From Mother Tongue to Linguistic Mother Author(s): Yoko Tawada and ...
From Mother Tongue to Linguistic Mother Author(s): Yoko Tawada and Rachel McNichol Source: Manoa, Vol. 18, No. 1, Beyond Words: Asian Writers on Their Work (Summer, 2006), pp. 139+141-143 Published by: University of Hawai'i Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4230450 Accessed: 24-10-2016 14:14 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
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YOKO TAWADA
From Mother Tongue to Linguistic Mother_
Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960 and educated at Waseda University
and the University of Hamburg. In 1982, she settled in Germany and began writing. Herfirst work, Missing Heals, won the Gunzo Prizefor New Writers in 1991. In 1993, she received the Akutagawa Prizefor The Bridegroom Was a
Dog (the English-language translation of which was published in 1998). She writes in both Japanese and German, and in 1996 she won the Adelbert von
Chamisso Prize, a German award given to foreign writers who make significant contributions to German culture. An English-language translation of her collection of stories, Where Europe Begins, was named Best Book of the Year by the Times Literary Supplement in 2005. In addition to short fiction, her works include novels, poetry, plays, and essays. The following essay is translatedfrom German.
The first year I spent in Germany, I needed over nine hours of sleep a day
to recover from all the new impressions. Every day at work was a series of puzzling scenes for me. Like anyone working in an office, I was surrounded by all kinds of writing utensils. In that respect, my new environment was not so strange at first. A German pencil was pretty much the
same as a Japanese one, though it wasn't called enpitsu anymore, but Bleistift. Using the word Bleistift gave me the impression that I was dealing with a new object. A vague sense of shame came over me whenever I had to refer to it by the new name, a bit like the feeling I got when I had to address
a recently married friend by her new surname. I soon grew accustomed to writing with a Bleistift-and no longer with an enpitsu. Prior to this, I had not been aware that the relationship between me and my pencil was a linguistic one.
One day, I heard another woman in the office complaining about her
pencil: "This stupid pencil! It's gone mad! It refuses to write today!" Every time she sharpened it and tried to write with it, the lead snapped. In the Japanese language, you cannot personify a pencil in this way. A pencil can neither be stupid nor go mad. I have never heard anyone in Japan complaining about a pencil as if it was a person. This must be German animism,
139
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I thought. At first, I wasn't sure whether the woman was joking or really as
angry as she looked. I had never gone into a rage over my writing utensils and could not imagine feeling so strongly about such a small object. Yet the woman did not seem-as far as I could make out-to have meant her
words as a joke. Her face was quite serious when she threw the pencil into the wastepaper basket and picked up a new one. Curiously, the pencil in the bottom of her wastepaper basket suddenly seemed alive.
The German language was at the bottom of what I saw as a strange relationship between that pencil and the woman. In German, it was possible for the pencil to offer the woman resistance, and in return, for the woman
to assert her power over the pencil by complaining about it. Her power consisted in the fact that she could talk about the pencil, whereas the pencil was dumb.
Maybe she complained about the pencil to reassure herself of this balance of power. For the woman was very unsure of herself the moment she
found she could not write. Whether it is a matter of lead snapping or lack of creativity, the inability to write would drive anyone to desperation. It can force you to reestablish your position as scribe by remonstrating with your speechless writing utensils. Not only did the pencil seem alive to me when the woman was com-
plaining about it, but also masculine: in German, der Bleistift is masculine. In Japanese, words have no gender. While the nouns can be divided up
into different groups-as their numeric classifiers clearly illustrate-the criteria defining these groups are never masculine or feminine. For example, there are groups consisting of flat or long or round objects. Houses,
ships, and books all make up separate groups. Then there is the group of humans, of course: men and women both belong to that. Grammatically speaking, a man is not even masculine in Japanese. It took a lot of effort to learn the gender of a German word. I would for-
get it immediately, as if it had no bearing on the word. In a German grammar book, I read that a native speaker perceives the gender of a word as a natural part of it. I was at constant pains to figure out how to acquire this way of perceiving. I tried to think in different terms: when I saw a person, for instance, the first thing I registered was whether it was a man or a woman. Even if this distinction had no significance for me, I would not allow myself to perceive a second person without registering what sex the first one was. Back then, I probably ought to have registered objects in exactly the same way.
