My dear friends:
Languages serve to communicate. But they don’t just “serve.” They transcend that practical function. Languages cause us to be. And sometimes, just as in the story I mentioned, they cause us to stop being. We are born and we die inside speech; we are beholden to language even after we lose our bodies. Even those who were never born exist within us as the desire for a word and as a yearning for a silence.
Our lives are dominated by a reductive and utilitarian perception that converts languages into the business of linguists and their technical skills. Yet the languages we know — and even those we are not aware that we knew — are multiple and not always possible to grasp with the rationalist logic that governs our conscious minds. Something exists that escapes norms and codes. This elusive dimension is what fascinates me as a writer. What motivates me is the divine vocation of the word, which not only names but also invents and produces enchantment.
We are all bound by the collective codes with which we communicate in our everyday lives, but the writer seeks to convey things that are beyond everyday life. Never before has our world had at its disposal so many means of communication, yet our solitude has never been so extreme. Never before have we had so many highways, and yet never before have we visited each other so little.
I am a biologist and I travel a lot through my country’s savannah. In these regions, I meet people who don’t know how to read books. But they know how to read their world. In such a universe where other wisdoms prevail, I am the one who is illiterate. I don’t know how to read signs in the soil, the trees, the animals. I can’t read clouds and the likelihood of rain. I don’t know how to talk to the dead, I’ve lost all contact with ancestors who give us our sense of the eternal. In these visits to the savannah, I learn sensitivities that help me to come out of myself and remove me from my certainties. In this type of territory, I don’t just have dreams. I am dreamable.
Mozambique is a huge country, as huge as it is new. More than 25 languages are spoken within it. Ever since independence, which was achieved in 1975, Portuguese has been the official language. Forty years ago, only a tiny minority spoke this language, ironically borrowed from the colonizer in order to disaffirm the country’s colonial past. Forty years ago, almost no Mozambicans had Portuguese as their mother tongue. Now, more than twelve percent of Mozambicans have Portuguese as their first language. And the great majority understands and speaks it, stamping standard Portuguese with the imprimatur of African cultures.
This tendency towards change places worlds that are not distinguished only by language, in confrontation with each other. Languages exist as part of much vaster cultural universes. There are those who fight to keep alive languages that are at risk of extinction. Such a fight is an utterly worthy one and recalls our own struggle as biologists to save animals and plants from disappearance. But languages can only be saved if the culture that harbours them can remain dynamic. In the same way, biological species can only be saved if their habitats and natural life patterns can be preserved.
Cultures survive for as long as they remain productive, as long as they are subject to change and can dialogue and mingle with other cultures. Languages and cultures do what living organisms do: they exchange genes and invent symbioses in response to the challenges of time and environment.
In Mozambique, we are living in an age when encounters and disencounters occur within a pot bubbling with exuberance and paradox. Words do not always serve as a bridge between these diverse worlds. For example, concepts that seem to us to be universal, such as Nature, Culture, and Society, are sometimes difficult to reconcile. There are often no words in local languages to express these ideas. Sometimes, the opposite is true: European languages do not possess expressions that may translate the values and concepts contained in Mozambican cultures.
I remember something that really happened to me. In 1989, I was doing research on the island of Inhaca when a team of United Nations technicians arrived there. They had come to carry out what is generally known as “environmental education.” I don’t want to comment here on how this concept of environmental education often conceals a type of messianic arrogance. The truth of the matter is that these scientists, brimming with good faith, had brought with them cases containing slide projectors and films. In a word, they had brought with them educational kits, in the naïve expectation that technology would prove the solution to problems of understanding and communication.
During the first meeting with the local population, some curious misunderstandings emerged that illustrate the difficulty of translating not so much words but thoughts. On the podium were the scientists who spoke in English, myself (who translated their words into Portuguese), and a fisherman who translated the Portuguese into the local language. It all began when the visitors introduced themselves (I should mention here that most of them happened to be Swedish). We are scientists, they said. But the word “scientist” doesn’t exist in the local language. The term chosen by the translator was inguetlha, which means “witch doctor.” In those folks’ eyes, therefore, the visitors were white witch doctors. The Swedish leader of the delegation (unaware of the status conferred upon him) then announced: “We have come here to work on the environment.” Now, in that culture, the idea of the environment has no autonomous meaning and there is no word that exactly describes such a concept. The translator hesitated and eventually chose the word ntumbuluku, which has various meanings, but refers above all to a sort of Big Bang, the moment when humanity was created. As you can imagine, these island folk were fascinated: their little island had been chosen to study a matter of the highest, most noble metaphysical importance.
During the course of the dialogue, the same Swedish member of the delegation asked his audience to identify the environmental problems that were of greatest concern to the islanders. The crowd looked at each other, perplexed: “Environmental problems?” After consulting among themselves, the people chose their greatest problem: the invasion of their plantations by the tinguluve, or bush pigs. The tinguluve, interestingly, are also believed to be the spirits of the dead who fell ill after they stopped living. Yet whether they were spirits or pigs, the foreign expert didn’t understand very well what these tinguluve were. He had never seen such an animal. His audience explained: the pigs had appeared mysteriously on the island and had begun to multiply in the forest. Now, they were destroying the plantations.
“They’re destroying the plantations? Well, that’s easy: we can shoot them!”
The crowd’s reaction was one of fearful silence. Shoot spirits? No one wanted to talk or listen anymore, no matter what the subject. And the meeting came to an abrupt end, damaged by a tacit loss of trust.
That night, a group of elders knocked on my door. They asked me to summon the foreigners so that they could better explain the problem of the pigs. The experts appeared, astonished by this interruption to their sleep.
“It’s because of the wild pigs.”
“What about the pigs?”
“It’s because they’re not quite pigs…”
“So what are they, then?” they asked, certain that a creature couldn’t exist and at the same time not exist.
“They are almost pigs. But they’re not complete pigs.”
Their explanation was going from bad to worse. The pigs were defined in ever more vague terms: “convertible creatures,” “temporary animals” or “visitors who had been sent by someone.” Eventually, the zoologist, who was by now getting tired, took out his manual and showed them the photograph of a wild pig. The locals looked and exclaimed: “Yes, that’s the one.” The scientists smiled, satisfied, but their victory was shortlived, for one of the elders added: “Yes, this is the animal, but only at night time.” I have few doubts that, by this time, the experts doubted my ability as a translator. In this way, they didn’t need to question what they were saying, or query how they had arrived in an unknown locality.