Lives IN TRANSLATIONLives IN TRANSLATION BiLincuat WRITERS ON IDENTITY AND CREATIVITY Eprrep ay IsABELLE DE CoURTIVRON palgrave macmillanUVES IN TRANSLATION Copyright © Isabelle de Courtvron, 2003, All rights reserved. No pat ofthis book may be wsed or produced in ‘ny manner whatsoever without written permision excep inthe ease of brief quotations embodied in criti articles or reviews. Fist published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN A175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS, (Companies and representatives throughout the word PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan vison of St. Marta Pres, LLC and of Palgrave ‘Macmillan Ld. Macmillan® i a registered tademarkin the United States, United Kingdom and other eountrice. Palgrave is registred trademark inthe European Union and other counties, ISBN 1-4039-066-6 hardback, Cataloging-in-Publiation Data aval tthe Library of Congres [A catalogue record fr this book x avalable fom the British Library. Design by Letra Libre, Tne First edition: July 2002 987654321 Printed in the United States of America Toone] Sen ForS.L.B. For NancyCONTENTS Introduction by Isabelle de Co Various Lives by Anita Desai “Writing in the Language of the Other” by Assia Djebar “The Wandering mists of Language by Ariel Dorfinan “The Im/Possibility of Life-Writing in Two Languages by Shirley Geok-tin Lim by Eva Hoff The Mask and the Pest by Nancy Huston “Bilingualism, Writi of Not Quite B yleia M nd the Feeling ag There” 19 29 69“Linguistic Ecology: Preventing a Great Loss” by Nuala N¢ hom “To Write and Eye Words? by José FA, Oliver “Arabic: The Silenced Father Tongue” by Lett ‘The Drowned Library (Reflections on Found, Lost, and Translated Books and Languas by Anton Shammas “My Love Affair with Spanglish” by Ilan Stavans “Writing in the Web of Words” by Yoko Tawada ‘Memoirs of a Bilingual Da by Isabelle de Coun Contributor 129 147 16) “Si, dans le passé, des experts établirent un alphabet pour fixer les langues, j’aspire a trancrire une écriture libérée, non seule- ment de l'alphabet, mais encore de mes deux langues: celle de Vendroit ott je suis née et celle de endroit oi jai débar- qué(....) ya la langue avec laquel celle qui ayant acquis une forme, plume. C’est lap: c je pense et me parle, et tira de ma bouche et de la migre que j'essaye d’insuffler aux mots. Sans elle, ils restent sans vie. Il est probable qu’elle se volatilise lors du trajet de ma bou Ja page. Néanmoins, & partir de cette langue sans existence, je me fraye un passage vers les mots in- stitués. Je cherche a Paccorder a eux comme je cherche dans I'e- space un son, Jen Tintérieur de moi, a un état extérieur inaltérable. Il est rare que je puisse les faire se joindre.” ‘efforce d’adapter un état, qui fulgure @ ("If in the past, experts established an alphabet in order to dif ferentiate langu s from one another, I aspire to transcribe a that is free, not only from the alphabet but from each of my established languages: the one belonging to the place where I was born and the other to the place where I disem- barked(.... .) There exist both the language with which I think and talk to myself, and the language which, having taken on material shape, exits from my mouth or pen. It is the former that I try to breathe into my actual words. Without it, the lat ter remain lifeless. It is likely that the former will virtually evaporate during its journey from my mouth to the written page. Still, it is out of this make my way towards inguage with no existence that I igned words. I strive to match them up in the same way that I y to snatch a single sound from the vastness of the air. I struggle to make what blazes in ete form, It is rare that I can make side of me take on con them truly coincide.”) Sylvie Baron Supervielle, Le Pays de BcritureACKNOWLEDGMENTS To the writers and translators in this volume who spontaneously and generously accepted to write or translate an essay despite their numerous commitments, my thanks, To the members of Foreign Languages and Literatures at MIT, the most congenial group of bilingual cone could ever hope for, my thanks. To Philip Khoury, Dean of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sci- ces at MIT, f thanks. agues and friends any en his unfailin, support throughout the years, my To Shannon McCord for her invaluable assistance during stage of this project, my thanks. To Lara de Courtivron, Jane Dunphy, Eva Hoffman, Bob Lowe, Susan Slyomovics, and Nicolas Wi and encouragement and espe semblable—mon frére,” my thanks ‘To Kristi Long, who initially took on this project, Roce Raz who took over as its editor, and the excellent editorial team at Pal- fe Macmillan, my thanks. Finally I would like to express my profound gratitude to two ll people: my American dad, Scott L. Behoteguy, without whom I would have never known the challenges and the joys of a bilingual life; and Nancy Lowe, for in many ways this book is hers as wellPERMISSIONS Adapted from CES VOIX QUI M'ASSIEGENT, originally pub- lished in France by ALBIN MICHEL, Paris 1999. Djebar. Adapted from an article in THE AMERICAN § ume 71, no.1, Winter 2002. © Ariel Dorfiman. An excerpt from NORD PERDU, originally published in France by Actes Sud, in 2002. Translated in English by the author as: Losing North: Musings on Land, Tongue and Seif (Toronto: ‘McArthur & Company, 2002). © Nancy Huston, Lyrics from “Locotes” by Louis Freese / Senen Reyes / Lawrence ‘Muggerud © 1996 BMG Songs, Inc. (ASCAP) / Hits From Da Bong Music (ASCAP) / Phreakas Ada Phunk Music (ASCAP) / Publisher Unknown. All rights the world on behalf of Hits From Da Bong Music (ASCAP) and Phreakas Ada Phunk Music (ASCAP) administered by BMG Songs, Inc. (ASCAP). All rights reserved. Used by permission. “Not Waving But Drowning.” By Stevie Smith, from COL: LECTED POEMS OF STEVIE SMITH, copyright © 1972 by Stevie Smith. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. ssia CHOLAR, vol-Lives IN TRANSLATIONINTRODUCTION IsaBELLE DE CouRTIVRON BEING BILINGUAL. WHAT DOES TT MEAN? Living in two lan- guages, between two languages, or in the overlap of two languages? ‘What is it like to write in a language that is not the language in which you were raised? To create in words other than those of your earliest memories, so far from the sounds of home and childhood and origin? To speak and write in a language other than the one that you once believed held the seamless connection between ‘words and things? Do you constantly translate yourself, constantly switch, shift, alternate not just vocabulary and syntax but con- ciousness and feelings? Such questions lead to numerous explorations. Linguists ask how one learns language, how and where the human brain stores and uses languages. They analyze critical periods, domains, code switch ing, the difference between compound and coordinate bilingual speakers. Political scientists explore the relationship between the language of power and the power of language: the role of language as a mechanism of assimilation and nationalism, colonialism, diglossia, and ethnic resistance. Literary theorists and cultural crit- ic reflect on bilingual games and agency, on the translingual imag- inary, on hybridity, “in-betweenness,” nomadism, and “métissage.”2 Isanst1e De Courrivrow Alllof these are fruitful and complementary approaches that shed light on a multidimensional phenomenon. But the writers in this, collection are engaged in another form of questioning altogether ‘one that has to do, quite simply, with fundamental issues of identity and creativity Despite the fashionable postmodern emphasis on displace~ ment and dislocation; despite the celebration of diversity and “more-than-oneness”; despite the intellectual persuasion that trying to find wholeness in our lives is a somewhat obsolete ideal, the anxiety about fragmentation and the search for exis- tential coherence remain primordial human responses. The life~ long struggle to reconcile the different pieces of the identity puzzle (or at least to acknowledge that they cannot be recon- ciled) continues to be a painful and constantly renegotiated process. All the more so, perhaps, when the fragmentation exists in that most intimate of sites—language. “Are there disadvan tages to being a traveler between languages, a double, triple or even quadruple agent crossing frontiers of identity?” George Steiner asks in Errata: An Examined Life. The writers in this col- lection respond to this question in multiple ways. As their essays demonstrate, none eschews issues of identity, of existential an- guish, of difficult choices, and of the tortured search for self and place. But none regrets the emotional and literary enrichment that being bilingual has brought them. For in the end, each cele~ brates, in his or her own manner, the “imaginary soothing solace” of translation (Shammas), their “maddeningly migrant” lives (Dorfman), and their “fluid, uncertain” homes (Desai). Products of the postwar global realities in which they have matured, these authors interrogate the individual; they explore the intimate ex- perience; they ponder the strange itineraries that have led them from a childhood in one language to a writing life in another; they meditate on the upheavals and the transformations, on the challenges and the adjustments, and on the reconciliations— which in some cases have taken a lifetime and in some will never be complete. For them, the answer lies not merely in partial self- Inropverion ; acceptance and understanding of the patchwork of their lives but in acknowledging that if there is a pattern in the quilt after all, what brings together the mismatched pieces is the writing proj- ‘ect. What Patrick Chamoiseau calls an “inky life line of survival” (School Days). It is not surprising, then, that a number of the women and men included in this collection have written language memoirs— all of which echo one another, despite their radically different contexts and histories, For many, it is the shock of discovering a new language that precipitates the loss of childhood paradise. ‘Then there is the ambivalent discovery of school (and how many absurd colonial and postcolonial school systems are described in these bilingual memoirs!) but also of books that reveal a world both alien and mesmerizing. We're frequently shown an alien ation from parents who do not share the same linguistic and cul- tural metamorphoses; the glacial paralysis of self-imposed silence, of being temporarily without language; the reluctant mastering of the second language (and, for some, the return to the original language after a period of alienation and rejection). ‘Then there are the complex aesthetic and political choices. Fir nally, a voice emerges from the dualities, molded by the cadence, the rhythm, and the memories of the original melodies and boldly charting new language territorie: While exile is “hot,” and it is chic these days to celebrate our multilingual, multicultural and mobile world, the essays m this volume remind us that this condition is often less romantic than its academic version would have us believe. Today's younger global souls” may feel comfortable everywhere, as Pico Iyer claims in The Global Soul, but our writers challenge this claim. While acknowledging that “we have come to value exactly those qualities of experience that exile demands—uncertainty, displace ment, the fragmented identity,” Eva Hoffman (in Letters of Tran- sid) reminds us that real dislocation is “a matter not of willful psychic positioning but of an upheaval in the deep material of the self” And where does the deepest material of the self lodge itself4 Isaneiue pe Covxrivnos if not in language? For, indeed, you can never sidestep the ques- tion of identity when you learn to live in a new language. Ques~ tions of home, of assimilation, of linguistic and cultural alienation, of triangulation and translation; the elusive search for one-ness, and the haunting quest for the self are pethaps foregrounded more acutely in texts by bilinguals because their authors face an ultimate disconnection. How much more difficult the fragmentation when you don't quite have “the words to say it”? Of course there are many reasons for being bi- (or multi-) lingual—the word itself can be defined in many ways, though it al- ‘ways involves some sort of continuum—and varying historical and individual contexts color each experience. You can be bilingual be- cause your parents spoke difference languages, the culture in which you were raised was a multilingual or diglossic one to begin with, or because the one where you sought refuge is monolingual and learn- ing that language was the price of assimilation. It can be because an- other tongue was imposed on you for political reasons, or because you chose another tongue for affective or aesthetic reasons. You can be bilingual because you have maintained your ties to a regional tongue like Breton or Catalan, in addition to speaking the majority language, French or Spanish. Or because you live in an officially bi- ot multilingual country like Switzerland or Canada or India or Nigeria. You can become bilingual when you are five, thirteen, or twenty-five. And of course bi- and multilingualism became increas- ing phenomena during the twentieth century as migration, tech nology, postcolonialism, and globalization dissolved borders and increased cross-cultural mobility. Some of the writers whose memoirs relate their bilingual jour- ney have attempted to come to terms with dualities by dividing their linguistic identities once and for all. Thus Richard Ro- driguez, in Hunger of Memory, remembers that early on he re~ solved to split Spanish and English into private and public Tanguages. Marjorie Agosin, discussing Spanish and English as well, explains that she always differentiated between the language of memory and that of order, each with its own function: “One Iwrropverion 5 language insisted on forgetting, the other on memory” (Tbe Al- phabet in My Hand). Nuala Ni Dhombnaill, referring to the diglossic situation in Ireland, writes (in this volume): “Irish [is] the Janguage of the emotions and even the preverbal and English [is] for me a bridge to the outside world.” While some hold on to the original tongue as a memory of wholeness and poetry, others are wrenched between the two. Or else they resist the competing ex- igencies of both assimilation and purity. ‘Metaphors of duality and dislocation and betrayal abound in bi- (or tri-) lingual autobiographical texts. In this volume, Ariel Dorfman refers to an “incessant and often perverse doubleness,” Nancy Huston to “theater, imitation, make-believe.” Anton