26 December, 2005

Rarefaction

Just read a post in the Chopsticks blog that made me remember what it was like to be a foreigner living in a foreign country and wondering whether the foreignness will ever diminish.

Feng-Mei Heberer, who is spending a year in China, wishes that the day-to-day life in her newly adopted country of residence become “selbstverständlich ohne an zu Entdeckendem wegzunehmen” (very rough translation: self-evident yet, retain a sense of constant discovery).

About a year after I moved to Germany, I went to a reading by an author (sorry, I forgot her name) who was born in Poland, eventually moved to Australia via France, and then, after many years, moved to Britain. Her was a holocaust survival story, written beautifully and fluidly in her adopted language, English.

After reading some of her work, someone in the audience asked her why she wrote in English, her third language (French was her second), instead of in Polish. She said she did this because it was a challenge to write about her life experiences in a language she could still speak fluently, but it was not her mother tongue. The foreignness of the language rarefied her childhood memories and sharpened her sense of loss without coating it in sentimentality.

She also said that she had come to embrace her foreignness. She liked living in London as a foreigner simply because she would/could never become complacent. She could never wander through a day without posing questions, making comparisons, or embracing newness.

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