"Getting Over It" and Writing Memoir

Both my parents' deaths were very much an "unfinished business", without any real closure, and I am writing a memoir about my mother; this has left me, for the last two years of working on this book, to meditate almost daily on the nature of "getting over it"—that common place and common sense phrase that resonates as absurd, false and grotesque in my mind.

Being from a different language, I always find it interesting how unspecific English can be when dealing with feelings and actions—and this from a language that has so many different words to describe vaguely similar objects and their possible uses. 

A generic verb like "to get" is used to cover a multitude of sins, or possibilities; in Italian, as in French, or Spanish, or any other language I know a little about, there are very precise verbs, or elaborate turns of phrases, that describe the same actions or feelings covered by the English "to get" + various prepositions, adjectives or nouns. 

To get off, out, by, down, up, at, away, hot, cold, thirsty, hungry, even, into, on, it, over, real, somewhere, through, ahead, after, a life, a move on, away with, together, wind of, with it... The list is almost infinite.


When my mother died, I was living in Vancouver, BC, and had just started the first year of a PhD that I subsequently had to abandon for various reasons. One of these (not a reason any academic department would ever take into consideration) was the fact that I had not been allowed any real space and time to grieve. 

After spending a couple of traumatic weeks in Italy sorting through (now here's another "get-like" verb) legal documents and my mother's messy and filthy apartment and trying to sort out my own messy and not altogether pure feelings, I got (ha ha) back to university, where I was supposed to have had my allocated time to "deal with it" and was expected to get back to my work. Which I did, but not with the same degree of success, or enthusiasm, I had had in the first half of the year. And thereafter, the tormenting ghost of my mother, and the specter of my own guilt, have been a feature of my life.


In our contemporary Western cultures, death has so little room, we are not supposed to think about it, dwell on it, be absorbed in it. We are supposed to take a few days, a couple of weeks at the most, off work or school, and then "get right back to it" and "get on with it". 
In novelist Howard Norman's beautiful book "The Northern Ligths", one character says: 
"I never could stand that saying, Time Heals...It heals some thing, but makes the rest worse just because they've gone on longer." 
When I read this sentence, it stopped me in my tracks. As simply worded as it was, it was also absolutely, utterly true. And also runs contrary to the received notion that we can just "get over" anything and everything in time; that pain will disappear; that all manners of longings and yearnings and losses will simply fall away like dead leaves from an autumnal tree.
It ain't necessarily so, as the song used to go. Not for all of us, at least. So what do you do with those resistant longings and pains? You can turn them into art, of course, if you are so inclined. You can write about them. An artist whose name escapes me now, once said something like this: what's the use of pain if you can't sublimate it into art? 


In writing about my mother's death (she died alone and was found dead a long time after the fact), I was forced to delve into topics that are, to many contemporary people, distasteful at best, horrific at worst: the decomposition of the flesh; how to dispose of a dead body; funeral rites and the aftermath of whatever kind of disposal we choose—be it cremation or burial. One way I found to deal with these unimaginable horrors was to resort to my intellectual curiosity and find out as much as I could about the physiology of death and decomposition, and also to research various rituals of death in different cultures. 
We all have our methods for making sense of pain, and the cerebral way is my way—lest I should go crazy otherwise; and because I don't believe in any religion or form of spirituality taking the pain away. 
Some of the research I undertook for my memoir will make its way into the book, in different forms; some will not. But I always find it a useful underpinning to support an edifice that might otherwise crumble at any time under the weight of unbearable personal grief. Research puts everything into perspective—the perspective of realizing that we are not the center of everything (we are of our own small universes, but not of the universe); that a story needs to have some wider appeal and value to function.


