In Search of A Mother Tongue Locating Home in Diaspora

In Search of a Mother Tongue: Locating Home in Diaspora
Author(s): Sophia Lehmann

Source: MELUS, Vol. 23, No. 4, Theory, Culture and Criticism (Winter, 1998), pp. 101-118
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of the
Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)
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In Search of a Mother Tongue: Locating

Home in Diaspora
Sophia Lehmann
San Jose,California
Placefor me takes theform of memoryand language.
-Ilan Stavan,"TheOtherVoice"
The locus of truth is always extraterritorial;its diffusion is madeclandestine

by the barbedwire and watch-towersof national dogma.
-George Steiner,"OurHomeland, The Text"
Colonialism and the Holocaust have jointly conspired to create a

legacy of global displacement, in which people are robbed of their
homeland and the language in which their culture has been formed.
Disparate diasporic communities are now faced with the shared
struggle of articulating a cultural identity in which history and home
reside in language, rather than nation, and in which language itself
must be recreated so as to bespeak the specificity of cultural experience. The situations of Jewish and Caribbean writers seem a particularly useful source of comparison, in that the Jewish-originated term
diaspora becomes a significant one for understanding Caribbean experiences, and the Caribbean idea of language as home becomes reciprocally edifying with respect to Jewish American writing. Both
Caribbean and Jewish American communities strive to mold English
into a language which can become a home within diaspora. For
Caribbean women writers the task is doubly challenging: not only
must they struggle to subvert aspects of the language which are culturally alien, but they are further left to grapple with the patriarchal
assumptions in which English is rooted. Jewish American writers
confront a different form of double alienation in the form of a double
diaspora: first from the symbolic and biblical homeland of Palestine,
and then again after the Holocaust and the death of both GermanJewish and Yiddish culture.
The term diaspora was originally coined to describe the circumstances of the Jews who lived outside of Palestine after the BabylonMELUS, Volume 23, Number 4 (Winter 1998)
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SOPHIA LEHMANN
ian exile. Since then, its application has been enlarged to include any
group who has been scattered far from its homeland, particularly
with reference to the descendants of Africans who were torn from
their native continent and brought to the "New World" as slaves beginning in the seventeenth century. The linguistic yoking of diasporic
Jews and Blacks is indicative of the common problems they face in
trying to create a sense of identity and cultural continuity in diaspora.
Writers from both groups themselves openly acknowledge the
similarity of the problem that they face. Among Caribbean women
writers, Michelle Cliff seems to feel particularly keenly the parallels
between the plight of the Jews and that of Caribbean peoples. In The
Landof LookBehind,she begins the poem "A Visit to the Secret Annex"
with a comparison between the horrors of the Holocaust and those
inflicted by colonialism in the Caribbean, which results in a particular sense of resonance between herself and Anne Frank: "I was born
later / not into this world. / The trees were not the same / The horrors not exact-but similar" (104). In Abeng as well, the narrator approaches her own Caribbean history through learning about the
Holocaust. For her, Anne Frank becomes a symbol of both a voice
which survived, in writing, the cultural annihilation of the Holocaust, and also of a female voice strong enough to contest the white,
male version of history Cliff has been handed by her father.
Jewish parallels resonate for Michelle Cliff not only in terms of the
Holocaust but also in terms of the dilemmas posed by the ability to
pass as white. In The Landof LookBehind,Cliff mentions the Maranos,
the Jews in fifteenth century Spain who were forced to pretend they
had converted to Christianity. In the same text, she writes of lightskinned Jamaicans like herself who "were able to pass into the white
American world-saving their blackness for other Jamaicans or for
trips home; in some cases, forgetting it altogether" (60). The danger
of succumbing to the pressure to pass, both culturally and physically,
and as a result forgetting, is what gives the urgency to Cliff's project
of writing herself back into her history and culture.
Forgetting and isolation, the circumstances which both the Nazis
and the colonizers tried to enforce, become self-imposed when one
passes as white. Passing for Cliff is tantamount to being defined by
others: "It was never a question of passing. It was a question of hiding...I would be whatever figure these foreign imaginations cared for
me to be. It would be so simple to let others fill in for me" (Land of
LookBehind 71). Passing was often tantamount to survival for both
Black ex-slaves and European Jews during the Holocaust. However,
the result of passing is not only forgetting, as Cliff indicates, but also
being cut off from one's community, the group with which one feels
IN SEARCH OF A MOTHER TONGUE
103
cultural and linguistic affinities: "It could become a life lived within
myself. A life cut off" (Landof LookBehind71).
The paradox of assimilation in that it tends to exacerbate rather
than alleviate the sense of marginality for which it was supposed to
be the cure. "Gentle readers," Cynthia Ozick writes, "may or may not
be surprised at this self-portrait of a third-generation American
Jew...perfectly at home and yet perfectly insecure, perfectly acculturated and yet perfectly marginal" (qtd. in Shaked 169). Gershon
Shaked refers to the protagonists of Jewish diaspora literature which
attempts to be universal and repudiates cultural specificity as "deracinated" (173), a term which implies both a lack of roots and of race:
In casting off or repressing one's "tribal" affiliation, one also loses a
sense of roots-of history and tradition.
Within both the Jewish and Caribbean diaspora, the conditions of
diaspora are intensified with each subsequent generation. Contemporary Jewish and Caribbean writers document in their stories the increased attenuation of community as younger generations move
from the country or the shtetl community into the anonymity of the
city and then abroad. Adrienne Rich writes,
The danger lies in forgettingwhat we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildrentape-recordinggrandparents'
memories on special occasionsperhaps-no casual storytellingjogged
by daily life, therebeing no shared daily life what with migrations,exiles, diasporas,rendings,the searchfor work. (78)
Under these circumstances of heightened isolation, the need to create
community through writing and language becomes even more
pressing.
Living in diaspora, Afro-Caribbean and Jewish American people
are redefining the terms of communal identity so that nationality is
not the fixed or definitive basis. George Steiner writes that Jews are,
"by definition, conscientious objector[s]: to the vulgar mystique of
the flag and the anthem, to the sleep of reason which proclaims 'my
country, right or wrong,' to the pathos and eloquence of collective
mendacities on which the nation-state-be it mass-consumer mercantile technocracy or a totalitarian oligarchy-builds it power and
aggression" (21).1Rather, in diaspora, language works both to define
and to create this sense of commonality between people who share
history and experience.
Yet defining one frontier or one base from which these people can
write in community is difficult, given the nature of diaspora. Rhoda
Reddock writes, "In an area consisting primarily of the descendants
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SOPHIA LEHMANN
of migrants, the search for a national identity goes beyond the