Shammas describes himself as a “cultural smuggler.” Sylvia Mol- loy characterizes the works of bilingual writers as “always altered never ‘disaltered,’ always thirsty, always wanting, never satisfied.” ‘These themes are present in the works of bilingual writers not in cluded in this volume. For Marjorie Agosin, existing in two lan- guages means “being split in half and belonging to no one.” Luc Sante, in The Factory of Facts, writes of feeling “excluded at the gate,” of living in a succession of “rented rooms,” of ‘crossing bor- ders but never straddling them.” Vassilis Alexakis, in Paris Auhines, describes himself as an actor watching himself on the sereen in a dubbed version. As Ilan Stavans switches among four languages, he perceives himself as if he were “inhabiting other people's tongues” or “borrowing another person's suit” (On Bor- rowed Words: A Memoir of Language). Early on in his memoir Out of Place, Edward Said admits: “I have never known which was my first language, and have felt fully at home in neither.” Just as Shirley Geok-lin Lim distinguishes between homelands of mem- ory and homelands of the future (in her memoi, Among the White ‘Moon Faces), there are languages of memory and languages of the fature. And sometimes there are even, during privileged moments, two languages of the present. The topos of duality extends to writing, of course. The writer who has placed language at the center of his or her creative life,6 Isanete be Courrivnow and for whom writing has become home, must at some point make a fundamental choice. “In what language will he express his confused awareness of these intimate paradoxes?” asks André Aci- ‘man in his introduction to Letters of Transit. ‘This question of creative choices is far from new: Conrad, Beckett, Tonesco, Joyce, Kafka, Nabokov, and Sarraute have pre- ceded the contemporary writers cited above and left looming shadows. Modernism also was a literature of exile and immigra- tion, and it too was defined by experimental linguistic practices. But this earlier generation lived in a different world and had doubts of a different nature, as does the vibrant new generation of young bilingual writers such as Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz, or Shan Sa. Nevertheless, the question remains acutely relevant, as Susan Suleiman reminds us in the introduction to Exile and Cre- ativity. Noting that the state of being “not home” implies a dis tance from one’s native tongue, she wonders: “Is this distance a falling away from some original wholeness and source of creativ- ity, or is it on the contrary a spur to creativity?” Both, of course. For some writers, the hard-earned mastery of the adopted language (the “stepmother” tongue, as Assia Djebar calls it in Fantasia, An Algerian Cavalcade) is a painful appren- ticeship, but it is often a successful one. This is notably the case for Russian author André Makine whose classical prose has earned him a place in the pantheon of prize-winning “French writers,” and for Chinese-born Ha Jin, who won the U.S. Na- tional Book Award for his English-language novel, Waiting. For Eva Hoffman, Richard Rodriguez, and André Aciman, the com- mand of the other tongue, in this case English, may have come at 4 price. But each has developed a very personal style that owes its elegance and power, in part, to this initial struggle. For Ariel Dorfman and Nancy Huston, the temptation to be one, the fan- tasy of feeling happier and more “one's self” in a second language, may have briefly promised peace; but it also brought an unex- pected longing that has led them to write in two languages, in- cluding in the rejected mother tongue. In the case of Yoko Itropucrion 7 ‘Tawada, the haphazard meeting of languages as radically differ- ent as German and Japanese has not been resisted; on the con- trary, the odd juxtaposition has provided an unexpected aesthetic liberation, bringing with it the discovery of a style filled with playfulness, humor, and surrealist encounters. Sylvia Molloy translates and retranslates herself and finds that her texts improve in this shuttling, Linguistic merging, mixing, and “métissage” find thei way into Assia Djebar’s lyrical passages with their over- tones of Arabic; into José Oliver's poetic Andalu ages; into Patrick Chamoiseau’s weaving of franco-creole orality, and into Gloria Anzaldua's defiant code-switching, most point- edly exemplified in Borderland/La Frontera, One can be inhabited by bilingualism even if one does not speak two languages fluently but writes from the absence of what should have been. For sometimes, after the loss of an early lan- guage, the music nevertheless remains alive en creux, leading one to write as on a palimpsest, in one tongue but always over the body and the sound ofa buried language, a hidden language, a language whose ghosts reverberate in words (German, Hindi, and Urdu for Anita Desai, Spanish and Amerindian tongues for Richard Ro- driguez, Arabic for Leila Sebbar, Malay and Hokkien for Shirley Geok-lin Lim). Bilingualism has a bad name in the United States, often for ab- surd political reasons. It has been enlisted in nationalistic culture wars and held hostage by polemics; it has been used as an acces- sory in reductive ideological stances. And its opposition has some- times been bolstered by the regrettable smug assurance that one need only speak one language to be a citizen of the world, as long as that language is English. So it is time to restore to the term to its more capacious and endlessly enriching acceptation, one that inevitably leads to what Ursula Hegi in Tearing the Silence calls “a deeper way of seeing.” Tn the end, we are all exiles. Exile is, after all, only a metaphor for the human condition. We have all lost our childhood par- adises, even if this did not happen because we left behind our n-German im-8 Isasetir ox Courrivnon mother tongue, We all struggle to understand the self as well as to reach out and communicate with others. Bilingual beings have no particular claim to these more universal themes. But perhaps be- cause they experience them more acutely as they navigate between words and between worlds, they remind us, as does Shirley Geok- Jin Lim at the close of her own autobiographical journey, that in the end “home is the place where our stories are told.” REFERENCES Aciman, André, ed. Letters of Transit, New York: New Press, 1999. Agosin, Marjorie. The Alphabee in My Hands: A Writing Life tans Nancy Abraham Hall. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Alexakis, Vasilis. Peris-Aebénes. Paris: Fayard, 1997, Anzaldua, Gloria. Bonderlandi/La Frontera, San Francisco: Aunt Lat, 1987 Chamoiseau, Patrick. S:b00/ Days. Lincola: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Dijebas, Assia. Fantasia, An Algerian Cavalcade, New York: Seven Stories Press, 1995, (Ces Voix gui massdgent. Psis: Albin Michel, 1999 Dorfinan, Ariel. Heading South, Looking North, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998 Grosjean, Frangois, Life with Tuo Languages. New Haven, CT: Harvard University Press, 1982. Hegi, Ursula. Tearing tbe Silence: On Being German in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997, Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: Life im a New Language. New York Penguin, 1989, “The New Nomads," in André Aciman, Letters of Transit. New York: New Press, 1999, Huston, Nancy. Déis ef rélié, Montreal: Léméac, 1995. Nord perdu suivi de Douze France. Atles, France: Actes Sud, 1999, Trans by the author as Lasing North: Musings on Land, Tongue and Seif Toronto: MeArthur 8 Company, 2002. Iyer, Pico. The Global Soul. New York: Knopf 2000 Jin, Ha. Waiting. New York: Random House, 1999. Kellman, Steven. “Translingualism and the Literary Imagination.” Crit- icism 33 (1991), Inraopucrion 9 Press, 2000, Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. Among the White Moon Homelands. New York: Feminist Press, 1996. Makine, André. Dreams of My Russian Summers. Trans. Geoffrey Stra: chan. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1995 Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory. New York: Bantam Books, 1982. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta Books, 1991, Said, Edward. Out of Place. New York: Knopf, 1999, ‘No Reconciliation Allowed.” In André Aciman, Letters of Transit. New York: New Press, 1999 ante, Lue. The Factory of Facts. New York: Pantheon, 1998, Sebbar, Leila. Une Enfiance Algerienne. Pasis: Gallimard, 1997. ne parle pas la langue de mon pire. Paris: Julliard, 2003, tavans, Han. On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language. New York: Viking, 2001. anslingual Imagination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska aces: A Memeir of the mined life. New Haven, CT: Yale Univer- Suleiman, Susan, ed. Exile and Creativity. Durham, NC: Duke Univer- sity Press, 1998,Various Lives Anta Desat FOR THE SAKE OF SIMPLICITY, I would like to say that I was bi in In a at a time when it was a meeting place f 3 two cultures, nerely umbrella terms, for both cultures were split into an infinitely larger num- Indian and British, but the truth is that these a ber of spokes and panels that came together to form not an ele- gant object but a conveniently usable one. In my home in Old Delhi, a rambling old bungalow weighed down with bougainvil- leas of the kind the British left behind all across their empire in Asia, we listened to my mother sing us German lullabies and play Schubert on her piano (always out of tune because warped by Delhi's ferocious temperatures) while my siblings and I spoke Hindi to a h other and our neighbours, a Hindi that actually Urdu to form—conveniently, us y Hindustani spoken in north India. We bicycled to school past the Nicholson Gardens and the British cemetery where many of the stalwarts of the British Empire—and their more frail offspring— were buried. At Queen Mary's High School for Girls we sang hymns (curious, when one thinks of it, that the mild English mis- sionaries who taught us so enjoyed hearing assemblies of a hun- dred or more girls, Hindu and Muslim every one of them, lustilyn ‘Awtta Desat and unthinkingly bellow “Onward Christian Soldiers”), and we played rounders and badminton in the playgrounds. In the evening we went for a walk to the Qudsia Gardens, where we played hide-and-seek amongst the tombs of emperors and em- presses of the Moghul Empire mouldering under the palm trees, or to the Jumuna River, where at twilight the bells of the temples along the riverbank clanged and banged while we played in the sands till dark. We came home and read for the hundredth time our treasured copies of the works of Dickens, the Bronté sisters, Wordsworth and Milton, or old copies of comic books like Su- perman and Beano that we had bought with our pocket money in the arcades of Connaught Circus. Or we listened to my mother tell us one of Grimm’ fairy tales or of Christmastime or Easter in Germany, or heard my father talk of his childhood among the rivers and rice fields of Bengal, so far to the east and in the past as to be quite mythical So for me the European section of the umbrella had panels made up of both colonial Britain and the more distant, less phys- ical world of my mother’s prewar Germany while the Indian sec- tion had stripes that were Hindu—festivals, dress, food—and also ‘Muslim—other festivals, foods, and dress. Was this ridiculous, this object that we held over our heads, fashioned by our motley ancestors? Was it schizophrenic? ‘We gave it litle thought and got on with our lives. Its pied, patchwork structure seemed to us quite commonplace, normal. Turned upside down, we could use it to sail into wider seas, expe- rience different worlds, And England, when I first visited it, seemed vaguely familiar, one knew what to expect—daffodils blowing on a hill, little dark pubs and red letterboxes; and in America the high rises, the neon lighting, the spaghetti of high- ‘ways sprawling across the continent. And yet, and yet how con- fusing the actual experience proved. This world had been a part of my reading and my imagination, comfortably so, which made set- tling into the life of a visiting fellow at Cambridge University a dreamlike experience of recognition rather than the unsettling one Vatous Lives 8 of discovery. The latter was the experience that America provided when I arrived on this third continent to teach, initially at a small liberal arts college in western Massachusetts that was close to where two of my children were studying. This experience proved far more unsettling: India had prepared me for England but not, 1 found, for America, I found it hard to understand what was said to me, and people found it equally hard to understand me. I could not make the switch from tom-ah-toe to tom-a-to or frag-ile to frag-il my jaw ‘was too stubborn, my tongue too stiff. Also I found that I laughed at things others considered serious and that they spoke at length of matters I would not think of divulging in public. I was a for cigner. Mystified, I observed other foreigners—of a younger gen- eration—brought up not on literature but on the common currency of movies and pop music, who on arrival jumped in feet first, laughing with confidence, and bobbed up fully baptised first- generation Americans. I was too old for this, my joints too stiff When I tried to pump gas or pour myself coffee in a busy cafete- ria, all my fingers turned to thumbs, distressingly. It was a chas tening experience to find myself, at my age, a callow beginner. I studied once again Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Nabokov’s Lolita, Frost's austere poems, Eugene O’Neill’s great tragedies. I prowled the streets, looking through the big picture windows I passed at lighted interiors. The sounds of lawnmowers, of boom boxes in passing cars, the smoke and smells of summer barbecues were items I studied anxiously for clues. But a glass pane separated us; I found myself trying to lip-read, puzzled, Every few months I returned to India. It was comforting to put iy feet into slippers again, dress in old soft cotton clothes, know what everyone was saying, or leaving unsaid, or thinking. But I could also see that my American experience had interposed itself between us, created an unease. Here too I was on the outside now, looking in. So much had happened while I was away, so much that Thad not experienced or participated in, and I no longer had the right to comment. And while some things remained unchanged,4 Anrta Drsat stood still—the family, the circle of friends, the way of life—so much else had changed or was in flux—the economy, the media and, above all, the politics of the time. Fluid, volatile, powerful, they were carrying everyone in their tide, except myself. I was not part of it and did not understand it How can one write of scenes and worlds one does not under- stand? One may write of one’s bewilderment, but that has its lim- itations. And these scenes, these times have their own writers to interpret them, writers whose materials it rightfully is. I had nei- ther the experience nor the understanding nor even the language to tackle this new territory. Both the old and the new territory could equally well do without my contribution, Having plunged off one coast, I had not really arrived on another. Instead I found myself floundering midway; like the person in Stevie Smith's poem, “I was much farther out than you thought/ And not wav- ing but drowning.” Yer other writers had traveled, had found their new worlds rich, allenging, and rewarding—even more so than the ones they had sometimes. E, M. Forster's greatest book was the one he wrote about India, Henry James’ greatest books his European ones, Nabokov’s masterpiece American. Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milose had even taken to writing their poetry in their adopted language. How, I wanted to know, how? Te was evidently true that the experience of travel, the novelty of the scenes you visited, could lend your writing a certain vivid- ness; like scenes lit up by flashes of lightning in the dark. But you also needed a language for these unfamiliar places and experi- ences; the old language did not always do. What I knew was the literary language—and it had sufficed in England, where it had originated; what was proving difficult to master was the living one into which it had evolved and that I now heard around me—and to a novelist it is this that is essential since it is the key that un- locks the world you struggle to describe. In India I had picked up words, languages, customs, costumes, and cuisines from the litter left behind by the tides of history as a Various Lives 5 magpie might pick up bright objects to line its nest. I wrote in En- lish, that first language I had been taught to read and write by the missionary ladies of Queen Mary's School, but could not re~ strict myself to it; if did, I was pursued by a sense of leaving other parts of my tongue locked, unused. What about the Indian lan- ‘guages I used every day? What about German, my “family secret”? Ttcreated a lingual unease, this need to bring them into my writ- ing. And yet my work needed to be comprehensible to readers who did not share my precise inheritance. For that, my prose had to be as clear as a pane of glass, transparent. Perhaps that was the key: to use transparency so that it would allow the buried languages, the hidden languages, to appear be- neath the glass of my prose. I first consciously attempted to do that in Jn Custody, a novel about an Urdu poet, Nur. Now, Urdu is a gorgeously rich language in its sounds—Zindagi for Life! Zamana for Time!—but its liter ary tradition is also strict, formal. In writing about a poet, and concocting poetry I attributed to him, I had to write verses in En= lish that echoed their Persian origin. I employed traditional im- ages and metaphors and tried to follow the Persian verse forms in lines such as: Night ends, dawn breaks, and sorrow reappears, Addressing us, in morning light, with a cock’ shrill crow. and: ‘The breeze enters, the blossom on the bough wafts its scent, ‘The opened window lets in the sweet season, Spring, I was immensely gratified by a scolding I received: “You really should have acknowledged the poet you quoted; why is there no acknowledgment?” But it was accompanied by a rumble of unease knew, even if the person who scolded me did not, that it was only pastiche, not poetry. The greatest gratification actually came about6 ‘Awrta Desat when these verses were translated into Urdu by the Urdu transla- tor who adapted the screenplay I wrote for the Urdu version filmed by Ismail Merchant, Hearing the translated lines spoken, I felt myself translated into an Urdu poet—a surreal experience. ‘Then there was the German strand in my linguistic being: I searched for years and years for a subject that would allow me to use German in an Indian setting, the German buried, hidden, locked up within me. I could not use a German subject—I had never lived in that country even if I grew up singing “Hoppe, hoppe Reiter” and quoting Goethe's fine “Kennst du das Land... ? Finally I found him: Baumgartner. His name dropped out of a tree and struck me on the head as I walked in Lodi gardens in Delhi on a dusty summer evening, and I went home and started writing a book about a German emigré who escapes from the Holocaust to India. This is how I have him react to the languages he hears in a foreign land: He had had trouble recognising her language as English; it had seemed to him more like the seeds of red hot chilli exploding out of its pod into his face. He mopped his face And: He found he had to build new language to suit these conditions — German no longer sufficed, and English was elusive. Languages sprouted around him like tropical foliage and he picked out words fiom it without knowing if they were English or Hindi ot Bengali— they were simply words he needed: chai, khana, baraf, lao, jal, joota, chota peg, pani, kamra, soda, garee ... what was this language hhe was wrestling out of the air, wrenching it around to his own pur- pose? He suspected it was not Indian, but India’, the India he was ‘marking out for himself ‘This Baumgartner, this golem, then became my guide. Like him I too wandered, quite haphazardly, into a world about which I knew nothing, that was totally foreign to me—or so I thought. Driven by a bitter, grey northern winter in search of light and colour to Various Lives 7 ‘Mexico, I experienced a shock of recognition: This was India! Or, at any rate, an Indian world. True, its language was Spanish, its re~ ligion Christianity, but there was that same sense of history, of every stone being old and containing centuries of time. And so it was I went further still, south to Guatemala. This is the new con- tinent I explore now and where I find myself at one time a stranger and a native. To live in that state one needs to make one- self porous and let languages and impressions flow in and flow through, to become the element in which one floats. ‘Once one has torn up one’s roots, one becomes a piece of drift- ‘wood, afterall, or flotsam. It is the tides and currents that become one’s fluid, uncertain home. I found it interesting that Brodsky chose as his final resting place Venice, that island in a lagoon where contin ts wash into each other, creating a confluence that belongs to poetry, to art and spirit rather than to humdrum reality. l understand that wish—to hhave the wash and flow of water as one’s final home. It is a very Indian urge, after all REFERENCES Smith, Stevie. Poems: A Selection. Ed. Hermione Lee. New York: Faber and Faber, 1983,WRITING IN THE LANGUAGE OF THE OTHER Assia DyeBaR A WOMAN NOVELIST IN THE FRENCH LANGUAGE, that is how I might present myself today, my hands held out in a gesture of offering. ‘And what do I have to offer after entering literature, more than forty-five years ago, if not ten novels, two collections of short sto- ries, two plays, and a short collection of poems, an example of these works in one hand (let’s say the right hand since, while I write, I am not a “left-handed woman,”! and in the left hand two rolls of 16 mm color film (1,500 meters and 800 meters) corre~ sponding to two full-length films that I wrote and directed Such is my small harvest at my womanly age, which is the age of maturity. Where would the difference be between me and any other woman my age who would introduce herself with, ample, four adult children and two or three younger one: even with one or two grandchildren in front of this gro this case it would be her human oeuvre? perhaps But now, this is my speech (parole): and my speech is in the French language. I am a woman and a “French speake this speech might have been deployed in another register—in20 Assia Dyenan. Arabic, or eventually in another language. Nevertheless, my liter- ary writing, in its original text, can only be in French. ‘Thus, my speech, capable of doubling and trebling, participates in many cultures, even though I have but one manner of writing: the French one. In the past, one would say: “I am a man (or a woman) of my word” and assert: “I keep my word,”? and the meaning was under- stood almost in terms of honor. Well, I choose to present myself before you with this assertion: “I am a woman of my wording,” in a tone of seriousness and love . Thave but one manner of writing: that of the French language; with it I trace each page of each book, whether fiction or reflections, un an ap up ae Tam an Algerian woman, but rather than referring to my native land, I should refer to the language of my male and female ances- tors; “I am an Arabo-Berber woman’ and add “writing in French.” Since my first novel, forty-five years have elapsed, changing nothing of my identity whether it involves papers, passport, the fact of belonging by blood and soil Nonetheless, forty-five years later, I acknowledge this: I present myself first as a writer, a novelist, as ifthe act of writing, when it is daily, solitary to the point of asceticism, might come to modify the weight of belonging. Because identity is not made up only of Paper o blood but also of anguage. And if t seems that language, as is frequently said, is a “means of communication,” it is above all for me as a writer, a “means of transformation,” insofar as I prac tice writing as an adventure. un an ap un an In May 1982, in Ottawa, during my first stay in Canada, I was to speak at a conference on French literature. I remember I had been ‘Warring 1y Tae LANGUAGE OF THE OTHER a thinking about it very early in the morning, alittle before the time specified for my talk. Rushed by having to make a public speech, I suddenly discov- cred this obvious fact: Up to now I have used the French language as a veil. A veil over my individual self, a veil over my woman's body; I could almost say a veil over my own voice And I recalled my experience as a young girl going out into the street with a lady (my mother), a city woman enveloped in her white silk veil, a smaller veil of embroidered gauze over her face, and I, alittle girl with my hand clinging to the rough edge of im: maculate silk, conscious of the villagers’ voyeuristic glances at this veiled city woman who went every Thursday to the bathhouse. A veil neither of dissimulation nor of masking, but of sugges- tion and ambiguity, a barrier-veil to desires certainly, but also a veil subsuming the desire of men. Thus it was for me a first stage in my journey as a writer. This ‘writing, I wanted it far from me, as if in its hollows, in its thin and thick cursive script, I could hide myself somewhat, conscious of the extraliterary curiosity that my writings would raise before I even began—in a way, a little like my mother's city-woman silhouette marching through the village center in front of the peasants. T tried to explain to those men and women in Ottawa who had read my most recent texts (notably at the time, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment) to what degree I had paid the price for this am- biguity: about the ten years of nonpublication, living in voluntary muteness, I would almost say with sudden aphasia. As if I were trying, entangled in this silk veil symbolically evoked, to pull away from the French language without altogether leaving it! ‘To go around it, then choose to reenter it. To repossess it like a landlady, not as an occupant with heredi- tary rights. Thus, French was truly becoming for me a welcoming home, maybe even a permanent place where each day the ephemeral nature of dwelling is sensed. Finally I crossed the threshold freely, no longer submitting to a colonized situation.22 Assia Dyaaan So well did I do so that this language seems to me a house that 1 will inhabit henceforth and that I will try to put my marke on every day—knowing all the while that over the soil that supports it T have no direct rights. But if I do not pretend to jus soli (birthright by soil), atleast, at the risk of an easy wordplay, I can Pursue not my right to the sof (soil) but to the sole (sun)! Because my characters, both in Women of Algiers as well as in my novel (4 Sister to Scheberezade) struggle against the traditional veil, attempting to remove it yet becoming caught again, I, as au~ thos, have found my space in this writing, A woman's space that willingly inscribes at the same time her inside and her outside, her intimacy and her unveiling, as much her anchor as its opposite, her navigation. Writing that could his- torically signify my extraterritoriality yet is becoming, gradually, my only true territory un an ep un ae “The language ofthe other,” announced. After 1982, having writ- ten for over two years Fantasia: An Algerian Cavaltade, the first volume of a four-novel series that is a “quest for identity” and ad- mittedly semiautobiographical, I asked myself: This language of the other, what does it represent for me? By what means did it enter so deeply within me? Am I at the point that I have become the “other” in my socie y.am I at the point that I might seize my portion of “otherness,” of the foreignness that is inevitably in- cluded in a group of origin? I, who, barely twenty years old, en- tered into literature almost blindfolded, yet feeling as though drowned in light? The first sentence in the book Fantasia answers, I would say di- rectly and certainly, any fundamental question, with its multiple answers that come to dic, like su ive waves on the sand of the shore, without exhausting such questioning, Yes, my first answer was clearly my father's hand: Warne IN THE LANGUAGE OF THE Oran 3 A little Arab girl going to school for the frst time, one autumn morning, walking hand in hand with her father. As for me, need I remind you of the situation of any emigrant child today, in Europe or in Canada, who goes to school and is so- alized little by little in the host country’s language, in the “out side language,” I would say. This child comes home every day and usually he finds his mother there, sometimes his father as well, speaking in the language of elsewhere, the language of rupture and separation. It is in this language that he hears his mother, the sound of his origins, and he is sometimes unable to respond. As if absence, like the absence within