My mother tongue is a foreign language
This anomalous utterance by the French poet of Jewish-Arabic origin, Edmond Jabes, invites us to dive deep into realms such as estrangement and foreignness within our most intimate, to find a way of embracing them.
overview
"My mother tongue is a foreign language" is a collection of spoken-word / sonic fiction essays, united by the themes of language and otherness, seeking to re-examine the very essence of some core concepts that shape the contemporary subject at both individual and collective levels: from the identity policies to language as technology that forms our culture and ideology, the quest of this work is driven by the search for new connections, perspectives, and meanings.
To approach the nucleus of this project, we may start with the Saussurian note that language is a web, a structure of interconnected and evolving meanings that we inherit, yet it doesn't really belong to us. Language is a form that generates meanings, but only by failing to express something that lies beyond. It is precisely in this failure of expression that a human subject is being born. Language, in essence, is a question that raises questions, an endless birth cry. As Edmond Jabes said, "Through our words we are forever this cry of an infant in search of a familiar face, of a warm breast, of love." Continuing his line, we might say that through our words, we are forever strangers. Paradoxically, being a tool for communication and a web itself, language is also a seal of solitude and exile.
structure
"My mother tongue is a foreign language" unfolds through separate, open-ended chapters, each following its own logic, method, and motif, yet, all united by the central themes - those of language and otherness.
The topics and characters of the chapters are intermingled in a nonlinear way, preserving the independence of their states and plurality of possible interpretations. This narrative structure allows us to not get bogged down in the production of ideologemes by turning to the diversity of linguistic expression.
By "us," I mean artists and poets from different parts of the world, with diverse languages, backgrounds, and origins, who are integral to this work, presenting texts that are dear to their heart and soul, texts which, perhaps, would exist on the limits of language, trying to express the inexpressible.
Thus, in contrast to the tradition of spoken-word sound art, which usually aims to distort language by prioritizing the acoustic qualities of words over semantic meaning, this chapter sought texts that already exist on the threshold of language—exceeding the message while simultaneously never reaching it, failing yet creating a new bridge through the void of the unsayable and the human experience.
God’s truth is in silence.
To fall silent in turn,
with the hope of dissolving into it.
But we become aware of it
only through words. And words,
alas, drive us ever farther from our goal.
Edmond Jabes “The book of margins”
To a stranger among strangers*
The one who attempts to break the silence of truth by writing the truth of silence faces a double bind: silence can be heard only in and through the words that destroy it. Silence, in other words, fades in its very uttering. The disappearance of silence clears the space in which language is articulated. In struggling to form language from silence, the writer reenacts a drama that is as old as creation itself.
Edmond Jabes
Could you be speaking from the heart of silence?
silencesence
Through language we leave singularity,
involving it in a network of ungraspable,
impalpable, perpetual deferral.
Jean-François Lyotard
The first chapter - "Silencesense” traverses the theme of textuality broadly construed beyond its linguistic form, as a world-matrix on which the whole system, including that of culture shaping our species, is deployed. The narrative arc, hence, is structured around the tension between the text and something that breathes and moves through its caves with endless referential chains.
However, beyond this conceptual frame, this chapter of “My mother tongue is a foreign language” is in a sense a hymn to the melancholy of the human subject that is both allured and imprisoned by the world as it is and one’s own subjectivity.
"One can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea."
(Michel Foucault)
The piece consists of three passages that were recorded and partly installed as multichannel compositions at EMS, Elektronmusikstudion, Stockholm, in 2019. They feature a song performed by a Swedish singer, Malva Molund, a poem written and read by a Spanish poet Isabel Cadenas Canón, and an electroacoustic blend I made with a Buchla 100 system, a Serge modular synthesizer, grand piano strings, and field recordings from the streets of Stockholm. Each step is processed slightly differently and mixed with a 15.1 Genelec sound system. The resulting canvas is a binaural stereo interpretation.
The second chapter (in progress) includes works with a Ukrainian poet Tatiana Bohuslavska, Iranian artist Mahsa Salali, and a brasilian artist Pedro Oliveira (see the sketches and some notes on these works below)
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An image is a mixed-media collage made out of digital art sketches created by me in Houdini with a photo of the Mercury statue I shot at the Catania Museum, Sicily.
