By PEDRO PENNYCOOK*
A tongue that embraces me and, with the same force, pushes me out
I remember the launch of my first book.
It was a small collection of poetry, grouped together without review and at personal expense. It was launched in a shopping mall bookstore. He acquired his literary dignity artificially. A table moved, cutting off what used to be a corridor on a daily basis, a suit bought in a hurry, a fountain pen borrowed from colleagues. Seriousness that, in its own way, sought to camouflage the poorly written words that were celebrated there. Possible dignity.
I had never seen my grandmother with a book in her hands. Mine was the first. She looked at him without really knowing what to do with that strange object. She held him with a mixture of zeal and estrangement, a deep yet distant attachment. She held him with the same hands that hugged me.
It was an extension of me, my body finally covered, mixed with someone who needs to grab the words so they don't escape and push them to bring them together to the inevitable. My whole childhood was those hands hugging me like a foreign object. Family was not knowing what exactly to do with me. Love as indecipherable belonging.
My first philosophy work was published in a foreign language.
It needed to be like this. And I was amazed to know that, although I technically didn't know English, the familiarity with which my grandmother imposed it was the same with which I saw her hold that leaflet of poems. Fifteen years ago. She held it with the confidence of someone who didn't need to read it to understand it, a confidence I never had even when I wrote them. She read me with her hands.
I learned from my grandmother that you can read with your hands.
Like coffee.
It was the gratuitousness with which that language dispossessed me that haunted me. My first “real job”, debut in philosophy, and I didn’t speak the language I was born in. I was surprised that that book reminded me of not speaking my family's language. Maybe I never said it.
Change of scenery.
Now only its foreignness exacerbated in lyrics what had always been a solitary and internal experience for me. How I dreamed of that day, how I peered into that language. Obstinately. I desired her every day, feeling her rhythms, touching her gestures, drawing her sounds. It made my mouth a scorched earth from which it could finally sprout.
I learned English like someone who carves out a voice for themselves.
It was necessary to learn another language to do so.
My.
Wasn't winning her the memory of holding in my hands what I had dreamed of for so long? And yet, it was still the same feeling as the hands that had carried them fifteen years ago. It was the same strangeness and, in a way, the same words that were contained there. They continued to be born in a permanently strange language. One is always born as a member of a language. Family is knowing how to speak a language we don't remember learning. The hands understood me.
Maybe they always understood.
They spoke in a strange language that I understood perfectly.
A tongue that embraces me and, with the same force, pushes me out.
* Peter Pennycook is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Kentucky.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
