Losing Your Tongue

Losing Your Tongue

Ici je raconte la soif des livres cracquelés, je pronounce les silences riches d’émotions contenues dans chaque cellule désséchée. C’est ainsi que je retrace les voyages internisés sous ciel torride.

This is how we lose our mother tongue; that first language to tease our seat of knowledge. I lost my own bearings in the sand, one word at a time, and with it, the cultural difference it carried. The mental map folded and creased by cold letters from ‘home’. The names of objects which I found in new surroundings replaced accurate adjectives which I no longer used. This is how devolution of elocution came upon me, rapidly dropping onto the arid soil of the new places. So I spoke faster to mask the sense of loss. I learned every word in the context of found books and discarded papers. I avidly read every word of advertisement, front to back and again. The winds blew all perception as I grieved a part of self whom I had ill known.

If language is the vehicle of cultural identity, I became a split personality the day I decided to leave my birthplace. Romantic notions aside, I divested myself of a heavy mantle of propriety and gradually took on an assumed personae who spoke the words of miners and vagrants that inhabited the western desert. With every name of a rock and each tool of the trade, I discarded years of experience in both rural and urban way of French life, like sand dropped from my pockets, and disseminated in dunes forevermore.

In retrospect, a youth spent between a rigid city education during school, and hard labor at vacation time in my ancestral village, had previously prepared me for dual adaptation; as if I had been plugged into different circuits all along. I had already suffered the innate clan mentality which ostracizes others and excludes them from pleasant conversation. Family stared and sneered at me each time I used correct language in daily speech. Little ‘City girl me’ spoke Latin and whatever other “things” she learned there. On the other side of the cultural divide; upon my return to the renaissance hilltop of ancient knowledge ‘Country me’ was severely chastised for using spontaneous expressions in the Patois dialect of my ancestors. Every holiday was an exercise in Cartesian discipline, as much as I favored the satisfaction of learning, I felt a strange attachment for the simpler expression of my country folk. No time to use fancy phrases between chores. Three little words and turn around. I thrived there, for awhile.

The thirst for expanded knowledge would always stir, anywhere, and with it, the hunt for communication. Books were my primary source of American English; they were left as gifts, offered by temporary anonymous residents in the abandoned shacks which pepper the far landscape of the Great Basin. All I had to do was to find material before the pack-

rats did. From partially chewed newsprint to pristine Vonnegut, I ended up talking like an old Reader’s Digest magazine, and had the sense of humor of a third grader. It was easy to make me laugh, everything seemed somewhat funny to me.

“You’ll never be one of us” said the miner to me. Neither budging nor twitching, I felt a tear welling at the tip of my lashes, so I turned silently and felt the man’s hand hovering close to my shoulder. He hesitated and bent his head whispering “I don’t mean it like that”. I knew what he meant, but that was the last act of separation for the isolated woman I had become. The desert had become its own dimension between past and present. That unassuming man had given some food to our little family, he had provided water and blankets; probably because somewhere, he had children and a wife who would not live on the desert floor. His gestures, as those of other miners spoke of the division. “That is not bad – really - you don’t want to become like us out here” he added twisting his rough hands, I consoled him with a dismissive “I understand”. (No, I did not!) I was bent on chameleonizing my adoptive environment. Not to fit in, but to live in.

When the children were of school age, I was summoned to the office and severely admonished for speaking our language to them. I was told that I was confusing the children, and they were confusing the class therefore I should immediately stop. That was another snip of the cultural scissor, a surgical strike precisely delivered to my insecure seat of emotions. The fear of deportation looming as I feared they (whoever they were) would find out that we had no utilities, a public sin far worse than difference of language. I had been told that my children and I would be cleaved asunder if the authorities found that cold water and candles were inadequate situations to raise little Americans.

I reluctantly taught mostly flat English and kept the French for bonding chores only; ‘va te laver les mains - fait la vaisselle - et tes chaussures’ the daily commands of a quasi normal life. So we carried our water in jugs for miles and cooked on makeshift grills over deadwood embers. Life tasted good in any language. And the kids could generally read, write and count before teachers got ‘a’hold of their brains too. Sand is the ideal write –erase board, and twigs abound in nature. What is love for?

It was in Tecopa California that I realized that I had gained some track on the runaway train of language. I met a lady at the local Post Office who invited me to her local home extension of the Inyo-Kern library. For the next few months I read much of the little shelf full of donated serious literature and even perused saccharine romance before dutifully returning each and moving on. I no longer groped for new words whenever I encountered rare prospectors or geology students along our daily food foraging in Death Valley, but when I arrived at whatever hovel or cave I called home, the walls closed in on the fact that I was alone (with three small children) and my mind spoke no French. Even my dreams resisted the old language; they were now silent movies, gesticulating on an ethereal theater within. No color, no odor, I was dead to the old world for several years.

