As I was thinking about how to put together a post about Tim Brookes's new Endangered Alphabets-related Kickstarter campaign (The Right to Speak, The Right to Read, The Right to Write), I was in the middle of pondering current efforts in Texas and elsewhere in the US to (once again) to ban books that certain factions don't like. This happens all too often, so much so that the American Library Association sponsors a website called Banned and Challenged Books and promotes an annual Banned Books Week to celebrate the freedom to read.
Still, English- (and other first-world language) speakers largely take reading, writing, and speaking for granted so much that our collective knickers get all knotted up when those rights are threatened (even if we don't quite understand what the Freedom of Speech amendment to the Constitution really means). But as contentious as things tend to get, nobody is threatening to ban our alphabet or eradicate our language. Here, at least.
Elsewhere, however, these irreplaceable components of culture are so threatened that for many years now, Tim Brookes has been working to save as many endangered alphabets (the graphic representation of languages) as possible possible. (See a list of posts on the Farm about the Kickstarter campaigns and my efforts to support his various campaigns here.) The success of these projects has resulted in a wide variety of resources from The Atlas of Endangered Alphabets to the recent launching of Ulus: Legends of the Nomads, a tabletop game designed to foster the imperiled Mongolian language, writing system, and culture.
The newest project involves a large-scale carving in three scripts:
Osage, from the Great Plains of North America
These will be inscribed, by Brookes himself, using his remarkable skill (with which I'm familiar first-hand, because I own several that were obtained as rewards for previous project backings) on a large, spectacular piece of wood that emphasizes both the beauty of the scripts and their importance to the cultures that use them.
All three of these scripts have been rescued from total loss by community efforts to revive them. Two of them, Bamum and Osage, had to be invented in order to help preserve the languages because of political efforts to obliterate the cultures that spoke them. We may not think that this sort of thing can happen to us, but I spent a good deal of time today thinking about how much simpler it is to assimilate and repress indigenous cultures if you make it impossible for them to maintain their historical identity and memory.
Please take a little time to check out the links I've included above, and to imagine how much poorer our own lives would be without the written records we've inherited from our ancestors. Without writing and the documents they produce, rights as we understand them would not exist.
If you've ever wondered why dystopias and post-apocalyptic scenarios are so popular in today's literature and films, think about how much political and cultural angst lies at the heart of stories like Brave New World, 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, Fahrenheit 451, The Man in the High Castle, or A Canticle for Liebowitz. And think about how the abridgment of fundamental rights like reading, writing, and speaking would impact people who've never really had them threatened before.
Only two years ago, pandemics were the stuff of bad dreams and old SF stories like The Andromeda Strain or Earth Abides. But impossibly large numbers of people have become ill and died from COVID-19. So, if, on top of the disruption of day-to-day life and public health, the destruction of cultural and historical memory is even imaginable to us-- perhaps it's worth contributing to the celebration of fundamental rights to remind us of how fragile they really are--in an increasingly uncertain world.
I keep trying to find ways to stay positive these days, and this campaign has come along at just the right time. A few bucks toward supporting such an important vision seems like a pretty simple way to lift one's spirits.
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