Subsister / Stutter-juice
Hi, so didn't read the essays in the back yet, but hoping we can talk more about them as the blog rolls itself out.
Obviously, especially for those of you who were in the translation workshop with me, I agree w/ Tawada's claims that this is a "radical form of translation that knows no other way but
to cross over into poetry"; one that "[needn't] serve the readers but represent the process of translation as an artistic act." A translation that crosses into poetry by leaving "the gaps intact." But instead of summarizing any more of Tawada's intro, I just want to turn to the Wolf quote she pulls out. The one where Wolf talks about German being less of a "fatherland" language and more of a "false-landly" one. Something that spoke to me, personally (as it may have others), and also might get to the heart of the destabilization this particular translation enacts. One in which "seemingly solid meanings...appear to dissolve."
Besides the one created by the asymmetric relationships between titles-- e.g. the (non-)German "Dust Bunnies" and Seita's "Dust Bunnies VS Wool Mice" --like you, I'm seeing this destabilization in the way the languages porously move between each other (instead of operating with an air-tight wall between them --which maybe Tawada mentions?)
That quote, "two heads are better than 'ohn'" (18), seems to be one way that Seita pulls the pun out of Wolf's language, or maybe creates a new one: a new layer of paint in an off-hue, but w/ similar oils and consistency. I'm talking about tone, yes, but also about movement. Like:
"i gulped: cold spit, spooky skit. behind us word rabbits scampered out of
ashbery's hat. to the ballroom then, to circumdance my twin"
(again, the destabilizing effects of neologism are familiar, but moreover)
Me: fascinated by the way "gulp" becomes a gateway, by way of image, by way of 'spit', for the sonic effects of "cold spit, spooky skit" to utter their way into the poem: a stutter-play, a "stutter-juice": a hyper-tight language play somehow able to sit and 'do its thing' in the same book as the syntactically open Tatting:
"...ist der name [-] fur lace [-] a moving face [-]
made my me [-] or [-] by means of repeating [-]
holes [-] (ear) pierce [-] & [-] close [-] those never [-]
tired [-] mouths like [-] die [-] frauen tattern [-]
die schiffchen [-] rattern [-] their teeth [-] what did they
[-] tattle about [-] what did they [-] need etc." (92)
Which again feels intimate and recognizable to me, but also reminds me of Jake's UG & SM series--not to mention AM's more recent set of ekphrastic poems.
Admittedly, I was often bogged down by the (albeit rich) Steinian quality of these texts:
"the great trekker, yes: you go ahead and try to sell that, lecker." (24)
By Steinian, maybe I just mean punny. The pun here? Trekker and lecker. But I guess, as a humorless crab-ass, this does nothing for me. It does, however, lead us back to Tawada's poetics of play.(someone else please elaborate).
Another example:
"you twirled me until me needles kneeded veines, compact, compass.
which way did they point. pee over there, or as far as you can,
truth." (28)
A humor so richly 'pointless' and destabilizing I can't help but be brought into presence, or into the surface: a Here, where, while uttering the text, an aural landscape stubbornly insists itself underneath any semantic signification. What I've described elsewhere as a "lyric specter" (specifically re LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs' Twerk) -- a sonic/musical/rhythmic thread stringing, even staggering together seemingly un-like phrases. & ecstatically so.
On the other hand, the poem's opening sentence ("the bending of our gender words began early as a set of pines near coastal dunes--lithe with level roots, androgynously grown.") brings that landscape out of the aural and back not only into the semantic, but into the visual (or at least activating visuality).
or: "in our hands, all articles were political"
or: "we look for other ways to wrap what we said."
Obviously, especially for those of you who were in the translation workshop with me, I agree w/ Tawada's claims that this is a "radical form of translation that knows no other way but
to cross over into poetry"; one that "[needn't] serve the readers but represent the process of translation as an artistic act." A translation that crosses into poetry by leaving "the gaps intact." But instead of summarizing any more of Tawada's intro, I just want to turn to the Wolf quote she pulls out. The one where Wolf talks about German being less of a "fatherland" language and more of a "false-landly" one. Something that spoke to me, personally (as it may have others), and also might get to the heart of the destabilization this particular translation enacts. One in which "seemingly solid meanings...appear to dissolve."