But, going back to the "getting over" the grief: what I also find interesting, in the writing of memoir, is the commonplace idea that in order to write about something very painful, you have to have "processed" it first; yet it is never very clear what that processing would entail—because, not withstanding the "How To" psychobabble that is so fashionable in American discourse, no one really knows; and because a different kind of processing is required for each and every person. 
I have my own personal take on this "processing": I do believe that a certain amount of emotional distance is required to write about something personal and painful. However, too much distance can render the experience generic, the writing bland, the voice obfuscated. There is a hard balance between writing as a kind of therapy (I'd always advise to go through a lot of therapy first, and then start writing), and a kind of writing that incorporates the visceral aspect of a pain that is still present and raw, that makes it palpable for the reader, even to the point of discomfort—and who says that we always have to make our readers comfortable? Only the more commercial blandness that passes for art today. 
The artist of the past knew how to make waves, and how to turn those waves into tsunamis. I don't claim to have found that perfect balance yet, but it's something I'm grappling and working with, and that's the kind of writing I aim for. It's not for everybody, not for the faint of heart, it will never be a commercial success if it makes it into print, but it's the kind of stuff I myself like to read (call me a masochist), and I, too, am a reader— a part of the audience that one is supposed to think about when writing.


And, at the end of the day, if you are writing about it, you are not really "getting over" it: you are getting into it instead.

Television: A Black Hole or a Useful Tool?

I must confess that (like most "modern" people, I guess) I have developed a keen interest (should I call it an addiction? I don't think it's quite that serious) in the watching of television. 
I don't want to call it an addiction because I know that, as with any other "drugs" in my life (which in my old age have pitifully, though perhaps healthily, reduced to just red wine, and sleeping a little too much sometimes), I am capable of taking or leaving them, depending on circumstances. I have been known to go on a detox and quit wine, cheese and rich foods for months; I have in my past lived for years without a TV set; I have been capable of getting up at dawn if my job at the time required it.
Winter, though, is invariably one of those times when I am particularly depressed, for reasons both personal and weather-related (I probably suffer from the most-appropriately named S.A.D.), and therefore more prone to reach out for "the three great stimulants of the exhausted ones", as the Joni Mitchell song would have it. 
In her case, she called them "artifice, brutality and innocence"—and though I'm not sure what she referred to (all poetry requiring a certain degree  of hermetism), I know all of these terms could apply to the TV shows I watch. I am not fond of cops, yet I do watch Criminal Minds and even CSI NY; since reading Dracula as a teenager, I have had a literary fascinations with vampires yet I am spiteful and weary of all the spin-offs that feature these wondrous creatures today (haven't vampires been done to death yet—if you'll forgive me the cheesy pun?). This weariness, and even my intolerance for any plot featuring the lives of American college students and of blond cheerleaders in particular, didn't prevent me from getting totally hooked on Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. 


Of CSI NY I admire the fabulous acting (let's not forget Gary Sinise's past as a founding member of Chicago's Steppenwolf  Theater), but I dislike the extreme reliance on scientific proof and hi-tech instruments to solve crimes; I also abhor its all-too-facile implication that good and evil can be so easily separated. 
Such an implication is instead dissected and constantly pulled at the (frayed) seams by both Buffy and Criminal Minds, which makes them a rewarding and worthwhile use of my mental time. Well, here you have one intellectual excuse for escapism—but at least I'm not pretending, like some theories of the media that used to be fashionable, that all mindless TV is instead an exercise in critical viewing, that viewers "negotiate" their own meanings instead of taking everything at face value, etc. The sad reality is, more and more people are hooked on mindless television shows and Internet sites; all the more important, then, to extol the virtues of those programs that manage to instill some shred of doubt (I doubt, therefore I think) into the viewers.
In Criminal Minds, for instance, almost not one episode goes past (at least in the old series; I have yet to catch up with this year's) without the discovery that some form of family abuse and/or social, religious and moral rigidness and intolerance are the root causes pushing the "unsub" (=unidentified subject) over the threshold of the basic life traumas we all inherited at birth into the murky territory of violent psychotic behavior. 
Yes, the psychological analyses the members of the BAU (Behavioral Analysis Unit) come up with to explain the criminal of the week's behavior may be simplistic at times (but this is television after all, not a conference of the psychoanalytical society), yet the message is more than a touch subversive: that threshold between good and bad, normal and abnormal, Criminal Minds tell us, is a lot thinner and more easily crossed into than we care to believe... 
The underlying implication, which flies in the face of "commonsense" American stories about good and evil and the rewards of a life spent doing good deeds as opposed to the "wages of sin", is that, given the right (=wrong) circumstances, we could all be the unsub...
Also, the lives of the members composing the FBI team investigating and solving the crime (though on occasion arriving too late to save the latest victim of the unsub, a fact which also flies in the face of American conventions of "happy ending" storytelling) are anything but neat and tidy, or rigorous and full of morality as Anglo-saxon puritanism childishly expects of its public figures—forgetting that they, too, are human beings: their lives are messy, full of heartaches, break-ups, drug addictions, controlled rage, unfulfilled desires, and dark family histories. In other words, the stuff of life...