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* “To a stranger among strangers” refers to a phrase by Edmond Jabes, but also draws on the Lacanian theory of subject in Laruellian interpretation. For him, broadly construed, a stranger is the subject meeting the Real, or, rather, the one that is always in between the Real and language. Besides that it’s another way to say “to those who are wo/andering”
narrative
"The unsayable lies at the rock bottom of what is said. We navigate on the surface: even, smooth, transparent, or opaque surfaces; but never level."
I
1
The first track, sung by a Swedish singer, Malva Molund, sets the tone for this chapter.
It is a verse from "Strange Fruit" - the 1936 protest song against racism and police violence, written by Abel Meeropol and famously performed later on by Billie Holiday. This song led her to persecution by the authorities, and ultimately to death, but became a symbol of struggle for freedom for many years.
For an accompaniment to this emblematic piece of art and activism, I have chosen a minimalist approach in the form of sea noise. Buchla synth here imitates the indifference of the universe and the inertia of basically any system, inclined to endless repetition of the same.
2
To break the loop, to go out of the matrix, with its violence and strictly established signs and norms, out of the text in a broad sense, that's what art always seeks to do.
The second part of the chapter, hence, is an attempt and a failure of this sort.
A melancholy born from the previous turn unveils an unexpected chance for liberation precisely through vulnerability, subtleness and contemplation. It opens up a curtained field of possibilities.
This passage flows and falls through and into the ineffable wind, permeating the grip of the structure. Technically, it relies mostly on the bass strings of a grand piano and granular synthesis, organised with a Krell patch, which itself hinges on chance, underlining the character of this move as ambivalent, probabilistic and a-textual.
Be that as it may, this track conveys silence as a condensed message which eludes the rigid structure of a linear reading. Effusing through iridescent movements of manifold particles and filaments, it may appear (or so I imagine) as a touch from a sort of angelic realm.
3
If anguish and longing arising from an encounter with such an overwhelming silence can find its way through language at all, then it might be a poem like "Ocio Nueve" by Isabel Cadenas Canon, read by herself for the third passage.
Here, she cannot find her footing in that fragile place where the wind blows from all sides as we strove for in a previous move.
Her profoundly intimate text is an acute example of art that expresses some sort of universal yet confusing truth through something deeply personal and subjective.
Here, we found ourselves lost, disillusioned, disoriented, and perplexed by the complexity of the disenchanted world and its demands, hoping to reassemble ourselves by orchestrating the puzzles of memory, as if it fully depends on but doesn’t belong to us.
Strangely enough, within alienation, even from those things that apparently constitute us, which results in a refusal of any possession, including that of signs, we may find an emancipatory effect.
Yet, we can't possess even this brief enlightenment, this desired achievement in a satisfactory way. It evades; it is always at arm's length, like a balloon carried away by the waves in the sea.
Thus, we are stuck at an eternal halfway through the gap, like Achilles, who cannot catch a tortoise.
Here’s a full poem with a translation:
Ocio Nueve.
Es como si la memoria ya solo dependiera de nosotras.
Ya no acumulo entradas de cine, ni de teatro, ni billetes de avión, ni monedas de países a los que no voy a volver. Tampoco monedas de países a los que voy a volver.
Un día dejé de guardar papeles que alguna vez significaron algo. notitas que me pasaba con mis compañeras de clase o tarjetas de visita en las que él había dibujado una sonrisa o incluso, sí, un corazón.
Dejé de almacenar cosas, pesaban demasiado. Y aún así nunca consigo situarme en ese lugar quebradizo en el que por todas partes me sopla el viento.
Solo a medias dominó el arte de perder.
Y es, justo, la mitad que no importa.
Leisure Nine.
It's as if memory now depends solely on us.
I no longer collect movie tickets, theater tickets, plane tickets, or coins from countries I'll never return to. Nor coins from countries I will return to.
One day I stopped keeping papers that once meant something: little notes he passed between my classmates or business cards on which he had drawn a smile or even, yes, a heart.