Besides the one created by the asymmetric relationships between titles-- e.g. the (non-)German "Dust Bunnies" and Seita's "Dust Bunnies VS Wool Mice" --like you, I'm seeing this destabilization in the way the languages porously move between each other (instead of operating with an air-tight wall between them --which maybe Tawada mentions?)
That quote, "two heads are better than 'ohn'" (18), seems to be one way that Seita pulls the pun out of Wolf's language, or maybe creates a new one: a new layer of paint in an off-hue, but w/ similar oils and consistency. I'm talking about tone, yes, but also about movement. Like:
"i gulped: cold spit, spooky skit. behind us word rabbits scampered out of
ashbery's hat. to the ballroom then, to circumdance my twin"
(again, the destabilizing effects of neologism are familiar, but moreover)
Me: fascinated by the way "gulp" becomes a gateway, by way of image, by way of 'spit', for the sonic effects of "cold spit, spooky skit" to utter their way into the poem: a stutter-play, a "stutter-juice": a hyper-tight language play somehow able to sit and 'do its thing' in the same book as the syntactically open Tatting:
"...ist der name [-] fur lace [-] a moving face [-]
made my me [-] or [-] by means of repeating [-]
holes [-] (ear) pierce [-] & [-] close [-] those never [-]
tired [-] mouths like [-] die [-] frauen tattern [-]
die schiffchen [-] rattern [-] their teeth [-] what did they
[-] tattle about [-] what did they [-] need etc." (92)
Which again feels intimate and recognizable to me, but also reminds me of Jake's UG & SM series--not to mention AM's more recent set of ekphrastic poems.
Admittedly, I was often bogged down by the (albeit rich) Steinian quality of these texts:
"the great trekker, yes: you go ahead and try to sell that, lecker." (24)
By Steinian, maybe I just mean punny. The pun here? Trekker and lecker. But I guess, as a humorless crab-ass, this does nothing for me. It does, however, lead us back to Tawada's poetics of play.(someone else please elaborate).
Another example:
"you twirled me until me needles kneeded veines, compact, compass.
which way did they point. pee over there, or as far as you can,
truth." (28)
A humor so richly 'pointless' and destabilizing I can't help but be brought into presence, or into the surface: a Here, where, while uttering the text, an aural landscape stubbornly insists itself underneath any semantic signification. What I've described elsewhere as a "lyric specter" (specifically re LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs' Twerk) -- a sonic/musical/rhythmic thread stringing, even staggering together seemingly un-like phrases. & ecstatically so.
On the other hand, the poem's opening sentence ("the bending of our gender words began early as a set of pines near coastal dunes--lithe with level roots, androgynously grown.") brings that landscape out of the aural and back not only into the semantic, but into the visual (or at least activating visuality).
or: "in our hands, all articles were political"
or: "we look for other ways to wrap what we said."
(cont.)
ReplyDeleteTwinship (re Don Mee Choi) shows up image-wise (as conjoined-twins):
"did these always-public brothers, so as not to double up but to coax some
breath-space out of the other, fork their languages in two?" (20)
& again, in the same poem: "relative clauses" -- a filial pun.
However this idea, for me, becomes complicated, or (a term seemingly overused by academics)
'exploded' in the Subsisters section (35), which moved me, but at present doesn't elicit more critical response -- except that these texts remind me of a set of poems in Anais Duplan's Take This Stallion (woah, throwback), that begin w/:
"Dear [triangle-shape], Looking down from Victoria, I found ten thousand steel prisms.
O Hong Kong! As I turned around, I saw the bodies of two Black Kites, which,
overlooking the city, had turned to steel..."
This poem is paired with an image of a little black girl playing with a black lab in a field w/
a distant barn in the background. Besides the recurrence of two 'black' figures, compositionally
these two pieces are dramatically different and have qualities that resist representation
in their respective counterpart-mediums. Qualities that are not just asymmetrical, but 'exceed' each other.
I think this, w/ Duplan's poem coming newly to the surface, is why the introductory quote to the section was especially moving to me:
"All subtitles invariably transform the original text...
Transformative subtitling implies that the original is not
only what it is, but that it also exceeds itself:
Eric Cazdyn, "A New Line in the Geometry"
Me: wondering how the essay on the "Poor Image" factors into this, but, more importantly, warmly look forward to reading your responses
Lastly, some other quotes that struck me:
[12]
"the countries fill in their domicile and //
put the stationary back into its pencil / case.
what is stationary? put it back."
Me: a return into what? into non-inquiry?
