COLUMN

When I am about to start a carving, I give much thought to not only what to carve but how to carve it.

There are two diverging paths that I can follow when I want to highlight and promote and preserve and, if possible, revitalize it. (Bear in mind that in virtually every case, I’m working in a script that I can’t read and I can’t write.)

One of these paths is what you might call the artistic path. In these cases, I don’t want to produce a mere copy of a font or a piece of printed text. I want to create something original, expressive, and eye catching that really makes people see it as not simply writing in the sense of: “Here are words that mean something that I want to get across,” but ,“Here is the act of taking a thought and making it visible for other people in the fashion of my culture.”

That’s an extraordinarily profound transaction, and I want my carving — the way I represent these characters — to encourage people to look at writing in general in that way. If I do my job well, the response is not just, “Oh yeah, this is how they write in this other country or this other community,” but, “Wow, this is something remarkable and new to me, and I want to pay attention to it.”

Needless to say, the artistic path is fun but full of dangers. If I add a swoop or a curl to make a letter more (to me) graceful, I may change its meaning and the meaning of the entire piece of text. More subtly, I may give the impression that I’m the one who chooses how this script should look, which is profoundly arrogant and insulting. Some people have indeed told me, “We like the fact that you’re bringing your own style to our script, because whenever anyone does that it brings it to life and expands its possibilities.” Still, I wouldn’t want to take that open-mindedness for granted.

The other branch of these two divergent paths is what might be called signage or the expression of authority.

All of the scripts that I carve are minority scripts. The community they come from is invariably marginalized, and in many, many, many cases, people from those communities will never see their writing in a place of significance or honor, such as in a schoolbook or in text on a television, or even on a road sign.

They may never see their written script at all, in fact, and when I do a carving from a culture where my principal aim is to restore this sense of value, autonomy, and integrity, what I may well want to create is something that goes up on a wall not as a piece of art but as a sign, because signage implies authority, and in a way, I am trying to appropriate power on behalf of the powerless.

For example, right now, I’m working on some village name signs — in other words, signs to be mounted at the approach to the village that identify the village’s name. But with a difference.
Here’s the backstory.

In Sierra Leone, the script Kikakui (which roughly means “ABC,” as Ki, Ka, and Kui are the first three syllables) was created roughly a century ago for the Mende language. Like all indigenously created scripts, it faced enormous opposition from colonial authorities and colonial thinking, which held that it was the job of “backward” nations to improve their prospects by acquiring culture and civilization — that is, English, French, or Arabic culture and civilization, by and large, via the medium of the English, French, or Arabic language.

Over time, Kikakui became all but extinct, only used in two or three small villages. According to Wikipedia, it’s a “failed script.”

Here’s the point, though: Many in sub-Saharan Africa are haunted by the question, “Who would we be if we had never been overrun and/or colonized?” It’s the question that underlies the film Black Panther: What might an African culture be like, given its natural resources, its ingenuity, its strengths and talents, if it had been able to develop on its own?

As such, some indigenously created African scripts hint at the same issue: What if we had our own authentic writing that we ourselves created, as an expression of our own aesthetics, our own spoken language, our sense of what is important and how to express it? And if we had such a script but it was lost, or driven underground, what would it mean to us as a people to revive it?

Konrad Tuchscherer, the scholar who has been studying West African scripts for years, is now actually in Sierra Leone, jumpstarting a revival of this script, teaching it at university to great enthusiasm and response by his students. It’s yet another illustration of the fact that writing is not merely a tool or a communication medium — it is co-created over time by everyone who uses it, and as such it is the visible manifestation of what a language community finds important, worth noting down, work keeping.

When I asked Konrad how I could help, he asked me to carve the names of the three villages, the refuges of Kikakui, in the Kikakui script, so that’s what I’ve been doing.

And that leads me back to the top of this essay: How should the writing look?

For this purpose, everything I’m doing is not intended to strike the observer as elegant or fluid or florid. I have decided to make it as simple, strong, and clear — as official — as possible.

It’s a way of communicating, “This village is proud of its name, and of its history, and especially of its history in preserving this indigenous script. This is where the script is at home. This is where we are at home. This is where our cultural tradition is at home, despite the overwhelming forces of colonial language and colonial cultural influence.”

I very much doubt that those three villages, which I haven’t (yet) visited, are as colorful, as sexy, and as zippy as Wakanda. All the more reason, then, for me to make them the best signage I’m capable of, in recognition of their fortitude, their resilience.

And when the road signs are finished and in place (an act that strikes me as being very similar to nailing one’s colors to the mast or one’s theses to the church door), then we move on to less symbolic and more practical steps. Creating classroom materials, training teachers, publishing poems and stories and memoirs in Kikakui so people have a reason to learn to read it, promoting these revitalization efforts throughout West Africa so other cultures with minority scripts can draw inspiration from it.

One final note: It turns out that this wood, makore, which I chose because it looks stunning and is actually from West and Central Africa, turns out to be a powerful irritant, and even the act of carving it is having a terrible effect on my asthma. So for the first time, I’m carving in an N-95 mask.

The revitalization of the Kikakui script will involve several stages over at least five years. If you or your company would be interested in sponsoring this work, please contact me through info@endangeredalphabets.com