| Note |
JL: I just have one very small question to follow. You spoke about altering the syntax of a very colonial language that we’re still using at the moment to communicate and everything. Just a little bit more about that. When you’re engaging in that process and that writing of that effort of trying to sort of build, almost, relation through language, you were saying, but also to build a particular kind of perspective, and you were talking about the complications of embodied “I,” but what’s that like? Does English still resist in some ways, and then how do you sort of go about really literally sort of decolonising the very sort of terms that we’re using?
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CN: Trying. So, part of it can be simply practical things of around how we juxtapose language and so we may be creating meaning or alternate meanings, or we might be um revealing more about the context or the meaning of something. There’s no innocent words. We can do things with how we place them that heighten and highlight elements that we’d like to have brought out, so that’s just a practical thing. We can reduce and undermine language too, and make it silly, we can make it selfish, we can do things that make, show, and reveal its tendencies. We can work with sound and rhythm and for me, and I’ve learned this more in my more recent book project, but um, really really giving over to um motion and movement, sound, rhythm, as a device I suppose, or kind of a formal thing, but also as a freeing thing, because it’s different from what language does. Which is not to say that when we speak, you know, we do have rhythms and cadences, it’s necessary, part of how we hear each other, there’s lots of connotations and the ways in which we use language that is inflected with sound and volume and tone and how we you know but um that can get more and more deliberate, or we try to get more and more deliberate in the context of poetry, and you do believe it has some power that maybe supersedes the actual meaning and formality of just expository language. |