Semionaut, Signifying Everything

Diversity Act II

Act II Reconciliation Commission

This is a continuation of some exploratory warm-up writing carried out in preparation for more formal work in progress, for ESOMAR, on diversity culture and semiotics. The thoughts in this section were triggered in part by Linda Colley’s recent book Acts of Union and Disunion, which explores Britishness and the mosaic of identities it brings together. Apologies for the indulgence here in family and Welshness. Being Welsh is a vocation, unfortunately, a bit like being  Russian. Luckily we are very badly placed to ever start a nationalist war against anybody. I have tried to limit my rumination in that direction to matters strictly relevant to diversity. As a student in the 1960s, when Conservative politician Enoch Powell ranted against immigration and foresaw race wars and “rivers of blood” ,I briefly ran a campaign to offer extremist English people £10 each in cash to help them repatriate to Germany – leaving the native Britons, the decent open-minded English and our friends incoming from around the world to create the happy heterogeneity which at last came to fruition in the new diverse London emerging triumphantly at the 2012 Olympics. 

As I started this piece my partner Hester, who voices documentaries, museum guides, advertisements, corporate training videos, cartoons and computer games, asked me what I was writing about. When I replied ‘diversity’, she said “Oh, that’s a word I have to say all the time” and she asked “What does it mean?”. It’s a moving target. If you talk about it in the abstract you miss it altogether, hence the need to concretize diversity in some kind of living mosaic. It’s at the core of ideology today – and ideology is something we live and breathe not just something we profess or have safely parked in our heads.

For my Semiotic Monkey (see Act I for an introduction) every day is a diversity field day, my home life being partly in France and my working life in UK as a jumping off point for semiotic training and analysis carried out around the world. I have noticed here in Paris that what estate agents in England call the ‘master bedroom’ (where the master beds his servants, presumably, including the wife – ‘her indoors’ in common English parlance) is known in France as ‘la suite parentale’, connoting the civilized discretion of an ensemble of spaces occupied by equal partners in caring authority and still active intimacy. It takes all kinds. I enjoy very much being French on a part-time basis but like many I keep a tally of the days I spend here (and never do an iota of work) so I don’t come even remotely near that magic 178 days number where you become eligible for French income tax. An Englishman in the South of the country told me that more than half of French people in employment are civil servants. So each one of them needs a proper productive person to look after him/her.  Or so the Englishman said – I gave him an indignant look.  As he left he retorted “If I want to support my own French civil servant I’ll buy one in a pet shop”.

I seem to remember, as a schoolboy in Wales, hearing that a condom (which in UK we called a French letter) was known in France as an Englishman’s overcoat. Apparently when syphilis appeared and spread through Europe like wildfire after being brought back by Columbus’s sailors from the New World (allegedly – sailors get a bad press and tend to attract a lot of knee-jerk prejudice, my dad was a sailor in the war) each country referred to it as something characteristic of and potentially contracted from the country next door – so in England ‘the French disease’. Now that’s what I call diversity.

Or rather its antithesis, paranoid and intent on living with loaded binary oppositions. I would recommend to anyone who suffers from this loaded binarism malaise Robert Johnson’s book Owning Your Own Shadow. That’s Robert A. Johnson not the one who sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads. But Robert A. is every bit as insightful as Robert was.  And if you approach that dodgy loaded binarisms problematic through psychology it’s a lot more interesting than doing it through Derrida, who reads like a combined user guide to origami, sudoku and crossword puzzles written for bonobos. Which, not believing in loaded binaries, I think is a good thing.

My great uncle Arthur Wynne invented the crossword puzzle – a family myth I was delighted to find confirmed as true in Bill Bryson’s book on American English.  We are all sitting here waiting patiently for the royalties. My great aunty Nansi, a distinguished Welsh harpist who travelled the world, met Robert Kellogg when in America and, the Welsh word for cockerel being ‘ceiliog’, suggested to him that this fortuitous homophony would suggest the cockerel as a very good symbol for his delicious new-fangled breakfast cereal. If you don’t believe me read her autobiography Cwpwrdd Nansi. I’ll send the Semiotic Monkey over to translate.

‘Welsh’ means ‘foreigner’ in the English spoken by the German invaders when they came over and stole the country from the aboriginal Brits. So it is a national identity playfully posited on internalised otherness and originary diversity. At Semiotic Solutions, in the early days of commercially applied semiotics I had my own special mug with a picture of a sheep on it and “Happiness is knowing that you’re Welsh emblazoned”. I remember that with great affection – anyone who was there will know I don’t mean this ironically. For anyone who wasn’t there I should explain that the Welsh (like people from New Zealand and the Falklands/Malvinas) are believed to have a more than passing or casual interest in sheep. The Welsh do diversity beautifully. Our Prince Madoc of Gwynedd and his crew landed at what is now Mobile Bay in Alalbama a very long time before Columbus did, leaving the New World unconquered, instead assimilating nicely with the indigenous peoples.  The princes of Gwynedd tended to be 7 or 8 feet tall. I wish I had a penny for every time in my life that anyone has asked me “What’s the weather like up there?”  Not that I’m implying a right of any kind to the Authentic Prince of Wales title – that would be treason which may still carry the death penalty in England. And the family’s still waiting for the cheque from Kelloggs. We’ll be swimming in yummy nutritious Coco Pops for generations!  The coming flood of grace, bounty and booty feels biblical in its scope. I’m planning to keep my head on for that.

For Act 5 of this unfolding drama Semionaut is asking people from around the world, in a few words, to answer these two questions: 1) What is the one big thing you remember most in your personal history and experience of diversity? 2) What’s the intriguing emergent thing in your mind right now about diversity as represented in the culture you’re closest too. Answers please (+ one image by way if illustration if possible) to editorial@semionaut.net  Plus a maximum 80 word biography, if you’re not already part of the network, and a face/head photograph of yourself to join.

© Malcolm Evans 2014