Buffy, though, in my mind went more than a notch better: by positioning itself in the world of the impossible, or rather of the anything is possible, the script gave itself room to breathe, the freedom to expand, grow, change, be in turns utterly dark and painful or terribly churlish and funny (and, often, both in the same episode). 
With Buffy, it took me a lot of viewing to get into the story, and this wasn't because I was required to suspend belief about a world filled with new monsters constantly surfacing and vampires prowling cemeteries at night the way raccoons prowl the less frequented areas of some American towns. All storytelling, whether visual or verbal, whether "factual" or fantastic, requires that we suspend belief (and, I would argue, the more "realistic" the story the more we should probably be suspicious of it). 
No, the reason it took me so long to get into the series is because the characters are written in skillful, careful and complex strokes that bimboesque Cordelia, the impossibly goody-goody Riley—and even the Buffy character herself (and Sarah Michelle Gellar's work on her). 


Just think about any other TV series featuring the same characters, week in week out (Raymond, Friends, even the much wittier Frasier): mostly, what changes is what happens to the characters, it is the external events, but their reactions remain similar and predictable, because they are predictable and unchanging. Yet this is not really the way we experience people in reality; in real life, we are in constant flux, and over time, while our most inherent make-up may not change much, we reveal aspects of ourselves we didn't even think we had, or others who knew us didn't think we possessed. So one could say that, although being about something completely outlandish and fantastical and implausible, Buffy was much more about real life, real human experience, than some "factual" documentaries could ever engage with (think of the complexities of a character like Spike, for instance—and James Marsters' masterful rendition of them).


But what I most like about Buffy is that it was not afraid to court controversy, by promoting the character of a highly-sexed, vulnerable-yet-amazingly-strong, not-too-intellectually-deep-yet-profoundly-philosophical, aspiring-to-goodness-yet-ridden-with-a-dark-side young woman; by daring to present us with homosexual as well as heterosexual love as both being perfectly acceptable and normal; by insinuating several messages about the real evils in our lives: capitalism and consumerism, regimented school learning, the military machine, even, god forbid (!) religion (in one episode, after hearing about the significance of a reliquary from Giles, Buffy utters: "Note to self: religion—freaky"). 
The ultimate message in Buffy (as exemplified in one of the most sublimely-written episode, Lie to Me) being that our facile vision of the world as neatly divided along the lines of good vs. evil is a convenient but totally untrue story we tell ourselves because we are, surprise surprise, afraid of, and in denial about, the darkness within...


I think there's a lesson in there for writers too, especially those of us who work with non-fiction, and particularly in the genre of memoir—a territory that is inherently hybrid and murky, unstable and unreliable, like quicksand in the bayou; yet always threatening to cave in to the absurd demands of those who clamor for "just the facts, ma'am"...

Life Gets in the Way...and the Ghost of Christmases Past and Present

It's been so long since my last post, as the overwhelming burden of life just got in the way: putting together an MFA application, gathering transcripts, filling in forms, choosing writing samples, and having to condense all the mistakes and triumphs of my life and my future goals in a 500 word statement (who thought of that? It's more like journalism or business memos than creative writing); dealing with a perpetual house renovation that has been going on for over a year, that started to go wrong the minute after the house was bought and has left me marooned in a 40% finished house without a "room of my own" to write in, without even a shelf to house my books—a totally stressful situation; squabbling endlessly with the husband, for reasons stupid or serious but always hurtful; being stranded in a new city where, a year on, I have yet to find any footing, any true friends, any real sense of community; finding a job—after looking for work for a year—I'm totally overqualified and totally underpaid for—not great for my self-esteem. And finally,  the icing on the cake: the onset of the winter blues that always weigh me down (on top of my everyday underlying depression)...

All the stuff of life one has to contend with, day in day out; many writers out there would tell me to get over it and get off my ass (or rather get it down on a chair) and "just write"; but sometimes that isn't the feasible or possible way. So after much agonizing and guilting myself (as if I needed any more guilt in my life) about not getting my book done, I've decided to give myself a break, a holiday, a respite.
I will continue to think about my book, to breathe it, dream it, write little notes to myself about it, to send out submissions, to revise the already written parts; but I'm not doing any serious writing for a while.
I've decided that, right now, I need the distance; and that I especially need a break at this particular time of the year when many are celebrating their being part of a family, a community, and I find myself instead totally alone and so far away from the few people in the world I hold dear.

I have always hated the holidays, and I'm sure I'm not the only one to feel that way; but I'd become the Grinch if I told people that, so I shut up and smile politely when people tell me how much they are going to enjoy their Christmas dinner, and complain to me about how little time they have for their Christmas shopping.
Inside, I feel like screaming. I have no great Christmas stories to tell anyone; all I can think of is the myriad Christmases that my mother ruined for me because she would always provoke a fight with my father on our way to dinner at his family's, whom she hated; I remember one particular Christmas when my mother was carrying on and must have insulted my uncle so badly that he threw a plate of tortellini in brodo at her, which missed and went on to smash itself on the wall behind our table, splattering chicken broth and filled pasta all over the black leather sofa underneath.

As if all these bad memories were not enough, my mother ruined Christmas once more, and forever, for me by dying during this holiday period—sometime between Christmas day, and the month of February when she was found dead. So celebrating Christmas or even pretending to find any joy in these winter months is just not an option for me.
I have always dreamed of a Christmas far away from Christmas, in a place where it is summer in winter, where, ideally, the population is not even Christian; every year, I dream of Christmas on the beach, basking in the sun, forgetting that it is Christmas, away from the glitter, tinsel, wrapping paper, decorations, religion.

So my probably very bad, unprofessional advice to all the writers who are feeling like me right now  is: when you can't write because your life just gets in the way, not in the normal everyday manner that life always has of getting in the way of creativity, but in a huge, insurmountable way that gives you physical pains and heartache, just give yourself a break; take a holiday from your writing; dedicate yourself to healing the mind and the body for a while, and then get back to the work with a fresh eye.

That's what I have promised myself to do in the new year; in the meantime, I will keep updating this blog (hopefully at a faster rate than I have lately) and this will be my writing task for the holidays.

A Snippet from the Non Fiction NOW Conference: Truth, that Old Chestnut Again

I just came back from the Iowa NonFiction NOW conference—a rather exhilarating experience—and found a post on the lovely blog "Sixth in Line" with a UTube video by Dinty Moore that rehashes that old contentious chestnut, truth or non-truth in non-fiction, in a hilarious manner. That chestnut was of course one of the dominant themes at the conference, so my immediate instinct was to post this reply on Elisabeth's blog. I will post conference notes and reflections on this blog in due course.

[at the conference] Dinty Moore was "debating" David Shields exactly on these points. In my mind, they were both right and wrong. 

Writing may be a contract with the reader, but it's not a legal document where you swear you'll tell the truth, and nothing but. 

Conversely, I cannot abide Shields' dislike of anything that has a personal narrative that's not disjointed and fragmentary. 

I read many memoirs that are structured like linear narratives and still wonderful; I read others that are more lyrical, more experimental, more fragmented, and still wonderful.

The writer's contract is with his/her own conscience: it is the obligation to turn out a book that, as Kafka said (and Shields himself seems to like that quote) strives to be the "axe for the frozen sea within us"

Anything else is just idle intellectual discussion.

The Scorn About Memoir, Again

What is it about memoir that prompts many intelligent and learned people (who should know better) to poo-poo it? Yes, it's true that memoir has become somewhat of a literary trend lately and often for the wrong reasons (the proliferation of not-really-indispensable remembrances by the rich and famous is my pet-peeve example); but as a genre, memoir has a legitimate place in the pantheon of literature and should not be treated with the scorn that it is subjected to by many writers and readers alike.
I saw just one more example of this when I attended a public interview with Leslie Marmon-Silko , the wonderful Native American author. She has recently published a new book, The Turquoise Ledge, whose subtitle is "a memoir". It is, as her interviewer Molly Gloss pointed out, a memoir in the style of Annie Dillard's meditative essays on nature and the environment: Marmon-Silko lives on the edge of the Sonora desert in Arizona and, when not writing, loves to take long walk; the book is a collection of the thoughts inspired by and the incidents witnessed during, these walks—interspersed with personal recollections.
Molly Gloss is an author herself, of historical novels set in the American West and fantasy books; during the interview, she displayed a considerable scorn against memoir, implying that perhaps the new Marmon-Silko book should not have been labeled such (too good, or too serious to be a memoir?)
At one point she said that when one thinks of memoir, usually this conjures images of famous people writing about their achievements, or people with "dysfunctional f". The latter was uttered with a considerable smirk on Gloss' face—the implication being that only self-indulgent, self-centered people write memoir (and especially so when it is about "dysfunctional families"): the rest, the enlightened and "serious" writers, concentrate on either the more conventional end of non-fiction (ie. the politically-worthy, such as exposé journalism, or socially relevant essays); or, better still, they just write fiction.
Now, I am the greatest lover of fiction around; and I must confess that I read a great deal more fiction than I do non-fiction; and yet, apart from the occasional short story and poem, the thought of writing anything other than non-fiction, and then again other than personal non-fiction stories, has never occurred to me.
Why? Because, as an old and old-fashioned feminist, I believe in that little dictum, "the personal is political"; and I believe that, by writing memoir, we can both satisfy our "reality hunger" (with apologies to David Shields —someone who certainly doesn't have a narrow idea of what non-fiction is) and communicate something that will be socially and culturally relevant and of interest to readers other than our family or friends. In fact, let's explode once and for all the myth that the only people who will be interested in reading our memoir are our next of kin or our closest friends: oftentimes, these are in fact the people who end up being our worst critics and least enthusiastic readers, because of the personal investment they too have in our life story—and the fact that their perception of the "facts", the "truth" may not exactly coincide with ours. Many memoir writers talk about this problem—see for instance Louise DeSalvo and Mark Doty .
As a rebuttal to all those who scorn memoir: all good writers, even when they are writing about themselves, are capable of separating their real life from their real life as it exists on the page, where it ceases to belong to them alone and becomes an artistic product, becomes public domain.
I had just one of those "dysfunctional families", but the reason I came to believe I ought to write about my mother's madness and terrible life was not therapy; I have never confused art with therapy: when I want therapy I go to the therapist, when I want to write, I go to my desk. It was instead because I realized that there was a story there, potentially interesting to other women (and men, too); a story about madness as it related to gender, as it related to a specific culture. And that I could tell that story in a voice that was both poetic and critical.
Yes, it is possible to write memoir that is utterly solipsistic and narcissistic, and indeed there are many books like that out there; but there are also many crappy works of fiction, so would this latter fact be enough to disqualify the entire genre of fiction? Should we look at books as entities within a labeled box, as part of a genre—or should we look at books as we ought to look at human beings: each one unique, each one the product of a particular culture, historical moment, the product of a creative mind inflamed with a timeless yearning: the desire to tell a story?

A Haunting of Gloves: The Things I Lost

In writing the memoir of my mother, I've been thinking a lot about material things—things she gave me, things I gave her, things that were in her apartment in Naples and I lost when I got rid of them in a haste. At the time, I had such an urge to get the place cleaned up and could not deal with it myself: my mother had died there. She had been found dead. After quite a while. Not the kind of scenario anybody wants to deal with when it's time to "clean out the closets". Just being a couple of hours alone in the apartment was agony for me, so I took a perhaps too-swift decision and called for the local equivalent of "1-800-Got Junk"—a couple of guys with a rickety truck who came and took everything away.

Later, I realized not only that I'd given away things that were potentially precious from the monetary standpoint, but also things that I really should have kept as mementos.

One entire fragment (I prefer to call them that, rather than chapters) of my memoir deals with the "biography" of these lost things. Objects are such potent repositories of memory, of memories; and often the things we miss the most are not those that ought to be most valuable or important to us, either in financial or emotional terms. 

Instead of bemoaning the loss of the Persian rug that I could have probably sold; or the wall clock that chimed Big Ben's tune (though my father had long stopped its mechanism, claiming he couldn't sleep; and after his death my mother had never restored the clock to its song); or the 1960s and 1970s furniture that I personally found horrid but in America sells as "vintage modern"—instead of missing any of these things, today, nearly five years after my mother's death, I still find myself obsessing about a pair of gloves. 

A pair of gloves I'd bought for her in London, where I lived for 15 years prior to moving to North America. They were, as English fashion often is—a compensation for, as that Pink Floyd song had it, "hanging on in quiet desperation"?—a little eccentric, a little baroque (Vivienne Westwood's lesson): in a fake velvety material that was in fact synthetic yet still plush to the touch; of a color there are no exact words for, best described as a sort of burnt amber with a deep golden glow. 

My mother, not usually given to eccentric outfits even in the throws of her most manic and absurd behaviors, fell in love with these gloves, and took to wearing them even around the house sometimes, to cover her mildly arthritic hands, their skin chapped by too many years of dishwashing.

She loved those gloves. 

And I got rid of them. 

Afraid that keeping anything too personal of hers would jinx me with some evil eye; my scarlet letter of guilt, the guilt of having abandoned her because there was nothing else I could do, nothing I could do for her, short of allowing myself to slowly die next to her. 

Or, in a more rational version of this story, afraid of contamination because the gloves were in the room where she died and was found. 

I kept them separate from all the stuff I had the Sri Lankan house cleaner who worked for one of my best friends stuff in big black trash bags; this was in the first few days of my stay in Naples, when I still believed some manner of sorting out of my mother's apartment was possible. 

Later, having learned from my mother's nosy neighbors how she had died, the cleaner was spooked and disappeared, leaving all the trash bags sitting in the room. He would not come back to help any longer, didn't even ask for his wages, would not meet me; I ended up giving the money I owed him to my friend to give to him. 

I was alone, help-less in the most literal sense, overwhelmed by the dirt in the apartment, the mess of useless things my mother had accumulated in the nearly 20 years since my father's death. She was not exactly a hoarder—rather, had always been a reluctant housewife; my father's stern military command had forced her into a housekeeping duty she did not embrace, a daily requirement that she cook, clean, be a dutiful wife. When he died, she saw no reason to maintain the place tidy, or even clean. She let it go, let herself go.

