I wrote a post explaining - a little verbosely - how By the Feet of Men came about and how important it is for every creative voice (even those with the smallest audience) to scream from the rafters about the climate crisis until we all wake up and do something drastic about it.
Thanks to Kate Vane, who has written four (!) books of her own. All of which look tasty.
https://katevane.com/2019/06/17/guest-post-grant-price-author-of-by-the-feet-of-men/
Brexit, white supremacists in the White House, far right rumblings across Europe, ethno-nationalism. It feels as though humanity is on a knife edge at the moment. We’re standing there in the snow, clinging to the mountain ridge, hoping our footing is strong enough to keep us where we are. But a katabatic wind is buffeting us, our fingers and toes are numb and we don’t know which direction to go in. Wouldn’t it just be simpler to slip over the edge and slide down the mountain into oblivion? To accept that we’re not going to get out of this situation, to give up, to bow our heads to the forces trying to knock us off our perch and let them do it?
Well, no. Of course not.
Any movement or group that spreads hate and discord relies on its ability to create a fear of the Other. Othering individuals, communities and cultures is fundamentally based on the assumption that that which is being othered represents a risk to our way of life, to what we know and understand about our individual or collective sense of Self. Still, these groups aren’t the only ones doing it. In fact, alienation comes quite effortlessly to most of us, even if it isn’t our intention. It happens in our conversations, in the risqué jokes we make among friends and family, in our snap judgements of people on the street, in the influential media we consume, at home and work, in the condescending interactions we have on holiday. It can be conscious or unconscious. The latter is perhaps more damaging than the former—if you don’t know you are othering someone, how can you stop it?
When a foreign word is highlighted in italics—i.e. one that is not part of the language in which the text is being written—it becomes Other. Syntactically, it still belongs to the sentence; semantically, it has been set apart, singled out, left to fend for itself. It has the same effect as placing a big red arrow underneath it. When it has been italicised, your eyes can’t help but stumble over the word. They see it, they stop, they look at it again. They are taken out of the reading experience to consider that single word, to see it as something alien. And then they dive back into the safe waters of the familiar, eyes gliding over the page, devouring the words that haven’t been italicised. When the next italicised word appears, the sense of Other is compounded. They can see it, further down the page, in the next sentence, on the same line. They know it is alien. Perhaps this time they don’t stop to mull it over. They jump over it as though it is an obstacle in the road.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, the notion of Us vs. Them crystallises, becomes the standard. Even if the aim is to highlight the uniqueness of the word, to celebrate it, to signpost it so that the reader won’t trip over it, the result is still one of Entfremdung. If the word is not the same, then it does not belong. If it does not belong, it is not to be wholeheartedly trusted. And if the word cannot be trusted, then the people to whom the word belongs and the culture surrounding it cannot be trusted either.
In The Penguin Modern Classics edition of Burmese Days by George Orwell, there is a brief, but interesting explanation on the use of italics in the novel:
“Almost fifty words have been italicised at every appearance. One effect is that Orwell’s story is presented as he would wish: it is the British who are aliens in this society and the language in which the story must be told—English—is itself alien to the host people.”
Here’s an example:
“The old butler was hurrying from the servants’ quarters, thrusting his pagri on his head as he came, and a troop of twittering chokras after him.
‘Earthquake, sir, earthquake!’ he bubbled eagerly.
‘I should damn well think it was an earthquake,’ said Mr Lackersteen as he lowered himself cautiously into a chair. ‘Here, get some drinks, butler. By God, I could do with a nip of something after that.’”
The butler is immediately othered through the italicised use of the term ‘pagri’. Instead of adding the suffix ‘headdress’ or receiving an explanation (‘pagri, a turban typically worn by Indian males’, for example), we understand only that the butler has thrust something strange on his head, making him strange by association. This, coupled by the fact that he has no given name other than butler (despite being an ‘old’ butler who has probably been at the clubhouse for a long time) and ‘bubbles’ rather than speaks like Mr Lackersteen, establishes him as an entity that has no real place within the rarified clubhouse atmosphere. In addition, the butler is followed by ‘a troop of twittering chokras’. On first read, it seems as though the chokras are an animal of some kind, perhaps birds (twittering) or monkeys (troop). In actual fact, they are boys employed as servants for the white men at the clubhouse. All we understand, however, is that they are Other.
