Double-Edged Sword: Punctuation as Coloniser, Punctuation as Freedom-Fighter
‘Poetry makes nothing happen.’ So speaks one of the twentieth century’s most versatile stylish lyricists, W.H. Auden. At a time when it was cool and modern to write poems without any rules at all (or your own rules at best), Auden rhymed. Auden counted syllables. Auden was (shriek!) old-fashioned. ‘Poetry makes nothing happen.’ The line provokes, and is supposed to do so. It was 1940. Like many writers, artists, and thought-leaders around the world, Auden had volunteered in the Spanish Civil War three years prior, fighting the onslaught of fascism – in vain, as we know in hindsight. By the time of the poem which he composed in honour of another poet’s death it was abundantly clear that, really, poetry couldn’t make anything happen. And this was just the beginning.
Of course, the story’s much more complicated. What does “making something happen” even mean? Is poetry’s “making” of a different kind? One that can’t be measured with the measures of the moneyed world, industry, globalisation? I’ll leave you to chase up the poem, and discover what Auden might be suggesting, what he puts forward as poetry’s work, or impact, or action, or purpose. While no war or peace has ever been brought about by a poem (though perhaps it has, and my historical knowledge is just too limited.), poems are made of words; words huddling together form a text; a written text needs the traffic signs of punctuation in the flow of meaning, and so, punctuation-text-language orchestrates political decisions, millions of lives, and billions of dollars. Language makes stuff happen, after all. In big ways, more often than not in small ones, too. Minuscule ones even. It just takes one infinitesimally small bacterium too many for our immune system to fail its defences. The small print matters.
¶
So, what if I told you that punctuation is both a tool for oppression -- and liberation. For colonial enslavement, and its subversion. For literal and cultural occupation, and a resistance that declares boldly that every human being has the right to self-determination. This is the story of punctuation’s role in the politics of the Middle East. It’s one that’s fraught with contradictions and icky complicity, somewhat hard to bear for a punctuation-lover like me. Then again, punctuation – language – any human thing – has always been a double-edged sword, and it’s our purpose in this life, I think, to learn discernment. Commas and colons can help us do that.
By the way: yes, this is all about Palestine/Israel. Again. The horror persists and so does the ability of punctuation to speak to what is going on. And so this newsletter shall as long as the slaughter occurs unabated. If you want to get right into those politics, jump the first half of what follows! Which is the history of Arabic punctuation before the 1890s.
¶
There isn’t a lot of pre-islamic writing in Arabic that survived, but writers in the past did have a sense of the sentence as largest unit of writing, and while they didn’t demarcate it with a symbol yet, they left blank spaces of various sizes, depending on the subjective level of pause when reading, and on how finished this parcel of words was. If this sounds a bit vague, it’s not: think about the semicolon and how unclear it is quite exactly where a sentence stops and the next one starts.
In pre-Islamic writing (and post-Islamic non-religious texts), the little spaces were called fawasil, meaning distance or separator, and were associated with rhymes at the end of lines. (I’d have to research more, but I’d be inclined to suggest that there probably wasn’t a concept of prose as such in Arabic yet; instead, historical events or social values were preserved in poetry as is usual in largely oral traditions, so rhyming as memory aid makes sense.) Over the course of years, the Prophet (pbuh) received his revelations and passed them onto his followers orally. The structure kept changing, but his companions held onto the sequence of verses the prophet agreed to on his deathbed. Through their prodigious memories, the companions held that version in their minds, while it was finally decided to also note it down in order to avoid human falsification of the word of God.
The book history of the Koran is contentious and fascinating, and its internal punctuation deserving of its own post. It’s important to mention it here, though, because within a few decades of the prophet’s death in 632, companions and theologians agreed to one version which has remained unchanged and unchallenged ever since, providing a touchstone for Arabic itself.
The Islamic empire, vast as it was, needed administration, of course, and unified legal codes, taxation, chronicling, and engineering effort. Arabic text, then, was made to shoulder a huge amount of responsibility in establishing and maintaining the running of the vast caliphate, stretching from Andalusian Spain to the Indian subcontinent. An army of scholars from all parts of the world contributed their expertise, crucial among those Persian linguists who composed grammar books for Arabic, enabling intellectual theological underpinnings of Islam in the first place. (This is for my fellow Iranians who disown Islam…)
One of the first caliphs, the erudite cosmopolitan al-Ma’mun himself, ordered copyists to attend more precisely to punctuation, leaving appropriate spaces and introducing symbols between sentence-units. Around 200 years earlier, Pope Gregory the Great gave similar instructions to scribes multiplying his instruction manual for priests Cura Pastoralis in order to make sure they read his suggestions on proper church service correctly. Shortly after al-Ma’mun, another empire became very interested in standardised writing as channel for administration: Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne hired bishop Alcuin of York as chief language officer, overseeing the introduction of punctuation across Charlemagne’s lands, as well as the development of a readable clean clear and elegant script (Carolingian minuscules, that script Tolkien so loved).
