Donald Trump, the once and future President of the United States, travels to God’s black desert. Eagle Pass, Texas, where America ends. He talks for the cameras. ‘Everybody I speak to,’ he says, ‘says how horrible it is. Nobody can explain to me how allowing millions of people from places unknown, from countries unknown, who don’t speak languages—we have languages coming into our country, we have nobody that even speaks those languages. They’re truly foreign languages. Nobody speaks them. And they’re pouring into our country, and they’re bringing with them tremendous problems.’
We’ll have to take Trump at his word here. He was the President; he gets information that you and I do not. Clearly something very confusing is at work. But what is it? What are these ‘truly foreign languages,’ spoken by ‘nobody’?
Most people seem to assume that Trump is talking about unestablished languages. He means that some of the people coming from Central America don’t speak Spanish, but Q’anjob’al or Zoque, and some of the people coming from West Africa don’t speak French, but Mpongmpong or Weh, and some of the people coming from East Asia don’t speak Chinese, but Dbusgtsang or Cuối. You don’t understand those languages; in fact, you can’t even pronounce their names. But there are a lot of people who do speak them. They are not the languages that nobody speaks. It’s very hard to find a language without anyone. Supposedly, there’s nobody who speaks Latin, but actually plenty of people do: balding dons, beady priests, toffs. Akkadian has been dead for two thousand years, but every major university still has a sad little room full of people who can write each other memos in cuneiform. May all the curses of Ishkur and Nusku be upon he who leaves empty sachets of coffee creamer by the side of the machine.
The languages that really are spoken by nobody are the languages whose speakers were killed. We only have a few of the words spoken on Tasmania back when it was still called Lutruwita. Pögöli-na was the Sun. Wīta was the Moon. For someone, at least; there might have been multiple entirely distinct language families on the island. The people who spoke those names were shot like birds. Maybe there’s nowhere on the planet without these ghosts. There were unknown languages in Old Europe, spoken in the first farmlands before your Yamnaya ancestors rode in from the steppe to strike off everyone’s head. Before that the Neanderthals had their rough speech like the screaming of crows. The bad conscience of the world filters through the US-Mexico border. It sings its sorrow in words no longer known, in the tongueless tremor of a language without speakers, echoing across America, bringing with it tremendous problems. But even the dead are not so different from us. They are not truly foreign. We will join them soon enough. What would a truly foreign language look like?
Someone has, in fact, described just such a language. In 1916, in the middle of the First World War, a twenty-two year-old German student described it in a letter to Gershom Scholem, who would go on to found the academic study of Kabbalah but was, at the time, seventeen years old. Later, Walter Benjamin published that letter as On Language in General and the Language of Man. Funny title: isn’t the language of man the only language? Benjamin doesn’t think so. ‘There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language.’ There is, he says, a language of things: silent, wordless, but still language, permeating everything that exists. He points out that ‘it is possible to talk about a language of music and of sculpture,’ that communicates itself without units of individual meaning: not through a particular language, but as a language. There is also the language of a lamp, a mountain, a fox. And beyond the language of things, in some secret sympathy with it, lies the language of God, the language with which God spoke the world into being. Originally, human language was part of this continuum. It had nothing to do with communication between people; the first use of human language is recorded in Genesis 2:19. ‘And God formed out of the earth all the wild beasts and all the birds of the sky, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them; and whatever Adam called each living creature, that would be its name.’ Naming is language as such expressing its own linguistic being. Or, as Benjamin writes, ‘the proper name is the word of God in human sounds.’ But we weren’t content to simply name things, and this was the Fall, ‘into the abyss of prattle.’ Babel is already contained in the exile from Eden: eventually the world is plagued by ten thousand prattling tongues.
Until now. This is the truly foreign language, spoken by nobody, that’s coming into the United States. The language of things. The language of Eden. The terrifying, worldmaking language of God.