Whenever I saw a fountain pen, for instance, I really tried to perceive it as a male object-not in my head, but with my senses. I would take it in my hand and stare at it for a long time, murmuring all the while, "Masculine, masculine, masculine." The magic words gradually gave me a new way of looking at things. The little realm that was my desk gradually became sexualized: the pencil, the ball point, the fountain pen, der Bleistift,
Tawada . From Mother Tongue 141
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der Kugelschreiber, der Fuller-all these male objects lay there masculinely
and asserted themselves masculinely when I took them in my hand. There was a female object on the table too: a typewriter, die Schreibmaschine. She had a large, broad body tattooed with all the letters of the alphabet. When I sat down in front of her, I felt as if she were offering me a language. Her offer did nothing to alter the fact that German was not my
mother tongue, but now I had a mother inside the German language. I called this female machine, which gave me the gift of its language, Linguistic Mother. All I could do was write the characters that she already
bore; in other words, writing had no meaning for me other than repeating these symbols. Still, this meant that I could be adopted by the new language. Of course, I only ever wrote business letters in the office, not poems. And yet I often felt very happy while typing. Whenever I typed a character, it stood out on the paper straightaway: black on white and, at the same
time, full of mystery. If you have a new linguistic mother, you can experience a second childhood. As a child, you take language literally. Consequently, every word acquires a life that is independent of its meaning within a sentence. There are even words that are so alive that, like mythical figures, they can develop biographies. Back then, there were two figures in the German language that struck
me particularly. They often stood there in front of my eyes, their faces hidden. I didn't quite know what or who they were, and it wasn't possible to ask anyone about them, for my German colleagues did not seem to see
them. One of the figures was "God," and the other, "it." They kept showing up in different sentences. "God" often came out of a woman's mouth along with an unedited
emotion: "Oh, my God!" "Oh, dear God!" "Thanks be to God!" "For God's sake!" Every time I heard one of these expressions, I felt an enormous power trying to dominate me. To avoid its influence, I always tried to ignore the word. To this day, I cannot use any expression in which it appears.
The second figure that particularly struck me was "it." People said, "It's raining," "It's cold," "How's it going?" My German book said that this "it"
did not mean anything, but merely only filled a grammatical gap. Without the "it," the sentence would have no subject, and that was simply out of the question-there had to be a subject. But I wasn't convinced that a sentence had to have a subject. Besides, I didn't believe that the word "it" had no meaning. The very moment you say "It's raining," an "it" is established that pours water out of the sky. If you ask how "it" is going, you imply that there is an "it" that can influence people's well-being. And yet nobody paid it much attention.
It didn't even have a proper name. But it kept working away busily and effectively in all sorts of areas, living modestly in a grammatical gap.
142 MiMnoa . Beyond Words
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One of the writing utensils I liked best was the staple remover, or Hefik-
lammerentferner. Its wonderful name was the incarnation of my longing for a foreign language. This little object, which reminded me of a snake's head with four fangs, was illiterate, though it belonged to the writing utensils. In contrast to the ball point or the typewriter, it could not write a single letter. All it could do was remove staples. But I was especially fond of it
because it seemed magical when it unfastened all the sheets of paper stapled together. In your mother tongue, words are attached to your person, so you rarely
experience a playful, pleasurable sense of language. In your mother tongue, thoughts cling so closely to words that neither can take flight indepen-
dently. In a foreign language, however, you have something like a staple remover: it removes what makes things cling to one another. Translation by Rachel McNichol
Tawada . From Mother Tongue 143
This content downloaded from 205.208.10.61 on Mon, 24 Oct 2016 14:14:41 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms
University of Hawai'i Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Manoa
This content downloaded from 205.208.10.61 on Mon, 24 Oct 2016 14:14:41 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
YOKO TAWADA
From Mother Tongue to Linguistic Mother_
Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960 and educated at Waseda University
and the University of Hamburg. In 1982, she settled in Germany and began writing. Herfirst work, Missing Heals, won the Gunzo Prizefor New Writers in 1991. In 1993, she received the Akutagawa Prizefor The Bridegroom Was a
Dog (the English-language translation of which was published in 1998). She writes in both Japanese and German, and in 1996 she won the Adelbert von
Chamisso Prize, a German award given to foreign writers who make significant contributions to German culture. An English-language translation of her collection of stories, Where Europe Begins, was named Best Book of the Year by the Times Literary Supplement in 2005. In addition to short fiction, her works include novels, poetry, plays, and essays. The following essay is translatedfrom German.
