied on translators and linguists around him to make sense of his words. Despite this, linguistic confusion led to multiple published translations, with blatantly differing contents. Here the issues surrounding the translation of the controversial character 夷 surface once again.

While in an 1840 edition of The Chinese Repository, a translation of the word reads ‘foreign merchants’, in Ssuyu Teng and John Fairbank’s China’s Response to the West a ‘crowd of barbarians’ is used instead. The letter never actually reached the Queen; it was lost in transit in a British ‘mail packet’ (ship containing post) during the 8000 mile journey. However had it reached its destination the former version may have led to a positive imperial response, while the latter would more likely have caused extreme offense and an increase in diplomatic tension; this variation in translations undeniably reflects both nations’ inability to understand each other.

‘Letter to the Queen of England, from the High Imperial Commissioner Lin, and His Colleagues.

From the Canton Press.’

The Chinese Repository, 10 (Feb 10, 1840) ed., XVIII, Kraus Reprint Ltd., 1840, 497–503.

Hanes & Sanello (2007), as above.

The linguistic issue surrounding the character 夷 was resolved during the Treaty of Tianjin in 1858, which concluded the first phase of the Second Opium War. Despite Chinese protest, Article 51 of the Treaty established two elements: the word 夷 was banned from use in official Chinese documents when referring to British citizens and the word’s (English) definition was permanently, artificially fixed by the inscription ‘“I” 夷 [barbarian]’. This peremptorily ended the dispute in a manner that satisfied only the British, furthering Chinese anger, humiliation, and revanchism.

The British justified their inclusion of the article by insisting on the importance of equal terminological treatment; the hypocrisy of this justification within the context of a treaty which was clearly more favourable to the British and thus unequal is almost comical. The dispute over “‘夷/barbarian’” thus reflected and to a certain extent amplified tensions that were already beginning to simmer. The dichotomy established by the word reflected the ultimate incompatibility of two Empires’ world views and claims to sovereignty.

While thus far only the linguistic issues linked to diplomatic tensions have been explored, other catalysts of conflict must be taken into account. This is where Liu stumbles in her Clash of Empires.

Indeed, in an attempt to dramatize or simplify her work, the author grossly exaggerates the importance of the word 夷, going so far as to style the linguistic dispute around it as ‘a life-and-death struggle waged between the declining Manchu Empire and

Liu (2006), as above.

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the rising British Empire’ and attributing ‘the future of China’ to its mistranslation. Nonetheless during the Opium Wars, the inability or refusal of both Britain and China to reach compromise on issues of national sovereignty and power claims, as reflected by the tensions over the word 夷, did ultimately lead to military confrontation. However, it is perhaps more fitting to identify an underlying problem of not linguistic, but cultural mistranslation at the heart of the conflict.

Teng, S. and Fairbank, J. (1994) ‘Lin Zexu’s ‘Letter of Advice to Queen Victoria’, 1839.’ China’s Response to the West: a Documentary Survey: 1839-1923, Harvard University Press.

Hanes & Sanello (2007), as above.

Returning to Lin Zexu’s letter to Queen Victoria with this in mind, the document exemplifies the Qing emperor’s inability to recognize the importance of commercial gains for the increasingly industrialized, powerful British empire. It also reflects China’s continued anchorage in traditional values and systems. Lin relies solely upon moralizing and spiritual arguments, rather than displaying an understanding of the commercial benefits of the opium trade for Great Britain, and attempting to reach a mutually satisfactory economic compromise. Lin displays outrage and disbelief that a nation could ‘bear to go further, selling products injurious to others in order to fulfil [its] insatiable desire.’

Plaguing the Queen with enumerations of rhetorical, moralizing questions, he goes so far as to directly apostrophise her: ‘where is your conscience?’ He urges the Queen to consider how she would react if the English population was the one suffering from a mass addiction and trade deficit: ‘Certainly your honorable ruler would deeply hate it and be bitterly aroused. (...) Naturally you would not wish to give unto others what you yourself do not want’. The letter suggests that both societies functioned with incompatible cultural paradigms linked to underlying ethnocentric stances and that Chinese society, unlike emerging Western powers, perceived itself as still abiding by strict Confucian moral principles and codes of honour. Hanes rightly asserts that the Opium Wars were ‘ultimately a narrative of cultural confrontation – the clash of two worlds, each convinced of their own superiority’.