"what is stationary?" : an opening
"put it back" : a foreclosure, and a command
[14]
"...instead the red lines snapped, rolling back into their
very own names: murmuring with the greek one, chartis, carta
with the italian, and karte with me, meaning my card: looks
like we're here. almost true freunde."
Me (re that last line): a word-play that acts as a mechanism through which a welcome intimacy enters
"...folded, in the manner of this country, as they say,
into maps."
Thanks,
M
How might Lyn Hejinians "Rejection of Closure" be used to read this book? How might we use it to think about the flatness Madison sees in this text? What is the role of the "intimacy" of the poet/translator? What might Don Mee Chois idea of twinship have to do with this intimacy?
Delete(Madison, since half of the class wasnt in the translation seminar you need to explain/introduce this concept)
Ok many ideas here. Looking forward to what you write.
Johannes
Madison,
ReplyDeleteThanks for kicking this thread off. While I am one among us who did not take Johannes’ translation course last fall, I’ll do my best to articulate the takeaways you outline, since I think they are insightful for our conversation this semester as well.
To weave myself in, I invoke points from Hejinian’s “The Rejection of Closure” (and apologies in advance for the different page numbers: the citation I’m using is from Cynthia Miller’s edited volume Writing Talks: Views on Teaching Writing from across the Professions” (1985)):
“What the naming provides is structure, not individual words” (Hejinian 281).
“In the gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceives there is to say) and what one can say (what is sayable), words provide for a collaboration and a desertion. We delight in our sensuous involvement with the materials of language, we long to join words to the world—to close the gap between ourselves and things, and we suffer from doubt and anxiety as to our capacity to do so because of the limits of language itself.” (Hejinian 285)
“Yet the very incapacity of language to match the world allows it to do service as a medium of differentiation. The undifferentiated is one mass, the differentiated is multiple. The (unimaginable) complete text, the text that contains everything, would be in fact a closed text. It would be insufferable.” (Hejinian 285)
“For me, a central activity of poetic language is formal. In being formal, in making form distinct, it opens—makes variousness and multiplicity and possibility articulate and clear. While failing in the attempt to match the world, we discover structure, distinction, the integrity and separateness of things” (Hejinian 285)
These four quotes highlight the biggest takeaways I had while reading Wolf. Of particular interest is the structural/taxonomic approach of language that Hejinian identifies here and, within that taxonomic approach, the frustration and potentiality inherent in what escapes that naming—what can’t be said, or refuses to be said in one language or another, and the single undifferentiated mass that we are thus left with (ding, ding: Madison’s “dark matter” concept from his manifesto?!)
It’s at this juncture that I must mention Subsisters’ interrogation of “stock phrases”—something I felt a real affinity with in my Ugly Ground Swell Moss series. From Wolf:
but the days came when the stock phrases multiplied. gaps
grew bigger, some fell into them, got stuck in each oth-
er’s head, with foreignness. even so, the stock remained
depleted, little table, nicht more. instead, menus with ambig-
uous watermarks began to hover over everything—faded
lists, sloshing softly. each was an enchanted inventory, each
measured the perceived distance, resistance from the thing.
or so they said. where concord was held, where songs were
once yelled, there no glimmered jelly-like things. jelly-like
things. sometimes it helped to repeat things thrice, like in
equally wobbly times. (Wolf 128)
The proliferation of stock phrases that act as, in equal (?) parts, a critique, a closure, and a middle ground within Subsisters is a mysterious dynamic for me. It’s in a related way, too, that I connected with Wolf’s sense of (and Madison’s explication of) the “fatherland” < “false-landly” use of a “mother tongue” (which itself is a phrase we’ve come across most recently in Jean’s workshop submissions). In what ways do stock phrases work as shorthand? As short cuts? As copouts? As necessary tethers?
Excited to discuss this further with all of you.
DeleteI’d like to open my thoughts with Deleuze + Guattari, from “The Rhizome.” They write: “A map has multiple entryways “ and “the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight.”
Subsisters is, as Tawada asserts, “ a radical form of translation.” I see its radical-ness by way of its engagement with distance. Tawada continues, “Proximity is sometimes more complicated than distance. Wolf’s language has a suppleness that knows how to deal with a difficult proximity.”
Perhaps this “suppleness” is the consistency of Subsisters-as-map. Or should I say “mapping,” something active?
The first poem of Subsisters, “Stationary,” is of redefinition, world-configuring. Its ”someone makes crosses on a map” serves as an assertion of distance (maybe? bc “someone”) and catalyst into a poem of maps. From “Can You Show Me On Se Mappe”:
“We wanted to lean over this phrase like a charted city, to make a point, create a mouthspace, myth of hear or say […] and so we found, with the wrong sign, our site, and the rest of the city we folded, in the manner of this country, as they say, into maps.”
What is the relationship between the folded and the flattened? I ask because I’m still trying to engage with the “flatness” Madison recognized, and don’t have an answer myself.
Language enacts at least one of the book’s maps (does it matter if the book is comprised of a multiplicity of maps, or if the book is one ever-expanding map?). I’m thinking of ““On Classification in Language, a Feeble Reader,” particularly its—to use Tawada’s word—“radical” breakdown of the gender binary.
“the bending of our gender words began early as a set of pines near coastal dunes—lithe with level roots, androgynously grown. […] the things we hung to dry between trunks that grew askew, they always blew in line with the axis of the earth. even the wind pushed for direction, straightened them.”
“Annalogue on Flowers” might be my favorite—
“they say surplus, I say bloody overplus, blossom guff. they ruffle and put up pillows, i hiss: what can all this green stuff be?”
“i suffer floral tunnel vision. Je dis: one fleurl Je dis: one fleurl what grand malheur. eyes see room, taffeta-curtains, pile-up of bourgeois gushes, just the very bouquets i can’t get a handle on, only single blossoms, suspended."
This “they” feels of Deleuze + Guattari’s “tracing.” Of the binary Wolf deconstructs. I hear this song, “suspended”: https://nnatapes.bandcamp.com/track/i-want-this-place-impeccable.
Thinking about folded vs. flattened.... I think something folded retains its boundaries and integrity of layers, but flattening radically equalizes (synthesizes? homogenizes?) all components into a singular layer. The poems' polyphony and plenitude of characters and language integration (not full translation) seem to fold rather than flatten
DeleteHere's from Babeltrack:
Delete"exultant foreign arrangement of folds, folds are falten, me falta [...] this word, which means miss, in the language of this island [...] en-wringed."
Loving "falten" vs. "flatten." Reading it as affirmation of your "fold rather than flatten"
The poems in Subsisters focus on the dynamic nature of languages. In the poem Stationary, instead of giving it a straightforward answer to the questions “what is a domicile?” and “what is a crossing”, the responses are obscure and resist the static meaning of words and imply that certain words can’t have a clear definition. In the last line “what is stationary? put it back.”, the question is answered with an action/demand that implies the meaning of the word, and connects “stationary” and “stationery” by isolating the action of “put … back” from “stationery” and using it to explain “stationary”.
ReplyDeleteThe theme of diaspora and displacement intertwines with the complexity of languages in the poem. The end of poem invokes Nelly Sachs, and “the transformation of the world” in Dust Bunny’s epigraph appear in the poem in various ways. The concept of nationality changes from “domicile”, to “homelands”, then to “countries”, while this concept’s physical forms changes from clubs, to card players, and to crosses on a map. All these transfigurations indicate that diaspora is a disorienting process accompanied by shifting national identities. Languages first appear in the form of “word tree”, which is “a crossing in the flubbed dialect of these forests.” The association of language and tree implies that words/languages are both rooted and branch out to form connections between diverse forms of linguistic expressions like dialects. In the line “out of its wood/someone makes crosses on the map.” shows that the national identity is created by the physicality of language (the wood/pencil is made from trees).
The complexity of languages and the resistance to a single voice I think! Re: enactment of diaspora
DeleteOhhhhhhhh this book was everything I didn't know I needed until I read it!
ReplyDeleteTawada's introduction/framing helped immensely to foreground the approach to these poems mid-translation/being sculpted into and out of languages. She mentioned "false friends" in languages closely related, which is something I tinkered with in last semester's translation course. Wolf's poems use such slippage to draw a monolingual reader into believing they know every word, in or out of translation, foregrounded by the Glissant quote on page 11 ("To leaves traces in language means to lay a trail into the unpredictable within the shared conditions of our lives."). In this, I wonder if anyone else had a similar reaction to the poems as familiarizing through the act of foreignizing? An invitation to multilingual moments without forsaking the target or original language.