While there certainly was care taken in producing tidy manuscripts with a certain level of attention paid to segmentation, non-Koranic Arabic lacks any and all punctuation marks in the stricter sense. Blank spaces or decorative symbols like circles, tear drops, eyes, flowers, or a triangle of three dots populate the pages for hundreds of years, separating paragraphs and units no smaller than the sentence. Personal taste rather than a commonly shared system governed level of punctuation and choice of sign. That’s why no grammarian or rhetorician had anything to say about punctuation, a silence which re-enforces the lack of punctuation that was apparently neither obligatory nor important enough to do anything about.
As in the West, this worked well enough for many hundreds of years: secretaries well-versed in grammar and foreign diplomats who knew the message of the political missives both read any text out loud to the ruler, and needed no punctuation crutches to identify meaning; scribes and scholars knew their respective language(s) inside-out, scoffing at something so baby-ish as a segmentation symbol to tell them about the water they swam in every day.
Then, things started to change, and the written word had to perform more tasks. This was the case during the European Renaissance, and it was the very same a little later in Arabic-speaking regions. And now we become political!
¶
While the Muslim Empire was the most advanced glitteringly intellectual peaceful innovative place at different times in its history, the Middle East had lost to the technological advances of the West by the time of the European Renaissance, well and truly under-dogging it in the nineteenth century. We can argue about the whys and wherefores, but for the purposes of our punctuation story, it’s enough to grasp that European culture as well as languages like English in India and French in North-Africa and the Orient dominated and threatened native counterparts they colonised or bullied into political submission.
As early as the beginning of the nineteenth-century, Egyptian writer Rifa’a at-Tahtawi published a travelogue on his journey through France, noticing that the French can read and understand their language more easily without a profound knowledge of its structure unlike Arabs who require a high level of education to access text in their own mother tongue. Being able to read (and write) in your native language without excessive schooling, at-Tahtawi believed, contributes to the progress of French literature and sciences.
Fast forward two or three generations, and the need to reform Arabic has become exponentially more pressing. European colonialisation was gripping Muslim countries not only politically and economically, exploiting and oppressing, but also in terms of cultural forms of expression, social values, educational system, and language. It has become easier to write a novel or play in French than an Arabic ghazal. French was also considered urban and modern, and had a greater reach at the time.
Owing to the over-bearing presence of French, Arab literati were concerned about the foreign language choking off expression in Arabic from literature to history to scientific research. The conundrum with Arabic was two-fold, and here’s where its Koranic roots come into the mix: as the language of divine revelation, remaining perfect and unchanged for over 1300 years, it was impossible to admit that Arabic needed reform. If it needed reform, that would be tantamount to suggesting it’s somehow defective and inferior to colonial languages. Standard Arabic was also a unifying factor across vast stretches of territory from Mauritania to the Ottoman Empire, representing Arab identity. Would Arabs dispossess themselves of the last object of pride that was left them by the invader from the North?
Simplifying Arabic by not only tolerating a foreign principle like punctuation, but actively inviting it to set up shop in its midst seemed accepting another kind of inferiority – and yet, without this linguistic borrowing Arabic was at risk of ossifying into a textual language of scholars only, a catch-22 if ever there was one. (For fear and loathing concerning language change, check out this post on “bad” English.)
A catch-22 that practical history eventually settled, rather than the opinion, anxiety, and quarrelings of a small number of theorists. And that practical history starts with her: Lebanese writer and thinker Zaynab Fawwaz.
Zaynab is probably my favourite punctuation personality – she’s also the only woman (I came across) to actively reach into punctuation history, and lobby for signs (rather than use them in her writing in a particular way). She wrote an article for the Egyptian newspaper al-Fata in 1893, warning of the fading of Arabic as a language for intellectual exchange, and proposing to import French ‘signs that add a hidden meaning incommunicable by words.’ Mysterious marks, unlocking the magic of the text!
