“I nga mo, J”
I’m writing to my colleague and my first task has been to look up the greeting that he would use in his mother language. It takes a bit more time than just assuming I should use ‘Dear…,’. It’s a tiny gesture but that additional effort at equity and courtesy, of placing myself in the position of linguistic vulnerability, can matter.
When I do this, the response is a face full of smiles or an email full of emojis. When I don’t, it’s perfunctory and my linguistic dominance and the knowledge systems which underpin this remain untroubled.
In his work on the social bond, the theologian Rowan Williams speaks of how society is remade anew, on a daily basis, in the social rituals of meeting, greeting and eating. The time we spend together at a table, or setting the tone and following the greeting and meeting protocols of any place or community is a strong determinant for how to get a common task, a piece of work, a potential idea underway.
It’s in these almost fleeting encounters that Mary Douglas, in her work on symbols, saw decisions being taken about safety, power, possibility, comfort. I’ve watched myself recoiling on many occasions when, in the conferences of the Global North, the first thing we do is tell people the Wi-Fi code and where the fire exits are. How to get out of the room where we gather, rather than how to attend to where we are, is signalled as the most important protocol.
We aren’t going to decolonise migration research by doing it in English. Hillary Footitt’s report from The Listening Project is full of excellent guidance and a challenge to all English language-using researchers to pause, and switch things around. This is not simply a matter of courtesy or researcher integrity, it is about ensuring the rigour of understanding, and forming proposals, projects and work solutions in the languages through which they will be enacted. It is about challenging the power dynamics of languages, and making attempts to renew and set a different course.
But this doesn’t mean our research must be perfectly bilingual or multilingual. Rather, that it might accept re-conceptualisations from other languages, and move towards different cosmologies and ways of understanding. It also means being as knowledgeable as possible as to the way the languages used by people migrating will bear a rich variety of improvisations and terms they have come to find will help. Usually, with eating, greeting and meeting – establishing courtesy, safety and trust.
What might this look like? I’m writing this in Aotearoa New Zealand, a country at the forefront of attempts to decolonise language through the revitalisation of te reo māori. Listening to the English here, it is not an English I know, not even in the academic settings which will begin with ceremony in te reo. To write, to speak with integrity, language needs to morph.
A little like this.
Po ki runga o whiria
For Piki
There is a mountain
In the saltair of the north
Where Tane Muhuta
Stands guard
Watching the breakers.
Your Maunga
where sea meets slopes
and spring smiles.
A haven.
Rahariri
Is laughing as Tamanuiterā
Bejewels Moana
and Tāwhiri-mātea
Tangles with our hair
For a while
Ranganui ceases
his weeping
absorbing the dew
From Papatūakanu
Tamariki of Matariki
race to the peak
flowers in extended hand
manaaki making and
in my palm,
Taonga indeed
Kia Kaha
Wāhine
She lilts
Kia maia
my precious ones
She murmurs
Kia manawanui
She whispers
turning us in a circle
And calling us
home.
Kia ora
Thank you
Oye wala do