himself, were calling out to him. For he was too rapidly thrown into the language of here—the lan- guage of the other, the outside language, and, in intimate contrast, cone that has become the language of “here and now.” We can only imagine what fragile wavering, what imperceptible imbalance, what insidious risk of vertigo—if not of schizophrenia- penetrates this precocious identity. My childhood, as I have wanted to tell it, was split equally be- tween two languages, my inner partition reflecting a parallel di- vision between the world of cloistered women and the world of ‘men, native ones as well as foreigners. For me, the nubile girl who would never be cloistered, French—for an entire century the lan- guage of the conquerors, of the colonizers, of the new posses- sots—this language had changed for me into the father’s language. Father had held out his hand to lead me to school. He would never become the future jailer: He was becoming the mediator. A profound change began then. Because he was a French teacher, he had assimilated an initial hybridity of which I would be the beneficiary elena aoa rene so long ago in a flaying, a territory of languages still remains be- ee det rn eau te eee ade ea voice, is installed within me like a proud fortress, whereas the24 Assia Drenan ‘mother tongue, all orality, made up of rag sists and attacks, between two tired bre: ters and shreds, re- hs.” (Djebar, Fantasia) “A territory of languages between two peoples,” 1 noted. This com- mon language was shared with other migrants, from other cultures and other tongues. How—whether one chooses or is pushed to write—yes, how does the language thus appropriated “function,” as it were, when it is put to use, in the hands of the professional scribe? I would answer by putting forth the idea that, when one is a writer but has only recently come to a language—let us say with: out the cultural heritage that is carried with it—to write in the language of the other often means to make the “other” percepti- ble, the other in all languages, and the other's power of alterity Let me explain. In 1982 I was finishing a second film project, a unique one: through film archival images reconstituting a recent ‘Maghrebi past, No longer as a simple historical illustration or as an aural commentary about images placed within a chronological continuity—no. 1 felt quite quickly that those who photographed, who took Pictures of yesterday, had an “other” gaze (the gaze, I might say, “of a tourist”). They took pictures of everything, that is, of nothing re- ally essential. Because what was essential was clandestine, hidden, outside of the frame. ‘To reconstitute on the screen several decades of a colonized people's life had to make you feel to what degree reality, in each image, was in the margins; how everything, once, a long time ago, barely seen, became emptied of meaning. In short, these images hid the past, by proposing a sort of deforming, illusory screen, How, then, to approach this “identity” of a past that is finished? ‘The sound beneath the images could not be a commentary; it had to fill a void, to make us feel this emptiness. It should “denounce” and alert, without being polemical, or even “engagé.” I then un- derstood that, through the sound, I must bring back, suggest, per- haps even resuscitate invisible voices, the voices of those who had Warring in ris LaNouacE oF THE Oren 5 not been photographed because they were crouching in the shade, because they were held in scorn. ‘Memory is a woman’ voice, Night after night We strangle it Under the bed With leaden sleep! sang an actress, beneath the body of the first Maghzebi women photographed in color, at the beginning of the 1920s. un up up up ap So I return to this “other” of all writing, ‘Through this work on visual memory (nine months in the edit ing booth, working with rolls of film but also with musicians made to sing, made to take up fragments of anonymous folk songs), I understood that, in the same way, in literature, the hidden, the for- gotten ones of my group of origin should be brought to light, but specifically in the French language. ‘Throughout the entire Algerian nineteenth century, a century of confrontations, of violence, of effervescence, no painter of battles had followed those ancestors who struggled, who pranced on horseback under the sun in order to defy and to die. I felt within me the ur gency of bringing up these images but to do so with French words Hence, in the language known as the language of the other, I found myself possessed by the need to reminisce about an else~ where, about a dead Arabo-Berber past, my own. As if the hered- ity of blood was to be transmuted into a welcoming language, and n fact this is the true welcome, rather than merely stepping over the threshold of the other’s home. Thus my Ariadne’s thread became my ear. Yes I heard Arabic and Berber (the wails, cries, ululations of my ancestors of the nineteenth century); I could truly hear them and thereby resusci~ tate them, those barbarians, in the French language.26 ‘Assia Dresar So much so that to write becomes to inscribe, to transcribe, to write from the depths (“en creux”), to bring back to the text, to the paper, to the manuscript, to the hand, to bring back at the same time the funereal chants and the buried bodies: yes to bring back the other (once considered the enemy, unable to assimilate) through language. ‘Was I able to convey what was, for me, this work of exhuma- tion, of unearthing the “other” of language? Perhaps this is what a writer primarily does: always bring back what is buried, locked up, the shadow so long engulfed by the words of language. To bring darkness to light. un we ap up a In conclusion, I might ask myself: Living in two cultures, strad- dling two memories, two languages, bringing together in one writing the dark aspect, the repressed—in the end, what difference does this make to me? Am I doomed to be a woman in transition, a passing writer, to deliver the message in stereo, so that instead of double loyalty itis double betrayal that awaits me?"? Not to write anymore, fearing the risk, bit by bit, of never again speaking the “words of the tribe” (according to the beautiful Italian novel by Natalia Ginsburg, this would mean to never again be part of any tribe, of any group, without being able, in fact, to add up two pasts, two treasures. A gradual displacement, slow and infinite deracination, no doubt, as if it were necessary to wrench out one’s roots. Wrench- ing out while discovering yourself, discovering yourself because of wrenching out. we we an ap ae Who am I? I answered at the beginning: first and foremost a woman novelist in the French language. Why not end by asking myself this question once more: Who am I? A woman whose cul- Warrixe ns THe LaNouase oF Tite Oren 7 ture of origin is Arab and Islam, So let’s underline it: In Islam, the woman is the hostess, that is, pasagére risking, at each moment, unilateral repudiation, she cannot truly claim a permanent place. ‘Thus, in a religion that begins with an almost sacred emigra- tion, the woman becomes a constant emigrant, without a destina- tion and, because of this, a creature that deserves both the best and the worst. The best symbolically, the worst historically. As for me, even though writing every day in the French lan- guage, or indeed because I write this way, I am in fact only one of the women in this multitude. Simply a migrant. The most beauti- ful label, I believe, in Islamic culture. Translated | by Izabel de Courtioron and Susan Slyomovies Notes 1. Refers to the novel by Peter Handke, The Left-Handed Woman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978) 2. French literally: T have only one word” means “I keep my word.” 3. Djebar plays withthe juxtaposition and double meaning of “double fel ite” (which also means stereo) and “double derive” (to be cu adrift) 4. French translation of Natalia Ginsburg’s novel Lessio Femigliare (Torino: Einaudi, [1963]; 1985). assagére” means both “a passenger” and “passing through.” REPERENCES Djebar, Assia. Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1993,THE WANDERING BIGAMISTS oF LANGUAGE ArrEL DORFMAN I MAY HAVE BEEN GARCIA MARQUEZ WHO ONCE told me the story of entire Colombian villages that had migrated as if they were birds. Fleeing from catastrophes or perhaps plagues or recur- rent floods or merely the desolation of never-ending civil wars, these villages had seemingly decided, at some point in history, to uproot themselves. And as they moved to a remote location in search of peace and packed every transportable belonging, these future fugitives did not forget what was, to them, the most crucial of all things: their dead. In effect, according to Garcia Marquez, these villagers, on the verge of becoming nomads, dug up the bones in the cemetery and carried their ancestors on that journey into the unknown, probably animated by the need to defy the fluc~ tuations of time and geography with the illusion that something from the past endures and abides and permeates the present, seek- ing to keep at least one hard physical link to memory at a time of devastating change. ‘Not all migrants can push to such extremes, of course, their de- sire to stay connected to the men and women who generated30 Ania Dorraaws them, who coupled distant descendants into life. Most migrants are barely able to bring along a photo, a clipping, the keys to a house that is no longer theirs and that may, in time, be demol- ished, its address lost. But all migrants will inevitably take on their travels another sort of possession, one that invisibly preserves those faraway dead and their past and their receding land better than any bones can. All migrants through history have invariably transferred with them the syllables and significances enclosed in the language they learned as they grew, the language that gave them a slow second birth as surely as their mother gave them a rel- atively rapid first one. That language, which contains the seeds of their most intimate identity, will be put to the test once the voy- age is over, especially if the migrants happen to be unfortunate enough to move to a foreign land. Because waiting for them at the new location are multiple others—with their own dead, their own ceremonies and cemeteries, and, of course, their own tongue. Ifit were to be the same language—let’s say, for instance, an Uruguayan who migrates to Spain or to the Dominican Republic or a French-speaking woman from Cte d'Ivoire who comes to Lyons—there will still be a valley of distances and misunder- standings between she who arrives and he who greets her, he who arrives and she who sells him bread, but itis more frequent in our globalizing world that those who arrive on a hostile shore are faced with an alien tongue. And will therefore be condemned to live a bilingual fate. They will not be able to avoid the need to live for many years in two languages, torn between the public dominant language, on the one hand, in which the police interrogate, the school principal complains about a child’s conduct, bank accounts are opened and all too often closed, groceries are bought, jobs are proffered, signs and advertisements are written, and on the other hand the private subjective set of words that keep the newcom- ers in touch with the old home and homeland and with the per- sons they once used to be, the persons they believe they still might once again become. ‘Tut WaxpeniNe BIGAMtsTs oF LANGUAGE a How to deal with this incessant and often perverse doubleness, how to protect the fragile shell of the self bombarded by two needs and two communities that read opposite meanings into every mouthful at every meal? From the beginning of history, migrants have wavered between extremes that promise to resolve and even abolish this fragmented anguished condition, These possibilities are not always available to everyone, but they do tend to be phan- tasmagorically there, temptations that call to us, suggesting wholeness, a delusion of completeness. One strategy, of course, is assimilation: The migrant secks to become an integral part of the new society, tries to forget or hide the mother tongue, wants to blur the accent, fantasizes that all bonds to the past can be cut, makes believe the dead are really, en- tirely dead. And if the originating migrant cannot always do this—because languages cannot be cast off like old socks—there is always the reverie that this fll status in the new society will ma- terialize with the children or, eventually, the grandchildren, con- jecturing that some acquiescent offspring will overcome the curse of a bilingual, duplicated existence. The opposite of this solution is what could be called the rejectionist model: I have seen Chilean compatriots of mine who, twenty-five years after they were first banished from their land, continue to stubbornly refuse to learn more than a few words of the host country’s language, their faces and their hearts nostalgically fixed on their remote country, their tongues repeating colloquialisms that, in fact, have fallen out of use back home. It is not necessarily a tactic doomed to failure. ‘They plan to return to Chile someday, to make the trip back, and indulge, therefore, like so many Kurdish and Moroccan, Indone~ sian and Korean, Nigerian and Mexican emigrés in a similar situ- ation, in a tactic of cultural survival that holds on to the native language as a pure and intact entity, a bridge, a down payment on that ticket home. These two strategies, assimilation or rejection, represent the two extremes with which monolingualism, its temptation of im- maculateness, tugs at the heart and mind of every potential mi-2 ‘Ante Donan grant, attempting to avoid the Janus-like existence that haunts most wanderers. Of the two, it is assimilation that is the more powerful. Influential and effective institutions align themselves behind this monolingual alternative, first and foremost the na- tion-state with all its history and resources brought to bear on cre ating and enforcing borders and boundaries, imposing them on Beography and bodies, on flags and hymns, 2s well as on syllables and relative clauses and interjections, identifying the nation with & language as a bulwark aguinst foreign contamination, always alert to the need to control and homogenize its population in the name of security and internal order. And that national language also thrives by its alliance with those structures in which it s em- bedded, religion, literature, family rituals, newspapers, schools, ll of them allowing citizens to imagine themselves as members of a vast