Writing Between Languages

Dear all,

Much of the material that we have encountered has focused on complicating stable origins, deconstructing identity, politicizing and poeticizing dislocation, and nuancing the givenness and simplicity of the notion of a mother tongue. It seems that at the margins of these questions is the irreducible desire for a home, for roots, for a dwelling in comfort. But even if this is only some sort of fantasy, it is a powerful and rich one - I’m thinking of the mother figure in the works of Zukovsky, Cha, and Scott. Thus, it seems that this desire is a continual point of return as a root of tension. In fact, desire (in its psychological psychoanalytic implications) enacts its own return by definition.

I’m not really posing a question, so much as wanting to draw attention to the figure, real or not, of the mother when we talk of mother tongue (as Celan thought of it). How do we, as literary critics, poets, translators, fuse poetics of dislocation with our living interactions? Or really, is there some sort of divide in the first place? 

In short, I miss my mum. Here is a poem I wrote a few days ago:

Mother Tongue

i rest

my baby

hairs on ur

shoulder

shudder as you 

smother my worries

smile mouth-to-mouth as you 

resuscitate my breath 

Oh mother! no other’s

kin’s so close to  

share each & every

mutter & murmur

i utter ur na

mẹ/i 

call in our tongue 

Hi all, 

Reflecting back on the course, my thoughts for our final class are about fluency. I’ve brought this up in class before. We’ve read texts by authors who juggle more than one language masterfully, even when they reflect on their own lack of mother tongue or complicated relationship with language(s). The high level of consciousness to language and its different functions (as artifact, as culture, as means of communication and more) testifies to their command of the languages they use. 

However, so much of the multi-lingual experiences I’ve had has to do with the lack of fluency — the expectations from your surrounding when you are near-fluent, confusion and misunderstandings, and other markers of inadequacy. What role does the awkwardness of speaking a different language play in the project of our course? Does it only have a place in this project when it is artfully repurposed for conscious reflection on language, from the vantage point of acquired fluency (e.g., in the case of stutter)? 

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

With Pax Babeliana, Omar Berrada invites us to re-examine the concept of Babel as a process of reconstruction. Starting from images of ruins, he ends his poem on evocations of construction works (“the trace”, “your foundation”, “sous les pavés, l’asphalte”, “we are the earth”). From ruins, he constructs a reversed building, starting from the top and down till the earth. He creates a positive image of deconstruction: not so much as a curse from God but as a creative potential. Languages are juxtaposed – and perfectly mastered by the performer -, regardless of their reading direction. Languages are at peace. French and Arab can be read in a same sentence, even if they are written in opposite directions (from left to right and right to left). Babel becomes a positive process of deconstructing the hegemony of a language, as underlined by Antena in her Manifesto for Interpretation as Instigation. The interpreter is “an instigator because we actively work to demolish languages hierarchies as they become real in space and time.” (p.5) This deconstruction is seen as enriching the text, rather than producing a loss. Antena claims what we already stated in class: the translator is a creator.

Something that we've been discussing all quarter that the final readings made salient was the co-production of multilingual texts. This was dramatized most clearly in the video of the Antena performance ("Outside, glorious illusion"), where lines of poetry by Lucas and by Levitsky were refracted through one another and through the performers’ translations. Poems changed hands as poets changed tongues. The instantaneous translation seen in this experiment is standard conduct for the interpreter, as we learned in “A Manifesto for Interpretation as Instigation.” The work of the human interpreter is more about improvisation than derivation. And yet, in acting as the moderator between two mouths, the interpreter needs to be cooperative to some extent. She's an instigator, mayhaps, but one whose goal is mutual understanding, whose purpose is hermeneutic. 

Why this desire, then, to mystify interpretation in the manifesto? I’m thinking of the following point:

• Interpretation is not translation. Translation is not interpretation. The craft and skills needed for interpretation (oral communication, except in the case of sign language) are remarkably different from those required for translation (written communication). We feel ridiculous when we correct people about these terms. But we are willing to embrace our ridiculousness.

Where might literary interpretation fit in here, especially since interpretation refers to oral communication? Can a literary interpreter be an instigator? Moreover, what happens when we call the translator a reader, or the reader a translator? These questions become more pressing as we reflect on the significance of voice in our rememories of the quarter — speaking in other voices, speaking for other voices, speaking in a voice that speaks for you, (and I add) developing one’s voice as a critic. 

We’ve spoken at length about the generative - not healing, but producing - powers of breath as a constitutive part of enunciation, of poetic justice. For Bergvall, it is not breath that is necessarily interesting, but the moment after, when one exhales and makes space for the pronouncement of language in the clearing of one’s throat as an almost corrective gesture to this “friction” (158), the pretension that the body is not where language is located, but some metaphysical space of home/land and belonging. And for Bergvall, language, this self-reflective object that one absorbs without consciousness of this flux, can be illuminating when one commits to an “apprenticeship” in excavating its volatilities, its ruptures, its discontinuities. 

