Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad: A Monolingual Memory

Abstract

As I have explained in the previous chapter, Bendahan defends a decon-structivist notion of identity in which, rather than emphasizing the duality of her bilingual identity, she chooses to emphasize the delayed promise inherent in any discursive articulation. This is not to say that she is defending an essentialist identity, but whereas Benarroch’s identity is defined by the encounter of several languages, hers conforms to the notion of monolingual écriture, as opposed to the notion of bilingual écriture that I have described before. In an essay dedicated to the historical memory of the Sephardim, Bendahan describes her relation to the Spanish language through her knowledge of Jaquetía as a form of deferred identity, which once more echoes Derrida’s notion of the monolingualism of the Other:

There are words in Haketia, the Judeo-Spanish spoken in the north of Morocco … that I did not know that they belonged to standard Spanish … and I became aware of that linguistic phenomenon in which I lived words oddly, I was familiar with those that I used in private, but there were other common to all Spanish speakers that I thought were part of my secret vocabulary. Besides, many of my secret words have a common meaning in some situations and provinces of Spain. That is when I began to feel that my language was part of that moving and disturbing space that is language. (“No recuerdo”)