The first year I spent in Germany, I needed over nine hours of sleep a day
to recover from all the new impressions. Every day at work was a series of puzzling scenes for me. Like anyone working in an office, I was surrounded by all kinds of writing utensils. In that respect, my new environment was not so strange at first. A German pencil was pretty much the
same as a Japanese one, though it wasn't called enpitsu anymore, but Bleistift. Using the word Bleistift gave me the impression that I was dealing with a new object. A vague sense of shame came over me whenever I had to refer to it by the new name, a bit like the feeling I got when I had to address
a recently married friend by her new surname. I soon grew accustomed to writing with a Bleistift-and no longer with an enpitsu. Prior to this, I had not been aware that the relationship between me and my pencil was a linguistic one.
One day, I heard another woman in the office complaining about her
pencil: "This stupid pencil! It's gone mad! It refuses to write today!" Every time she sharpened it and tried to write with it, the lead snapped. In the Japanese language, you cannot personify a pencil in this way. A pencil can neither be stupid nor go mad. I have never heard anyone in Japan complaining about a pencil as if it was a person. This must be German animism,
139
This content downloaded from 205.208.10.61 on Mon, 24 Oct 2016 14:14:41 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
I thought. At first, I wasn't sure whether the woman was joking or really as
angry as she looked. I had never gone into a rage over my writing utensils and could not imagine feeling so strongly about such a small object. Yet the woman did not seem-as far as I could make out-to have meant her
words as a joke. Her face was quite serious when she threw the pencil into the wastepaper basket and picked up a new one. Curiously, the pencil in the bottom of her wastepaper basket suddenly seemed alive.
The German language was at the bottom of what I saw as a strange relationship between that pencil and the woman. In German, it was possible for the pencil to offer the woman resistance, and in return, for the woman
to assert her power over the pencil by complaining about it. Her power consisted in the fact that she could talk about the pencil, whereas the pencil was dumb.
Maybe she complained about the pencil to reassure herself of this balance of power. For the woman was very unsure of herself the moment she
found she could not write. Whether it is a matter of lead snapping or lack of creativity, the inability to write would drive anyone to desperation. It can force you to reestablish your position as scribe by remonstrating with your speechless writing utensils. Not only did the pencil seem alive to me when the woman was com-
plaining about it, but also masculine: in German, der Bleistift is masculine. In Japanese, words have no gender. While the nouns can be divided up
into different groups-as their numeric classifiers clearly illustrate-the criteria defining these groups are never masculine or feminine. For example, there are groups consisting of flat or long or round objects. Houses,
ships, and books all make up separate groups. Then there is the group of humans, of course: men and women both belong to that. Grammatically speaking, a man is not even masculine in Japanese. It took a lot of effort to learn the gender of a German word. I would for-
get it immediately, as if it had no bearing on the word. In a German grammar book, I read that a native speaker perceives the gender of a word as a natural part of it. I was at constant pains to figure out how to acquire this way of perceiving. I tried to think in different terms: when I saw a person, for instance, the first thing I registered was whether it was a man or a woman. Even if this distinction had no significance for me, I would not allow myself to perceive a second person without registering what sex the first one was. Back then, I probably ought to have registered objects in exactly the same way.
