lundi 9 janvier 2012
Writing medium. I love you.
Thomas asked me yesterday if it would be possible for me to write in French. My French facebook friends, I've known for the past twenty years, wonder why all of a sudden, I've shifted from French to English, in all my facebook comments and banter. Some of them may even feel betrayed or atleast left out.It may even look like I'm a blind follower of a fad. No one can deny the fact that speaking English is one of the trendiest things you could do in a social get-together in France, like speaking in French used to be hype, back home in Chennai. I was in my twenties then, when Chennai was called Madras and I was a bit of a show off with my French, among other things. Looking back, who is not a show off in their twenties ? Honestly ? Yes, I guess I'm a bit of a show off even now. Come on ! who ever would want to stop the show ?
But that is not the reason why I choose English. And I have to admit that I'm totally capable of writing in French. After all, I qualified with one of the most prestigious degrees in this noble language. ( Here I go flaunting again !) Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is more to a language than just what makes it a communication tool ( to show off or not). I do not think that I would have put in that much effort to learn the French language, just to be a show off. Just like I would not put in that much effort to stay slim at all costs, for instance. That is one helluva trendy thing to do in France! And yet, I refuse to fall into these traps of size and shape, going to the extent of increasing boops, decreasing back-sides and adding and removing baubles of the like, and ultimately, reducing the intake of the one thing that can really nourish and satisfy you. Food. This is because I will just cease being me. I cook food and I eat it with relish, whether others decide it is trash or not. This is something I hold on to with care. My history. My being. All I'm asking for is to be me, in whatever size, shape and colour I was delivered. And if ever you catch me showing off, it will all be just me! Well, I guess we have had enough about showing off.
So what is the reason for me to write in English ? I did give Thomas' suggestion, a second thought and went about rethinking the sentences in French and realised that the fabric I was weaving was totally different. It had nothing to do with what I had written in English. I was striking different chords and producing music which was not sweet to my ear. It was not me. I being my first fan, I decided it was not good enough to be shared with others. Because, it was not me.
My mother-tongue is Tamil and it is claimed to be one of the most ancient written and spoken languages in the world. I can make myself be understood in this language, in everyday life. I can even read and write in Tamil if I put in a herculean effort. I have been called many times by the local customs police officers and the Court to be a translator to Tamil-speaking immigrants. However, there is a huge distance between me and my mother-tongue.
Let me explain. Being a very old language and lacking in regular updates, my theory is that this language is a living fossil. There are things so simple as 'I love you' and 'I'm sorry', that I couldn't frankly say in Tamil without sounding excessively ridiculous. If I had to say sorry for having stepped on someone's toes by mistake, I would sound so dramatical in Tamil in this context and yet so ridiculous if I had to say the same sorry for something as dramatic as the loss of someone near. So most Tamil speakers in my English speaking circle just resort to English and say 'I'm sorry'.
Well, when it comes to 'I love you', I still keep wondering if this makes any sense at all, even in English. When you truly love someone, you really don't have to spell it out. Well, I'm talking about the kind of love that a mother has for her children and they have for her. All of us know it is there, even when I'm yelling my guts out and raging after my children. It is always there. It is like this expression, very common in some English speaking circles, 'God bless'. I always thought God blessed everybody, whether you said it or not.
Let's get back to the omnipresent 'I love you' and what it may actually convey. A vast range of euphemisms seem to have sprouted out in the west in order to upgrade our gregarious animal lives. We all would so like to deny Darwin's truth about our existence and look at something more poetic in it all. And when it comes to the lustful 'I love you', I guess we would all like to add some spice and play around some more of this poetic game called romance, instead of the very straight forward," Hey, I'm hitting on you!" or "My hormones are bubbling for you !" or the down right "I wanna sleep with you". Though the western societies have seemed to have marched forward towards the down right, "Let's have some sex, babe", which is somewhat shockingly a step backwards in my eyes. I guess I'm a Lucy (the fossil) myself!
