“It’s not so much correctness as rightness that we’re after” – Seamus Heaney (Stepping Stones)
Disney’s Mulan is playing on the small television. I am five or six, without the language for why I am moved, and am quietly crying. Without being able to explain why, I also knew that I would somehow break my family’s heart.
This was the late ‘90s greeting the new millennium. Vibrant primary colour cassette tapes were hastily recorded over with whatever oddly caught my attention. A recording of Match of the Day goes from a notably victorious Newcastle United match to a momentary roar of white static before Spirited Away takes over. The scene a third of the way through where the Water Spirit finally speaks.
I felt peaceful while I watched the spheres of oxygen leave Chihiro’s mouth, and the thudding silence of being underwater. I was mesmerised by scenes of wordless understanding. I wanted that, and didn’t have access to it. My family weren’t a bookish one, so I had no prospect of finding words for difference there, and the formless potential of the early internet frightened me from trying to find them there either.
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Without external stimuli, without any sort of language or image that equated to my experience, things like existing harmoniously in a family or playing with boys in the street didn’t feel quite right, and infrequently went well. It profoundly moves me, now, to remember Hua Mulan’s face reflected in water, half-dressed in delicate alabaster makeup, and the other half bare, and that I understood, and more, empathised so intensely with how she felt slant to her family without comprehending how.
I think about the conservative anxiety regarding our expanding vocabularies and cannot understand this as anything but an impoverishment
The world at large seems agitated about the broadening of children’s language; those concerned would rather different ways of living were not given form in words. Better for young children to pine in wordless feeling as I did: different, not quite right. That there is the possibility for a smaller gulf between a child’s selfhood and the words that are “allowed” to exist around them is to be unequivocally celebrated.
If you reduce the capacity for children to name, they will invent new words for things. From when I was very young until I had the sense to refuse, I was brought to a Gaelic pitch in Derry every Saturday. There were three or four gravel pitches situated side by side, so to my smaller and more imaginative viewpoint, those charcoal-grey gravel stones, sharp and unforgiving (and often found along the base of my palm) seemed to go on forever, as did my agony at being alongside shoals of agitated boys.
It was here that I was first greeted by words for my difference – faggot, bender, fruit – from comically unbroken voices. Some of those boys I nowadays witness in bars as men. They dip their noses into their glass of beer, or nod to me sheepishly. I forgive them. I never blamed them at the time. I had, and continue to have, such a faith in language that I perceived these voices as clinical diagnoses, and trusted them. Those boys might have been spared their shame too, their beer-wet noses, if our resource for different kinds of experience was more commodious.
I think about the conservative anxiety regarding our expanding vocabularies and cannot understand this as anything but an impoverishment. I think of US Republican commentators who exclaim that elementary school teachers are attempting to “transition” their students, that offering a child a resource where they might see themselves reflected is tantamount to paedophilia or grooming. This sentiment is straight from the phrasebook of how people spoke pejoratively about those with HIV/Aids (and some conservative politicians in the North, come to think of it).
Upwards of 400 anti-LGBT bills are being discussed at length in America at time of writing. Section 28 is in not-so-distant memory. Proprietors of such sentiments often speak about ideology when they are really speaking about language. They fear their children may encounter language that might lend them words for their experience.
I was on the last bus home a fortnight ago and on the top deck a man was loudly trying to flirt with a girl sitting beside him. The other passengers were quiet. She was drifting, speaking exasperatedly about how she was given warnings now three times for refusing to use a colleague’s preferred pronouns. The man beside her said, as a way of empathising, “Someone from home put on Facebook that he was gay, and I thought Who cares?”
Backwards movement is not tolerable, and the impulse behind the instinct is to return us to those moments of childhood where we lacked the words for our difference
This is what happens when a group’s grasp for a more inclusive language is made light of as do-goodery or politically correct, rather than right. Political rightness, if we can imagine such a thing, might begin with allowing all human beings to exist equally in dignity, in rights, and also with the language they feel is adequate to their experience of the world around them. I think a lot about the words other people lay onto things, being from the North. Language’s ultimate effort is its ability to communicate the, until-then, unintelligible. We need to trust that language knows what it is doing, and all we might need to do is let it.
The American writer Marilynne Robinson has said that ameliorative behaviour, whatever it is, is to be utterly valued. The broadening of our language is to be celebrated, and any calls for it to be reduced acknowledged for what they are. Oppressive, sensationalist, and ill-informed. Language is what queer people quest for; it makes experience tangible, both to ourselves and to others. The poets taught us this long ago, and continue to, it is no new revelation.
Backwards movement is not tolerable, and the impulse behind the instinct is to return us to those moments of childhood where we lacked the words for our difference. A woman I know called Heather was a volunteer for Lesbian Line in the 1980s in Belfast, a helpline for gay women in and around the city. She told me how the silent calls were the most difficult. You keep speaking, hoping there was a woman on the other end of the phone, trembling, not able to say the words to reach across the phone line. You keep speaking, Hello, I’m like you, hello are you there? In the hope that she will, in time, speak back.
Mícheál McCann is a poet from Derry. His writing has appeared in The Poetry Review, Tolka, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly and Queering the Green, as well as broadcast on RTÉ and BBC. His first collection of poems is forthcoming in 2024
