“Writing in One Language, Living in Another” Comments, Page 1
You are currently browsing page 1 of comments on the article Writing in One Language, Living in Another.
You are currently browsing comments. If you would like to return to the full story, you can read the full entry here: “Writing in One Language, Living in Another”.
14 Responses (Including 3 Discussion Threads) to “Writing in One Language, Living in Another”
-
1
Thanks for the article, Sarah. I’m a non-native speaker/writer of English, and the child of parents who only learned to speak English in their 30s when they came to the US as refugees.
What I observed in both of my parents was that they were nicer people in Polish, their mother tongue, than in English. English was the language they learned from the bosses in the factories they worked, from the landlords who told them they wouldn’t rent to Poles, from the store clerks who had little patience for someone who didn’t speak English. When my parents spoke English, they became hard, aggressive, impatient. They were speaking the language they learned in the factories and the streets. They were waiting for the insult that would come because they were foreign/other.
At home or among other Poles, speaking Polish, there was a softness to my parents occasionally, an easiness in the way they spoke and interacted with the other Poles they trusted.
Over the years, I’ve observed this in other working class non-native speakers of English. English is the language of work and the factory, the native language is the language of a nostalgic past, the language of loved ones, of the mothers who fed us, the fathers who gave us their hands.
-
2
Thanks for the comment, John… makes a lot of sense to me. The ‘outer’ language becomes a kind of survival system and a defence. Facing prejudice makes you harder, and that gets encoded in the language as you speak it… I know this is a personal question, so obviously feel free not to answer, but I wonder how you feel about it yourself, coming from a different generation, if you too feel you are a slightly different person when you speak Polish?
-
3
Oh, I definitely am a different person. I spoke almost nothing but Polish until I was 5 or 6. After that I only spoke Polish at home because where I grew up, speaking Polish was considered a sign of mental inferiority. Poles were considered dumb, malformed, primitive. Polish was the dirty secret you didn’t want to reveal to anybody.
So my Polish was pretty much stunted. I spoke the Polish of a child. I knew the words for soup and bread, the words for rain and snow, but little else. I ended up getting a PhD in American Literature, and Polish was a language I couldn’t talk about any of that in. I didn’t know the Polish for Kant or Postmodernism or Derrida. (I have a poem about this somewhere — in English of course.)
When my dad was alive, we talked exclusively in Polish. He didn’t like to speak English for the obvious reasons and so we spoke Polish, but the Polish I spoke was a child’s Polish, mixed with mispronunications and English words I didn’t have the Polish for. He was a kind person, he didn’t mind.
After he died, my mom and I spoke English exclusively. One day, I asked her about this. She was living in a retirement community where she was the only Polish speaker. I thought she might like to speak Polish. I asked her and she said no. When I asked why, she said that she hated to hear my Polish. She said, it hurt her ears.
At this point, I’m 61 years old (or I will be next week) and it’s been 55 year since I spoke Polish exclusively and twelve years since my dad died. I live in a community where I’m probably the only Polish American, and if I found another Pole, I probably couldn’t say anything to him except “please give me some butter for my bread.”
-
4
Language in 2009 is such a rich subject! For centuries humans have lived with a notion of language tied to place and ethnicity – “Frenchâ€, “Englishâ€, “Polishâ€. But the whole notion of “language†has exploded and reconstructed itself in recent years.
As a software engineer I spend the day immersed in computer languages such as Javascript and C# (read as “See Sharpâ€). Graphic and interaction designers are methodically creating and defining “visual languagesâ€. On Twitter and SMS we now speak an abbreviated language of LOLs and OMGs. But I’ve still been moved and witnessed poignancy in the shortest of text messages. And we fluidly float between corporate speak at work and hip-hop slang and gestures at the club and whatever we use at home with our loved ones. And so many of us spend much of our time solely in the company of professional or artistic colleagues that we speak the arcane jargon of our field, whether it’s “geek-speak†or “lit-critâ€. Surely this must affect the way I write, and your blog entry has encouraged me to consider the question!