Tensions caused by these differing cultural priorities were exacerbated by each country’s belief in its own superiority. In a 1792 letter addressed to King George III, the Qianlong emperor displays a lack of cultural tact and presents his confident assumption of Chinese self-sufficiency as a justification for his refusal to facilitate Sino-British trade relations :‘Our ways have no resemblance to yours, even were your envoys competent to acquire some rudiments of them, he could not transplant them to your barbarous land’, ‘strange and costly objects do not interest me. […] we possess all things.’ The prospect of negotiating, let alone reaching a compromise with an inferior tributary state seems unimaginable. It is however important to nuance the assumption that the Qing empire was blindly convinced of its superiority. Despite the

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overweening tone of Qianlong’s letter to King George III, secret instructions to his most trusted ministers indicate that this preening may have been more of an anxiety-fuelled bluff to intimidate foreign powers who the emperor believed would ‘become arrogant [if] treated too favorably’. In a 1793 edict, he expressed concern over a potential British regional trade monopoly, recognizing that ‘among the western ocean states, England ranks foremost in strength,’ and that other states were ‘terrified of their brutality’.

The Qianlong emperor therefore appeared to be somewhat aware of the extent of British power, though he publicly asserted Chinese dominance.

Great Britain was indeed emerging as a considerable industrial power, yet one with an equally ethnocentric perspective. The British were guilty of treating the Chinese with almost identical contempt. Factory records of the East India Company display use of the word ‘barbarian’ to refer to the Chinese from as early as 1721.

This discrimination was not just a matter of individual prejudice.

The mass racializing of the Chinese began in the late 18th century and continued through the 19th with the use of pseudo-science (race theorists, craniologists, physical anthropologists) to prove they were ethnically inferior. Carl von Linné, in his System of Nature, ascribed them to a separate human category, Homo/ Monstrous, which was characterized by bestiality and abasement.

Therefore convinced of its religious and moral righteousness as well as its ethnic and material superiority, the British wanted to be considered at least an equal, if not a superior. It was in this context that conflict surfaced during the Macartney Embassy of 1792-3, during which the British sent out envoys to negotiate the opening of ports and trade agreements in China. Lord Macartney refused to kowtow in front of the Emperor unless a Chinese official reciprocated the greeting in front of a portrait of the British monarch as a symbol of equality. This was refused as the concept of ‘reciprocal equality’ directly contradicted the Chinese belief that the Emperor was the Son of Heaven and thus superior to all. The British embassy was considered by the Chinese ruler as a mere tribute mission, Macartney nothing but a ‘conveyor of tribute’.

The extensive debate over the seemingly trifling issue of a greeting reflected the intense stubbornness of two nations with fundamentally incompatible senses of self-worth.

Peyrefitte, A., and Alexander, W., (1990).

Images De L’Empire Immobile. Fayard.

Liu (2006), as above.

Ethnocentrism is the act of stipulating that the people, beliefs, and customs of one’s own race or country are superior to those of other races or countries.

Hanes & Sanello (2007), as above.

Focusing on the tension and conflict surrounding the single character 夷 during the late 18th-19th centuries can give the illusion that it was central to Sino-British tensions during the build up to the Opium War and Century of Humiliation. Considered within the complex fabric of contemporary social and cultural relations, however, the varying translations of the character seem merely symptomatic of two countries’ vastly different cultures and Cambridge University Languages and Culture Society | 41

equally strong conviction of their superiority. Contrary to Liu’s suggestion, it may be more suitable to hold this great cultural schism accountable for the continued conflict of the period. The refusal of both Great Britain and China to alter their perspectives and resulting views of themselves and each other meant that any hopes of reaching a peaceful, mutually satisfactory compromise were futile. While words can spark wars, they are also essential in resolving them. Sino-European cultural and political differences are more deeply entrenched than linguistic disagreements, and their resolution is a challenge which arguably remains to this day.

On History in Literature Navarro’s Dispara, yo ya estoy muerto Anna Stirk ‘Shoot me, for I am already dead.’

J

ulia Navarro’s 2013 novel, ‘Dispara yo ya estoy muerto’, is an epic narrative covering a timespan from the 1860s to the present day and a geographical area as wide as Russia, Spain, and the Middle East in just under 900 pages. The novel centres on the Jewish experience in Europe in the long twentieth century, which combines in the latter part of the book with a parallel Arab storyline, to discuss the Arab-Israeli conflict and its impact on the region and the characters. As such, it serves as excellent ground on which to debate the role of history in literature and authorial responsibility towards the real people whose stories are represented in fiction.

Given Navarro’s implied attitude to the often-opposing accounts presented by her two protagonists, Ezequiel Zucker and Marian Miller, it is important to consider whether the author has a re-

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sponsibility towards the people whose stories she is depicting. The Jewish experience and the Arab-Israeli conflict are not only emotive and controversial topics for those immediately involved and observers, but also key to the novel. The two protagonists, through whom the wider story of the Jewish Zucker family and their Arab counterparts, the Ziads, is told, represent the two sides of the conflict. Indeed, the narrative culminates in Miller – whose Arab heritage is concealed from the reader and Zucker for most of the novel – attempting to kill Zucker for his perceived crimes as an Israeli against her Palestinian family. It is a powerful conclusion to the novel as an indication of the violence and ongoing tensions of the conflict; the reader is made aware that this is a current issue.