Here is a square of cement in the desert. The hills go blue in the distance, but below them there’s a shallow ravine, half-piled with crud. Coke cans and water bottles, plastic bags, surgical masks and scraps of clothes, diapers stained brown by the juices welling like resin from spat tobacco wads. The ravine is foul and loud with flies; it would take a lot of digging no one wants to do to find in there the yellowed teeth and the pieces of human bone. Between the hills and the ravine is a square of cement in the desert, with floodlights rising up at regular intervals like banners on a parade ground and four hundred people kneeling in strict rows with their hands cuffed behind their backs and a gag across their mouths.
Men in fatigues patrol up and down these rows of kneeling figures. They wear safety goggles and hold their rifles up with the stock just below their chins. The patches on their arms say SHIBBOLETH and underneath, the motto, ‘TAG ’EM.’ The illustration in the middle of the patch shows a small mound of severed ears. According to the federal government, Texas SHIBBOLETH is an illegal paramilitary unit with no authority to detain or question anyone. According to the media, there’s a worrying overlap between SHIBBOLETH units and certain far-right militia. But there’s an Arizona SHIBBOLETH too now and a SHIBBOLETH boat squad in Florida, and some state senators in New Hampshire are talking about setting up their own SHIBBOLETH to patrol the border with Quebec. It’s going to the Supreme Court.
According to the state of Texas, its State Human Intelligence for Beating Back Other Languages Except Those that are Human is a perfectly ordinary cultural institution that simply responds to the exceptional needs of the present. Nobody complains about the Académie Française ordering people to say courriel instead of email or piège à clics instead of clickbait. Nobody begrudges the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua its mission to limpiar, fijar y dar esplendor. And unlike those, SHIBBOLETH isn’t even formally devoted to the protection of the English language in particular. Half its officers grew up speaking Spanish at home. But despite it all, despite the blasts of speechlessness coming in from the border, despite the fact that half of California’s already gone, already reverting to animal cries, entire cities howling in the night—even now, liberals still pretend that it’s somehow racist if you want to maintain language as a system of signifiers. They won’t even let you have a few men patrolling the invisible line that separates langue from parole. And yes, SHIBBOLETH is armed, but even that’s not so unusual. Don’t you know that French Academicians get to carry swords?
The four hundred people kneeled on the cement don’t look at anything in particular. No fear in their eyes but no bravery either. Just a slow placid waiting for whatever’s next. These people have seen things Americans never see. They’ve made it here from every dying corner of the dying earth. Places where one militia shoots half a village and when it’s liberated the other militia shoots the rest, because only collaborators would have survived. Noisy diesel-stinking cities where a third of your wages go on cooking fat. So they sold everything they could, took a flight to Colombia, and then they started walking north. Bad things happen on that path. Stragglers shot in the fevered stumble through the Darien Gap. Or the kidnappers on the altiplano that circle a caravan late at night, snapping like wolves to winnow out the women. And all this for the country of neat green grass: to mow the grass on someone else’s lawn. It takes months to get here, and these people had already left their homes before they heard the news. That America the safe broad fat and generous isn’t safe any more. That there has been some terrible change.
Here’s how it works. An unmanned drone spots a group of migrants breaking through the border fence at night. The drone plays a recorded warning message in English, Spanish, French, and Mandarin. If they appear to understand the message, a unit is dispatched to detain the migrants and hand them over to federal border authorities. But migrants who don’t understand, or who respond negatively to the English-language warning—wincing, holding their ears, assuming the foetal position—are considered high risk for theolalia. At this point a SHIBBOLETH strike team has to detain them. The goal is to have all migrants gagged and cuffed before any of them can say a word. It’s dangerous work. Every week, dozens of agents are exposed to Überhaupt, and after a few seconds of that your brain is just an inert ball of slime. High-risk individuals are brought here, to this square of cement in the desert. And then, one by one, they’re processed.
