{"id":278,"date":"2009-05-15T14:47:59","date_gmt":"2009-05-15T18:47:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/henryalford.com\/?p=278"},"modified":"2009-05-16T12:33:01","modified_gmt":"2009-05-16T16:33:01","slug":"elderism-51","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/?p=278","title":{"rendered":"Elderism #51"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I can&#8217;t stop thinking about (probably because I don&#8217;t fully understand it) something that Mia Coutu, Mozambique&#8217;s most famous novelist, writes about in &#8220;Languages We Don&#8217;t Know We Know,&#8221; his essay in the new <a href=\" http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Gods-Soldiers-Penguin-Anthology-Contemporary\/dp\/0143114735\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1242412132&amp;sr=1-1\">Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing<\/a>. Quoting a short story of his in which a terminally ill woman is able to fall asleep only once her husband speaks to her in a made-up language or gibberish, Coutu explains, &#8220;those sounds brought back memories\u00a0 of a time before she even had a memory! And they had given her the solace of that same sleep which provides the link between us and what was here before we were alive.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Going on to say that James Joyce called this relationship with an unformed, chaotic world &#8220;chaosmology,&#8221; Coutu says rites that we should all be able to speak the language of chaos. He writes,<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;The man of the future should surely be a type of bilingual nation. Speaking a finished language, capable of dealing with visible, everyday matters. But fluent too in another language to express that which belongs to the invisible, dreamlike order of existence.&#8221;<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I can&#8217;t stop thinking about (probably because I don&#8217;t fully understand it) something that Mia Coutu, Mozambique&#8217;s most famous novelist, writes about in &#8220;Languages We Don&#8217;t Know We Know,&#8221; his essay in the new Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing. Quoting a short story of his in which a terminally ill woman is able to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=278"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":291,"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278\/revisions\/291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}