Artikel
NEWSPEAK: FRAME BY FRAME
30 juni 2016
A critical approach to the use of language can take up extremes, as you can see within student communities who consider certain words, certain phrasing as micro aggressions and demand targeted warnings in classes when some texts pass that might be an offence to their identity.
But just as much, this need for new vocabulary, new phrasing (different words) exposes the way habits and even worldviews are concealed behind the careless use of certain words. These should be taken to task, for instance because they maintain stereotypes about certain groups of the population.
At the same time there’s a lot of spinning and framing going on, and especially when political objectives are at stake. Populist politicians in the Netherlands are framing the refugees that fled Syria as a “refugee tsunami” and the males among them as “testosterone bombs”; it’s just an example, framing is not restricted to populism, of course.
Literary texts sometimes come under fire too. In a new edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the words ‘injun’ and ‘nigger’ have been replaced by ‘Indian’ and ‘slave’. Of course, the original words are derogatory, but this use of language was exactly what Mark Twain wanted to denounce. A similar unease about certain words is also imaginable in poetry. Should Lucebert’s classic poem (Lucebert is one of the more famous Dutch poets) that opens with the lines: ‘a big grumpy negro has descended in me / who does things within that no one sees / not even I for it is dark there and black’, be rewritten too?
Does this sensitivity about language and the criticism, the judging, the intolerance, the fanaticism that goes with it, has any effect on poetry? Does poetry has to relate itself to this discussion? Poets usually are aware of what is going on in the discours about language, in the public debate about intolerable language, but can one trace something of that debate in contemporary poetry? If not, is that a problem?
On this subject Festival Poets Maarten van der Graaff, Aase Berg and Lisa Robertson and Laurens Ham, a lecturer in Modern Dutch Literature at Utrecht University (whose current research focuses on themes like literary authorship and the relation between literature and the political domain) shed their lights.
Laurens Ham talked about language, diversity and the need to listen to what other people think
Maarten van der Graaff spoke about the opposition of dirtiness and purity in reading and writing and contemplated on the implications of the hyphen in the term Judeo-Christian.
Aase Berg demonstrated the necessity for hacking language by way of several of her poems.
Lisa Robertson spoke about the function of language as an agent of empathy and a means to refuse decorporalisation and advocated listening for absent words.
Language. We think with it, we write with it, we talk with it – and about it. There are good reasons to talk about language on a Poetry Festival. nThere are quite some language issues poetry brings along (like the use of tropes, metaphores, paradoxes or the sound and rythm of a poem), but as much of interest is the widespread discussion about the subtext, the hidden ideological layers of everyday speech, and if and how poetry has to relate itself to this linguistic sensitivity.
Social media – an indicator for what's on people's mind – explode because people fight over words. Understandably, when words express a pejorative or discriminating vision, reveal prejudices of a racist or gender discriminatory nature. But a lot of people feel themselves offended by the way others express their opinions, by too much or too little tolerance, by being too elitist or too populist.A critical approach to the use of language can take up extremes, as you can see within student communities who consider certain words, certain phrasing as micro aggressions and demand targeted warnings in classes when some texts pass that might be an offence to their identity.
But just as much, this need for new vocabulary, new phrasing (different words) exposes the way habits and even worldviews are concealed behind the careless use of certain words. These should be taken to task, for instance because they maintain stereotypes about certain groups of the population.
At the same time there’s a lot of spinning and framing going on, and especially when political objectives are at stake. Populist politicians in the Netherlands are framing the refugees that fled Syria as a “refugee tsunami” and the males among them as “testosterone bombs”; it’s just an example, framing is not restricted to populism, of course.
Literary texts sometimes come under fire too. In a new edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the words ‘injun’ and ‘nigger’ have been replaced by ‘Indian’ and ‘slave’. Of course, the original words are derogatory, but this use of language was exactly what Mark Twain wanted to denounce. A similar unease about certain words is also imaginable in poetry. Should Lucebert’s classic poem (Lucebert is one of the more famous Dutch poets) that opens with the lines: ‘a big grumpy negro has descended in me / who does things within that no one sees / not even I for it is dark there and black’, be rewritten too?
Does this sensitivity about language and the criticism, the judging, the intolerance, the fanaticism that goes with it, has any effect on poetry? Does poetry has to relate itself to this discussion? Poets usually are aware of what is going on in the discours about language, in the public debate about intolerable language, but can one trace something of that debate in contemporary poetry? If not, is that a problem?
On this subject Festival Poets Maarten van der Graaff, Aase Berg and Lisa Robertson and Laurens Ham, a lecturer in Modern Dutch Literature at Utrecht University (whose current research focuses on themes like literary authorship and the relation between literature and the political domain) shed their lights.
Laurens Ham talked about language, diversity and the need to listen to what other people think
Maarten van der Graaff spoke about the opposition of dirtiness and purity in reading and writing and contemplated on the implications of the hyphen in the term Judeo-Christian.
Aase Berg demonstrated the necessity for hacking language by way of several of her poems.
Lisa Robertson spoke about the function of language as an agent of empathy and a means to refuse decorporalisation and advocated listening for absent words.
© Jan Baeke
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