there’s a quote I saw in a post here, some time ago, that went:
“English is the only interesting thing that’s left in my life,” says Brodsky. “The need to find le mot juste starts out as a concern, turns into an obsession, and ends up as a way of life. These writers excel at the art of making virtue of necessity: out of a need to understand how the new language works, they turn into linguistic maniacs; out of a concern for correctness, they become compulsive grammarians.”
writing in english, for me, is one of the parts of the inner emigration: in situation where I cannot leave physically, there are some parts of me that can. my voice, my writing; everything I am able to write about — my politics and my queerness, interconnected and inseparable from my text — cannot be written — read — in my native language. so, I turn to english. I start to plot my stories in it, I hope to write original fiction in it, not just something that has already some connections to the language — fanfiction, that is, from fandoms that dictate the culture in my head.
and, obviously, I turn to the experience of immigrants before me: both physical and in language, their stories now painfully relatable.
but there’s a difference between that experience and these of a modern immigrants: where the focus point was of a language itself, the importance of style and form too high, now in my peers I see the opposite. so we see Nabokov, a master of the prose, who studied english in his childhood; while modern immigrants give their works clumsy translations, announce the gap between them and their language deliberately, and embrace autofiction. content before form. meaning before style.
at some point, it becomes an issue about class. good education of the imperial past versus the attempts of grasping the language in the process of emigration. the story about infatuation with the language versus the story that is told despite the language.
an understandable dichotomy, but one that I’m not sure how to apply to myself: with a lack of genius or a strong enough story to tell, with being middle class, I am neither end. privileged enough for the chance to know language well enough so it’s undistinguishable but not being enamored with it enough to be perfect at it; impacted by the real life events enough to want for my writing to conduct all of it — but not having the skill, the story for it to sing.
these are just facts, not a cry for compliments or self-flagellation. still; it’s interesting how my english is the language of the internet, not perfectly studied but understood intrinsically in the process of my submersion into the world, different from my own — from my escape to the social media, friendships, communication in the spaces distanced from my reality. yet another part of inner emigration: searching for a place to be able to breathe.
and now, it shows in my words— in my writing in ways unthinkable for the past, brought by the globalization. what a thought.
gummygunk
2087
turnnoffyourmind
romaincrisis
