When Language Breaks

I spent fifteen years perfecting language as a tool for understanding reality. Then I discovered that the thing I most needed to understand couldn't be reached through language at all.

I grew up in a Flemish intellectual family. My father was an ethicist and philosopher. At the dinner table, there was no chit-chat. Only deep thought. Arguments had to be sound. Words had to be precise. I learned early on that language was not just a means of communication, but a tool for analysing reality.

That tool became my field of study. At Leiden University, I chose Languages and Cultures of Africa, with a fascination for Khoisan languages. These are languages that use clicks. Sounds that do not exist in any European language. Languages that force you to let go of your entire idea of what a human language can be before you even begin to understand them.

In hindsight, that was already a sign.

Then I did a Research Master's in African Studies, again in Leiden, with linguistics as my lens. My research was linked to Mirjam de Bruijn's NWO-VICI project Connecting in Times of Duress: how do communication, technology and conflict relate to each other in societies under pressure? My own focus was on Kribi, Cameroon, where a deep-sea port was being built in the middle of the habitat of the Bagyeli, an indigenous community that had lived there for generations. I investigated how language, technology and power converge when a community is literally displaced.

I was good at that work. I could dissect structures, expose power dynamics, analyse discourses. Every day, I switched between languages and registers, from academic French to the Bagyeli field. Together with others, I founded Voice4Thought, a platform that connected academic research with art and activism in conflict areas.

And yet something was not quite right.

The more precisely I phrased things, the less they got through. Not because people were stupid. Not because I was unclear. What I was trying to convey was beyond words. I sharpened the instrument until it was razor sharp, and then I cut through the air with it.

There is a difference between not being able to say something because you don't have the words, and not being able to say something because words are not the right vehicle.

The first is a language problem. The second is a liminal experience.

I had the second, but treated it as the first for years. I kept refining it. Rephrasing it. Searching for the sentence that would hit home.

That sentence did not exist.

Not because I failed. But because language stops at a certain point. All language. It can refer to what lies behind it. Trace the contours. But it cannot hold on to it. A map is not the landscape. A menu is not a meal.

That sounds philosophical. It wasn't. It was frustrating, lonely and confusing. Because when your whole existence revolves around clear communication, and you discover that clarity isn't the problem, what is?

It was a body problem.

The answer did not come in words. It came in the form of a horse, an arena, and a nervous system that finally got permission to speak. But that is part 2.

This is part 1 of the five-part series When Language Breaks. Next: When the Body Speaks