Losing the fear of politicizing language

Now that Sant Jordi is coming and many decisions will have to be made about the language of the books we will be giving away, it's a good time to reopen the vexing debate about what Ada Colau once called "the Catalan oversight thing." We can say that the only positive legacy of the Catalan Process is that we are losing our fear of politicizing the language. Naturally, this is not a credit to the parties and associations that led the effort, but rather a response to their failures. After decades of neglect and deceit regarding immersion and a sovereignty movement that swallowed the mental Trojan horse of the Spanish cosmopolitanism (note the oxymoron) according to which talking about identity and language is old, dangerous and counterproductive, now it turns out that Catalan is in danger.

But an identity and a language are neither an endearing folkloric distinction to be protected like an exotic pet nor the essentialist donkey ears of a tribe: an identity and a language are above all the continuity of a group's history. And that means they are useful and politically fundamental tools, because if in Catalonia you don't know or participate in the Catalan conversation, you are defenseless against the rest of the world's powers, who are perfectly aware of their identity and make policies to make it better than yours. To reverse injustices, women needed to recognize themselves as women, workers as workers, and Black people as Black people, while those who oppressed them told them it wasn't necessary, that everything was universal and neutral. Sant Jordi is a great day to remember that the Catalan language is the key to accessing the stories that root and empower you in this piece of land we call Catalonia.

The problem is that politicizing the language is an expression that sounds bad right now. We think that explicitly speaking about the conflict will upset the majority of Catalans who don't have Catalan as their mother tongue, and that the alternative is to treat the language as an evil that doesn't want to be heard. But it's precisely when a cause is at its lowest ebb that it's necessary to remember the meaning of politicizing. As the history of social movements and the political science that has been done on the subject explain, important political changes have never been achieved through consensus, but rather through denunciation and tension. Consensus is very good and desirable, but it's the medal awarded to politicians who reach the end of a conflict process that is usually long and difficult. It's only because someone points out an injustice that went comfortably unnoticed that things can begin to be put right. This doesn't mean that selecting demands, how to communicate them, or when to tighten and when to loosen them aren't important factors. But the case of Catalan is an obvious example that looking the other way is part of the problem. And conversely: thanks to a polarizing campaign like the one carried out by Ciutadans, anti-Catalan sentiment and the desire for linguistic genocide were activated and consolidated, while the Catalan side continued to fail to confront the issue with its own clear and courageous discourse.

During the Trial, there were certain theories about social movements. I think of works like Manual of civil disobedience (Saldonar), whose charm is that, instead of recommending ways of doing things from abstract reflection, they started from a detailed historical analysis of cases that showed that the commitment to polarization is not a matter of faith, but that mobilization, even in difficult contexts, has achieved important changes. From the suffragettes to civil rights in the US, passing through the right to gay marriage or social security, denouncing discriminations that at first may seem unpopular raises an awareness that in the long term leads to victory. A truly transformative cause cannot be mainstream from the beginning, and a social movement must accept that raising its voice will activate a certain number of people against it and not everything will be flowers and violas.

In Catalonia, Catalan is currently a minority language, and it's only natural that pointing out linguistic injustices and demanding change provokes a mixture of fear and vertigo. But polarization is natural; societies are divided on many issues, and the great focus of the fear of politicizing stems from the interplay of interests among professional politicians. History tells us that a certain capacity to embrace tension and stand firm is what ultimately changes things. "Politicizing language" should be an expression that increasingly sounds more natural and appropriate to us.