I stayed in Naples for a while, sleeping at a friend's house and going to the apartment every day, trying to sort things out, always leaving without having accomplished anything much other than feeling miserable, overpowered, wrecked, haunted. 

All this time, the gloves sat on a green metal trunk covered with a mauve cloth bearing a design of nineteenth-century ladies on horseback, in the room where my mother had died. I meant to keep them; yet, on my last day of visiting the apartment, I did not take them with me, and did not leave them in what had been my teenager room, the contents of which were the only things I decided to salvage and have shipped over to North America. 

Instead, I threw the gloves onto the pile of trash bags still filling the room, walking out on them, consigning them to the fate of all the other things in the apartment.

I recently came across a lovely post on writer/teacher Paul Lisicky's blog . You know that old, over-abused dictum —(that many theoretical essays on photography have sought to disprove)—"a photograph is worth a thousand words"? Well, the title alone of this post was worth a million photographs: "The Museum of My Mother" .

Lisicky's post was not dark; rather, it was a lyrical, nostalgic remembrance of his mother through the odd objects she left behind in the vacation house he inherited from her. 

In his post, Lisicky says that the house is "ghosted with her presence"; my mind is ghosted with my mother's presence, and at the same time her absence. In my urgency to run away from her place of unhappy life and horrible death, I lost a great deal of objects, mementos; but their vivid images are forever burnt into the retina of my mind, haunting me all the same. 

You can take your life out of the place of memories, but you can't take the place of memories out of your life.

On Being From Another Language

This post was stimulated by another, on Maria Clara Paulino's blog which is full of wonderful reflections on estrangement and being "in-between" two languages, two places, two cultures. She is Portuguese and I am Italian, but I can relate to her musings in a familiar way. In the post, she writes on the use and abuse of the word "love" across cultures—how in her native Portuguese language it is taken very seriously and it means a very specific kind of affection (as it does in my native Italian); while in America, it is often just thrown there at the end of a letter just to mean a slightly more intimate form of  salutation.
I have often wondered how it felt for Joseph Conrad (with whom I curiously share a last name, though mine was acquired through marriage) to write in a language other than his native Polish. According to the Wikipedia entry for him, Conrad "brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature." I think there is something to be said for being a bilingual, bicultural writer; it certainly gives us a different perspective on the language we write in, and also on ourselves. When I was living in Canada, the linguistic slippage between the English and French that were the official languages, and the Italian in the back of my mind, often created some interesting occurrences. Below are some musings written during one of those occurrences, one day that I was listening to the French CBC radio channel:

'... a sudden jolt to my system: words in Italian coming out of the radio, like an alien lingo, dissociated from any source, context, culture, discourse, dialectic, amorous or hateful speech; the politeness of formal encounters or the cutting language of intimate insults; words in Italian coming out of the blue, like sobriquets inserted into a strange electronic music part-psychedelic part-contemporary/classical—words foreign to anybody else listening to this Espace Musique station I often put on because the Quebecois accent, when it's not too gratingly nasal, is soothing to my ears and I don't have to pay too much attention to a language I don't understand very well, I can let it wash over me like ripples in a calm sea, it doesn't jump at me with the same heavy burden of meanings, associations, memories and images like English... 

But today, it was Italian, oh, the incongrousness of it! All of a sudden a strange string of Dove posso trovare un albergo? Mi puo' indicare la direzione del museo? Come si chiama questo? — conventional phrases from travel books, those that never really help you because you always invariably misuse or mispronunce them or they are hopelessly out of date in the continuously evolving universe that is a living language shared and spoken by millions; silly phrases for tourists, made even more ridiculous by the strong Anglo accent, and in the suddeness of it I was moved and shocked and surprised by the intensity with which it moved and it shocked me, that such words all of a sudden should come out of my radio, and fall there in the otherwise silence of my morning alone preparing breakfast, feeding my cats; words so foreign and exotic to others in their incomprehensibleness, but to me, all too familiar, arresting...