Furthermore, given the extent to which Navarro humanises those on each side of the dispute, making brutally clear the impact of high politics on the characters’ quotidian existence, she cannot be accused of using the conflict for shock value or a cheap plot twist at the end. The length of the novel as well as the lengths to which she goes to discuss different angles ensure this. However, as an author of fiction, how far should Navarro conduct research?

In a book of this scale, perhaps some errors should be forgiven: for the reader, the three generations of the two central families prove difficult enough to remember, without taking into account the overarching political events that shaped much of the action.

One of Navarro’s characters comments at the outset, ‘Te diré algo de ese hombre: es una leyenda’, indicating the scepticism taken within the novel of the various stories being told and perhaps suggesting that the reader would do well to follow suit. This quotation may also suggest Navarro’s stance on this question, in that the characters are fictional or ‘legendary’ and thus some liberties may be taken in representing the general story of a particular group, such as Jews forced to flee Russian pogroms in the late nineteenth century.

‘I will tell you something about that man: he is a legend’

The #OwnVoices movement has great relevance to this debate.

Coined by the writer Corinne Duyvis in 2015, the term argues that marginalised characters – or narratives focusing on their experiences of marginalisation – should be written by marginalised authors from the same group. While this movement has good intentions in seeking to prevent inaccurate representations or ‘trauma porn’ (media sensationalising a group’s pain and trauma for the sake of entertainment), it also presents issues with allowing novels with marginalised characters to be written in large numbers or at all, as a result of the minority status of many of these groups in society and the publishing industry in particular. Thus, this movement has some relevance to the story of Jewish and Palestinian oppression which Navarro seeks to tell in her novel.

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One recommendation of the #OwnVoices movement is that authors carry out extensive research to represent the experiences of others as accurately as possible. Although #OwnVoices originated in Young Adult contemporary circles, the principle can be carried over to historical fiction. The burden of authorial responsibility which #OwnVoices places on individual authors requires significant research to be undertaken, although the more extreme approach of hounding authors to disclose their own experiences of oppression to legitimise their use of certain themes and events has fortunately fallen by the wayside. The evidence of Navarro’s considerable investigation into public events of the time is clear throughout the novel and the glossary of historical events and figures supplied after the conclusion. Following the lines of the #OwnVoices argument, an understanding of the environment in which the characters live is a strong starting point, but Navarro is unlikely to be able to gain a full insight into the mindsets and attitudes of contemporary individuals. However, this is where the label of fiction must be reapplied – Navarro writes fiction, and consequently use of imagination within a framework of comprehension is part and parcel of her craft.

This debate also raises questions regarding the boundaries between history and literature, or fact and fiction, and whether the two dichotomies should be equated at all. Postmodernist historians such as Michel Foucault argue that the pursuit of objective knowledge about the past is futile because historical treatises are mere reproductions and interpretations by the historian and their reader, rendering attempts at precision somewhat pointless. This approach also contends that historians – whether consciously or not – incorporate their own political beliefs and agenda to their own work, in a similar way to nationalist works of fiction. In this view, historical fiction (that is, works belonging to a genre where the plot is set in the past) bears more than a passing resemblance to the writing of history, both being efforts to understand a past which is past and cannot be rediscovered in its entirety.

Consequently, a novel with the scale and historical detail of ‘Dispara, yo ya estoy muerto’ could be seen as itself a valuable historical source, encompassing the long durée of Jewish experiences in Europe and their interactions with Arab narratives. The borders between history and literature may be more porous than they appear at first sight – it would be a difficult task for any reader of this novel to finish reading it without an enhanced understanding of the topic at hand – but this does not reduce the responsibility of the author towards the events and people depicted in her work.

Regardless of whether this piece of historical fiction is conceived of as a historical source, a reproduction, or an invasion of minority experiences by an outside author, the power and ongoing 44 | Polyglossia 2021

relevance of the themes with which Navarro engages cannot be dismissed.

