Unwriting Empire: A Queer History of Language and the Feminine Spiral
Reclaiming the sacred roots of language through gesture,memory, and the spiral logic of return.
What if writing began not with empire, but with breath? This piece traces language from spell to script, reclaiming its sacred, feminine, and relational roots. A return to coherence, not control. Begin again.
Prologue: The Question We Forgot to Ask
What’s lost when language becomes abstract and disembodied — and what returns when it’s relational, ancestral, feminine?
I’ve been circling that question, not looking for a firm answer, but letting it stretch and spool out like thread between my fingers. So much of what we’re taught to believe about writing begins with conquest. With lists. With measurement. With the idea that alphabets are inventions — tools forged to tame the unruly wilds of thought and sound. In school, the story often starts with the Sumerians, or the Egyptians, or sometimes the Greeks — people who, we’re told, helped birth civilisation by learning how to write things down. Writing, in that telling, becomes synonymous with progress. A mark of order. A sign that someone — some culture — had finally learned to keep time, manage surplus, own land, track people. In other words: to control.
But I find myself uneasy with that version. Or maybe not uneasy — just unwilling to live inside it. Because what if writing didn’t begin with empire at all? What if the first marks weren’t tallies or treaties, but tender things — made in the dark, made in silence, made with breath held softly in the throat? What if language came not from the mind’s grip, but from the body’s longing? From the hand pressed into ochre, from the circle drawn in ash, from the sound a mother makes when rocking a child just on the edge of sleep? What if writing was never meant to capture or contain — but to call forth?
Not as ledger. As invocation.
Something ancestral stirs there. A memory that doesn’t quite belong to me, and yet feels like it’s always been humming low in the bones. I don’t want to know language the way textbooks know it. I want to remember it the way soil does. The way rivers carry it. The way the night keeps it — softly, without needing it to explain itself.
Sigils Before Syntax: Language as Spellcraft
The Stone-Borne people wrote in monument, in time and space and place, in epoch.
Their language wasn’t inked onto parchment or encoded in alphabetical form — it was carved into the world itself. A cup-mark here, a standing stone there. Lines etched in alignment with solstice shadows. Hands pressed in red ochre against cave walls not to say “I am,” but to say I was with you. I am still.
These weren’t proto-letters. They weren’t stepping stones toward ‘real’ writing, as scholars so often suggest. They were something else entirely — gestures of relation. Markings made not to capture thought, but to honour it. To offer it back to the land, to the stars, to the unseen. These were not attempts to fix meaning, but to participate in it. To leave a trace that said: I stood in this place. I listened. I sang. I bled. I buried. I became.
Before syntax, there were sigils — not in the way modern mystics might use the word, but in its oldest sense: a mark made with intent, with care, with the desire to alter the fabric of what is. A spell is not a description. It’s not a report. It’s a shift. And perhaps that is what the earliest writers knew, or intuited — that to write was to bring something into being. Not to name the world, but to touch it. To tilt it.
In the animist traditions still alive in the roots of many lineages, language is not separate from the world it speaks. It is the world. Breath as vibration, sound as spirit. The voice of the river is a kind of sentence. The call of a bird at dawn, punctuation. And in matrilineal memory — especially the memory that flows beneath the surface of empire, tucked into lullabies and weavings and small, persistent customs — words are not commands. They’re invitations. Currents. Ways of staying with.
This wasn’t language as code. It was language as current. As breath. As presence.
And perhaps the turning point came when we forgot that. When we began to treat words as things that pointed at meaning, rather than things that were meaning in motion. When we began to separate the mark from the body that made it. When we stopped seeing the cave wall as a mouth, and began to treat it like a tablet.
The Break: When Writing Was Taken
And then—there was the break.
A shift so deep it lingers still, unnoticed beneath our keyboards and curriculum, encoded in the very shape of the sentence. At some point — not all at once, but gradually, deliberately — writing was taken. What had once been breath and presence became index and inventory. The sigil was flattened into symbol, the gesture pressed into grid.
In Sumer, the earliest marks — once used to track offerings to the temple, the flow of grain, the cycles of moons — became tally marks, ledgers, systems. Cuneiform was born not from song, but from surplus. Not from praise, but property. Over time, these wedge-pressings hardened into bureaucracy: receipts, contracts, measurements, taxes. Likewise, in Kemet — the real ancient Egypt — the sacred glyphs of priestesses and seers, once used to honour the dead and summon the divine, were pulled into court record and decree. The language of the divine was drafted into service of the state.
The spell became an account. The invocation became a report. The breath became a tool.
