On the tip of the tongue

If the word ambaradan in Italian means a confused, chaotic situation, or a shambles, its origin refers to the Ethiopian mountain massif in the Tigray region, Amba Aradan, where in 1936 the Italian army used chemical weapons [including mustard gas and phosgene] in a heinous war crime. Or the word zombie, which recalls cinema and those catatonic hordes of dead-living creatures that slowly attack humans; in fact its origin is Congolese, from the word nzumbe, [meaning spirit, fetish] and was used to identify workers on Caribbean plantations. Or Menelik's Tongue, the little carnival whistle in which you blow into it and a long paper tongue unfurls whistling, is so called to mock the Ethiopian emperor Menelik II, accused by the Italian colonists of being a liar with a forked tongue.

OHT's new work explores this invisible form of racism that is still in our mouths, on our lips and on the tip of our tongues. If etymology traces the ultimate meaning of language almost exclusively to Greek or Latin, On the tip of the tounge deconstructs this hegemonic origin by bringing out the ghosts of a creolized language. Hybrid words, with uncertain etymology, that hide a monstrous origin that we are unable to see because of the painful reality to which it refers.