The hoary aphorism reminds us that the pen is mightier than the sword. By this, we understand that physical injury is not half as bad as the injury to the psyche via the injudicious use of words.
The Bible reminds us that “in the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God”. The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) is described in the Qur’an as ummi, which generally translates into “not having been formally taught literacy”. But he memorised the Holy Text which was revealed to him.
One verse says: “Read! In the Name of your Lord who created Man from a clinging substance. Read: Your Lord is most Generous – He who taught by the pen – Taught man that which he knew not.” (Holy Qur’an: 96:1-5.)
There are many other injunctions in varied and seminal texts that exhort us to read the words of the learned, the wise, the literate, the informed, the inspired and the great who left us much to think about.
We cannot experience everything that life has to offer, but reading releases our temporal and spatial limitations and set us free to travel to worlds and realms unknown.
Whoever wields the golden words, who has “kissed the Blarney Stone”, who has inherited the “gift of the gab”, should ply their wares assiduously and enlighten those who reside and wallow in the darkness of not knowing.
Polonius famously probes Hamlet by asking him what he was reading so intently. Hamlet responds pithily: “Words, words, words”, thereby throwing back at Polonius his own aphorism that “brevity is the soul of wit”. And who can ignore the revelation of the power of self-deception contained in the claim of the Nazi Joseph Goebbels: “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.”
It is also referred to as the illusory truth effect. We hear the lie so often that we are emasculated and buy into the heinous cunning of the propaganda. Linguists refer to this as “reification”, the process of coming to believe that humanly created social norms are natural, universal and absolute things.
Up to this point, I have demonstrated the positive and negative power of the written or spoken word. One becomes horrified at the temerity of ideologies that categorise people with such vigour, muscularity and insistence, that the poor victims no longer know the truth about themselves.
Then they are cunningly placed in a category where they happily live out the attributes (or lack thereof) which end up with class domination.
It is easy to see where I am going with this. I am, by definition, a coloured, brown or mixed person. Another is a black person or a person who is not white.
Edward Said, in his magisterial tome Orientalism, exposes the fallacies about the East perpetrated with such vigour that one sees the Orient through the eyes of the English narrator.
It took Salmon Rushdie to make me aware that “open sesame” was, in fact, short of a comma. Sinbad was addressing the cave by saying “open, sesame”, not the unpunctuated version spread throughout the colonial contagion.
In much the same way, we were told that we were lesser beings because the colour of our skins said so. Worst of all, we started acting in an expected way because the lie about us was repeated so often that we bought into racial category acceptance, a sort of self-loathing psychic self-immolation.
Only nations heal nations. Nations need the words that heal. One such word is “enough”. The words of the deceitful must be consigned to the fires of hell. Only injured nations get angry enough to stand up and cry: “Enough!”
Is that time now? And are our best weapons the words we use?
* Literally Yours is a weekly column from Cape Argus reader Alex Tabisher. He can be contacted on email by [email protected].
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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