boundaries of the individual island, or indeed of the Caribbean region as a whole" (62). Carole Boyce Davies expands on the impossibility of imposing geographic boundaries on Caribbean identity in
Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. She suggests that the very concept of "nation" is "a male formulation," and
instead works from Benedict Anderson's idea of "imagined communities" which rely on a cultural bond rather than a racial or geographic one (12-13).
The notion of developing cultural allegiances is an important one,
for it helps to overturn essentialist constructions of race and ethnicity.
Racially related cultural practices are based in learned ideas, rather
than genetic composition. If the boundaries which define one culture
and language are not rigidly defined, then neither are the boundaries
which divide that culture from other cultures insurmountable
(Mintz Introduction). The American emphasis on difference works to
obscure the fact that most Americans (including people from the
Caribbean) "share the common quality of a foreign past" and a contemporary diaspora (Mintz 2).
Yet in countries which are founded according to nationalist principles, a tension arises for people who define themselves in terms
of diaspora rather than nation. Shaked defines this problem
through the notion of "dual identity" (167): a Jewish identity in diaspora which perforce includes a cultural and religious tradition at
odds with the non-Jewish culture and language of the country at
large.
The tension between nation and culture is one which Carole Boyce
Davies emphasizes with respect to Afro-Caribbean people. She replaces nationhood by the idea of "migratory subjectivity," in which
culture becomes a concept which spans geographic boundaries. An
analog of Davies' migratory subject is the wandering Jew; the term
was initially a medieval Christian condemnation of the Jew who was
fated to walk the earth as punishment for scorning the crucifixion,
yet it has become a metaphor for the diasporic Jew who is continually reformulating an identity in successive exiles.
Through the necessity of redefinition, diaspora itself becomes the
basis for creating culture and bridging cultural differences: The uniformity of a fixed or rigidly bounded culture is replaced by more
open and mutable one in which the spaces between languages and
countries become sites of new creation rather than marginality.
For women in the Caribbean, creating a language which expresses
and embodies their history and experience is an arduous and ongoing process. Since the arrival of enslaved Africans in the seventeenth
105
century, culture in the Caribbean has been a function of migration

