Mother Tongue

Lisa asked referencing the upcoming BlogHer panel, "Suffragette Journalists - Oped Pages of Our Own" with Anastasia Goodstein, Chris Nolan and moi:

"Is there anything about blogging that is uniquely available to and valuable for *women* writers and readers?"

Just when I thought I was getting the hang of "conversational" media, renowned sci-fi writer Ursula Le Guin illumines something that has been lurking as a continual knocking, knocking that I've nearly refused to answer.

Yes, women can bring more to table. Much more. Read on as Le Guin provides a jolting conversation starter. (I recommend the entire speech...let sink in.)

The truth: the native tongue scares the wits out of me. But that's also the direction paradoxically I'm pulled toward. I don't think it's a coincidence that suffragist Sojourner Truth leads the way here (read on).

Yeah, you might say its our birthright. And not just women's.

The dialect of the father tongue that you and I learned best in college is a written one. It doesn't speak itself. It only lectures. It began to develop when printing made written language common rather than rare, five hundred years ago or so, and with electronic processing and copying it continues to develop and proliferate so powerfully, so dominatingly, that many believe this dialect - the expository and particularly the scientific discourse - is the highest form of language, the true language, of which all other uses of words are primitive vestiges.

It is the language of thought that seeks objectivity. I do not say it is the language of rational thought. Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective thought.

When it claims a privileged relationship to reality, [the father tongue] becomes dangerous and potentially destructive.

Using the father tongue, I can speak of the mother tongue only, inevitably, to distance it -- to exclude it. It is the other, inferior. It is primitive: inaccurate, unclear, coarse, limited, trivial, banal. It's repetitive, the same over and over, like the work called women's work; earthbound, housebound. It's vulgar, the vulgar tongue, common, common speech, colloquial, low, ordinary, plebeian, like the work ordinary people do, the lives common people live. The mother tongue, spoken or written, expects an answer. It is conversation, a word the root of which means "turning together." The mother tongue is language not as mere communication but as relation, relationship. It connects. It goes two ways, many ways, an exchange, a network. Its power is not in dividing but in binding, not in distancing but in uniting. It is written, but not by scribes and secretaries for posterity: it flies from the mouth on the breath that is our life and is gone, like the outbreath, utterly gone and yet returning, repeated, the breath the same again always, everywhere, and we all know it by heart.

It is a language always on the verge of silence and often on the verge of song. It is the language stories are told in. It is the language spoken by all children and most women, and so I call it the mother tongue, for we learn it from our mothers, and speak it to our kids. I'm trying to use it here in public where it isn't appropriate, not suited to the occasion...

Early this spring I met a musician, the composer Pauline Oliveros, a beautiful woman like a grey rock in a streambed; and to a group of us, women, who were beginning to quarrel over theories in abstract, objective language - and I with my splendid Eastern-women's-college training in the father tongue was in the thick of the fight and going for the kill - to us, Pauline, who is sparing with words, said after clearing her throat, "Offer your experience as your truth." There was a short silence. When we started talking again, we didn't talk objectively, and we didn't fight. We went back to feeling our way into ideas, using the whole intellect not half of it, talking with one another, which involves listening. We tried to offer our experience to one another. Not claiming something: offering something...

The third language, my native tongue, which I will never know though I've spent my life learning it: I'll say some words now in this language. First a name, just a person's name, you've heard it before. Sojourner Truth. That name is a language in itself. But Sojourner Truth spoke the unlearned language; about a hundred years ago, talking it in a public place, she said, "I have been forty years a slave and forty years free and would be here forty years more to have equal rights for all." Along at the end of her talk she said, "I wanted to tell you a mite about Woman's Rights, and so I came out and said so. I am sittin' among you to watch; and every one and awhile I will come out and tell you what time of night it is." She said, "Now I will do a little singing. I have not heard any singing since I came here."¹

Singing is one of the names of the language we never learn, and here for Sojourner Truth is a little singing. It was written by Joy Harjo of the Creek people and is called "The Blanket Around Her." ²

maybe it is her birth
which she holds close to herself
or her death
which is just as inseparable
and the white wind
that encircles her is a part
just as
the blue sky
hanging in turquoise from her neck

oh woman
remember who you are
woman
it is the whole earth

So what am I talking about with this "unlearned language" - poetry, literature? Yes, but it can be speeches and science, any use of language when it is spoken, written, read, heard as art, the way dancing is the body moving as art. In Sojourner Truth's words you hear the coming together, the marriage of the public discourse and the private experience, making a power, a beautiful thing, the true discourse of reason. This is a wedding and welding back together of the alienated consciousness that I've been calling the father tongue and the undifferentiated engagement that I've been calling the mother tongue. This is their baby, this baby talk, the language you can spend your life trying to learn...

The complete transcript of Ursula K. Le Guin's address at the 1986 Bryn Mawr College Commencement is here. It's also published in her nonfiction work, Dancing At The Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places.

SEE ALSO:

Women Travel Writers ("At the end of my review of Emma Larkin's Secret Histories I made the comment that this book, along with Anna Funder's Stasiland, "seems to be opening up a new genre (I'm hating myself for writing these words): female writers providing a personal perspective of political troubles; not personal as in their own perspectives, but in that they piece together the histories of the states they're writing about through the stories of those who have lived within it.")

We're All Journalists in the Age of Ordinary Art

The Artistic Gifts of Women Bloggers

There Are Many Ways to Tell Stories

Comments

[Marilyn]

"Offer your experience as your truth."

That would seem to be the primary reason the women bloggers I read partake of this dynamic medium. Sorry I won't be at BlogHer to hear your panel, but look forward to your thoughts on the conference.