Empire and Language

Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire

Teixcalaanli is inspired by Nahuatl (... and Greek); Stationer is basically Space Armenian. I'm kinda a language nerd—Arkady Martine

I am re-reading Arkady Martine’s wonderful debut novel, A Memory Called Empire. Martine has a PhD in Byzantine history, with a focus on Armenia, and she worked as a city planner before becoming a novelist. Not surprising given her background, there is enormous attention given to world-building in the story—especially to culture and language.

In fact, a translator friend, whom I admire tremendously, mentioned that he felt the novel captured something of what it would be like to attend a court gathering at the Heian court, with poetry contests and people dazzling each other with their nuanced understanding of art and literature. Also the way Japanese has so many politeness registers based on social and cultural context.

In the novel, the language of Teixcalaanli is based on the MesoAmerican language Nahuatl—being a logosyllabic tongue written in glyphs that permit poetic artistry and playful wordplay. This is also reminiscent of Japanese, especially classical Japanese. In gatherings with poetry contests, the protagonist Mahit tries to display her cultural prowess by her ability to make nuanced references to literary tropes, mainly from poetry. I had no idea that such contests were a centerpiece of Byzantine political life during the Middle Byzantine Period (approximately 900-1204 CE), and were used in much the same way to prove an orator’s intelligence and cultural competence, and also to make political arguments.

In addition to Nahuatl, Teixcalaanli is also inspired by Byzantine Greek. This month for my column at 3 Quarks daily, I wrote an essay about what makes Japanese so damn hard, called Japanese and the Empty Mind. And for me, it was always the challenge of getting the correct level of politeness in verbs and vocabulary that made speaking tough. I enjoyed reading as Mahir struggles to get the correct polite verb ending as she attempts high-level communication with Teixcalaani aristocrats~~Polite versus colloquial/ humble versus honorific/ male versus female etc.

Diglossia is term from linguistics used for a situation in which two languages (or two varieties of the same language) are used under different conditions within a community, often by the same speakers. The term is usually applied to languages with distinct “high” and “low” (colloquial) varieties, such as Arabic. I think Japanese is like this, as is Byzantine Greek. In the case of Greek, Arabic (?), and Chinese: the language and the alphabet often conflated—and this leads to gaps in use.

As Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote:

I think that scholars who have almost let themselves be drawn into forgetting that Chinese is a spoken language have so exaggerated the influence of the Chinese writing system that they, so to say, put the writing in place of the language.

This is a bit of a diversion, but I am just finishing a book that I highly recommend called, THE GREATEST INVENTION A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts, by Silvia Ferrara (Translated by Todd Portnowitz.) The book traces the nine main scripts that she considers to be “true inventions.” And along with Chinese, the Zapotec script, from which Nahuatl derived, is one of these stunning inventions. The book is a great read, but you might need to get past her unique writing style.

Anyway, for all these reasons, I think Martine’s choice of Nahuatl is an inspired one to couple with Byzantine Greek, with its connection to power and empire.

In the novel, the main character Mahit is not from the imperial capital, but rather was born and raised in a station. She is an outlier. A “barbarian.” The “Station” language where she is from is alphabetic and consonant heavy (modeled on Armenia). Maybe Mahit is not able to be as literary in such a language. That is how I felt in Japanese. I think it’s hard for me to be as thoughtful or pleasant in English. It’s harder to refer to the seasons or to poetry. I really related to the way Mahit admired the refinement of Teixcalaanli culture her entire life. It was her life goal to travel to the city-of-cities and study. And she is thrilled when the day comes and she is appointed as ambassador.

Yet, being from an outlying region, she knows that no matter how proficient she becomes at the language she will never be “one of them”—

She longs to belong, saying

liking Teixcalaanli poetry was just being cultured, especially when one was barely an adult and still spending all one’s time getting ready for the language aptitudes. Nevertheless she disliked Nine Maize’s acknowledging smile, the condescension in his nod: of course new works were celebrated in backwater barbarian space.

In fact, her novel is dedicated to “anyone who has ever fallen in love with a culture that is devouring their own.” This juxtaposition of empire versus borderlands reminded me so much of Orhan Pamuk’s earlier work and to interviews he has given about his own relationship to empire.

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For more, please see, Japanese and the Empty Mind

Languagehat also had a post on the language in the novel here.