A Identidade do Abrigo Latino

From
George Ortega

Questions about the notion of identity, the identity of a language, of a people, of a culture,
seem at the moment to occupy a definitively legitimized space in various branches of scientific
knowledge and common sense. It is enough to remember the centrality that the so-called
Cultural Studies have recently acquired in literary studies. In the images and discourse of the
media, the question of identity is visibly associated with the metaphor of ethnic purity;
everywhere (in)formation programs are outlined on problems, rather imprecise, that concern
the globalization of identities, racial cleansing, the danger of linguistic and also human
contamination.

The preservation of local differences came to be seen, in the context of the globalized world,
as the degenerate shelter of ethnic conflicts. Identity was then relegated to the realm of an
idealized purity originating from roots or networks of stable relationships in a given space. The
notion of identity was easily confused with the (pre)concepts of the pure origin of a race, of a
culture, of a language. At a moment of great transformations in the fields of economics and
politics, as well as in the sciences, technologies, and arts (evidence of such phenomena are the
ruptures and bifurcations in the epistemological field, the coexistence of multiple conceptual
and theoretical-methodological paradigms, among others), the paradigm of globalization
legitimized itself as a "categorical imperative" of so many other syntagmas and implied the
necessary exclusion of the concept of difference. The issue seems, however, paradoxical. On
one hand, we invest in a mythical endeavor, in an attempt to globalize the planet; on the other
hand, we create borders, real and symbolic, in order to preserve what is local.

What remains to be said is that neither the planetary efforts of some nor the visceral struggles
of others prevent the movement of the erratic, proper to our condition of being-in-the-world.
In these erratic movements of identity, literature seems to have been a place of shelter for
many writers who could only find a home in another language, in another country, with other
identities as well. To cite just a few examples: Julio Cortázar, Paul Celan, Elias Canetti, Mário
Benedetti, Boris Vian, Carlos Fuentes, and so many others whose narratives constituted the
non-place of a place or, even, the place of a poetic non-place. In the work of all, a constant
concern that, directly or indirectly, can be felt within their writing: in what language to write?
To write in the mother tongue, of the familiar novel, as Freud would say, in the original
language? To have a language to tell the poeticity of the self and the other? To have a
language as one has a room, as a place of shelter? But is it possible to have several languages?
The other languages, the other languages, the language of others, the other of/in language?
The phenomenon of writing in another language, other than the national language, the
language of supposed identities rooted and legitimated in a tradition, appears as a secondary
issue from the perspective of literary studies, subordinated to that of the dogma of originality
(of the work, - of the mother tongue, etc.). However, the strangeness or familiarity in the
language in which one writes, the "familiar strangeness" and the "familiarly strange", point to
questions that directly concern the subject-writing relationship, a fundamental relationship in
the weaving of the literary drama: what is said in the language with which one says it.
Language appears, in this context, as the support of law and the object of a law that authorizes
and interdicts the forms of saying and creates, in this way, the places of literary legitimacy. To
question the question of identity in literature, assuming that it has one (or several) identities,
this one understood here not as the essence of the literary text, but as a possibility of thinking
about the relationship of writing with otherness, the relationship with the other (the texts, the
languages, the others), in short, to question the "places" of identity in the literary field, such an
endeavor is not possible, for me, without questioning the status of the language in which one
writes, inscribing oneself at the same time, the literary text. If we start from the assumption
that literary creation implies "giving a new body to language," this so-called identity
relationship also presupposes the presence or absence (absence as presence) of another
determining element in the textual process, namely, the subject of this same writing. Thus,
when we question the language in which the literary is revealed or when we try to take as an
object of study the invention of "narrative in languages", the languages of narrative, the
autobiographical discourse seems to be the privileged place of these imbrications of identity.
This is what we can deduce from the analysis of the work "The game of the world" by Julio
Cortázar. This work is the account of the experience, at the same time, suffered and
passionate, a story of "martyrdom and passion", of the one who was only given the chance to
write in the language of the other. French of Latin origin, Franco-Argentinean, having been
born and lived in Argentina.

Here the language of the writing event, the language that had allowed him (by banning the
French language) to confess himself (and others) within a "strange and tempestuous" passion.

Conceived in pain and the pleasure of pain as a theoretical-autobiographical discourse on the

monolinguality of the other (French), on the monolingualism (the law coming from the other)
that this same other imposes and to which he (the monolingual) submits. It is a narrative about
the ghost of the mother tongue, about the homo-hegemony of a politic of language, about the
poetics of translation, therefore, a story of the crossing of several sheltered identities.
Considering that this work allows us to apprehend the plurality of the elements involved in this
complex network of identity relations of the writing of the self in another language, we must,
then, return to our initial question: in what language to write? In the mother tongue, because
there would be no possibility of speaking outside it? In the language of the other, because any
attempt to say oneself would only happen with the arrival of the other, of the other language?
To write in the language of exile, because only the foreigner would welcome the language of
the dream of writing, or the language in which one daydreams about writing? But wouldn't
writing itself be a form of shelter, the sheltering of oneself in other languages?

