At 9:53 AM -0500 26/1/2002, Romana C Huk wrote:
>Isn't her work all about the constant
>'translation' of her several languages into one another?  Not a native
>English speaker, her own 'linguistic displacements' have become one of the
>most important 'subjects' of her work; in fact, the subject of an event
>we're collaborating to produce this spring.  I would love to hear more
>about Alison's own displacements and what they mean for her work, as I
>don't find such generative problems banal at all.

Thanks Romana - my original post was prefaced with an apology for
talking of myself, and my comment on Bergvall was slantwise, on the
way to clumsily trying to isolate a dilemma I feel in my own language
(I was talking of splinterings of language like those used by
Bergvall, or somesuch) and so very vague. It's nonsensical to talk of
Bergvall being linguistically at-home, and I take that back.   I'll
try here to be more articulate and specific, which means this will be
a longer post.

Bergvall's approach, and I admit I have no great in-depth knowledge
of her work and am open here to correction, seems to devolve on the
body, language de and re-contextualised, language placed solely in
the mouth; a materiality which permits its tormenting, typographical
displacements, errata, elisions, shiftings of focus between different
material - visual, tactile (as in the tactility of
hearing/speaking/words themselves), and a fluidity of gender and even
being, as radically challenged by say genetic modification, and
assays on production and re-production and so on.  And I read there a
jangling eroticism yes like the disturbing works of Belmer,
mechanisms of attraction and repulsion.

Bergvall's work seems to scalpel into the dna of language.    And I
was reflecting that my impulses are much more crude, and wondering if
that has anything to do with a cruder kind of displacement, which is
the experience of migrancy as a child - not across Europe, but being
born in South Africa, a time spent in England between four and seven,
and then coming out here to Australia (a classic childhood I might
add of late English colonialism).  In all these places I didn't have
the challenge of another language; what opened was a tension between
the apparent ability to speak and be understood (I speak English!)
and a simultaneous fracture within the language itself, which became
quite profound when I came here.  Because speaking English was no
guarantee of being understood at even a basic level, and it was not
simply interpersonal, but inward.  So I guess my experiences are more
those of being a foreigner within my own language.

The kind of thing I mean (with apologies here for being basic, this
is all fairly commonplace): when I first went North to the Daintree
Rainforest and stood on the beach at Cape Tribulation, it dramatised
for me something of what I felt.  This is a landscape which has
changed very little since Cook first arrived on the Endeavour: the
only difference is that there are now coconut palms.  The rainforest
runs right up to the beach, a wall of dense vegetation, and then
there's a strip of very white sand, and then the Pacific Ocean.  It
is very beautiful and very - I felt - alien, a landscape which shuts
out, not because it is inherently hostile but because it will not
abide easily within a language which has not grown there: it was one
of the times I felt very sharply my Europeaness.  I have long been
fascinated by the linguistic shock evident in the logs of the
Endeavour voyage; Cook and his crew had _no words_ for the creatures
and plants they were finding.  The first paintings of Australian
landscape were of landscapes like English parks dotted with oak
trees: the observer quite literally could not see the trees in front
of them.   Joseph Banks' descriptions of strange creatures no one in
Europe had ever seen before, ("it was like an umbrella, or a mouse" -
I paraphrase from memory) are full of all sorts of strange locutions;
unsuccessful attempts to colonise this world with its language.

The Americas were much more apt to comprehension, despite their own
strangenesses; mythologically they could be placed as Eden, as in
Paradise Lost; there were recognisable and exotically "savage"
civilisations, peoples who made monuments and so on, and an
eco-system which was apt to European farming practices (when the
First Fleet arrived they didn't know how to grow things here and all
their crops died).  Australia was only recognisable to the European
mind as a dystopia, as an absence, a lack, a negative, "terra
nullis".  And I feel I am still in the first shock of that: my
children won't have the same difficulties.  There are poets like John
Anderson who inhabit (rather than colonise, although I suppose most
language acts like this are a form of colonising) the Australian
landscape with a European sensibility derived from Ponge and others;
I have often envied that, and I simply can't do it.  But most
Australian poets are urban, like most Australian people.  I live in a
city, but it's never solved the displacement.   I have never been
able to quite get over this estrangement; partly I suppose because it
happened when I was seven, which is a fairly crucial age in childhood
development.  At a point where a whole network of linguistic
associations were already mapped in my consciousness, they were
irrevocably torn and opened out to a strangeness I couldn't process.
I think it's one of the reasons I started writing poetry as a child.
And when I lived in England for six months after a long absence, I
instantly felt more "at home" in the language - not less foreign, I
hasten to add - but suddenly my internal associative connections made
sense, and a kind of constant itch, as of ill-fitting shoes, seemed
to lessen; and not uncoincidentally, I think, I felt more able then
to disturb them more.

I'm not sure at this point if I'm over-dramatising this, or even if
I've made myself clearer; there are many more aspects, but if I went
on this post would be even more unwieldy.  It's complicated as well
by the kinds of gender questions which drive Bergvall's work, which
is why I thought of her, which are further displacements especially
within literary language and traditions.   But I think that one of
the consequences of this is that my preoccupations are more at the
surface, the skin rather than the dna.   I certainly find myself
obsessed with the idea of skin.

Best

Alison


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Alison Croggon

Home page
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