Issue 97, April 2004
Learning to talk
by Kamran Nazeer
My parents thought I was autistic, but I just couldn't see the point of having a conversationKamran Nazeer is a freelance writer
Her office was lined with red carpet. She sat in a chair with a high back. I sat on the floor and drew pictures in the carpet byrunning my fingers through it. We listened to a tape of two Americans, Tom and Maureen. I had to identify the topics of theirconversation. She held up cards. I had to guess what the next word was. Sometimes, I broke off and went back to my pictures.I shook my head when she challenged me. "I've run out of words," I shrugged.There was a garden at the apartment block where my family lived and I used to sit on the steps, like a guardian. No one couldget in without giving me the password. I had begun to overhear the word "aw-tism" from my parents. They had two books thatused it in their titles. "Aw-tism," I decided, was the password needed to enter the garden. Autism, my parents feared, was theword that would prevent me from entering the realm of normal human functioning.I was sent to see the lady because at break, I spent the entire time walking up and down the kerb that separated the playgroundfrom the grassy verge. When the teacher asked questions, sometimes I stuck my hand up and told a long, elaborate lie: "...andthen I went right into the crater of the volcano in a big bubble device." There was a corner of the classroom that I had decidedwas mine. If other kids entered it, they would get pushed. I hadn't spoken until I was two and a quarter years old. Later, I usedwords only for games I had invented. I didn't see any other use for words.The psychiatrist and I had a contest once to find the best description of how I felt when the words ran out. She wondered if itwas like going into the labyrinth to fight the minotaur only to find that the ball of string wasn't long enough. I suggested that itwas more like walking down a tightrope only to discover halfway along that your laces were untied.She encouraged me to keep a journal. I noted in it - at age 12 - two lines from Emerson: "What you do speaks so loud that Icannot hear what you say" and, "People who know how to act are never preachers." I describe in the journal how I waswriting while sitting cross-legged by a big bay window, my forehead was against the glass. I wrote that the lines fromEmerson suggest the possibility of transforming my "autism" into an ideal (I use the inverted commas because the therapistswere reluctant to make an outright diagnosis; I can imagine them writing "borderline"). Not speaking very much was gettingto be a problem by age 12. Other children were less pliable, less willing to play my games. There were groups, and I wasoutside them. In the eyes of my parents and their friends, I was evolving from a quiet and charming child into a quiet andmenacing teenager.I didn't understand how to talk. I could reply, and I could ask. But I couldn't talk. I had Emerson to help me. I wouldn't talk. Ididn't need friends. I didn't need approval. I had my thoughts. And my books. And my journal. I would just act, and then theywould know.
I remember learning that Isaac Newton refused to meet both Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin, when they were keen to meethim. I remember thinking, "Yeah, good on him." Around the same time, however, in the same journal, I have written out aline from Edith Wharton's novel The House of Mirth: "She wanted to get away from herself, and conversation was the onlymeans of escape that she knew."It took me a long time to learn and to harness the value of conversation. But by the time I wrote those things in my journal, Ihad at least learnt various lesser ways of talking. I could manage politeness. Indeed, I could make people miserable with mypoliteness. Friends of my parents would ask me about school and about video games. Dressed by my mother into a little suit,with my arms stiff by my sides, I would reply briefly, but extremely politely. There are two crimes for which a child will notforgive an adult. One is insincerity, the other is weakness. When my parents' friends, faced with my silence, asked me thesequestions, to my mind they became guilty of both. I couldn't understand why they would care about my schooling or aboutwhat books I was reading. I understood that there was this arcane art known as "making conversation," but, jeez, thepractitioners had to become so inauthentic. So I replied with contempt, hiding the contempt behind politeness. It was like apuzzle, politeness. If you fit phrases together correctly, you were successful. The adult smiled, and left you alone. Later theytold one of your parents that you were a "good kid."My speech was probably syntactically and grammatically more accurate when I was a kid. It is as if I decided to start speakingsolely because I understood it to constitute an intellectual challenge. I never produced Aramaic mutterings, but I quicklybecame fluent in the three languages of my household. I remember showing off in front of adults by flipping between Urdu,Punjabi and English, all in the same sentence.Lying was another challenge. The goal was to make the story as fantastical as possible without putting the listener in theposition where he or she would have to challenge its veracity. It helps being "foreign," I suppose. People are much less willingto interrupt when you have "difference" on your side. The volcano I told my teacher about was in the north of Iran. How couldshe know for sure there wasn't a bubble device that took you down into the crater? She believed my stories. At the nextparent-teacher night, she commended my parents for their adventures. I remember that night, sitting on the edge of my bed forhours, waiting for them to return home, imagining the dialogue through which my lies would be uncovered. As it happened, Ireceived no reprimand. It was far worse. My parents came home and telephoned the therapist. They seemed a little afraid of me that night and it made me cry. But it didn't make me stop. And the best place to tell lies wasn't at school: it was at buffetbreakfasts in hotels. I would come downstairs and explain to an old couple that my parents were dead but that their lastrequest had been that my nanny take me for a trip around the world. I would describe the places where we had already been.I was an abominable child. I was drunk on the special kind of intelligence that I possessed. And none of the talking was anescape from myself. I didn't get Wharton's point at all. My talking was a way of deepening my confinement. I was alsobeginning to learn a third way of talking: argument. I come from a political family. I was always encouraged to believe that noplace and no cause is too far away. We sat down to dinner together most nights, and we didn't talk about what had occupiedour lives during the day: we talked about other lives and other problems. We stored up news items to relate to each other,provocations to dispute over the pouring of water and the distribution of pickles. As I grew older, I went from observing thesearguments and intuiting that something important was going on, to participating in them. The trouble with argument can bethat it is directed towards winning. But we seemed to understand that. We eliminated the competitive aspect of it, rotating ourcommitments. It was through this exercise that I began to learn how to talk; that is, to talk properly and devotedly.The usual perception of undergraduates is that, in their immaturity, they strive to convert conversation into argument. But asan undergraduate in Glasgow, I learned to go the other way. When the stereo was off, or at least when the volume was turneddown, we talked. We didn't argue, we didn't tell lies, we talked. We even went to the pub. The pub was demystified for me.When I first came to this country, I couldn't comprehend this form of entertainment, which seemed to involve going to a roomand talking. Just that. You talked, for hours. Why weren't you watching television or reading a book? How could there beenough to say, evening after evening? I ordered a round as if it was an oral exam - a lager tops, a pint of eighty, a Diet Coke. Itook a seat. And I learned how to escape from myself. I resorted to Nietzsche: "When we talk in company we lose our uniquetone of voice, and this leads us to make statements which in no way correspond to our real thoughts."