This is exactly the problem and the power that lies with using italics. It causes immediate alienation, creates a dividing line between host and hosted (or perhaps invaders and invaded). And while Orwell applied this technique to lay bare the hatred, hypocrisy and intolerance surrounding British colonial rule, many other works have no such ambition to fall back on.
Giovanni’s Room is a wonderful, complex novel, a natural successor to the Isherwood novels of the 1930s and a gateway to the gay literature of the 1960s and 1970s. One thing Baldwin does consistently throughout the novel, however, is to mark French words in italics almost to the point of parody. For example:
“He was sitting bundled up in his greatcoat, drinking a vin chaud.”
And:
“‘I’ll see you later. A tout à l’heure.’”
And:
“It was observable, through open windows on the quais and sidestreets, that hoteliers had called in painters to paint the rooms.”
In the three examples above, the italics serve only to keep reminding the reader that the novel is set in France, France, France. There is no social commentary being made here, no attempt to force the reader to contemplate the horrors of colonialism or forced occupation. Baldwin’s intention may have been to put the reader in the shoes of David, the US protagonist, as he seeks to unpick the existential knots binding him to the streets of Paris, but the attempt falls short when one considers that David has been in Paris for over a year and has clearly mastered the language. He is at home in this environment, more so than in the USA, a country to which he has no desire to return. Moreover, the words highlighted are so banal. Vin chaud is simply mulled wine. A tout à l’heure is a repetition of ‘see you later’. A quai is a quay. And an hotelier is...an hotelier (a word used in English since around 1900, according to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary). Why use italics at all?
Compare this to the following passage from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things:
“The bald pilgrims in Beena Mol began another bhajan.
‘I tell you, these Hindus,’ Baby Kochamma said piously. ‘They have no sense of privacy.’”
In this example, Roy turns the use of italics on its head brilliantly, choosing to highlight a word in English as a way of underlining the superiority complex of Baby Kochamma, a Christian, when confronted by a group of Hindus. It is not the bald pilgrims who are othered after starting to sing a bhajan (a spiritual song); they are accepted, natural, integrated. Instead, it is the educated, English-speaking Baby Kochamma who is framed as prissy, conceited and out of step with the rest of her environment.
If the intention is not, like in Burmese Days, to reinforce the sense of alienation between the foreign word and the English-language text, I would argue that it is better not to italicise the word at all. If the reader wants to look up the word later (or immediately), then they will, but don’t rely on the typographical equivalent of stringing fairy lights around the front of a house. Embed it within the rest. Make it part of the whole. It’s more constructive to build bridges than to dig trenches. After all, we’re all standing up there, on that knife edge, wondering which way things are going to go. Navigating a safe route down starts with the language choices we make and how we use it with one another.
Home doesn’t have to be something we cling on to like crazy people.
My publisher has now listed By the Feet of Men on NetGalley, where it will remain until the launch date (1 September). If you have a NetGalley account and would like to read it, please click on one of the links below (UK first / ROW second). All reviews are welcome, as they will pretty much make or break the book.
For the dear UK readers
For the rest of the world
Miserable things I found out this month include:
In Poland, Coca-Cola sent empty plastic bottles (with green labels) to influencers asking them to recycle the bottles, share their efforts online and encourage people to create a world without waste. The plastic bottles weren’t old ones that had already been used; they were new. This is the kind of behaviour that future generations will look back on and absolutely despise us for. Maybe they’ll even hunt down the people who came up with ‘initiatives’ like this and try them for environmental crimes. Fingers crossed. In any case, the Caligula years will thankfully be coming to an end pretty soon, whether we want them to or not.
