Federal dread / Proper pronouns

Today: "Sally Forth," a federal worker in Washington, D.C.; and Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, Nigerian linguist, writer, translator, founder of Olongo Africa, and writer and producer of the documentary, Ebrohimie Road.

Issue No. 253

The Time of the Preacher
Sally Forth

The Gendered Madness of Language
Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún

The Time of the Preacher

by Sally Forth

I am a federal worker in Washington, D.C. I am middle-aged. I am a minority. It is three weeks now into the transition of the new President, Donald J. Trump, in the Year of our lord 2025.

In the quiet hours of the morning, my very own private D.C. was a pretty how town of row houses like so many wedding cakes, adorned with endless streamers and bows and turrets and painted like candy. Weeping willows on every other block, leafless in January, lean like giant Rapunzels casting down their hair. I am so close! And also so far from the Sturm und Drang of the business of the Capitol and the fury of the very new very old man in the White House.

In my office now it’s mostly fear and quiet conversations and fewer lunches in the refrigerator than before. To drown out the eerie silence: Willie Nelson. A red-headed stranger, prowling the land, bent upon revenge:

It was the time of the preacher
In the year of ’01
Now the preachin’ is over
And the lesson’s begun

On the campaign trail we weren’t certain what the lessons would be but we knew there would be lessons in spades. 

Sunday, January 19
Took the Metro to see the crowds at the rally at the Capitol One arena. I’d heard this was to be a time of retribution against people like me. Wanted to see up close: what would that look like? I wore a MAGA hat for safety. In the station I saw a boy, 10 years old? Asian descent, with a white mom in a baseball cap. The boy held a Trump flag twice as big as he was and ran back and forth near the entrance to make the flag stream out behind him. His face looked proud and flushed. His mom took videos of him on her phone.

I got to the arena two hours early with tickets I’d reserved the week before. 

There was a man with a bullhorn: “Repent! Donald Trump will fail you. Your mother and father will fail you. Your sons and daughters will fail you. Jesus never fails.”

I saw a Black man selling Trump merch: “I got hats! I got hoodies! I got scarves!” Saw a lot of Black men selling Trump merch.

From the arena I started walking, trying to find the end of the line. I walked, first in a light mist and later in pelting sleet, for 30 minutes until I ended up on the Mall across from the Air and Space Museum. A line 30 minutes long. A lot of people, none of them locals, came to see the preacher.

Got in line behind a suburban white couple and their early teen kids and, a minute later, behind me was a family speaking what sounded like Chinese.

The white dad tried to talk to me; I found it hard to smile and engage. There was a lump in my throat! These people were here because they hated me, and my work, and most of the people I love. How could I smile back? What is small talk with a threat in the air.  

By 2:45, with the rally set to begin in 15 minutes, we’d barely moved 20 yards when the D.C. police drove slowly along the line to tell us the arena was at full capacity. 

Took the Metro home. Watched the rally on my phone. I heard Elon Musk made a Hitler salute but I only saw it later in pictures. 

Friday, January 24
I’ve heard that some of us are receving emails saying we should turn in colleagues supportive of or involved in DEI. Will they? What does that even mean?

We’ve heard there are minders being installed in most agencies. I haven’t seen any but would I even know? Some are calling them MAGA commissars.

Longstanding directives aren’t just ending they’re being “abolished.” Dramatic executive orders are always a thing in a transition but these are different. Sound like they were written by an angry middle school child. Because of the nature of my work, a lot of them feel personal. Schoolyard bully threats with the force of law—and the ability to fire us. Maybe.

Wednesday, January 29
There’s never been a direct line from OPM to every federal worker but now we all got an email from “HR”—[email protected], an email address none of us have ever seen before. Says it’s from officials high up at the Office of Personnel Management but I read today that it copies, word for word, parts of an email that Elon Musk, allegedly the world’s richest man, sent to his employees when he bought Twitter.

I panicked, opening the email. I’d already heard about it, read about it. I wasn’t being fired, thank god, my bank account only has enough for me to get by, maybe, for a month. It’s some kind of offer, a “deferred resignation” I think. Get paid through September, working from home, or maybe not working at all.

I was in the office today. Nobody I know has quit so far. Nobody knows what to do. Is it a buyout? Eight months of paid admin leave? We’re feds, we know the law, we all know the government can’t give us more than ten days of paid admin leave in any calendar year. We know the government can’t promise funds that haven’t been appropriated yet and we know nothing has been funded beyond the March continuing resolution. There’s a lot of, “the offer is valid, lawful, and will be honored,” which suggests it won’t be?

There’s a Reddit thread now for federal workers. I’m too nervous to use it. But I’ve been reading it. Everybody is saying the same thing: “Don’t quit. Hold the line.”

