Geography of No Language

Kathy Acker: Imagine that you are in a foreign country.

Since you are going to be in this place for some time, you are trying to learn the language.

October 2009

A young Serbian poet lands in Seattle, her heeled boots striking a puddled street.

The air smells of salt and asphalt. The language hums around her like electrical wiring.

She believes she knows English.

Years of grammar drills.

Vocabulary lists.

Irregular verbs.

She tries to write.

“It doesn’t sound right,” a native speaker says.
“Awkward word choice.”

Awkward.

She looks it up.

Causing difficulty.
Causing embarrassment.
Not smooth or graceful.

Awkward like:

debt = death = that

Her mouth refuses obedience.

“Oh — where are you from?”

The question is always a trigger.
The question is always a border.

November 2009

In trying to adopt a new language, the poet approaches it with reverence.

Some words are beautiful — she repeats them privately, imagining she can roll them

underneath her fingertips like prayer beads.

Others resist her tongue.

When she wrestles them out loud, in public, they expose her.

Her foreignness spills before she can wipe it.

Kathy Acker: At the point of commencing to learn the new language,

just before having started to understand anything, you begin forgetting your own.

Within strangeness, you find yourself without a language.

December 2010

A young woman who used to be a poet gives birth to a daughter.

She talks to her in Serbian.

She reads to her in English.

She sings to her in Italian.

The baby smiles or cries.

December 2011 — diary entry

I am mute.
I am wordless.
My world is erased.

January 2012

The little girl now walks.

The mother walks with her to the library every day.

At bedtime, the mother reads Goodnight Moon, then Goodnight Seattle,

a ritual they repeat every night.

April 2012

The young woman travels to New York for a writer’s conference.

The wind in Manhattan bites. She has no words to describe it.

Tayari Jones gives a keynote and tells the story of how she wrote her first book.

At dawn, she’d hide to write inside the closet.

The ex-poet understands hiding. The story lands in her ribcage.

She writes at her kitchen counter, overseeing the baby playing on the carpet below,

usually standing or with one buttock leaning on the Ikea stool.

She returns home with Goodnight New York.

June 2012 — diary entry

Embarrassment has always been the worst feeling.

I am not mute.
Nor illiterate.
Nor uneducated.
Nor stupid.

I am not average.
I am not ordinary.

I am —

languageless.

But what is languageless?

Is it absence?

Or a corridor?

Is there a geography of no language?

Is such (no)space negative?

Where do languageless writers live?

 On ferries between cities?

In apartments where the radiator hisses in English?

In grocery stores, rehearsing sentences before reaching the cashier?

In the long pause between debt and death and that?

July 2013

The child starts preschool and switches languages before she knows she is switching.

Serbian when she is hurt.

English when she is playing.

As if she has access to an internal and an external voice.

As if she was born bilingual not only in tongue, but in being.

The ex-poet watches.

Language does not wound the child.

Language does not embarrass her.

Language moves through her.

August 2013

With her daughter in preschool four hours a day, the mother returns to writing.

She writes in coffee shops, and most of her days she stares at the whiteness of the page,

comforted by the smell of the beans.

Fall 2013

At the local library, the mother meets Richard Blanco.

Inaugural poet. Bilingual. Cuban and American and neither and both.

He reads in two languages without apology.

She watches his mouth move between them like a body crossing water.

After his talk, she asks him whether an MFA program is worth the time and the money.

He says: You can get where you want with your work without it – no doubt about it.

But the MFA will give you the community we all search for in the loneliness of writing.

That is worth everything.

She enrolls the following summer.

July 2014

One windy day, the ex-poet disembarks from a ferry

in a small coastal town with a beautiful lighthouse.

She carries two embryos.

One will cry in February.

The other will take years to find its voice.

She is pregnant, nauseous, and enrolled in a master’s program for writers.

She is awkward.

Awkward accent.
Awkward belly.
Awkward in workshop.
Awkward in ambition.

July 2014 — diary entry

I said embarrassment was the worst of feelings.
But I have not yet experienced all-day morning sickness.

What was I thinking?

A master’s program is for writers.

I am a languageless pregnant mother of a three-year-old.

Languageless.
Pregnant.
Awkward.
Self-conscious.
Always about to vomit.

Fall 2014

As her belly expands, so does her search for language.

She begins to understand: she lives in between.

Between languages.
Between continents.
Between dream and duty.
Between motherhood and freedom.
Between silence and story.

Between.

Između.

The Serbian word sits differently in the mouth. It is thicker.

More rooted. It does not apologize.

In August of 2015, the ex-poet receives a letter from her mentor.

Let all your ways of knowing, your particular and idiosyncratic ways of looking at the world into your work.

Write your dreams. Use language strangely.

Allow the music of Serbian into your English.

Write as if you are naked.

Love,
Micheline

Diary entry:

Use language strangely.

Write as if you are naked.

Naked means without protection.

Without grammar as armor. Without correctness.

The ex-poet begins to suspect that awkwardness is not a deficiency.

It is texture.

It is the body refusing to smooth itself into someone else’s mouth.

In February 2015, she gives birth to another daughter

and names her after a city in Italy known for its red square.

Red like embarrassment.
Red like blood.
Red like the beginning.

The search for language reddens.

August 2016

The young woman spends her summer vacation with her family in Greece.

While her youngest daughter takes her midday naps, the mother reads The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch.

The cover of the book is red, like her newly started search for language.

She underlines almost everything and writes notes in the margins.  

And memory has no syntax.

Once back in her hometown, the young woman leaves the kids with her parents

and locks herself in her friend’s empty apartment.

For the entire month, she writes and writes until her fingertips are sore and cracked.

She forgets about the language, obsessed with the characters she created.

October 2015 — diary entry

I found a new word: exophonic

Meaning the writer who writes outside her language.

I never thought I could write outside a language.

Can I?

The idea of a story comes before language.

First, there is a seed.

Then a pulse.

So quiet it must be felt, not heard.

An image forms. An emblem. A flicker.

Language arrives later.

Motherhood teaches her this.

Before a child speaks, she exists.

Before a novel finds its syntax, it breathes.

October 2016 — diary entry

The story in its creation is beyond language.

Samuel Beckett, who chose French to escape the habits of English, wrote:

I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

The ex-poet copies the sentence in her notebook.

She underlines go on.

In December 2016, she sends her master’s thesis to her advisor.

An 84-thousand-word novel in the English language titled, Should We Keep On Dreaming.

I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

What if languageless is not a loss?

What if it is the geography before naming?

The ferry between coasts.

The womb before the cry.

The sentence before grammar.

The book unfolds, her mentor writes to her.

Let it unfold inside and outside of you.

February 2017

The young mother watches the wind curl over Puget Sound on her ferry ride towards Port Townsend.

She is on her way to graduate.

Her, ex-poet, immigrant writer, exophonic or languageless, is going to receive a Master’s in Fine Arts.

Her eyes tear up at the sight of the Space Needle distancing from her;

the wind dries her tears in no time.

At sunset, she goes to the lighthouse to read the excerpt

of her book that she was going to read at graduation.

She can’t pronounce excerpt.

Kathy Acker: It is here, in this geography of no language, this negative space, that I can start to describe.

For I am describing that which rejects language.

The ex-poet continues to write.

Not despite the accent.
Not despite the awkwardness.
Not despite the in-between.

Because of them.

Because language, like motherhood, is not owned.

It is crossed.

It is carried.

It is born.

And sometimes, it constitutes itself in the geography of no language at all.