The Botswana Democratic Party has decided to lift its elephant hunting ban, because stocks have rebounded to 110,000, and a few of those 110,000 are being a nuisance to farmers, killing a few unfortunate people and generally not respecting man-made boundaries. Instead of seeking a solution that is beneficial to both spheres (such as ramping up eco-tourism), preserving a critical part of a delicate ecosystem, protecting a species ranked as ‘vulnerable’ on the IUCN Red List, and continuing to set an example to the rest of the world, they’re going to let overweight white men with small dicks shoot elephants in the chest until the problem goes away and everything is fine.
McDonald’s has released a vegan burger in Germany to cash in on that ethical dollar. This is one of those things where nobody is going to be right, but: for me, it’s a little like when Tony Soprano, an outsized sociopathic bastard who was awful to pretty much anyone he locked eyes with, did something a little bit nice (like, say, deciding not to kill someone) and the audience thought “ah, I guess he isn’t so bad after all”. Yeah, a vegan burger might be a step in the right direction, but McDonald’s is a brand that is wholeheartedly committed to animal genocide. It’s better to not support it at all. Only by taking a concerted stand against the concept of corn-engorged, bloodstained fast food will it one day become possible to liberate the global food supply from the hands of companies that couldn’t care less how much animal suffering they cause or how sick we become from eating what they serve us. The ‘value for money’ card doesn’t play, either - nobody who is eating a vegan burger at McDonald’s is doing so because they can’t afford to buy normal vegetables. Let’s be honest - by and large, veganism is the privilege of rich white people. And these are the people (as usual) who are influencing the discourse being taken here. So why not - instead of succumbing to laziness, hunger pangs, idle curiosity or whatever - do the right thing and ignore these pedlars of misery? They’re just trying to tempt you back into the fold.
The world’s population is now nearing 8 billion. I remember when it reached 6 billion as a kid (in 1999) and was amazed at how quickly it then went on to hit 7 billion in 2012. Now, just 7 years later, we’re close to the next milestone. I suppose it’s not so surprising, actually. More people equals more sex equals more babies. But the question is how long this is going to go on for. Do we just keep having babies until the systems in place can no longer support us and everything collapses? Modified monoculture crops paired with chemical fertiliser (the innovation that allowed the population to grow massively in the first place - cheers, Justus von Liebig) are already eating away topsoil at a catastrophic rate, contaminating rivers and groundwater, killing the insect population and killing natural diversity. The food we eat is, by and large, unhealthy and unnatural, and this will become even more so as we desperately strive to feed every new mouth that comes into the world. These cycles, in turn, produce more CO2, the thing we need to somehow suck out of the atmosphere in order to stop the Great Acceleration from turning into the Great Human No-brakes Joyride At High Speed Into A Wall of Extinction.
But the question is why exponential population growth, caps and limitations aren’t part of the political discussion. I mean, I know why - it’d be political suicide. You can’t take a person’s right away to have a baby. Even so, if we’re changing the way we eat, changing the way we travel, changing the way we consume and use resources and changing the way we speak (climate change > climate crisis), why shouldn’t we change the way we populate the Earth? Even a cursory glance at the World Population Clock reveals our current approach (which is to do absolutely nothing at all) reveals how unsustainable it is to simply allow people to have as many kids as they want. What I’m certainly not saying is that a cap should be forcibly imposed. That’s fascism. There is a whole raft of religious, educational and socioeconomic issues to contend with here, too. But population growth should at least be a much more vocal element of the conversation on the climate crisis, and it might get people to think more about whether they do actually want to bring another child into a world already groaning under the weight of civilisation. Stuart Aken (who was kind enough to review my book) has some more coherent thoughts than mine on this.
Music with no discernible flow because nothing makes sense anyway:
Tyler, the Creator - Igor’s Theme
IDLES - Mercedes Marxist
Autoclave - Dr Seuss
Holly Herndon - Alienation
Ellen Allien - Free Society
Red House Painters - Between Days
Critical Defiance - 507
Tim Hecker - That world
ominous audrey.