Mother tongue
When I mention that writing in English, which is not my mother tongue, is a special challenge for me, people keep refuting it. When I insist even though it makes me sound like a whining baby trying to gain extra attention, they still don’t get it.
“Oh, what are you talking about your English is just fine” Is the normal reaction. The other one will be “Why, the way you make a use of the words and phrases is so unique and interesting”. It makes me feel like some strange bird admired for its colorful feathers. These same people will get all excited over my accent too. “Oh, and where are you from, I love your accent” I smile politely as I shrink inside.
So yes, sure, my command of the language is just fine but when it comes to writing this by far is not enough and the challenge is huge. Nuances and expressions, slang and idioms, sayings that are rooted deep in the culture, subtle shades of meaning, those are all part of the writers’ language; part of the huge pool from which he can draw just the right word or phrase.
All the while I am hobbling, limping and stumbling along the road. Every sentence typed needs to be reviewed, reread and corrected. Every word needs to be spell checked and verified for its right spelling and meaning. I often look exasperated at the words that come to my mind, words I am not even sure are real words and other times I have remarkable ideas but for the life of me cannot find the right vocabulary to articulate them. I constantly move back and force between the thesaurus, the spell checker, the internet, and the varied dictionaries and still never completely sure that what I write makes sense to anyone but me.
The only explanation I can offer for this torment I put myself through day after day is that I love writing. Writing to me is nothing short of magic, almost like pulling a white rabbit out of my sleeve it’s about creating something out of nothing. I can’t stop marveling at how just few simple words put together in the right way can posses so much beauty and power. While the same words in someone else’s’ hands are nothing but words.
When I read I am forever looking for the secret spell that the writer used to achieve this beauty, this power, this lure. I try to keep at it while paying close attention but always at the end I get drown into the story, only to pick my head up pages and pages into the book and realize that I've missed it again. Sometimes in an extreme effort to find it I will leaf back running my eyes along the pages to no avail. Like true magic you cannot bring it to its knees by tearing it apart and examining the pieces.
I don't know what makes me believe that once I’ll find it, the secret, I can do it too. I am aware of the possible ineptness of my efforts not only to produce good writing but to do it by using a language that is not truly my own. And still I keep at it.
Sometimes I wonder if hiding behind the unfamiliarity of another language makes it easier to say things that are otherwise hard to deal with. Perhaps writing in a foreign language besides being a stimulating challenge is also sort of a refuge, a place of safety. I found an echo to my thoughts in these lines I took from a poem written by someone who like me feels the duality of writing in a foreign language.
“I write in the Hebrew language which is not my mother tongue,
to lose myself in the world. He, who does not get lost, will never find the whole.” Salman Masalha
to lose myself in the world. He, who does not get lost, will never find the whole.” Salman Masalha
And so I continue to write in the English language which is not my mother tongue stumbling and falling and picking myself up. Perhaps if I will get lost enough I will find the whole.
I'll have comments on this later, but I couldn't read it without thinking of one of the greatest English prose stylists ever, a stylist for whom English was not his first choice of compositional language.
ReplyDeleteHere is what he says in the afterword to his most famous book:
". . My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses -- the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions -- which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way."
I'm not sure I have anything much to add to what you say and to what the writer I quote above has to say.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm not sure I really have a higher compliment to pay than to say that your essay says so many of the same things that afterword quotation does, right down to the analogy to magic and to the transcendence of the 'heritage' or as you and your poet put it, the 'whole.'
Tell me: do you write in successive drafts or do you do all this hobbling and limping as you compose? If you had successive drafts (but I'm guessing you don't), looking at the early ones might help me think about how to make the writing less stumbly and perhaps would allow you to spend more time in searching and magic and less on mechanical problems, spelling etc.
But if you edit as you write...some teachers would tell you that is a bad idea, but, in truth, that's how I write myself, so I can't tell you that.
You've exposed your vulnerablity in writing--brave to do before your English teacher, and I'm flattered you trust me for this confession of weakness)--but you also show the spirit, the desire, the interest in magic and decoding that lying behind the weakness.
It's a powerful essay.
What can I do to help you write even better?
You are right, most of the time I edit as I write and then go over it again and again. Sometimes I might go back to half drafts that were left behind and try to inject life into them and depends on the assignment it either works or not.
ReplyDeleteThis course already has been tremendous help. Your critique and the reading of other people posts (and critique) is the best learning. It is going to end way too fast.
Sign up for ENG 162 online? It's very different, but if you take it we can tailor it to suit your needs.
ReplyDelete