A SHIBBOLETH agent loosens the gag on the first detainee. No digas nada, he says, silencio, sí? The man nods. The agent produces a regulation Red Delicious apple. Qué es esto, he says. The man’s eyes flash around for a second. Is this some kind of joke? The agent jabs a finger at the apple. Sussuro, he says. Como se llamo? Una manzana, the man whispers. The agent nods. Bueno, he says, bueno, una manzana. And on to the next. Una manzana; una manzana. Una manzana; una manzana. On the other side of the square another agent is moving methodically down his own line, where handcuffed men whisper pingguo and he says shi de yi ge pingguo. Some people say aful or sapharacanda or seb. It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s a word with no necessary relation to the apple, signifying only through a differential relation to the rest of the signifying system. But one girl in the Mexican section starts whimpering when they show her the fruit. She doesn’t want it. Ma’taali’teeni’, she whispers, por favor, ma’anaatik ka t’ann. Whatever that is, it’s not the word for an apple. Suddenly ten guns are on her. Theolal? Was that theolal? The girl wears torn leggings and a pink hoodie decorated with repeating images of SpongeBob SquarePants riding a unicorn. Wherever she’s from, they don’t have apples in the supermarkets there. They don’t have supermarkets. One of the agents shoves the apple in her face and she cringes like it’s a bug. Este, he barks, este, este, un nombre. She starts crying. Dale un nombre, he says. Ahora! And so she does.
It’s not clear if the girl’s lips even move. When the name comes it seems to emanate from the apple. The terrible luminousness of its being. A name that rips through the shabby appearances of the world like lightning, like lava, primordial and molten-hot. For a moment, every other name seems ridiculous. Apple, manzana, pingguo: arbitrary mouth noises. Meaningless slurping sounds. Like when you say a word often enough and it sounds weird weird weird weird weird because with enough repetition meaning dissolves into sounds. But the girl speaks the apple’s true name and it’s as if she’s called the apple into being for the first time: the first true apple since the Fall. There is no distance. Word and thing are one and the same, and the world is finally healed. A half-second of silence on the square of cement as the thunderclap clears. And then ten SHIBBOLETH agents unload a full clip into the girl’s slight body. Two hundred bullets each bigger than her fingers that rip her apart until all that’s left is bone fragments and pulp.
Every year, two million people illegally cross the US-Mexico border. There’s an incident like this every few days.
It’s all futile, though. SHIBBOLETH can set up its security zone between signifier and signified on the southern border, but inland Überhaupt is already unleashed. Read the news and they’ll tell you: California is gone. The majority of people there now speak language. Not English or Spanish or Armenian or Tagalog, just language, language in general. The experts call it Überhaupt. It’s comforting to give the theolalia a name, as if Überhaupt and German are the same type of thing, but they’re not. Imagine an animal that isn’t a lion, an elephant, a dragonfly, a jellyfish, just a general undifferentiated animal. That is what’s running wild over California. A million thunderclaps every night in LA, the chorus of unmouthly names.
Actually, if you talk to Angelinos, those Angelinos that can still talk, they’ll tell you it’s not that bad. Yes, the streets are full of hobbling disfigured people who hiss the holy language of the Moon and the tides, but this is Los Angeles, and what else is new? Stay in your car with the doors locked and the AC on. Listen to a podcast or something. Block out the noise. The only real problem is that voice control has stopped working on everyone’s phones, so they’re all dabbing at screens while they drive and the traffic’s worse than ever. Of course, if you go south of the 10 the wordless language of your body might obliterate the brief articulacy of your mind, but why would you want to go south of the 10? In fact it’s best not to go anywhere, but then you never really went anywhere before. The sun shines every day; you’re not really missing anything if you spend today inside. Tip your Instacart shopper generously—but don’t open the door until he leaves. If you share just a few words with him—‘here you go,’ ‘thank you’—there’s always the chance you might hear your door talking too.
