Word Made Real

What I want to talk about is metaphors. Sometimes I think I could never be a scholar because I fall too hard for metaphors. If metaphor was a lover, it would be that cool one that is bad news, but damn, you want it. The point is, I don’t know how to steer clear of metaphors. I love the story to them. The image. The sounds they can make when the consonance and vowels and syllables line up just right. And at its root (its root!), the metaphor signifies. And there is a word for the thing it signifies: the referent.

When I learned this word, I was both relieved and nervous. I love the idea that something is made of only itself and exists despite our language, which tries to hold it down. And I want to say I like things to be clear and solid in language because there are so many ways we trip and fall around our words and narratives. But that’s not true. I am drawn to the messes of sounds and space and grammar. The breaking of rules.

The metaphor—living, dead, undead, no matter—has energy and power in terms of creating reality. Figuratively, of course, but also literally. What we say becomes physical by how it sounds in our head or the way it feels in the mouth. The things we read that we cannot forget, or the way a description feels in the spine or heart, hit us figuratively, but the body sensation is real. The body-magic and the reality-magic of words. This sacred way of knowing sits well with me and among my Diné people.

And I can see that it must be easy to judge the Diné way we hold language and story. Jiní (it is said) there are things we don’t share or talk about. There are things not to utter. And this has created a quake within our writing communities and even between tribes. It can look like gatekeeping or superstitiousness. I do believe we should spread knowledge to know the truth of a place and people, but within limits—not just cultural, but existential ones. What I’m getting at here is the act of sharing the stories in texts holds power—actual power, literal power, referent power.

This is not to be confused with a text’s ability to make us feel or want to act. I’m talking about a power that is the embodiment of knowledge and stories we share. Language and stories aren’t just carried in our bodies, but they grow and transform. The word can make its way to something real. One could see the withholding of sacred stories and words as selfish or childish. Or worse, a type of power play—a show of dominance and superiority. Yet for us Diné, we believe words and language are alive, respected, and \u2028honored—they help us make sense of the world.

I think of this poem, “tó,” by Sherwin Bitsui, from his book Flood Song:

tó

tó

tó

tó

tó

tó

Tó is the Navajo word for water. And here we see it dripping. We hear it too. Does this poem make water appear? Or give us the essence of water? Perhaps. How many times? 50? 100? How many times until you are thirsty? Until we feel water in our bodies, in the sky? The power of language is not only in how it makes us feel or think or what actions we take—it creates the world around us. It creates need and vision and awareness—that is the metaphorical call of language and the life that sustains it.

Words don’t make things happen.

Words are things happening.

In this way, they are sacred as is our relationship to them. Our sacred relationship with language is a presentness too easily called the past or far far away.

Perhaps language travels so fast and quickly that it only seems like silence. Seems like space. If we accept that language is always and everywhere, then it is not nearly so cluttered or obstructive as we imagine it to be. Perhaps we must never say “I do not have the words” or “he/she is speechless,” but instead that the words are too quick and true; we must accept a holiness in the language of space and silence.

There is an ever-present push upon us to abandon the reality of our words, our Diné existence. We are forced to engage in discussions that frame the value of words for us and demand we agree to colonized ways of thinking and being. And this is what happened in the first encounters with the English language for Indigenous people. Since then we have lived among brutalized grammatical remnants, as thick and bloody as trophied scalps. This is how colonial grammar continues to fail us and why we always find our own way.