Hierarchy of Tongues:
Language and Status in The Emperor’s Babe
Bernadine
Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe begins
with an epigraph by Oscar Wilde: “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite
it.” Though the novel is undeniably focused on refiguring the history of the
Roman empire, it does much of this through the refiguring of language. By
examining the interplay of Latin and English in the book, we can also examine
how language—and the cultural expectations that come with it—acts as both a
marker and an enforcer of status within Roman Londinium. Evaristo’s
protagonist, Zuleika, is circumscribed by the tongue of Empire, kept oppressed
by it while also only gaining status through it, and only by rebelling against
the linguistic and cultural framework of Rome does she find fulfillment.
The book’s
very first poem puts the focus on Zuleika’s relationship to language,
specifically her struggles with Latin as they relate to her marriage. The poem
is titled “Amo Amas Amat,” drawn from midway through, when Zuleika “was sent
off for decorum classes,/learned how to talk, eat, fart,/how to get my amo amas
amat right, and ditch/my second-generation plebby creole,” (Evaristo 4). The
Latin here serves two-fold. “Amo amas amat” is the beginning of the conjugation
for the Latin verb
amare, or
to love. Therefore, the title translates
as “I love, You love, He/She loves
[1].”
Not only is this one of the first verbs many Latin students learn—including
Zuleika, it would seem—but it also hints at the book’s larger narrative.
Zuleika may have learned from her tutor how to get her forms of love right
grammatically, but she certainly did not
learn how to sort out love itself. However, even her grammatical lessons seem
not to have stuck. The same poem ends with the line, “Solitudoh, solitudee,
solitudargh!” (Evaristo 5). While at first glance this seems to be another list
of Latin conjugations, it is not. Indeed, it does not seem to mean anything at
all in Latin. It is as if Zuleika has tried to treat the word
solitudonem as a verb and then conjugate
it, only to grow so frustrated as to finish the final one not with a Latin verb
ending but with an onomatopoetic cry of anguish. Indeed, the entire line
becomes a sort of onomatopoeia, conveying Zuleika’s frustration with the
solitudonem her marriage has brought her
not through its definition or denotational meaning, but through its form. It
resembles proper Latin, but only enough to get her meaning across to an
audience that does not actually
speak
Latin—or at least an audience engaging with the text primarily through a
language that is not Latin. It is Latin constructed by a non-native speaker of
Latin for non-native speakers of Latin.
This
disconnect between Zuleika and her Latin raises the question of why she uses
the language at all, and the answer lies with power. Though the story takes
place in what is now London, and few of the characters are actually from Rome,
the dominant culture in Zuleika’s Londinium is distinctly Roman, and as such,
Latin is the language of power. Just as Rome has colonized the land of
Londinium, it has colonized the language of its people, tying their cultural
fluency and position to linguistic fluency. The use of Latin is a status
symbol, one Zuleika uses to assert her dominance over less fluent characters
like Valeria and Aemelia, whose Latin is even worse than hers and whose speech
she calls “vulgar babble” (Evaristo 55). Yet Zuleika’s speech is deemed little
better, called “second-generation plebby creole,” (Evaristo 4). This is a
distinctly loaded term, and perhaps the best illustration of how Zuleika is
seen by Roman society. The label of “second-generation” is accurate, certainly,
but here it becomes a pejorative term, full of the same sort of anti-immigrant
xenophobia that plagues London today as much as third century Londinium.
“Plebby,” too, is a term with significance both modern and Classical.
Literally, it refers to Zuleika’s status as a plebeian, the Roman class of
commoners. However, the term “pleb” is still used today in England as an insult
to denote those of the working class. Finally, “creole” has a distinctly double
meaning. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is used in linguistics
to mean “a language that has developed from the mixing of two or more parent
languages and has come to be the first language of a community, typically
arising as the result of contact between the language of a dominant group
(historically often a European colonizer) and that (or those) of a subordinate
group (often the colonized people, or a slave population),” (“Creole, n. and
adj.”). Thus, the language Zuleika speaks is in fact a creole, in that it
likely combines elements of Latin, as the dominant language, with elements of
local languages that have been subjugated under Latin. However, it also means “[a]
person of black African descent born in the Caribbean or mainland Americas,
esp. as opposed to one recently arrived from Africa,” (“Creole, n. and adj.”)
Though she was born in Londinium and not the Caribbean, there is a certain
parallel between Zuleika—the child of two members of an African diaspora who
have settled on an island colonized by a white empire—and the children of
African parents born later in the Caribbean. And so, Zuleika certainly speaks a
creole, but she also is a creole. In
a sense, she is the language she speaks, a language that Rome belittles.
