On Summer and travel –and III- Mask lovers, lobsters & polyglots

Last on the lazy summer series. Since the log is also about the language of migrants and exiles here below is a clip in memory of Edward Said.  

Summer is over. While prisoners remain in prison, tourists and cosmopolitans return home. Tourists arrive tanned as red as lobsters from popular Mediterranean resorts. Although they prefer the word artifact, cosmopolitans come with authentic cultural gadgets, preferably from Africa, but also further afield, masks, statuettes, rugs, ceramic pots… For a while they have immersed and integrated into, even embraced an alien, exotic culture. Mind you: without becoming too committed to it; the doors at home are always open to return whenever necessary.

Unlike real cosmopolitans, who take active part in an alien culture by will, migrants and exiles do not participate in the foreign culture they inhabit by need. To face up to life, migrants and exiles need holding on to the symbols and the cultural heritage rooted in their own particular places of origin. The impracticability of integration and/or assimilation by the host culture annoys the indigenous ethnic majority. What can be done though? Certainly not denying that Edward Said was right when he said this in “The 1993 Reith Lectures”:

Once you leave your home, wherever you end up you cannot simply take up life and become just another citizen of the new place. Or if you do, there is a good deal of awkwardness involved in the effort, which scarcely seems worth it. (Vintage, 1994: 45).

Awkward as it may be, taking up life in a new place involves learning other skills and other lessons. Existing as Said also said “in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old” (36), migrants and exiles are not only compelled to inhabit several identities. To do so there is something practically unavoidable, namely that other languages must be learnt, the process of negotiation and translation between mother and foreign languages becoming then a constant source of (dis)enchantment.

Insisting on such particular aspect of the linguistic problematic, Julia Kristeva did not fail to remind us this in “Etrangers à nous-mêmes”. For Kristeva, the foreigner…

…est perdu dans le kaléidoscope de ses multiples identités et des ses souvenirs intenables, pour ne laisser de ses exils accumulés qu’une trace en mots.

French! Beautiful, is it not? In another section which I now freely translate (48-49) she also said that once deprived of attachments to the maternal tongue, to the foreigner the language(s) newly learnt remain artificial altogether, like algebra or solfeggio. Like in a hallucination, the verbal constructions of foreigners roll on empty space, dislocated from their body and passions, taken hostage by the mother tongue. According to Kristeva, foreigners do not really know what they say in the new language. Their subconscious do not inhabit their thoughts and feelings. As a consequence, the language of the foreigner becomes of an absolute formalism, of an exaggerated sophistication. The foreigner’s voice rests thus on the single strength of his/her naked rhetoric. Or else, it turns into silence. Placed between different languages the foreigner’s element becomes silence. But not a silence imposed upon them from the outside. This silence refers back to an inner state of being. It is a silence that empties the mind and leaves the brain laden with despondency.

To sum up, Kristeva’s perspective involves a vision whereby beyond the mother tongue, the late learning of languages becomes, inevitably, a “source of estrangement”, a source of disaffection, split and withdrawal leading to the “silence of the polyglot”.