“The first words were born in the voices of the first Speakers.” (p. 285)
Close your eyes and think. Think of words as living beings. Not the living, breathing entities that can be meek or overbearing as we know them in our minds, but physical, sentient beings with emotions, personalities, and speech. Anxious might trot and stutter at infrequent intervals, fretting about the state of the world and the hiccups she’s been having throughout the week. Serendipity would likely find treats lying in a corner, or their favourite book left on their doorstep by accident, always in a cerulean summer dress. Fiasco would find accidents and heartbreaks on every street they pass through.
But what if the Words were married in a symbiotic relationship with their Speakers, like fungi and algae, both dependent on each other? What if, when not spoken, the Words grew weak and dissipate? Picture a Scream enfeebled because, for quite some time, no one has used him. Imagine Speakers struggling, too, to find an expression with fewer words: What if expression itself withered with the weakened words? And what if, without the Words, the Speakers were left to pass through life without a voice and an outlet to express themselves?
Such is the world of Payal Kapadia’s Woebegone’s Warehouse of Words. Taken over by a dictatorial, oppressive regime under Gunther Glib, as the novel opens its Words and Speakers live in silos, with the former kept in warehouses and the latter in apartments (a kind of warehouse, too, if you possess the right kind of imagination). Speakers order specific Words for themselves to speak and write throughout the next year. For those who cannot afford or obtain certain words, their thoughts remain a jumble, a mishmash of unexpressed emotions.
Protests happen every now and then over this capitalism of the word but are swiftly crushed under the relentless weight of surveillance and propaganda. After all, the difference between lies and truths simply depends on who speaks them and how often.
It is within these very circumstances, and in those warehouses, that two of our protagonists reside: Wonderful and Woebegone, the former one of the many Words in the warehouse and the latter in charge of taking care of and shipping them. Two of our other protagonists, Asha and Zeb, live amid the same circumstances—but in apartments. When the Word Bloc arrests Zeb for both real and concocted crimes, and Asha is suspected of inciting riots, they’ll cross paths with certain surprising Words.
On the other side of the world, Wizened (ever-wise, inquisitive), Sweltering (always feeling hot and sweaty), and Luminous (warm, ever-optimistic) set upon a journey to the (mythical?) Word Wood. As they discover new truths that go against everything they’ve known so far, these Words and Speakers will be left to challenge the might of a dominion that won’t stop at any cost to gain and retain power.
As all this may suggest, Kapadia’s writing is dressed like a fable: Her characters, whether Speakers or Words, possess a sort of innocence, which the writing complements and maintains. Certain tales, and the characters that spin them, require sincerity and integrity and a conspicuous absence of irony and sarcasm. Think The Lord of the Rings (1954) or The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956), or go further back and think One Thousand and One Nights or the Vetala Panchavimshati, and you’ll taste that sincerity that settles on your tongue with this book.
Similarly, Kapadia’s words are derivative of their meanings but not entirely refined from them, instead forming personalities and quirks that are as reflective of their experiences as their definitions. For instance, Wonderful is, indeed, wonderful, but she’s also someone bound by a sense of duty, highly averse to risk-taking, and filled with self-doubt. Equally, Cool is shaped by her own peculiar understanding of the world: Being inherently in vogue, Cool sees the world from under a spotlight.
The Words, too, have a symbotic relationship with their Speakers. In a world of Shrinking Vocabulary, “Words needed their Speakers. They needed to be written and spoken. Remembered like they mattered. Words that hadn’t been thought of shriveled and faded, till they weren’t there at all. A disappearing act in slow motion” (p. 18). Words have faded before, and languages have died. Words shall continue to fade, and languages will be put in boxes shaped like coffins. Speech and expression are a matter of evolution. Words fall into disuse, languages shrink, and then remain lost.
The concern, then, is not extinction but its pace. This brings us to the larger contexts and contours of this novel. Yes, there’s the matter of that low-hanging fruit called authoritarianism that we shall tend to in a second, but before that an equally important observation needs some consideration.
In the age of social media, waning attention spans, and declining vocabularies—all exacerbated by the entry of our new friend(?), the Intelligence that is Artificial—words matter. They matter more than ever: how we use them, which ones we use, which ones we leave out and how, and, in turn, which ones leave us. In the world of Woebegone’s Warehouse of Words, for example, certain words always stay in demand: Cool, Awesome, and Nice are the popular kids in the block, while Gossamer, Arcane, Bulwark, and Fulminate stay put in their respective boxes, with no Speaker in sight in years. After all, as vocabularies become constricted and thoughts become hazier, minimalism stops being a choice to take the shape of a forced decision.
The only remaining option is to resist: Resist the tyranny of overstimulation, the commodification of attention, the commercialization of memory, the capitalization of expression, and the obfuscation of language. But it has never been easy to fulminate against the powers that be, and now the word itself is frail and tattered at the ends. Attention keeps running astray, memory betrays, and the blinds of propaganda are dense, difficult to peep through, and almost impossible to pull aside.
Indeed, the Word Bloc wishes to remove certain words from the warehouse—out of sight, out of mind—from Genocide, Idea, and Dissent to Opinion, Instigate, and Question. Words and their consequences have long left the pages of George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and been usurped by dictators, both successful and aspiring. Limited vocabularies and constrained languages are favorite tools of both. But hiding words can make them more, not less, powerful. As Kapadia writes, “the search made the Speakers love the Words more when they found them.”
Payal Kapadia’s Woebegone’s Warehouse of Words is a warm and cozy fable that is nevertheless relevant to our times. As we increasingly find ourselves in a world with too much information and simultaneously too little of it, our relationship with words and language, directly and indirectly, shapes the colors and contours of our lives and how we live them. Words shape (and reflect) how we interact with technology and the world around us, and how those things impact us in return.
The words we choose are the words that choose us. And the language we form is the language that forms us.