Another journalist, Hassan at-Tuwayrani, the founder and editor-in-chief of the Egyptian an-Nil newspaper, agreed with Fawwaz that punctuation marks could make Arabic more accessible, but he refused to grab foreign signs. In his Book of Putting Signs, he defends the need to adapt marks to Arabic’s grammar, tone of voice, and effect on the reader. While at-Tuwayrani contends that ‘simplicity’ was preferrable, his actual proposal was not so modest: he listed a whopping 95 signs, flagging up not only grammatical separation or tone of voice but also vulnerability, sadness, threat, and disapproval, a trembling voice, a low voice, a sign to lift the hand, bend the head, walk, or move your feet. Punctuation, for at-Tuwayrani, was clearly more than a textual stop-and-go exercise: it encouraged a complex psycho-somatic response to the writing, engaging in a kind of interpretative battle with the reader, and exerting power over their body. This punctuation has agency, boldly declaring its presence, and claiming to meddle with the words as it sees fit.
If this sounds a little outrageous, consider all the various attempts at introducing new punctuation marks, notably an irony mark, the toughest nut to crack for countless writers across centuries. The most recent brave mission at putting forward new signs is by Austrian designer Walter Bohatsch whose 30 “typojis” obtain an equally abstract and brainy quality as at-Tuwayrani’s.
Nearly one hundred punctuation marks are clearly several too many (our most current ones today are ten, twenty at a push, if one accepts asterisks *, hashtags #, and various kinds of parentheses >}]). While at-Tuwayrani’s was a laudable attempt to explore what punctuation could hold in store for Arabic from the inside-out, the process of experimenting, introducing, discarding, refining, circulating, and maintaining marks had taken hundreds if not thousands of years for Western writing systems. But Arabic needed to change now, and quickly.
So, instead of taking time over exploring a language-specific punctuation repertoire, Arab writers went with what was already around: writer, editor, translator, and language-reformer Ahmad Zaki simply put readers in front of the fait accompli: his collection of letters on the universal exhibition in Paris in 1900, Dunya fi baris (“The World in Paris”), drops readers in at the deep-end, using punctuation marks as if they were native to Arabic already. The only crutch is a brief introduction to the ‘new style of expression’ at the beginning of the book ‘that will not be appreciated by those who cling to the old traditions of writing’ at the expense of ‘ignor[ing] the development that took place in the other languages of the world’. And what better context to insert Arabic into the rest of global languages than the world exhibition!
Zaki justifies his bold move by claiming that without punctuation ‘the reader must mentally repeat the phrase to know where it ends’. This, he alleges, takes too much time and mental energy, necessitating constant re-reading – precisely the same motivation that fuelled the punctuation explosion during the European Renaissance. Zaki also suggests to re-punctuate old Arabic manuscripts in order to preserve their knowledge for future generations. Punctuation marks, he says, are the bond between reader and writer. Bridges across time. And so they are.
¶
Today, more than 100 years and the world-changing invention of the personal computer and the internet later, punctuation in Arabic is still an ambiguous creature (which it generally is anyway!). Linguist Rasoul Khafaji has stripped a set of short stories of their punctuation, offering them to university lecturers of Arabic for re-punctation. Less than 40% of marks overlapped between the originals and the re-punctuated versions. That’s not very much! Participants mostly entered commas between the words, followed by full stops. Only 15% of signs were spread among the rest like exclamation mark and colon. This is very low. The outsized presence of the most basic segmentation marks like comma and fullstop, and the relatively infrequent correspondence between the original and the re-punctuated samples suggests that Arab native-speakers aren’t exactly sure of their punctuation. That makes perfect sense, since its introduction is still quite young, and references to punctuation rules in grammar books tend to make statements rather than show the effective use of punctuation through examples. So, whither art thou going, Arabic punctuation? Who knows. Where is Western punctuation headed? Where there’s language, there’s punctuation, and where there’s punctuation, there will always be a degree of leeway, personal preference, and robust change fed by technological developments and social needs.
BUT! The story doesn’t end here. Here comes what we’ve all been waiting for: punctuation’s dual life as subversive anti-colonial force – and as coloniser. At the very same time – in the 1890s – as Zaynab Fawwaz and colleagues in Egypt sought ways to reform text in Arabic through punctuation with the express goal of stilling the wave of writing in foreign languages, that very same punctuation became a tool for colonial oppression close by. In Palestine.
