Teaching Subjectivity. Travelling Selves for Feminist ... - MailChimp

‘before’ has been cancelled with a sponge that left rivers of blood. Your ‘after’
has been a proud struggle to reconcile the two separate parts of your biography.
Both of us have made a total effort so that everything can be reunited, all that
we love, as in childhood fantasy, the whole that gives completeness, because, as
you say, we are the sum of all our parts. To achieve this goal we should penetrate
and appropriate the cultural and linguistic codes of our adoptive societies.
And in this chosen path, language is viceroy.
In the beginning, you will learn the new language, every day you will
learn new words, but their artificiality hurts you. You see these words simply as
signs on the paper, signs that do not represent life.
But mostly the problem is that the signifier has become severed from
the signified. The words I learn now don’t stand for things in the same unquestioned
way they did in my native tongue. ‘River’ in Polish was a vital
sound, energized with the essence of riverhood, of my rivers, of my being
immersed in rivers. ‘River’ in English is cold – a word without an aura. It
has no accumulated associations for me, and it does not give off the radiating
haze of connotation. It does not evoke (...) I try laboriously to translate
not from English to Polish but from the word back to its source, to the feeling
from which it springs (…). This radical disjoining between word and
thing is a desiccating alchemy, draining the world not only of significance
but of its colours, striations, nuances – its very existence. It is the loss of a
living connection. 24
All immigrants undergo this period of dissociation of the new language
from their emotional experience. The new words are enigmatic and have no
relationship whatsoever with their previous experience. It is necessary to be
born again, to appropriate a new life, new emotional experiences so that the
new words may become full of meaning, of feeling, of warmth.
The “third space” on the horizon or exercising heterotopia?
I situated the scenario of our imaginary dialogue in one of the East European
‘transitional’ countries, in Hungary, in Budapest. I wrote a long version of my
dialogue with Eva in Italian. 25 The dialogue continues on the narrow streets
of old Buda, where we are engaged in investigating concepts such as: border
24
Ibid., 106-107.
25
Melita Richter Malabotta, “A passeggio con Eva”, in Almanacco del Ramo d’oro (Trieste, n. 4. 2004), 11-28.
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