Mother Tongue
Dear all,
Much of the material that we have encountered has focused on complicating stable origins, deconstructing identity, politicizing and poeticizing dislocation, and nuancing the givenness and simplicity of the notion of a mother tongue. It seems that at the margins of these questions is the irreducible desire for a home, for roots, for a dwelling in comfort. But even if this is only some sort of fantasy, it is a powerful and rich one - I’m thinking of the mother figure in the works of Zukovsky, Cha, and Scott. Thus, it seems that this desire is a continual point of return as a root of tension. In fact, desire (in its psychological psychoanalytic implications) enacts its own return by definition.
I’m not really posing a question, so much as wanting to draw attention to the figure, real or not, of the mother when we talk of mother tongue (as Celan thought of it). How do we, as literary critics, poets, translators, fuse poetics of dislocation with our living interactions? Or really, is there some sort of divide in the first place?
In short, I miss my mum. Here is a poem I wrote a few days ago:
Mother Tongue
i rest
my baby
hairs on ur
shoulder
shudder as you
smother my worries
smile mouth-to-mouth as you
resuscitate my breath
Oh mother! no other’s
kin’s so close to
share each & every
mutter & murmur
i utter ur na
mẹ/i
call in our tongue
where we rest as one











