Speech Sounds

Imagine if you woke up tomorrow and humanity lost its ability to not only speak, what would we do. We'll that's easy, you would say, we would write stuff down and get on with our lives. What if humanity didn't just lose its capacity to speak, but lost its ability to produce and understand language entirely. All of a sudden things become much more complicated.

Octavia Butler has written a charming little story that poses some very big questions. In a world where 99% of the human population has lost the ability to use language in any way, the tenuous membrane that separates humans from animals is torn apart. Octavia Butler presents a world without language as being violent and dangerous, as people struggle to get their thoughts across and convey emotion.

I think that in a larger story, Butler would have possibly shown how families fared with non-language communication. When you live in close proximity to a group of people for a great majority of your day, you begin to develop subtle and nuanced  forms of body language that bi-passes  the need for language altogether. Encounters with strangers would be the troubling and dangerous instances where communication would crumble. Butler seems to capture this very well at the beginning of the story where she describes strangers arguing on the bus without any means beyond frustrated grunts to convey their anger. More subtle is the moment where Rye is trying to ask Obsidian to come home with her. Initially he misunderstands her gestures and declines the offer. Rye decides to use a different set of gestures and Obsidian gets into the front seat beside her. The scene expertly and delicately conveys the difficulty that one would have communicating with nothing but body language and gestures. Without syntactical and semantic rules, things fall apart.