Borough of Manhattan Community College
City University of New York
Department of English
THE NOMADS OF LANGUAGE by Ariel Dorfman
I believe it was Gabriel Garcia Marquez who told me the story of entire Columbian villages that were migratory. Fleeing from catastrophes, plagues perhaps, or recurrent floods, or merely the desolation of being caught in the middle of civil wars, inhabitants of these villages decided, at some point in history, to uproot themselves, moving to a remote location in search of peace. As they packed every belonging that could be transported, they did not forget what was most important to them: their dead. According to Garcia Marquez, these villagers, on the verge of becoming nomads, dug up the bones in the cemetery and, in effect, carried their ancestors on their journey into the unknown, probably animated by the need to defy the fluctuations of time and geography with the illusion that something from the past permeates the present, forming a hard physical link to memory at a time of devastating change.
Not all migrants, of course, can push to such extremes their desire to stay connected to the men and women who generated them. Most are barely able to bring with them a photo, a clipping, the keys to a house that is no longer theirs and that may, in time, be demolished, its address lost. But all will inevitably take on their travels another sort of possession, one that invisibly preserves those faraway dead and their past and their receding land better than any bones can. In every era, migrants have transferred with them the syllables and significances enclosed in the language they learned as they grew, the language that gave them a slow second birth as surely as their mother gave them a relatively rapid first one. That language, which contains the seeds of their most intimate identity, will put to the test when the voyage is over, especially if the migrants are moving to a foreign land. This is because those who await them at the new location have their own dead, their own ceremonies and cemeteries, and, of course, their own tongue. If it happens to be the same language – let’s imagine, for instance, an Argentinean who migrates to Spain or to the Dominican Republic, or a French-speaking woman from Zaire who comes to Marseilles – there will still be a valley of distances and misunderstandings between she who arrives and he who greets her, he who arrives and she who sells him bread. But more frequently in our globalizing world, those who come are faced with an alien tongue and are therefore condemned to live a bilingual fate. They cannot avoid the need to live for many years in two languages, torn between the public, dominant language, on the one hand, in which the police interrogate, the school principal speaks, business is conducted, groceries are bought, jobs are offered, signs and advertisements are written; and, on the other hand, the private, subjective set of words that keeps the newcomers in touch with the old home and homeland, and with the people they used to be.
How to deal with the incessant and often perverse doubleness, how to protect the fragile

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shell of the self from its bombardment by two needs and two communities, which read opposite meanings into every mouthful at every meal? From the beginning of history, migrants have wavered between extremes that promise to resolve and even abolish this fragmented, anguished condition. These possibilities are not available to everyone, but they are always present as phantasms, temptations that call to us, delusions of wholeness. One strategy, of course, is assimilation: the migrant seeks to become an integral part of the new society, tries to forget or hide the mother tongue, wants to blur the accent, fantasizes that all bonds to the past can be cut, makes believe the dead are really, entirely dead. And if he cannot do this himself – because the languages cannot be cast off like old clothes – there is always the dream that this full status in the new society will materialize with his children or, eventually, his grandchildren, so that some faroff offspring will overcome the curse of a bilingual, duplicated existence. The opposite of this solution is the rejectionist model: I have seen Chilean compatriots of mine who, twenty-five years after they were first banished from their land, continue in a stubborn refusal to learn more than a few words of the host country’s language, their faces and their hearts nostalgically fixed on a remote country, their tongues repeating colloquialisms that, in fact, have fallen out of use back home. It is not necessarily a tactic doomed to failure. They plan to return to Chile someday, and – like so many Kurdish and Moroccan, Indonesian and Korean, Nigerian and Mexican émigrés in a similar situation – indulge in a tactic of cultural survival that holds on to the native language as a pure and intact entity, a bridge, a down payment on that ticket home.
These two strategies, assimilation and rejection, represent the two extremes with which monolingualism, its temptation of immaculateness, tugs at the heart and mind of every potential migrant attempting to avoid a Janus-like existence. Of the two, assimilation is the more powerful. Influential and effective institutions align themselves behind this monolingual alternative, first and foremost the nation-state, with all its resources brought to bear on creating and enforcing borders and boundaries, imposing them on geography and bodies, on flags and hymns, as well as on syllables and relative clauses, indentifying the nation with a language as a bulwark against foreign contamination, always wanting to control and homogenize its population in the name of security and internal order. And that national language also thrives by its alliance with those structures in which it is embedded: religion, literature, family rituals, all of them allowing citizens to imagine themselves as members of a vast community. To this we must add the ingrained psychological need of every human to belong and bland in and succeed, the enticement to erase what reminds us of failure or pain.
I happen to disagree with the monolingual option, both for countries and for human beings. But I also happen to understand the wellsprings from which the desire to be whole and indivisible in one language flow, having been myself a fundamentalist of language, someone who, for decades, tried to escape the bifurcation of tongue and vocabulary – first rejecting y native Spanish for English as a child, and then, as a young man, refusing to speak English and reconverting to Spanish, and finally, once I was sent into exile from Chile, embracing the need to live in two dimensions, to pledge loyalty to two cultures, to use one language to speak to the mailman and the other to read the mail from home that he brings to our door. For me – a resident