and diaspora. To define the experience linguistically, life began for
the African slaves with the Middle Passage, a phrase which implies
an immediate decentering and liminality, as well as an ongoing
process-motion, as opposed to fixity. Torn from different geographic areas and different cultures, the common point of origin for the
slaves was this oceanic crossing.
British colonizers sought to eclipse this fluidity by imposing artificially delineated geographic and linguistic boundaries. They referred
to the Americas as the New World, a term which served to eclipse the
continuing connection with the "old worlds" from which both slaves
and colonizers came. Not only did the term refuse to acknowledge
the cultures already in existence in the Americas, but it overlooked
the oceanic passage and implied a clean break, a self-sufficient and
new "world" unto itself, with clearly defined boundaries and no unruly links to other cultures.
Concomitant with the notion of a New World was the imposition
of standard English, a language which was presented as globally applicable within the parameters of this new world, yet which in fact
expressed the historical realities of only a small number of people in
the Caribbean, and expressed the current experiences of absolutely
no one, the land itself being alien to pre-existing English vocabulary.
In the four hundred years since the Middle Passage, the challenge
for people living in the English-speaking Caribbean has been to subvert the imposition of standard English and mold it into a language
which reflects the realities of the Caribbean peoples. As Marlene
Nourbese Philip writes, "In the vortex of New World slavery, the
African forged new and different words, developed strategies to impress her experience on the language. The formal standard language
was subverted, turned upside down, inside out, and even sometimes
erased" (She Tries Her Tongue 17). Unlike the codified, "standard"
English, Caribbean demotics developed orally. Since African families
and communities had been forced apart, there was no central locus
for this process. Variants of Creole developed for the necessity of
communication between slaves and as part of a rebellion against the
imperialist imposition of a language which denigrated or denied
Black existence.
Philip describes the endeavor to create a language which is capable of describing female, Caribbean reality as a search for a mother
tongue. Because connections with African civilizations have been
erased or suppressed in the Western European tradition, Philip
writes that she has become an "epistemological orphan" ("Managing
the Unmanageable" 299). She feels that she has no choice but to use
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SOPHIA LEHMANN
English as the base from which she works, but it is a father tongue for
her, not a mother tongue; an international, written language rather
than a localized and personalized one (She TriesHer Tongue18).
Writers such as Merle Hodge have turned to Creole as a solution to
the problems posed by writing in standard English. She defines Creole ("a fusion of West African syntax and the modified vocabulary of
one or another European language") as her mother tongue, in opposition to the "international language" of English ("Challenges" 204).
Yet the danger of using only a local or demotic language is both that
of repeating the artificial and enforced boundaries which the British
tried to impose with the introduction of standard English, and of isolating one's self from other cultural communities. As Philip writes,
"Too often [dialects] remain a parallel and closed experience" (She
TriesHer Tongue19).
To phrase it differently, the goal is to create a language which functions as both an international language, as standard English does,
and also as a "tribal" language-a language which expresses the particular realities of the community with which one identifies (Ozick,
"Toward a New Yiddish"). Philip endeavors to write from "the confrontation between the formal and the demotic," and asserts, "It is in
the continuum of expression from standard to Caribbean English that
the veracity of the experience lies" (She TriesHer Tongue18). To return
to the metaphor of the Middle Passage: In a country which has been
migratory since the first slave ships arrived, it seems appropriate to
create a language in the spaces between conflicting cultures rather
than within the rigid parameters of one culture or country.
The emphasis I have placed on fluidity is not meant to obscure the
violence of the process. Wrestling for the space in which to speak and
write is an act which irrevocably alters both interactive cultures and
languages: a process akin to Homi Bhabha's concept of hybridity,
but, from the perspective of Caribbean women, a hybridity of violence and rupture rather than simply exchange or mutual influence.
Opal Palmer Adisa uses the metaphor "She scrape she knee" to describe the process: Women who scrape their knees are those who
"dare to be more or other than what good girls are supposed to be"
and continue to question and act in defiance of the laws and language
imposed by those in power, in order to survive and be heard (145).
Creating a new language involves both reviving or reinterpreting
old forms and also creating new forms. In the Caribbean this often involves the pairing of African rhythms and music with Creole/ English words. Kamau Brathwaite writes,
107
English [nation language] may be in terms of its lexicon, but it is not

