Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition

conclusionToward a Multilingual Paradigm?The Disaggregated Mother Tongue

c onc lusion Toward a Multilingual Paradigm? The Disaggregated Mother Tongue the disaggregated mother tongue What is the relationship between language and identity today? According to the monolingual paradigm, there is one privileged language, the mother tongue. This language is special because one is born into it, one acquires it with the “mother’s milk” (H. Weinrich, “Chamisso”) or at least at the “mother’s knee” (B. Anderson , Imagined Communities). The individual is connected to it through family and kinship ties and experiences childhood through it. The sounds of this language can stir something deep down inside a person; this is the language of primary attachments , the language in which one first says and becomes “I.” It is a language that signifies belonging and reaffirms it. On a practical level, it is the language one masters best and has full command of. Other languages may be enjoyed but will never be mastered in the same way and can never attain the same deep meaning, they can never penetrate to the very core of the subject in the same manner . This story about language and identity, I have argued, can best be understood as a linguistic family romance that constructs a narrative of true origin and ensuing identity. The concept of the Conclusion 204 mother tongue and its rich connotations, in other words, offers a strong model of the exclusive link between language and identity. Yet, while this vision may be true for some, it is just as often untrue for others. The “mother tongue” can be a site of alienation and disjuncture, as German was for Kafka; it can be the medium of chauvinist expulsion from, and endogamous self-enclosure into, identity (Adorno); the “mother tongue” can be experienced as enforcing a limiting, suffocating inclusion (Tawada) as well as being a carrier of state violence (Özdamar) and social abjection (Zaimoğlu). These dimensions are part of the less told story of the “mother tongue.” More importantly, however, this concept blocks from view the possibility of multiple, and even contradictory, attachments, of desire for something unfamiliar and unrelated as well as the pleasure derived from new childhoods and new connections. Reading multilingual forms against the backdrop of the monolingual paradigm reveals that languages not considered “mother tongues” can be the site of joy and significant reconfiguration, as French and Yiddish were for Kafka. It may be the “foreign” elements of a language that enable attachment to it in the first place, as in the case of Adorno. For him, as we have seen, foreign-derived words secure nonidentity and retain the memory of historical failures rather than smoothing them over. They also carry the utopian promise of a “language without soil.” Such detachment from the mother tongue is also a desired outcome of Tawada’s bilingualism , where a foreign language is a gateway to liberation and pleasure and provides new perspectives on the world and new experiences of it. Against the violence of the mother tongue, a new language can be the means of working through trauma and recovering liveliness (Özdamar). Additional languages can help project new locations on transnational maps, as English does in Zaimoğlu’s Kanak Sprak, or they can locate subjects in relationship to national histories from which they are excluded, as Yiddish and Hebrew fragments do in the same text. But what about those for whom the “mother tongue” does indeed fulfill its promise and to whom it gives a sense of wholeness, Conclusion 205 belonging, and affective attachment, one might rightly ask at this moment? What if the loss of a “mother tongue” is a painful experience rather than a liberating one? Eva Hoffman’s memoir of being “lost in translation” provides such an account of leaving behind her beloved Polish to become a new person in English. The readings in this book lead me to argue that while the “mother tongue” may indeed be experienced as a wholesome unity by some, the problem lies in the monolingual paradigm’s insistence that this is always and exclusively the case. The distinct aspects of the monolingual paradigm that are tackled by each of the writers discussed in this book ultimately indicate that, rather than being a seamless whole, the “mother tongue” is an aggregate of differential elements, all of which are subject to historical and social configuration. They reveal that what is called the “mother tongue” combines within it a number of ways of...