Page 16 - Studia Universitatis Hereditati, vol 11(2) (2023)

them. And still… I observed not the content of Dougall 2006, 5) of the displaced – layers of (in)
what they said or didn’t say, but their way of mix- visibility in discursive and non-verbalized forms
ing and using language as a means of preserving of the presence of the past. It begins with sounds
their imagined presence in the country or coun- and languages as a way to highlight the key role
tries from where they came. They lived around of fragments of worlds, memories, places, times
several centres, built several ‘over there’ from dif- and practices and the qualitative relationships
ferent ‘here’ that coalesced, reordered temporal- between these fragments, however dissonant:
ities and reintroduced continuity in fragmenta- not as a puzzle or a whole to be completed but
tion and disruption. as so many pieces adding new layers of meaning.
Research experience may be understood in
terms of a journey: ‘we leave from home, we cross The Broken Tongue: Worlds Within Us
the world, and we return home, even if it’s a dif- I grew up among displaced people before grow-
6
16 ferent home than the one we left behind, because ing up to study them. I experienced a dissonant
the departure, the original split, gave it its mean- world where the spectres of past worlds and all
studia universitatis hereditati, letnik 11 (2023), številka 2 / volume 11 (2023), number 2
ing’ (Magris 2001, 13–14).
the absent things and people were exceeded in all ti
I imagine this article as a kind of suitcase, a parts of the social and material space surround-
travel kit, which (pp. 9–10) is part of the jour- ing me. I first associate this absence and disso-
ney: on departure, when you pack the few nance with an expression: ‘To have a broken
things you think you’ll need, always forget- tongue’. This expression remained enigmatic for ta
ting something essential; on the way, when a long time in my mind. Brodsky, in particular,
you pack what you want to take home; on summed up the link between exile and language
the way back, when you open your luggage in a few illuminating words (Brodsky 1995, quot-
and no longer find the things you thought ed in Heller-Roazen 2008, 49): di
were important, and things appear that you
didn’t remember you’d packed. The same To be an exiled is like being a dog or a man
thing happens with writing; something that, hurtled into outer space in a capsule (more
while we were travelling and living, seemed like a dog, of course, than a man, because
fundamental has vanished, on paper, it’s no they will never retrieve you). And your cap-
longer there, while something that, in life - sule is your language. To finish the meta-
in the journey of life - we had hardly noticed phor off, it must be added that before long, here
takes shape imperiously and imposes itself as the capsule’s passenger discovers that it grav-
essential. itates not earthward but outward.
Still, every journey has a point of departure. This capsule contained the language of the
What was mine? My research grew out of hy- exiled, their broken tongue.
brid spaces between different places, people and 6 This term was discussed by many scholars in different
fieldwork, languages and countries, my incapac- countries that experienced massive fluxes of populations
ity to put down roots anywhere, in a liminal ex- due to decolonisation, as evidenced by Pamela Ballinger,
Michele Baussant, Jasna Čapo Žmegač and Andrea Smith.
perience of encounters and openings that made Such people’s departure was often portrayed as inevitable
me at home and a stranger to each place wher- (a consequence of decolonisation, their alleged lack of at-
tachment to Algeria, or, for Jews, their association with
ever I lived. These crossroads, intersections and the colonial power), not forced, and as a quasi-internal
hybrid spaces gave rise to this unconventional displacement. Moreover, the trajectories of some of them
writing style for attempting to convey the pro- are marked by multiple displacements throughout sever- studiauniversitatis
al generations and are sometimes ignored or marginalised
found non-linearity, uncertain and fragmentary in analyses that long tended to consider them as homoge-
nature of my work’s premise – my embodied ex- neous populations with the same roots and a shared sense
of belonging. See Ballinger (2012), Baussant (2002), Čapo
perience and my ‘perceptual knowledge’ (Mac- Žmegač (2010), and Smith (2003; 2009).