Englishin terms of its syntax.And Englishit certainlyis not in terms of
its rhythm and timbre,its own sound explosion.... Often it is an English which is like a howl, or a shout, or a machine-gun,or the wind, or
a wave. It is also like the blues. And sometimes it is English and
Africanat the same time. (266)
Music survived the Middle Passage better than words, because of its
ability to transcend cultural specificity and communicate experiences
which were in other ways silenced.
Orally, Caribbean languages subvert standard English through the
use of African rhythms. In writing, they disrupt standard English literary forms through challenging the linearity of the narrative. In her
novel Angel, Merle Collins interrupts the sequence of chapters, which
are titled in standard English, with outbursts of darkly printed section headings in Grenadian Creole. And in her theoretical work Black
Women,Writing and Identity, Carole Boyce Davies interrupts her own
introduction with what she calls "migration horror stories":
Thesenarrativeshave theirown separatetextualities,and are deliberate
attemptsto breakthroughthe tiredness,fake linearityand posturingof
academicdiscourse.Horrordisruptsseamless narrativesof people and
place. (4)
Not only does non-linearity expose the artificiality of "seamless narratives," but it incorporates an element of orality-the notions of interaction and of repetition-into writing.
Fluidity of content and form seems to be especially relevant to the
experience and writing of women, from the time of slavery to the present. This is perhaps in part due to their exclusion from male
Caribbean as well as colonialist cultural expression. For women who
are accustomed to inhabiting marginal spaces, the ability to cross
boundaries is a related occurrence. The tropes of both Middle Passage and margin thus become empowering rather than disempowering locations, despite the troubled history behind them. As Philip insightfully remarks, one could equally well call the margin a frontier,
thereby casting it in a fittingly revolutionary light and avoiding the
negative connotations ("Managing" 300).
As is suggested by the metaphor of a mother tongue, the female
body becomes an important source for Caribbean women in the endeavor to create a language which reflects their experience. Not only
does the female body become a source of agency and power different
from that offered in patriarchal paradigms, its use also becomes a reclaiming of a body which has been appropriated and misread by both
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SOPHIA LEHMANN
men and whites. The linking of the African-American or AfroCaribbean female body with issues of slavery and freedom originated in slave narratives such as The History of Mary Prince and Harriet
Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Both Prince and Jacobs include vivid accounts of the sexual brutalization which typified the
treatment of female slaves. Prince was the first Black woman to publicly articulate the abused she suffered as a woman, and, as in most
slave narratives, the attainment of liberty and literacy are inextricably linked in her narrative.
Marlene Nourbese Philip, in her poem "Discourse on the Logic of
Language" refers back to the legacy of slave narratives and the question of literacy and the female body. She creates a visceral image of a
woman licking her newborn child as an evocation of the means by
which women transmit language; the image serves both as a paradigm for a positive, female language, and as a reclaiming of the experience of Mary Prince (She Tries Her Tongue 56-59). Philip also responds to the communal voice behind slave narratives. Henry Louis
Gates writes, "There can be little doubt that, when the ex-slave author decided to write his or her story, he or she did so only after reading, and rereading, the telling stories of other slave authors who preceded them. In this process of imitation and repetition, the black
slave's narrative came to be a communal utterance, a collective tale,
rather than merely an individual's autobiography" (x). Prince makes
the process explicit through incorporating the voices of other slaves
within her own narrative. At another level, her text becomes communal in that it is framed by the testimonies of its abolitionist editors.
Philip, responding to the tradition of communal voice while simultaneously inverting the hierarchy of power, includes in her poem on
one page a slave edict written by a British colonizer, the above-mentioned scenario of mother and child, a medical description of the operation of language, and a monologue about the loss of a mother
tongue and the related problems of using English. However in
Philip's text, unlike that of Prince, it is she who does the final editing
and framing.
Perhaps one reason for the ability of Caribbean women to combine
different voices, languages and media to create one text stems from
women's link with orature. Although oral storytelling is central to
both male and female texts of the Caribbean, women trace their connection to the genre through a female lineage: their mothers and
grandmothers, and then more archetypally, Nanny of the Maroons,
who rebelled against her enslavers and became a central figure in
Caribbean folklore. Stories recount her physically repelling attacks of
bullets with her buttocks, sending the bullets ricocheting back to-
109
ward her oppressors (Ford Smith 3). Her physical resistance serves as
a model for the linguistic rebellion of later Caribbean women, who
likewise seek to turn the oppressive aspects of English back on those
who enforced its practice.
In this vein, Louise Bennett becomes a more recent model for
women writing in the Caribbean, because of her insistent and rebellious use of Creole, her refusal to write in standard English. In her poetry, she adopts the voices of a wide range of Jamaican women, and
shows the strength they have manifested over the ages: "An long before Oman lib bruck out / Over foreign lan / Jamaica female wasa
work / Her liberated plan!" (22). It was largely through her work that
Creole was introduced into the realm of "serious" literature, as opposed to remaining sequestered because of the taint of inferiority and
illiteracy which clung to it.
The boundaries of language are blurred further for women in the
English-speaking Caribbean by their insistence on interweaving "fiction" and "theory." Kamau Brathwaite describes a male paradigm of
language, in which he draws a clear distinction between the two
modes: "Our novelists have always been conscious of these native resources [of oral literature], but the critics and academics have, as is
often the case, lagged far behind" (268). Women like Marlene
Nourbese Philip and Michelle Cliff, by contrast, write poems and stories which double as theoretical manifestos.
The blurring of genre distinctions emphasizes the political character of fiction; far from being removed from reality, the fiction of
Caribbean writers is a political tool of self-empowerment and liberation. Merle Hodge writes, "Fiction has immense political power...I
began writing, in my adult life, in protest against my education and
the arrogant assumptions upon which it rested: that I and my world
were nothing and that to rescue ourselves from nothingness we had
best seek admission to the world of their storybook" (202). Similarly,
Erna Brodber writes of her "twinning of fiction and science" as part
of her "activist intention" to spread information through which
"blacks and particularly those of the diaspora will forge a closer unity and, thus fused, be able to face the rest of the world more confidently" (167, 164). Fiction becomes a means both of resisting colonial
cultural and linguistic domination, and also of creating community.
The centrality of community is particularly strong with respect to
orature, which, because it is not tied to one fixed text, is readapted
and reworked with each telling as part of a collaboration between
speaker and audience which takes its form from the interplay between them. Brathwaite writes that the oral tradition "makes demands not only on the poet but also on the audience to complete the
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SOPHIA LEHMANN
community: the noise and sounds that the poet makes are responded
to by the audience and are returned to him. Hence we have the creation of a continuum where the meaning truly resides" (273).
In that language should serve to mirror the reality of one's existence, the political ends of resisting colonialist culture and creating
community are related. Marlene Nourbese Philip, in describing the
difficulties of creating a text which reflects the chaos of African experiences in the "New World," writes, "The form of the poem becomes
not only a more true reflection of the experience out of which it came,
but also as important as the content. The poem as a whole, therefore,
becomes a more accurate mirror or the circumstances that underpin
it" ("Managing" 298). Subverting colonial images of daffodils (which
dominated the primers from which Caribbean children learned to
read) by writing in language which reflects life in the Caribbean both
helps to provide Caribbean readers with words and images to describe their own experience and also validates their culture, as opposed to leaving them with the feeling that because it has not been included in literature, it is inferior to the imposed British culture.
Like Caribbean women, American Jewish writers are faced with
the dilemma of creating a mother tongue, a tribal language which
both subverts and is molded from standard English. Whereas for the
Afro-Caribbean community the challenge lies in overturning British
colonialist linguistic and cultural impositions, for American Jews the
struggle is to express themselves in a language which is based in
Christianity. John Hollander writes,
A poet whose language is English, whose wrestling grips are English
hammerlocksand chanceries,has the EnglishBiblebuilt into the heart
not only of the diction and syntax,but also the poetics of his language.
The English Bible is a polemically Protestanttranslationof an orthodox Christianbook called the Old Testament,which is itself a Christian
interpretive translationof the Torah.... Thus there is a profound and
ever-presentirony in a [Jewish]poet's writing "in"(would "out of" be
better?)a language from whose literarytraditionTorahis not, in fact,
merely absent but ratherpresent in such fascinatinglydistorted form.
(44)
Cynthia Ozick addresses the dilemma of English and its affinity
with Christian rather than Jewish thought in "The Pagan Rabbi," the
story of a rabbi who abandons his Judaic learning and community for
the lure of the Greek naiads and dryads he fancies he sees cavorting
in a park. As a result of his turn from tradition to idolatry, he is separated from his soul and eventually commits suicide, hanging himself
from a tree. The pagan rabbi's sense of cultural fragmentation is sym-
111
bolized by his diary, which he writes in three languages, Greek, Hebrew, and English. The Greek names and celebrates the forest sprites
of the Pagan Rabbi's imaginings; the Hebrew cites Scriptural passages that chastise those who go "a-whoring" after Nature; and the
English is a compilation of excerpts from Romantic poetry. The English, in Ozick's view, is clearly aligned with the Greek: it is a language
wrought to express the beauty of nature and art, rather than the
moral and historical seriousness of the Jewish covenental tradition.
Hollander uses as a means of entry into the English language, a
starting point for transforming and claiming it as one's own, the fact
that English has always been an amalgamation of various cultures
and linguistic heritages and as such has, in a sense, always been a diasporic language:
The English language itself, partly Germanic,partly Romance,veined
with Latinand Greekspecial vocabularies,its writing system and early literatureshaped by Christendom,its poetic history shaped by the
gradual unfolding of the ProtestantReformationfirst in England and
then in America,its great "rabbis"being Spenserand Shakespeareand
Milton and Wordsworthand and Emersonand Whitman,its character
partakingfor the Jewish poet of Hebrew and Aramaicand the Yiddish
or Spanishor Arabicof daily life over-thecenturiesall at once. (48)
Yet even if we concede that English has never been a cultural
monolith, we are left with the task of creating a particularly Jewish
voice within standard English. Cynthia Ozick refers to English as
"The New Yiddish," because the Holocaust eradicated Yiddish, the
lingua franca of Eastern European Jews, in as irreparable a way as
slavery eradicated African languages for people brought to the
Caribbean. However, for the Jews the effect was layered, because before the Holocaust they were already living in a diaspora. After the
Holocaust, then, there is a sort of double diaspora: many Jews who
had made Germany and Eastern Europe their home, if they survived
the Holocaust, fled to America. Not only were they scattered from
their original and symbolic homeland of Palestine, but they were
now deprived of the homes which they had inhabited for centuries in
Europe. Diaspora was further redefined for the Jews by the creation
of the State of Israel, a contemporary national homeland to which
they could emigrate, rather than, as previously, a symbolic biblical
homeland of the past, or, in the case of the African Diaspora, a past
homeland and place of origin. After the Holocaust there were not
enough people left who spoke Yiddish to make it a viable medium of
communication within the larger community, nor, perhaps, would it
have suited or been able to express the new realities and exigencies of
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SOPHIA LEHMANN
post-war existence any more than African languages would in the

