Signs of the Sojourner Reminds Me that Fascism Isn’t Impenetrable
Language is a beautiful miraculous tool. Through language we fall in love and wage horrible endless wars. It signals the most triumphant moments in life and cosigns the deepest most painful memories. In America language breathes life into and bestows form on destructive fascist mindsets. With a very simple mechanical flourish Signs of the Sojourner shines an uncomfortable light on the seemingly impossible task of communication effectively with a human being that seems fundamentally different from yourself.
Signs of the Sojourner places the burden of revitalizing your crumbling dust bowl hometown squarely on your shoulders. You and everyone you love live on the furthest edges of a trade caravan route, and you’re all facing down the threat of being dropped from it in a few months, which is without question a death sentence. Your late mother had garnered enough respect and influence in her heyday to stave this off, but she’s gone now. Hopefully you’ve inherited her silver tongue along with the store she left behind. Your only tools as the player in this game are your words, represented as simple cards with a symbol on the left and right sides, and your wits, represented as… well, those are just the wits you have inside of your actual brain.
Good luck.
You play a simple game to drive conversations. The symbols on your cards map to conversation styles, and all you have to do is match your symbol on the left with the last one your partner has played, while making sure you leave them an opportunity to do the same. At the end of the conversation, successful or not, you must take with you a card they played, while leaving one behind. Your deck changes, but it never grows or shrinks, choose wisely.
The system leaves you with a simple choice. Who are you going to try to please? Everyone in the world is so different, and you only have ten cards in your deck. Every moment of discordance is so unbearable. You meant to compliment them, if this doesn’t go well then everyone at home suffers, how do I apologize? Give me one more chance. You only have a few months. But if you try too hard to please these traders away from home then maybe you risk alienating your childhood friend back home. If your deck remains relatively the same, then chatting with him is a breeze no matter how well you did out on the road. You can paper over any of the mistakes you made out on the road. He’ll understand. If you try to please everyone, then your shelves stay bare, and that caravan will drop you like a sack of rotting potatoes. What’s more more painful, disappointing your friend and the folks back home, or do you weather the constant disdain from people that you can’t seem to please?
Signs of the Sojourner acts as one of the most poignant metaphors for living in America right now. The internet has thrown open the doors to nearly every single person on the planet, and sometimes that feels like a mountain of bricks screaming directly in your face. Just concrete walls of furious people wanting to restore a country that’s so obviously failed them to whatever their picture of former glory is. You know you have the answers, it’s so simple. How can you make them see? Of course,it’s more complicated than that. People are difficult. There’s decades, centuries of disparate experiences standing between you and some kind of accordance. It’s impossible to immediately gel with every single person you see in passing, especially with a single sentence. Your hand is all circles and triangles, and their entire deck is squares and unprocessed grief. What do you do? How do you convince these people to stop killing you? Maybe you’ll fail this first uncomfortable conversation, but you’ll learn something from them. If you’re smart, you hold that new card close to your chest until you can play it in a pinch. There’s something underneath that discomfort. You can’t change everyone, you won’t understand them all, but even if you learn one thing from a mountain of bricks that might be the one thing that changes the tides later on.
