Ideas 0: Language Shapes Memory
This is a longer-form post, the first of the series I’ll simply call “Ideas.” Don’t take this as a commitment to more frequent news (it might happen—I’m still working out some balance) but do expect more of these.
I recently had a Black and Green moment. I call it this in reference to Brian Dooley’s book “Black and Green: The Fight for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland & Black America.” It was a Black and Green moment between myself and my husband who is very connected to his Irish heritage. The conversation ended up being about the power of words in shaping collective memory.
Language as a tool of forgetting
My husband had gotten into a heated discussion about the word “famine” in reference to what’s happening to the Palestinians in Gaza. Someone had spoken about how regrettable the famine was (now that it had officially been deemed a famine) and this really triggered his ancestral rage. As a descendant whose ancestors fled to Turtle Island from Ireland during the Great Hunger, he is very aware of the language used to discuss forced starvation—an atrocity which is always the outcome of human-driven policy decisions and norms. From his perspective, the word “famine” has historically been wielded as a tool of forgetting and a way to remove human decision-making as a contributing factor. Rather than being understood to be caused by policies and choices, famine is instead attributed to nature. These catastrophes are not identified as genocidal policy outcomes; instead, they are laundered into unavoidable acts of God. His point was proven by the same person who brought up famine in the first place: when my husband mentioned the “Potato Famine,” this person responded “That wasn’t caused by a bug?”
The Great Hunger (the so-called “Potato Famine”) in Ireland was not caused by a bug or a bad harvest alone. While a blight contributed to food insecurity, it was the policies of the British colonial government enforced by wealthy landlord collaborators that insisted what little food was grown be sold for export. The Irish working the land starved, often facing retaliation from landlords for daring to grow their own food for subsistence. The government weighed whether or not to send food assistance and opted to leave the Irish to fend for themselves. The Choctaw Nation sent money for food to County Cork in 1847 while the colonial government did nothing to aid the country as its people were starved. Another historical atrocity that comes to mind is Stalin’s Holodomor which devastated the Ukrainian population.
Class is always the caveat
The Irish experience sounds familiar to what we see now every single day. Some like to throw monkey wrenches into the argument for why an occupying power has the responsibility to protect its subjects. They say things like “Some people clearly have food.” Well, the starvation of a region will look like that. To quote a close friend, “Class is always the caveat.” Those with the most resources (and the most power) can access what they need at disaster premium prices and everyone else is left to scrounge for the scraps that are left. Fishermen have been shot at. Alleged aid sites distributing paltry foodstuffs have been used as killing fields. These are not acts of God. They are choices of men.
“I got in an argument about the ‘famine.’” As he recounted the experience, I began to understand. At first I even found myself unwittingly explaining away that we’re all referring to the technical definition. But that’s not how language works. It didn’t matter that either of us may have been referring to famine in the technical sense, what matters is what the word “famine” evokes in our collective memory. When we think of famine, do we first think of nature or of policy? That is the power of language in shaping memory.