Caribbean. Ozick writes, "The German that became Yiddish became
Jewish:it became the instrument of our peoplehood on the European
continent, and when a spectacular body of literature at last sprang
out of it, it fulfilled itself as a Jewish language. I envision the same for
the English of English-speaking Jews" (176). In other words, English
must become a mother tongue for American Jews, as well as a father
tongue.
In the context of molding English into a tribal language, Ozick addresses the issue of audience. She uses the shofar, or ram's horn, as a
model for language in diaspora: "If we blow into the narrow end of
the shofar, we will be heard far. But if we choose to be Mankind
rather than Jewish and blow into the wider part, we will not be heard
at all" (177). Thus the use of a "tribal language" within English, far
from reducing one's audience, actually broadens it, because only
through speaking from the specificity of one's experience can one
create a sound heartfelt and loud enough to be heard.
Like Marlene Nourbese Philip, however, Ozick cautions against
using only a tribal language: In the story "Envy; or, Yiddish in America" she attacks the parochialism and solipsism of Edelshtein, a central character who bitterly clings to Yiddish and is therefore imprisoned in the past. Once Jews are living in America, Ozick implies, it is
foolish nostalgia to continue to use Yiddish, a language which practically no one understands, whose culture has been annihilated, and
the use of which therefore only leads to frustration. Philip and Ozick
both advocate a form of bridging, a reconception of English as both
father and mother tongue.
For contemporary diasporic Jews, another linguistic option is the
interjection of modern Hebrew. Young American Jewish authors like
Allegra Goodman are increasingly incorporating Hebrew into the
English of their characters, much as earlier generations of American
Jewish authors used Yiddish. In Goodman's story "Variant Text," a
teacher at the religious preschool, the gan, writes on the blackboard,
"Hashemor Darwin, you decide" (90); and the protagonist expresses
approbation for a bar mitzvah reading recited according to the modern Hebrew pronunciation rather than "those twisted Hungarian and
Rumanian vowels from the old-timers," the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazic Jews (103). Yet Goodman's story suggests an antithetical dilemma to that posed by "Envy...," namely, that the use of Hebrew accompanies the dismissal of history in favor of exclusively contemporary issues. The Jewish legacy invoked in "Variant Text" is a biblical,
religious one, rather than a historical or recent one. The Holocaust is
never mentioned.
113
The problemsof writing in English while rememberingJewish history are intensified by the language's literary tradition. In his story
"The Lady of the Lake," Bernard Malamud writes Jews into the
canon of English literatureby reworking classic texts. The story recounts the experiences of an AmericanJew who conceals his Jewish
heritage by changing his name from Levin to Freeman, clearly in
hopes of attainingfreedom from marginalizationand anti-Semitism.
He travels to Italy, where he falls in love with a beautiful Italian
woman, Isabella. She repeatedly inquires whether he is Jewish, and
each time he vociferously denies it. The story ends with her revealing
her breast, marked by the numerical tattoo of the concentration
camps, as she tells "Freeman"that she cannot be with someone who
is not a Jew: "Mypast is meaningful to me. I treasurewhat I suffered
for" (132).Levin/Freeman loses both honor and community through
the denial of his Jewish identity. Malamud addresses the conflicting
legacies of Judaism and English literature through reworking
Arthurianlegend. He recreatesthe mythic Lady of the Lake as a contemporary Jew, and in doing so emphasizing the contrast between
Arthur,who proudly comes into his identity as he is given Excalibur
by the Lady of the Lake, and Levin, who is left empty-handed and
alone. Malamud's story echoes not only the episode from Malory's
MorteD'Arthurbut also many aspects of Henry James'sTheAmerican,
therebyclaiming a place within a specificallyAmericanliterarytradition as well. "Freeman,"like James'ChristopherNewman, travels to
Europe to become a "new man," and find adventure and romance.
Yet Newman is indeed the representative rich, young American;
"Freeman,"by contrast, is only masquerading as such; ironically,
throughhis Judaism,he has the complexity of history and experience
which Newman seeks in Europe. WhereasJames highlights the differencesbetween America and Europe,Malamud,by setting the story in Italy and exploring the potential solidaritybetween Isabellaand
"Freeman,"emphasizes the way in which diasporic community transcends nationality.
Though both Caribbeanand Jewish writers respond to earliertexts
in reworking English, what differentiatestheir endeavors to create a
home within English is that Jews are heir to a cultural and religious
tradition which has survived since biblical times. The centralJewish
texts, in this sense, in some respects serve an analogous function to
that of African rhythms and music in the Caribbean.The Torahand
accompanyingrabbiniccommentaryhave served as the base for Jewish community and continuity throughout the ages. The French
philosopher EmmanuelLevinas refersto the Jewish people as "a nation united by ideas" ratherthan land (257). He continues, "Thecu-
114
SOPHIA LEHMANN
riosity which has been reawakened in the great books of Judaism,