As an illustration of the emotional power of literature which history cannot always achieve, the final scene of the book – briefly discussed above – provides a useful example. Until this point, the reader is unaware of Miller’s Palestinian heritage, given her role as an apparently neutral NGO worker. The subsequent hostility which she exhibits towards Zucker in threatening to shoot an elderly man who she views as the embodiment of Israeli aggression towards her Palestinian family is more than likely to be a surprise for the reader. If the reader has not gained an appreciation of the intensity of the struggle between the two groups in the previous 800-odd pages, the sudden change in Miller’s temperament as she reveals her ulterior motive for gaining Zucker’s trust demonstrates the depth of emotion and vitriol experienced on both sides of the conflict. Navarro’s dual-protagonist approach ensures that the Jewish-/Israeli perspective is given roughly equal coverage to the Palestinian one, which reinforces the inherent subjectivity of fiction in showing how two different individuals respond to the same events in starkly different ways.

Therefore, history and literature have areas in which they overlap and intersect, aiding comprehension of past events. Despite the fictional nature of the work produced by Navarro, its engagement with historical themes and narratives necessitates a similar level of historical research to that conducted by historians. The very real nature of the events and people on which it is based and the real-world impact which it could have demands as much research and sensitivity as possible, in line with a moderate #OwnVoices approach, in order to fulfil the burden of authorial responsibility.

Navarro’s novel is remarkably successful in achieving the combination of fictional narrative and historical accuracy that produces an engaging work of historical fiction, particularly given the scope of the timescales and themes involved.

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A Feral Call Short Fiction by Josué Brocca-Tovar-Kuri

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unday mornings were the days that I felt most at ease with the Brownings. I don’t know if it was the smell of freshly brewed coffee coming out of the family-sized Bialotti in the centre of the table, or the fact that it was the only moment in the week in which I would see them in an attire that wasn’t freshly ironed, but there was something in particular of the passing of those hours that made me feel that there was not as much distance between us as it seemed. The Chiapas sun illuminated the colourful patches of the hand-knit tablecloth as Richard spoke to Anthony about some insignificant piece from the cultural supplement in Milenio and they discussed fervently on the matter. They didn’t reach any conclusions, but they always talked about corruption, even if they had started chatting about regional music. They were both in their mid-forties and had come to the Rodríguez Estate after closing a life-changing deal with Limes and Seeds Unlimited Co. in Belmopán. Although it was their first time in Mexico, they had been doing business in Central America for over a decade — the sweets industry, they said.

They had booked the Hacienda for themselves for the whole summer. It was their own inauguration of a time of bonanza. With them came Liz and Maggie, who were still in their thirties. Richard and Liz brought Bobby along, who would go and try his skills with the Mayan slingshot in the mountainside against scorpions and dragonflies while the adults ate breakfast in the terrace. Maggie was seven months pregnant, and spent most of the summer basking in her room with the AC at its coldest, sunk on the pages of the life-learnings of a Chinese monk with a four-letter name.

Richard wore a Dior gown those mornings and lit a pipe in the middle of breakfast every time. None of the five amongst them seemed to mind the smell of methane of the dozen cheap matches that he used to ignite his handpicked tobacco. Anthony was more of a sports type. He would arrive at the table in a sweaty tracksuit, Airpods still in place, and ask me to bring him a drink. The first time I did it I brought a simple glass of chilled water with rosemary. After quaffing it, he asked me to bring him more in a clay Cambridge University Languages and Culture Society | 47

jug. He said the taste of crystal felt tainted after drinking from mixteca pottery. I could not disagree.

Despite their differences both brothers always had the same to eat.

Their personal favourite was chicken enmoladas with the Hacienda’s own cream and cheese. They sometimes asked me to put a poached egg on top. I tried to convince them twice to have it fried, but they said they had been off oil for too much time to go back to it. Liz and Maggie did not partake. They kept to themselves, whispering to each other about the arrangements for the rest of the day. Maggie was fickle. Her orders went from scrambled eggs with fresh beans for breakfast to chocolate brioche conchas filled with nata, but she would never eat all of what she asked for. Liz had diced fruit with papaya seeds on top. I would bring her a tray with three pieces of white ceramics that contained raisins, yoghurt, and almond honey. She left the raisins untouched, and by the time she left the table flies were already swarming around them. She later confessed to me that she only ate our fruit for its health benefits: “It’s like starting the day with vomit”.

On their third week at the Hacienda they asked me to take them on a day-trip to the Sumidero canyon. I brought a styrofoam icebox along, filled with guacamole sandwiches with gruyere cheese and three six-packs of Corona beer for micheladas. Maggie had stayed in her room with Bobby, absorbed on her Asian meditations while he hypnotised himself watching Minecraft videos on YouTube.