This makes
it all the more interesting that she in turn belittles the speech of her maids,
going so far as to render it in a semi-phonetic transcription of their dialect.
She calls their speech “vulgar,” and it is
vulgar, at least in the sense that it is the common tongue instead of
Latin. But just as “creole” is applied to both describe and disparage Zuleika’s
speech, she uses “vulgar,” with all its connotations of uncleanly and uncouth
behavior, to belittle the speech of her maids. Her slaves. If Zuleika is and speaks a creole, then her slaves must
both be and speak something worse if she is to maintain power over them. They
must be something vulgar. In a land where speaking the language of Empire
grants one access to better opportunities—as surely it does, for Zuleika can
only marry once her Latin has been perfected, and her poetry only matters to
the canon if it follows proper Roman literary traditions—the hierarchies of
language are also fundamental hierarchies of power. Zuleika, who speaks the
tongue of Londinium, is oppressed by those who speak the tongue of Rome, and
she in turn oppresses those who speak the tongue of the Britons.
This
linguistic oppression is mirrored throughout the book by more overt displays.
Despite being the child of Sudanese refugees living at the farthest reaches of
the Empire, Zuleika is expected to adhere not to Sudanese cultural norms, nor
to British ones, but to Roman ones. She is expected to gain status for herself
and her family through marriage to a Roman nobleman, and within that marriage
she is expected to behave like a proper Roman wife. Though Felix marries her specifically
because she does not resemble the Roman women available to him, calling them
“simpering debutantes,” he then turns around and pays to have Zuleika educated
specifically to make her more like those very noblewomen (Evaristo 16). This
illustrates quite clearly the double-standard that Felix—and by extension the
rest of Roman culture—holds Zuleika to. They praise her for her beauty, often
linking it specifically to her race and exoticizing her endlessly, and yet she
is expected to wear wigs or false hair and makeup to lighten her skin, making
her look more like a Roman woman (Evaristo 27). Felix marries her for her
youth—she is a literal child, after all—but forces her to perform the sexual
and social roles of a grown woman. Just as women of color often are in Western
culture today, Zuleika is fetishized at an appallingly young age for not
conforming to white beauty standards, and then promptly expected to work to
better conform to those same standards. Even her poetry must be mediated
through Rome. Her tutor insists that before she can write her own work, she
must learn the canon by wrote. The problem with this, as Zuleika points out, is
that the canon Theodorus is offering does not reflect her experiences. (Evaristo
83-84) It is written by and for people who fit the Roman mold, something
Zuleika cannot and will not do.
There is,
however, resistance to the power structures of Rome, both linguistic and
physical. Venus, in particular, seems to represent much of that resistance in
Zuleika’s life. She is a quintessentially queer character, not only in her
gender identity, but in her queering of societally enforced norms. Like drag
queens and many trans women today, Venus performs hyperfemininity in a society
that expects her to be masculine. While it remains unclear whether this is a
performance in the sense that “Venus” is a persona—à la modern drag queens—or merely
performative in the sense of performative gender, it is undoubtedly deliberate
and undoubtedly rebellious. She adheres to all the beauty standards that Rome
expects Zuleika to—face-paint, high heels, fancy gowns—and yet in doing so, she
subverts them. Venus takes the story of Hadrian, one of Rome’s great emperors,
and focuses not on the conquest or the state-building, but on Hadrian’s
same-sex relationship (Evaristo 122-123). She takes a tale of Roman glory and
turns it on its head by pointing to what was already there but what many would
rather not see. Similarly, by simply existing as a visibly queer individual who
refuses to conform, Venus points to the nonconforming elements of Roman
Londinium as a whole. And indeed, her performance is not restricted to gender
or sex. She affects a Cockney accent and even Cockney rhyming slang, such as
when she offers to “ball-of-chalk you home, darling,” despite actually being
from a wealthy family in Camulodunum (Evaristo 44) (Evaristo 46). Not only does
Venus reject the gender she was assigned at birth, she rejects the status
symbol that Latin and cultivated speech represent in Londinium. Instead of
asserting social dominance by peppering her speech with Latin words and
phrases, the way Zuleika often does, Venus uses distinctly British slang. And
yet, despite all this—or perhaps because of it—Venus is also tremendously
successful in defining her own destiny. She is wealthy enough to own a club,
she has enough cultural influence to gather an audience for Zuleika’s poetry
reading/orgy, and every indication at the end of the book points to Venus
having finally found the great love she was looking for. Even her name is a way
of thumbing her nose at Rome. She takes the name of the goddess of love, Rome’s
most profound symbol of female sensuality, and uses it for her own singular
name. This is an especially rebellious gesture in a culture that used women’s
family names in place of personal ones, as it casts off the names of her
relatives and takes instead a name she has chosen to be hers. It signals how
she has cut ties entirely with her family and fashioned herself into an
irrepressible—and perhaps even blasphemous—symbol of femininity. She is
self-made in every sense of the word. If anyone in the book has found a way to
exist within Roman colonial culture while also subverting it, it is Venus.