Like me, Tamil is slowly evolving. As much as you cannot expect the fossil Lucy, if she were to be alive today, to play games on the Wii or the Kinect, or even ride a bicycle, you cannot expect a decent 'I love you' from my native tongue. Never in the evolutionary cycle of the language, did Tamil meet with a social structure which would require of it to declare one's flame for an attractive person of the opposite sex, in these terms. From arranged marriages, India just got rocked and rolled into the very western way of life that came with its own medium, English. It is therefore quite funny to watch lustful, bubbling people fall in love in melodramatical sing-song Tamil movies and when they culminate to the point of not being able to hold the engulfing flame back any more, they break into that relieving, inevitable, "I love you" in English. A comic relief !
Very many English expressions that punctuate our social existence or communicate a vital desire, have been engulfed by today's spoken Tamil. But I know that purists will come up with translated equivalents to challenge my theory. But I refuse to ridicule myself. The "I love you" is a different concept altogether hatched by another species, born out of another history. However, I congratulate the Tamilians for having borrowed these expressions and made them theirs. But I'm pretty sure that way back, some 2000 years ago or even earlier, courting went hand in hand with other Tamil expressions, ( I would love to know what they said to each other then), when Tamil may have been the language that could convey the being to its full extent. Unfortunately, today's 'me' is totally out of tune with yesterday's Tamil.
French is a my acquired language. All my academic excellence and failures have been in French. I fell in love with this language, which I took up in school as a second language, in order to escape the nightmares that Tamil was giving me then. I first loved the soft sounds of this vowel-oriented language. It was such a peaceful change from the consonant-oriented Tamil that had the drum-beat without the music. So I grew up scholarly in French. And this growing up became more and more shaky, until I started mocking it, the Jane Birkin way, even before I knew who Jane Birkin was. When I heard her speak in French, I had found myself another TV screen friend. Try as I might, to master the genders in French, I will never master that art of maling and femaling the entire world of things. This is a genetic disorder in me or am I a different species altogether, sharing some of my unfrench genes with this Jane, who seemed to be mocking at her own disorder. She would arrogantly say 'le chaise', 'la stylo' and 'le mouche' with a very thick British accent.
One thing that trips me over is this thing about animals. The fly can be either masculine or femine, can't it ? You know the male and the female fly? You do agree with me on this, don't you? But in French, the species as such will be either 'le' or 'la', that is either masculine or feminine, with total disregard for one of the sexes. Go figure! I can understand our species being ranked under the male dominant 'l'homme' or 'les hommes'. It was a man's world after all. But are the females dominant among the flies? It is 'la mouche' that will take the cake. The fly that comes around visiting your cake on the table is 'la mouche' even before you take a look at its sex. And a giraffe is also female dominant, I think.
Well, at this point, my doctoral degree in French was being challenged, by every Tom, Dick and Harry. Or every Jean, Paul and Moustafa.
A cleaning woman, once corrected me when I made up my own simili. 'Like a curved up shrimp on fire' was immediately called back to be replaced by 'like a foetus'.That's what you would say in French, she claimed.
Curse words surged in me. But I held them back. And a few minutes later I was laughing to myself. Couldn't you make up your own similis and metaphors ? Can't you stray away from the established rules of the language? Where's the fun?
That is the secret about English which can greedily engulf all kinds of new words from everywhere in no time. I'm quite proud of some of the Tamil contributions, such as 'malgatawny and katamaran', towards English. The other secret is that English does not bother translating or making it sound very English. The word is just borrowed, made into a verb, a noun, an adverb, an adjectrive, anything. Updates are so frequent that you may need a new dictionary every six months. In so doing, it manages to keep itself abreast of its times.
Let me quote Bill Bryson on Shakespeare to throw light on the different attitudes towards a language
" And there was never a better time to delve for pleasure in language than the nineteenth century, when novelty blew through English like a spring breeze. Some 12000 words, a phenomenal number, entered the language between 1500 and 1650, about half of them still in use today"
And Shakespeare coined or first used more than 2000 words in this period. This is the freedom one gets when one uses English and that which French violently refuses to give you, leaving you, quite frustrated again.
