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“Language is never sufficient. There is not enough of it to make a true mirror of living. The soothing or afflictive effect of stories we tell is not in whether we select the right words, but in our proximity to what the right words might be. This is not some abstraction, but a very real expression of power — the privilege of describing a thing vaguely, incompletely, dishonestly, is inseparable from the privilege of looking away.” — Omar El Akkad
As we bear witness to utter human depravity and consternation at our leaders’ inaction, it may seem futile to linger on the purpose of words. Urgent times do not require more language cogitation. However in many of our societies, language precedes action, and conversely, justifies inaction.
So we might ask: what is the role of language in a time of genocide?
There is an underlying contradiction between the need to use precise language to describe something urgent and world altering, like genocide, and not be imprisoned by words that label us, reduce us, or be paralysed when words lack.
Those of us with a conscience feel so overwhelmed by the horrors we witness that we find ourselves, literally, lost for words. Every word we utter becomes meaningless as new horrors unfold. We are outraged, appalled, aghast, horrified, shocked, heartbroken, dismayed, stunned. No words can sufficiently capture our emotions. No adjective will lead to action.
On the other hand, we have to contend with words being misused, deliberately omitted or even forbidden. The perpetrators of genocide and their accomplices need to avoid the word from being used because its purpose is not for analysis after the facts, but to intervene before the facts unfold, it imposes an obligation on states to intervene.
Language is also a weapon of domination, wielded by empire, the coloniser, the authoritarian. It can be used to soothe us, like recent expressions of concern by European leaders (choose suitable adjective) whose words are mere theatrics to reassure the public that they care. And it can be used to control us. Restricting expression through the banning of languages, of words, is always how authoritarianism begins to assert power over people. It is an attempt at erasing cultures, ideas, thinking, and ultimately, aspirations for liberation.
Throughout the colonised world, Indigenous people were forbidden from speaking their own languages. The United Kingdom restricting people to two genders is a form of control and erasure. Germany imposing Kafkaesque rules on which words or languages can be used at demonstrations is about controlling the narrative. We are to submit, to assimilate, to obey, or face the consequences.
At the same time, empire sanitises violence and weaponises language. It is not torture, it’s enhanced interrogation. It’s not civilian deaths, it’s collateral damage. It’s not genocide, it’s self-defence. Some people are massacred, others simply die. Some people are hostages, others are prisoners. When white people commit mass murder, it’s a mental health problem, when brown people do, it’s terrorism.
There is an art to this sort of thing, Omar El Akkad explains, we are witnessing language being used for the exact opposite of its purpose, to unmake meaning.
So how do we liberate ourselves from language that evades, obscurs, imprisons, hides, and instead, use language as a tool to humanise, to understand, to take action, to become wiser? After all, what are words for if not to clarify the world to us?
“We have to throw everything we have as writers against the machine invested in the unmaking of meaning. And you know what, we might fail. But the greater failure is to not attempt it. To simply look away and talk about how beautiful the moon is,” El Akkad says.
Language is not just words, of course, but it is what most of us are accustomed to. Within the climate movement, for example, there is a growing recognition that western languages lack appropriate words to describe planetary changes as well as emotions emanating from this. So new words are entering our vocabulary, some invented, some repurposed, many borrowed from other languages.
New words don’t just help in describing something previously indescribable, but they also help us to see in new ways. In some Indigenous languages, for example, there are no words to differentiate between genders, words simply refer to animate or inanimate objects. In others, there are numerous genders, to welcome and celebrate difference.
Perhaps, rather than allowing words to determine or limit our understanding and engagement with the world, we can take this as an invitation to see language as animate, as a body that is alive and evolving, where there is creation, revision, evolution, loops, everything that involves life. Because as El Akkad asks: “What good are words severed from anything real?”
Words, Veronica Yates and illustration, Miriam Sugranyes.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad.
‘Omar El Akkad : One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,’ Between the Covers Podcast. Listen here.
The Ecotopian Lexicon, compiled by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy. See more here.
Braiding Sweetgrass, Sherri Mitchell.
‘Indigenous Sexualities: Resisting Conquest and Translation.’ Manuela L. Picq and Josi Tikuna, 20 August 2019. View here.
Perfect Victims, Mohammed El Kurd.
‘Gaza genocide: The West finds new language - but does nothing to stop Israel.’ Middle East Eye, Marina Calculli and Gjovalin Macaj, 22 May 2025. Read here.
‘The Colonizer’s Dictionary: A Guide to the Language That Built Empires & Broke Communities.’ Christian Ortiz, 22 May 2025. Read here.
The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates.
“When you exclude people from the conversation, when they don’t have a role in your journalism, when they don’t have a role in your film, when they don’t have a role in your TV, when they don’t have a role in your books, they seize to exist as people and become these kind of cartoon cut-outs that other people make of them. And they become much more easy to kill. That’s on us.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates
“To be nobody but yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” — E.E. Cummings
“[People] fall into a cult of big hero/rockstar worship and don’t appreciate the efforts of small local ‘invisible’ everyday heroes and their small acts.” — Manish Jain
“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.” — Pablo Neruda
“The poets, by which I mean all artists, are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only the poets.” — James Baldwin
“When you exclude people from the conversation, when they don’t have a role in your journalism, when they don’t have a role in your film, when they don’t have a role in your TV, when they don’t have a role in your books, they seize to exist as people and become these kind of cartoon cut-outs that other people make of them. And they become much more easy to kill. That’s on us.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates
