A-gro-ba: contaminations, translations, transcultures

[International Conference “Language as Social Semiotics” – Sv. Kirik, Bulgaria, September 7^th-9^th, 2003]

0. In this paper, my aim is to propose a notion of language as social semiotics that takes in consideration the role of the subject in language, as it emerges today in the multifarious relations of power, conceived on a global scale. This aim cannot but both deepen and explore again, yet in a renewed light, the questions that rise from concepts regarding the sense of the other in language and in society. 

Many of these aspects have been developed in the last decades by cultural studies, above all in that stream that is generally known with the name of postcolonial studies. Semiotics may at the same time both offer a theoretical foundation to a still eclectic field such as postcolonialism, and receive from it a new vital strength, also from the political point of view.

1. I begin explaining the first word of the title that I have given to this paper following Bruce Chatwin who, in his novel The Songlines, writes that

“in Tibetan, the definition of ‘human being’ is ‘a-Gro-ba’: ‘wayfarer’, ‘who makes migrations’”.

Therefore, the word I use in my title is a sort of figurative sign for denoting, though critically and provisionally, and despite all Chatwin’s ambiguities themselves, the position of the “I” who is speaking in this moment, my position, our position of utterance. It becomes a sign through which it is possible to recall some of the possible deconstructions of the pronoun “I” itself: “I who speak”, I as the subject of utterance and language. In this first part of my paper, I would explain better how, going on with Chatwin’s suggestion.

Chatwin assumes the position of the wayfarer, of the migrant, as a cultural position: his point of view is that of the postmodern travelling writer. In The Songlines, he writes that the roots of this nomadic and travelling writing destiny was probably inscribed in his proper name:

When he was a child, Chatwin says that his aunt Ruth told him that their surname had once been “Chettenwynde”, that means “winding path” in Anglo-Saxon. So he began to think that there were a mysterious connection among poetry, his name, and the road.

As it is well known, The Songlines takes its title from the Australian Aborigines belief that the totem ancestors, in their journey all over the country, were "singing the world into existence".

"A song was both map and direction-finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country".

Australia was a vivid image in Chatwin’s life. He remembers that his great-aunt had a picture book about Australia. His favorite picture, Chatwin writes,

"showed an Aboriginal family on the move. They were lean, angular people and they went about naked. . . . The man had a long forked beard and carried a spear or two and a spear thrower. The woman carried a dilly-bag and a baby at her breasts. A small boy strolled beside her--I identified myself with him".

In the novel, Chatwin represents a sort of cultural mediation in which there are three positions of utterance (three “I’s”, we may say): there is an informant, Arkady, who is a migrant himself; there are the Aborigines; there is the “I” of the novel, the narrating voice (Chatwin himself as he is “objectivated” (in Bakhtin’s terms) in the novel). Arkady is an Austalian citizen, son of Russian parents “who never read a book in English”, showing in this way a position of linguistic and cultural closing towards their land of migration. On the contrary, Arkady was doctor in History and Philosophy, and was the “friend of Song-people”. Unfortunately, in this way he had disappointed his parents, maybe breaking their dreams towards the social emancipation of their son.

Arkady tries to explain to the telling “I” of the novel the Aborigene’s view of life through a sort of cultural translation. For example:

“To understand the concept of Dream Time – he says – you have to consider it as an Aboriginal equivalent of the first two chapters of the Genesis, with a meaningful difference”.

The difference is that while in Genesis God created living beings at first and then he moulded Adam with the clay, in Australia the Ancestors created themselves with the clay.

The cultural and semiotic translation becomes writing, “travellogue”, it becomes the book itself that Chatwin generates through the notes he writes on his “moleskine”: a notebook, a place of écriture, a place of travel. In this sense, literary language becomes the place where inter-cultural translation is made possible, in spite of any presumed untranslatability among cultures and languages. It is the place where the dialogue among world-views is figured and made possible. In this case, the place of writing (Chatwin’s notebook) and the geographical place in the Aborigenes’ view play the same role: the place becomes language, thought, dialogue. But the place is a place of travel, is a wandering place, a moving space, where counsciousness is created on the basis of a plurilinguistic experience in which otherness creates the consistency of identity itself.

2. The idea of “travelling cultures”, of culture as both migration and translation has been elaborated in many recent fields of cultural studies, above all in the postcolonial stream. For example, the African English scholar Paul Gilroy, in his book The Black Atlantic, elaborates this idea through the concept of diaspora. In his opinion diaspora is

“a silent conflict on cultural codes”, a “disturbing concept”, a concept in which identity means “contingency, indeterminacy, conflict”. It is no longer an essentialistic concept and it has nothing to do with the metaphysics of “race” or “nation”. It is exactly the opposite of the coincidence between place and identity. Coming out from a culture of migration (in particular African migration, in Gilroy’s view), diaspora poses the question of otherness as implicit in sameness: in Gilroy’s words, the “changing same”.

It is not simply and not always a “happy” condition because it passes through such experiences as exile, subalternity, exploitation, in other words through the social relations of domain historically determined in the world, and historically determining what we currently call the “first” and the “third” world.

3. “With that cry, that terrible vowel, that ‘I’”:

commenting these verses by the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, Homi Bhabha describes using freely semiotic categories the generation of the position in social utterance of the colonised “I” and its emergence into the post-colonial, migrating, dissemi-nated culture of the present:

“The I intended as a vowel, as the arbitrariness of the signifier, is the sign of the interstitial difference through which the identity of the signified has been produced. The ‘I’ conceived as a pronoun, as the confession of the colinial subject made slave. [..] who traces his own name on unstable sands giving life to the postcolonial community, migrant and in-different-in-difference” (The Location of Culture, 1994).