And the scribe — once a conduit — became a functionary. A keeper of rules. An enforcer of order. Writing became specialised, then professionalised. It was no longer the right of the many, but the skill of the few — a priestly caste, mostly male, mostly tethered to power. It was here, too, that patriarchy deepened its claim: inscribing lineage through the father, codifying punishment through the state. From Hammurabi forward, language was folded into law. Script as surveillance. Code as control.
The world of words shrank. What once shimmered with possibility became merely practical. Writing was no longer a site of becoming, but a site of compliance. It could tell you what you owed, but not who you were. It could list what was real, but not what was sacred. And slowly, imperceptibly, we began to forget that each sound once had a spirit. That each mark was once a movement of the heart.
This was the capitalist hijack of language before capitalism had even named itself: standardisation, replication, authority. Where before there had been room for the spiral, now there was only the line. The sentence. The rule. The rubric.
Grammar became something to be policed. Spelling lost its spell. Syntax marched in lockstep with empire. And the echo of that rupture is with us still, every time a child is told they are wrong for speaking in rhythm instead of rules. Every time an accent is shamed. Every time fluency is measured in closeness to the coloniser’s tongue.
Language was taken. But something in us remembers.
The Ghost in the Script: What Remains
Even in the aftermath—after the flattening, the ledgering, the years of enforced forgetting—some things stayed behind.
Ghosts, almost. Whispers curled into the corners of letters. Feminine figures half-buried beneath phonemes. The breath didn’t vanish entirely. It lingered. It found new ways to wait.
Aleph still stands at the threshold of sound. A silent ox-head, ancient and unmoving, shaped from the horns of labour and strength. It speaks not in syllables but in presence—the first breath held before the word, the stillness before sound becomes sound. It is power not in domination, but in potential. A waiting. A seed.
In Sanskrit, there is Akshara — a syllable that cannot perish. The eternal sound, the letter that never fades. To write an akshara is to bring something into being that outlives the body. Not just phoneme, but force. Not just symbol, but soul in motion.
And there is Omega — so often misunderstood as simply the end. But Omega, too, is womb-shaped. An opening. A return. It is not a full stop, but a descent. A passage. A softening into the spiral that comes after.
We forget, sometimes, that these shapes are not neutral. That our alphabets hold within them old geometries: curves like hips, arcs like crescent moons, labyrinths coiled into the bowls of letters. The spiral, that oldest symbol of cyclical time and continuous becoming, still turns in the ampersand. Still echoes in the shapes we make without thinking.
And beyond the letters themselves—there are those who carried the script. Those whose names are mostly lost to empire, but who once held the thread:
Ninhursag, the mountain mother, shaping humans from clay with her hands.
Sophia, not wisdom abstracted, but wisdom embodied, fallen, weeping, rising again.
Saraswati, river and word, goddess of learning whose speech flows like water, never still, always singing.
Seshat, the Egyptian goddess of record, who wore the seven-pointed star and measured time with rope and reed, inscribing not just numbers, but stars and sacred geometry.
Each of them reminds us: writing was not always divorced from the sacred. It was not always a coloniser’s tool. There was a time when to mark a symbol was to open a door. To write was to offer, not to command. To witness. To join.
The feminine never left the script. She only went quiet. Waiting for someone to remember how to read with reverence again.
Toward a Queer Teleology: Let Time Unfold
What would happen if we stopped making language perform for power?
If we stepped outside the factory walls of meaning, where words are punched into shape by logic, efficiency, and profit — and instead wandered into the wild where syntax grows tangled, and time moves sideways?
Patriarchy teaches us that time is a ladder: climb it. Beat the clock. Reach the top. Own the future.
Capitalism quantifies it: monetise your attention, narrate your productivity, track your progress in bullet points.
And language? Language becomes the tool to enforce it all. To package, to segment, to rule. Grammar as governance. Semantics as surveillance.
But beneath all that—before that—language was body. Pulse. Rhythm. A murmur passed from breast to breath, from soil to sound. The first words weren’t declarations. They were responses.
A call. A presence. A resonance.
To reclaim teleology through the Feminine is not to assign womanhood to time, but to unshackle time from the masculine fantasy of linear mastery. It is to say: the womb is not an endpoint. It is recurrence. Portal. Weaver of gestalts. It is to remember that the spiral, not the line, is what keeps us whole.
A queer teleology resists climax. It lingers. It loops. It notices what emerges between moments, not what triumphs at the end. It honours fragmentation, contradiction, refrains.
A gestalt teleology recognises that closure is not completion — only coherence. And coherence, for us, is not alignment to an external rule but a felt sense. A shimmering. An inner signal that says: now, this belongs.
So what if we let go?
Let time unfold as a forest floor unrolls: moss over roots, mushroom over mulch, mycelium dreaming in the dark.
