NüShu: A Script for Women

Why hello there, various General Kenobi's reading this, it has been a long time since my last educating post and I know that you have been on the edge of your seat, scratching your arms fervently awaiting your next fix from the Provisser. Well, the time has come my friends and hopefully, this work will make a fine addition to your collections.

What I am writing about today caught my eye a while ago, and was brought to my attention by a friend of mine. I know, shocking. I know I give off this aura of complete historical knowledge and it may upset you that I, your beloved Provisser, was ignorant of this. So we are going to use a secret technique used and handed down by generations of politicians and conspiracy theorists; we are just going to ignore the truth and believe that the Provisser knows all.

So, the topic of the day that I found, with no help whatsoever from anyone, is the ancient Chinese script called NüShu which literally translates to "women's writing" and it was a written language used exclusively by women in 19th and 20th Century China, but possibly originated in the 17th Century. It was used exclusively by women in the Jiangyong Prefecture, Hunan Province, and nowhere else. The majority of China and even the world was clueless about this script until the 1990s. For you linguist nerds out there - or as I like to call them, "weirdos" - NüShu is a syllabic script, which means that a character represents a syllable (some 600-700 characters to be exact), compared to the Chinese logographic script when means that each character represents a word or part of a word.

As much as I would love to make jokes and witty comments, there is actually an issue surrounding NüShu that I would actually like to address. So buckle up people, the Provisser is about to get as serious as the virus that is coursing through his veins. There is a discourse surrounding NüShu, with most people believing that it was a secret language used by oppressed women to communicate their feelings and their struggles with one another. It was perfect, women were denied education and here a secret script was created to defy the patriarchy. It is the liberal West's wet dream. Unfortunately, that is not true. Simply put, we simply do not know much about NüShu. It was not a secret language per se, but because it was only used in a single prefecture, there was no academia surrounding it at all. The last woman who was proficient in NüShu and who learned it from her mother died in 2004 at the age of 98. While there are still workshops being taught, they are not being taught by people who learned it from past generations. By the time the Chinese government started workshops, a discourse of NüShu had already been imposed on it; that of a secret language. Illaria Maria Sala who was a university student in Beijing in the 90s actually spent some time in a village where NüShu was still very much prominent and what she experienced versus the discourse that was written was very different. For a start, NüShu was not a secret language. Just because it was unknown outside its original prefecture does not mean it was an intentionally kept secret. Especially since the men knew about it, they were just indifferent to the activities of the weaker sex (their words, not mine don't come after me please). The women talked about it brazenly and even the children were aware of the language from a very young age. To these women, it wasn't a tool to fight oppression, but just their written word. When Illaria told an elderly villager that she did not know NüShu, she was genuinely surprised. Why would that be the case if it was a secret language?

What is known for a fact and one of the main reasons that it is believed to be a secret language was the fact that it was scrawled on fans and in small and easily concealable books and was indeed used for women to communicate with their best friends after they had been married off. But that those fans and books were actually gifts given to the friend by the bride and they were often poems conveying sadness that they had to leave, and this somehow turned into a discourse that NüShu was used solely to convey women's sorrow. They had to leave the village and go live with their husband, of course they were bloody well going to be sad. It doesn't mean that they were oppressed people. But like I said, NüShu was just a written language without any purpose of defiance. One of the most prolific writers of NüShu was exactly that, a writer. No other purpose behind it

My problem with this, and I hope it was made evident enough, is that they took something that was already interesting in its own right, and twisted it into something else for no apparent reason. I could make an argument that it was to fulfill an agenda, that the Chinese government encouraged a discourse that would obviously appeal to the West to increase foreign interest and boost tourism and other cynical comments but it is really anyone's guess. What is important is that this discourse is so widespread that it is believed to be objective truth. Most of the articles I read to research this who called this a secret language used to fight oppression were written by Westerners with publishers such as The Guardian and BBC Travel. I am not trying to disparage these writers and publishers, I am just pointing out that these articles were not written in an academic environment. Furthermore, just imposing this discourse is a tad disrespectful. The fact that this script exists and was unknown by the majority of China and the entire world for possible centuries is incredible enough, but forcing this discourse on it makes it seem that because it was not used to fight oppression or anything of that sort that it was unimportant otherwise. It does not need to have some all-important agenda to be worthy of our attention.

Wow, there were very few jokes cracked in this one. I know I said I was going to be serious but damn. I promise the next post will not be as serious, it'll be very hard to take a war against emus seriously. Before I leave, I want to make sure that you all took something very important from this.

I came up with this no one else whoever told you otherwise is a liar and will be stoned I am the Provisser I know all fuck off and I'll see you soon.

EDIT: Hi there I am back. I just wanted to clarify what I meant of about the academic environment of NüShu. While the Guardian does have specific topics like science and politics and all that great stuff, none of it is peer-reviewed which is a requirement in an academic discourse. Never thought I would have to explain that but there you go. Alright fuck off love you