proviso
This is the text of the talk I gave at the launch of proviso
at the Small Publishers Fair, London, on 6 November 2015
More information on proviso here
In 2010 I travelled
to Greenland. I ended up leaving a word behind there. I’ve tried to get through
the last five years without it. It’s a common word, without an obvious
alternative, so occasionally I have to reorder my sentences in a convoluted
manner to get around the fact it’s not there any more.
Why do this?
Partly, it was a promise I had made. Before I left the UK I stayed with my good
friends Frances and Nicolas McDowall who run the Old Stile Press in the Welsh
Borders. It was December, and snow fell until their house was surrounded by
deep snowdrifts. We joked that it was probably unnecessary for me to go to
Greenland - there was enough ice and snow on our doorstep. It was like the
trial runs polar expeditions used to go on: I practised all the activities I
had planned for the Arctic, such as writing in the snow with maple syrup, and
allowing the lines of sugar to harden into candy. When I finally left Frances
and Nicolas inundated me with things I might need on my travels. I don’t
remember when they concocted the scheme to give me a word to take away with me.
Perhaps over a glass of Campari by the fire in the evening.
This word
had been letterpress printed at the press several years before as part of a
commission: a keepsake for a grand dinner held by a major media organisation.
It is a beautiful piece of typography, though modest in size. But after
printing was complete, the organisation changed its strategy, and the McDowalls
were left with a large edition of these words, which lay forgotten in their
attic.
Anyone who
has trained as a letterpress printer or typefounder, who has cast type from
molten lead, tin and antimony, and then set and printed it by hand, will
understand how language begins to grow concrete in the process. I have often
adapted my texts according to the number of sorts I had in the typecase, for
example. In Greenland, by contrast, my experience of language was the reverse
of physical. This is an oral culture, where for many years words were passed on
in songs and stories, and never written down. As a writer, I found this historical
lack of textual authority challenging. The original Danish missionaries did
too: when they came to Greenland in the 18th century they introduced
printing, despite the problems presented by using ink in freezing temperatures.
But does printing ensure a language’s survival? Soon Danish was the first
language of the nation, and by 2010 West Greenlandic was accorded vulnerable status on
the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger.
In Upernavik
I got to thinking about the English words I had, valuable words to me, that
were useless in Greenland, and thinking about the words that the Greenlanders
were using. I began to gain a few Greenlandic words and I realised if I stayed
there long enough I’d probably lose some English ones.
In Greenlandic
a single word can express concepts that other languages tiptoe around with a
phrase. I
was delighted to discover that on waking up in the morning I could say nuannarpoq rather than ‘I
am full of a delirious joy in being alive’. Or illisiverupa,
which means ‘to put something away in a safe place and be unable to find it
again’. As I grew accustomed to
densely-woven Greenlandic, with its small alphabet of only 19 letters and
polysynthetic words, I began to find English finicky and prim in contrast. As
though they were knucklebones used in a game of dice, I shook up tiny English
words and scattered them before my audience, having little influence on the
score.
The Greenlandic language has always been haunted by
absences. When spoken, the suffixes are uttered so softly that an untrained ear
cannot hear them. Verbs accrue morphemes, while nouns tend to disappear. It was once
customary to name people after objects, but since a taboo forbade reference to
the dead, the favoured objects were repeatedly renamed. The original names/words were never
used again. The power of such words is not diminished by their absence from the
vocabulary.
proviso documents an intervention I undertook at Upernavik Museum as part
of my investigation of lost languages. A clause in my contract as Writer in
Residence read ‘Visual
artists must leave a work behind in the museum, but writers are not required to
do so.’
This proviso
irked me a little. I understood that it was merely a reflection of the lack of
prestige accorded the written word in Greenland, the preference for visual
media. Needless to say, it was
liberating to be excused from producing any work during the residency. However,
it seemed strange that I should be exempted on account of working with
language, when the Greenlandic language had proved such a rich resource for me.
It set me to wondering how I
might circumvent the rule and leave something verbal behind. Something not too obtrusive,
something that no one would have to read. (I was thinking of the environmental
caveat - variously attributed - ‘take nothing but memories, leave nothing but
footsteps’.)
So I decided to leave behind
just one word. Luckily I had a manifestation of language handy, in the form of
the printed fragment created by Frances and Nicolas! I decided to not only
leave the paper behind, but also excise the word from my language, so that I would
never be able to use it again. It is a word on which future actions depend, so it
is relevant to a place where decisions are being made that may change the fate
of the globe. Climate change for example, or isolated events, like the recent,
controversial proposal for a uranium mine in South Greenland. Of course, the word also features in a famous English poem.
It was to
the Greenlandic dictionary that I turned as a custodian, leaving the word
between its pages. Greenlandic has a long tradition of adopting loan words so I
like to think my insertion will be welcome. Of course, that word was only one
of a large edition printed by Frances and Nicolas. Perhaps it was the weight of
all these unwanted words that led me to create the artist's book
proviso as a record of the intervention. My own vanity likes the idea of leaving things behind too much.
Photographs (c) Peter Abrahams / Lucid Plane