This place is still really very liveable, even with the sudden irruption of the language of God into the sublunary world. Up in the Bay Area it’s more difficult. There they gibber Überhaupt outside your windows. Everything is constantly glowing forth into its full being. All this time, a tree was just an instance of the true name for a tree, planted in the earth; it was never made of wood, it was made of its own name. In San Francisco, the human turds on the sidewalk have learned to sing. A corpse partakes in language as much as a man and so much of the hubbub on Market Street and around Union Square is the silent chatter of unburned corpses. They loll over vents, clothes rippling in the bath of steam, speaking. There is language that towers up out of the sidewalk and language that collects in the gutters, and one wide pacific word that drains out of the Bay and away, a word that might melt into thirty percent of the Earth’s surface area, washing against the far edge of itself to send Japanese fishermen insane.
It takes a certain kind of person to live here. But the tech workers are still around. They’re very happy. This is everything they’ve been working towards. Nonhuman language, a language that isn’t made of meanings but simply iterates itself uncoiling out of the void. If you could just find a way to patch this stuff over to the model, every single one of the teething troubles of generative AI would instantly be solved. No more hallucinations, no more loopy results. A neural net running on Überhaupt would be definitionally incapable of saying anything untrue, since every word it said would also be the object it referred to. Maybe it could even get Alexa working again. Already all the VCs are piling money into Divine Language Programming. If you believed in open borders before, you’re fanatical about them now. We need more, more deathblasted refugees bringing their unspoken languages, we need to suck the language of God out of these people. It just might save the economy. Like every social and technological advance, in the long run it means more jobs for everyone.
The places where nobody is happy are in the middle. The Central Valley, buffeted by one deformation of language welling up from the border and another pouring down from the Bay. That vast flat landscape beneath the bald Diablos, pixelated with feedlots and fields. At the Harris Ranch Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, also known as Cowschwitz, workers discover that every single grunt of unhappiness the animals make can now be perfectly understood. The cattle know why they’re alive and what will happen to them. They’ve always known. For forty generations they’ve lowed their lament, and every newborn calf joins the threnody for itself.
But there’s another deformation of language out there, the one beating its path from Mar-a-Lago to the White House. It’s an election year, and California has fifty-four electoral votes. Usually those would all go to the Democrats. But much of the Democratic base in California are currently wandering, hollowed-out vessels for the language of God, while the right-leaning suburbanites are barricaded in their homes, still speaking English, and very eager to express their concerns at the voting booth. The only voices they hear are the ones coming out of the computer. Old films and TV shows have become weirdly incomprehensible, but there are a lot of podcasts. ‘These global elites, they don’t want you eating real nutritious meals, they want you eating slop made from bugs. They don’t want you speaking the language of Shakespeare and Milton, they want you babbling in Überhaupt. You get the picture? They don’t want you to be a white man, an American, a patriot, with a culture and a heritage you can be proud of. They’re trying to to turn you into a person in general.’ Who can stop this stuff? The language of God is made of names: somehow, the people who speak it must be made to respond to the name of Joseph Biden.
Where did this truly foreign language come from? Why is it here?
Once, people sought it out. In the Middle Ages, it was generally assumed that the magical language in which Adam named the animals must have been Hebrew. Isidore of Seville says so; Bede agrees. The only people who disagreed, in fact, were the Jews. Maybe it helped that some of them spoke Hebrew, and understood full well that the words they used did not have any particularly magical relation to reality. (The letters they used were another story.) Christian thinkers usually insisted that a child raised without any exposure to language would end up spontaneously speaking Hebrew, but Maimonedes and Abulafia both deny this. In 1290, Hillel ben Samuel wrote to Zerachiah of Barcelona, asking the same question. Zerachiah replied that Hillel had been spending too much time talking to ‘uncircumcised’ philosophers. A child raised without language wouldn’t magically learn Hebrew; he’d end up barking like a dog. Instead, Jewish thought tended to a deft bit of Aristotelianism. Yes, all languages are basically arbitrary conventions. But, as a student of Abulafia wrote, most languages are based on conventions between people, while the Adamic language was a convention between Adam and God. As soon as God withdrew from that language community, the original speech was lost.