Unfortunately, the French language is slower in its evolution. As its history, it relies on revolutions for any serious change. It stays there rigid, scientific, rational, reflecting its species' ideologies and beliefs.
I had to admit this gaping truth. I did not belong here. This was not my history. Not my being.
Over time, I've made a little game out of this gap between me and the French. It makes me laugh so much to see my friends, mostly foes, or say people I don't give a damn for, trying to seriously correct me, when I come up with the Jane Birkin's slaughter of the noble language.
Having said this, I have dodged out of this trialing experience scholarly, by going around the problem. The saving grace comes from the relieving plural. All masculines and feminines are grouped under a masculine plural 'les' even if there is only one male in a large group of a million females. Now do you seriously think that history and culture don't have a part to play in the building of a language ? Here we have a noble language leaning in favor of the masculine. As a feminist, I'm ridiculing the language more and more, and while the French keep challenging me, I am actually having a lot of fun dafiantly ridiculing the whole package.
And when this uptight, upstart, upnosed female once corrected me, I burst out, in my anger : ' Where is the penis ? Can you please show it to me?'( The word was 'bitume'. Oh yes, now I see. It's in the word itself, well almost.) Well, that's when I had reached the end of the road holding hands with the French language. This female, an Alsacian (from Alsace, I mean) had given me the immediate cause for a break up. We were partners and we had coexisted for a while with all our ups and downs.Now we are filing for a divorce. I shall not honour you any more.
But all this while, enduring this unhappy marriage, when our souls would never meet, I was longing and yearning for my childhood love. English. The language, into which I truly grew up. My father read all the Shakespearean plays to us on many a Sunday afternoon. We reread some of them and learned to enjoy the power of words, play with words, quote Shakespeare. We watched all of the BBC plays on TV, knowing some of the plays almost byheart. We went to theatres to watch English plays. We listened to music in English and American. We went on to watch Hollywood movies. Let's say French was an intermission, a parentheses of sorts.
Well, a language is not what you study in school. Nor is it a set of grammar rules to be mastered and used along with its extensive, bombastic vocabulary and jargon. It is a culture you carry with you. You see the world through that one single language, closest to you. The chords you can strike with this language make you tingle. And the language that can reach you down to the core and bring you out is truly your language. And I think mine is definitely English, though I have not backed it up with any doctoral degree. Somewhere down the line, English has become a part of me. We shall never part. I love you.
But that is not the reason why I choose English. And I have to admit that I'm totally capable of writing in French. After all, I qualified with one of the most prestigious degrees in this noble language. ( Here I go flaunting again !) Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is more to a language than just what makes it a communication tool ( to show off or not). I do not think that I would have put in that much effort to learn the French language, just to be a show off. Just like I would not put in that much effort to stay slim at all costs, for instance. That is one helluva trendy thing to do in France! And yet, I refuse to fall into these traps of size and shape, going to the extent of increasing boops, decreasing back-sides and adding and removing baubles of the like, and ultimately, reducing the intake of the one thing that can really nourish and satisfy you. Food. This is because I will just cease being me. I cook food and I eat it with relish, whether others decide it is trash or not. This is something I hold on to with care. My history. My being. All I'm asking for is to be me, in whatever size, shape and colour I was delivered. And if ever you catch me showing off, it will all be just me! Well, I guess we have had enough about showing off.
So what is the reason for me to write in English ? I did give Thomas' suggestion, a second thought and went about rethinking the sentences in French and realised that the fabric I was weaving was totally different. It had nothing to do with what I had written in English. I was striking different chords and producing music which was not sweet to my ear. It was not me. I being my first fan, I decided it was not good enough to be shared with others. Because, it was not me.
My mother-tongue is Tamil and it is claimed to be one of the most ancient written and spoken languages in the world. I can make myself be understood in this language, in everyday life. I can even read and write in Tamil if I put in a herculean effort. I have been called many times by the local customs police officers and the Court to be a translator to Tamil-speaking immigrants. However, there is a huge distance between me and my mother-tongue.
