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 twisted grafting of huma