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of this dual existence, married to two tongues, inhabited by English and Spanish in equal measure, in love with them both now that they have called a truce for my throat – the distress of being double and somewhat homeless is overshadowed by the glory of being hybrid and open. It is as a fluid bigamist of language that I now encourage migrants and the states in which they dwell to embark fully and without fear upon the adventure of being bilingual, and ask them also to celebrate, as so man of the young do, the many intermediate tongues (condescendingly termed patois) that prosper in the spaces between established linguistic systems, the myriad creole zones of confluence where languages can mix and experiment and express the fluctuating frontiers of a mingled humanity.
The call of mine is not merely, I believe, the fruit of my own personal back-and-forth romance with two languages. Just as there are institutions that compel up toward the adoption of only one language in order to defend our identities under siege, there are equally strong forces in the world today that push us toward multilingualism as a real alternative. First is the sheer mass of migration, all those bodies and minds smuggling foreign grammar across borders under the noses of immigration officers and customs officials, penetrating the defenses of the nation-state, invading the fields and the kitchens and the schools. In the case of the country where I now live, the United States, the Latino influx is so enormous and unstoppable that within a century I expect exploding demographics to make bilingualism the norm rather than the exception.
A second major condition favoring bilingualism is the way in which distances that used to separate migrants from their native lands have been compressed. We now have the feasibility of ever more frequent circular journeys back and forth to Ithacas from which we no longer need to be absent for twenty years, not to mention the manner in which technology allows us to connect to the simultaneous words being spoken back in the motherland – as well as to ever wider international networks of linguistic partners across the globe, inciting communities to organize in webs that would have been unimaginable thirty years ago.
Which leads us to a third factor: The world itself, because of this incessant movement of bodies and goods and capital, is producing speakers who are increasingly multilingual. A great deal of this linguistic traffic is conducted in English – a circumstance that I greet with ambivalence. Although the near-universal spread of one of my languages allows me the convenience of breaking down travel and intellectual barriers, its predominance also fills me with suspicion. The ascendancy of English, like so many phenomena associated with globalization, leaves too many invisible losers, too many people silenced. Regarding languages and migration, I never forget the questions that are so often neglected when progress is abstractly celebrated, the questions that the real suffering human subjects face, one by one by one. Do you come from a place that is poor, that is not fully incorporated into modernity, that does not control a language that commands respect? Do you come from a place that is poor, that is not fully incorporated into modernity, that does not control a language that commands respect? Do you inhabit a language that does not have armies behind it, and smart bombs and modems and cell phones? Do you reside in a language that will one day be extinct, or whose existence does not have the kind of value in the marketplace that can get you a good job and help you in the

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everyday struggle to survive? Do you dwell in a language that is wonderful only for making love, for teaching your children the difference between right and wrong, or for praying to God?
How does such a language defend itself in our globalizing world?
I hold no effortless answers to this quandary of globalization, but regarding the empire of language, I can at least console myself with the reminder that English, or whatever lingua franca will be used by many men and women from many nations, will itself undergo – is, indeed, undergoing at this very moment – the slings and joys of outrageous appropriation, the mongrelization that inevitably comes when transnational people breed bodies and syllables. But perhaps more crucial: the new global disorder enacts a world where more and more people, submitted to the obligation of dividing their brains between two (or more) linguistic systems, end up deterritorializing language, unlinking it from the power of the nation and the coercion of the state, allowing other tormented bilinguals to feel accompanied in their own quests for the sort of pluralistic citizens that hope would constitute a model for tomorrow’s new humanity.
If I am optimistic about the prospect of bilingualism, it is because I believe that languages
– in spite of their conservative tendency, which answers a need in us for stability and continuity
– have themselves always been maddeningly migrant, borrowing from here and there and everywhere, plundering and bringing home the most beautiful, the strangest, the most exciting objects, learning, learning, taking words out on loan and returning them in different, wonderfully twisted, and often funny guises, pawning those words, stealing them, renting them out, eating them, making love to them, and spawning splendidly unrecognizable children.
Indeed, the first bilingual experiences, at the origin of our species, must have flourished in the intersections between groups that had already evolved divergent and mutually incomprehensible linguistic systems. There was the intersection of trade, the bartering of goods that had to be accompanied, at some point, by the bartering of words and the dawning discovery that anyone who knew both tongues would be able to sell and buy, swap and acquire, on far better terms – trading stories first, then desires, and finally goods. And there was that other intersection, the crossroads of war, when captives were taken as booty, and warriors were spared or enslaved, and women were brought back for breeding. I think of those captives as the first nonvoluntary bilinguals of history and prehistory, though they may have also been the first to educate their captors in the delights of another language and another viewpoint, Scheherazades of the forked tongue. And then the ultimate intersection, the marriage of languages due to the sweeter meeting of love and reproduction, the biological and cultural and personal and epic need for exogamy, the need for the other, the age-old impulse toward mixture and miscegenation, the cell’s urge to fertilize by expanding, the need to leave the suffocating inner circle of what is familiar and plant yourself in the wider world. And languages were there, had to be there, in those love affairs at the beginning of time, one language for the man, another language for the woman, coupling the bodies and coupling the minds and coupling the tribes.
Languages, two of them, both of them, there, at the very start of the journey out of Eden – an immediate, almost automatic way of challenging death, telling us today that we need not uproot the cemetery as those mythical villagers in Columbia did, that we need not carry the

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physical bones with us into the future in order to stay in touch with our origins and dispute death’s rule. If this vision of the bilingual origins of our humanity is correct, then the chances of our living simultaneously in multiple linguistic systems not only may be daringly contemporary but may have roots in our most ancient mirrors. If language is our first and last attempt to defeat death, then perhaps a bilingual humanity is the best way of fooling death when it comes for us, fooling it not once but twice, and perhaps even three times and more. Perhaps before we disappear from this earth, we can at least force death itself to speak all our tongues.

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