Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, and Translation

Conclusion

223 Conclusion Sometimes, yes, I do feel like a kind of cultural Frankenstein, when those who speak only English regard my fluency in ‘their’ language as freakish, an interesting but somewhat grotesque mimicry of a language which belongs to them but was only lent to me. (Minfong Ho,“The Winter Hibiscus”162) The question as to when one should“mark”oneself (in terms of ethnicity, age, class, gender, or sexuality, for example), and when one should adamantly refuse such markings, continues to be a challenge. For answers to this query remain bound to the specific location, context, circumstance, and history of the subject at a given moment. (Trinh Minh-ha,“An Acoustic Journey”8) A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war. (Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands /La Frontera: The New Mestiza 8) Marlene Nourbese Philip’s and Jamaica Kincaid’s situation vis-à-vis the English language illustrates what Jacques Derrida calls “a logical contradiction ,” the impossibility he expresses in one sentence: “I only have one language, yet it is not mine” (Monolingualism 2). Although this paradoxical “monolingualism” is most traumatically embodied by postcolonial subjects like Philip and Kincaid, Derrida posits the truth of this condition for any subject of language, including diasporic subjects like himself, a Franco-Maghrebian Jew, or bilingual subjects like the other immigrant women discussed in this study, or even “native” speakers of dominant languages adopted by these immigrants. Following Derrida, I have made a 224 Conclusion distinction between universal and empirical conditions of displacement in language that always clash with the law of the “proper,” whether it invokes property rights to language or the rules of correctness. By exposing the fallacy of equivalence and transparency, the philosophies of translation examined in the preceding chapters challenge the “proper” and confirm the truth of “an essential alienation in language—which is always of the other” (Monolingualism 58). What immigrant women’s life writing as idiomatic testimony—that is, narrative accounts grounded in concrete singular and historical circumstances—contributes to our understanding of the relationship of the subject to language is that this relationship always has a political dimension and material consequences. Such narratives “phenomenalize” the laws of language and translation and allow us to repoliticize what is at stake in translation as both a linguistic and cultural transfer, namely, the power of monolanguage and the suppression of the effects of plurality. The politics of monolanguage still remains undeconstructed in contemporary thought despite a relative undoing of such categories as gender, race, ethnicity, and identity as monolithic or essential “properties” of the subject. Monolingual hegemony is derived from the nineteenth-century ideal of linguistic nationalism and the importance of the nation-state as a territorial unity where one language is spoken. However, the linguistically and culturally homogeneous national space has been and continues to be contested by today’s transnational diasporas, which resemble “an older archetype: the multilingual trading city” (Shell 685). Yet, people still view themselves as attached to a “mother tongue” and situate as “foreigners” second-language users of such an international language as English. In designating primary or secondary rights to a language, we are still caught in the metaphysics of origin and reaffirm the “legal fiction” of the mother tongue as “the originary and irreplaceable place of meaning” (Monolingualism 91). For Derrida, this monolingualism characterizes an essential coloniality of every culture, which tends, repressively and irrepressibly, to reduce language to the One, that is, to the hegemony of the homogeneous. This can be verified everywhere, everywhere this homo-hegemony remains at work in the culture, effacing the folds and flattening the text. To achieve that, colonial power does not need, in its heart of hearts, to organize any spectacular initiatives: religious missions, philanthropic or humanitarian good works, conquest of markets, military expeditions , or genocides. (Monolingualism 40) Conclusion 225 Any subject who claims exclusive possession of language or feels the unease of speaking a language that is “not my own” might be seen as having internalized this colonizing drive of culture and exhibiting complicity with the order of property and identity. No one can claim “natural possession ” or “ownership” of language because such claims—whether by the colonizer or the dominant culture—are based on “politico-phantasmatic constructions” imposed “through rhetoric, the school, or the...