In bhabha’s comment, the question of the other establish its own space within the “I” who speaks, establish its question itself as a question of language, of utterance, of a moving, migrating position in the discourse.

4. Language is both world-view and experience. In this horizon, language is conceived at the level of utterance, as the socially located and oriented word. I would emphasize the implicit foundation of the diasporic, migrating conceptions of intercultural relations, as they are expressed in postcolonial studies - as I have shortly quoted through both Gilroy and Bhabha - on the semiotic notion of hybridization. With regard to this, we cannot but move from Bakhtin’s definition of hybridization:

"a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor" (Discourse in the Novel).

In Bakhtin’s opinion, hybridization is intentional as an artistic device in the novel, because literature makes possible to picture a situation qualitatively different from the mere co-existence of two or more languages.

When it is unintentional, as it happens in the social history of languages, hybridization represents the primary means of change in a language. In this case, in Bakhtin’s opinion, hybridization expresses itself as

"a mixing of various ‘languages’ co-existing within the boundaries of a single dialect, a single national language, a single branch, a single group of different branches or different groups of such branches, in the historical as well as paleontological past of languages".

I would emphasize the role of hybridization not simply in diachrony, but above all in the synchronic sphere of language conceived (as the title of this conference says) as social semiotics, that is, conceived at the level of utterance (vyskazivanie, using Bakhtin’s Russian word). If we consider language in abstract, in fact, untranslatability becomes a reality. For example: how could we transfer from a language into another the Aborigines’ world-view regarding the Dream-Time and the Songlines? The theorists of linguistic relativity would say that, as language and thought are intimately connected, one cannot think outside his/her own language, therefore the Aborigines cannot be translated, the European “I” could not understand them. That means, in other words, that the Aborigines cannot speak. And this would be true, in one sense, if we consider the relations of domain that determines the decisions on what is normally considered “translatable” or not, on how often the translation occurs between dominated and dominators, between the “first” and the “third” world.

The question is the same that the Indian American scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak poses since the title in her famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. This question already underlines an idea of what is “speaking”, that is to act through recognizable signs that can be interpreted within “an already well-defined structure and history of domination” (Chow).

In Chatwin’s example, we have seen a concrete device of utterance (though intentional, because it is literary), we have seen different positions of utterance, in which the positions of migrating cultures and languages are generated as possible models of saying “I”. This is only possible in the regime of utterance considered as a field of transformation, with its evaluations, its ideological orientation, its internal conflicts.

Bakhtin writes that:

"For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. All words have the ‘taste’ of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour".

There is not a simple co-existence, as it happens in what is actually defined generically as “multi-culturalism”. The concept of hybridization lets us go further. Hybridization is a political gesture that rises when the linguistic contamination becomes a field of transformation, where hybridization itself trans-mutes, trans-figures both language and culture.

An image that contains efficaciously this condition is that of the border. The border conceived as sense-border, space-border, language-border, that is no longer a limit, but a space of transformation. This image has been well expressed by the chicano writer Gloria Anzaldúa, who has introduced the figure of the mestiza as the political subject who is produced in the hybrid space of border-lands (this is the title of her most important book of 1987, Borderlands/La Frontera). ‘Mestiza’ is a female word, but it is far from the essentialistic coincidence of grammatical, cultural and sexual gender: on the contrary, the emphasis on the female breaks any possible gender primacy in discourse. Mestizaje is a condition, an experience, in which language and the body are involved, in which language is marked by the pulsions of the subject of the social utterance. This is a multiple subject with regards to his/her/its (?) belonging, gender, language. From the semiotic point of view, both the images of the border and of the mestizaje are images of transformation: a body, a land, a language, are open towards other, look at multiple directions, towards a zone where the transit among cultures, social and individual stories is continuous.

In Anzaldua’s view, this is the zone where the “third” world meets the “first”. She pictures in her book the “jumps” of the sense that every border contains and that linguistically corresponds to the clandestine everyday migrating jumps of the border between Mexico and the United States. The language of her book is a continuous jumping and shifting among the different codes and registers of both English and Spanish, of both prose and poetry, of many dialects and talkings. The strategy of writing transforms what is implied in the level of the content into the tangible image of the expression. In this way the relation between language and power is in discussion. The image of the mestiza gives no confirmances, no reassurances. It is a

“strange doubling, a deviation of nature that horrified, a work of nature inverted”.

Anzaldúa shows the linguistic melting pot of her borderlands where a interlacement of power relations occurs: English is dethroned in Spanglish, an Anglo language pronounced with the Spanish accent; on its turn, Spanish becomes pocho when it is spoken with a strong American accent. She lists some of the languages, patois and dialects spoken in her land: Standard English, Working class and slang English, Standard Spanish, Standard Mexican Spanish, North Mexican Spanish dialect, Chicano Spanish (regional variations in texas, Arizona and Mexico), Tex-Mex, Pachuco (called caló), are only the most important.

“Deslenguadas. Somos los del español deficiente. We are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestisaje, the subject of your burla. Because we speak with tongues of fire we are culturally crucified. Racially, culturally and linguistically somos huérfanos – we speak an orphan tongue”.

presentazione

 “Because I, a mestiza,

Continually walk about of one culture

And into another,

Because I am in all cultures at the same time,

Alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro,

Me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio.

Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me hablan

Simultáneamente”.

What is implied in the figure of both hybridization and mestizaje is substantially the question of the other. Where, who, what is the sense of the other, once we have assumed that it is the “I” itself, once we consider the multifarious and translinguistics dimension of this “I” as a-Gro-ba”, once we consider, last but not least, the strict connections between the discourse order and the relations of domain in the world, in other words between language and power?