D'où parlez vous?

Where do you speak from? The question - intriguing, knotty, gnarly - (note the silent unpronounced letters) has been on my mind for months now but, like those silent, unpronounceables, I have begun to notice that there is quite a bit more to it than meets the eye. I am no expert in French, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it seemed important to set the title question down as such - 'original' of course to Ricouer, but foreign, if not exactly alien, to me. Richard Kearney, student and translator of Paul Ricouer, opens his book Anatheism with this question and describes it as one that has haunted him. Like the ghost letters of the adjectives I used to describe it, I find that it too has had a haunting effect on me.

It is a question that requires a willingness to look closely at the threads of one's life. It doesn't mean "Where do you come from?" or "What is your mother tongue?", questions frequently asked of foreigners which can be answered factually. (And, often, if not usually, filed away in code. In Japan, at least, this is true to my experience. As a white African, I don't fit so well in the file cabinet.) Ricouer's question, however, asks for something truer than fact.

I was at last granted a release and an insight into what had begun to seem like a cumbersome koan-like question listening to a dharma talk by Mary-Grace Orr taking a lush green early morning walk recently. In the talk I was given to understand that the self is made up of a collection of stories that we are more or less attached to. Ah ha! Thinking about stories allowed me to re-gain a sense of spaciousness around keeping the question company.

It seems you apply the question to a position taken. Kearney applies it to the question of returning to God (after God). It asks: what are you speaking about, who to and from which angle are you coming at it? What is it in your sense of self, your identity -your story- that is animated in your speaking? I have thought that in our shrinking, hyper-connected world the question may serve as a role as clarifying as smelling salts.

The American philosopher Stanley Cavell, too, has shed some light on my preliminary explorations of the question, linking philosophy and autobiography, and demonstrating a model of a self that is like a nexus in a network whose arrangement shifts and adapts with each change to it, its sensitivity reminiscent of the influence of the flapping butterfly's wings in the Amazon causing storms in far off places. (Yes, chaos theory!) In Cavell's view, there is a sense of improvisation, that is appealing, an ongoing 'process of self and language in translation'. [You could read Naoko Saito's article on Cavell available here as a taster, as I did. My copy is liberally scribbled over. It's interesting, quite technical but I know I've not quite digested it sufficiently. I may return to it here another time.]

The notion of translation drew me, quite naturally, embedded as I am in a language community far beyond my youthful imaginings. Much of my life is lived quite literally in translation, improvising and between the worlds, and this is but one of the reasons why D'où parlez vous? has felt like a bit of a snake in the grass in some respects. Nevertheless, in principle, the serpent might be just the critter to assist my thinking on the topic, looking as I tend to do on the whole Apple Incident as an opportunity to enter into the adventure of full humanity.

Thoughts circumambulating this question have been roiling since Pentecost, that great feast of comm-uni-cation. You may expect further notes and queries: the language question is central to where and how I make my living.