Chapter 10 E-concept – Lingua Echofranca
Lingua Echofranca
... And this our life, exempt form public haunt,
Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
I would not change it.
As You Like It, II i 14-17 Shakespeare
I read with interest Clair’s short article titled “Dismantling the idea of the subject.” She posits that the normal poetic tradition of anthropomorphising non-human entities is being subverted by the de-anthropomorphising of women into non-human objects. Clair gives the example of metaphorizing a woman as water in waterpipes, hence marginalising her to the periphery of the house, placing her in the background of servitude against the foreground dominated by the man.
This reminds me of terra nullius, a legal concept used by Cook to justify the colonisation of Australia for George III, citing the Aboriginal people were uncivilised (nla.gov.au). This notion, however, was in direct opposition to the instruction given by James Douglas, 14th Earl of Morton and President of the Royal Society which funded Cook's expedition: “[The Aboriginal people] are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit.” Here Douglas refused to let Cook to objectify the native, acknowledging them as humans rather than as part of nature, whereas Cook saw fit to do it to please the King. So Cook saw them precisely as part of "nature," free to exploit. Perhaps if there was a meaningful dialogue – connecting man and "nature" – between Cook and the Aboriginal people, the course of history could have been different.
Such a dialogue is needed now in our ecosystem before nature is subjected to the same fate as the Australian Aborigines. At present, both Morton's ecomimesis and Boes and Marshall's ecodiegeis are not dialogues; they are monologues. Ecomimesis is a human construct to mimic nature; it does not talk to nature in any meaningful ways. Likewise, ecodiegesis is a narrative constructed by nature, but man can choose to ignore it without answering its pleas. What we need is a two way communication to address this ecological exigency, a dialogue, between human and nature.
To achieve this, I would like to propose a new e-concept called Lingua eco-homo-franca – lingua echofranca for short. Although the latter has the carries the risk of reducing "dialogue" to mere "echo." But echo is perfectly suitable if it provides the desirable result. I will use the Australian Regent Honeyeater as an example to show how lingua echofranca works.
Australian Regent Honeyeater is an endangered species. There were only a few hundred sightings in the Blue Mountains and the Northern Tablelands. They are so rare that many males fail to sing their species-specific expressive songs to attract females. They are learning wacky songs of others' instead. Such a loss of song culture may be a precursor of extinction; a prelude to their requiem. But luckily, help is at hand. Conservationists at Toranga Zoo are teaching young chicks to sing by playing songs through loudspeakers. This epitomises lingua echofranca at work: Honeyeaters inform us of their trouble; we respond in action to reteach them their songs (click here for video). May they thrive have many children!
Another mode to dialogue with nature is through phenomenology ...
Work Cited
Abram, David.
Oppermann, Serpil. "How the Material World Communicates." Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication. Routledge, 2019. pp. 108-117. https://www-routledgehandbooks-com.wwwproxy1.library.unsw.edu.au/doi/10.4324/9781315167343-10