community. As if this were not enough, there is another inner confederate: the ingrained psychological need of each and every human to belong and blend in and succeed, the enticement to erase that pain in the past that reminds us of failure T happen to disagree with the monolingual option, both for countries and for human beings. But I also happen to understand the wellsprings from which flow the desire to be whole and ind:- visible in one language. I have myself been a fundamentalist of language, someone who, for decades, tried to escape the bifurca- tion of tongue and vocabulary, a back and forth that was deter- mined by exile and repression and geography. Born in Argentina to a Spanish-speaking mother and father and forced into my first migration—to New York—at the age of two, I all too soon used a childhood sickness and trauma to jetison my native tongue for the English that was, in those post-World War II er, beginning its umphant domination of worldwide business and popular culture that would make it the global lingua franca of the plane tary elites. But when, at the age of twelve, [had to follow my fi ther into yet another exile, this time to a Chile that I did not want to live in and whose language I could not speak or write, I found myself at the mercy of Spanish—and it treated me not like a Tie WANDERING BicaMasTs OF LANGUAGE 3 ned mistress, but rather as a lover who had been patiently Bee tartar ak ial aor pclae kof oe ar Pio esdereta seduced; and it was not long before u decided to refuse to speak any English whatsoever, a politic choice that was meant to cement and proclaim my identity as a Latinoamericano opposed in any way he could to the encroach ments of the Yankee I had been on the land I had come to call my ‘own, including the intricate inner domains of language. As A many converts, I made a point of burning my bridges—even sl called them puentes, maybe so my snubbed Anglo language ne not understand what I was doing and retaliate against me in a fit of jealousy. Though English also knew how to wait for the te ward husband to come home, patiently let history ambush me. wonder at times ifit could read the future, my English, if antic~ ipated that once Chile fll toa dictatorship and T was sent into exile, I would need its refuge, its skills, the very words I am writ ing in this essay, perhaps these words in English were inside 2 predicting the moment when they would be allowed to eat ize. Though what I finally arrived at ae the rar x the other one but rather a cohabitation, my two lan- ae ee a truce in order to help the body they were lodged ferrite a phase galliren' re having embraced the need to live in two dimensions, pledge loyalty to two cultures, use aes guage to speak to the mailman and the other to read the mail a home that he brings to our door. It is asa resident of this dual = istence, married to two tongues, inhabited by both English an Spanish in equal measures, in love with them both now that they have called off the war for my throat, itis as an adulturer of = guage that I presently trust that the distress of being double an« somewhat homeless is overshadowed by the glory of being hybrid and open. It is as a fluid bigamist of language—indeed, as some~ one who has to write everything first in one and then in the other tongue, who corrects the Spanish text sent to E/ Pats in Madrid with its English transliteration and re-creation that will appear in4 ‘Antex Donescay the Los Angeles Times, who has to explain to himself and others why the novel Terapia is called Blake's Therapy in its rival incar- nation—it is as a confessed grammatical philanderer that I now encourage migrants and the states in which they dell to embark fully and without fear upon the adventure of being bilingual and ask them to celebrate as well, as so many of the young do, the many intermediate wonderful full-fledged patois that prosper in the spaces in between established linguistic systems, the myriad creole zones of confluence and mixture where languages ean min= aile and experiment and express the fluctuating frontiers of a hy- brid humanity. ‘This call of mine is not merely, I believe, the fruit of my own Personal seesaw romance with two languages. Just as there are in- stitutions that compel us toward the defense and adoption of only ‘one language for our identities under siege, there are also equally strong forces in the world today that are pushing us toward mul~ tilingualism as a real alternative, The primary factor, I would wager, isthe sheer mass of migra- tion, all those bodies and the minds inside those bodies smuggling foreign syntax across the borders under the noses of immigration officers and customs officals, penetrating the defenses of the na- tion-state, invading the fields and the kitchens and the elementary schools. In the case of the country where I now live, the United States, the latino influx is so enormous and unstoppable that within a century I anticipate that exploding demographics will force bilingualism to be the norm rather than the exception—as it is in some of the major cities in America today. A second major condition favoring bilingualism is the com- pression of the immense distances that used to separate migrants from their native lands. The feasibility of ever more frequent cir- cular journeys back and forth to Ithacas from which we no longer need to be absent for twenty years is undeniable, not to mention the manner in which technology invites us to connect to the si- ‘multaneous words being spoken back in the motherland as well as to ever wider international networks of linguistic partners across Ti WANDERING BIGAMISTS OF LANGUAGE 3 ¢ globe, inciting communities to organize in diasporic webs that ea not have ie even imagined thirty years ago. Which leads us to a third factor: The world itself, because of this incessant movement of bodies and goods and capital, is producing speakers who are increasingly plurilingual. It is true that a great deal of this linguistic traffic is transpiring in English; I greet this circumstance warily, even if this predominance of one of my languages allows me personally to break down travel and intellectual barriers (and make a better living). Any excessive hegemony has always filled me with suspicion. English’ ascendancy, like so many phenomena associated with globalization, leaves too many invisible losers, too many people silenced. Regarding languages and migration, I never forget the questions that are so often neglected when progress is abstractly celebrated, the questions that the real suffering human subjects face, one by one by one. Do you come from a place that is poor, that is not fully incorporated into modernity, that does not control a language that commands respect? Do you inhabit a lan~ guage that does not have armies behind it and bombs and modems and technology? Do you reside in a language that will one day be extinct or whose existence does not have value in the marketplace and can't get you a good job and help you in the everyday struggle to survive? Do you dwell in a language that is wonderful only for making love or teaching your children the dif- ference between right and wrong or serves to pray to God? Is your language perfumed with unpronounceable words by poets with "unpronounceable names describing their unpronounceable forests and guttural maidens? How does such a language defend itself in our globalizing world? Thold no effortless answers to this quandary of globalization, but regarding the empire of language, I can at least console myself with the reminder that English or whatever other international Janguage will be used by many men and women from many nations will itself undergo—is, indeed, undergoing at this very moment— the slings and joys of outrageous appropriation, the mongrelization that inevitably comes when transnational clans breed bodies and36 ‘Antet Donpwaxs breed syllables. But perhaps more crucial: The new global disorder enacts a world where more and more people, submitted to the obligation of dividing their brain between two (or more) linguistic systems, end up deterritorializing language, unlinking it from the power of the nation and the coercion of the state, allowing other tormented bilinguals to feel less alone in their own quests for the sort of multiple pluralistic beings that I hope would constitute a model for tomorrow's new humanity. Tf am (tragically) optimistic about the prospect of bilingual- ism, it is because I believe that languages—in spite of an innate and inevitable conservative tendency that answers a hunger in us for stability and continuity—have themselves also always been maddeningly migrant, borrowing from here and there and every- where, plundering and bringing home the most beautiful, the strangest, the most exciting objects, learning, taking words out on Joan and returning them in a different wonderfully twisted and often funny guise, pawning those words, punning them, stealing them, renting them out, eating them, making love to them and spawning splendidly unrecognizable children. Indeed, the first bilingual experiences, at the origin of our species, must have flourished in the intersections between groups that had already evolved divergent and mutually incomprehensi- ble linguistic systems. The intersection of trade, certainly, the bartering of goods that had to be accompanied, at some point, by the bartering of words and the dawning discovery that anyone who knew both tongues would be able to sell and buy, swap and acquire, on far better terms, trading stories first and then desires and finally goods. And that other intersection, the dire intersec- tion and crossroads of battle, when captives were taken as booty and warriors were spared and enslaved and women were brought back for breeding and pleasure. I think of those captives as the first nonvoluntary bilinguals of history and prehistory, though they may also have been the first to educate their captors in the delights of another language and another viewpoint, Schehereza- hades of the forked tongue. And then, the ultimate intersection, ‘Tae Waxpenine Broamists oF Laxcuace 37 the intersection of languages due to the sweeter intersection of Jove and reproduction, the biological and cultural and personal and epic need for exogamy, the need for the other, the age-old impulse toward mixture and miscegenation, cells that want to fertilize by expanding, the need to leave the suffocating inner cir- cle of what is familiar and plant yourself in the wider world. And languages were there, had to be there, in those love affairs at the beginning of time, one language for the man, another language for the woman, coupling the bodies and coupling the minds and coupling the tribes. At gonie ‘two of them, both of them, there, at the very start of the first journey out of Eden—an immediate, almost automatic, way of challenging death, telling us still today that we need not excavate the cemetery as those mythical villagers in Colombia did, ‘we need not carry the physical bones with us into the future, to stay in touch with the origins and dispute death's rule over us. If this vision of the bilingual origins of our humanity is correct, then the chances of our living simultaneously in multiple lingustic sys~ tems may not only be daringly contemporary but could presum- ably have its roots in our most ancient mirrors. If language is, finally, in its deepest essence and meaning our first and last at tempt to defy and defeat death, then perhaps a bilingual human- ity is the best way of fooling death when it comes for us, fooling it not once but twice and perhaps even three times and more; per- haps before we disappear from this earth we can at least force death itself to speak all our tongues.Tue Im/PossIBILITY OF Lire-WRiTING IN Two LANGUAGES Survey GEoK-LIN Lim Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativity, the title of this volume of essays, presents a provocative, ambigu- ous set of problems. The relation between living and writing has never been clear to me. Having written a memoir, autobiographi: cal poems, and personal essays, critical and reflective, I do not dis- miss the notion that I have often turned my lived experiences, the people I have met and the what of these encounters, into writing; made stories out of the inchoate, confused, contingent, pained, provisional, temporal, and shifting; the unfaithful and faintly vis- ible; the unsaid, said, unheard, heard, overheard, and uncertainly heard presences, hauntings, absences, and poverties; the regimes and revolutions witnessed, turned to or away from, as a lurker, a bit player, or a willfully placed central figure. Living is seldom what I can take a firm grasp on, despite the supposition, generally held after the deaths of gods and their traditions, that “I” alone have charge of my life and, as possessor of my destiny, am ac countable for my decisions and outcomes. Discontinuous, like liv- ing, writing, also like living, is an act over which “I” am supposed° ShtntsY Gror-un Lie to wield ultimate control. Signing the permission form that mits others to reproduce a piece of writing with my signatur its pages, I participate in a professional-disciplinary ruse, acon tractual misunderstanding that writing a life reproduces that life as storied memory in a definitive text and that of experiences is recoverable in language Autobiographical writing is of and from moments in the story- teller’s eS ‘The time of the life recounted and the time of the writing that may or may not also be addressed in tha show thet calle nner fas cre at text that is read can never be fully accounted. Other stories remain untold or, sometimes, even if narrated, unpublished and inacoees. ble. Between life and writing sprawls vast territories of utterance, incipient or unattended, that undetmine the naive notion that 2 life in writing is teleologically what itis claimed to be. Thus, after my memois, Among the White Moon Faces, appeared, 1 among some notes, this handwritten paragraph per: an individual's store at a years T find, thon with Chine ogee ae es tive that he internalized, reenacted with me, his Chinese- Malian Girlfriend, and unhappily detested ‘about himself ory il ly cil” ee spiking oxtf1not only had he igi to ee bar e Tue Iw/Possiauery oF Live-Warrinc 9s Two LANGUAGES 41 right, less than humane, less than understanding. I had the thick skin of the intellectual female—my mind was my proudest pos- session, and my body, subordinate to mind, was therefore per ted to be manipulated, enjoyed, deployed as an open territory. I reproduce here the entire paragraph as penned with no revi- sions. I had composed