Let me explain. Being a very old language and lacking in regular updates, my theory is that this language is a living fossil. There are things so simple as 'I love you' and 'I'm sorry', that I couldn't frankly say in Tamil without sounding excessively ridiculous. If I had to say sorry for having stepped on someone's toes by mistake, I would sound so dramatical in Tamil in this context and yet so ridiculous if I had to say the same sorry for something as dramatic as the loss of someone near. So most Tamil speakers in my English speaking circle just resort to English and say 'I'm sorry'.
Well, when it comes to 'I love you', I still keep wondering if this makes any sense at all, even in English. When you truly love someone, you really don't have to spell it out. Well, I'm talking about the kind of love that a mother has for her children and they have for her. All of us know it is there, even when I'm yelling my guts out and raging after my children. It is always there. It is like this expression, very common in some English speaking circles, 'God bless'. I always thought God blessed everybody, whether you said it or not.
Let's get back to the omnipresent 'I love you' and what it may actually convey. A vast range of euphemisms seem to have sprouted out in the west in order to upgrade our gregarious animal lives. We all would so like to deny Darwin's truth about our existence and look at something more poetic in it all. And when it comes to the lustful 'I love you', I guess we would all like to add some spice and play around some more of this poetic game called romance, instead of the very straight forward," Hey, I'm hitting on you!" or "My hormones are bubbling for you !" or the down right "I wanna sleep with you". Though the western societies have seemed to have marched forward towards the down right, "Let's have some sex, babe", which is somewhat shockingly a step backwards in my eyes. I guess I'm a Lucy (the fossil) myself!
Like me, Tamil is slowly evolving. As much as you cannot expect the fossil Lucy, if she were to be alive today, to play games on the Wii or the Kinect, or even ride a bicycle, you cannot expect a decent 'I love you' from my native tongue. Never in the evolutionary cycle of the language, did Tamil meet with a social structure which would require of it to declare one's flame for an attractive person of the opposite sex, in these terms. From arranged marriages, India just got rocked and rolled into the very western way of life that came with its own medium, English. It is therefore quite funny to watch lustful, bubbling people fall in love in melodramatical sing-song Tamil movies and when they culminate to the point of not being able to hold the engulfing flame back any more, they break into that relieving, inevitable, "I love you" in English. A comic relief !
Very many English expressions that punctuate our social existence or communicate a vital desire, have been engulfed by today's spoken Tamil. But I know that purists will come up with translated equivalents to challenge my theory. But I refuse to ridicule myself. The "I love you" is a different concept altogether hatched by another species, born out of another history. However, I congratulate the Tamilians for having borrowed these expressions and made them theirs. But I'm pretty sure that way back, some 2000 years ago or even earlier, courting went hand in hand with other Tamil expressions, ( I would love to know what they said to each other then), when Tamil may have been the language that could convey the being to its full extent. Unfortunately, today's 'me' is totally out of tune with yesterday's Tamil.
French is a my acquired language. All my academic excellence and failures have been in French. I fell in love with this language, which I took up in school as a second language, in order to escape the nightmares that Tamil was giving me then. I first loved the soft sounds of this vowel-oriented language. It was such a peaceful change from the consonant-oriented Tamil that had the drum-beat without the music. So I grew up scholarly in French. And this growing up became more and more shaky, until I started mocking it, the Jane Birkin way, even before I knew who Jane Birkin was. When I heard her speak in French, I had found myself another TV screen friend. Try as I might, to master the genders in French, I will never master that art of maling and femaling the entire world of things. This is a genetic disorder in me or am I a different species altogether, sharing some of my unfrench genes with this Jane, who seemed to be mocking at her own disorder. She would arrogantly say 'le chaise', 'la stylo' and 'le mouche' with a very thick British accent.
One thing that trips me over is this thing about animals. The fly can be either masculine or femine, can't it ? You know the male and the female fly? You do agree with me on this, don't you? But in French, the species as such will be either 'le' or 'la', that is either masculine or feminine, with total disregard for one of the sexes. Go figure! I can understand our species being ranked under the male dominant 'l'homme' or 'les hommes'. It was a man's world after all. But are the females dominant among the flies? It is 'la mouche' that will take the cake. The fly that comes around visiting your cake on the table is 'la mouche' even before you take a look at its sex. And a giraffe is also female dominant, I think.
