14:

 The language of the heart.

“The richness of the English vocabulary, and the wealth of available synonyms, means that English speakers can often draw shades of distinctions unavailable to non-English speakers”

Mother Tongue Bill Bryson (1990)

I always spoke Hebrew but for the past two years, while participating in various writing classes, I switched to English. I think about this a lot, when I struggle to find the right word, the most fitting idiom, the effective way to express an idea. I was not forced into this ambivalent relations it was me and only me who chose to turn my back on my own language. There is a certain measure of loneliness combined with a feeling of freedom that accompanies this choice. As if by distancing myself from my mother tongue I am allowing for more space and the leisure to experience something new, unconfined by the old rules.

Being there it is clear to me that when talking about mother tongue I am talking about more than a language. I am talking about myself at the deepest layers of my being and so I am curious how other writers, who write in a language other than their mother tongue, feel about this. Maybe through them I will gain a better understanding about the process of making the choice to write in a “foreign language” the relationship formed between the writer and his language of “choice”. And last but not least, the technical difficulties namely the use of grammar and words; the tools of the trade. 

Generally a very systematic person I start by looking for definitions for both mother tongue and language and identity (Wikipedia of course) many words later I surface up not only thoroughly tired but also very confused.

  So many definitions and observations and the only clear understanding I come out with is that there is truly not one simple characterization that can contain comfortably the wide spectrum of this somewhat fluid term. The definition of mother tongue is highly personal as are the reasons for which people adopt other languages. As varied as are the definitions of mother tongue so are the languages chosen by different writers as the ones to express themselves and the special relationships that develop in the process both between the writer and his new language and the writer and the language left behind. Perhaps the best example of this ongoing conflict are those writers who keep writing in both languages going back and forth, as can be seen from the rich literary of Vladimir Nabokov, who translated many of his own early works into English and other works into Russian. Nabokov metaphorically described the transition from one language to another as a slow journey at night from one village to the next with only a candle for illumination. (Google)

What effect does the process of changing languages has on the writer is my next big question. Taking into consideration the immense powers language has on us in general it is mind boggling to try and evaluate the impact it might have on a person whose whole liveliness rotates around words. And so I continued my search by checking several web-sites and books written on the issue; I keep looking for what other writers had to say on the matter searching for myself in their words.

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“Writing in another language is just the path but not the place where we want to go, and the place where we want to go is the place of our dreams, the place that everybody wants to go: a place of passion and truth and life and death”. Shan Sa
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“To cut to the chase, though: what in the world possessed me to write in a language other than my mother tongue? It is true that for many of us our relationship to our adopted language is not territorial. Mine is English that I cobbled together from the many places I have lived and the books I have read, a transnational quilt. It limits me in some respects, and opens avenues.”Dan Vyleta
***

“My mother was never like that. She never owned the language she spoke. Her displacement within the intricacies of English class, and the uncertainty that went with it, taught her to regard language as something that might go off in her face, like a letter bomb, a word bomb. I've inherited her wariness, or more accurately, I learned it as a child. I used to think I would have to spend a lifetime shaking it off. Now I know that's impossible, and unnecessary, and that you have to work with what you've got.” Ian McEwan

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 “All I can claim after all those years of devoted practice, with the accumulated anguish of its doubts, imperfections and faltering in my heart, is the right to be believed when I say that if I had not written in English I would not have written at all.” Joseph Conrad

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“Two selves exist within the language-adoptee, as with any adoptee-what might have been, what was lost, and the good fortune, the delivery from want and frustration. For a writer, the melting of another tongue is the madeleine, the way back and the way in, an early loss with the deepest memory, the mother of all plots.” Bharti Mukherjee

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 “The screen language I employ in order to pass unmolested in the land where I have lived most of life without ever shedding my internal foreignness. French is my secret identity, inaccessible to my friends. Sometimes I feel as though I have it all to myself” Luc Sante

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 “Americas are linguistically very tolerant, very nice. I was often congratulated on my very good or even excellent English. On each such occasion I grinned politely because I knew only too well that I was just American politeness. English was still my very limited inner language, grammatically more or less correct, but idiomatic” Josef Skvorecky

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 “Even though I was told that my writing does not show signs of rigor mortis, it is a fact that I write slowly and laboriously, pausing after every word I set down. I change it countless times and repeat the process with each sentence and paragraph before I can move forward.” Louis Begley

***

I read all these polished words of people who made writing their life and writing in a “foreign language” their professional choice and realize how each one of them had to go through the same kind of struggle as I do now.  Still I am not content, in the back of my mind another persistent question would not let go. Maybe the biggest of them all, the question of loyalty to heritage and culture, perhaps the deepest conflict associated with language cross over. Not only using a language that does not belong to me but abandoning what was passed to me to keep and cherish, will it always be something I will have to reckon with?

But then I stumble upon the words of a soul mate from far away land.  “I am Indian, very brown, born in Malabar, I speak three languages, write in two, dream in one. Don’t write in English, they said, English is not your mother tongue. Why not leave me alone…Why not let me speak in any language I like?”Kalma Das -1934

These words hit a chord in my heart. This complex issue of choosing a language to write in maybe is not complex at all. People move from country to country for various reasons that are either in their control or forced on them. Each move usually demands adjustments to different cultures, different landscapes and different languages. Some hold on to what was left behind while others embrace the newness as their own and take off. No one story is alike; each is unique just like we as human beings are unique and different. This is my story and it only just begun.