Language as a Witness
"Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl." An extremely dubious claim, that one. Or so I believe. How does one tame language- how does one make language tremble with desire? How does one fish out from its universal inadequacy, the artful conceits that ornament the utterances of war-mongers? How does one filter language into white squares of grief, and how does one stretch it across 1.5 million acres of mutilated life-worlds? Language is a refugee camp supervisor; language is a discarded relic of identification buried in the rubble. Language is the misplaced nuqta نقطہ that turns aab آب into aap آپ, disrupting- while also equating- life-forces. Language is a unresponsive lover; language is the matchmaker of disjointed signifiers. How do you discipline language; how do you make its unruly metaphors line up to form the defining sonnet of an epoch? The word, out here, is the overlord. Patiently overseeing the twist...