Nuraliah Norasid 3
Details
Nuraliah Norasid 3
Metadata (MODS) |
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| Titles | Nuraliah Norasid 3: Clip 3 |
| Name | Nuraliah Norasid |
| Name | Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Type of Resource | sound recording-nonmusical |
| Genre | Interview |
| Identifier | Interview |
| Identifier | Nuraliah Norasid Interview Clip 3 |
| Abstract | Nuraliah Norasid discusses how she conceived of the languages in The Gatekeeper in relation to the physical bodies of the different races and their social organisations. She explains her decision to use the medusa as a central figure in the novel. |
| Extent | 8:12 |
| Form | sound recording |
| Note | Joanne Leow: I wanted to get your view about how you see this invention of this new language in relation to the ecology, the natural world around it, the migrations into this island, and everything like that. What is that relationship between the language and the placemaking, the worldbuilding? [0:15] Nuraliah: The language itself took me six months to even think about, and to develop it. What happens is that, in terms of the relationship—the Tuyuns are the, you could say that they are the natives of the island, they have just been there for the longest time. And so, then they have this language, Tuyunri, and the language itself is actually very tied to—and I was thinking in terms of, how is language tied to culture? And how is language also tied to the environment? Because obviously we don’t create language for things that we really cannot comprehend—things that we cannot imagine even, or fathom, it just doesn’t have a language. Maybe there might be an image, but eventually there would be a language with which we can still narrate that, but can we think of something that we don’t think about? Is there a language for that non? I was thinking in terms of that. So, for the Tuyuns, what do they need to communicate? They would need to communicate, definitely, the relations between one person to the other, and also they would need to communicate time of day, activities, and then because I was thinking they’re a hunter-gatherer society—tribal society—so they would have to communicate, location of prey, location of edible food, edible fruits and so on. And these would translate into language. So, I came up with words for the things that they would need to communicate in the environment. And then I also thought about the fact that after the Tuyuns, the Scereans were—because it was mentioned that they have a very close working and trading relationship—the Scereans, because they came from—because they are the swamp, marsh dwellers—and then they came from South Ceras, and then they would have to communicate. And the thing is that, the interesting thing about lingua franca is that it develops even, let’s say, in the Malay Archipelago, and then everyone speaks a very different dialect, and it comes together—but then the thing about the lingua franca is that it has to work to communicate common things between two groups of people, and yet at the same time it has to also be simple enough for two groups of people to be able to speak it, which is why, if you think about languages, there are lingua francas, they are a little bit easier to just grasp, Malay, for example. And so, I was thinking that, when the Scereans came down, they actually speak Sumayan, and so what happened is some of the words from Sumayan would actually translate into Tuyunri as well, and then so Tuyunri would have some of those words that can be communicated. So, yeah, I was thinking in terms of that, and then I was thinking, how would it sound, like, it would have to sound… language and the way language sounds has a lot to do with biology. But also the environment plays a huge part, because sometimes some languages would need to be forceful, because they’re in an environment where you need to communicate maybe over long distances; you articulate words that can be heard from the person over there. But then in smaller spaces there’s no real need to be very loud. For example, Malay is actually very flowy, I guess, I think people tend to live in pretty close proximity, I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong in this one. So I was of what Tuyunri would sound—and then if they are hunters trying to communicate to another person, another hunter over there, it would have to sound very natural to the environment, it would have to sound like a call, like an animal call, and the animals probably won’t think too much about it. So, it’s probably guttural, very back of the throat, and then because their scales resemble the bark, and the rocks, and so that’s also played some part in the way it falls into your voicebox and the way it shapes your body, so I have to think in terms of that, too. [4:22] Joanne Leow: The last part with the body is just really really cool. What struck me the most, I guess, when you were describing the way you were thinking about language was that those bodies, again, and also the kind of indigeneity of the two sisters to the island. In some senses—and we haven’t talked too much about this—the medusas themselves, why pick them? Specifically, why pick them in the context of the island? Are they, in some ways, almost physical embodiments of that land? What does that mean, really? [4:51] Nuraliah: The interesting thing is that between Barani and Ria, both of them are not endemic to Manticura, especially Barani. And it’s in the way I crafted their two characters as well. Barani’s hair, actually, the vipera barani, which is endemic to Turkey, so, and then her features are also not very local, so she’s very tall, her eyes are very close to violet, and then she has really high cheekbones, where Ria is much much closer. It’s almost as if she is molded by the land and then birthed from it, because her hair is the naja sumatrana, which is the black spitting cobras of Sumatra, so, that is already pretty much embedded in the Malay Archipelago, then transposed into this world, and her skin is pretty much very close to the environment. It’s almost as if she could just stand there and she would camouflage. With Barani, I specifically wanted her to seem a little bit foreign, but then at the same time, and that’s where we think of migration, isn’t it, there’s a high chance that Barani would be from somewhere. Ria may not be completely endemic, but this part that environments—and I mean environment does play huge role in molding people—they have a way of molding people. Choosing medusas, huge, huge question, simply because it is so outside of Asian mythology, or Malay mythology for that matter, and so on, because it’s very embedded in what people keep viewing as Greek mythology or Roman mythology, but that’s the thing, that in my research, what happens is that even the figure of the medusa picked off from even earlier Neolithic, not even from like, the Mediterranean Mesotopia[sic]. And then they, even the Mesotopians[sic] picked up the figure of the snake goddess or the snake woman from much, much earlier cultures before them. And, it is almost a common line when it comes to thinking about snakes and its relation to women. I grew up actually reading about the White Snake, Madame White Snake. In the Malay mythology or folklore, there are mentions of snakes. The reason why I chose medusas is also, in a way, to show what we keep thinking is cultural borrowing may not be so alien after all. In terms of such imageries and figures, it can flow into a culture, and then that culture shapes it in one way or another. So that was that, and that’s why the sisters have—I mean, the way they are being drawn or written, and then the descriptions of the snakes and so on—it is meant to show that there is that movement, that flow, and then after that there is that molding that happens. So, I wanted them to seem very foreign, or to have a certain foreign aspect, and yet this very grounding familiarity to them. So, I was just playing around with that. |
| Access Condition | Contact Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Subject Geographic | Pacific Ocean |
| Subject Hierarchical Geographic | Asia--Singapore------Singapore |
| Subject Local Name | ----Communication--Culture--Embodiment--Pacific Ocean-- |