and the necessity of applying a thought to them that is not simply
emotional but is a demanding one, is the principal condition for the
survival of Jews in the Diaspora" (258). On Passover, Jews retell the
story of the Exodus from Egypt not only as a remembrance but as a
way of actually reliving the experience. Jonathan Boyarin writes,
"Jews have always, it seems, used narrative to recreate their shared
identities across time. This technique demonstrates language as an
ethnic strategy that need not impinge upon the autonomy of others"
(Storm FromParadise).
The trait which has enabled the survival of the central texts is an
insistence on distinctions which is unique to the rigors of Jewish Law.
Levinas writes, "We cannot be conscious of something in whatever
way we wish! The other path [from the vagaries of subjective choice]
is steep but the only one to take: it brings us back to the source, the
forgotten, ancient difficult books, and plunges us into strict and laborious study" (52). It is a point elucidated by Cynthia Ozick's story
"The Pagan Rabbi": The eponymous rabbi's transgression is not his
interest in the world of nature, but his betrayal of the rigidity of Judaic distinctions. He seeks to efface the boundary between the Jewish
G-d and the idols of Nature, to reconcile monotheism with multiplicity.
In his story "The Eighth Day," Max Apple considers how the adherence to distinctions operates in contemporary, multicultural
America. The narrator's girlfriend is interested in "primal therapy,"
and encourages the narrator to try to reexperience his birth. However, he finds himself unable to remember anything preceding circumcision. At first he struggles with his girlfriend to overcome this impasse, but by the conclusion of the story he no longer wants to undo
the covenant with G-d signified by circumcision. He realizes that the
Eighth Day, that on which circumcision occurs, is emblematic of what
distinguishes him as a Jew. As Apple's story indicates, the Jewish
American reformulation of English as a mother tongue must adhere
to traditional Jewish distinctions while simultaneously responding to
the exigencies of contemporary American culture.
The common legacy of slavery and the Holocaust lies not only in
the difficulty of constructing a new language and repairing a culture
which has been torn apart, but also in the problem of expressing the
inexpressible: What does one do when one's people have undergone
atrocities so horrific that they defy language, and yet, as Marlene
Nourbese Philip comments, one must write about them in order to
move on:
115
The Africanin the Caribbeancould move away from the experienceof