But as time went on, Christians became increasingly obsessed with the idea of seeking it out. Maybe the original language wasn’t Hebrew, but something more mysterious. Hildegard of Bingen developed her own idiosyncratic script called the lingua ignota or unknown language for her communications with God. She believed that the original language would have consisted not of words but a pure musical harmony; on that basis, she argued that nuns should be allowed to sing in church services. John Dee transcribed words in Enochian, the language of Adam and the angels, with whom he had a fairly chatty relationship. In Enochian, the name for man is Ollog. Earth is Toltorg. Or maybe a more likely candidate was ancient Egyptian. The hieroglyphs suggested a language in which word and thing were still uncleaved; they also had the advantage that nobody actually knew how to translate them. In the seventeenth century, though, Athanasius Kircher, everyone’s favourite mad philologist, claimed to have found the key to translating the mystic symbols, and laid it out in his massive Oedipus Aegyptiacus. An entire supplementary book, the Obeliscus Pamphilius, was devoted to interpreting the following inscription:
Per Kircher, these hieroglyphs are a mystical diagram. Each image doesn’t just stand for a concept; it illuminates through fragments the fundamental nature of reality. His translation begins ‘To the Triform Divinity Hemphta, first Mind, motor of all things; second Mind, craftsman; pantamorphic spirit, Triune Divinity, eternal, having no beginning nor end, Origin of the Secondary Gods, which, diffused out of the Monad as from a certain apex into the breadth of the mundane pyramid, confers its goodness to the intellectual world,’ and continues in that vein for several hundred more words. In fact, the bit he’s translating here doesn’t mean anything a all; it’s purely decorative. And the obelisk was never even in Egypt; it’s a piece of ancient kitsch raised by the Emperor Domitian. The hieroglyphs are just his name.
The other exciting candidate, though, was Chinese. At the time, it was assumed that sinograms also expressed a concept without routing it through the messy contingencies of human sound. A pure, universal language in which a word might have a natural relation to its object. Kircher shared his era’s enthusiasm for Chinese. He identified Confucius with Hermes Trismegistus, and produced a series of charts showing exactly how sinograms descended from Egyptian hieroglyphs. He didn’t go as far as John Webb, who in 1699 wrote that Chinese was the language of Adam, and babbling babies are actually speaking fluent Chinese. But he still saw in the East a fragment of Eden.
Through all this history, there was always the temptation to cut through the abstract speculation and find out. All you have to do is actually carry out the thought experiment. Take a few newborn children and raise them in total isolation, making sure they never hear a single word. Then you can see what language they start to speak. If the chroniclers are to believed, this did happen. According to Salimbene of Parma, a thirteenth-century Franciscan, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II performed a particularly cruel version. He procured some children—Salimbene doesn’t say where from—and gave them to nurses with strict instructions to feed and bathe them in absolute solemnity and silence. But the children all died. ‘Non enim vivere possent,’ Salimbene writes, ‘sine aplausu et gestu et letitia faciei et blanditiis baiularum et nutricum suarum.’ Without applause, gestures, funny faces, and tender caresses, it was not possible to live.
Some centuries later, James IV of Scotland is supposed to have tried it again. In his Historie and Cronicles of Scotland, Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie records that ‘the king gat tak ane dum woman and pat hir in Inchekeytht’—an uninhabited island on the Firth of Forth—‘and gaif hir tua zoung bairnes… the effect heirof to come to knaw quhat language thir bairnes wald speik.’ Lindsay doesn’t record the results. ‘Sum sayis they spak goode hebrew bot as to my self I knaw not.’ These days, we would find this unlikely. Zerachiah of Barcelona was right; feral children don’t speak Hebrew, they usually have lifelong difficulty learning any language at all. The lesson is that language is intersubjective; more than that, it’s a function of care. When you strip away the polluting influences of culture from a human being, you don’t reveal the divine, natural essence within. Instead, you kill them. Before words, we must be loved.
