Mother Tongue: language variations
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- 1 Sara Greaves and Monique De Mattia-Viviès, Language Learning and the Mother Tongue: Multidisciplina (...)
- 2 A notion introduced in my book (a critical study and a bilingual edition) Côté guerre côté jardin : (...)
1The following poems can be read in connection with the research on the many-faceted subject of the mother tongue, especially as it helps or hinders second language learners, that I have conducted with Monique De Mattia-Viviès over the past few years. The first poem has to do with transmission, and with children who find themselves the champions of other people’s causes – causes which were themselves perhaps transmitted. Speech disorder is seen as a kind of symptom. The poem can also be seen in the light of what Monique De Mattia-Viviès describes as “language variations within the family”1, in this case “intralingual variations”, where the parents speak the same language but in contrasting ways. The second two poems also engage with intralingual variations, this time from the point of view of the exile whose language evolves without them in another country, or who feels their mother tongue unravelling. In the fourth poem language aspires to the sensuality and sensitivity of skin, to lalangue, and the final poem recalls the notions of the “plurilingual skin-voice”2 and the “bilingual overlap”, two notions I have developed in my research. The voice moves between languages, suggesting the fluidity of a plural identity and perhaps the role of exophonic writing as a refuge from intimacy.
- 3 « Entrer dans la langue ou dans les langues : de la langue maternelle à la langue mat-rangère », E- (...)
2Ces poèmes peuvent se lire en lien avec la recherche sur le sujet multidimensionnel qu’est la langue maternelle, notamment en ce qu’elle facilite ou freine l’apprentissage d’une langue seconde, que j’ai menée avec Monique De Mattia-Viviès depuis quelques années. Avec le premier poème il est question de transmission, et d’enfants qui se retrouvent être les avocats des causes des autres – des causes elles-mêmes transmises, peut-être. Le trouble du langage évoqué ici est présenté comme une sorte de symptôme. On peut également éclairer ce texte à la lumière de ce que Monique De Mattia-Viviès appelle les « variations linguistiques au sein de la famille »3, dans ce cas des « variations intra-linguales », où les parents parlent la même langue mais de manière contrastée. Les deuxième et troisième poèmes rappellent aussi cette notion de variations intra-linguales, cette fois-ci du point de vue de l’exilé.e dont la langue évolue sans lui ou elle dans un autre pays ou qui sent sa langue maternelle s’effilocher. Dans le quatrième poème la langue aspire à la sensualité et la sensibilité de la peau, à lalangue, et le dernier rappelle les notions de “Voix-peau plurilingue » et de « chevauchement bilingue » que j’ai développées dans mes travaux de recherche : la voix passe entre les langues, suggérant la fluidité d’une identité plurielle et, peut-être, le rôle de l’écriture exophonique en offrant un refuge à l’intime.
3Tongue-tied
4Tie a knot in your handkerchief
a keepsake of unrecalled
sweepstakes not yours
to win or lose...
Bear lifelong witness like Moses
to a scalding hot coal,
to your light too bright
for day, snuffed out
by a matronly scold.
Daughter of silence
you hand down the lore
more surely than any
self-proclaiming guru.
Your Aaron is a sharp glance,
your rod a silent eloquence
more efficacious than any miracle.
Night after wide-eyed night
of burning immolation,
acid etched onto copper
plates for tables of the law.
Which, perhaps, you would feign
have hammered: what is a stammer
but a stall in the flow – inarticulate
retch of rebellion?
Uneasy I wait as you stumble along
your syntactical obstacle race
and politely applaud.
5Conference
6Just as words that ring
with class-bound vowels
prick the skin-voice,
so here words trip
and traipse – spot-on smug
decorous diplomats
minding the seating
Words like facilitate
Enabling, competencies -
so many pecunious pieties -
riverrun prissily
flash legitimacy
to a polyglot audience
grateful for globish
Such words refine
to bland, ethics-wieldy
(I find your maternity
metaphor distasteful
and what’s more gendered)
handy with pathos,
design and describe
the new general
But to the visiting exile
these words sting
a reminder the river has
run
shady rivers
woodland bluebells
sunspotted pools
7Language in exile
8The Seine is rising the forecast warns,
the Marne, the Meuse…
Speeding northwards my eyes
wander a watery
landscape of flooded gardens
greenhouse panes crosshatched
with silver strokes and
pale rainbow, windbreaks
of cypress and poplar
waterlogged orchards in rows
like wading oysterers.
France is afloat – though
not at sea like old Blighty,
Europe’s maverick menacing
shipwreck. Rallying Paris
I’m off to gorge on old
language with other exiles
poetry-raiders all dangling
their language by the ear
like a lost child’s teddy.
Partners in crime – on parole
in fluent French with English
a moth(er)-eaten paisley
shawl of guilt-furled tongues.
We are like stammerers
Skirting velar plosives
or blindfold, speech a minefield
of mumbled humblings
or morphed modes for global markets.
Whose life speeds by in French
in words insouciant
of the music of home
and words immersed
in a clear elemental
liquid self-in-the-world
hanging catlike over armrests,
filling any empty space
on a cluttered desk.
What language then for us?
what thrown shuttle
for our frayed cloth of
melancholy, its thinning
threads – all those Englishes
we’ve lived in, shared or
unshared isles bristling
with difference or
chuckling at old jokes
and the blown sand
9of that once-upon-a-time strand.
10Shallows
11Shallow waters caught between
the deep and the high dry sand
Kind to toes and blennies
Warm the shore lines
Up for a massage to mould
Into runnels smooth as set
Tallow pleasing to combers
And angler ancestors
Channels wet for worms
Mineral-animal
prised from their casts
Wade smulching out
To the shrill gulls, gulp
splash of brackish water
Sparkling drops on skin
And hair gleaming seal-like
To a rock rugged-sharp
Wrinkled footsoles gripping
Limpets chimplike
Perching on a locus solus
Facing the drizzle, mind
Adrift on soft sea-skin.
12Gasp from the past
13On my smartphone
A jab on the chin
Chant, chantonner, chan-tourner
En rondes blondes
Petites filles fraîches,
Flesh de ta flesh
Fleurs des champs et des haies
Fleurs, filles, famille je vous…
Dit le fils je vous dis ou la fille
Mais l’adulte protecteur
Mais le père débonnaire
Mais le père pas le père pas le
Per-ambulator cot
Of pale yellow
Caresses the hedgerow
(Not lurching down steps)
Your wife is in heaven
But you well you’re not;
You’re exiled in Devon
Notes
1 Sara Greaves and Monique De Mattia-Viviès, Language Learning and the Mother Tongue: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, trans. by Sara Greaves (Cambridge University Press, 2022), p.18.
2 A notion introduced in my book (a critical study and a bilingual edition) Côté guerre côté jardin : excursions dans la poésie de James Fenton, Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2016 and developed further in « Entre langue maternelle et langue(s) étrangère(s), une ‘voix-peau’ plurilingue… », in press.
3 « Entrer dans la langue ou dans les langues : de la langue maternelle à la langue mat-rangère », E-rea 16.1/2018, https://journals.openedition.org/erea/6502
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Sara GREAVES, « Mother Tongue: language variations », e-Rea [En ligne], 20.1 | 2022, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2022, consulté le 15 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/erea/15389 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.15389
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