Societal scissors had severed the cords. I had chosen not to mend the wounds; perhaps to protect the family unit, or was it to forget the pains carried by my first language, my first life.

Writer's Cramps

Writer's Cramps.

Snow yet on the ground and frostbitten cheeks, conditions seem propitious for writing the novel, my novel, this voice which feeds ideas beneath earthly concerns. Reviews credit the work, but the personal appreciation of the ways of a wordsmith delve deeper into the art itself. So allow me to slide from this lofty perch to a lower branch where i may feel a bit more comfortable.

Writers are often isolated beings, i was an only child, an undesired one, a girl child in a land of paternal lineage rights. Two options soon became apparent to the precocious ballast bundle of pale flesh. One: mimic the environment to fit in. Two: shut up and be cute. In France, the average length of forgivable cuteness was about four years, soon expectations do rise above one's head.

Adaptation became necessity, from relative to relative, from the butcher at the corner to Mother Superior, i slid into useful roles with plenty of time to observe both urban and rural surroundings. Lessons beyond the Latin instruction prepared me for hardship. By the time i emerged from formal schooling, i already had a full book of poetry in my secret satchel.

By age ten, my Mother had declared that she could no longer understand my French language, my normal range of discourse had surpassed even my instructors, i was wedged between the role of teacher's pet and student bane. Appreciated, yet unwanted. Work was the only reliable outlet.

Not being allowed to have friends, i entertained my brain with languages to escape my parent's world, or philosophy, to impress my much older classmates. Upon graduating very early, i discovered that my mother had made plans to –sell me-- to a noble family as a governess. This was to remain a total secret for legal and personal reasons. Father was told that i had found a better alternative to lazy college education.

I first asked to publish my book of lyrical prose and poetry. There is a picture of my mother indelibly imprinted upon my mind. She stands above me as i rake the ashes of the manuscript, making sure that not one word, not one particle is detectable in the flowerbed where she had ceremoniously handed me the one match to put an end to-- “this nonsense...what would your father say if i told him what you have been wasting your time on all these years?”.

In one gesture i had lost a whole being, my sole refuge carved out of loneliness. I was ashes in the dirt, landscaped into oblivion once more; literary hara-kiri. Tearless and stoic, i temporarily lost my voice rather than rebuke.

Not yet fifteen, i worked with diligence and on my only partial day off per week, i rode the train to the nearest university and audited one class, soon i was writing several term papers for failing students, for books only. Then i became the cafe terrasse 'objet de curiosite'. People rode and walked long to hear what they called my witty repartee. Entertainment for expresso, i missed my calling. I had discovered an audience who understood, yet could not quite follow the vertiginous twists of my Thursday madness.

Prized servant which I was, appreciated for my polyglot skills, for me, life was the hallway to sunshine, a grand foyer of expectations which would lead to artistic evolution. Hands tied, mind alive, i knew of greatness beyond reality. Grand mother's flocks had taught me contained freedom, city dogs had shown me how to disappear. I ran away from indentured service and married a foreigner. I knew more English than most native speakers after a few months.

Once again isolated, this time, in the American desert, i began to write in English. By then i had almost forgotten my mother tongue and every other language which i had once learned or spoken. Adventure and travail had consumed my energies to channel them into emotional exile. The pen hovered over the blank space as if magnetized yet inert, reticent. No word lining up in a coherent french phrase, although I wrote a perfunctory letter to my parents every Thursday. Creativity dried up as a useless appendage.

A column here, a poem elsewhere, i felt my way through whichever literary outlets i could access from rudimentary means. Whether in France or stateside, i found people to be attracted to that edge over which i see the other side. I no longer dwelt in the abyss, i peered intentionally into it to transmit the incongruous visions to most willing recipients.

Long gone the knowledge, ballast over the ocean that separates me from myself. Long discarded the burden of importance and place. This nomad scribe has achieved amused detachment. Remains a duty to readers, including myself, a vague morality which dictates outrage and fuels rants.

In the culling of fact and performance, there is form and texture, this may be what the reader gleans and enjoys as a reflection of his own memory. Technology has afforded us a separate dimension, whereby the author receives purer response to his art, than if face and voice were interfering with the words. I may again be that child of expression with mordant pen and lazy wit.

Words, the etched logos on the tablet of this, our time, solid, absorbed into the psyche with no other trouble than the present and its moods. Humble? Bah! Not yet, i have only been out there, on that web for a short while, so i plan to enjoy this a little longer before i decide to work at a really professional, literary oeuvre. It's back there, fomenting, fermenting, can you hear it?