We-Two

We-two are camping about fifty kilometers south of Darwin, that’s how Tyson Yunkaporta opens a chapter of Sand Talk. Old Juma teases him because he knows both men are afraid of frogs; they snicker and edge closer to the fire. The reader stumbles at once—not over the scene, but over the pronoun. We-two: neither “I” nor “we.” The hand drifts toward the typo—except it’s not one, in our language. Except it’s not a typo. It’s a thought.

I write to provoke thought rather than present facts, in a kind of logical and reflective dialogue process for the reader. To do this, I often use the dual first person: a pronoun common in Indigenous languages but absent in English; that’s why I translate it as “we-two”—and my fingers are typing these words while my mouth is saying ngal.

The word in his language is ngal. It’s a first-person pronoun, but a pronoun for two: neither the “I” that speaks alone nor the indistinct “we” of a crowd. Yunkaporta notes that his languages have more of them than English—which only has I/me and we/us. “There are pronouns you could translate as: ‘I-myself,’ ‘we-two,’ ‘we but not others’ (not them), ‘all of us together…’” Where French must choose between singular and plural, Wik-Mungkan has an exact form for the two-in-relation: you and I doing this together, right now, and no one else.

That this pronoun exists is no grammatical curiosity. It carries a way of knowing. “In Aboriginal worldviews, nothing exists outside relation to something else. There are no isolated variables: every element must be considered in relation to others and to context.” Knowledge doesn’t escape this rule. It isn’t something one possesses; it lives in the passage between beings, places, and their custodians. “An observer won’t try to be objective but will find themselves integrated into a sentient system observing itself.” You don’t withdraw to know: you enter.

A choice must be made before drawing near. Our first person of thought is solitary: I think. Since Descartes, the knowing subject withdraws, doubts alone, and founds certainty in a single mind; knowing becomes a private affair, guaranteed by retreat. To be objective, for us, is to step back, remove oneself from the picture. Ngal moves in the opposite direction. You don’t step back to see: you’re already caught up in it, part of the system observing itself. And knowledge isn’t hoarded—Yunkaporta insists, on the contrary, that “it’s necessary to pass knowledge on […] to as many agents as possible, rather than trying to accumulate it individually.” On one side, a possession one owns; on the other, a deposit one circulates; on one side, an “I” that detaches, on the other, a pair that, before any “I,” is already the unit that thinks.

It’s not that we’re strangers to thinking together. Our philosophy was born as a dialogue, two voices in a square. But in our dialogue, two separate Is exchange arguments; ngal names the pair itself as the place of thought. Yunkaporta tests this in the very form of his book: he writes “Let’s we-two do an experiment in imagination,” and suddenly he’s pulling the reader into the pronoun. The page ceases to be a transmission—one who knows to one who receives—and becomes a relation. The common ground is there, narrow and real: a thought only comes alive when it passes between two. But it’s a threshold, not the room: “we-two” makes the doorway what our dialogue makes of exchange.

Yunkaporta isn’t a sage outside time: he has a PhD, publishes his research, carves bark shields with his brother-in-law, and, to teach, draws lines in the sand. Ngal isn’t some rare word he’s exhumed; it’s the ordinary pronoun of a childhood, which he brings into a language that lacks it. And that lack says something about us: we have a word for the thinker alone, and none for the two who think.

The question ngal poses to our I think remains: the thought I take to be mine—did I have it alone, or did it come to me, without my knowing, from a work done together, from a we-two I’ve forgotten?