I noticed recently the physiotherapist’s tone of voice when he worked with a client. I listened very carefully to the choice of (new) words. When the hip flexors he asked to be activated refused to awaken, he suggested lifting the knee. He spoke the words a little louder, firmer. The injured leg listened.
I first came across the phrase “tired language” in Sara Ahmed’s book Living a Feminist Life. It was three years ago —three lifetimes ago when I thought I was a feminist and sought my feminist “development” in the prison of the American academic institution. I don’t remember much else from the book. It is the only thing that has remained breathing in me, albeit on a ventilator. Feminism, development, and “western” academia succumbed to the tiredness and died unpeacefully in their restless sleep. Unlike Gaza, I have a good supply of body bags for all my tired learning. They are in very marked graves.
My end-of-term paper for the class, Womanist Feminist Decolonial Worldviews, was about tired language. It was my desperate attempt to understand the fragility of the learning spaces I was contorting myself to fit into. I was often afraid to speak lest my language -my life- triggered the delicate ears it tried to reach. “Triggers” and their derivatives flew all over the classroom policing truth and lived reality, often hitting me in the face with such force that made me question myself. It was exhausting for my tongue to “Goldilocks” my truths into palatable bites.
My Arab tongue and I were out running one rainy morning in early October. I never liked the rain, but that day I was grateful for my tears to be washed with heaven’s. My [non-fragile & always trigger-ready] American friend messaged to check on me. “How are you?” “Maq’houra,” I wanted to tell her. My English language was spent of words. How do I explain what was raging through my heart? Where do I start? I tried to find a translation. There was none. The tired words could not possibly hold the breathtaking, back-breaking weight of injustice, lies, pain, and webs of narrative steel spun by American imperialism and its minions.
I shared my response on social media. It traveled far and wide and continues to this day. It is not tired. It is the exact opposite of tired: activated, determined language to disrupt the wilful coma of ignorance inflicted on humanity by our structures and systems.
My paper was an invitation to call out tired language, one of a host of symptoms of overall stagnation experienced by even well-meaning justice warriors. It was also a cautious call to suggest rage, confrontation, and fire are vital to activism and social justice work. Rage is what has captured the world’s attention to the century-old settler-colonial project on Palestine. Fire is what will liberate her.
A quick (albeit mental and very limited) review of titles of published papers in the humanities indicates that rethinking, rereading, reframing, reclaiming, deconstructing, dismantling ... are frequently employed. (I am out of breath just writing them.) Sara Ahmed describes this frequency as “words that travel furthest” and in so doing essentially do less.
In Aphro-ism. Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters, the disruptive (and insightful) Ko sisters offer a critique of “intersectionality,” liberal academia’s (well-traveled) word/concept of the century.
“Intersectionality is a wonderful and useful tool to help oppressed folks navigate current systems of oppression that we never created, but it was never designed to map out the future. This is, in part, why some movements that claim to be “intersectional” feel stagnant; they keep dogmatically regurgitating the same analyses. Many intersectional movements assume liberation rests in finding newer intersections of oppression and creating new terms to add to the lexicon of oppression. These activists tend to replicate cosmetic diversity under the guise of intersectionality.”
Palestinian resistance has put down the markers -and the countless intersection maps of “intersectionality.” They are walking liberation.
Merrium Webster defines bypassing as circumventing, neglecting, or ignoring. Tired language is an expression of linguistic bypassing that can best be described as a de-souling of language: sucking the life/breath/soul out of words –and out of our world. This is an intentional process of arming by de-arming: weaponizing language by robbing it of its potency and purpose. World leaders are masters at this. Their minions follow suit, then pick up their coloured markers and return to their maps and intersections. Their legs don’t move. Recently, “durable peace” has been making the rounds. I cannot tell you how tired the phrase is. It is so sick of the tongues that speak it. It is disappointed in the ears that receive it unquestionably. It is tired of being tired and begging for eternal rest.
Ahmed writes,
“When someone offers us new information that should disrupt our framework, many of us cling even harder to our viewpoints and frameworks because we're scared to change. There is seemingly nothing worse for an activist than being introduced to a new perspective or theory that challenges the way you've been doing things.”
Palestinians have offered the entire world “new information.” They have presented a “new perspective” that not only “challenges” the tired status quo, it blows it to pieces. My ears have rebelled. They refuse to receive the tired cliche of “changing the narrative.” Between you and me, what is a narrative anyway but a spinning of tales -lies and Golidlocked-truths?
Palestine is not a narrative. Palestine is the truth.
Ahmed explains how choosing words that do less becomes the strategy of safe activism. “Ironically, then, choosing words that do less becomes a strategy, almost as if to say, doing less is as much as we can do.” In reality, “less” is the status quo: enrichment of a powerful few, oppression of the rest, and destruction of the planet. Motaz Azaiza called the world out recently in an interview where he said that ending a genocide requires more than pressing like on a social media post. His statement hit me like a ton of bricks, or in the tired language of my former classroom: it triggered me. I have done nothing to end the genocide other than touching buttons. My fingers are as tired as my language.
There is evidence that the more oppression some of the non-triggered witness, the more they insulate themselves in perceived safe cocoons. In contemporary society, there's a growing sensitivity towards language and concepts that might trigger emotional distress or discomfort. This sensitivity has been pointed out by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, who describe it as a symptom of what they term "the coddling of the American mind." This fragility towards triggering language can be seen as part of a broader trend where certain heuristics, or simplified rules, are treated almost like religious beliefs, with adherence to these rules becoming increasingly prevalent in societal discourse.
Pray for “peace in the Middle East” is a religion.
We must take things personally. We must be triggered. We must be enraged. Being radical requires you not only to be informed of what is happening in the world but to be uncomfortable and very triggered. It requires moving legs. Ignorance and so-called safety serve the status quo. The status quo is an evil murderous, pillaging complex.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer explains that the vast majority of words in Potawatomi are verbs. These express life, movement, action. She writes, “English is a noun-based language, somehow appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things. Only 30 percent of English words are verbs, but in Potawatomi that proportion is 70 percent.” She also reveals that Potawatomi is non-gendered language and that nouns and verbs both are animate and inanimate. Curiously, the only inanimate words describe human-made material.
“... [I]n Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family. ... rocks are animate as are mountains and water and fire and places. Beings that are imbued with spirit, sacred medicines, our songs, drums, and even stories, are all animate.”
There is so much work to do. Our tired language is struggling to keep up. Our activism and civil duty is to ignite the spark to trigger the trigger. In our classrooms, we must demand to “deconstruct deconstruction.” Vandana Shiva writes in Earth Democracy. Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, “Ghandi was asked what he thought of Western civilization. He responded ‘It would be a good idea.’”
It would be a good idea. The leg must lift.
So we keep talking, keep trying, keep writing, release old ideas and welcome new ones. It’s a never ending journey of disrupting what we think we know in search of what we don’t. All in the name of love for one another. 🙏🏻
Thank you for sharing this piece. It is profound that genocide is a noun and nonstop killing, dying, and suffering would be better description for the “verb” nature of ongoing slaughter and injustice. I feel as though I’m re-wiring my mind and realizing that it is not as hard as long as I don’t resist the change.