H. Masud Taj: Language and the Morphing of Parrots

November 14, 2022 H. Masud Taj Visual Spaces 0

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“She put him near the front door and a number of visitors were surprised that he would not answer to the name ‘Polly’, which is what all parrots were supposed to be called.”

– Gustave Flaubert “A Simple Heart”

T

he oppressed can get away with expressing the most incendiary thoughts that yet sound harmless; pauses as loaded as things left unsaid. But when the oppressed stops mimicking the tongue of the oppressor, and starts his native whistling, beware! The music of the mother-tongue has begun.

Colonization and decolonization, both begin with language.

But whistling can debase into dogged dog whistles.

Karl Krauss warned of the holocaust that follows the debasement of language. Linguistic abuse precedes and predicts moral obtuseness and parrots morph into canaries in the twisting tunnels of mine-fielded minds.

Human beings are first dehumanized and only then despatched.

“Parrot” was published in “Alphabestiary: A Poetry-Emblem Book.” (Toronto: Exile Editions 2011 pg. 68). The Kraussian turn in language that the author observed in 1990’s (Poets and Planners) has now accelerated.

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H. Masud Taj in The Beacon

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The Beacon is a web-based only feature magazine of writing and reading (long-form essays, fiction and poetry) that believes in confluences more than in consensus. The Beacon searches for the intersections at which political/economic analyses meet literature, the personal weaves into the social, the real is imagined and unity spells diversity. Confluences make conversations meaningful and possible; intersections are the locations for cultures—of diversity, differences, pluralism, hybridity.

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