Through our boat ride on the canyon, the Browning Bros sunk deep in conversation, discussing whether black jaguars could be considered a type of panther. Richard mimicked the animal, gnarling at his brother. “What would you do if you were caught off guard by it in the middle of the jungle? All your training would prove useless. I don’t care if you can run 10 miles in sixty minutes, you still won’t be able to escape the reach of his claws. Snip-snapclack: give it a few hours and you’ll soon be on your way to be a pile of kopi luwak in the depths of the Mictlán. That’s when you’ll know what it means to love God in the land of the Mayans”. Richard jumped at his brother, grabbed him by the neck, and rubbed his knuckles against the centre of his bald spot. Anthony struggled to get out of the wrench, causing the boat to tumble from side to side. The rest of us clenched the edges of the boat waiting for it to regain balance. After Anthony managed to pull himself aside, he caught his breath back in a big laugh and asked me for a “michelada por favor’’. Richard fixed his pipe and had a smoke, smiling to himself. I could tell the Big Cat was still growling in his head.

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Beto, the teen captain of our expedition, led us into the centre of the Sumidero, where he decided to stop the engine so that we could enjoy the view. The sun was setting, and the roar of the cicadas gave the air a crusty texture. The water laid in violent stillness before us while our faces got covered in a haze of light rain. Liz ate her sandwich in silence. Her phone sat on the table at the centre of the boat. She was playing a small video she had just recorded of the landscape, but the screen didn’t do justice to the eruption of the sunset against the splendor of the place. I went to Beto and asked him in Spanish if we could loiter there for another hour, while I tucked two five-hundred peso bills in the front pocket of his worn-out guayabera. Richard’s orders. He smirked complacently, laying back against the engine. He clutched his knees with both his hands and turned his head to the water.

Richard and Anthony’s discussion went past the point of lightheartedness. They talked about their Papa, who was already battling the wearing of dementia. He had apparently been involved in some type of scuffle at the asylum he was in. Richard laid out the details with solemnity. The crack in their voices grew deeper as the soothing sounds of summer wrapped the brothers in a buzz.

They held each other by the shoulders as they drunkenly dozed off.

The silhouette of Liz cast its shadow from the chair next to me.

Her eyes reflected the last rays of sun that bounced in the water. They smiled at me. She closed the distance between us and laid her brunette head on my chest. It was drenched in sweat. A mosquito circled around my beard. I felt the urge to reach out and crush it. I decided not to as the jungle night closed its hearth on the five of us.

Beto lit a flashlight and turned the boat around. I hadn’t eaten yet.

I decided to grab a beer and a sandwich from the icebox. It was all mostly water inside it. All of the food had gone wet, and the cheese had a rubber-like sensation now, so I washed every bite down with large sips of beer. The Coronas were still pleasantly cold.

Every morning at the Hacienda I raked the verandah with the boys. When the winds were strong, it was usually covered in a violet tapestry of bougainvillea flowers, sometimes accompanied by tarry spots of zapote fruit that had splashed the vine. I was in the middle of this routine the day that Richard walked to me and asked me for a word. We walked the edges of the mountain while I told him the story of Kukulkán, and how in central Mexico people know this deity by another name. “Some friar even said that he was actually St. Thomas, who had arrived at the Americas long before the expedition of the Spanish Crown”, I smirked, “but he Cambridge University Languages and Culture Society | 49

was really the God of Wind.” Richard cut my digression short. He said that in the evening he was taking a plane to New York City to catch up with a friend from Japan —an architect— whom he hadn’t heard from in a while. He asked me to make sure that all the Brownings were well catered to. “I’m mostly concerned about Maggie. Tony has quite a busy week ahead and you know that he burns most of his free time with his workouts. Please make sure that she has everything she needs.” I nodded. We made preparations for his departure immediately.

No more than 72 hours later Maggie’s water broke in the middle of the night. She called me in tears, while trying to soothe herself by taking large breaths. We put all hands on deck. The Rodríguez Hacienda offered a child-delivery service with local midwives who had a better reputation than most obstetricians in town. I rang them and called the boys to prepare the meditation hall for the occasion. We brought her into the hall still in her nightgown.

Her skin glistened with the redness of the coralillo flower as she walked stoically to the middle of the room. Anthony was deeply agitated, but he preferred to stay away from the action, struggling to contain the tumult that churned in his stomach. Liz and Bobby had heard the stir. They arrived at the hall before us. As two ladies bandaged Maggie’s shins, the boys opened the gate to bring in the tub and started to fill it with warm water. Magdalena, our eldest partera, told us to leave the room. “El marido se puede quedar”, she told Anthony, who was already entrapped by the vision of the new role that the universe was about to assign him.

