Writing in One Language, Living in Another
Do we all feel some degree of anxiety and effort in speaking the languages required of us in everyday life? Does it often feel that the words are speaking us, rather than we speaking them?
This post is inspired by a question asked on the Fortunate Daughter website. (Fortunate Daughter is an imprint of Tebot Bach, publisher of my new chapbook, and they have a Q and A spot where the poets can be interrogated/have information gently teased out of them!)
The question was “how does living in another language affect your writing?”
This of course is a practical question, as I live in Poland and write in English, but it provoked a train of thought that went much deeper, and in several directions.
Is it the case that when we write poetry, as we sometimes do, if only when drunk and heartbroken, if only as teenagers, if only once (I am talking about the majority of people, I think, not some small group who identify as poets), we are always reaching for a language which is different from the one we live in?
Are we looking for something more essentially ours? More intimate, clearer, cleaner than life will allow us to be? Something that feels real, or true? Without forgetting that while we may feel we can’t control anything in our lives, we do have control over the words on the page.
For emigrants — first, second and even third generation — as long as the “home” language is spoken at home, the mother tongue means something special, is a way into a sense of belonging, which edges into a sense of secrecy (the others around us don’t understand) and mystery as the generations grow up with another culture to call home, too.
Writing and speaking my “mother tongue” (the phrase makes more sense to me than trying to lay claim to an entire language as my own!) is something comforting, normal and easy, a refuge from the difficulties, anxiety, embarrassment and sheer effort involved in “living in another language”, a sanctuary and refreshment. There need be no conscious effort at all. I open my mouth and out it comes. Maybe these qualities are tangible in the writing, maybe not.
But maybe this is the case for everybody. Do we all feel some degree of anxiety and effort in speaking the languages required of us in everyday life? Does it often feel that they are speaking us, rather than we speaking them? That we might get the words wrong and fall out of the game?
Maybe we all have our own secret “mother tongue” — our own private language of attachment, where we feel safe — and maybe some others speak it too. And perhaps when we feel lonely we like to speak it to ourselves and see it on paper, where it becomes writing, something outside ourselves, conjuring up another speaker. Or maybe we don’t feel lonely, we just want to extend this language, play with it, see what we can say in it and what we can’t, make it sing.
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