Book Review: Native Tongue

Title: Native Tongue

Author: Suzette Haden Elgin

Author's now-memorial web site: http://ozarque.livejournal.com 

Publisher: Daw

Date: 1984

Length: 301 pages

ISBN: first edition shows none

Quote: “All citizens of the United States of the female gender shall be deemed legally minors.”

(An earlier version of this review appeared on Blogspot.)

There's nothing quite like reading the hypothetical futures envisioned in vintage science fiction and observing that...to be fair, science fiction writers don't say that these visions were how they expected the world would be; they say that their stories take place in the world as it might be if certain other things happened. Most of these things, of course, do not happen.

In the hypothetical future world of Native Tongue, which has a United States with a Constitution but that Constitution seems different from ours, the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment started a trend. Men found new ways to convince themselves that women were inherently inferior. Meanwhile the Cold War and its accompanying Space Race proceeded unchecked; the world remained divided between countries allied with the U.S. and countries allied with the U.S.S.R.,who continued to separate themselves by an Iron Curtain, even as each faction of Earthlings explored and colonized other planets. Inevitably, all this interplanetary travel brought Earthlings into contact with alien civilizations, all of whom seem to be much more enlightened than humans. Communication and trade with these aliens was handled by trained linguists, who therefore went from being considered not quite even scientists to being some of the most important people on Earth. Some aliens preferred to communicate with females; therefore, although male linguists insisted that female linguists were as stupid as any other women, the female linguists did hold on to a few tiny, feeble vestiges of power as translators...

Some people confessed to Elgin, at her “Ozarque” blog, that they were turned off by the image on the cover of the first edition of Native Tongue, which is the edition I have for sale now. If you don't know what to expect from Elgin it does look a bit as if the giant alien might be planning to eat the baby. The idea (not, of course, subject to Elgin's approval—this was a science fiction paperback) was that the alien is talking to the baby in a kind, auntly way, teaching it the alien language. Before this baby is half grown it will be working as a translator...when it's not in school. 

Native Tongue is mostly about the linguists, and specifically about a linguist woman called Nazareth Chornyak and how she decided to liberate women by teaching them a special “women's language.”

Nazareth's hard life is intended to show us what even the best-off women are up against in this fictional world. They're not beaten, raped, or starved. They're just treated as children. Nazareth's father is one of the best men on Earth; when a stupid adolescent mistake puts Nazareth's life in danger, only her father can save her...and the way he saves her makes you want to strangle him.

Surprisingly, considering how long the author had lived and worked outside the South, what may be the most important theme in this book seems to need explaining. Readers unfamiliar with Elgin's other work could be excused for thinking, “This is just another shrill, hostile, probably lesbian feminist's version of 'Men Are No Good.'” It's not. Nor is the theme “Humans Are No Good,” although that possibility crossed my mind; the men do consistently sound like jerks and the women do consistently sound like fools. Elgin was both wiser and more compassionate than that but I probably had to be a Southerner to get the point. The theme is more like “People do themselves as well as others a great injustice when they insist on believing that other people are stupid.” Southerners, at least, who were reading in 1984 were meant to hear echoes of some of the things “liberal” White Southerners said about “Negroes” earlier in that century, in the things male characters say to and about female characters in this book. Young women who didn't throw the book aside in disgust were meant to hear echoes of the ways our sincerely caring fathers clipped our wings.

Elgin had given science fiction readers more appealing hypothetical worlds in earlier novels. There was a reason for this long, strange, rather grim story--an actual scientific experiment. Real linguists were debating the extent to which the language we speak shapes the thoughts we're able to think (the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis). Does growing up speaking English make us unable to understand how some kinds of trees can be seen as "he" and some as "she"? Real students with a gift for linguistics were indignant about the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment and the continuation of the Cold War. Why not engage the students in a real experiment to determine what, if any, effects getting them to speak a constructed language would have? So this experiment was done, and the Native Tongue trilogy reflected the outcome of the real experiment.

Briefly, it “failed”...I suspect partly because of the way it was set up. In order to work in the story the constructed language, LAadan, needed to be a difficult code to crack. (I posted an elaboration on this idea at Live Journal, for other fans: http://cat-sanctuary.livejournal.com/14619.html.) In order to serve the students' actual needs, new English slang worked better.

So, if Native Tongue was meant to introduce a scientific experiment, and if the experiment “failed” from the point of view from which the trilogy was written, why read Native Tongue?

Because, despite unavoidable serious flaws in the plotting of the whole trilogy, the individual scenes are beautifully written; the ones that teach us something about how not to talk to people are almost flawless, the ones where the nice characters are doing good things are a delight to read, and the satirical scenes are hilarious.

Because Nazareth is one of the few fictional characters readers actually enjoy getting to know.

Because writers can learn a lot from Elgin's use of one telling detail to make a very tastefully written scene linger in readers' memories, and engage their emotions, more than a whole page of smut or gore could do. Like her other novels, Native Tongue is not explicitly erotic or violent, but it is intense, not for children or the faint of heart.

Even because there's a whole international blogging/writing subculture that grew out of mutual admiration for a writer with a near-perfect ear for dialogue, among people who have very little else in common, and you might want to be part of it. It started at http://ozarque.livejournal.com and has carried on at LJ and other sites since then.

The story of the marketing of Native Tongue has always been ironic. As a real scientific experiment, it was widely recommended as a textbook. Although the original paperback editions were cheap, students got them "free" (at other people's expense) by photocopying them and passing the photocopies around. So, although it was very widely read, Native Tongue sold poorly; while non-student fans waited for Elgin to write the third volume and get on with another short enjoyable novel, publishers told Elgin her sales figures for novels had been so disappointing that they wanted her to stick to nonfiction. A second edition came out in 2000 (that's the one you'll see on Amazon), and although it didn't become a runaway bestseller while Elgin was alive and could have used the money, wow, get a load of those collector prices now! (Somewhere, perhaps, she's laughing at the irony...she was a polio survivor, and knew when she might as well laugh as cry.)

The copy I physically own is the first edition, well worn, and not horribly expensive at Amazon. If you want a cleaner copy of that edition, send $5 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment to either address at the lower left corner of the screen. If you want the 2000 edition with the scholarly notes and all, send $10 per book + $5 per package.