Like the Surrealist list recounted by Michael Foucault at the beginning of "The Order of Things", these words belong to a taxonomy strange, almost disquieting, exotic in its foreigness, remote, incomprehensible to most listeners, who can be amused by them, irritated by them, pleased by them, but not find them normal. And yet, and this is the mark of my displacement, my permanent damnation to stranger status, I cannot find them normal either, because they are transplanted away from their context, deracinated from any meaning I can recognise, any soil I could walk on, any speech I could utter or hear uttered by others.

 Words. Just words. Foreign. Exotic.

 I am exotic to myself, for a moment, and yet at the same moment my brain, my heart recognize these words: they are part of the milk imbued at my mother's breasts, part of the sounds heard when I was growing up; they are the sounds and tastes and feelings and smells I was socialized into as a child. They are part of my landscape, but my landscape at some point suffered an earthquake and collapsed and went under the ground. My landscape is all interior and nothing in these mountains, these trees, this sea, these smells and voices and colours and sounds and clothes and demeanours and vibrations surrounding me here, today, call up any tree, any mountain, any sea, any sounds, any smells any voices any clothes any demeanours and vibrations I can recognise from my interior landscape.

To live in the crack where my landscape fell into; to inhabit an Atlantis of the memory, swimming in its amniotic waters day after day, and no one, no one knows where I really live when I say I live "just around the corner", nobody really knows where I am when I smile to them, when I talk to them in their language, when I reply with or without attention, when I shop and pay in the exact change and I make a joke at the checkout counter and I am more often than not misunderstood not because of my imprecise use of English but because of the slippage between my English and their English - a slippage not linguistic but cultural.

Some weeks ago an acquaintance told me, eyes ablaze and amused with the discovery she had just made: "I've just realised why your way of talking is so lively, so distinct, so wonderful! You use English as if it was Italian—it's not the grammar, it's something else. Your intonation, an inflection, certain peculiar words you use, you make it come so much more alive!"

She is a storyteller and translator from the Yiddish, speaks three languages and grew up in a Jewish area of Montreal in the 1950s. She understands the mystery of languages. Even though her passport says "Canadian", even though English appears to most to be her first tongue, she, like me, lives in several different linguistic universes at once, making comparisons and shifting from one to the other restlessly. It's a good but hard exercise for the mind, and sometimes you can get stuck, you can become confused, caught in the limbo between languages, and then you don't quite know where you are anymore.

Which language is this now? What am I speaking now? Which language am I supposed to use now?

Even today, after 24 years of having made English my daily language, 24 years of no longer speaking my mother tongue from rising to bedtime, I can become caught in that gap. Sometimes, a little shortcircuit in the brain, some crossing of wires, and an Italian word or even a whole, brief sentence may slip into my English conversation, and suddenly the gap opens up into a deep and almost threatening abyss, the abyss of my mother's madness I have tried to keep at bay all my life.

Her madness had nothing to do with language, her madness had all to do with language. In different cultural contexts, my mother's frequent ranting and raving, apparently without any sense or order, some of her speech patterns, could have been those of glossolalia, the phenomenon of "speaking in tongues" praised and encouraged within some Christian practices. And, in yet other cultural or historical places, her delusions could have been seen, praised or feared but never ridiculed, as manifestations of the power of witchcraft or shamanism...

I come from a culture that still believes in the power of the evil eye, and the evil eye is not really much to do with a gaze but rather with an incantation that needs to be verbalized, requires an utterance to come alive, to become effective, powerful and dangerous. But I have come to see that there is another form of the evil eye: it is that question I have learned to recognize as not necessarily innocent, not always just the sign of a curiosity about others:

"Where are you from?"

Language as the marker of identity and otherness, and once  you open your mouth, even if your facial traits, your body language, your clothing style, had not already given you away as a foreign, anOther, your accent does.

Where are you from?

From another language, one far, far away, eons removed from this one."