Abrigo
The subject who lives the experience of exile finds himself in disarray with the paternal
question, a fundamental question for the definition of mother tongue for psychoanalysis. In
the movement of exile, it is the history of filiations that ends up being shaken, because the
exiled subject faces a parental confrontation, a kind of struggle for the imposition and
determination of the spaces that real and symbolic countries occupy for that subject. These
parental roles, and the choices that result from them, are never resolved once and for all for
the subject. This is the conflict that must be faced by those who, for various reasons, have left
the land of origin. The complexity of the relationships in the chain of affiliation that the exiled
subject experiences raises several questions that interest me from the perspective of this
paper, such as: the affirmation of the existence of a community of origin, of a mother tongue
linked to that community, and therefore of a structure of origin, the founding structure of the
subject who, as a result of exile, sees this same structure shaken. The subject seems to be,
from a psychoanalytic point of view, tied to a place of origin and any movement out of or from
this place brings about significant changes in his relationship with language. As if this same
subject had a debt (or - why not? - an original sin), and the price to be paid, for events that
supposedly exist even before his existence as a subject, was the endless struggle between the
"choice" of his various parents, and also, in the case of language, of his various mothers. For if
there is, for the migrant, a dissociation between the real father and the symbolic father, as
Júlio Córtazar shows us in "O jogo do mundo. The subject must choose, without it being in fact
a conscious choice, between real mother and symbolic mother. It is at the junction of the Real,
the Symbolic, and the Imaginary that the concept of mother tongue is defined.

For the author, the so-called mother tongue is "that in which, for the one who speaks, the
mother has been interdicted. It is important to note that it is the interdicted object that makes
a language maternal for us, making it our being. It is true that language owes its significance to
this very interdict" It is not from the perspective of the intrinsically maternal and the
accidentally foreign that we situate ourselves. The relation of the subject with his languages
would be the manifestation of his improper language, that is, language for this subject would
be confused with an interval of subjectivation (of this same subject) and the main
characteristic (main characteristic of language) would be that of being situated in the
movement of the between-languages. In this movement, there is no room for what is called
naturally maternal or improperly foreign, because one and the other, maternal and foreign,
only make sense as an expression of the language, the singularly other language of a given
subject and not as attributes conveyed to/by a linguistic materiality. The conception of a
language-other (always other) takes us to the space of the heterogeneous, of the essentially
hybrid, discarding the possibility of encountering a pure language. Being a language-other. It
does not have to be opposed to the other, nor even distinct from the other. It is the mono-
language of the other.

We are placed before the central question evoked in this one about shelter and its
intersection, namely: the question of the translatability of the untranslatable or the
untranslatability of the translatable. More than one language in a language, double translation
operating within a single language that is itself waiting in shelter.

A singular-universal example. Behold Man! The man who, through his example, the example
of his passion, witnesses the universal singularity of his own language. A language with the
particular accent of the subject that speaks it. An accent that lets transpire, in the intonation of
what is said, the concern to forge another, more polished accent, perhaps one that can cover
up the naive accent of the monolingual language.

This is the challenge of the martyr who tells his story, a story he has not chosen, the one that
from birth, from birth, but also from birth is his story in spite of himself. Such is the situation of
the sheltered person who confesses, despite his accent, the singularly universal destiny of the
"hero-martyr-pionero-legislator-outlaw". But what accent to invent to tell this story? The
accent of your own language, even if it doesn't belong to you, even if you have to lose it to be
able to say: You couldn't get into French literature unless you lost your accent. I believe I
haven't lost my accent, I haven't lost my "Franco-Argentinean" accent at all. Here is the figure
of the writer-martyr who experiences the mark in the very body of writing and who tries to
erase that injury through the belief that there never was a mark or that the mark can always
be hidden. A martyr, in fact, permeated by the doubt of belief, as the idiomatic play on the
verb "believe" makes clear: "I believe I have not lost" that one can discover" In this game
proper to language, denial appears as self-affirmation, as a mark of one's own language. Hope
that is faced with the difficult realization.

Desire or simple rhetoric of the verb believe? What to do with this accent that marks a body-
to-body in literature.

To "be with" the language even when it is absent. But is there such a thing as an absent
language? Absence can only be understood here in the movement of nothingness, in the
interval of presence-absence as deferred presence or as deferral of presence. To know how to
situate oneself in this game (absence/presence), in this singular errancy of language, in this
hyphen, is perhaps what is most proper in language. To inherit in an unappropriable manner,
to inherit under the law of expropriation, a law that does not allow a certain dwelling place for
the subject in exile from himself and from his own language. A language without a home of its
own that cannot accommodate itself within a mother tongue, because the so-called mother
tongue also lives under the auspices of the law of expropriation, as we find in the hypothesis of
a shelter literature.