Please pardon this late post, but as I was re-reading Zong! for tomorrow I was suddenly struck by the similarities to avant-garde “cut-ups.” As Tristan Tzara describes it in “HOW TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM,” the cut-up technique involves taking a pair of scissors to a linear text (like a newspaper article) and copying down the strips as you pull them out of a bag to create a poem. William Burroughs and Byron Gysin enlarged upon Tzara’s instructions with their cut-up and fold-in methods; the pastiche novel, The Ticket that Exploded (1962), is just one example of this DIY, anti-literary approach to making language and unmaking narrative. These artists wanted to undo the primacy of the author—"anyone can make cut-ups"—and of the writing event—“all writing is in fact cut-ups” (see The Third Mind). What Burroughs and Gysin make salient is that the words on a page belong to no one, not even the author, and so the product can be attributed to a “writing machine.” 

The reason that this pertains to Philip is that Burroughs and Gysin believed that words “infected” each other when they were reconfigured within a new work. The “contamination” within Zong!, Philip’s metaphorical morgue for the 1781 massacre of the African slaves, travels through human contact—from author to reader—a transference that would not be found in Burroughs and Gysin, at least not a humanistic one. They did not feel ethically implicated in the material they sliced through. It would be difficult to imagine Philip adopting such a surgical approach to the subject matter of Zong! On the contrary, she narrates the production process as if she were restaging the murder herself. Editorial acts performed on the case record like excision and rearrangement take on the full weight of their history when Philip describes them in such macabre terms as those on pages 193-4. 

The Crawley piece is very interesting in terms of the implications of the generative and affective power of breath for a poetic mode that we haven’t really covered in class yet: the poetics of rap. Crawley notes the multiplicity of interpretations of the song Strange Fruit by indexing the differences in enunciation, emphasis, and breathing between Nina Simone and Billie Holliday; one could imagine a similar analysis for rap writ large as well, especially since rap is hugely dependant on regulating one’s pattern of breathing, and has been strongly influenced by gospel and other forms that have influenced the development of Blackpentacostal aesthetics. 

M. Nourbese Philip’s Zong! demonstrates the gap between first-person experience and the legal account of events through language. “Zong! #1” is shocking in its mimesis: the fractured words and repeating “w” and “r” sounds of water turn the word into a chilling onomatopoeia — swallowing water, interrupted breath, the sound of death by water. The “o” letters scattered on the page resemble bubbles, and the experience of reading conveys an aspect of drowning — for example, the attempt to find a grasp in the patters on the page (a descending horizontal line of “w” letters on page 4). Language is pushed to its material limits by becoming sensually mimetic.

Compare to “Zong! #12”: legal language is arranged in lists that hinge on “it,” a thin word that barely gestures toward the horror of the Zong massacre that emerges in “Zong! #1” and other poems in the book. The legal register of “decided… justified… ground… proved” is impersonal, a tone that while it conforms to legal standards, stands in tension even with the casuistic common law tradition, which favors elaborate explications of the case and the applicable rules. The mirroring of the text after the event is described — “it / was a throwing overboard” — invites an ironic reading of the same legal terms. If “appeared impossible” could refer to the ship’s owners’ legal claims that saving the African slaves’ lives was impossible in the first part of the poem, it can convey shock and repugnance when repeated in the second one. 

Legal language, the language of proper syntax and of the page, fails to describe the Zong massacre except through the gaps in language: the ironic reading, the tension of listening to the legal account of a horror. The written poem ends with “it / was,” but the recorded version says, “it / was / murder.” The legal term to describe what really happened is absent from written language, a public sphere that fails to represent the massacre. In order to come closer to understanding what happened at the Zong massacre, one is required to listen to the drowned voices in the fractured language of poems like “Zong! #1.”

Crawley posits the performance of breathing as a critique of normative thought. Taking from Foucault the notion of critique (as resistance)  and from Butler the notion of performance (as constitution), Crawley shapes his aesthetics of possibility that acts out breathing in an aesthetic, performative way to irrupt the distinctions of the normative world. 

To follow Crawley’s argument, we must see how ‘power’ in the discursive practice links to subjectivity. Power manifests itself in relations that subject an agent to lines of normative behavior. This is one meaning of subjectivity. Such imposition of normativity includes and excludes along lines of categorial distinctions e.g. man/woman, human/non-human, thereby giving certain subjects (and not others) intelligibility and legitimacy. This is the second meaning of subjectivity.