Let language return to its animal state — instinctive, relational, made of breath and memory.
Let ourselves write not toward dominance or destination, but toward invitation. Toward return.
This is not utopian. This is ancestral. This is possible.
And perhaps it begins, as you say, with a refusal:
A refusal to perform fluency for empire.
A refusal to package experience into metrics.
A refusal to obey a calendar that has never known your seasons.
Let’s unmake the sentence.
Let’s unfurl the time.
Let’s write in a tongue that doesn’t end — it becomes.
Echoes Outward: Writing Otherwise
And if we remembered—if we let this be the logic we moved by, the pulse we wrote from—what then? How would it feel to live inside a language that no longer demanded mastery, but met you as you were?
What might teaching become if it were not about correctness, but coherence? If it stopped trimming thought to fit assessment rubrics and instead let ideas arrive wild and whole, exactly as they needed to come? Imagine a pedagogy that followed the rhythm of the seasons rather than the quarter system. That let a child repeat, rephrase, return, until the meaning fit in their mouth just right. How would it feel to learn in that world? To not be corrected out of your voice? To be held in your syntax — with its echoes and gestalts and loops — and told, not “fix this,” but yes, I hear you?
And activism — how might it change, if it didn’t echo the cadence of officialdom? If it spoke less in citation and command, and more in chorus, in memory, in incantation? What if protest looked like holding vigil, like weaving stories across kitchen tables, like slow refusals spoken in quiet rooms? Not always loud. Not always urgent. But true. Felt. Relational. What if it made us feel not just angry, but home?
And the archive — what if it ceased to be a cold room of folders and locks, and instead became a living body? What if it pulsed? What if it smelled like earth? If it remembered what was spoken, not just what was written — if it honoured the shaky voice, the unpunctuated line, the rhythm that doesn’t quite translate? How would it feel to walk into such an archive and find yourself already welcome? To see your story not footnoted, but rooted?
If we wrote otherwise — if we let language become an ecology again — it would no longer be something built to standard. It would be something tended. Felt. Responsive. A field, not a file. Not a factory, but a garden. Language would grow around us like moss — soft, slow, shaped by where we’ve been, and who we’ve loved.
This is what a queer teleology offers: a way of being that resists being tidied into forward motion. It asks us to live by resonance rather than resolution. To let the story circle back. To let the meaning unfold unevenly. To feel into the pattern, not rush the conclusion. To say: I don’t need to understand this yet to know it belongs.
Let your writing circle back. Let your gestalts lead. Let resonance weigh more than the final word.
And what might that feel like, finally? To let language hold you, not pin you down. To speak and not be asked to explain. To write and feel — not the anxiety of “is this correct?” — but the deep, full-bodied knowing that this, this is real.
In that world, perhaps we don’t write toward endings at all.
We write toward belonging.
We write toward return.
We write in the knowledge that meaning doesn’t have to close — it only has to call us home.
Closing Invocation: Begin Again
Let us begin again.
Not by starting over, but by spiralling inward, and outward, and inward once more. By remembering that beginnings are not only where we start, but where we return — not from failure, but from deepening.
Let us unlearn the tyranny of linear fluency. Let us let go of the need to arrive. Let us learn to live in the shimmer, the echo, the half-spoken phrase that still vibrates long after it’s left the mouth. Let us honour the fragment that never wanted to be whole in the first place. Let us trust the loop, the refrain, the sentence that begins again not because it must — but because it wants to linger.
The tongue doesn’t just tell stories.
It births them.
It remembers what the hand once knew, what the body once marked.
It carries breath, and blood, and the pulse of all that came before.
And none of this is new. I haven’t made it up. I’m only reaching toward what has already been gifted — whispered through the work of those who kept the threads when the centre wouldn’t hold. What I’m calling forth has been spoken, dreamt, sung before. By Sylvia Wynter, who broke open the human to make space for the plural. By Gloria Anzaldúa, who taught us that writing from the wound is a sacred act. By Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who reminds us that story is relationship, not artifact. By Trinh T. Minh-ha, who lets the page breathe, contradict, resist containment. And by Leonard Shlain, whose Alphabet Versus the Goddess dared to suggest that the shape of our letters could shape the fall of our goddesses — and perhaps their rise again.
So this is not creation. This is remembrance.
This is not invention. This is becoming.
A gesture. A call. A return.
Somewhere in the dark, a sigil takes form again — not to define, but to invite. A spiral, soft and slow, presses itself into the soil. Not for proof. For promise.
You do not have to write for power.
You can write for presence.
You can write as spell, as love, as refusal.
Begin again.
Begin always.