Archives for January, 2008

Dear People Who Spit On The Street,

I hate you.
Furthermore, I hope you all die of the flu.

Best wishes,
-f.

PS: Every   single   one of you.

In my stumbling monolingualism, I am not my mother’s daughter. She spent her childhood immersed in English and Sinhala; met my father and learned Tamil; lived and worked in Saudi Arabia where she absorbed Arabic.

Add to that list now Greek.

One of my mother’s patients is a stroke victim and a matriarch in the grandest sense of the word. Her whole family, down to the third generation, comes to visit her in the hospital and she has introduced them all to my mother.
“You will teach me English,” she informed my mother when they first met, “and I will teach you Greek.”

My mother was in recently to tell her she was going to be discharged soon. “How do you say better in Greek?” my mother asked the patient’s daughter. She told her and my mother turned to the patient and explained to her that she was καλύτερλ and almost ready to go home.
At this the patient started yelling and everyone started laughing.
“My mother,” explained the daughter to my baffled mother, “wants to know – WHERE IS YOUR HUSBAND?”
“…?”
“She wants to tell him how good you are -”
WHERE IS YOUR HUSBAND my mother’s patient is still shouting.
My mother replies with the literal truth and probably without, knowing my mother, any sense of irony at all, “He’s with the kids.”

Continue reading this entry »

The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language … but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions; it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own. And not all words for just anyone submit equally easily to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves into quotation marks against the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated – overpopulated – with the intentions of others.

- Mikhail Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel; qtd in Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (1215)

What is the nature of that hyphen? What does it want?
The silence of that hyphen does not pacify or appease anything, not a single torment, not a single torture. It will never silence their memory. It could even worsen the terror, the lesions, and the wounds. A hyphen is a never enough to conceal protests, cries of anger or suffering, the noise of weapons, airplanes, and bombs.

- Jacques Derrida. Monolingualism of the Other. translated by Patrick Mensah.

I am monolingual. My monolingualism dwells, and I call it my dwelling; it feels like one to me, and I remain in it and inhabit it. It inhabits me. The monolingualism in which I draw my very breath is, for me, my element. Not a natural element, not the transparency of the ether, but an absolute habitat. It is impassable, indisputable: I cannot challenge it except by testifying to its omnipresence in me. It would always have preceded me. It is me. For me, this monolingualism is me.

- Jacques Derrida. Monolingualism of the Other. translated by Patrick Mensah.

Or some variation of the word idiotic¹.

I’m in school. You know? Yeah.
Count years: one two three four aaaand       five.

Not too bad, five years and two degrees, with a third on its way¹⁶, provided I do things like submit papers. And readings. And not-sleeping in class. Provided I do what people who pay for the privilege of learning do, I should be able to append another couple of letters to my name come this fall.
Go me.

Yeah, hi. It’s past two in the eh em, and though I spent the day outside, I was indoors most of the time. Lack of sky, whatever its colour and cloud cover, gets to me. Also, I need gloves and an empty park. Tomorrow: checkmarks.

Fine, OK. While lack of sky does induce attacks of bathetic melancholia, that was just an excuse. A cowardly disclaimer so I could wash my hands of the insanity that threatens to follow.
My apologies, sky. I will refrain from insulting your dignity like that again. Your patience is appreciated.

Fact: it’s not really the time that chafes. What would I have done in those five years instead? Knowing me, very likely nothing. So that’s nice: half a decade of nothingness thwarted by the likes of QCARD, Passport York, and ROSI².
Though, for all I know, those could have been five years of very productive nothing. Who knows. I mean, I highly doubt it, but I’m not Who and only Who knows. Apparently.

Today I was productive. Continue reading this entry »

They say that you’ve arrived
That’s just a high class bribe
    Don’t you let them take the fight outta you
There’s always someone younger
Someone with more hunger
    Don’t you let them take the fight outta you

- Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals, “Fight Outta You”

And when Mayakovsky exclaims: “Leave the cities, you silly people,” it is the cry of a man who is citified to the very marrow of his bones, who shows himself strikingly and clearly a city person, especially when he is outside the city, that is, when he “leaves the city” and becomes an inhabitant of a summer resort.

- Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution

Moreover, I don’t think there’s such a something as the Leg of the Literary Public. So-o: the question of pulling it cannot arise.

- G. V. Desani, All About H. Hatterr

I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him? Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to Odradek.

- “The Worries of a Householder” (Franz Kafka)