Bobby, Liz, and I sat patiently for hours in the fibre chairs that stood outside the hall. The child had brought his tablet along, and was listening to a record of anime theme songs that I told him to download from Spotify. Liz had a book of poetry in her satchel, but she was still half-asleep. I killed time fetching items for them across the Hacienda to hide my own impatience. A large quilt to warm both of them. The cushions from the Billiards room. A glass of juice for the boy. A cup of green tea for her. I even prepared a shot of espresso for myself. Bobby asked me to take him to the bathroom. Liz fell back asleep. We walked to the tennis court to do some star jumps. The sun started to rise. Bobby was entrapped watching a ladybug caught in a drop of dew. When we returned to the hall, his mother was already inside, enraptured by the image of Maggie’s wet arms holding the newborn against her loving chest. Anthony’s face blossomed into a smile. “Lorenzo, what’s the word for Jaguar in Mayan?” he asked me in whispers. “Balam”, I said, as the hall’s wooden floor croaked with the steps of the crowd. The baby’s eyes shone fearlessly at the dawning of his mother.

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Later that night Liz came to my room. She rested her satchel and her poetry book on my armchair. A reproduction of some oil painting of an Italian lady with a ceramic pot stared at us from the calendar that clang to the bathroom door. Liz put her head against my chest again. She asked if she could take a lock of my hair to plant it at her house. I cut it off myself.

Durch die Gitter blicken Confinement and Liberation in the Early Work of Arno Schmidt Jack Graveney

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o the vast majority of people, the name Arno Schmidt means next to nothing. Perhaps they know him as the ‘German Joyce’; they may think of his monstrous Zettels Traum (1970), a text of such imposing proportions it demands a lectern to be properly read; they may have heard something of his character, the hermit of Bargfeld, the literary curmudgeon par excellence.

If they are Germans of a certain age, perhaps they remember the controversies and legal cases surrounding his works’ supposedly pornographic and blasphemous content, so distasteful to the palate of the 1950s. All of this is to be expected: Schmidt’s carefully cultivated personal mythology, the artwork of his life, has left an exoskeleton of legend around his oeuvre. It has also ensured him an obsessive clique of devotees, the so-called ‘Schmidteists’, a small army of fine-toothed-comb-wielding super-fans dissecting his works for the tiniest of intertextual allusions and philological wisecracks.

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What it has not done is convinced the average reader that he is worthy of their time. Only textual engagement – ideally of the most naïve kind – can achieve this. Where to begin? Perhaps with Aus dem Leben eines Fauns (1953), Schmidt’s main consideration of the Nazi period in Germany and one of his more accessible works, as it is still anchored in historical reality, its author not yet having withdrawn entirely from society into the musty cloud of literary cross-pollination which engulfs his later efforts.

‘mosaic’ or ‘porous’ (Original quote from Schmidt, A., (1995).

Essays und Aufsätze 1. Zürich: Haffmans Verlag.)

‘My life ?! : is not a continuum ! (not simply fractured by day and night into white and black pieces ! For even by day they are all different, the fellow who walks to the train; sits in the office; bookworms; stalks through groves; copulates; smalltalks; writes; man of a thousand thoughts; of disintegrating categories; who runs; smokes; defecates; listens to the radio; says ‘Commissioner, sir’ : that’s me !) : a tray laden with glistening snapshots’.

(Original quote from Schmidt, A., (2005).

Nobodaddy’s Kinder.

Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.) ‘sense of an »epic flow« of events’ (Original quote from Schmidt (1995) as above.)

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What meets the reader’s eyes when they open this text, the Faun?

Before the content of the work, its formal features: a series of jutting fragments – ‘paragraphs’ would be generous – each beginning with a number of words in italics and filled with a further series of words, a sizeable proportion of which are not to be found in any dictionary. In turn, these are arranged within a stubble field of frantically deployed punctuation marks. Schmidt called this ‘musivisches’ or ‘löcheriges’ narration, and it represents one link in his chain of attempted formal convergences upon effective mimesis in literature, seeking to imbue the written word with a directness usually only images can lay claim to. On the first page of the Faun, he offers, through its protagonist Heinrich Düring, an explanation and justification for this method, which also conveys a sense of his prose’s character: Mein Leben ?! : ist kein Kontinuum ! (nicht bloß durch Tag und Nacht in weiß und schwarze Stücke zerbrochen !

Denn auch am Tage ist bei mir ein Anderer, der zur Bahn geht; im Amt sitzt; büchert; durch Haine stelzt; begattet; schwatzt; schreibt; Tausendsdenker; auseinanderfallender Fächer; der rennt; raucht; kotet; radiohört; »Herr Landrat« sagt : that’s me !) : ein Tablett voll glitzernder snapshots.