It is,
perhaps, Venus’s influence that leads to Zuleika’s own subversive tendencies.
For all Felix’s insistence that she remain a chaste, dutiful wife, she takes a
lover. For all her lessons in deportment, she still uses much of the slang from
her youth. And for all her tutor’s insistence on Classical canon, she writes to
us not in hendecasyllables or in Latin, but in English free verse. Even the
pressure to gain status through rich, Roman men is subverted. Zuleika certainly
manages to associate herself with a powerful figure in Roman society—the
Emperor, no less—but the man himself is fundamentally not Roman. Zuleika’s great love is just as much an immigrant as her
parents, and his language reflects this. Severus’s first quoted word in the
book, “Aiwa,” is not in Latin but in Arabic, (Evaristo 140). He even mentions
how he “was ridiculed on arrival in Eternal City/because of his thick African
accent,” (Evaristo 144). Zuleika finds true happiness only in the arms of a man
who, like herself, has had to force himself to fit the mold of Roman citizen in
order to advance, and yet also one who still does not fit that mold.
Unfortunately, the Roman order quickly reasserts itself. As soon as Severus is
dead, Zuleika finds herself once again trapped in her old life, and then
finally murdered for her transgressions against the role she has been assigned.
It is Felix—perpetually the stand-in for repressive Roman culture—that kills
her, in the end. And yet, though Zuleika goes quietly to her death, she goes—at
least in some small way—on her own terms. The collection’s penultimate poem,
“Vade in Pace (Go in Peace)” sees Zuleika take control of her death the way she
so rarely could control her life. She asks Alba to bury her, embracing the only
female solidarity and friendship that she has had from her very beginning,
without the intervention of Rome, and she asks to be buried not with the slap
of a Roman woman or the wig she wears in “A Quiet Bedtime Voice,” but with an
afro pick and braids, both of which signify embracing her African heritage.
What’s more, in her final moments Zuleika seems to cast off the linguistic yoke
of Latin. “Vade in Pace (Go in Peace)” contains almost no Latin. There is the
title, of course, and the title of the poem she speaks for Alba, “‘Mors Certa,
Hora Incerta,’/ ‘Death Certain, Hour Uncertain,’” (Evaristo 248). However, both
of these titles are glossed within the text, changing the Latin from a status
symbol accessible only to those with command of the language into something
legible to everyone in Zuleika’s society. The only word of untranslated Latin
in the poem’s eight pages is “arsenicum,” the poison that Felix has Tranio slip
her, (Evaristo 243). Thus, Latin is literally transformed from something that
signaled power into something that signals only death. Zuleika even makes a
move back towards the improper Latin—the “plebby creole”—of her youth,
bastardizing vice versa into the much
more Venusian “vicky versa,” (Evaristo 248).
This book
begins with Zuleika trapped within a framework of language and cultural
expectations designed to keep her rigidly in her place, but it does not remain
there. Though perhaps she can only gain power through linguistic and cultural
fluency, that power is never enough to protect her, nor enough to make the
Romans around her see her as one of them. It is, perhaps for this reason that
Zuleika sets aside Latin at the end of the story and gains something else:
legacy. For it is only by working against the frameworks that she has been
confined to that she finds not only the love of an Emperor, but an audience for
her thoughts. After all, this book is not in Latin, but English. In the end,
Zuleika takes control of her history by rewriting it in a language that does
not need Rome to act as intercessor.
Works Cited
"Creole, n. and adj." OED Online, Oxford
University Press, June 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/44229. Accessed 20 June
2018.
Evaristo, Bernardine. The
Emperor's Babe. Penguin Books, 2004.
Wong, Jennifer. Personal
interview. 20 Jun. 2018.
[1] All Latin translations
were done with the help of Jennifer Wong.