Language is associative – when we hear “restaurant†we think of the sound of clinking glassware and the murmer of conversation. As poets we rely on our readers to make the right associations, so as to produce poetry’s economy of words. But as a software engineer I can tell you that the INability to associate like that is why robots cannot (yet) speak natural languages well. Still, the associations, the frameworks, and the ways all these new twenty-first-century languages divide up time and give us new rhythms, words, and concepts will sooner or later demand their own poetry .
-
5
Beautiful article, Sarah. My mother tongue is Spanish and I have written some poems (long time ago) both in Spanish and English, but… I was never able to translate the Spanish poems into a “decent” English version I felt okay with and vice versa.
This means the poems I have written in one language have stayed in that language, because although I work as a translator, I still find it very difficult to find the most suitable words that would convey my views and express my feelings, accurately.
I do agree that our mother tongue holds some magic. In my case, I was born to a Spanish speaking family, but grew up in the United States, so at some point it’s been hard for me to feel or express myself in just one language :)
-
6
Reading along and absolutely fascinated by all the comments!
-
6.1
I shared some of my writing about my parents with my mother. I was translating her stories into English and then translating her English into poetry (another language). She couldn’t read English and never took any interest in my writing until I had my poems translated into Polish.
At that point, she started reading my poems about her, and her immediate response was. “That’s not how it was.”
The various translations of her experience missed her experience, she felt!
You can see the poem that she responded to and a poem I wrote about her response to my poem at:
http://www.eiu.edu/~agora/Dec03/Guzall.htm
-
-
7
Wow… l love the poem about your mother’s response, John. To me it says something about language as a way of naming and controlling the world – and the irrelevance of these activities next to violence, death, and other things which cannot be spoken…
-
May McLeod8
As I grew up I felt myself secretly inept at the game of language. I was painfully aware that there were lots of words I really didn’t know the meaning of – I did get general flavour, but felt shamefully uncertain of my understanding – I would just pretend I’d ‘got it’. Sure this is part of how we learn language, but I’m talking about something else here – it connects with the assumptions in the naming of “mother” tongue – associations of comfort and belonging.
My mother used to speak about everything as if she ‘knew it all’.
I am thinking about the ways we learn our ‘mother tongue’ – maybe mostly, and firstly, from our mothers. The assumption is that our mothers love us – thus the ‘belonging’ and ‘comfort’ of our ‘mother tongue’ as we learn to speak. It is a very different ‘game’, though, when the mother who transmits this language is also needing to continually assert her own dominance and power.
I so appreciate what John Guzlowski has said about the prejudice towards foreignness/otherness – the prejudice against his speaking of his own mother tongue of Polish in an English-speaking social context. Sometimes this prejudice against ‘otherness’ happens inside what is assumed to be the ’safety’ of ‘family’.
There are still many words which trigger an attack of ‘two plank brain’ (the short version of “As thick as two short planks”), even though I have repeatedly looked them up in the dictionary and tried to ‘remember’ what they mean. I seem to have a ‘mental block’ about some words, which I reckon has to do with the emotional messages that were part of the relational contexts in which these words were habitually used in my family. It was a game of exclusion, and I knew I was only pretending to understand…
Because my parents only liked intelligent, sensible, capable children I kept my stupidity to myself. It was about power, I think, and their needs, as profoundly ‘injured’ and ‘insecure’ persons who couldn’t bear to own such ‘weaknesses’ in themselves, and so were often brutally ‘contemptuous’ of any sign of such things in their children (amongst others). So my ‘mother tongue’ was a dangerous game – a mine field really – not just because I didn’t feel able to play it competently (I grew up thinking I had to have a degree before I could have an opinion), but because of the ‘forbidden’ things I really wanted to say, and sometimes did try to say, but then found things exploding in my face!
I took to writing to myself – the only form of conversation available. It was lonely – it didn’t feel like ‘belonging’, though there was some comfort in it.(It was in reading other people’s stories that I did find comfort and companionship – so YAY for language!) I still find it ‘dangerous’ to say what I really think, but have been doing more of it lately – life is short. Recently I have even begun to appreciate things about my ‘mother tongue’ – never used to like English much – all part of the ‘coming home’ to myself and my own history – through words.