slavery in time; she could even acquiresome perspective upon it, but
the experience,having never been reclaimedand integratedmetaphorically through the language and so within the psyche, could never be
transcended. (SheTriesHerTongue15)
This is a problem which both Cynthia Ozick and Aharon Appelfeld
write about with respect to the Holocaust.2 For both of them, art becomes a means of transcending what is otherwise impossible to express. In her story "The Shawl," Ozick has the central character turn
to metaphor to describe the moment in which her child is thrown
against an electric fence by a Nazi: "She looked like a butterfly touching a silver vine" (Shawl 9). Only through an image as anomalous to
the concentration camps as a butterfly can the sense of dehumanization which occurred be conveyed. Appelfeld expounds on the sentiment in a recent collection of essays: "Who can redeem the fears, the
pains, the tortures, and the hidden beliefs from the darkness...if not
art?" He writes (BeyondDespair), thereby reversing Adorno's dictum
that there is no art after the Holocaust. Fiction is further politicized in
this context: it becomes a means of both remembering and giving
voice to history.
The power of the word both to create and transcend reality is central within both Afro-Caribbean and Judaic tradition. Philip describes
New World Africans as "descendants of cultures and societies where
the word and the act of naming was the focal point and fulcrum of
societal forces" (She TriesHer Tongue21). In Judaic tradition, the word
is equally central. According to Jewish mysticism, one can bring
golems, clay monsters, to life by writing the name of G-d on their
foreheads, then return them to earth by erasing the name. It is as
though the spirit of G-d is within the words themselves.
Because of the centrality of language to both Jewish and Caribbean
cultures, creating a mother tongue which incorporates both history
and contemporary culture and experience is tantamount to creating a
home within the diaspora. Philip writes of the need for language "to
name and give voice to the i-mage and the experience behind that image-the things we conceive in our hearts-and so house the being"
(She TriesHer Tongue20, emphasis added). She continues by discussing
"the challenge facing the African Caribbean writer who is interested in
making English her home"(She TriesHer Tongue21, emphasis added).
John Hollander recalls that the Torahbegins with the Hebrew letter bet,
which means house, and explains that "the original Phoenician syllabic sign [for the letter] was derived from...a pictogram [of a
house]" (47). And George Steiner argues that the textual focus within
116
SOPHIA LEHMANN
Judaism makes diaspora more conducive than even the state of Israel
to the practice of traditional Judaism, because in Israel, issues of nationality tend to obscure those of the text, the true "homeland" of the
Jewish people ("Our Homeland, The Text").
In his memoir The Invention of Solitude, Paul Auster approaches the
potentialities of language as a mutable home within the Diaspora. He
transcends the limitations of English by emphasizing the importance
of translation, on both a literal and metaphoric level, to create bridges
between cultures and between past and present. In the memoir,
Auster sequesters himself in a small room to write about his father's
death. He discovers that the objects his father has left are without
meaning or memorial value, that meaning must be created through
forging imaginative connections in his own writing. "Memory as a
place," Auster writes, reformulating the concept of language as
home.
Images of exile and wandering abound in Auster's narrative: A
photograph from which his grandfather has been torn out, "exiled to
another dimension" (34); his father's family's frequent moves, which
he characterizes as "nomadism" (48); Amsterdam as a maze of streets
through which he wanders, lost; descriptions of his travels, of the numerous apartments in which he has lived in New York, in Paris; the
isolated room in which he writes. Yet he his alone in the room only on
a physical level. The memories and sense of community which he
creates through his writing transcend place, and in doing so are characterized by Auster as specifically Jewish. Early in the narrative, he
writes with respect to his doubts about the success of his project,
"Just because you wander in the desert, it does not mean there is a
promised land" (32). He begins the latter half of his narrative, entitled "The Book of Memory," in Anne Frank's house, and he quotes
Marina Tsvetayeva, who wrote, "In this most Christian of worlds /
All poets are Jews" (Auster 95). The closest Auster comes to finding a
"promised land" is in discovering the power of his own storytelling
to overcome his solitude and connect him with his family history and
with a community including all those whose experiences resonate
with resemblance to his own.
Language is a form of bridging at many levels. Marlene Nourbese
Philip writes about "the bridge that language creates [in] the
crossover from [internal] i-mage to expression" (She TriesHer Tongue
15). Language also functions as a bridge within a particular culture or
community, between various members of the community; and then
as a bridge between communities and cultures. In this context, it is
important to develop communication and solidarity between different mother tongues and cultures which develop in the English speak-
IN SEARCHOFA MOTHERTONGUE
117
ing world. In making English a home, Caribbeanwomen and American Jews are creatingbridges both within their own community and
with other cultures trying to find a home within English, and hopefully learning from each other further strategies for this process of
subversion and reclamation.
Notes
1.
2.
Steiner's assessment is dismissive of the impact of the creation of the State of

