Page 17 - Studia Universitatis Hereditati, vol 11(2) (2023)

What could a broken tongue mean? As a melded into one, mainly French, always insuf-
child, I imagined people’s tongues were broken. ficient for expressing pictures, sounds, odours,
Later, I wondered how French or Arabic, like an colours, objects, food, values, landscapes, sit-
object, breaks. I remember Françoise, who left uations, and practices. Those most used could
Egypt in 1967 and her ‘broken Arabic’; Yves, sometimes be the mutest, breaking into ex-
who ‘broke’ in a continuous stream of French, changes, marking gaps. This broken tongue both
Hebrew, English and Arabic, all spoken fluent- echoed what linguists call a ‘substrate’ – ‘the per-
ly but always with errors and a hesitation that sistent remainder of one tongue within another,
never left him; Jacob, who in French avoided us- the forgotten element secretly retained in the ap-
ing letters unpronounceable for him, because parently seamless passage from one language to
they ‘broke’ his language and revealed his for- the next’, ‘superstrates’ – the changes brought
eignness, like this librarian, quoted by C. Nag- upon the tongue of one people through its adop-
gar: ‘I have the accent of a language I don’t know, tion by another – and ‘adstrates’– changes in one 17
Arabic. The accumulation of rs sometimes pre-
language due to the proximity of its speakers to
ti vents people from understanding me. To avoid another idiom to which it is related (Heller-Roa-
zen 2008, 78–79).
repeating myself, I choose words without r’s: café
Thus, to have a broken tongue covered sev-
au lait instead of café crème’ (Naggar 2007, 119); eral meanings: to speak different languages with-
ta mixing languages because such an object could out feeling that one knew any one of them ‘cor-
Carole broke the thread of our exchanges by
rectly’; to possess no language of one’s own, no
only be said in Arabic, and such and such food
language that one masters; to break, to damage
could only be expressed in French. Not that they
di were all the same. Not that she could not trans- the language by incomplete knowledge of it; to ‘between myself and myself lies my true country’ ...
late them in either language, attribute the same
mark a language used in everyday life with syn-
taxes, pronunciations, turns of phrase which re-
meaning to a word from one language to anoth-
er, but simply that each thing had its value in a
specific language that could not be the same in vealed other languages, sometimes silent, some-
times resurgent; to not be able to produce a
here language, an idiom for each of us, and always thing and to say at the same time that which was
well-crafted narrative in a language one had mas-
another. Translating it into another language
would always be a failure.
tered; to consistently fail to speak about some-
This broken language was a singular, unique
unspeakable; maintaining a difference, preserv-
ing the stranger within (Derrida 1993); to car-
more than a language, sometimes drawing unpre-
dictable trajectories of meaning and interrupted
ry in the body the mark of a rupture, of an ab-
histories, spaces and journeys. It was an every-
exists among the descendants: ‘The words of the
day, trivial world, made up of words and phrases
language I don’t know,’ writes Carole Naggar,
expressed in French but which came from else- sence, a kind of ‘ghostly matter’. This mark also
where, with mysterious meanings for those out- ‘are dead people attached to my living ankles’;
side this world, where to say that a woman was they make her ‘feel like a stranger in France,
‘in position’ meant that she was pregnant, where in this country whose language I speak with-
7
one could have la scoumoune and where peppers out an accent’ (Naggar 2007, 94), reminding us
were called piments. that words, like languages, cannot be a shelter,
Several languages – Arabic, Spanish, Ital- a home nor even less a homeland (Cassin 2013).
ian, Greek, Hebrew, German, and English – The broken language also meant the ability
A term designating bad luck, associated in France with Ar-
7 studiauniversitatis of the people around me to transform or not the
abic, but probably popularised by the Italians who settled timbre of their voice, using different languages
in Algeria and then by the Europeans in Algeria and com- and different words. All year round, my parents
ing from the Italian scomunica, which itself comes from
the Latin excomunicatio. seemed to go inside themselves, except for one