I remember sitting with my friends and watching as they stopped being my friends. The way they moved their hands changed.The manner in which they spoke changed. They suddenly revealed knowledge of fantastic arcana. It was exactly this that hadonce irritated me. It was exactly because of these changes created by conversation that I had identified it as inauthentic. Butthen I got it. Inauthenticity was fun. There was nothing immoral in trying to entertain people. It didn't make you weak. And itturned out that I did know how to do it. Conversation was a game, just like the games I used to invent. And it didn't matterthat I was "autistic." Once I knew that I was participating in a game, the words came more easily. They had a reason forcoming out. What I still find difficult is having to tell people what I feel. That is when the words run out. I don't see the pointof doing it, and I am no good at it. What I also find difficult is working out what people are feeling and why they might betelling me about what they feel.My friends often come to talk to me when they are sad. They don't understand this fully, but I am a useful person to talk towhen they are sad precisely because I am bad at relating and reassuring. I will either intellectualise the sadness or I will leadthem out of that area by involuntarily making inappropriate connections. Either way they end up feeling better. I get thecredit. But I am a fraud.What has the socially arid child learned about the "art of conversation"? Actually, I didn't realise what I had learnt until Icame to live and work in Cambridge, where there were two dominant modes of talking. There was politeness - what do youstudy and what college do you study it at, how was your day, what did you read? And usually that was the prelude to thesecond mode: exchange of information. I'll tell you about peasant farming in Mongolia if you'll tell me about the 19th-centuryFrench novel. The art of conversation was not practised at all widely. At parties, when the politeness ran out and people feltthat the occasion required them to refrain from exchanging information - that is, talking about work - we played charades. Wenever played charades in Glasgow.A conversation, or a certain type of conversation, is a performance. This is why it doesn't matter if we lose our unique tone of voice. That's part of the point. Conversation requires insincerity. Or at least it is often indifferent as to whether a statement issincere or insincere. What matters is whether it is funny, or disputatious, or revealing, or sad. Conversation shouldn't bedirected at a conclusion either, and it shouldn't firmly be about something. It should circle, it should break off, it shouldrecommence at an entirely different point. A conversation is merely a series of juxtapositions. A phrase in what I said, a topic,a point of view, connects with something that you contain. Then you say something. And so we proceed.The problem with the academic intelligence is that it is too tidy. It reacts against insincerity, hyperbole, provocation andwordplay, which are all essential to the art of conversation. If the aim is to establish truth, then of course all of these elementsmust be disciplined. In a highly competitive environment like Cambridge, it may be better to stay silent or speak reservedly,and it is never advisable to take the weaker position for the sake of doing something entertaining with it or just for the sake of keeping the conversation going. It is never advisable to begin talking about non-serious topics. I don't of course claim this istrue of every conversation that took place there, only that it is a tendency. And I don't imagine that the problem exists only inCambridge. Another element of the problem may be the specialisation of knowledge, and of ways of talking. Every subject,every profession, has its own discourse. Every conversation, on the other hand, requires a shared background.I used to silently condemn passengers who talked to strangers on buses or trains. Why can't they be alone with themselves?Don't they have material in their heads to amuse themselves for this short trip? I understood their loquacity as a weakness. Butnow I've realised: they are the daring ones. They are willing to perform. They want a new tightrope all the time. And sorecently, as a part of my effort fully to assimilate the ethics of conversation, I started a conversation with a stranger. Twostrangers, in fact. It was on a plane, with an elderly Israeli couple. Fairly early on, they explained to me, in the manner of unclogging a drain, that they were both anti-Zionists and they could never live in Israel again. But because I wasn't interestedin winning an argument, because I was interested in having a conversation, I rhapsodised about nationalism, and the notion of a homeland. I compared Israel to Pakistan. There are deep disanalogies between the two cases, but I wasn't being a scholar.The couple resisted me for some time. But gradually they spoke about the relief they felt when they originally moved toIsrael. They spoke happily about living in a kibbutz. They spoke about their children's experiences of Israel, especially of military service. One had liked it, one had not. They spoke about friends who still lived in Israel, their insecurities, theirqualms. I had a lovely time on that flight. I also acquired so many stories for use in other conversations. As George Meredith
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Learning to Talk (The Art of Conversation), Nazeer, K (Prospect Magazine, Issue 97, April 2004)
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