I stopped storing things; they weighed too much. And yet I can never quite find my footing in that fragile place where the wind blows from all sides.
I only half mastered the art of losing.
And it's precisely that half that doesn't matter.
II
The second folder is based on three very different poems: one is "I Know a Woman", read by Iranian artist, musician, and performer Mahsa Salali, another is a poem by the revolutionary Russian poet Mayakovsky, read in Swedish by Malva Molund, and the last one is a poem "The Other" by a Ukrainian artist and poet Tatiana Bohuslavska.
(in process)
The work is based on the poem “Zani ra mi shenasm man — I Know a Woman” by Iranian poet Fariba Shesh-Blouki, read by Iranian artist Mahsa Salali, based in London. The poem reflects on the starkness of the women's fate— their struggle, endurance, and labour, their daily reality under severe patriarchal, economic, and cultural constraints.
Within the piece, I accompanied the woman’s voice with raw, ragged broken-beat pulsations. Stripped of atmospheric embellishment, voice and rhythm remain exposed, creating a sonic encounter with the precariousness of life — an austere echo of Agamben’s “bare life.”
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زنی را می شناسم من
زنی را می شناسم من که با شیطان نفس خود هزاران بار جنگیده و چون فاتح شده آخر به بدنامی بدکاران تمسخوروار خندیده زنی را می شناسم من
زنی آواز میخاند زمی خاموش میماند زنی حتی شبانگاهان میانه کوچه میماند
زنی درکار چون مرد است به دستش تاول دردست زبست که رنجقم دارد فراموشش شده دیگر جنینی در شکم دارد
زنی در بستر مرگه است زنی نزدیکی مرگه است سراغش را که میگیرد نمیدانم نمیدانم
شبی در بستری کوچک زنی آهسته میمیرد زنی هم انتقامش را ز مردی هرزه میگیرد زنی را میشناسم من
I know a woman —
I know a woman who has battled the devil within her a thousand times; and having triumphed, she laughs mockingly at the infamy of the wicked. I know a woman.
A woman sings; a woman falls silent; a woman stands in the alleyway, even in the dead of night.
A woman toils like a man, her hands calloused from labor; she forgets her own suffering, even as she carries a child in her womb.
A woman lies on her deathbed; a woman is nearing her end—yet who comes to seek her out? I do not know; I do not know.
One night, on a humble bed, a woman quietly passes away; a woman exacts her revenge upon a dissolute man. I know a woman.
A poem by the revolutionary Russian poet Mayakovsky, read in Swedish by Malva Molund, and accompanied by the sounds of wind which by trying to burst through the window, tugs and tears at the blinds.
(in process)
III
"Then where is the truth but in the burning space between one letter and the next?"
Edmond Jabes
The third chapter is based on the poem "Humanidad" by the Brazilian black writer Carolina Maria de Jesus, a slum-dwelling woman who gathered scrap metal and made remarks about the environment, people, and times she witnessed. The poem was presented and read by the artist and writer Pedro Oliveira.
It is one of the most bitter texts that I have ever heard and read, full of despair and hopelessness about humanity and the world itself, as the author, being a black homeless woman, experienced it. It devastates and leaves one speechless.
This speechlessness constitutes both the form and the content of this chapter.
All compositions here are based on the silence between the spoken words, which went through a multilayered procedure, to not accompany the text in a more traditional way as it was in the first chapter, but to create a parallel landscape from the tiniest artefacts of the breath and the atmosphere of the room - to make the silence speak on its own.
(in process)
a video to the second passage "Silence Sense" I made with particle simulation in Unreal Engine
All sounds, commentaries, corresponding visual art, and design at this site are made by me, Snezhana Reizen, except in cases of collaboration that are credited.
The process of creation and investigation through it is too valuable to me to outsource to LLMs, so I always prefer to work through and struggle with it on my own, or rather, with the huge help of the human web.
The LLM, at the same time, being a technology that expands the web of linguistic structures shaping our culture, is a subject for the works to come. This project heavily relies on collaboration with others. I am open to your suggestions and contributions.
Related projects:
ZERO NIGHT
Eremos: a sojourn devoid of place
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