Well, at this point, my doctoral degree in French was being challenged, by every Tom, Dick and Harry. Or every Jean, Paul and Moustafa.
A cleaning woman, once corrected me when I made up my own simili. 'Like a curved up shrimp on fire' was immediately called back to be replaced by 'like a foetus'.That's what you would say in French, she claimed.
Curse words surged in me. But I held them back. And a few minutes later I was laughing to myself. Couldn't you make up your own similis and metaphors ? Can't you stray away from the established rules of the language? Where's the fun?
That is the secret about English which can greedily engulf all kinds of new words from everywhere in no time. I'm quite proud of some of the Tamil contributions, such as 'malgatawny and katamaran', towards English. The other secret is that English does not bother translating or making it sound very English. The word is just borrowed, made into a verb, a noun, an adverb, an adjectrive, anything. Updates are so frequent that you may need a new dictionary every six months. In so doing, it manages to keep itself abreast of its times.
Let me quote Bill Bryson on Shakespeare to throw light on the different attitudes towards a language
" And there was never a better time to delve for pleasure in language than the nineteenth century, when novelty blew through English like a spring breeze. Some 12000 words, a phenomenal number, entered the language between 1500 and 1650, about half of them still in use today"
And Shakespeare coined or first used more than 2000 words in this period. This is the freedom one gets when one uses English and that which French violently refuses to give you, leaving you, quite frustrated again.
Unfortunately, the French language is slower in its evolution. As its history, it relies on revolutions for any serious change. It stays there rigid, scientific, rational, reflecting its species' ideologies and beliefs.
I had to admit this gaping truth. I did not belong here. This was not my history. Not my being.
Over time, I've made a little game out of this gap between me and the French. It makes me laugh so much to see my friends, mostly foes, or say people I don't give a damn for, trying to seriously correct me, when I come up with the Jane Birkin's slaughter of the noble language.
Having said this, I have dodged out of this trialing experience scholarly, by going around the problem. The saving grace comes from the relieving plural. All masculines and feminines are grouped under a masculine plural 'les' even if there is only one male in a large group of a million females. Now do you seriously think that history and culture don't have a part to play in the building of a language ? Here we have a noble language leaning in favor of the masculine. As a feminist, I'm ridiculing the language more and more, and while the French keep challenging me, I am actually having a lot of fun dafiantly ridiculing the whole package.
And when this uptight, upstart, upnosed female once corrected me, I burst out, in my anger : ' Where is the penis ? Can you please show it to me?'( The word was 'bitume'. Oh yes, now I see. It's in the word itself, well almost.) Well, that's when I had reached the end of the road holding hands with the French language. This female, an Alsacian (from Alsace, I mean) had given me the immediate cause for a break up. We were partners and we had coexisted for a while with all our ups and downs.Now we are filing for a divorce. I shall not honour you any more.
But all this while, enduring this unhappy marriage, when our souls would never meet, I was longing and yearning for my childhood love. English. The language, into which I truly grew up. My father read all the Shakespearean plays to us on many a Sunday afternoon. We reread some of them and learned to enjoy the power of words, play with words, quote Shakespeare. We watched all of the BBC plays on TV, knowing some of the plays almost byheart. We went to theatres to watch English plays. We listened to music in English and American. We went on to watch Hollywood movies. Let's say French was an intermission, a parentheses of sorts.
Well, a language is not what you study in school. Nor is it a set of grammar rules to be mastered and used along with its extensive, bombastic vocabulary and jargon. It is a culture you carry with you. You see the world through that one single language, closest to you. The chords you can strike with this language make you tingle. And the language that can reach you down to the core and bring you out is truly your language. And I think mine is definitely English, though I have not backed it up with any doctoral degree. Somewhere down the line, English has become a part of me. We shall never part. I love you.
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