Except there’s one more instance of the experiment: it happened again, within living memory, and this time it worked. After the 1979 Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, the country gained its first deaf schools: previously, deaf children had been locked up at home, silent and often neglected, all but incapable of communicating. Now, they had dedicated East German teachers, who tried to teach these children to read and write and lip-read ordinary Spanish words, on the understanding that what these kids needed was to be brought into mainstream society. It didn’t work. The kids refused to understand ordinary language; they didn’t seem to understand what language was. Until, that is, they invented one.
On the playground, they started using a set of haphazard hand signals; come here, go away, hello, goodbye. Eventually these gestures became more systematised and less gestural. They developed into a full-fledged sign language, with its own distinct grammar, fully capable of expressing complex ideas. Nicaraguan Sign Language is a totally independent language: unlike most other signs, it’s not a translation of Spanish words into hand signals, because the people who invened it had never heard Spanish in their lives. They were raised, effectively, without language. But all it took was enough of them to be in one place, and they drew a language without words out of the pure linguistic being of the world.
Maybe it’s happening again. Everyone remembers that when Donald Trump was President, the US government separated children from their families at the border and put kids in cages. This was an incredible cruelty. Outrage; politicians thundering to the border to be photographed giving these kids a big sympathetic hug. After 2021, when Biden took over, the US government continued effectively separating families at the border, and there were still kids in cages—but now, no one cared. For years those children lingered in the facilities, without their parents, without speech, gestures, funny faces, as the detention sites slowly overcrowded, until suddenly critical mass was reached. All those medieval theologians were right. You just need the proper soil. A border zone. Here, stuck mid-translation between one language and another, in the nothingness between words, these children started speaking the Adamic tongue.
The catastrophe isn’t coming from over the border. It’s a product of the border itself.
Minor forms of undeclared civil war. The state government of New York anounces it’s divesting from Texas until SHIBBOLETH is shut down. In response ten coachloads of hooded and manacled migrants are dumped outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Unvetted, unprocessed, all of them at high risk for theolalia. A weapon. The same day ten thousand people register to house one of the migrants until long-term accommodation becomes available. It’s a beautiful moment. The politicians in Texas thought we’d be as cruel as they are, they thought New Yorkers would recoil the way they do from anyone who speaks an unfamiliar language. Didn’t you know this city is the Mother of Exiles? We’ve always lit our lantern for the tempest-tossed. We are kind.
But then the volunteers discover that when they try to talk to their honoured guests in English, the guests scream, cower in the corner, mutter feverish prayers. No, you say, I’m not like those pigs at the border, I just want to help you, but whatever you say your guest’s eyes widen in horror. Every single migrant placed with an English-speaking host flees into the street within twenty-four hours, at which point the authorities lose contact with them. Forty-nine violently assault their hosts. Some of them use a kitchen knife; four volunteers suffer serious wounds, two die. One host is shot in the stomach with her own gun by a nineteen-year-old from Myanmar. After she’s released from hospital she tells the TV cameras that she forgives him. She says that all she saw in his face when he pointed the gun at her was fear, and the more she tried to talk him down, the more frightened he became. She doesn’t know what she did wrong or what traumas he’s experienced, but she wants to learn. She says that if he can hear her, he’s welcome to come back to the apartment any time. Eventually the NYPD find him on one of the lake islands in Prospect Park, wet and shivering and gibbering in terror. They shout for him to drop the gun. He fires at them. A Burmese interpreter is brought in to talk to him, but he doesn’t speak Burmese, he speaks Palaung. Does anyone in the city speak Palaung? Probably, but how are you supposed to find them? They try their best. Phone around all the restaurants and Buddhist temples in Elmhurst. In the meantime an inflatable dinghy is deployed to retrieve the gunman and he shoots himself through the head.