the memoir directly on the computer and have no memory of writing this passage, no notion as to when it ‘was written in the course of the memoir's composition. T infer it must have been scribbled early, then set aside and misplaced. The segment—part of a larger story of why and how I came to the United States—must have lingered somewhere in my conscious ness. The published narrative of the unhappy affair, however, makes no reference to concepts of “free spirits” and “shame” or to the sexual prowess of the partner. Early in the writing process I had consciously made the decision to tell my life as story rather than interpret it as analysis. A short story writer before I turned to writing the memoir, I was acculturated to an aesthetic code that, valued narrative rather than the expository genre, dramatic and lyrical modes rather than “objective” report. At the same time, wanting to foreground “the truth of my life” rather than an imag- ined life, I turned to histo even as I recognized that the story's structure was generated by a hermeneutics of experience and not by externally validated facts. Narrated life references learned outside of official history. Such learning, layers of instruction formed through many different mo- ments of self-reflection, including that provided in moments of writing, whether published or not, was what generated, ordered, and polished the life that appeared in and as Among the White ‘Moon Faces ‘My scanning of the unsettled space between life and writing is not new. Nor is it new to caution that such unsettled spaces may ‘well deserve invisibility; perhaps it should remain consigned to the en voicing and deletion that we call revision. Exam- for substantiation of the life story, terrain betw ining the paragraph cited, I understand why the author of the2 Sutnizy Grox-uiw Lie memoir did not remember to include it in her book. It appears cruelly misleading and to no efect. Sexual ineptness i, after al, « ‘matter of relational coupling, not merely a result ofan individuals Performance. The word “accident” falsely dramatizes a drawn-out ambivalence and consequence-filed struggle as to which fusne that young woman should commit herself to; and the Passage con fases decision and contingent action with personality. Conversely, the paragraph may be seen to reproduce acutely the entangling of Cran ngency and personality leading up to the departure fron Malaysia, an entanglement that was histrionically played out as the sexual other, the inept human lover to be displaced by the pri- mary object of desire, the United States of America. In narrating another version of that story-time, the published memoir pro- duced a different version of my life, albeit with the “same” experi- ence in view. Another problematic in writing a life is th main untold. In the same box of papers in which the paragraph ‘sppears, I found pages containing points in outline form thar ap- Pear to be notes toward the drafting of the had been given alphabetical markers that appear imposed after the fact oftheir writing. Studying these pages, it seems to me that I ‘must have had completed the first chapter of the memoir by then and was outlining how to proceed with the rest of the project. But 1 did not seem to have returned to this outline; the fined onganiza- tion of the published memoir pretty much ignores the sequence of events, ideas, and characters briefly sketched on these pages. A quick review of these pages shows the importance I had Placed then, at the opening of the m rience of living in two languages. at of stories that re~ memoir. The points nemoir project, on the expe- Among the points I had jotted own were “Chinese working class English-educated dines Under “stepmother” appears ‘silence, distance, language.” Starred under “girl, motherless” is scrawled “English speaker” and "Ea slish language.” Further down the page, the phrase “Mandarin classes” is added. On the same page I had also scribbled “Family- Clan culture of noise and silence,” “suby ersions of community Tie De/Possiaitrry oF Lire-Warrinc 1v Two LaNGuacEs 43 eachers, nurses—debating teams-elocution contests,” ata ley anneal doting aeparition by lnguge identity and how On the cond page Tha ced Ret sss against silence” and written “What is unadmitted—Aiyal Why talk about it” ng the notes, “ile : CE eer “English” chree times; “Chinese” and “Man iain once each; “language” appears twice, “noise,” “debating, ” or nonspeech, or at least nonlan- oad" ‘ ” “individual,” and “na- and “loution? one cack and “Meni” ind s a ‘oe ional” once. Taking these points as pressing the wei be on the fife the memoir should have expended ie a ease tw Pehle hele peer oS lori ch se of living inthe En eI Chapter 1, which, in the English and Chinese languages. Chapter 1, SE cael ace appears to have been already composed, Bisse shokcrpcricnoafay cal chilling in my, mothers Malaytonged presence Maly wat eee wd her abandonment of the family when Iw. ened nie Pes vesafacaeahcarroc eaaea Ta me he eldest son, who speas it fund, and her youngest son, who iris jos Matej eopecng oneckcld hector chdcen staat lal AF omicted OEMGU The lowing nacis, oe jppear to have dropped the issue of living in wo lan aaa deformation. I can only speculate on guages as a primary social deformati ean ERSTE Rats ae eae & i rytelling, toward a more progressive Ee Seale positivist narrative, left little maneuv ; a inscription of the operations of silence and of what Bakhtin had called “heteroglossia”—the presence of different languages in a. common discourse. ie But these aborted materials and themes, their ee leave certain traces on the autobiographical text, even as ie or, in pursuit of a fullness of storytelling, strategizes to eli a nets d y Asian American autobi- bridge these losses and defeats. Many Asian A: nies ographies suggest lives formed and understood in more“ Shmtsy Goor-um Lae language as well as lives marked by varieties of nontongued action, Silence is often taken as signifying nothing: Unworded, un- tongued, with no representational, indexical, deitic exchange of meaning. Except for when it is represented as illegible, able, or indeterminately expressive and situational, silence 4 an utterance that the writing of a life is intended to n contest, and to negate. Arguably, however, silence, as symbolic ac- tion, is as expressive and signifying as any speech act, and narra~ ‘ors may be hurt or may hurry others into silence as much as they may be driven into speech or rhetoric. At the same time, if writ. ing is supposed to make visible and audible what would ochersris bea silent, that is, unrepresented, life, how can writing represent the experience of silence without turning it into language, break- ing that very silence whose presence itis invoking? This moment of impasse between language and silence serves as an analogue for the presence of another language in a monolin- gual English-language text purporting to represent a multilingual life. Like so many bilingual authors, IT write in one language, En- slish, even as the sociopolitical, cultural forces, and relationships that a and continue to shape me have been articulated aad articulate themselves in languages and dialects er than En- glish—Malay, Hokkien, Cokin ‘Mandarin. ms ay as I write belongs chiefly to the United States, although before the age of twenty-four I was immersed in the English of Malaysia With its idiolectic derivations from Malay, Hokkien, Cantonese Tamil, Portuguese, and more. Very little of these polyglossic fea- ‘ures appear in my memoir, which, asa literary artifact, may there- fore be said to be less real life than writing, albeit with the life in What would the memoir be like if I had adhered faithfully to the original outline? Ie crosses my mind that this occasion pro- vides me with an opportunity to write another version of my life one in which those themes so quickly sketched would be given claborate treatment. For example, I try to recall my struggle to understand the women’s Hokkien sentences that settle to a mur- unread- appears rupture, to ‘Thee bePossiairy oF Lire-WnrrinG is Two LaNcuaces 45 mur whenever I enter the room where my stepmother and my fa- ther’s sisters-in-law are gossiping around the kitchen table. The room is tiny, hot, crowded with shabby battered furniture, like the rest of the single-story shack that is too narrow to be described as a bungalow. Entering this room in memory, I understand that I have grown up like a fish not in three languages but between them, not swim- ming pridefully among these languages but shamefully ostracized from two. Hokkien was the language of women's talk, and as the daughter of a woman who had betrayed her family by abandon- ing us all to whatever evils may devil us, I was also deliberately deprived of it; my ears, to be shut against those women’s gossip of my mother in another country, thus also shut against that volatile language of malicious and social communing. The women, laughing loudly just before they see me suddenly in the room, now fall silent; then they murmur so low I can barely make out their words, cannot make out the shape of the vocabulary of sto- ries they were rattling off until I appear on the scene. My mother’s abandonment has shut the doors to Malay everyday speech on us; it has also shut me away from Hokkien, the home language in which her story is narrated repeatedly and which I am not permitted to hear. Between Malay and Hokkien, it is no wonder I choose the one that does not refuse me: those sentences, the words and babbling in the pages of English-language books that open compliantly hour after hour to my lonely forays. T use this memory to remind myself that language choice is never as simple as political scientists and cultural studies scholars have argued. My life between languages cannot be reified as be- tween colonized and indigenous elements or reduced to collusion and complicity with global power. More local, individual, idiosyn- cratic particulars accrete and plumb language use with psycholog- ical sense and intrapsychic nervousness. But if, indeed, I were to write my memoir with the sense of Malay and Hokkien refusals in my ear, it would have to be a46 Sumnury Grox-Lin List memoir not about living in two or more languages but with and about the sensibility of a particular bilingual human. More than referencing the historical, immigrant, colonial, and tacialized forces that generated the Nonya-Baba and Hokkien community of Malacca, these forces, manifesting themselves in linguistic noise, would also have to be overdetermined as textual aestheti cization. The memoir must struggle to represent the interiority of living simultaneously in 2 plethora of languages without easy re- course to the collage effects, the bricolage explanation from post- modern culture. Multilingual interiorities are arguably reproducible—ook at the shifts between registers of lyrical and dialectical English in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye or between English and Spanish in Gloria Anzaldua’s La Frontera/Borderlands for models—but the reader for such a project may be much less easy to generate or imagine when the shifts occur between Amer- ican English and a minor Asian language such as Hokkien or even between English and Mandarin, a language owned by over a bil- lion speakers in the world ‘The history of civilizational literacies is that of strands of monolingual fluency. What did it mean for Augustine that he grew up in North Africa, surrounded by slaves and easy women speaking in a multiplicity of indigenous languages other than the Latin of the empire? His Confessions drive toward an expression of his vision of conversion, from wicked world to divine salvation, transcending human languages. The Conféssions continues to be read outside the politics of language with little attention paid to the elisions produced by the totalizing dominance of Latin in the written life. In a secular age, dominated by the language of capi tal and the powers that it produces and that produce it, enabling and enabled by the monolingual englobalization of world civi- izations, writing simultaneously in two languages has yet to gain a purchase either as cultural capital or as market value. Transla- tions to a second language are proving more popular as agencies such as the United Nations cast about for means to salvage inter- Tae Ia/Possisiniry oF Lire-Warrine 1N Two LANGUAGES cultural exchange despite the monolingual practices of much of the world’s population. This is not to say that the goal of writing closer to the phe- nomenological object, writing in two languages the way that more and more of us are living in two languages, should be discounted. Recounting, narrating again and again, our experiences as bilin- gual humans, stretching for a new aesthetics of modes of imagi nation and literacy that encompass two tongues, two language nations, two cultures, we may finally be able to write our lives out side the imperial centers of monolingual discourse, moving away from the ideal of singular Latinate lives toward stories of frac~ tured, bilingual, and dialogical relations. REFERENCES Anzaldiia, Gloria. La Frontera/Borderlands, San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1987. Augustine. The Conftsions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. Among the White Moon Facer. New York: Femi- nist Press, 1996, Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Knopf, 1970; Penguin, 2000.BS. Eva HorrMan WHEN SIT SAFE TO RETURN to something you have loved and lost? Sometimes not for a long time; perhaps not until the thing you've left has been replaced with something just as valuable, just as cherished. So it has been for me with language, with losing and returning to my first, native tongu w cence, I found my en I emigrated from Poland to Canada in early adoles- elf in the startling condition of having, in ef- fect, no language. English was a terra incognita; and Polish seemed, suddenly, to disappear, as if obliterated by some silent ray. Tt was gone, if not entirely from actual usage, then, strangely and disturbingly, from my internal life; and there was nothing speech or words—to take its place. It was that brief but darkly informative experience of being without language, and the potent lessons that followed from it, that propelled me, eventually, to write my first book, Lost in Tra In that memoir, I was mainly concerned with the vicissitudes of lation. coming into English and trying to transpose myself into a new ver- bal and cultural idiom. The trajectory of the “lost” Polish remained much less clearly traced, simply because it remained less clear. For50 Eva Horraan one thing, it is difficult to chart the progress of the repressed in one’s psyche. And repression is, I believe, a not-inaccurate term for the act whereby my first language had become lost. At the time, the disappearance of Polish from my internal stage seemed to occur through some fateful fiat; but I now think that it was T in fact who lost it, displaced it, abandoned it, in a more active gesture of rejec tion. Let this brief reflection stand, then, as a kind of postscript to Lost in Translation, picking up that lost, or abandoned, thread. A while ago, I talked to a poet who was taken from his native Russia to Israel as a child. In between, held spent some time in a refugee camp in Germany and quickly acquired a young boy's German. After a few years in Israel, he found that he remembered, German quite well, but his Russian—a language in which he had been articulate and precociously literate—was entirely and defin- itively gone. “I killed it,” he said. “I almost remember the decision to do it—to murder Russian within me.” It was Russian, his fist, loved language, that presented the threat, that would have inter- fered with his project of becoming a writer in Hebrew. German, with its more neutral significance, could remain intact. 