The poems themselves make a playground and are as quippy (Madison's punny?) as they are dictatorial, to go back to last week's term + Hejinian essay. The invitation lies in the use of first person plural and the dictation is in the second person command, but they don't entirely lean into that authoritative mode because of the constant questioning and negotiating that shows its own fallibility (i.e. "...cassettes of our childhood! i almost said boyhood" pg 28). Two respective examples from the Dust Bunnies section:
inviting: "Dust Bunnies vs Wool Mice" pg 16 --> "we wanted to speak about little animals...we
want, so let's be quiet, let's eavesdrop on our knees"
dictation: "Speech, with a Conjoined Twin" pg 20 --> "consider the lengevitch of a conjoined
twin. consider the obsessed oblige of a noble king"
Moving into the Subsister section, the "twin speak" revs up as different matrilineal and female connections are explored (sisters, aunts, tallulah, marlene...). The voices weave and tighten only to switch sources, probably most apparent in the subtitle moments. This section also leaned into that playful structure, like labeling poems as "original version" but not having them be the original language. For example, pg. 49 with two English versions + lingering German words but one labeled "original version" and the other "english version" but the main difference between the two is the subtitle (in German) in the first poem.
Closing thought on one of the closing essays, "Faux-Amis Footprints" and this phrase/idiom "leading someone down the garden path" being important to Wolf's translation process (the translator noting her "guiding conceit is to play with the English idiom" pg. 169): meta moment for Wolf and her thoughts on translation and poems being too trusted and therefore doomed to deceive? That page made me think of the rhetoric of translation being riddled with anxiety about failure of language, of deceiving a reader and reconstructing a moment inauthentically rather than leaving behind a "clean and orderly translation," which would act similarly to a dictatorial single-interpretation reading of any poem right?
How Wolf bookends the poems with this Glissant quote seems important to her process of translation, and resisting a single interpretation of the poems themselves. And how that ties into playful multilingual poems highly aware of their own limitations...
I'm on a public computer, it didn't have me logged into my account. But this is Kim! ^^^^^ that whole spewage above
DeleteThere's a Deleuze for every question. Here's a summary of D. on "the fold": https://www.simonosullivan.net/articles/deleuze-dictionary.pdf
DeleteSubsister: I don't believe a word of it and I believe all the words. The liminally-sited linguistic stringing gives me comfort; because of this text-mosaic's insistence on the generative-dwelling of displacement i feel particularly, lavishly placed. There is detachment, but an elated, euphoric detachment artifacting objects as a means of Moving deeper into the multiplicitous 'self', which here is non-tethering--not even to one single mode of communication. Communication becomes hoisted up, made less systemic and more intricated.
ReplyDeletepointing to:
Delete[english version]
barbara is backed. both fort and da, that's the catch, in the breath. fast schnapp for air, another run-through, far far enough. i help. pack your things, skins, silk: all film and finger, she streams through my hands, with paillettes and little fishes. blink blink, barabara's keck whinge, she sequins, another fag, another fad, pacing the room, cornered, like fish, nightly applauded, in a window of sea.
--
Gertrude Steinish tactility on the tongue. The words make the mouth shape itself around something invisibly solid.
And: this moment be one of five permutations of selfsame moment. So then 'selfsame' intricates as: nonself, she who is addressed, the nameless, the ghost addresser, and the Reader. The epigraphs reverberate within a continuum, stretching moments into their rightful, oscillating spirals of recurrence. This section quoted here could be the subtitle mentioned in "all subtitles invariably transform the original text. ... Transformative subtitling implies that the original is not only what it is, but that it also exceeds itself."
DeleteThe reader also finds A Truth sprinkled into this from: "To leave traces in language means to lay a trail into the unpredictable within the shared conditions of our lives." The trick, Particularly of this latter epigraph, lingers in the fluid Meaningness of it. "Shared Conditions"!?!?! The conditions of our Tongues. The conditions of our bodies. The conditions of our State. The conditions of our Words. The Holy Words = The Broken Words. There is no holy, and there is no broken.
Just a clarifying question, Trish: When you said about Subsister that you "don't believe a word of it and I believe all the words," I'm wondering if you could elaborate on that apparent skepticism that I hear you speaking towards.
DeleteI guess what I'm curious about most of all is the this last sentence in your first post: I'm right there with you when you claim that, in Subsister, "Communication becomes hoisted up," though I wonder about the dichotomy (speaking of binaries we discussed last week) between "systemic" communication and "intricate(d)" communication.