But this is online. In person we honestly don’t say much.

I’ve been rereading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I underlined this in high school:

On his deathbed he called my father to him and said, “Son, after I’m gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.”

I think I underlined that in high school because I had to lie like that to my abusive parents. And now?

By the end of the second week, the feeling in the office wasn’t as much one of dread but, maybe, strength? People are standing around talking to each other now. People are saying “Elon Musk” and “DOGE” and “Trump” out loud, words I didn’t hear a week ago. Only one person I know is considering taking the fucking “fork” and they’re still on probation; the way they see it, they’ll probably be fired anyway so they might as well see what this offer gets them.

The worst story: after we’d all heard about the five days per week RTO mandate, a person on disability who’d applied for the telework exemption had to meet with their supervisor, who kept asking, “You’re sure telework is the only accommodation that will work with your disability?” and they said yes of course, my disability is no secret. Days later they learned they’d been put on a list of people who have requested that exception. A list, it was implied, of people the president is eager to find a way to fire.

Willie Nelson:

Don’t fight him,
Don’t spite him
Just wait till tomorrow 
Maybe he’ll ride on again.

I got a text from a colleague in public health. Said the CDC was erasing the entire section on HIV today.

From a journalist friend: CDC is purging datasets today. Race, ethnic diversity, LGBT, reproduction. 

The “fork in the road” emails keep coming, each time slightly sweetening the deal. People must not be taking it. They must be desperate for us to take it. They must realize we have more power if we stay. A lot of us have been talking—when Musk sent the same “fork” email to Twitter employees, many agreed to resign and he... never paid them. It’s still tied up in court. I guess that’s what the fork really is, a joke. Making a joke of the jobs we keep to feed our families, jobs that serve the public interest.

I heard that employees were responding in chats with the spoon emoji and then management removed the spoon emoji from the list. You hear a lot of things. This particular thing, I later read in the paper.

An American Airlines jet, the first domestic airplane to crash in 16 years, collided with a helicopter over the Potomac. There were no survivors. Last week, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration resigned. There is no one in charge at the Federal Aviation Administration. 

Sunday, February 2
Elon Musk and his college-aged goons now have direct access to the payment systems of some $6 trillion of U.S. funds. Meanwhile, they have locked out the government employees responsible for these accounts. This was reported in the Washington Post. A colleague told me it’s true. Still, I can’t believe it. 

I’m reading a book about World War II; this is something I underlined, something a high-up Nazi, Theodor Oberländer, said in the mid ’30s. “The struggle for ethnicity is nothing other than the continuation of war by other means under the cover of peace. Not a fight with gas, grenades, and machine-guns, but a fight about homes, farms, schools, and the souls of children.”

All the attacks we’ve had on teachers, schools, churches, immigrants’ homes: This feels like an occupation but it’s still the time of peace. I think.

Sunday evening, February 2
USAID employees were sent an email stating headquarters at the Reagan building would be closed on Monday. Few federal workers check our work email on Sunday evening. I wonder how many showed up for work. 

About 100 Feds began protesting at OPM and may have successfully blocked the door to several of Musk’s goons? Details are scarce and the main national news outlets are not reporting on this yet. 

It’s the end of the week. I still only know one person who might—might—take the fork in the road. A judge extended the deadline until next Monday, so they still have time to decide. The White House says 40,000 have taken it. None of us believe that number.

I think that slowly, maybe, there’s a sense of solidarity building. People are laughing in the office again, a little bit. Dark humor. Showing each other Musk memes on their phones.“Bigballs” is something we’ve all been googling, but on our phones, not our work computer. On our work computer, in front of our supervisors, in emails, in zooms, we’re mostly lying low. Wait and see.

Friday, February 7
We received an email stating that if we accept the “deferred resignation” we will have a few “activities” to complete after which we will be placed on admin leave and must promptly return all government equipment including laptops. Sounds ominous.

Earlier today in the Washington Post, more contempt for us feds from the White House: “‘We encourage federal workers in this city to accept the very generous offer. If they don’t want to show up to the office, if they want to rip the American people off, then they’re welcome to take this buyout, and we’ll find highly competent individuals who want to fill these roles,’ White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday.”

It sounds like that's how they'll justify not paying anyone who takes the fork—by saying we just wanted to rip off the American people. It's not legal to pay us more than ten days; more and more, it seems that's likely all that anyone who accepts this offer will get.

EXTRA FLAMING HYDRA INNINGS

Flaming Hydra Tom Scocca wrote something about the Baltimore Orioles in the 30th edition of the annual Baseball Prospectus guidebook. Scocca: “Believers and complainers alike had to admit that the front office had finally delivered a real team, no matter which emphasis one may have preferred to put on ‘finally.’” Baseball Prospectus: “Compare projection versus Pythagorean record over the last four seasons, and PECOTA’s annual margin of error shrinks to six wins—almost entirely due to 2023.” Whew! Play ball!