1 didn't do anything as violent as killing Polish; but I remember the almost palpable act of pushing it down into some cellar, or cof- fer, or dark place; out of, below, or—depending on how one con: ceives of psychic topography—behind consciousness. Whatever that topography, or the metaphor, I wanted Polish silenced, so that I could make room within myself for English. Perhaps the strata- gem was partly of a cognitive nature. Neurological research sug- gests that a second language is not as “deeply” encoded in the brain as the first; and I think I could almost concretely feel this, sense the insufficient attachment of English words to my interi- ority, my psychic cells and sensory perceptions—to what may have been in fact the dendrites and neural networks along which lan- guage travels or within which it lodges itself. So perhaps by dis- placing Polish, I was trying to free some neural trajectories to which English signals and syntax could attach themselves. For I badly wanted English to stick. Ps. s. But the maneuver, as I now understand more fully, was mainly psychologically determined, driven by emotion and Jaden with personal meanings. I had to push Polish out of the way because my attachment to it—in the other, affective sense of “attachment"—was too powerful; because, ifI didn't reject it, could not form an equally strong bond to the new language in which I was fated to live. It was psychic space I was frecing— emptying—as well as the physiological kind. At the time I was writing Last in Translation, 1 was thinking very much from within my own subjectivity. But since then, the problematic of bilingualism and self-translation has become much more widely recognized and studied from within various disci- plines and points of view—perhaps most illuminatingly through psychoanalytic observation and self-revelation. And since then, as Thave contemplated the findings of such studies and have talked with a large range of people who have traveled between languages and cultures, it has become more evident to me that, while the process of linguistic transmogrification is never easy or painless, its emotional and sometimes unconscious meanings can vary greatly. There are people for whom leaving one’s mother tongue is a liberation; they feel they can invent new personae in new words, or finally express their true personality—a self that had been in- hibited in their first language because of cultural constraints or carly inhibitions. There are others who refuse the graft of an ac quired speech altogether, perhaps because of some initial psychic rigidity, or just because the prospect of such profound change is too frightening. There are those who feel it is easier to say forbid- den things in a language that does not brim with childhood asso- ciations and taboos and those for whom the adopted speech is a formal instrument, a psychic mask within which no transgression or breakage of decorum is possible. In other words, what I recog- nized more clearly in the last few years, and what has been demonstrated both in coolly impartial researches and movingly personal testimonies, is that the kind of relationship one develops with an acquired language is deeply influenced by the kind of32 Eva Horraan bond one had with one’s mother or fither tongue—and, by exten- sion, with all the intimacies and intimate sensations of early life. My own relations with Polish seemed to me unusually happy and harmonious. Polish words described the world effortlessly, and 1 loved the sense that the world was thus word-shaped—loved it with an intensity that bordered, sometimes, on a sort of childish ecstasy, or preesthetic bliss. In retrospect, I might conjecture that this sense of seamless concord was shot through with an element of illusion; that perhaps my relationship to Polish, as to the city of my childhood, was a bit too fused, too symbiotic. It was, in any case, very difficult to leave them, to let them go. And I might also conjecture (indeed, I do) that my determined decision to stifle Polish once I was yanked out of my Cracovian idyll was a partly compensatory, partly self-preserving tactic. I— nething in me— must have known that otherwise, I could not leave what I must leave, could not live where I must live. And pethaps I also knew that Polish was dangerous because, if I spoke myselfin it in those first stages of emigration, the fall extent of my unhappiness and anger would have spilled out, direct and unrestrained. And so I ex- pressed my anger, my disappointment, my sense of loss, by reen- acting it within myself; by squashing my first language—my first self down. One could say that Polish was the loved “internal ob- needed to hate, while English was the forbidding external ject I must need to love. ‘After that initial fall into internal darkness, I paid little atten- tion to the vicissitudes of Polish in my mental life. All my ener- gies were absorbed in trying to make myself at home in English, to take it into the psyche and make it my own. And, until that happened fully, until English came to occupy all the strata of thought and self, it really wasn't safe to look at what was happen ing down there, out of memory and consciousness, where my first Janguage was living its choked, underground life. I started returning to Polish after a twenty-year hiatus, through a new wave of Polish immigration and friends with whom this was the one language we shared. But how badly I Ps. 53 spoke it for a while! I stuttered in it, repeatedly made mistakes I would have never made as a child, kept forgetting and reforget- ting the simplest expressions. Of course, the problem, once again, was partly cognitive. There is such a thing as cognitive memory and a cognitive forgetting. One does lose vocabulary and fluency in a language one doesn't use, and for many years I used Polish only minimally and only in rudimentary family ex- changes. But still, there was something in the extent of my for- getting that was more than just cerebral. It was as if the initial act of repression, of linguistic self-mutilation, was now expre: ing itself in these verbal tics and symptoms. The return of the re~ pressed is never smooth. And maybe I still felt the danger of letting Polish out of its box; I had to test its effects on English, and make sure it wasn't going to invade my hard-won linguistic territory and break it up. I cannot say exactly how it happened that Polish started reemerging into full light and living a more natural fife. But I do know that it happened not by increments but by some sudden leap. There had been, it is true, actual returns to Poland and more conversations in Polish in an adult vein. But the crucial turn did not come until I—something in me—realized that English was no longer an endangered speech; and realized, also, that I wasn't going to be lured back to my pre-English self by the siren call of nostalgia and, possibly, regression. Once that understanding sunk in, it was as if some strong, abrupt signal had been sent down: Pol- ish could come out of its hiding again. And once it did, it began percolating up like some upward-pushing stream released from its artificial constraint. Vocabulary kept bubbling up; speech began to regain its plasticity and its vagaries, its subordinate clauses and its unexpected turns. I could surprise myself in Polish once again, as I could now surprise myself in English. Is that definition of a “good” internal object? That one can be on playful terms with it, as well as on serious ones? Of course, one can play only if one feels a measure of security in the first place. Anxiety does not breed flexibility.4 Eva Hopman No, my Polish is not as comple stayed; there are still domains of vo ects of history) in which bly never write in Polish; te as it would have been had I ins of vocabulary (literary criticism, as- am a stumbling novice. I will proba it is too late for tha fi language is once again good enough erat ig ity. However it happened, eae the sense of sheer, prim ty: However ith sheer, primary pleasure at jc adant on this return bas been considerable. But pechape ner Tecan abet site the right analogy. At one stage of my self tran , it was important to me to go over my childh, ai Inn, twain my childhood experi- =e at new T could pick up the other part Ded sotPred story and grow up in Polish. This, T think, ie che wrens OF the pleasure: That itis possible now to go back and fours with the knowledge that both languages th sed nd exist within one structure; and to know enough to allow for pliancy and haps for new discoveries yet. at have constructed me that the structure is sturd penness—and, who knows, per- REPERENCES 1, 1989, “ inaNe w Language. New York: THE MASK AND THE PEN Nancy Huston THE Mask... A PERSON WHO DECIDES, VOLUNTARILY, as an adult, uncon- strained by outside circumstances, to leave her native land and adopt a hitherto unfamiliar language and culture must face the fact that for the rest of her life she will be involved in theatre, im- itation, make-believe. Naturally, one can be more or less intent on getting rid of the traits that betray one’s status as a foreigner. (It should be clear that Lam not talking about the problems of “integration” encountered by poor people who immigrate to wealthy countries.) I know any number of Americans who have been living in France as long or longer than I have, but have remained faithful to their accents, blue-jeans and hamburgers and been wholeheartedly accepted by their French entourage along with these Bizarreries ‘The fact is that one doesn't become aware of one’s own cultural values until they enter into conflict with those of a different coun try. I never felt especially “Puritanical” in Alberta or New En- gland, but on my first trips to Italy and the Riviera, I was shocked by the Mediterranean way of life. It took me a while to learn to56 Naney Huston appreciate the specific beauty of farmiente; the late trains, ineffi~ cient post offices and endless aperitifs drove me up the wall Everywhere I looked, in the very air I breathed—sun, figs, fish, soft winds, sand, music, sea—it seemed to me that there was oa much pleasure! Pleasure without struggle, pleasure without sacri- fice—“undeserved” pleasure! Thus it was that, over the years, I gradually came to acknowledge the Puritan in me. . In the theatre of exile there are any number of things that can “give you away” as a foreigner: your physical appearance, the way you move, eat, dress, think and laugh. Consciously or not, you ob- serve the prevailing codes, adapt to them, and begin to censor the gestures and postures which are inappropriate in your new con- text... . The biggest hurdle, obviously, if you're serious about your wish to become part of a foreign country, is the language. Learning your mother tongue also entailed imitation, only you weren't aware of it. You have nothing else to do! Babies never pro- ounce their first goo-goos, Ma-mas, and Ba-bas with an accent; they immediately get the sounds right. By a process of trial and error superfluous phenomes are shelved, vocabulary is enriched, grammar and syntax are acquired—and, once learned, can never be unlearned; they are cast in the bronze of “first experiences, For foreigners, its a whole different kettle of fish! They arrive in their new country weighed down with two or three decades’ worth of neuronal baggage. Ruts have been dug, habits hardened, synapses practiced, memories frozen, and the tongue has lost its talent for improvisation—hence, the mind is condemned to con- scious imitation. ‘The results can be quite convincing—the imitation can sound exactly like the rel thing; it all depends on how good an actor you are. Yes, some foreigners manage to “pass,” abit like the quadroons or octoroons or whatever hideous term was invented for those American blacks who took bitter pride in “passing” for white. All things being equal, women are generally better at linguistic cam~ ouflage than men (provided, of course, theyre allowed to take a stab at it—not if they happen to be Turkish women sequestered in “Tie Mask ax Tie Pew 7 their German homes by their equally Turkish husbands). Women are born actresses. They know all about adaptation; it's part of their identity as women. Foreigners, willy-nilly, learn to imitate. They usually find it daunting at first but they keep trying, their mastery of the adopted tongue gradually improves and at last the day comes when they speak it fluently. ... No matter how lengthy and arduous their ef- forts, however, a little something almost always gives them away. ‘The faintest trace, the slightest soupgon (a good word for it) of an accent. Or... well. ..a modulation, an odd tur of phrase, a co fusion of genres, an all-but-imperceptible mistake in the match- ing of verb tenses. .. . That's all it takes. The French are on the look-out. They're finicky, persnickety and nitpicking where language is concerned. ... The mask slips... and it's too late! They've glimpsed the real you behind the mask and now there's no way out: Excuse me, but, did you say UNE peignoire? UN baig- noire? LA diapason? LE guérison??? Did I hear you correctly? Well, Til be—you're an ALIEN, aren't you?! You come from another country and you're trying to pass yourself off as French. ... Ah well, you can't pull the wool over our eyes, we've found you out, youre not an authentic francophone. ... “What