To be clear, that's not to press indulgently on this matter; rather, I'm working on parsing out my own reading of Wolf's where it's precisely her "system(ic) approach" that makes her work seem so intricate(d) in the first place. Do you see these terms as mutually exclusive or are they much more dialogic (even dialectic?) in generative a productive third-term synthesis that meets somewhere--either in the middle or perhaps on some kind of transcendent level?
And the state of this "book": was it ever an other? How could this exist as simply an original? As the splicey-textural-antigravity-maneuvering piece that it is, how could it exist emptied of the translatory-interloper, making itself invaluably present?
DeleteBeloved Jake, thank you! Here's an attempt at doing you justice:
DeleteQ1: if we were to configure subjectivity here as a topology of folds, Materially comprised of selves, temporality, spatiality, and that thing called 'memory' (thanks to Johannes' sparknotes-Deleuze resource), I'd say my invocation of "belief" was triggered by This conception of subjectivity-Making. And making, here, marks for me the quintessence of Wolf/Seita's moves (ps. are they Here no longer individuals? Are they Kronenbergian Twinnage?)
What is believability? Where does it live? For me, the particular language, the Actual Word Choice, purposefully disavows (i.e. Resists/disrupts/subverts) umbilical dependence on any one PATRIARCHAL/ false-landly tongue (speaking here from the introduction)--and in effect (affect, too?), as a result of this recognition-via-conceit, i Feel trust/belief, a comfort through acknowledged and thus sublimated abjection.
The non-belief, Meanwhile, feels triggered by the artifacts, proper nouns (names), a sense of 'pretending' -I/-eye. When "jane, for my aunts always meant joy'' is also ''jane, who could be my aunt, and i shared joys and sorrows in the club'' is also ''jane, anything you like, very much, cheer cheer, brazenly so. dig deeper say goodbye.'' is also ''mit jane, sie könnte meine tante sein, freud und leid im club geteilt'' is also ''mit jane verbanden meine tanten immer freud'' IS ALSO ''my sister was too old for the nursery'' (<because epigraph)...THEN: the identity of belief, the question of identifying belief, is actively Apprehended by the conjoined Wolf/Seita, and my Readerly Position if forced into selfsame selfsame dis-believingness. Reality becomes a spiral in which an instant is recognized for its duplicitousness. The factness of an instant is Disruptured. So "I"-the-reader becomes hoisted (along with the mantled/dismantled Communication) into a SUSPENSION OF LINEARITY. In which all things must be true and false at once.
Deleteoh, @jake : the afterword quote from Caroline Bergvall puts it much better: "[d]isplacement is not here envisaged as exile but as the very condition for a positive understanding of relocation across and against the unifying, mythicized, and frequently exclusionary principles of national language and of monolingual culture"
DeleteJake's Q2: on system(ic) vs. intricate(d)
ReplyDeleteThe instigatory axis for this deluge definitely engages a conceit; resisting the system of monolingualism, thus a subversion of aforementioned false-landly-ness-language (which turns on itself upon utterance / = / self-recognizes its operations as [ph]/fallacious). The movement turning-in and also invoking-through-utterance inherently Intricates. Of course, the system (to an extent) is INESCAPABLE, but Wolf/Seita conjure a secret-trap-door through this turning, this recognizing. And for me, We-the-readers land in a dialexis, that topology of folds intricating into itself and outward: but the other is not the other any longer. It is selfsame, Recognized. The alienation of the self (ever-present) merges-seamless with what once was Other. So now we have Absolute Intrication. xD
Further possible epigraphs for these sub-sisters of ours:
"There, a birth to language, through a labyrinthine maze of names and identities coiling up, one around the other: a nostalgic ring of the unique. . . . In this story, I deeply believe that language itself was jealous." --Abdelkebir Khatibi, Amour bilingue
" "Lack" does not reside in the ignorance [méconnaissance] of a language (the French language), but in the non-mastery (be it in Creole or French) of an appropriated language. The authoritarian and prestigious intervention of the French language only strengthens the processes [les processus] of lack.
The demand of this appropriated language is therefore mediated by a critical revision of the French language. . . .
To the extent that French linguistic hegemony [Ie domesticage par la langue francaise] is exercised through a mechanism of "humanism," this revision could partake in what might be called an "anti-humanism." "
Edouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais