Hometalk

by

Obododimma Oha

An important training dispensed in the home is the ability to understand and produce some clandestine signs which are available to only the members of a family. In this way, the homestead guards and preserves information, uses such information to protect insiders (call it its shibboleth), and pursues a goal without external interference. These days when we give attention to the learning of the language of the home, do we care about this protective communication? Do parents talk to their children with their eyes and the addressees understand and act accordingly, instead of asking or challenging their parents openly why they are looking at them that way?

Call it 'hometalk.' Every home should have its own 'language.' Its 'language' is its identity, its life, its existence, its unified action, its safety, and its future. Every home should have a hometalk that only members of the home should have competence to speak and understand when the occasion arises. 

Talk could be wasteful!

 Yes, we subscribe to a language, but we also allow it to divide and protect us. Speaking only one 'language' makes us highly vulnerable. We cannot even play hide-and-seek with it when the need arises. So, it is good that each context chooses its own language and guards such a language jealously.

Hometalk  could be with the eyes. It is with the eyes we behold the world, and eyes can talk to eyes. Eyes should understand eyes. Eyes should always know what eyes are saying.

Hometalk excuses speech sometimes, and enlists the rest of the body. If not the eyes, the look on the face could say it visually and effectively. That may be one reason babies observe faces and make decisions based on what and how they read those faces. They are yet to deploy the so-called 'speech organs' but they can see and read faces.

What of even smells? Members of a home can recognise smells, and right from the crib. We should differentiate entities on the basis of their smells.

I don't blame that woman who searches for her real husband in the e-mail he has written to her. She is looking for him, for his voice, their shared feeling, in that email. She is looking for something intimate, and would see formality as a very uncomfortable distance. Why this distance in his language? Why the formality as if he is writing a memo to his staff? 

And if his memo to his shifts from an inappropriate "God bless you" of pretentious religiosity to even a vulgar "darling," she could shift in her seat and watch how he looks at her when he enters his office. Maybe something is coming!

Hometalk is the home. We all live or should live inside it. We all see other members through it. It is our mirror.

Whether hometalk is voiced or voiceless, whether hometalk is with the eyes or without them, whether hometalk is movement or no movement, et cetera, we need to learn it, master it, use it, or we are outside home.

What is even very crucial is the syntax or interaction of one sign in hometalk and another. These interactions and their decoding speak of competence. We need to understand how a look on the face and movement of a kind combine to provide an idea. Hometalk is a network of signs really, and speech may be a minor part of the whole in it.