are you? Ger- ‘man? English? Swedish?” Oh, I do the same thing, I admit it—the minute I detect an ac~ cent in someone's voice, I do exactly the same thing, whereas I know they must have endured the same hurtful, boring, idiotic in- terrogation a thousand times and are every bit as sick of it as T am: “Are you German? No? Hungarian? Chilean?” Which country? as they say in India Not only that, but the minute you give them the information they're after, it crystallizes in their brains and becomes your most salient feature, the thing that best describes and defines you. Henceforth, in their eyes, they will think of you as ¢he Russian, the New Zealander, the Malian, the Vietnamese or whatever (a serious magazine recently referred to film director Agnieska Holland as France's “token Pole”; another commenced a review of one of my58 Nancy Husrow novels with the sentence, “Elle est morose, not “Elle est morose, notre Canadienne” (“Our Canadian is in a sullen mood”)—whereas, back home, of course, your nationality was virtually non-existent, as invisibl ; audible as the air you breathed! aia “No, Canadian,” I say, blushing furiously, cau tio of foreignness. Sar “Really? Why don't you have a Quebec accent?” “Because I'm English = crs were from France.” ht in flagrenta dilec~ Canadian, and most of my French teach: “Tsee.” “When I go to Quebec, I do take o een 1 40 1 Qy do take on the Quebec accent, “Really? How peculiar!” It isnt peculiar though. It’s only natural Tim trying my best to get into your good graces, you se, regard less of you who are... try to speak lie you in order to be able to speak with you (by now Tm on the verge of tears)... Since the name of the game is imitation in any case, I see no reason why 1 should hang on to my Parisian accent in Montreal rather then adapting my pronunciation to that of my dear compatriots Tn France, I need to think twice before I sip an English word into my speech—will it make me sound snobbish? Or hand capped? Itall depends on the person I'm talking to. The the same phrase will elicit a blank stare from one friend, an annoyed frown from another, and a broad, knowing grin from a third. in Ques ‘on the other hand (contrary to received wisdom on the subject), conversations are often peppered with English expres, sions, employed with a delight sence of ony.The pea sure their use is intentional rather than insidious. What militant fran. cophiones reset is having no choice in the matter—eing fered to absorb English words and expressionsas they emanate, pollutionike fom the alt pores anglophone continent around them, : 30 in Paris T speak Parisian, and in Quebec What about in the Berry me No I hae same word, Quebecois. ... in? No. I have to draw the line Tie Mask asp ae Pex Py somewhere. I do not attempt to imitate the patois spoken by my peasant neighbors in that part of central France to which we re- treat regularly during school vacations—or I should feel I were making fan of them. I do, however, adapt my vocabulary to what i abstract, too intellectual, too Parisian, too Canadian, too feminist, too bookish ... and use only... er... concrete words, is that it? Oh, the hell with it. I can always keep my mouth shut for the space of an evening. I often do. It doesnt kill me. ‘Whereas there is a widespread irrational prejudice against peo- ple who speak with an accent, my own (equally irrational) preju- dice is in their favor. The minute I discern foreign intonations, my interest and empathy are quickened. Even if I have no direct con- sume to be theirs. I try to eschew words that might seem too tact with the person in question—I may simply be walking through a park or sitting in a restaurant—my ears prick up when hear her accent and, studying them unobtrusively, I try to imag- ine the other, faraway side of her life. When you think about it, there's a whole novel behind the voice of a Haitian in Montreal, a German in Paris, a Laotian in Chicago. .. “Ah,” I say to myselE. “That person is split in two. She’s got a story.” Because if you know two languages, you also know two cultures—and the unsettling ef- fects of going back and forth between them, and the relativization of each by the other. For this reason, it often seems to me that people with accents are more “civilized” (by which I mean subtler and less arrogant) than monolingual impatriates. Even if the foreigner is a person I know well, my husband, for example, we can be talking together—and ifhe suddenly picks up the phone and starts talking in a language that's opaque to me, I am moved. Why? In a sense, foreignness is a metaphor for the respect wal, All of us are dual, at the least. We are complex and multi-layered, filled with secret every individual owes every other individ memories; why do we so often ignore or pretend to forget this fact? Even within the same language, communication is a mira- cle. (Xenophobia proceeds, conversely, by grinding down asperi~ ties and blending over differences among members of a group,60 Nancy Huston insisting on the reassuring sameness among them to better ex- clude members of another group.) People who run off at the mouth—garrulous chatty windy gassy gushy people, those who use five words where one would suffice—never cease to astonish me, be they proletarians or pro- fessors. Even now, after all these years in France, I can become ex- cruciatingly self-conscious when required to speak French in public. The more formal and intimidating the circumstances, the more liable my tongue is to slip, causing me to say one word is stead of another or to commit unforgivable grammatical errors. Whence, most likely, my preference for the written word. On the page, at least, I can correct my mistakes, insert a word here, delete aword there. ...On the page, moreover, my accent is inaudible. ‘The use of a foreign tongue discourages not only loquacity but pedantry; it prevents you from taking yourself too seriously. In my case, at least, the fact that I'm perpetually aware of “playing” at being a francophone has given me a healthy distance from all my other roles in life, including those of writer and mother. The minute I start I yelling at my children, for instance, my accent worsens and my vocabulary shrinks—this makes them burst out laughing and I can no longer make my rage credible; I have no choice but to calm down and laugh. un ap up a ap So where is the real you? Huh? Let's say you decide to rip away the mask—what kind of face will be revealed? The problem is that when a human face has spent a number of years beneath a mask, deprived of light and oxygen, it changes. Not only does it age, as all faces do, but it tends to get a bit pallid, flaccid, puffy up ae wp up ae You go “home,” and people can't believe their ears. What? You call that your mother tongue? Have you seen the state it’s in? I don't be- ‘Tue Masx an Ta Pex al lieve it! You got an accent! You keep slipping French words into your speech! It’s ridiculous! Stop putting on airs! You're just trying ‘to impress us with your prestigious Parisianism? Forget it! We won't be taken in, ‘fess up, you're an Anglosaxophone like the rest of us.... Come on, talk normally! How dare you make mistakes! ‘How dare you cast around for the right word! You've got all the words you need, you drank them down with your mother’s milk, how dare you act as if you'd forgotten them? Talk straight, for Chrissake, talk English!!! Sure, yes, all right, Id be happy to oblige . . .only . .. which En- glish would you care to hear? Just as I can pick and choose among various types of French, I now have all sorts of Englishes at my disposal The English spoken in my hometown of Calgary has an odd ring. to it in New England, where most of my family now lives. Well, I can imitate the Boston accent, if you prefer . .. if it will make you happy. ... Or the Bronx accent. . .. How about New Orleans? Just tell me what suits you and I'll try to give you satisfaction. Tm also a master of pedagogical English—that simplified, ex- aggeratedly articulated version of the tongue which I taught to civil servants at the Finance Ministry in Paris for a number of years. No one speaks that language in real life, but I learned to speak it and can revive it at the drop of a hat—when foreigners ask me for directions in Manhattan, for instance. ‘You adapt. You do your best. You go berserk. I recall how disturbed I was upon hearing the voice of Sylvia Plath on tape a number of years ago, in a BBC interview recorded shortly before she committed suicide. She had been living in Lon- don for three years, and within a single sentence, sometimes within a single word, her voice oscillated between the intellectual, aristocratic British accent she was in the process of acquiring, with its crisp #8 and narrow vowels, and the rounder, thicker twang of her native Massachusetts. Plath’s undecidedness made it painful for me to listen to her. I remember thinking at the time that her English was a bit like a6 Naner Huston loose woman walking down the street with half her face made up and the other half naked, normal, untouched. But now, to my dis. may, my own voice has turned into the same loose woman. When 1 read aloud excerpts from my books to an English-speaking au- dience, I hear a distinct British accent in my voice. Now why on carth would I speak with a British accent? It beats me. It defeats ime. I don't even have Plath’ excuse—T've never lived in England! In fact, I don’t much /ige the British accent. To my Canadian ears, it connotes monarchy and haughtiness. ... Could it be that, even in my mother tongue, I can accept m elf only as a “foreigner”? Decidedly the more I think about these things, the more at sea I feel ++ AND THE PEN Foreigners, we were saying, are people who adapt. And the acute awareness of language instilled in them by the perpetual need for adaptation can be highly conducive to writing. The acquisition of a second tongue destroys the “naturalness” of the first; from then on, nothing can be sel me evident in any tongue; nothing be- Jongs to you wholly and irrefutably; nothing will ever “go with- out saying” again. This can incite you to pay an unusual amount of attention individual words, figures of speech, manners of peaking No - carried this attention to a more ‘transcendent degree than Marcel Proust—who wrote in his mother tongue, but was almost entirely cut off from it, isolated by his illness. Proust was more than just a great French writer, he was the unrivaled specialist of French id- joms. With the maniacal precision of an entomologist, he inven- toried the manifold ways in which French was used and abused at the turn of the twentieth century, just as Shakespeare had done for Elizabethan English.) Lexical formations and deformations, asso- ances and dissonances, possible and impossible translations, ety- mologies, -nyms of all sorts—syno, homo, anto, pseudo... . “When Tis Mask AND TH Pas 63 you come right down to it,” as Romain Gary says, “all names are pseudonyms”? ‘Yes—all forms of identity, including stylistic identity, are con: ventional and contrived. But (is anyone keeping score?) expatriates tend to be more aware of this than other people. ‘The French I use in writing has all the advantages and draw- backs of an acquired idiom. Whether I deploy slangy or sophisti- cated vocabulary, simple or convoluted syntax, it is something I have “learned” and used as convincingly as I can. My earliest texts in French, which date back to the mid-1970s, are rife with puns ‘This was partly a sign of the times (Jacques Lacan and Héléne Cixous were then making “plays on the signifier” very fashion- able), but it also betrayed my pathological awareness of the lan- guage itself, Foreigners are far more conscious of phonetical rubbings and thymings than native speakers. (In 1976, for in- stance, I wrote a short story called “Histoire en amibe,” “Story in the shape of an amoeba.” Most readers probably didn't notice that this was a takeoff on Histoire en abtme, but I did.? And at the time, Iwas proud of my calembour! Almost all my titles from this period are similarly “clever,” and when I see them now it makes me want alge) Style, someone once said, is a marriage of love between an in- dividual and his or her language. But can you “marry” an adopted idiom? Can you make love with a language learned through con- scious imitation? And if not, how should one go about using it? Whether I take Frangois Rabelais, Marguerite Yourcenar, or ‘Michel Tremblay as my model, the problem remains the same: None of these French languages is mine by birthright. (It would be grotesque for me to use exclamations like “Parbleu!” or “Tabar- nak!” in a written text.) Camus and Sartre could get away with the faintly archaic “je ne veux point,” or “il ne me plait guere,” but my ‘own pen refuses to produce such tums of phrase. It even balks at using the simple past, a grammatical tense that seems somchow too refined for a gal from the Praities—though my brain learned the intricacies of its conjugation decades ago.“4 Naner Huston Beckett was similarly sensitive to these issues, and T've always felt that critics paid insufficient attention to the influence of bilin- Bualism on his style. The fact that he was an anglophone writer of French made him, among other things, h an intrepid and scream- ingly funny ae explorer of commonplaces. In a foreign tongue, places are common all are exo. “Can of wore’ wan 8 cliche until I learned panier de crabes (basket of crabs); these different ways of designating a messy situation became interesting to me simply because they were different. Bilingualism is an endless Source of intellectual stimulation. Had Beckett not learned French, it would probably never have occutred to him to turn the expression savoir-vivre into savoir-crever (knowing how to die) or to complain of being “condemned to life.” “The shut ae a menstruate capable of whelping me,” he declared in Tbe Unam- ‘able Hiis entire oeuvre is a rejection of the gregatity impli the existence of language per se. “T'll ix tea for or he promised ... and he more than kept his promise , Who am I, in French? I really don't know—a bit of everythin Perhaps. When I meet with high school students, they often ex, press surprise atthe way I abruptly shift from the “elevated” to the colloquial” style in my novels. Why do you do that? they ask And Thave to admit that I have no idea. Probably because I like it doing eee them, © tranggress literary norms and expectation ‘The French language isa beauifil, powerful queen, Many people Irho consider themselves writers are infact nothing but lckeys in jhe Service of this grande dame—they hustle and bustle around