e cannot tell you who actually wrote Native Tongue. It was signed simply "the women of Chornyak Barren House." ... If anyone has evidence that might shed light on the mystery of its authorship, no matter how fragmentary, we ask that you share it with us. With that teasing piece of meta-fiction begins Suzette Haden Elgin’s novel Native Tongue.
It is the year 2205. In 1991, the United States Congress passed a bill that declared women to be legally minors. Women are unable to hold public office. All their activities must be approved by the men who are their legal guardians.
Got that? Now, imagine this: the aliens have landed, and they have really cool stuff. The United States government is mad to do business with them. That’s where the Linguists come in, a whole clan of men and women trained from birth to speak and interpret human and alien languages. Linguists lead hellish lives. As soon as they’re old enough to toddle into a human/alien Interface, they work night and day. And if the life of a male linguist is hell, the lives of the women who are his chattel are the nether depths of that hell.
But the women have a plan; that is, the old or infertile women who have enough free time in which to formulate one. They've been secretly creating a language of their own, one in which women can express the concepts that men think literally too trivial or silly for words. And knowing that language alters perception, the women of Chornyak Barren House know that when women start speaking fluent Láadan, the world is going to change. Whether for better or for worse is anyone’s guess ...
Razor-edged satire
It is fitting that Native Tongue was first published by Daw Books in 1984, the date made infamous by George Orwell’s satire about a totalitarian society. Native Tongue tweaks believability only a little to create a society built, much like ours, on the premise that women are inferior to men. The novel also takes deadly potshots at racism and classism: when a government official accuses the Linguists of overworking their children, Thomas Chornyak replies:
"If my children ... did not spend their lives in endless toil, your children, Smith--and all the rest of the dear little children of this United States ... could not be provided with perfect food and perfect housing and perfect education and perfect medical care and the leisure to thrive and live the good life. ... You love your children, you see, on the weary backs of ours."
But Elgin creates no easy heroes; as penetrating as Chornyak’s political analysis is, he’s incapable of applying it to the way his society treats women. It’s refreshing to read characters that are simultaneously admirable and despicable, astute and shortsighted.
Elgin has been criticized for omitting same-sex relationships in Native Tongue. Indeed, the novel is otherwise such a satisfying send-up of enforced heteronormativity that it seems odd that it doesn’t examine how that might affect the queer people of the society. For instance, the growing love between Nazareth and Michaela in Chornyak Barren House feels so much like limerence that it’s nearly impossible to read it any other way. Yet Haden Elgin clearly means us to understand that the women are platonic friends.
Haden Elgin has acknowledged this blind spot in Native Tongue. She says that at the time, she simply didn’t consider same-sex relationships. She does, however, point out that the women of Chornyak Barren House clearly love each other. And they do. That clear love makes it easy to root for this small cadre of aging, idiosyncractic and sometimes timid freedom fighters as they comfort and care for each other and begin to subvert their society from within, one woman at a time.