The self is fragmented, Schmidt argues. Any constancy – let alone holism – is illusory, and literary attempts to smooth out fragmentation simply perpetuate illusion. In his essay ‘Berechnungen’, Schmidt writes of the impossibility of conjuring immediately, in momentary consciousness, the ‘Gefühl eines »epischen Flusses« der Ereignisse’ of either present or recent past. When we summon them to our minds, events and emotions never appear handily ordered in pre-arranged chapters and categories; they invariably lack coherence and direction. Writing fiction is – amongst other things – an act of remembering; it should therefore be true to the jolting contours of this most irregular process, which means a stream of consciousness perpetually disturbed by dams, rapids, gorges, and spurs.

Seelandschaft mit Pocahontas (1953), a work for which Schmidt and his publisher Alfred Andersch narrowly escaped legal consequence, also plays with the idea of narration as unmediated remembering. Here, the method of choice is the ‘Fotoalben-Form’, combining a short initial paragraph presented in a rectangular box (the photo) with a somewhat longer ‘explanatory’ text (the label or description). In the same essay, Schmidt fleshes out the analogy: when we invoke a particular memory, there appear ‘zunächst, zeitrafferisch, einzelne sehr helle Bilder…um die herum sich dann im weiteren Verlauf der »Erinnerung« ergänzend erläuternde Kleinbruchstücke (»Texte«) stellen’. Remembrance appears here not as transcendent synthesis but rather vivid slideshow, chaotic bricolage. Crucially, these devices are not just gimmicks; in so accurately shadowing cognition’s distinctive tread they allow Schmidt’s works to penetrate the reader’s mind at a deeper level than the artificial fluidity of more traditional narration.

The uniqueness of Schmidt’s narrative forms is, however, perhaps not the most compelling reason to read him. For me, he is at his best as an observer of nature and man, crafting effervescent metaphors for the former and orchestrating the latter’s social interactions with hilarious precision. Take this description of the sky from the opening ‘photo’ of Pocahontas: ‘auf buntgesticktem Himmelstischtuch…vom Wind geblaut, ein unsichtbarer Teller mit Goldrand’. Luxurious imagery continues to embellish the text, from the Saar’s ‘langen Nebelbaldachin’ to bats carrying ‘schwarzen Markttaschen’ and the ‘Schaumkraut der Wolken’. The clouds, the sky, the water, the trees – even in his most yawning misanthropic abysses, these never cease to inspire Schmidt.

In turn, these abysses – of snobbery, disdain, despair, rage – are drawn inside out, mined for their creative potential, imbued with intellectual and comedic energy. In the Faun, Schmidt unfurls a red-hot dynamic of mutual contempt as Düring and his superior discuss a work project, captured in both the former’s initial assessment of his boss – ‘er sah aus, als ob er sehr scharf an nichts dächte’ – and the latter’s tone when enquiring as to his knowledge of foreign languages: ‘ganz zögernd, als wärs hoffnungslos’.

Düring enthusiastically retaliates when the time comes to prove his proficiency in English conversation, aping his interlocutor’s ‘mangelhafte Aussprache’ in the hope that this conscious underplaying of his abilities will be recognized. Common to these observations is their suggestion of performance, the core of disingenuity and calculation conveyed above all by the repeated ‘als’ or ‘as though’. With this word, Schmidt speaks to the gap between intention and reception, between what is said, what is meant, and how it is interpreted, and therefore to the cliff-edge of consciousness, where mind falls away and becomes world. The possibilities this

‘initially, like a timelapse, very bright individual images…around which, as the »memory« continues to play out, smaller supplementary explanatory fragments (»texts«) gather themselves’.

(Original quote from Schmidt (1995) as above.)

‘on the colourfully embroidered tablecloth of the sky, wind-blued, an invisible dish with a golden rim’.

(Original quote from Schmidt, A., (2015).

Seelandschaft mit Pocahontas. Die Umsiedler.

8th ed. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag.) ‘long baldachin of fog’ ‘black market bags’ ‘bitter cress of clouds’ (All from Schmidt (2015) as above.) ‘he looked as though he were thinking very intensely about nothing’ ‘with great hesitation, as though it were hopeless’ ‘flaw-ridden pronunciation’ (All from Schmidt (2005) as above.)

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disjunction offers are, of course, both comic and deeply alarming.

‘oration on the zone border’ (Original quote from Schmidt, A., (2004).

Das steinerne Herz. 12th ed. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag.)

Toolan, K., (2014). ‘An Interview with John E. Woods’, Context (24), 29 [online].

Available at: <http:// www.dalkeyarchive. com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/24context_final0320.pdf> [Accessed 8 April 2021].

‘square-shaped room’ ‘silence. Never found again. No longer seeing anyone.’

