language and migration

Regarding language and migration, I never forget the questions that are often neglected when progress is abstractly celebrated, the questions that the real suffering human subjects face, one by one by one. Do you come from a place that is poor, that is not fully incorporated into modernity, that does not control a language that commands respect? Do you inhabit a language that does not have armies behind it and bombs and modems and technology? Do you reside in a language that will one day be extinct or whose existence does not have value in the marketplace and can’t even get you a good job and help you in the everyday struggle to survive? Do you dwell in a language that is wonderful only for making love or teaching your children the difference between right and wrong or serves to pray to God? Is your language perfumed with unpronounceable words by poets with unpronounceable names describing their unpronounceable forests and guttural maidens? How does such a language defend itself against the globalizing world?

                      —Ariel Dorfman, Chilean expatriate, novelist, poet, and distinguished professor at Duke University

 

 

After years of abandon and neglect, I am returning to the language of my mother.  In almost the same way that I have come back, after so many years of being away, to the same island to build my house.  Every thing is as strange as it is familiar.  Perhaps, it is the blood that really knows and always remembers.  Never mind if, when the unpronounceable is heard, I ask for its translation.  I want to know.  It shall not be unpronounceable again.