A conversation with Andrea Alexander and Helenard Louw, written by Arron Moos
“It wasn’t an official language”, she notes as she walks us through a few nostalgic remnants of her childhood. “It wasn’t seen as something as important [as English or Afrikaans]. There was a definite game element”, she chuckles.
Passed on from her cousins during school holidays spent in her grandmother’s Beaufort-West home, Andrea Alexander refers to the p-taal (‘p- language’) as a particular language of code and secrecy. Perhaps it embodies the finest example of a child’s agency. By placing the letter ‘p’ before and after certain syllables in words, Afrikaans or English morphs into another language of exclusion - while sounding almost gibberish-like. A practice initially intended to block adults out of the childrens’ conversations, it became an act of reclaiming their own space amongst common hierarchies and dynamics within coloured communities and families. Alexander elaborates on her contact with family surrounding the language and highlights how it allows particular bodies to be included and excluded in the same space, even to the extent of blocking younger cousins out from the older cousins’ conversations – however, in her experience, it was only ever the girls that spoke the p-taal.
“She refused to teach me the language”, says Helenard Louw as he paints a picture of how his older sister used to host girls’ nights at home. It was here where conversations would flow between English and Afrikaans, yet abruptly be thrown into grand gestures of the p-taal as soon as he would step into the room. “So, to me, it was perceived to be this language of gossip and mystery”, he explains. There’s a distinct element of performativity and drama that comes with the p-taal as Alexander and Louw relive their past experiences. Attributed to the lack of explicit rules and the tendency of the same word to be pronounced in different ways, pending the placement of the ‘p’, Louw highlighted how hand gestures and facial expressions were part and parcel of trying to express meaning.
The p-taal seems like the perfect way to go about independent communication in the company of others by combining an intentionally fast tempo with visual cues of the body and face as well as a varying set of word pronunciations. Yet, I suppose it’s not too different from everyday communication between friends, families and strangers, where slang and pop culture commonly affect the meanings of what we say or do.
What is significant here, is the spaces and places the p-taal is used. Now a current Gender & Transformation Honours student at the University of Cape Town, Andrea Alexander reflects on her upbringing in Westlake and her familial roots,
“when we’re in Beaufort-West, children speak the language all the time. [...] But when I learnt it, it was an older sister who taught her younger sister and the younger sister taught me. But I think location was very central [to learning the language]. We’d been in Cape Town but they’d never thought of teaching me the language until we reached Beaufort-West ”.
The then notion of a language conceived during adolescence - authentic in its approach to creating a space for conversation in that self-conscious period of life - also tempts a wandering thought of whether the p-taal endures through people’s lives into adulthood or if it is merely a phase.
In considering elements of location and class, the p-taal can be identified as something particularly unique to certain spaces within the Cape Flats – an area distant from Cape Town’s Central Business District where majority of the population are black and coloured people of the lower to middle classes. Alexander and Louw say they’ve never heard anyone in the Southern Suburbs or the generalised area of Cape Town City speak the language, not even between coloureds themselves. Which begs the question, why do people feel the need to shift the ways in which they portray themselves in different spaces? Is this shift of performed identity linked to the secretive notions of the language? Or is this performance of who you are linked to expectations of behaviour? Thus, then what needs to be highlighted to a larger extent, through common conversation itself, is the way in which we use language - as communicative act in and of itself - to be that of a performance of existence and an extension of being.
It becomes interesting to note how class filters through language, particularly regarding perception in how you seek to see and be seen, especially in spaces steeped in histories of social marginalisation. Perhaps that’s why a language, such as the p-taal, which allows adolescent women to discuss issues like sex, sexuality and abuse in a comfortable and safe way – by including and excluding particular bodies in the space – is profoundly affected by the context of where and when it is spoken. Evidence of this lies in how far removed the p-taal is from the historically significant and traumatic spaces – of the coloured communities of the Cape Flats - found in Cape Town’s city centre.
“In academia, we always argue that we don’t talk about these things, but we do talk about it. We just talk about it in our own languages and our own ways and in our own spaces”, says Helenard Louw in reflection.
Thus, by foregrounding agency, the p-taal acknowledges issues which are discussed in common everyday ways of speaking and those which are silenced by placing them in its care – providing silenced issues a leg to stand on through the operation of a performative language.