Settler-colonialism in Palestine did not start with the holocaust of European Jews during the second-world war. As early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, Jewish Europeans, particularly in Britain, organised settlements in Palestine, aided by non-Jewish British politicians who sought to establish imperial influence in the Middle East. In 1877, British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli wrote that a nation of Jews ought to rule the region under the guidance of the British Empire, and supported the building of Jewish towns in Palestine. In 1890, around half a million people lived in peace in Ottoman-administered Palestine, most of them Arab Muslims and Christians, as well as several tens of thousands of native Jewish Palestinians. Then the Dreyfus affair happened, sending shock-waves throughout Jewish communities of Europe.
While anti-semitic laws, violent pogroms, and pervasive discrimination had been occurring for centuries all across Europe, the Dreyfus affair was a political scandal at the highest level, revolving around the framing of Jewish-French army captain Alfred Dreyfus for supposedly leaking military secrets to the Germans. Starting in 1894 and extending for years, much of the press’s covering fuelled public opinion with its anti-semitic tropes of the supposed disloyalty of Dreyfus because he was Jewish. Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl, shocked at the deeply-rooted and widespread hatred towards Jews in Europe from ordinary people to the highest echelons of society, published an influential pamphlet calling for a Jewish state to keep Jews safe, and founded the World Zionist Organisation.
Between the 1880s and 1914, around 75.000 European Jews moved to Palestine, building Jewish-only communities. While Palestinian Jews spoke Arabic like their neighbours, the foreign settlers arrived with their different languages: creating one shared unifying speech was thus at the heart of the Zionist endeavour as it would be at the core of any nation-building project. Until then Hebrew was not a spoken language. It was a language for worship, literature, and law, and only occasionally became a lingua franca for Jewish travellers and merchants. Rather than biblical Hebrew, Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe would speak Yiddish, a mixture of German, Slavic languages, and Hebrew. But this was not elevated enough for the early Zionists. There needed to be a Hebrew revival, turning a language that had lain dormant for thousands of years into a modern spoken and written version. Abstract and ancient Biblical Hebrew needed to expand to be able to answer to the needs of modern life. It naturally lacked words like “newspaper” and “car”. Nobody could actually talk about medicine or politics. Linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda who had experienced violent anti-semitic attacks in Lithuania, made it his life’s work to provide the budding Zionist state its national language. Fleeing hatred back home in Europe, he settled in Palestine with his wife, raising their son entirely in yet-broken Hebrew as the first native speaker after thousands of years. He invented words, and compiled a dictionary, encouraging Jewish newspapers and schools around the world to promote his artificial language. Modern Hebrew is a global precedent of a religious language without native speakers, practically resurrecting itself over night.
¶
And yet, the project of making modern Hebrew is a quintessentially European one that has little to do with the reality of Jewish Palestinians actually belonging to those lands. One need only consider Hebrew’s punctuation: just like Arabic, Biblical Hebrew lacked punctuation marks (although, just like Koranic Arabic, it had cantillation marks, that is, signs directing its pronunciation during worship). Just like Zaynab Fawwaz, Ben-Yehuda understood that Hebrew readers would need dots and dashes to navigate its written complexities. And, just like his Arab Muslim counterparts, he imported punctuation wholesale from European languages. The curious – and crucial – thing, though, is how those marks flag up both the artificial nature of Hebrew and its foreign origins: Arabic and Hebrew are from the same semitic (non-indo-european) language family. They’re written from right to left, and both lack vowel systems. Arabic native-speaker Ahmad Zaki truly adapted punctuation by turning ? and , around to ؟ and ، to align their directionality with Arabic’s right-to-left sequence: ما أخبارك؟ (“What’s up?”)
Early Zionists, however, stuck to their native Polish and German, allowing the marks to face the “wrong” way: ?מה שלומך (“How are you?”)
Quotation marks also stuck around in their German fashion until the 1970s, the opening pair at the bottom of the line, the closing pair at the top.
Punctuation marks in Hebrew come to us as relics of the brutal colonial system that’s far from over. It’s right here, under our very eyes, happening right now. We don’t have to dig to find it. One Google search beyond Western media will show the most insanely inhumane horrors the artificially constructed state of Israel is subjecting colonised Palestinians to. We don’t have to rummage around the language like archaeologists to stumble across evidence. It is in the question mark and the comma, their faces turned to Europe that we find proof. It is in the quotation mark’s crouching low on the line. They are German. They are not native to the Middle East.
Reading text swifter and more accurately, opening it up to a broader range of readers – that’s not good in and of itself. It’s also what we make of it. What’s clear is that Auden was wrong. Language matters. Punctuation does. Punctuation makes things happen. Punctuation enabled both the colonised to resist and the coloniser to settle. There’s no moral here. This is not a fable. This is reality. Stay vigilant. Read the small print.