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The Autobiography of a Language
"Here the mirror image of the almost hallucinatory, heart-rending loss of the familiar is literary defamiliarization. Arsanios both mourns and blasts apart the notion of the mother tongue, reminding us that for each "mother tongue" at least another tongue is silenced. Desire propels her genre-defying writing, which grief notwithstanding still manages to tongue languages, and that is her genius. --Mónica de la Torre Poetry. Hybrid. Middle Eastern Studies.
92 pages, Paperback
Published October 15, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 14, 2023
A few short passages from The Autobiography of a Language:
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This narrative isn’t reliable; you can trust me on this one.
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To feel shame out of privilege only fuels the righteous constitution of a subject whose identity is premised on the pain of others. Empathy is worthless without solidarity.
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She’s complaining about my presence or lack thereof. She wants to get to the core of my aloofness, which she connects to the aestheticization of my pain. Why think feelings instead of simply feeling them? It produces “bad writing,� a kind of prose that obfuscates the uncertainties of process by way of neatly tied narratives. I tell Nayla that I struggle between being with my father and writing about being with my father, and wonder whether my sentences are a buffer between me and the present, or a point of access to being truly “here.� “Write that down,� she instructs.
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What you called common sense was only common inasmuch as it was widely distributed.
*
*
This narrative isn’t reliable; you can trust me on this one.
*
To feel shame out of privilege only fuels the righteous constitution of a subject whose identity is premised on the pain of others. Empathy is worthless without solidarity.
*
She’s complaining about my presence or lack thereof. She wants to get to the core of my aloofness, which she connects to the aestheticization of my pain. Why think feelings instead of simply feeling them? It produces “bad writing,� a kind of prose that obfuscates the uncertainties of process by way of neatly tied narratives. I tell Nayla that I struggle between being with my father and writing about being with my father, and wonder whether my sentences are a buffer between me and the present, or a point of access to being truly “here.� “Write that down,� she instructs.
*
What you called common sense was only common inasmuch as it was widely distributed.
*
April 3, 2024
First of all; I will definitely come back to this again, and again, and again, and again.
This book looks upon itself and its own language in a third perspective so much that it grounds you back to where you are supposed to be: here.
“In physics a daughter is a nuclide formed by the radioactive decay of a mother. I assumed I was a bad daughter because I wasn't a good one. My belief must have been rooted in a language problem: the inherent binary implied in the adjective " good." I believed I was a bad daughter because becoming my own person came at the expense of my mother's demise.�
What a thing to twist the autobiography of language to make it what language is at its core: the mother tongue of an individual, the personal association of language so closely tied with the identity.
“Why think feelings instead of simply feeling them? It produces "bad writing," a kind of prose that obfuscates the uncertainties of process by way of neatly tied narratives.�
Not only have I quoted this ever since I read it but I’ve also repeated it to anyone who would listen. What a collection. What a collection.
This book looks upon itself and its own language in a third perspective so much that it grounds you back to where you are supposed to be: here.
“In physics a daughter is a nuclide formed by the radioactive decay of a mother. I assumed I was a bad daughter because I wasn't a good one. My belief must have been rooted in a language problem: the inherent binary implied in the adjective " good." I believed I was a bad daughter because becoming my own person came at the expense of my mother's demise.�
What a thing to twist the autobiography of language to make it what language is at its core: the mother tongue of an individual, the personal association of language so closely tied with the identity.
“Why think feelings instead of simply feeling them? It produces "bad writing," a kind of prose that obfuscates the uncertainties of process by way of neatly tied narratives.�
Not only have I quoted this ever since I read it but I’ve also repeated it to anyone who would listen. What a collection. What a collection.
February 22, 2024
all these trilinguals and their complex identities because omg i know three languages. but to be fair, it didn't feel as much of an exoticization of being a non-native english writer as much. it still bordered on it though.
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