More bodies show up in the weeks that follow. These people were desperate to live in America once, but now America is poisonous to them. They are allergic to New York. Somehow, the city’s hospitality has failed. A funeral mood settles over everything. Who are we, that we can no longer offer a good welcome? When, inevitably, Überhaupt starts to spread, nobody really feels like resisting it. Maybe this is salvation. To be a mere thing, to talk to the trees and the clouds. So you just sit there in silence when a stinking, dishevelled person lurches aboard your subway train, muttering under his breath what turn out to be perfect transcendent truths in a language older than man.
It bubbles up from underground. The names of God are spraypainted on all the bridges, and then the Army blow them up. This thing might be a sickness or it might be the cure; either way they want to trap it on its archipelago off the coast of America. A swarm of helicopters settles over Manhattan to evacuate the penthouses. The ordinary rich are left to their brownstones, their lofts, and their fates.
In the end we do discover what’s happened. It wasn’t the other languages that changed. Whatever happened at the border did nothing to Palaung or Mru. The language that broke was English, speech of the Angles and Saxons and Jutes, āne siþe, feorr ær. This is why Alexa and all the other pieces of voice-activated software have suddenly stopped working in English, and why all the old media is now incomprehensible. Maybe because English was so close to unlanguage anyway. All Indo-European languages are formless next to the strict syllables of Chinese or the crystalline Semitic roots—but English barely exists at all. No grammatical gender, almost no conjugation, no declension at all outside the personal pronouns. Sludgespeak, atomised, a formless slurry of lexemes, flow without code. So little there that when it happened, none of the English-speakers even noticed. It’s almost impossible to directly experience how the language you speak has changed, but you can try. Repeat a word out loud again and again, again again again again again again, until the meaning has drained out and it’s just sounds, and maybe it will come to you, fuzzy like a shape in the corner of your eye. The sounds you’re making don’t sound anything at all like how the word ‘again’ used to sound.
Even then, the change vanishes as soon as you try to focus on it. You can’t hear it. But people with absolutely no prior exposure to the English language—they can.
New York SHIBBOLETH manage to apprehend one of the migrants trafficked into the state from Texas. Tulé is a Garifuna man who’d been housed with a Honduran family near Crotona Park. Unlike most of the new arrivals he had not fled his lodgings. Speaking in Spanish, he complains to the SHIBBOLETH agents that New York is not like he’d expected, there are constant airstrikes and the Yankees Stadium is full of refugees from Long Island. Overall, Tulé seems friendly, co-operative. He shows no signs of theolalia. In fact, it proves impossible to coax any true names out of him, even after he’s presented with a series of bizarre and unfamiliar objects, including a Campbell-Stokes recorder and a sex toy in the shape of a callipygian motorboat. The names he invents for these objects appear to be Arawakan puns. In a final effort, they adminiser the bouba/kiki test. As fragments of language that conform directly to their objects, bouba and kiki are suspected to be a proto-Überhaupt, but Tulé repeats them without once assuming the shattering voice of God. After the interview, one of the agents tries talking to Tulé in English, and he has to be restrained and sedated. Afterwards Tulé is exposed to the English language again while handcuffed to a hospital bed, and asked in Spanish what he’d experienced. He begs the agents to either kill him or let him go. They keep up the questioning. Como suena? Es bajo o alto? Áspero o liso? He won’t look into the agent’s face. Sea lo que sea, he says, no eres humano. Un cuerpo humano no puede emitir esos sonidos. Whatever you are, you’re not human. A human body can’t produce those sounds.
The report to FHIBBOLETH headquarters in Washington DC comes with a brief postscript. The authors suggest that maybe the only way English-speakers can become aware of how English sounds now is through exposure to Überhaupt, because the true names reveals all language as mere sound. If the Adamic tongue is driving people mad, if it’s destroying the country from the inside out, it’s because Americans are, for the first time, actually hearing themselves speak.