Israel, which of course does provide a modern geographic and national homeland for the Jews. Elie Kedourie is censorious of Israeli nationalism,
"accus[ing] the Zionists of 'injecting national folklore' into Judaism" (qtd. in
Saul Bellow, ToJerusalemand Back 191); the implication is that before the creation of Israel, the Jewish people were united by common diasporic existence
and were therefore not subject to internal rifts based in nationalist concerns.
The issue of writing about the Holocaust has a long history, stemming from
Theodor Adorno's statement that it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz
and Elie Wiesel's insistence that only those who directly experienced the horrors of the Holocaust can understand it. Among those expressing opposing
views are Appelfeld, who urges writers to demystify the Holocaust and make
it accessible to the average individual; and George Steiner, who acknowledges
the multifarious difficulties of writing about the Holocaust but concludes, "For
a Jew to be silent about any part of his own history is self-mutilation" ("The
Long Life of Metaphor" 155).
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Nessa Rapoport. New York:Schocken, 1992.
Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude. New York: Penguin, 1982.
Bellow, Saul. ToJerusalemand Back.New York:Avon, 1976.
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Brathwaite, Kamau. "History of the Voice." Roots.Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993.
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In Search of a Mother Tongue: Locating Home in Diaspora

Author(s): Sophia Lehmann

In Search of a Mother Tongue: Locating

Placefor me takes theform of memoryand language.

The locus of truth is always extraterritorial;its diffusion is madeclandestine

-George Steiner,"OurHomeland, The Text"

Colonialism and the Holocaust have jointly conspired to create a

IN SEARCH OF A MOTHER TONGUE

of migrants, the search for a national identity goes beyond the

IN SEARCH OF A MOTHER TONGUE

century, culture in the Caribbean has been a function of migration

IN SEARCH OF A MOTHER TONGUE

English [nation language] may be in terms of its lexicon, but it is not

IN SEARCH OF A MOTHER TONGUE

IN SEARCH OF A MOTHER TONGUE

post-war existence any more than African languages would in the

IN SEARCH OF A MOTHER TONGUE

riosity which has been reawakened in the great books of Judaism,

IN SEARCH OF A MOTHER TONGUE

The Africanin the Caribbeancould move away from the experienceof

Steiner's assessment is dismissive of the impact of the creation of the State of

Wellesley: Calaloux, 1990.

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