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Schmidt’s fixation on the contortions of social interaction, and in particular the motif of deception, reaches a fever pitch in Das steinerne Herz (1956). Its plot is simple yet characteristically bizarre: the mild-mannered and middle-aged Walter Eggers poses as a travelling buyer, rents a room with and seduces the married Frieda Thumann, a granddaughter of the obscure 19th-century statistician Friedrich Jansen, all in the hope of completing his collection of the Hannoversche Staatshandbücher compiled by her ancestor. This calls for various impostures (which Frieda ultimately sees through), whilst also taking in an elaborately concealed theft from the Berliner Staatsbibliothek and a series of admirably neutral reflections on life either side of the Berlin Wall. Schmidt’s was the first novel to seriously consider the lived experiences and relative virtues of East and West, most notably in the ‘Rede an der Zonengrenze’, with Eggers earnestly mulling over the merits of each state as he straddles the inner German border and urinates.

Das steinerne Herz exemplifies two of the most distinctive and appealing features of Schmidt’s oeuvre: his ‘heroes’ and his works’ genre-bending resistance to classification. What the title page proclaims – despite it being set in the present – as a historical novel is just as easily read as a romance, a crime or mystery, a picaresque novel, or an adventure story. John E. Woods, the translator behind The Stony Heart, has even described Schmidt’s works as ‘fairy tales for adults’. Eggers correspondingly oscillates between swindler and lothario, ascetic savant and erotic aesthete.

They are a strange bunch, Schmidt’s ‘heroes’: politically left-leaning obsessive autodidacts; fixated on sex although deeply terrified of women; arrogant and filled with contempt for humanity, yet surprisingly free of introspective miseries, being anchored instead in factual exteriority – tables, numbers, maps, encyclopaedias.

These early protagonists radiate the authenticity of idiosyncrasy, an individualism which has breached the jungles of solipsism and resolutely set up camp.

None guarded their camp more steadfastly than Schmidt himself.

One imagines him patrolling the borders of his final dwelling in rural Bargfeld, driving away journalists and overzealous fans.

This desperate desire to retreat finds expression in both the Faun and the Herz. Düring takes a heathland hut occupied by French deserters in the Napoleonic Wars as his place of refuge from Nazi society. Likewise, when asked after his personal ideal, Eggers paints a monstrous picture, of a ‘quadratische Stube’ filled with books, relieved of urges to eat or drink, left only with ‘Stille. Nicht mehr aufgefunden. Niemand mehr sehen’. Most telling here is the aghast reaction of Karl, Frieda’s husband, who proclaims Eggers

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‘decided bête [beast, fr.]

(All from Schmidt (2004) as above.)

‘Let me be. I’m ill suited to being a literary mannequin’.

(Kämmerlings, R., (2014). ‘Autor Arno Schmidt: „Beim eigenen Heiligenschein nachts lesen“. Welt. [online].

Available at: https:// www.welt.de/kultur/ literarischewelt/article123864405/Beim-eigenen-Heiligenschein-nachts-lesen.html [Accessed 8 April 2021].)

a ‘dezidierte Bête’, reinforcing the connection between animality and sovereignty suggested also by Düring’s metamorphosis into the liberated ‘faun’.

When we venture beneath the tightly banded shell of these texts, what we hear is no less than a stifled gasp for freedom. Above all, this is a freedom which consists in negation, a freedom from rather than a freedom to: from society, from literary convention, from every judgement and expectation, from all but the seething self. In many ways, this is the ultimate transgression – more of a transgression than Schmidt’s bilious atheism, his assaults on the Adenauer regime, and his aggressive depictions of human sexuality in a culture of post-war repression. It is something one is allowed to say but not to mean. Schmidt stands alone in the sincerity and variety of his transgressions and boundary-crossings; it is, more than anything, these contraventions which give his writings such value. Ultimately, no one knew this better than he. As he wrote in 1953, rejecting Martin Walser’s invitation to join the prestigious literary Gruppe 47: ‘Lassen Se man: ich eigne mich schlecht als literarisches Mannequin’.

EDITORIAL TEAM Editor-in-Chief & Design: Marion Willingham Deputy Editors: Jack Graveney & Juliette Odolant Sub-Editors: Anna Feest, Zak Minett & Suchir Salhan

IMAGE CREDITS Page 21: “Statue anthropomorphe, Province de Mahajanga, Milieu du 20e siècle” by y.caradec is licensed with CC BY-SA 2.0.

Page 30: “The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford” by Michael Brace is licensed with CC BY-NCND 2.0.

Page 46: “Ex-hacienda Gogorrón - SLP México 2008 2060” by Lucy Nieto is licensed with CC BY-NC 2.0.

Page 55: “Norbert Barth: Arno Schmidt mit Kater Hintze an Zettels Traum, ca. 1955” by wolfgraebel is licensed with CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

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