From Pablo Bartholomew, Outside/in

Is bilingualism a kind of bisexuality as well? Are our English-speaking erotic personalities different from our vernacular ones? To what extent are sexual identities linguistically inflected? Is sex in English different from sex in Bengali? Do these linguistically different personalities attract or repel different kinds of people, in different ways? How consciously do we make use of linguistic range in our erotic play? Are you the same person, the same sexual-emotional-romantic creature, when you are thinking of someone while listening to Tagore’s Shudhu tomar bani noy go, when you write out a Shakespeare sonnet for somebody, email someone the YouTube link to Tanuja singing Raat akeli hai, and are dancing with a stranger to Madonna after a couple of martinis? And what are the larger cultural and historical meanings of being all these different people in a single body? How do you communicate the richness and fun of being thus to somebody who does not have access to this range of registers, not necessarily because this person is less privileged or more boring than you are, but simply because he or she knows only one language?

These questions kept niggling at me — sometimes pleasurably, sometimes uncomfortably — during a series of workshops on sexuality some friends and I had been conducting recently. Each workshop was with a different set of people and at a different venue: undergraduates in a suburban college, graduate students in a new suburban university, rural women who are social workers, male and female schoolteachers from a cluster of villages in the Sundarbans. We consciously tried to conduct these workshops in Bengali, for one of the reasons behind organizing them was to help create a vernacular discourse around contemporary issues or spheres of experience that have become the preserve of Anglophone societies or sections of society. This meant having to discuss, as freely as possible, the biology of sex as well as attitudes, assumptions and mentalities. We had to find Bengali equivalents of English words for parts of the male and female sexual anatomies and for different, very specific, kinds of sexual practice.

We did not want to sound either clinical or coy, and hoped to work out a way of talking that would be informal and natural. But, as the sessions progressed, what I began to feel — and I speak entirely for myself here — was not the usual embarrassment or nervousness of having to break the taboos of silence, but something else. As I was carefully translating into Bengali words and phrases that I would automatically use in English, the very nature of these things, their ‘feel’, started changing for me. I found myself becoming a different kind of speaking personality — a voice whose sexuality felt discomfitingly alien, and over which I seemed to have less and less control. Paradoxically, what this extended mother-tongue made me feel was not a greater facility of communication, but its opposite — a peculiarly tongue-tied distance from other human beings that was at once social and more intrinsic than social.

What had changed for me was not only language, but also an entire register of experience. It was as if I was not speaking but being spoken by another tongue that felt strange to the point of falsifying the lived experience of my own identity and personhood. Even more paradoxically, it was easier to discuss in this new language the violent and oppressive aspects of sexuality, rape and abuse, than pleasure, desire and happiness. Brutality and injustice were easier to talk about than tenderness and freedom. I started sounding deadly earnest or ridiculously precise, neither of which was quite me.

In a society riven with inequalities, sexuality has a conflicted relationship with both language and silence. Most forms of repression and oppression feed on silence. The breaking of these silences often involves importing words and concepts into the vernaculars from another linguistic register or language (usually English). Such ‘consciousness-raising’ then becomes informed with the awkward gradients that separate the worlds of these languages or registers.

Sexuality’s necessary darkness needs to be protected as much from the divisive and clarifying glare of language as from the ills of benightedness.