-
8.1
Hi, May, I read your post about your mom and your language.
It reminds me of my mom and my sister. My mom needed to control everything my sister did. My sister responded by being more and more American. Part of this involved using only English and avoiding our mom’s Polish.
This just made the relationship more tense of course, and it was only resolved when my sister finally married and left home.
-
-
9
Hi May, and John,
thanks for sharing your personal angle on this, May… indeed, what “mother tongue” means to us is all about what “mother” means to us, and that is not always a comfortable home in which to be, indeed not all of us even know where that place is…
in my experience it has only been since I have been uprooted from my language by living in another place, that it has become so precious. Before it was often a place of conflict, contradiction and escape attempts, but once I was no longer in *that* place, I realised how the language had invisibly sustained me…all around.
But as Peter pointed out, languages are fluid, various, interconnecting, no longer “natural” monoliths in today’s world. And here we all are, sharing our stories.
-
May McLeod10
Glad to have your responses, John and Sarah.
Reading back over, and thinking about ‘the words speaking us rather than us speaking the words’ and the ‘game’ that language is (’illusory’, fantastical, or otherwise) I think about the relational context again and see how skilled I became at joining in with other people’s language-worlds even when I felt I didn’t ‘know what I was talking about’ and even when their ‘world’ was intimidatingly different from my own. Now, with the wisdom of age (!) I can look more compassionately upon this younger me who seemed, in some ways, to be ‘capitulating’ or ’submitting’ to these games of making shared worlds through language.
I think about your sister’s clear rebellion, John, and have wondered why I wasn’t more obvious in mine – I have felt ashamed of the way I have ‘gone along with things’ so many times, and not ’spoken up’… Now I think I see my own behavior more in terms of my deep need of and valuing of relationship and connection, and my willingness to find my way into the language of another even when it made me feel uncomfortable, for the sake of finding/making/maintainig relationship to some degree at least. I know of myself now that I would much rather be able to talk things through with someone, even when it feels dangerous and difficult, than ‘make war’ or ’slam the door’ as my parents used to do. I don’t mean this with any moral judgement attached – it’s just an observation about the way I seem to work. Sometimes it’s a good thing. Lots of times it’s got me into big trouble, and I’ve wished I were better able to ‘make war’, or simply walk away…
But yes – this net of language in the sea of relationship… I love that language can ‘talk about itself’, and that we can talk about ourselves to each other like this! I am somewhat technophobic (’old fashioned’ – in lots of ways I prefer pen and paper) and don’t feel very ‘cosy’ with computer screen ‘interfaces’, but I sure do appreciate this strange new way of talking to people through the connections of this ‘world wide web’, even though, lots of the time, I hunger for languages other than words. It has felt like a big deal to me to enter in to this conversation – it feels so personal, yet is intimidatingly (to me) public, and I am so aware that I am always commiting ‘autobiography’ – even when I am not obviously talking about myself. Very ‘exposing’ – but this seems to be an excellent practice arena! A safely ‘distant’ yet also strangely intimate meeting ground… A place to try out different ‘voices’ – different tongues… To reshape the languages that have shaped us – our ‘mother tongues’. To think by speaking, and maybe to ‘grow up’ at last – inventing the world through the voices I ‘try on for size’ (like this one), not having to think that only one voice is ‘the real me’, nor that I must play it other people’s ways… Sometimes I wish I wasn’t such a slow learner – but surely better late than never! It helps having other people to play with!!
-
10.1
May, I like what you say at the end of your comment about finding new ways of re-expressing the self. I feel we are always, all of us, trying to find a way of doing that, using the language that we have and the language that we had, mixing them up in evolving ways.
Isn’t it always the trying to talk that keeps us talking?
One last thing, about my sister and her rebellion. She was the rebel, I was the passive, submissive one. She was 2 years older than I was. I think I learned from her that if one were to survive in the family I must submit. My sister wouldn’t.
-
Newer Comments »