LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY
MY STORY, MY IDENTITY Rehema Isa I grew up in a Christian home. Whether your response is to move on to another article, or your reaction is “What’s that got to do with anything?”, if you are still reading this, there is, at best, a mild curiosity to discover, affirm, or contradict what you think may follow. Through this seven-word opening statement, I invite you to tell yourself a story about the intentions or direction of this piece. Whatever you may have conjured up from my opening statement, I can confirm that for me and my home, the term Christian translated into going to church every Sunday as a practice. It meant a dedicated section for religious grounding in the form of Sunday school and confirmation classes. For me, the entire experience signified exposure to one of the oldest storybooks in the world, the Bible. I was enamoured by the parables, and careful simplification of lessons for living. Like many things that captivate us in our youth, time and life experiences erode memories that are replaced by new allures, concerns, and contemplations. A limited exposure to the Islamic faith, teachings, and practice got me fascinated by Hadiths and the similarities more than differences of faithbased teachings. One thing has remained consistent for me - my curiosity and the fascination with human stories, the lessons they carry, the weight we all assign experiences, and how we use them to convey meaning and values. My area of interest over the past 16 years has been storytelling by and of African entrepreneurs and organisational storytelling. My observations of the world of entrepreneurship have shown me how stories shape reality statements - deeming these as incontestable home truths with significant implications shaping the direction of discourse and the allocation of resources. In large corporate structures, I have seen how storytelling supports or hinders the devolution of strategic intent and value propositions from C-Suite boardrooms to organisation culture and execution, depending on the effectiveness of the storyteller and the compelling nature of the story. As Africans doing business, we all contend with stories on a daily basis, either as the chief narrator defining the plot or as active participants in stories playing out that we found mid-narration. We navigate multiple cultural paradigms and constructs on a daily basis. As dawn breaks, the first cultural context is the home dynamic, experienced through language of communication at home, faith practices, and cultural belief systems. Waking and being are a natural transition from the language of our dreams to reality. A “post breakfast” reality contends with the world of work. We all enter the world of work with a rich personal context and realities that influence what we think, how we show up, what we deem as significant and irrelevant. We spend several hours of our day at work, and it is here that we convene to share ideas, allocate tasks, and execute on mandates and priorities. Language is the official port of entry to the world of work, and the transacting currency is words. In South Africa, the currency of the workplace is the English language, an imposed and socialised standard of communication which is a bilingual barrier. Beyond the rules of the language, it also 69
DEI in the Global South | Edition 1
