‘Woebegone’s Warehouse of Words’ by Payal Kapadia: Words that conform to an Orwellian world

Bindu Menon

In George Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘1984’, the all-powerful Party designs a language “to diminish the range of thought” in the totalitarian state of Oceania. Newspeak, the language which replaces Oldspeak, is invented to stifle all modes of thought so that undesirable words are eliminated and words are stripped of unorthodox meanings. For instance, the word “free” is used in statements such as “This field is free from weeds” and not in the old sense as in politically free or intellectually free, for political and intellectual freedom no longer exist even as concepts, and are therefore nameless. Besides Newspeak, the book contributed other neologisms to the English vocabulary like Big Brother, Thought Police, doublethink, vapourised, thoughtcrime — all of which convey the nightmare of a world dominated by oppression, surveillance, distorted truths and fake realities.

A similar premise, eerily and decidedly Orwellian, runs through Payal Kapadia’s fantasy adventure ‘Woebegone’s Warehouse of Words’. The title is indeed a mouthful, in stark contrast to the fictional world created by Kapadia, where speech is rationed and words are a scarce commodity. The Speakers can pick and buy the living flesh-and-ink Words, which are then delivered in boxes via drones. The more popular ones aren’t easy to own and are auctioned away to the highest bidder. Here, the authoritarian Party of ‘1984’ is replaced by Word Bloc and Gunther Glib is the Big Brother watching everyone, aided by an army of Chasers, who hunt down transgressors for, well, unspeakable crimes.

“Freedom isn’t for everyone, some things are better off in cages,” says the sinister supremo Glib, who has confined the Words to a warehouse run by his protégé Woebegone. It’s their home till they are ready to be shipped when sought by Speakers.

The Words have designated labels: namers like Sky or Cloud, doers like Running or Skipping, describers like Wonderful or Luminous, and so on. The Words can survive only when the Speakers utter them. But imagine a world where the Word Bloc decides what Words must be uttered and what stories need to be told to Speakers. And what if some Speakers do stumble upon stories that can’t be told and dare to challenge the slogan ‘In Glib we trust’? Such rebels are made to disappear or, worse, silenced and then set free, to live among other Speakers as mute helpless witnesses. As one prisoner says, “Silence is its own prison.”

Kapadia’s book, though likely intended for young adults, does appeal to readers of all ages. For, the story holds a mirror to the times we live in: of the perils of false narratives, commodification and a blind trust in technology. The narrative is a tad sluggish in the early chapters but gathers pace as the story unravels and a roller-coaster of an adventure begins. The ones leading the resistance are a few brave Words and two Speakers with more than a streak of rebellion in them, 15-year-olds Asha and Zeb. When their paths and struggles align, they journey together to the original home of the Words: the long-forgotten Wood where once freedom and truth thrived. Can they bring down the citadel of untruths and artificial scarcities assiduously built by Glib and his cohort? Or will the Words be doomed to die and the Speakers condemned to silence?

In his 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, Orwell wrote, “When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.” He believed that dictatorships engender the decline and decay of language. A somewhat similar strand of thought weighs on Kapadia as well as she ruminates why certain words or languages die because of disuse. In the Author’s Note, Kapadia writes, “I began to consider a singular word that is endangered because it represents the most dangerous idea of all. Truth. For isn’t every language an attempt to reveal or to conceal the truths of our world?” It’s a point to ponder.