Whenever I saw a fountain pen, for instance, I really tried to perceive it as a male object-not in my head, but with my senses. I would take it in my hand and stare at it for a long time, murmuring all the while, "Masculine, masculine, masculine." The magic words gradually gave me a new way of looking at things. The little realm that was my desk gradually became sexualized: the pencil, the ball point, the fountain pen, der Bleistift,
Tawada . From Mother Tongue 141
This content downloaded from 205.208.10.61 on Mon, 24 Oct 2016 14:14:41 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
der Kugelschreiber, der Fuller-all these male objects lay there masculinely
and asserted themselves masculinely when I took them in my hand. There was a female object on the table too: a typewriter, die Schreibmaschine. She had a large, broad body tattooed with all the letters of the alphabet. When I sat down in front of her, I felt as if she were offering me a language. Her offer did nothing to alter the fact that German was not my
mother tongue, but now I had a mother inside the German language. I called this female machine, which gave me the gift of its language, Linguistic Mother. All I could do was write the characters that she already
bore; in other words, writing had no meaning for me other than repeating these symbols. Still, this meant that I could be adopted by the new language. Of course, I only ever wrote business letters in the office, not poems. And yet I often felt very happy while typing. Whenever I typed a character, it stood out on the paper straightaway: black on white and, at the same
time, full of mystery. If you have a new linguistic mother, you can experience a second childhood. As a child, you take language literally. Consequently, every word acquires a life that is independent of its meaning within a sentence. There are even words that are so alive that, like mythical figures, they can develop biographies. Back then, there were two figures in the German language that struck
me particularly. They often stood there in front of my eyes, their faces hidden. I didn't quite know what or who they were, and it wasn't possible to ask anyone about them, for my German colleagues did not seem to see
them. One of the figures was "God," and the other, "it." They kept showing up in different sentences. "God" often came out of a woman's mouth along with an unedited
emotion: "Oh, my God!" "Oh, dear God!" "Thanks be to God!" "For God's sake!" Every time I heard one of these expressions, I felt an enormous power trying to dominate me. To avoid its influence, I always tried to ignore the word. To this day, I cannot use any expression in which it appears.
The second figure that particularly struck me was "it." People said, "It's raining," "It's cold," "How's it going?" My German book said that this "it"
did not mean anything, but merely only filled a grammatical gap. Without the "it," the sentence would have no subject, and that was simply out of the question-there had to be a subject. But I wasn't convinced that a sentence had to have a subject. Besides, I didn't believe that the word "it" had no meaning. The very moment you say "It's raining," an "it" is established that pours water out of the sky. If you ask how "it" is going, you imply that there is an "it" that can influence people's well-being. And yet nobody paid it much attention.
It didn't even have a proper name. But it kept working away busily and effectively in all sorts of areas, living modestly in a grammatical gap.
142 MiMnoa . Beyond Words
This content downloaded from 205.208.10.61 on Mon, 24 Oct 2016 14:14:41 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
One of the writing utensils I liked best was the staple remover, or Hefik-
lammerentferner. Its wonderful name was the incarnation of my longing for a foreign language. This little object, which reminded me of a snake's head with four fangs, was illiterate, though it belonged to the writing utensils. In contrast to the ball point or the typewriter, it could not write a single letter. All it could do was remove staples. But I was especially fond of it
because it seemed magical when it unfastened all the sheets of paper stapled together. In your mother tongue, words are attached to your person, so you rarely
experience a playful, pleasurable sense of language. In your mother tongue, thoughts cling so closely to words that neither can take flight indepen-
dently. In a foreign language, however, you have something like a staple remover: it removes what makes things cling to one another. Translation by Rachel McNichol
Tawada . From Mother Tongue 143
This content downloaded from 205.208.10.61 on Mon, 24 Oct 2016 14:14:41 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
