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Dr. Francio Guadeloupe
Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen
Amsterdam School for Social Scientific Research, University of Amsterdam

Speaking the language of God has been a recurring obsession in the history of our species. Mystics in all human societies have sought to decipher the Ur-tongue of which the holy scripts written or recited in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Aramaic, Sanskrit, Ge’ez, Quiche, Yoruba, Etc, are but mere translations.

They complemented this noble endeavor by listening to the wisdoms in the so-called uncivilized languages of the wretched. The idea of course was that in discovering the universal in the tongues of Man, all men and women would agree on the ultimate Good. The ultimate Good being God, God being the collective name for the Indivisible Trinity of: justice, equality, and liberty. 

In our global society rift with wars, famines, power inequalities, multiple prejudices and misunderstandings, some still cherish this dream. Many however have perverted this vision. They deceive us into believing that God is partial. In the Caribbean we have a few of these false prophets. Naming their names is superfluous, for describing their activities will suffice. We all have come across their columns, pamphlets, theatres, compositions, or, read their books, or, tuned into their talk shows, where they continuously aver that God only speaks Papiamento, Sranan Tongo, Patios, Kweyol, Creole, Tyrewuju, Murato, Arawakan, Caribbean variants of Hindi, Cantonese, Javanese, Spanish, and Portuguese.

The Holy One supposedly does not speak Western dialects, which is only Devil’s speak; serpents speak; double speak. In short, it is speech that creates confused minds, disturbed minds, and colonial minds. To add weight to their argument they stress that SCIENCE says that children who are schooled and socialized in their mother tongues excel. The road to Calvary then is to shun the Devil’s tongues and to teach God’s preferred languages in school and reorganize Caribbean societies accordingly.    

Only a fool would deny that colonial education in European tongues created many black and brown skins wearing ill-fitting white masks. And only a fool will deny that today many white Europeans employ these tongues to talk down to blacks and browns. But only a bigger fool would think that this is the whole truth. In the Dutch of Anil Ramdas and Frank Martinus Arion, in the French of Maryse Conde and Aime Cesaire, in the English of Jamaica Kincaid and Wilson Harris, in the Spanish of Jorge Luis Borges and Nicolas Guillen, in all these so-called colonial languages, we recognize that God (the Indivisible Trinity of justice, equality, and liberty) is not partial.

Perhaps rereading the books of these Caribbean greats, along with those of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Elie Wiesel, Alice Walker, and Arundhati Roy, will remind us of what mystics have sought to tell us all along: we speak God’s language when our words do not perpetuate racism, sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance, and class and caste prejudice.

 Is this not the language we should teach our children and ourselves to speak?

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