 For Deleuze and Guattari, a minor literature is at once inside and outside a major language. It designates the revolutionary, strange, minor utilization from within the established, rooted literature. At issue is not the spitting out of one tongue for another, or a call for usage of dialect over the national bloodless language. But rather, a paradoxical position that rids territory, home, and the inside of its static comforts.

This deterritorialization is accompanied by impossibility, another negation that produces a new discourse, a minor literature: ‘[deterritorialization] turns their [Jews of Prague] literature into something impossible - the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, the impossibility of writing otherwise (16)’. That which gives away the minor literature is a stance of multiple negations. To choose another language but the major German language is to be confronted with the position of an exile from Czech territory. To choose the major German language is to be confronted with the a-positionality of the German population itself. Thirdly, and most importantly, to not write is impossible.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha rethinks the school exercise of dictation (dictée) in the post-structuralist theory of language and political voice. In the wake of Spivak, she asks: can I speak? No.

Why can’t I? Cha analyzes here all the places and discourses preventing her, women, foreigner to speak. Women silenced by men, by the Japanese, by the movies, by religious rituals. By the learning of another language. The Dictee becomes an epitome of a voice imposed on the subject, who has to imitate it, without criticizing it. The imperatives interrupting the story on page 1 make visible the voice imposed on the writer, the lack of freedom characterizing not only the student, but also all the women presented in the book.

Cha presents nine women, facing different types of oppression, and free herself from this oppression within its very language. Page 17 is interesting in that sense: she uses the religious vocabulary (“God who has made me in His own likeness”) and capital letters, to create a seemingly holy talk. But then, she gets carried over in an accumulation of nouns, synonyms of Image, thus sacralizes the banal or desanctifies the sacred. She works from within the language to undermine it. She makes her own those discourses imposed on her.

Cha’s DICTEE reveals a strange thing about language: many of its conventions are random, and using language involves countless decisions that go unnoticed in the experience of transparency in reading (Trenités’s poem “The Chaos” comes to mind: http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html).

Cha challenges language conventions throughout the book. One exercise in translation into French contains confessional writing rather than simple sentences, as well as quotation marks that seem inconsequential in such an exercise and deliberate grammatical errors, like “the other end feel” (15). The reader must decide whether to continue entertaining the notion of a translation exercise, and how. Soon after, on page 17, a Q&A session contains the following: “Q: GOD WHO HAS MADE YOU IN HIS OWN LIKENESS.” Does “Q” still stand for question in this case, or does it simply mark an interlocutor? Printing conventions are likewise called into question, when on page 20 it is hard to tell whether the line “From A Far” is part of the poem or its title. On the one hand, each word is capitalized; on the other hand, there is no line break between this line and the rest of the poem. And what would be the difference if we decided to read the poem this way or another? 

DICTEE makes the reader stop, acknowledge the convention and make a choice. The process is alienating — reading goes slower, and fluency becomes suspect. The difference between an intuitive, or “transparent” access to the mother tongue and the habitual computer-speed of deciphering language is also compromised. These deceleration of reading and increased awareness of the material aspects of language (such as the page, spacing conventions, and so on) create distance even from one’s mother tongue.*

  * Having completed writing this sentence, I remembered that English is not my mother tongue. I suppose this is how I perceive my audience… 

In Etel Adnan’s history with Arabic and English, fluency always followed its simulation. As a child, Adnan transcribed Arabic words without fully knowing their meaning: “…I used to sit and copy—which means reproduce faithfully, words after words whose alphabet I understood, but seldom their meaning—never trying to understand what I was writing: I think that I loved the act of writing things I did not understand, and I pretended that I was learning a language without effort, just by writing it down.” Her memory of learning (but not mastering) Arabic by rote suggests at once how reproduction can be a creative act and how learning a language is recreational. Learning by mimicry is also part of the painter’s training, where a customary practice for improving one’s technique is copying paintings by Old Masters (whereas in music, mimicry is playing another artist’s score for practice and for the actual performance). For Adnan, who works at the intersection of mediums, self-expression is largely borne out by the motion of the stroke.

There is a connection to be made between Adnan’s writing Arabic and her speaking idiomatic English. Using an idiomatic expression is the sign of a native speaker, who knows the phrase intuitively, but, as Adnan shows, it can give the non-native speaker the appearance of being literate, of being an “insider.” But even further, the act of copying a language and using an idiom relies on a kind of automatism—in other words, a somewhat semi-conscious mode of expression that is missing an intended meaning. The subliminal forms part of Adnan’s poetics. She notes that the “hypnotizing” effect of copying Arabic prefigured composing poetry via the “pleasure of writing.” She refrained from having Arab poets translated before sampling their work because she preferred the opaqueness of her knowledge. How is this “strange understanding” staged in The Arab Apocalypse?