The Mother Tongue

Abstract

In an interview with the New York Times, Rosario Ferré says that she felt distant enough to explore the death of her mother in her writing only when she began to write in English. Before that, she says she found it impossible to deal with the subject because it was taboo in her native Spanish (Navarro 2). A year later she describes her novel Eccentric Neighborhoods, written in English, in the same terms. The novel is “an attempt to lay bare the relationships between mothers and daughters,” an attempt, she says, to come to terms with the death of her mother in 1969 (Burch 31). In both interviews Rosario says that writing in English gives her a psychological distance that allows her to write about that loss. She describes writing in English “as if another person were writing” (Navarro 2). Writing in that other language makes her feel like a spectator, less vulnerable. She suggests that language is a contradictory boundary. On the one hand, it can be a distance between the writer and its subject. She compares English to a brush that mediates between the painter and the canvas. But language can also be a porous space of passage. Language, she says, meaning Spanish (her mother tongue), “is like your skin” (Navarro 2).

Speaking another language is quite simply the minimum and primary condition for being alive.

—Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt

I wish to thank Kelly Oliver and Doris Sommer for their careful reading of this essay and for their helpful suggestions.