The Gendered Madness of Language

by Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún

I have just replied to an email from a colleague whose gender I did not know. Her name, Olúbùnmi, is ambiguous. It's a Yorùbá name meaning “God gave him/her to me.” 

The gender is implied because Yorùbá names aren't inherently gendered. In fact, Yorùbá is notorious for having no single word for the gendered form of “sibling,” e.g. “brother” or “sister”. The filial part, yes, or the age differential, but not the gender. In Yorùbá, “So-and-so is my ẹ̀gbọ́n” (elder sibling) or “So-and-so is my àbúrò” (a younger sibling) are more common expressions than “So-and-so is my female-sibling.” 

So “sister,” as one-word equivalent, doesn’t exist in the language.

Native speakers of a language take such forms and conventions for granted. In more modern conversations, especially when Twitter became a thing in the early 2010s, the uniqueness of Yorùbá became an interesting topic of conversation among young Nigerians sharing their language’s particular features in the discourse around gender then in vogue. 

Some would have us believe that pronouns are a modern invention to excuse (or, as they say, encourage) gender dysphoria. Not, as most Yorùbá people conceive of them, a way to describe a person whose gender you don’t know, or couldn’t otherwise refer to because of the peculiarities of our language. 

To refer to an elder in Yorùbá, you say “ẹ” which is the same pronoun used for plenteous materials. In other words, “they.” It’s as if we assume inherently that elders in their individual capacity are more than one person. The honorific “ẹ” accompanies every reference to an elderly, or formal, acquaintance. Ẹ jọ̀ọ́ (please), when addressing my mother; and “jọ̀ọ́” when I’m addressing my son. “Kí ni wọ́n fẹ́?” What do they want? Even when “they” is the neighbour, a woman in her fifties who had come to borrow a pinch of salt. Even the non-honorific version is genderless: kí ni ó fẹ́? 

When I’m translating a book into English where the phrase exists, I might use an English pronoun, for clarity—“What does he want?” or “What does she want?” But the Yorùbá reader would know that the pronoun ó in the source material has no gender. The gender has to be derived from context.

In literary translation, this quirk is not always pleasant to deal with. My Yorùbá competence ran into a real-life challenge when in December 2019, I translated a short story by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie, whose story “The Shivering” is about a distraught Nigerian woman who has fallen in love with a Nigerian man she met on a New England campus. At the story’s crescendo, in which a big secret is revealed, there was a lot of back and forth between the two characters, which required pronouns to express reported speech. He said… She replied. He said… She said…

In Yorùbá, that was a nightmare. 

Repeating “Ó sọ pé…” (he/she said) ad infinitum was going to lead to confusion. The ó referred to a genderless subject. Unless any other detail was added, the reader only saw two people talking without knowing who was whom. I had to improvise. 

The result read something like this…

This one said…

That other one replied

Then this one says

Then the young lady replied

And then the man said

And the other replied

And so on, through the hope that one didn’t run out of inventive phrases before the scene was over. And the day was saved.

Yesterday, after replying to my colleague whom I had misgendered because I thought the name Olúbùnmi was male, I thought back to people today who feel the need to add pronouns to their email signatures to be more inclusive of transgender individuals. Intended or not, that would certainly have saved me. 

But then, I also read in the news that federal workers in the United States have been told to remove pronouns from their emails or be fired. 

A few years ago, shortly after I launched Yorubaname.com, a multimedia dictionary of Yorùbá names, I was approached by a few interested students who wanted to create a similar project for Igbo, another Nigerian language. Because the dictionary project was open source, the software was adaptable. Every new collaborator just needed to provide the desired names. With our software, they could replicate the dictionary in no time, and for free. We set up a group email to keep track, and a spreadsheet to populate with Igbo names.

A few weeks later, though, there was rancor. Some of the prominent members of the group, mostly men, began to insist that they felt slighted by another member, a female linguist, who suggested that the spreadsheet didn’t need a column for gender, because Igbo names didn’t inherently have gender. The men were outraged. Igbo names were gendered, they insisted. Names with Ike in them signified strength and were “obviously” meant for men. Names with nne (mother) or mma (beauty) were “obviously” for female children. What abomination was this, the suggestion that any name could be borne by anyone?

I, being Yorùbá, could not successfully mediate—my linguistics and real-life experience on the matter notwithstanding. The linguists of both language communities lost the battle. The conservatives couldn’t be pacified, and my linguist friend left. The group broke up shortly after. It was the last we heard of it, and the project never took off. 

Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún’s film, Ebrohimie Road, is now available for streaming on Vimeo. #yay

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