My mother tongue is a foreign language
The materials presented here constitute a series of spoken-word works that address a broad spectrum of topics related to language and otherness.
To acquire 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, which we can clearly see nowadays with the LLM. The 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. The language, in essence, is a question that raises questions; the language is 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 stamp of solitude and exile.
This work seeks to reexamine the very essence of some core concepts that shape the contemporary subject at both individual and collective levels. From the identity policy and post-colonial optics to the language as technology that forms our culture and ideology in the current digital world, the quest of this work is infiltrated by the search for new meanings, perspectives, and connections, by engaging creatively with the palette of the Web.
The first chapter of this sonic book, which I would like to present to you here, was fully recorded and partly performed as a multichannel composition at EMS, Elektronmusikstudion, Stockholm, in 2019. It features poems recorded by artists from different languages and backgrounds, accompanied by an electroacoustic blend made with Buchla 100 system, Serge modular synthesizer, and field recordings from the streets of Stockholm, and mixed with a 15.1 Genelec sound system. The resulting canvas is a binaural interpretation.
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
My mother tongue is a foreign language
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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.
"My mother tongue is a foreign language" is a collection of the spoken word / sonic fiction essays that are divided into separated chapters with an open end, each is following its own logic, and method, each is dealing with its compositional problem, emphasising its matter, story and motif, yet, all are united by the usage of the written and read texts, and 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 estates and plurality of the 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.
To actualise its agendas, they were asked to read aloud and record a text, dear to their heart and soul, a text which, perhaps, would exist on the limits of language, trying to express the unexpressable, failing at it, yet creating a new bridge through the void of unsayable and the human experience as it is.
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"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."
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I
1
The first track, sung by a Swedish singer, Malva Molund, sets the tone for this chapter.
It is a verse from "Strange Fruits" - the 1936 protest song against racism and police violence, written by Abel Meeropol and famously performed by Billie Holiday. This song led her to persecution by the authorities and 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 the 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 norms and signs, out of the text, that's what art always seeks to do.
The second track is an attempt and a failure of this sort. It is a hint to the ineffable wind, surfing on the surface and permeating the structure's grip. It is one of the few tracks in the whole book without a voice. Yet aren't modular patches using similar pattern connections to those of words?
Be that as it may, this track conveys the silence of the snow.
The video I made for it is below the text.
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Within this and the following track, I was able to assemble the famous Krell patch invented by Cage and Schtokhauzen, precisely in this studio, years ago. The bass strings of the grand piano and some noises from Serge were woven in and layered following that patch.
As you probably know, the Krell patch not only relies on chance but drives by it, which is a huge challenge for any composer and improviser, yet it is exactly what we are dealing with in our lives, encountering the Real with its unpredictability, blessings, and horrors.
3
If the silence and the sacredness of the melancholy can find their way through language at all, then it might be a poem like "Ocio Nueve" by Isabel Cadenas Canon, read by herself for the third track.
Her profoundly intimate poem is an acute example of art that expresses a universal or objective truth through deeply personal subjective experience.
Here, we found ourselves lost, disillusioned, disoriented, and perplexed with the complexity of the disenchanted world and its demands.
Strangely enough, but within alienation from such things even that apparently constitute us, which results in a refusal of any possession of signs, including those of memory, we find an emancipatory effect:
Es como si la memoria ya solo dependerá de nosotras.
It's as if memory will now depend solely on us.
Yet, we can't possess even this achievement in a satisfactory way; it evades, it's always at arm's length, like a balloon carried away by the waves in the sea:
Solo medias dominó el arte de perder y es justo la mitad que no importa.
I only half mastered the art of losing, and it's precisely the half that doesn't matter.
4
"Force is the other of language without which language would not be what it is," said Derrida in his "Writing and Difference." Echoing this, the fourth track deals with the force and it's called "Iнший" (The Other)
Hanging daggers of unresolved issues in the air, it discloses the tension without a resolution. However, this track is based on the crystalline beauty and tenderness of the love poem by Ukrainian artist and poet Tetiana Bohuslavska.
Within this poem, its heroine presages the meeting with the "sharp-penness" of the Other, puts roots upwards, approaching the verge
beyond which
The Other speaks
unknown language
about the rain in the middle of silence.
In the middle of silence, there is a hidden tension of various forces.
There is this "sharppenness" and the dangerousness of the Other that inspired so many wars and continues to do so - the reversal of roots... the reversal of meanings... Yet, there is also a shared hope for the rain, the rain that will mitigate fire, feed the earth, and bring the beauty of the light seeping into water through music.
What we have in the end here is an understanding of the Other beyond language's borders.
Within this track, a tender hope and a brutal reality meet without reconciliation.
Yet, in the middle of silence, there is a field of all possible matter that straightens the hope.
This track, though, exists on the threshold of noise.
The imperative of the noise as a genre out of genres is a rejection of obeying and conforming to the figures of power, including figures of speech and norms. It is a method of speaking without speaking, or "working through," as Mattin put it in his essay on noise: "to say the 'unspeakable' without guilt and without fear."
II
"Then where is the truth but in the burning space between one letter and the next?"
Edmond Jabes
The second 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)
III
"In breaking the silence, language realizes what silence wanted and could not obtain,"
Merleau-Ponty
The third folder is based on two very different poems: one is read by Iranian artist, musician, and performer Mahsa Salali, and the other is a poem by the revolutionary Russian poet Mayakovsky, read in Swedish by Malva Molund.
(in process)
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a video to a track "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, besides cases of collaboration that are credited.
The process of creation and investigation through it is too valuable to me to outsource to GPT, so I always prefer to work through and struggle with it on my own, or rather, with the huge help of the human web.
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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