By
Obododimma
Oha
Na
mbu ka o bidoro (It started from the outset), or the
put it more playfully, for the tautology to be more obvious to us, (It began
from the beginning!). Beginning from the beginning, humans become very curious
when certain things are forbidden, when they are not allowed access to certain
things. They become hungrier when they are told that they should not taste
certain things. Can’t you see that people become more interested in knowing
what or who is inside the raffia skirt in many African masking cultures, or now
that the masking communities have more fully become Christian, the person of
the pastor or reverend is now the “new” masquerade on stage that some curious
ones try to unmask at all costs! There is something about the human persons
that makes the forbidden or the “ugly” attractive to them! In our languages,
there are some expressions that bring up some areas we do not want to talk
about, at least, in some circles. If we have to talk about those, we mask the
expressions; we euphemize them, as if we want to hide them. In short, humans
are always pretentious in their use of language; hypocritical!
Expressions in
language that we pretend are the “bad” ones and which, all the same, are
favourites for learners of “new” languages who
want to begin right from the beginning are sex words (maybe the most prominent!),
curse words, and words that refer to things considered by many as “ugly.” These
sad and less privileged aspects of language find vent in the initial efforts
made by people who desire to learn new languages. Those people manifest the
human attitude of playing the hypocrite, accepting what they pretended to
reject. Or, maybe these “bad” expressions were never bad, were never
rejected, in spite of what our moralities tell us.
What is the attraction
humans have to expressions that refer to sex and sexuality? The sex points,
physiology working to their advantage, are mainly the hidden places. In a
simple but illogical logic that religious ones like a lot, this hiddenness
suggests that we should not talk about them! If the maker had meant them to be
talked about, he would have put them in our view; he would have located them
where we can see them when we look into the mirrors! Funny thinking! But, that’s
where we are; that’s where we are with our human language and thinking in this
age. Shallow graves, if you ask me.
The location of the
body parts has nothing to do with how often they have to be talked about, and
whether we have to talk about them! But what is even more interesting is that
we always excavate them when we try to learn languages thoroughly. We have to know everything. Language is also
about knowledge, about knowing the world. No masking. No keeping of expressions
from our views, or we think the person does not really want to teach us; the
person may have something to hide from us. We sense hostility and draw back.
We want to be
thorough and that is when we remember that language learning requires returning
to the basics. Ordinarily, hardly do language teachers design their curriculums
to include expressions referring to sex. The farthest they can go in elementary
schools (where they are not sufficiently elementary
in some societies anyway) is body parts. But it is not all the body parts
they point out to the children. Some remain areas of silence, and so the
children can postpone their curiousities till later in life when they could
dabble into sex and dabble out of it. If the teachers have to reflect this
depth on sexual parts and sexual expressions, they may lose their jobs and
termed immoral people in some contexts. In my own society in Nigeria, now that
faith-based academic institutions are springing up like mushrooms here and
there, their teachers that like their jobs should not just reflect sex on
language teaching manuals! That could be viewed as a symptom of an illness by
those who hold conversation with the spirit. Worse still in Catholic seminaries
because the seminarians and novices will one day become priests who are not
supposed to marry or spend nights thinking about sex and what they have missed.
The desire must be killed, beginning with the expression!
Now, why is someone
learning a “new” language interested in curse words? Is that person learning
the language to be able to curse, to be able to curse back when cursed? Maybe.
That is part of the search for security through language. I know that individuals
care for how they are viewed by others through their expressions (same old
hypocrisy!) and desire to be seen as “good” fellows. We do not often associate
people who carry enormous luggage of curse words with decency. Moreso, if the
fellow is a woman and curses often! Or talks freely about sex. Such a free-talking
woman is doomed in a patriarchal and hypocritical society. Irredeemably doomed: no husband, no boyfriend. Only exploiters of
her looseness and what she could freely give, maybe. I should think the desire
for thoroughness and the desire to know when something is said to our disadvantage,
when talkers do not wish us well and we have to be cautious or design effective
strategies for dealing with them, may also be among those reasons for making
the learning of curse words a priority. That is well in line with the key
reason for learning the “new” language: we want to be linguistically safe; we
want to be able to tell the speakers of the language that we know what they
know; that we can access this through the language.
As I pointed out at
the beginning, it all began from the beginning.
We are in light, but we desire darkness. We want to know darkness and how it feels.
Even if we build a Trump wall to separate “good” expression from “bad" one,
there could still be an occasion for “good expressions, out of curiosity, to
bore a hole in the wall to talk to “bad” expressions or to conspire with them
how to come over!
Comments