HOLY MISCHIEF: by Debra Roberts and Filiz Telek

A Living Language by Filiz Telek I was sitting quietly at the back of a dimly lit classroom. A stove kept us warm on that cold winter day. There were about twenty children, their ages ranging from six to eleven. The teacher, a friend of mine, was trying to teach the alphabet to the first-year students. There was a lot of commotion in the room: some of the younger ones were wandering about, others were shouting questions and waving their hands, while a few just sat there with glazed eyes, unsure of what was happening. What struck me about the situation was that even though all the students — and my friend, the teacher — were Kurdish, he was patiently trying to teach them to read and write in Turkish. This was a primary school in a tiny village in a predominantly Kurdish region of southeastern Türkiye. The year was 2009, and it was my first visit to this part of the country. I remember feeling raw and perplexed, witnessing the little ones wrestle to read and write in a language they did not speak. It broke my heart that my friend — their teacher — wasn’t even allowed to speak Kurdish in the classroom, causing all of them to struggle so much. It just didn’t make sense. What could be so threatening about children being educated in their mother tongue? The harsh reality of politics over people punctured my privileged naivete in that moment. The politics over culture. The politics over living things — the land, the children, the languages. The politics over everything that matters … it all stung. More than fifteen years later, I still can’t shake that sting. Listening to a For The Wild podcast episode titled “Illuminating Worldviews On Land, Language and Love” recently, I am deeply moved by a story X̱’unei Lance Twitchell tells from his native Alaska about Tlingit language¹: “And then she proceeded to tell the story about being a five year old girl. First day of school, her oldest sister said, “Don’t speak Tlingit at the school. Don’t do it. You’ll get in big trouble.” But she’s five years old, and this is the language that she knows. All the kids in the 1920s, they know that language. All the Tlingit kids that go to this … They had to go to their own school there. And so she goes, and she’s speaking Tlingit with her friends. And the school teacher — she said she was a big lady — she calls her up in front of the class, and she grabs her by her hair and lifts her off the ground and shakes her violently, saying, “I’m going to hit you if you do that again,” and drops her on the ground. She’s hurt. She’s scared. She’s crying. She goes and grabs her stuff. She’s embarrassed. And she makes this long walk home crying and so, so terrified.”² I am haunted by humans’ capacity to inflict suffering upon each other. After millennia of colonizing the Earth and one another, we are witnessing the slow collapse of a civilization built on power-over, scarcity, and the myth of “the winner takes it all”. I find myself in utter disbelief about the state of worldly affairs and the lack of basic human decency, every single day. In the darkest moments, I feel intimidated, impotent and defeated. And yet, a deeper knowing, not limited by time and space, quietly stirs inside me and resists the tyranny of “this is the way it is”. I seek refuge in a particular language, even in my solitude and devotion to nature. Gustav Klimt’s forest paintings The notion of belonging traditionally revolves around ethnicity, genealogy and geopolitical mythologies. Even language could be used as a cultural and political weapon for producing and policing identity. But there is even a bigger threat looming over us in the age of technology, particularly with the arrival of AI: Losing our agency to understand the language as a living being that welcomes us into this world and creates us … Mother tongue, a lullaby made of sounds of the untamable Earth that lives in us as birdsong, howling wind, rushing river, silent night, and ancestors speak to us of harvest, generosity, of gratitude. What if mother tongue is an invitation for a broader relationality in which we discover a deeper sense of belonging in this life?  FOR MORE